Actually, I don’t know. There’s no good reason. Meanwhile, here’s a screenshot of me at level 107.
I’m very pleased with my Junior League yuppiette hair-do and my brown newsboy cap (which is one of the few hats you can infuse with Ballistic Weave). Actually, I like myself so much that I might get whatever DLC lets me clone myself. Robert has provided inspiration:
For some reason, I’ve ignored all the islands in Fallout 4 — until now. I think it’s because I never wanted to bother with swimming and, consequently, getting irradiated. I have to say, though, that Spectacle Island is worth swimming out to. Here’s a little video where a chap discovers the island:
I guess one reason I wanted to see this place is that I reached character level 105 and was at something of a loss regarding what perk to choose. I noticed that Aqua Girl does two things: (1) it lets you breathe underwater (good-bye, mirelurk cakes), and (2) it makes you immune to rads when swimming. At this point in the game, I couldn’t think of a reason not to take it. Plus, it would give me a good excuse to look at some of those islands.
The video gives you a fair idea of where Spectacle Island is located and how big it is. There are plenty of basic workshop resources, especially wood, but perhaps the best two things are that it has its own power generator and it doesn’t have the settlement-building altitude limitation commonly found on the mainland. Let me explain. When you build settlements in the normal mainland areas of the Commonwealth, you can’t make your structures too tall. The game imposes a limit on how close your structures can get to the skybox. On Spectacle Island, there’s still a limit, but it’s more relaxed, so if you want to build that ten-story hotel made out of junk plywood and old tires, you can. You just need lots of wood and old tires, which the island supplies. Well, you need lots of other things, too, but whatever the island doesn’t supply, you can get it by sending a provisioner and linking to your other settlements. At first, I thought they’d have to swim, but it turns out that once you establish a settlement, a boat becomes available for ferrying back and forth. Not that you actually get to use the boat; it’s just an explanatory conceit for fast-traveling.
Which brings me to another discovery. Did you know that you can make Jun and Marcy Long into provisioners? You can’t kill them and, as far as I know, you can’t easily move them to someplace like Starlight Drive-in, but you can make them useful and have the satisfaction of knowing they’ll be attacked over and over as they schlep around on their supply routes. I didn’t want to overdo the supply thing, so I had to choose between Jun and Marcy. This was a no-brainer. I would much rather have Marcy in Sanctuary because her temperament is more like mine would be in a real Fallout world. I can’t stand criers and whiners, so Jun is out there, fighting the good provision fight and getting shot over and over, which makes me really happy.
As you can see in the video, some settlers tried to occupy the island and were soon harassed by raiders. Both parties died because the place is infested with mirelurks. At level 105, the puniest ones are Glowing, Savage, Uber-Spikey and whatnot. Their numbers are matched by Kings, Hunters, and a Mirelurk Queen, all appropriately leveled, so buyer beware.
Turning on the generator not only supplies power; it also lets you switch on a special siren that emits a high-pitched sound designed to drive mirelurks to the outer shore areas. It doesn’t always work, but it makes the place generally habitable. Fortunately, my maxed Sneak allowed me to turn on the generator and make it to the siren without being seen. This kept the mirelurks from mobbing me, but they were still a problem. Fortunately, I had brought with me a couple of maxed Exterminator weapons that did 50% extra damage to bugs and mirelurks, so even the Queen went down with one shot.
Now I need to go back to see if my supply line is working and start building my luxury plywood/old tire hotel. By the way, here’s another video where a guy built a very ambitious settlement (sadly, he uses some mods, but you can imagine what’s possible even without them):
It was only a matter of time before Robert discovered Nuka World and upset gorilla lovers everywhere:
Having established his new Raider settlement, Robert took the next logical step, which was to destroy Sanctuary and turn the most annoying NPCs into Soylent Green. Yes, even Preston:
In both videos, observe Robert’s excellent bowling ball cannon technique. Warning: his beloved alien companion dies in the second one but is lovingly memorialized, along with the gorilla.
In spite of my best efforts to capture the event for science, Microsoft ninja’d Win 10 Anniversary onto my work-at-home computer in the wee hours of the morning.
I was braced for misbehavior and mischief, but so far, things seem to be functional. The same thing happened to my gaming machine, which has been operating perfectly since the update. On neither computer have I experienced any of the terrible crimes so often reported on the intarweb. My privacy settings remained unchanged. Nothing blew up. Microsoft sent me a message to the effect that Skype was ready to use, but it won’t do anything until I activate it. Cortana is not in my face. The dreaded ad spam people cry about never happened.
Even more interesting: this is an upgrade of an upgrade. I originally had Win 8.1 on here. Win 10 was installed over it. Then Anniversary was installed over that. This is a perfect recipe for bugginess and slowdown, but that isn’t going on. Maybe I missed a step.
In completely related news: my spirit mage in Titan Quest is now lvl 25 and no longer seems utterly useless. She makes decent money and has managed to find or buy some nice doodads. I don’t mean to imply that she’s getting good drops. She has a whole transfer stash full of crap for melee and archer classes but almost nothing for a mage — nothing that dropped for free anyway. I’ve had to craft every performance increase from completed charms and essences.
The upper half of my skill tree is still untouched, as leveling in Titan Quest is much slower than in D3. Adding points to the skills in the lower half is getting me by nicely for now. I haven’t done anything with my secondary Dream mastery. I doubt that I’ll even get to it by the end of this playthrough in Normal difficulty. Actually, I doubt that most of the upper half of the Spirit tree will get any meaningful attention.
Mostly, I’m just playing to see the new locations. Presently, I’m in Thebes and am making a tour of the nearby Valley of the Kings. Whether this is geographically accurate in the real world, I don’t know. Probably no more than in Serious Sam. This troubles me not a whit. I’m just enjoying the casual nature of everything. I will note that the monsters are slightly more aggressive now. They’re also attacking in multiple species groups, so I’m having to be a little more alert. I wonder what happens at serious level tiers and difficulties?
In the News Nobody Cares About department, Rhykker has revisited the predictions he made in his Season 7 PTR (public test realm) video, concluding that his forecasts about top solo Greater Rift builds were eerily accurate with occasional upsets.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dc8oCe5NCK8
Not surprisingly, Europe is dominating the field of highest rift clears, with Asia coming in second and North America bringing up the rear. I imagine this is because Europeans tend to play old games forever while Americans always go to the next big thing. As for Asia – who knows why they do what they do? Who can plumb the depths of their inscrutability? They’re almost as mysterious as Canada.
Witch doctors are, of course, very strong, but are outpaced by monks. In fact, monks are presently the “third best” class across the leaderboards, but they’re squeezed out of the number 2 spot by, of all things, Legacy of Nightmare bombardment crusdaders.
At number one globally . . . are you believing this? . . . is the wizard. And this is for the second season in a row. The Firebird/Archon meta still dominates in spite of Blizzard’s devastating (and proper) nerf to the ridiculously OP twister-spam exploit.
I personally don’t care for Archon, whether used with the Vyr or Firebird set, but who knew three years ago that the stepchild wizard would become D3’s champeen toon? What a world in which we live in, in which.
Reality check: none of this matters unless you’re one of those career mouthbreathers who play a 2012 game sixteen hours a day and get your mother to change your diapers.
The thoughts are late because I waited until last night to see it. Starz had it on all their channels at the same time, which was rather unusual, and I prefer DirecTV’s HD broadcasts to sitting in theaters.
I must say that I was taken completely by surprise. I expected the usual Abrams excessive effects and forced nostalgia. Some of that was present, but mostly the effects were in correct proportion to the drama and the nostalgia was usually subtle and appropriate. If I didn’t know better, I would say that JJ is developing a sense of taste.
The old characters were sort of shockingly old, but I did the math and realized that Episode IV was made almost forty years ago, so yes: they really are that age. Nonetheless, the movie sold the notion that even though Han Solo is a geezer, he’s still Han Solo and still doing exactly the same things he did in days of yore. Leia, on the other hand — well, I don’t think she’ll be wearing the slave bikini any time soon. I guess wookies age differently because Chewy was . . . erm, still Peter Mayhew in a costume (which did not look as convincing as muppet’s masterpiece).
I also did not expect to like the new characters as much as I did. Let me go ahead and get Kylo Ren out of the way first. Sorry, but this guy just didn’t work for me. The concept and identity weren’t presented well, and Adam Driver wasn’t able to sell Ren’s dark side or his conflict with the light. He reminded me of that neighbor kid who went off to college and became a disappointment, but the family is still working on him. The new “Luke” — Daisy Ridley as Rey — was very good. I think they made the right choice there. The big surprise was John Boyega as Finn. I did not expect to care about this character, but I did — a lot more than Poe (a.k.a. the new “Han” or really a new Han/Luke hybrid of some kind). I think Driver may be able to do better work with Ren in succeeding episodes, and let’s be fair: Oscar Isaac’s Poe was not very deep and had a lot of dumb lines — I would say that Isaac did a good job with what he had. I think Finn will be revived and we’ll get to see more excellent work from Boyega. I expect big things from Miss Daisy as the series progresses.
Obligatory notice of BB-8: aww, so cute — will sell a lot of Pez dispensers.
The writing, to me, was nicely done. The plot made sense in most places, and I don’t really care that much about Star Wars “lore,” so I wasn’t cognizant of any horrible sins in that department. The music was excellent, of course.
I think the whole thing shapes up as a successful reclamation of the Star Wars franchise, now that it’s out of the hands of the Episodes I-III quacks. Some things could have been better: (1) I wasn’t really impressed by either the First Order or the Resistance. Neither had the definitive Saturday matinee identities of the Empire and the Rebellion. (2) Too many “incidental” resuscitations were made of old Star Wars alien types and scenes. The best example is the final X-Wing assault on the improved Death Star, which was almost a remake of the original, right down to the droopy faced alien and the fat-guy-friend-of-George-Lucas. (3) The villains weren’t really too dire, and the threats weren’t very threatening, even though it was clear that The Force Awakens is an intentional homage to A New Hope (you might even say a remake, as so many scenes and events were nearly identical to those in the first movie). At least George Lucas sort of believed in his hokey Empire, whereas I never get that sense from Abrams’ First Order.
But otherwise, our young Abrams does a surprisingly good job with a massive responsibility. I was expecting to hear millions of voices suddenly cry out that they were being asploded in a Transformer movie — or worse, that they were stuck in a new Star Trek movie — but it may be that JJ has grown up and the Force is strong in this one. The new episode isn’t perfect, but I think the series is moving in the right direction. I’m anxious to see what Luke does with Rey, and speaking of Luke: that may be the best ending scene in any movie ever. Is old Luke cool or WHAT?
Thanks to hurricane season, my part of the world is getting a lot of gentle, polite rain. While it’s nice to see everything greening up after a near-drought, I can’t walk outside as often as I’d like, so I have to rely on my el cheapo treadmill, which is starting to show its el cheapness. But all that is incidental, except to demonstrate how many clauses I can load into the same sentence.
No, what matters is that I’m incredibly busy at school because of numerous unlooked-for changes, so this means that I haven’t even been able to log onto Steam for a few days. (I tried to insert a “Lucy and Ethel at the Candy Factory” image here, but things didn’t work out.) As a result, I’ve forgotten how to play Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and will probably have to restart it. But that’s not all. Bethesda decided to release Nuka World right in the middle of all this, and from various reports, it seems that this DLC is much better than Far Harbor. On top of this, what does Blizzard do? If you’re guessing they’ve released their Legion expansion for WoW and that it’s getting lots of favorable impressions, you’re right.
This always happens. These idiots let the summer drag by with lackluster (or no) releases, and then when I get busier than a one-legged lone survivor soccer mom in a raider ass-kicking contest (think Lucy image), they spew all their good content simultaneously. I don’t know when I’ll be able to devote any meaningful time to games, and if I do get time, I don’t know what to pick. I should go on with Deus Ex, but I’m really curious about Nuka World and WoW: Legion. I feel rather guilty about Deus Ex because ILA was kind enough to gift it to me, along with Nosferatu. Then, of course, I still have The Witcher 3 just sitting on the hard drive untouched.
I’m a terrible person with no right to play games.
Notice I didn’t use the plural “impressions.” Also, I should add an extra “early.”
I only played for about an hour last night, so I didn’t do much more than look at the menu options and watch cut scenes. I did skydive onto the top of an unfinished luxury hotel in Dubai and start on what I assume is the tutorial mission. Very early on, I was able to get murdered by some terrorists. By the time I found them, I had forgotten who they were and why they were there — the briefing on their identity and motivations was barked out by some military guy on a transport plane, and I forgot who he was, too. Come to think of it, I forgot what military outfit he was with and why I was with them. This is not the game’s fault. I should pay closer attention, especially in a Deus Ex title, since every sentence and nuance usually turns out to be important.
So anyway, there I was on the top floor of this hotel whose construction had been interrupted by some spoiler I can’t go into. As I looked around, I noticed that practically everything could be picked up and thrown. I ignored this and marveled at the idea that I could mantle almost anywhere. Eventually, I came across said terrorists and realized that I must use my uber-pro-uncanny stealth abilities. Going through them would not be an option. Unfortunately, my uber-pro-uncanny stealth abilities were outmatched by their godlike lines of sight, resulting in my sad little death. I had a tranquilizer gun, but I think maybe I should have thrown a refrigerator at them. I can see that every encounter in this game is going to be a puzzle, which was the case in Human Revolution and which I liked very much.
So my impression thus far is that this is your usual Eidos treatment — it’s Tomb Raider with conspiracy theories gone wild, lots of talking, and lots of gnarly combat puzzles. It will probably take me a year to finish.
Oh, as for performance: I haven’t yet encountered the things that have upset the internet, but I’m sure I will eventually. So far, though, the game runs fine. It’s extremely console-ish, but that’s what you get these days and I can live with it if other things overshadow it. Everybody is throwing a fit about the preorder items not persisting beyond the first game session (or save or something), but since I don’t even know what the preorder items are or where to find them or whether they’re already equipped or whatever, I haven’t given them any thought. It’s early days, but right now I think this is a very professional “multiplatform” addition to the Deus Ex saga. Don’t be surprised, however, if I start whining.
This game is going to own me.
Rhykker has provided a very useful summary of the top 2.4.2 PTR builds for Diabro 3. I imagine the final patch changes have been negligible, so this is pretty close to live.
Of most interest: The monk appears to be on top for now, followed by the witch doctor. The wizard is okey-doke, but to attain rank 6, she has to use that stupid Firebird/Archon build, which is too fiddly and relies on an ancient Chantodo set (wand and source). I keep getting non-ancients, but it doesn’t matter, as I have no interest in this build.
A surprisingly popular ring choice with melee classes is the Legacy of Nightmares set, the one that gives you big damage boosts for using ancient legendary items instead of sets. I suspected this would gain popularity once people figured out its benefit and build diversity. This is the strategy Nananea used with her thorns barbarian months ago. Since she is the queen of out-of-the-box strategies, I can’t say I’m surprised.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tkeEkK1bPw
So anyhow, I am strongly considering a witch doctor build for Season 7, since the chapter completion set will be Helltooth this time. If you care about wizards, they get Tal Rasha, which is infinitely better than the crappy Delsere’s Magnum Opus set. I think all the classes get decent starter sets this time.
