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I guess since I'm here again, I'll make my own Now Playing topic!

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Author Topic: I guess since I'm here again, I'll make my own Now Playing topic!  (Read 13678 times)
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Maniac
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« Reply #375 on: 28 August, 2016, 10:17:14 pm »

I have pretty much no experience with his music. His only songs that I can even remember are a remix he contributed to USAO's BREAK OUT WHITE and this song he contributed to a MEGAREX release



(p.s. ULTRA HITECH 01 is crazy good, check that out)
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« Reply #376 on: 30 August, 2016, 07:11:31 pm »



reminder that akari daisuki bot is the best thing on twitter
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« Reply #377 on: 01 September, 2016, 02:45:59 am »

Fun fact: I've never played more than an hour of Baldur's Gate 1. As a kid/teen, I loved the hell out of Baldur's Gate 2 (for good reason), but I never got into Baldur's Gate 1. I still conflated the two because Baldur's Gate 2 is a masterwork, but yeah. Now that I've actually played raw AD&D 2.0, I've decided to finally tackle Baldur's Gate 1!

Playing as a mage, which is pretty uhhhhh. Mages level slower than any other class, requiring 2500 EXP for the first level. A couple hours of adventuring has gotten me a third of the way through that. At CL1, I have one spell: the damage spells do ass damage (Chromatic Orb has applications, I suppose, but not when it's my only spell), so I basically have one save-or-lose spell and then all I get is this dinky little slingshot with a THAC0 of 24 lol. For my part, I chose color spray, although now I'm using Sleep. Meanwhile, with 16 CON, I still have 4 HP so literally anything could one-shot me. I had a fun experience early on where I was attacked by that one CL3 mage assassin with mirror image and magic missile, and he basically just constantly no-sold my color spray and nuked me to hell with magic missile (All three blasts one-shot a level 1 Imoen, whereas a single blast out of three killed my mage). Should have brought on Xzar and Montaron when I ran into them, but I didn't expect to run into a CL3 wizard like, right outside the inn where Jaheira and Khalid were camped out, in the middle of public with guards running around no less.

After smashing myself against him for 20 minutes, hoping either my two party members or the guards could burn through his mirror images fast enough to kill him before he one-shot someone with magic missile, I actually got my party going. Jaheira and Khalid, as well as Kagain from Belerost. Pretty much none of them have the sufficient THAC0 where they hit anything, but having three meatshields alternate while two guys in the back poke the enemies with ranged weapons is cool. Spent another 10 minutes fighting another mage asshole -- some lady with Improved Invisibility (4th level) and Lightning Bolt (3rd level), meaning she's at least a CL7 mage. Fortunately, that one was less awful just because she doesn't come with horrible anti-melee spells that she could cast almost immediately, so my five party members eventually broke her concentration often enough to tear through her 20-something HP before she nuked the party with lightning bolt (I have a character with 20 con -- at level 1, even he is often dealt so much damage by lightning bolt that he gets taken down to -10 HP and perma-killed lol). Now I'm just going through the forest nearby, killing guys for pitiful EXP rewards (mmm, marginal...).

Aside from that... the scrolling in this game is crazy sluggish, something they smoothed out for Baldur's Gate 2. Baldur's Gate 2's pathfinding AI was pretty damn bad, but it's even worse here: party members are pretty damn likely to try to pass through other characters moving towards a target, and they often get caught between two characters already in melee range of the target, just standing there unless I have them manually and inefficiently have them back up and go far around the target. Baldur's Gate is, of course, locked to 640x480, so it's small as hell even on the rather low resolutions I tend to use on my monitors. Honestly, I don't like mods in general, but I might have to throw on some quality-of-life mods to make this thing more expedient, because yeah, this isometric RPG from 1998 is very janky lol

EDIT: stroll into the next town battered and bruised, go to the inn, oh look, another assassin! Oh look, they killed Kagain! Like, with the guys in Candlekeep, at least they attacked me alone in empty houses, so if they actually did successfully kill me, they at least had a chance to get out before they got caught. These guys are just gonna get killed by the Flaming Fist even if they did kill me. Why the hell are they attacking me in public places, in front of like a dozen witnesses? gj Bioware.
« Last Edit: 01 September, 2016, 11:47:38 pm by Maniac » Report Spam   Logged

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« Reply #378 on: 01 September, 2016, 07:12:25 am »

I've got BG1 on Steam but never got around to playing it whoops.
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« Reply #379 on: 01 September, 2016, 11:46:38 pm »

Level 2, yay~. Now I have two spell slots for the day lol. Both are sleep at this stage.

Went into Nashkel and saw Minsc soliciting assistance in rescuing his ward. Naturally, having Minsc in my party is pretty much necessary, so I hopped on board. I didn't entirely realize how far we were supposed to go at the time, but I went through like, five areas before actually reaching my destination. One big divergence between Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 is that there are a crapton of locations on the world map that are just open, barren wilderness. There will be like, a few fixed encounters or items in any given location, but finding them largely requires combing every last corner of the area, staggered out only by thinly-stretched, hilariously impotent mobs which give like, a middling 7 EXP per character (the first level for a mage requires 2500! even the fastest-leveling class, thief, requires 1250). Baldur's Gate 2 threw that out in favor of a more expedient world map with only major destinations and a few squares of wilderness, most of which housed a rather lengthy dungeon that was attached to one of the many larger side-quests in that game, and just packed all of those major destinations with those aforementioned fixed encounters/drops instead of spreading them out over 40 different nondescript patches of forestland. That was pretty much a unilaterally wise decision.

On the way, I aimlessly stumbled into another quest I had, where I had to hunt an evil CL5 Cleric surrounded by a ton of skeleton minions. In what is kind of an interesting mechanic for a Bioware game, you can go down a specific tree in the dialogue prompt that causes him to have a breakdown and destroy all of his minions, leaving him alone. Of course, I didn't actually expect that, so I just lured most of the skeletons away from him and manually killed them. At least I totally got EXP for each of them as opposed to nothing! The cleric himself was funny, one of those deals where I kick his shit in on the first go, forget to save and stumble into a random encounter that kills someone in my party. And then every subsequent try, I miss a bunch of swings and he just paralyzes my whole party, has one other guy confused and hacking away at the paralyzed guys while he takes potshots with a +2 hammer. Took quite a number of tries to take him out -- the attempt that finally did it had him confuse Minsc, who could easily one-shot damn near anyone in my party even without a critical hit (yay getting a +5 modifier to damage rolls!), so I had to kite him on top of fighting both the cleric and the mob I accidentally stumbled into right after killing the cleric as I desperately tried to stay away from Minsc. Kind of a miracle I actually survived.

Reached my destination, the Gnoll Stronghold. Here, I discovered one other divergence between this game and pretty much every single Bioware game made after it, including Baldur's Gate 2: enemies respawn. In fact, they respawn pretty god damn fast, often while you're only about 10-15 seconds worth of distance away from them. So while this place isn't hard, since Gnolls are hapless chumps and all of my party members have picked up a hit die by this point, there's a crapload of Gnolls and it's a slog to get around, especially as they respawn. These guys give miserable EXP rewards, like 7-11 per character depending on the variety, and even then my MC went from 2500 EXP to 4000 EXP during my stay. Eventually rescued Minsc's ward, Dynaheir. Had to dump Kagain for her, as I'm not done with Minsc yet. Simply put, Dynaheir sucks: She's an Invoker, so she's specializing in like, one of the shittiest wizardry fields while losing access to almost all of the rest. And well, wizards blow at this level -- her only options are equipping like, 3 casts of magic missile as she does a paltry 6 damage with any given cast while Minsc outdamages every last shot combined with a single swing of a greatsword. Gotta have her in the party if I want Minsc, though. We'll see if I don't dump the two of them in the near future -- giving up Kagain, whose AC I had gotten down to -2 with these gauntlets of dexterity I picked up earlier (with the HP he has, that means he's completely unfuckwithable in melee combat), for a lady who exists to spam magic missile hurts quite a bit.

Almost have my second level arcane spell slot woooooo
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« Reply #380 on: 03 September, 2016, 11:47:37 pm »

I pretty much changed my mind about Minsc and Dynaheir and basically dropped them at the end of the Gnoll Stronghold. Retained Kagain instead, because he's a dauntless behemoth, far more useful than Minsc would have been anyway. But since I'm short on another melee DPS beatstick, I went to hunt down Shar-Teel and recruit her. So I did, but one thing I didn't expect is that she's in an area with Basilisks -- you can probably guess what they do. There were two variants, the lesser basilisks and the greater basilisks, the primary divergence between them being HP. The thing about them is that the lesser basilisks give 1400 EXP a piece (which is then split between the six party members), and the greater ones drop 4000. At the time, I had never killed an enemy that gave 1400 or more EXP, and there were like, eight of those things, along with two Greater Basilisks. The game also plants a friendly zombie nearby that you can command (undead are flat out immune to petrification), so I had him charge forward, eat up aggro and slaughtered the basilisks. Went from halfway through level 2 to 4 by the end of it, so that was pretty damn lucrative.

Dumped Jaheira and Khalid for Viconia and Edwin. Along with Kagain and Shar-Teel, this means 4/5 of my party members are evil-aligned. A month out of Candlekeep and already are
(I'll level with you, I still have no idea if that custom-made mug I found on google image search is supposed to be a really girly boy or a boy-ish girl, but I'm just gonna say it's a dude because I'm awful) and spunky Imoen getting themselves caught up with the wrong kind of people. I guess it's kind of fitting, since he's named after one of my D&D characters who actually is Neutral Evil (that name really doesn't make any sense when it's on someone who isn't evil or at least chaotic neutral, but it's pretty~).

Finally doing the main story quests. Bandits here, bandits there, etc. My party was fairly overleveled for the first two chapters, but I think the game is starting to catch up. Party is half-way to two-thirds through level 5, aside from my dual-classed Shar-Teel and Imoen, who are both level 6 (that thief EXP, man). Kagain has -7 AC now, which is absurd. Few things have any chance of hitting him short of a critical hit. He also has 69 HP (nice), so he basically never dies. In a pinch, if I need to burn a spell-caster's spell slots, I just throw Kagain at them until they run out lol. Shar-Teel has a hide score of 165% does like, 40 damage on a backstab -- I sometimes just send her ahead alone and have her hit and run enemies that are inelegantly scattered and have a chance at sneaking around to feast on my backliners. Edwin has +2 spell slots from his amulet/being a specialist mage, so he provides a lot of support. Viconia has some fun cleric skills like Hold Person as well as -4 AC -- she's fragile thanks to her miserable con, but she's hard to hit. Imoen is basically just an archer and is there to use thief support skills, and Lucien is comparatively worthless thanks to not being a specialist mage lol. I also gave him terrible stats too, not knowing that dex and con mean nothing unless they're 15+. Oh well, he's another mage so he can help Edwin maximize the odds of a target failing their save against a chromatic orb, I guess.

Getting a hang of using this fragile, weird party though. Starting to enjoy myself after suffering during the first few hours.
« Last Edit: 03 September, 2016, 11:51:03 pm by Maniac » Report Spam   Logged

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« Reply #381 on: 04 September, 2016, 08:35:47 pm »



Oh, the things you could have been, Lucien...

Tempted to call a mulligan and just start over. Lucien is just so irreconcilably bad lol
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« Reply #382 on: 04 September, 2016, 09:02:01 pm »

just think about all the gay elfsex you could've had
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« Reply #383 on: 04 September, 2016, 09:27:47 pm »

nah, this is an RPG from 1998, gay romances didn't exist yet. or romances period, that started with baldur's gate 2 lol

actually, i think every woman you can romance in baldur's gate 2 is some kind of elf (half-elf, winged elf, drow), so if you mean straight elf sex then yeah, lots of that
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« Reply #384 on: 05 September, 2016, 07:06:45 am »



uggggh this song makes me so hard. why the hell can't his submissions to IIDX be this good anymore?
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« Reply #385 on: 05 September, 2016, 01:32:32 pm »

Okay, that one's actually pretty freaking sweet.
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« Reply #386 on: 06 September, 2016, 06:59:27 am »




like night and day
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« Reply #387 on: 06 September, 2016, 01:18:07 pm »

Wow.

You weren't kidding about your old character having a terrible build.
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« Reply #388 on: 07 September, 2016, 06:49:49 am »



the best way to win a fight

So, when I stopped playing as Lucien, I had just entered Baldur's Gate proper. Didn't spend any time exploring it before I rolled up Yiri out of my dissatisfaction with Lucien and saw the difference it made. So now that I've caught up with my first run, I'm actually moving around Baldur's Gate and this city is a fucking mess. It's made up of nine districts -- in terms of landmass, it's probably bigger than Athkatla in Baldur's Gate 2, albeit less densely populated and with fewer points of interest. There's a wall arbitrarily bisecting the city, so depending on which district you're coming from, you may end up in a dead end and have to play around with the map to reach your destination. Unlike with Athkatla, none of the nine districts are labelled (much like almost every region in the game, which has lent itself to some substantial confusion already), and also unlike Athkatla, there doesn't seem to be a general theme to most of them.

This causes a rather big pain in the ass: A lot of sidequests tell you to go to a specific inn, or temple, and don't actually tell you which district that place actually is in. One egregious example is with a sidequest you'll probably stumble into during your time there, where you encounter an assassin who runs off after threatening you, and you'll eventually find his associate in another district afterwards who tells you that this guy has somehow poisoned you, and that you will die if you don't obtain the antidote in ten days. This leads to a chain of fetch quests where you're told to go to this temple, and then that temple, and then to an inn somewhere, and then a completely different inn somewhere else, and at no point does that quest tell you where to go, and while one location is in a rather fitting location (the evil goddess of the seas has her temple in the docks, of course), there's no actual way to tell where any of those destinations are without brute force. I just decided to use a guide to find my way around, but god this would be a pain in the ass to do without one (and since this game came out in 1998, chances are you didn't have one back then lol). Time elapses pretty slowly unless you rest, and no time is spent when traveling around the city, so you're not really under the gun here, but it's a rather rude way to introduce you to the city in which you'll spend the next few chapters.
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« Reply #389 on: 08 September, 2016, 12:03:19 am »



and it only took almost 100 summoned monsters under the effects of haste and a few shots of resist fear to do!
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