Samuel_Tow

The "fog" only hides terrain, but does not hide the sky or visual effects. If you can jump or fly high enough, or just climb a high enough rock, you'll spot a version of the Chantry in the distance. Just head towards that and look for geysers to take you there. Black Swan is inside.

Alternatively, just follow the contour of the grassy area. You might need to climb a few rock ledges, but eventually you'll see the Chantry as a matter of course.

And you can't miss it. The skybox (rather, sphere) isn't affected by fog, so even if the chantry is, you'll still see a giant grey spiky ball floating against the orange sky.

They're still bulky and they still leave a gap between skin and armour. Decent for an armour plate, but really not something you can use for skintight clothing.

And thus is explained the motivation behind these rumours. And it's about what you'd expect - pure, unadulterated malice.

Now imagine walking and kicking at the same time.

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On the note of Diminishing Returns, what actually IS that? I have a fairly solid mental block in place when it comes to PvP, so I intentionally glossed over all the PvP changes back then and I never caught what DR actually constituted.

Well, I was probably the only person in the entire world who hadn't made that joke yet, so I figured I'd complete the set

Or that, yes. It feels good to have the last few powers have a leg up, and it helps exactly where help is needed. Sweet

It's really a personal thing. I could go on explaining where I draw the line, but it really isn't a very interesting read. My solution has been, as you put it, to simply play more fantastic origins, and it's worked to my benefit. Turns out that's what I like most of all anyway, and if it took a game FORCING me to embrace it for me to realise that, then oh well

And I really don't want to take away from anybody else's fun. Your characters, your call, none of my business. Long as it works for you, I'm all the happier for it.

Well, it looks American enough and it costs dollars. But why is it still branded Pegi 16, rather than the PG13 it is in the US?

From English to Bulgarian. Be much easier if I didn't have to deal with things like "retroviral oncogene v-erb-B." I don't know what that even is, let alone what, if anything, it translates to.

While I don't want to discuss Batman (not a big comic book fan in general, if it weren't clear by now), I want to point something out - I tend to not pretend that my characters don't kill if it looks like they do. I don't know why that is, maybe I just grew up with violent cartoons or what have you, but I've never had the kind of aversion for killing your enemies as most people here seem to. I mean, sure, wanton murder and destruction are pretty anti-heroic, I will admit, but if I write for a guy whose primary weapons are a katana and a pair of pistols... Well, I won't do the mental gymnastics to try and explain how he's really not killing them. He is.

But I don't want to start up a discussion about that, or indeed about Batman. That's how I see things, that's all. But the point is - the game really can't account for anything but "stand and fight" tactics. You fight a Kronos titan by facing it down and hitting it until it drops sideways. I realise I could re-imagine this as my character finding a weakness and disabling it, as climbing it or even as something more extreme, such as luring it into a trap where it falls through the ground and into mine shaft or some such. I could, but... When I can't SEE it, it's just beyond my willingness to want to bother. As such, I simply never write characters who would HAVE to resort to something like this. I'm not averse to playing such characters, as that's basically what the Prince of Persia is (one of my favourite games series of all time), but in this game, I somehow keep straying back to characters who COULD fight as the game depicts them as fighting.

In my head, I will always exaggerate the effect powers have, such as Inferno not having an effect that you can barely frikkin' see, but rather producing the kind of towering fireball that would catch your attention on the other side of a big city and make you go "Holy ****!" But that's still taking what a power IS and amplifying it. Making characters that the game forces to do things that their concept says they shouldn't be is an instant buzzkill for me, so I simply don't make those. I'm not sure which came first - the game limitation or the preference, but I realise now that that's what my tastes demand these days, anyway - characters who COULD take down a Kronos Titan single-handedly.

I guess what I'm trying to say is a re-tread of what I said before - over the years, I've grown to prefer the kind of super-powered characters who can take care of themselves against almost any threat with pretty amazing levels of power and sometimes explosions. You can take that as a partial explanation why, I guess.

Besides, I just enjoy the discussion so far just on its face

Well, that would explain a lot.

That's actually something I've been meaning to comment on, as it's a decision I had to make a LONG time ago. Once upon a time back in 2004, I made a collection of "natural human" characters (or rather, one concept I kept remaking) that I was trying to make something decent out of. Thing is, I'd never gotten above level 20 at the time, so I didn't know much of anything of what I'll be facing later on. All I'd seen was thugs and occasionally cultists.

Then I brought the titular Samuel Tow to 50 and started looking for a new character to play. At the time, I had Crash, the latest incarnation of my "natural human" concept. When I sat down and tried to imagine what she'd be doing at level 50, however... I realised that I could never work with such a concept. At level 50, we fight giant robots, space aliens with plasma rifles, giant monsters and actual super villains. For Samuel Tow, taking out a Zeus or even a Kronos Titan solo wasn't much of a stretch as I'd written him. He's basically a cheat mode super (hence why I try to avoid using him in stories if I can) and it made sense he'd be able to cap one of these things single-handedly without much effort.

For Crash, though, it just didn't make any sense. Originally, she was just a rugged martial artist, but simple skilled martial artists don't punch through tank armour, don't jump 50 feet straight up and don't survive missile swarms to the face. I mean, you can invent some kind of chi defence and mystical super strength miracle excuse, but then you stop being a natural human as such and go into over superheroics anyway. So I retconned her into a Battle Angel Alita inspired super strong, indestructible cyborg for whom it WOULD make sense to jump 50 feet straight up to the top of a Kronos Titan and then proceed to punch straight through its armour and pierce its internal power system for massive damage.

I really don't think the game leaves much room for "natural human" concepts, not considering what we fight at level 50. Again - Indiana Jones does not brawl a War Walker to death. He usually runs away from these. It'd be like him trying to stop that iconic boulder with his bare hands. I know this is just my opinion and other people have made and will make natural humans, but for me, the entire game's power level is just too high for humans who are simply very tough or highly skilled. You need actual super powers to survive as we do in this game.

Yeah, that's pretty much what I had in mind for Nova. I'd really love it if it looked more like that

Will do when time permits, but for the moment, I'm mostly focusing on Dragonball Kai as it releases, since I never got far in the original DBZ.

I gotta' say, though, the Cowboy Bebop movie I saw that one time was terrible, even if I'm sure it's not a good representation of the actual series. I'm pretty sure it ended with a mile-long monologue about butterfiles and the meaning of life.

Naruto has actually been going downhill pretty much since the first fight with Gaara, and I think the writer just lost his edge. The Shippuuden series looks like it was supposed to revitalise the anime, but by this point it's operating on a shoestring budget with a story so embarrassing I don't even want to talk about it. At this point, the non-canon movies are far superior to the series because they both have decent animations budget and they look like they're written by people who aren't suffering from writer's block several years running.

Dragonball Z is a particular offender in most people's minds for a simple reason - it's padded as hell. As I heard it, the anime kept running ahead of the manga, and they had to pad it out with pointless closeups, additional attacks, pointless filler arcs and just general dragging of feet, which makes it drone on and on and ON! The Dragonball Kai remastering has trimmed all of that, and actually dispensed with most of the big explosions, amusingly enough. They're down to one or two per episode, and usually plot-relevant explosions, to boot. As I heard it, it's down from the original 276 episodes to what's planned to be less than 100, so you can see how much they've trimmed.

All of that is to say that, yes, in general I agree with you that fights for the sake of fights with no plot to them are boring. That's why I never got into Pokemon - the whole show just felt pointless. However, I'm still willing to accept the allusion of a plot if it leads to big explosions nevertheless. Many of the Dragonball Kai fights, for instance, have paper thin excuses. "We want to know where Son Goku is and we'll beat you until you tell us." "OK, let's go to that island over there and beat each other up until a plot point develops." Basically, the entire show is a sequence of events which prevent Son Goku from fighting, so others have to hold out and die until he arrives, gets beaten up some and eventually triumphs. Repeat around four time (once for Vegeta, once for Freeze, once for Cell and I assume once for Buu). And you know what? That's good enough for me. I just love the way the good guys' eyes light up when the cavalry arrives, and I love the shock on the bad guy's faces when he powers up (within 10-15 seconds in Kai). Yeah, it's basic and uninspired, but it works for what it is. I enjoy the purity of action unburdened with politics and intrigue.

On the flip side, I really despise "story driven" stories as such, because this usually translates into people talking at each other for hours. I nearly flipped my **** when I tried to sit through all of the philosophical garbage of Ghost in the Shell 2. There's a half-hour scene in a cold room between one man and one woman debating the ethics of what it means to be alive and if a machine can ever be alive. It was supposed to be deep and dramatic, but it just about put me to sleep.

The more I think about it, the more I realise that my favourite stories are objective-driven in the same way games up. "This" must be done. How do we do it? Oh, we need to find "that" out and do "this other thing." OK, let's go do those. Oh, we can't because of "other things." I prefer stories driven by people doing things, with ethics, morality, philosophy and so forth used to justify and explain the actions, rather than stories driven by inaction and contemplation. And that's not to say I don't like contemplation, but you can still contemplate in a goal-oriented manner, depending on how it's written. By far the BIGGEST problem with anime isn't catgirls or brainless action. It's contemplating your naval for about 24 episodes, then something happens in the next two, then you proceed to contemplate your naval for another season. I fully regret watching Divergence Eve (DO NOT see it) for this precise reason.

I never exemplar because I don't like losing power. Simple as that. Now I have to worry about losing powers AND losing Incarnate boosts. This is unlikely to change status quo for me. In fact, I don't see a point in exemplaring, especially at 50, when I could have devised a build to depend on a high-level power or the strength of high-level enhancements (which start scaling down below 30). I see no point in it.

That's not to say the exemplar system is at fault here, but merely to say that exemplaring has been a "take it or leave it" affair ever since it was introduced. I don't envision this changing with Incarnates.

I can get behind this. It would make level 50 a little more special than "just another slot level," which is what it is right now. I realise asking for specialities like this is kind of out of the norm, but then I do wish that level 50 were indeed out of the norm. Not necessarily game-breaking or game-changing, but at least having SOMETHING that told you "Hey, this is as high as the level system goes. You reached the top!" Just something different from what I've had two out of every three levels for the past 20 levels.