Here's My Story

I finished one playthrough recently, including its 3 DLC (Descent, Jaws of Hakkon and Tresspasser). One good thing it has over the previous two (DA:O and DA2) is that it doesn't need any mod to make it playable. Then again, the reason why the first two needed so many mods, afaik, is that they haven't been updated to be compatible to current hardware and software. Sadly, that's the only good thing about DAI, It has a litany of problems: (1) Way too long. I spent over 160 hours, not counting the numerous side quests that I skipped. There might be games that I played longer (Baldur's Gate 3, I think) but DAI's side quests are boring. They are like your typical MMORPG quests but that's not what I expect when playing DAI. Also, story-wise, it doesn't make sense that the leader of an army does these micro-level quests. (2) Combat tactic instructions are non-existence. I'm so puzzled why they progressively rolled back this unique game mechanic. That's what ...

Dragon Age 2 has so many irrational people. Yes, it heightens the drama but it's dramatically stupid. Some glaring examples:   Templars:   I consistently opposed Meredith, even publicly backed Orsino against her at the start of the last Act. I also helped one of their leaders. Yet, these fellas suspected that I sided with Meredith. WTH.   Anders & Meredith: Anders: Compromise will not work between templars and amges. So I blow up the entire Chantry temple and kill the Grand Cleric. (WTH!) Meredith: I thereby invoke Right of Annulment i.e. kill all mages in the city. (WTH?!) Sebastian: Why invoke the Right of Annulment when the perpetrator is here? (Exactly!) Meredith: The city demands blood and I'm giving it to them. (Are you deaf?)   Fenris: Fenris: Tevinter mage is bad, mistreated me. Therefore all mages in Kirkwall must die so that I don't see them turn bad. Sooo, shall I now say, "An elf betray me, therefore all elves must die so that they won't betray me?...

Previously I blogged about this campaign  (with 3 more posts subsequently) where I initially built my character to severely hinder enemies from moving away from me but changed because of party composition. I recently changed back to the initial idea. Here's why: The impetus was the GM's announcement that we would be encountering many more undead, including those who are resistant (or immune) to physical and sometimes resistant to everthing except for vitality damage, This means that I'll likely be using more Wood Elemental Blast rather than Earth, thereby rendering the level 5 pick of  Gate's Threshold: Expand the Portal -> Earth Gate Junction: Critical Blast less useful. After tinkering with the build, here are the changes to the build:   Level 4   Class feat: Tumbling Lumber changed to Safe Elements. This is critical to prevent my teammates from the adverse effects of my kinetic aura (shown later). Also, this also gives the one-action ability Pacifying Infusion ...

I completed this expansion recently. The additional talents and specialisation are much welcomed but there were not enough of them to put all points in and so the enjoyment on that front vanished during late game. Also, I felt that the enemies were not scaled up properly to provide sufficient challenges. The last fight wasn't particularly difficult: it was just tedious. These issues could have been fixed by lowering the starting level of all characters.  I ended the game with the following specialisations: Me (mage): Spirit Healer, Battlemage and Blood Mage. The last one was chosen just for stat boost. Justice (warrior): Spirit Warrior, Champion and Templar. Weapon and Shield tank. Sigrun (rogue): Legionaire Scout, Assassin and Duelist. Dual-weapon mele rogue.  Nathaniel (rogue): Bard, Ranger and Assassin. Archer. Justice was the last companion I recruited. Before him, Oghren was my two-handed warrior tank, with specialisation in Berserker, Champion and Spirit Warrior. Althoug...

I finished my second playthrough recent. I ended with the following specialisations: Me: Spirit Healer & Shapeshifter. Took the latter just for the boost to defensive stats i.e. didn't unlock any talent. Alistair: Templar & Champion. Oghre: Berserker & Champion. Leliana: Bard & Ranger. Leliana's archer build is a late-bloomer and equipment dependent. Belatedly, I realised how great Scattershot is. Once they were fully built i.e. unlocked all key talents, the game was pretty easy except for a few fights towards the end. Definitely needed to depend on the armies I gathered.  Just started playing its expansion, Awakening. Meanwhile, here are some more gameplays:  

I played and finished one playthrough back in 2014. I then continued by playing Awakening, its expansion but never finished it. Can't remember why. Probably intended to just take a break and yet here we are, 12 years later :D So, late last year, I was looking for a game to play, among my Steam library, while waiting for price to drop for some games. I remember quite fondly the detailed auto combat tactics of DAO, which seems to be absent in other games. I checked and was surprised that I had DAO Ultimate Edition, which includes all DLCs. Unfortunately, as Ban and other players online said, some mods are needed to make the game work. Seems like bugs were not fixed? Oddly, I don't remember this during the first playthrough but then again that was more than a decade ago. Searching for the appropriate mod, downloading and installing them took quite a while. Incidentally, here's a shoutout to all the modders who make it possible to play this game bug-free and also with QOL adjus...

Ban and I are optimisers, whether in single or multiplayer games. In this post, I would like to focus on table-top role-playing games (TTRPG). Ideally, everyone should try their best to optimise their TTRPG characters. It would make their characters useful to the party and thus make everyone happy. I regularly encounter players who eschew optimisation in favour of flavour/roleplay-wise. For example, a DnD's Warlock can safely dump Intelligence and Strength to maximise their most important stats i.e. Charisma, Dexterity and Constitution to be useful but someone might say, "But my Warlock has to be intelligent because of his background." Their character is either (1) suboptimal but not bad because their most important stats are still reasonable: just not as a high as they could be because some points are allocated to their roleplaying stats, or (2) terrible because their most important stats are weak. In my heart, I would frown on (2) because they are just burdening the par...

Level 8 Class feat: Drifting Pollen. Yet another way to debuff enemies. Stacks with off-guard, which I can easily do by flanking, and frightened, which our swashbuckler and sorceress can do. This then increase the chance of critically succeeding in inflicting prone condition on them via some Impulses. However, since affects all creatures within my aura, I will retrain Level 4's Tumbling Lumber to Safe Elements and retrain Level 5's Calcifying Sand to Tumbling Lumber. I'm getting rid of the Calcifying Sand because of its Overflow trait i.e. if triggered, it will stop my Kinetic Aura and so Drifting Pollen will disappear too. Since it will not be my turn (it's a Reaction), I cannot reactive my aura immediately thereafter. Skill feat: Mortaling Healing. Increased potential healing from Treat Wounds. Level 9   Skill increase: Master in Athletics. Ancestry Feat: Mountain's Stoutness. Increased tankiness and survivability. Gate's Thresshold: Expand the Portal -> Ea...

Level 2 Class feat: Tremor. Range AOE that can knock prone enemies on critical success. Regardless of enemies' rolls, the burst area becomes difficult terrain. Prone enemies are off-guard and take -2 circumstance penalty to attack roll. So enemies are easier for us to attack while this makes them harder to attack us. They can stand to get rid of the prone condition but that will eat one of their 3 actions. Skill feat: Assurance in Medicine. Helps to auto-succeed in Medicine check to Treat Wound when it's upgraded at the next level. Level 3 Skill increase: Expert in Medicine. With proficiency bonus +7, I auto-succeed when Treat Wound because of Assurance in Medicine. General feat: Fleet. Speed increases from 20ft to 25ft. Positioning is crucial if I want to melee. Level 4 Class feat: Tumbling Lumber. Similar to Tremor but its AOE is retangular and requires Reflex save instead of Fortitude save. So the choice of which of these impulse to use is mainly dependent on which save the ...

So, I thought of ways to support my melee teammates. Right after first session, I asked GM's permission to change from single gate earth kineticist to dual-gate earth & wood kineticist simply to grab Timber Sentinel from wood element.  We're now level three and based on the various encounters we had so far, I came up with the following build up to level 12 (expected last level of the campaign). I'll set out my plan on how to use this build to help my party in this campaign. Level 1 Ancestry: Dwarf Dwarf has high hit points and boost Constitution (primary statistic for kineticist), Wisdom (high Will save is good and also main stat for Medicine) and one ability score of your choice. The flaw is a minus one Charisma, which isn't important for this build. Heritage: Aiuvarin Picked this so that later I can pick the ancestry feat to increase speed. Ancestry feat: Unburdened Iron A great feat as it lets you ignore the reduction to speed from any armor. The deduction in red...

For sometime now, Ban and join had accepted invitation to join an acquaintance's discord server mainly for ttrpg games that he runs. Later, upon my suggestion, Ban and I attended one-shot sessions of a couple of games. Signed up for a third but that was canceled because of lack of players. Despite having tried more systems, I'm still partial towards DnD's system. However, when the GM announced that he was looking for players for Season of Ghosts, an adventure path for Pathfinder 2e (now Remastered version), I decided to sign up for it after Ban agreed to do so too. It's the closest to DnD system and I had some experience with Pathfinder 1 from playing Wrath of the Righteous crpg, with lots of help and guidance from Ban. I am aware that Pathfinder is way more complicated than DnD. One great thing about Pathfinder is that there are free character builders that incorporate nearly everything in the game. The one we're using is Pathbuilder 2e. It is only the animal compa...

SpellRogue is a tactical turn-based roguelike deckbuilder game. It's like Slay the Spire ("StS") and Monster Train but with at most only 7 cards and use dice as energy. Cards are played by either using specific value of a die e.g. 2, or reduce its CD by the total value of a number of dice. It incorporates two key features of Montster Train i.e. enemies' intention (which StS has) and whether your character will die or not (which StS doesn't have). Yet, using dice makes the game distinctively different from the other two. I was at first apprehensive about how random this will cause but it turned out to be ok because there are cards to let you change the dice value. There is one such card in each starter deck that I played so far. I've eyed this game for quite a while, putting it on wishlist when it was still in beta (I think?) and later in early access. I didn't buy earlier because there were some problems as flagged out by bad reviews. It turned mostly (ver...

In a reent ttrpg session, our party was fighting a group of mummies. A teammate decided to use her whip to attack a mummy. I then suggested to her to say, "Who's your Mummy?" Some laughter ensued but immediately followed by... Me: Wait, I made a joke?! *lol* Another teammate: I thought you did it on purpose. Yes, I intended it to be a joke (the whipping bit) but the second joke (vs a mummy) was unintentional.  

I tried Magick Archer before Mystic Spearhand but the mechanic of using the bow was too clunky for me (or so I thought) when following the instructions in-game. I thought maybe this was the case because I was using kbm (keyboard with mouse) instead of a controller. Later, a video guide on building an Magick Archer incidentally helped me to realise that its bow mechanic is easier than described in-game. I tried, it worked and so I changed to that vocation :) Here's my final build: Weapon skills Frosthunter Bolt: It was my usual opener on single target. The aim was to freeze them. Sagittate Avalanche: After freezing them with the skill above, I would use this a couple of time, at least, before deciding whether to resume freezing them. If I had opened with this skill instead, I would draw aggro earlier iirc. Lifetaking Arrow: I used this it hit mass of small enemies to momentarily stun them. Super useful on flying creatures. Martyr's Bolt: This was used only if I desperately want...

Playing this vocation is like being a character in anime such as Naruto: zipping around in a blink of an eye, with a spear. Horizontal. Vertical. Flurry of attack, with after-images. Truly one of its kind in such ARPG. So after pretty much completing my Sorcerer build , I switched to Mystic Spearhand. Here's my final build: Weapon skills Dragon's Foin: Very useful in closing the gap or to run away. Also, it's used to go across a chasm but make sure it's not a wide one :D Skiedragoun's Feste: Use it to evade enemies' attack and if the evasion is successul, deal more damage to them. Quite amazing, actually. Mirour Shelde: Cheap and almost-broken invulnerability. Wild Furie: The above-mentioned flurry of attack. To be honest, I didn't observe how much damage it it but it was so cool to watch anyway :D Augments Mettle: Increase physical defense. Never a bad choice, in my opinion, especially for melee characters. Endurance: More stamina, much needed. Apotropaism:...

Lately I've been playing lots of Dragon's Dogma 2. The copy of the game belonged to Ban and he shared his Steam library so that I could play it. He had finished playing it like 8-9 months ago. Graphic is good, world building is not bad, combat is great but boy, their quest system is...questionable. Some of them gave very little clue on how to progress. Some needed others to complete so as to have "good" ending but with no hints of the prerequisite. NPC quest givers randomly died off-screen 🙄 At the start, I could start off as one of 3 classes: Fighter, Thief and Mage. As usual, I chose Mage but soon I switched to Sorcerer shortly after I unlocked it. I built my my pawn as a Fighter and I usually hired a Thief and a Mage. My Sorcer build is as follows: Weapon skills High Levin: I don't like Sorcerer's basic attack i.e. Magic Bolt. Yes, it's great that it's semi-auto aim but it merely tickles the enemies. As much as I love High Frigor for it's crowd...

In my second playthrough, I played as Paladin/Warlock, known as Lockadin by some players and Pallock by me. It took me about 171 hours to complete, including the extra long-ish epilogue scene and, as usual, excluding reload time. It's significantly faster than the 230-hour playthrough as Bard , mainly because I was already familiar with many things by then and also I took shorter routes as well e.g. killing Gotash early , whch unexpectedly triggered the completion of the quest of rescuing Duke of Ravengard (a failure) and the Avenging the Ironhands quest (a success). The idea behind this multiclass is to benefit from the stacking of extra attack from the Paladin class and the Pact of the Blade Warlock subclass i.e. 3 attacks altogether in a single turn. focusing only on Charisma as the ability to do weapon attack and spell attack, thanks to the feature of the pact. So the first thing to do was to rush to Warlock level 3 as soon as possible to unlock Pact of the Blade so as to use C...

In my first playthrough, playing as a Lore Bard , I did the more typical safer route in defeating Gortash: disabled the Steel Watch foundry first (but to do that, I rescued some prisoners beforehand) before confronting him. Steel Watchers are quite a pain to deal with. In this second playthrough, I followed the way of another player, where Gortash was killed in a much easier fashion: However, on hindsight, I should have gotten someone to unlock the next waypoint (should be Baldur's Gate) because the drawbridge connecting South Span and Wyrm's Rock was inexplicably up again, although the guards there acted as though it was down, and so I had to teleport straight to Wyrm's Rock, to be greeted by this: I probably should have made sure the doors of other rooms were close. It might have made a difference.

After I was done with my first Baldur's Gate 3 playthrough , I wanted to play something less time consuming for a little while before resuming my second playthrough . I chose Slay the Spire's expansion, Downfall. To my pleasant surprise, there was a new locked character, which much later on I found out to be still in Beta. To unlock it, I had to finish a run i.e. beating at least the Act 3 boss with the 7th villain i.e. Snecko. I did that long time ago because I had already unlocked the Ascension level. Oh well, I did it one more time on normal level, just to unlock the new character soonest. The new character is The Collector. I'm amazed and happy that this is yet another unique character. Key features: There's a separate deck called the Collection. Cards there are Megathereal, which is actually the same as Ethereal. I don't know why they use a different term for it. One card is drawn each turn. It's collected from from fallen enemies provided you have sufficie...

This is my first playthrough, which I finally finished recently after more than 230 hours 😬 (excluding reload).  My intention is to play all classes and that applies to the companions too. So, in this playthrough, these were the classes: Me - Lore Bard lvl 12 Lae'zel - Battlemaster Fighter lvl 12 Shadowheart - Tempest Cleric lvl 12 Wyll - Tome Great Old One Warlock lvl 9 + Storm Sorcerer lvl 3 I'm happy with all these classes. They all shone equally bright :) As for the game itself, I love it although I became impatient towards the end because I wanted to resume my second playthrough to experience other classes. The voice acting was great. For instance, I remember a decision that I made in advance through logical discussion with my hubby but when the time came to make that, I was very moved by a particular character's reaction before and after the decision. It truly moved me. The game isn't flawless but many of them can be overlooked easily except for one: Act 3 felt m...