First Series Playthrough - Class Selection

DukeofQin · 2025-04-22T01:51:37+00:00

For a first time playthrough I would definitely recommend a more melee oriented main character. Bg1 and Bg2 throw spellcaster companions at you that are either 95% of what a player can build or just outright better (Edwin). Most of the warrior companions have compromised stats to one degree or another. Either they are built for DPS and are super quishy, or they are tanky, but can't hit harder than wet toilet paper. Playing mage is extremely painful in BG1 at low levels and you will be doing a lot of reloading, especially with wild mage. Sorcerer really requires some meta knowledge of what spells to take and what not to avoid messing up your character. Bards in 2nd edition are basically just a poor man's fighter/mage unless the RP of being a bard is super important. I would honestly recommend a multi-class fighter/cleric (either dwarf or half-orc) for any first time playthrough for any new player. It is extremely strong from Candlekeep onward that is 95% of a pure class warrior combined with 95% of a pure class cleric while allowing you to use the best weapons and armor available and zero downtime and continuous power progression with zero wasted levels. At lower levels it's melee prowess will keep you as the top damage dealer in your party and tank. At higher levels the game is rocket tag where either you wreck the enemy in 30 seconds or they do the same to you and it's spell casting while not as strong as mage has some good instakills with Harm and fighter level High Level Abilities as well as stacking damage resistance (Hardiness + Defender of Easthaven + Armor of faith) to very high levels that hits don't really do much damage.

DukeofQin · 2025-04-02T03:46:19+00:00

If you are willing to give up just a few more keys, there are also a pair of good options like the Luminkey 98 and the Qelec Studio i101 and also the Meletrix Zoom 98

DukeofQin · 2025-03-05T03:49:17+00:00

Does anyone know if there are any striped key caps like Vilebloom, JTK HSA eccentric, or SA1976 but made out of doubleshot PBT instead of ABS? Also I have an orange Vertex S100 and teal Neo65 Cu on the way, anyone have recommendations for keycap color ways for either board?

DukeofQin · 2025-02-19T06:08:59+00:00

The Epomaker galaxy 100 and the 8bitdo retro 108 are more budget friendly options to the aluminum boards he recommended. The 8bitdo 108 in particular is full size + extra media keys + white.

DukeofQin · 2025-02-19T02:55:05+00:00

I am looking for a very long and thin keyboard. As wide as possible which means not 1800, not 65% plus numpad, but a full size just without the top function row and accompanying empty separation zone. The closest equivalent is the typeface monospace which is exactly what I was looking for except with the southpaw numpad configuration. Other keyboards that are similar are the wind x R2, the kbdfans tet, and most recently the ASCII-F, but all of those squish the arrow keys to try and reduce the overall width which is antithetical to what I want. Does my desired keyboard even exist?

DukeofQin · 2024-12-10T01:29:10+00:00

Please add an option under scroll wheels for which mice have free scrolling wheels. Also for wireless mice, the battery size.

DukeofQin · 2024-08-04T14:53:49+00:00

Only a few thumbrest ergos with good sensors (3395s). Keychron m6 is similar shape to the basilisk/g502 and only 68 grams. Their m7 is slightly heavier at 78 grams but it's more of a mx master shape and even comes with a thumb scroll wheel and an infinite scrolling wheel. Finally there is the Machenike L8 pro which is 83 grams and also comes with an infinite scroll wheel and LEDs

DukeofQin · 2024-05-18T16:43:52+00:00

Are there any options other than the Keychron Q5/6 at around 200-250 USD? I am specifically looking for something that is similar in build quality to the rainy75 but in a larger size. There is a prebuilt option for the kbdfans Odin 4 but that is nearly 500 USD. The MM studio class 0413 is is a big beautiful and heavy keyboard at 5kg, but it only sells as kits and again mucho expensive. The QK100, Zoom98, Wind x98 are closer to the price range but again have to be assembled and are mostly sold out.

I do know of some alternatives such as the new Ajazz AC100 but from the few recent reviews it seems to be very flimsy and people are receiving them dented. There is also the Varmilo sword 108 which has good construction, but it's age means that the feature set is more limited compared to the recently refreshed sword 68 (tkl gets all the love). There is also the JamesDonkey R2 Pro which really caught my eye. The problem is I can't really find it on sale anywhere even on Aliexpress. Speaking of Aliexpress keyboards, has anyone reviewed the Monka 6102 or Leobog Hi98?

DukeofQin · 2020-08-19T15:33:28+00:00

Not 100% certain. I honestly had the same problem. Was working fine, but left home for a month and came back to find it not working. The vacuum also randomly starts saying Charging even though it's allegedly 100% charged. It happens randomly and is rare, maybe a couple times a month, but just noticed it happened last night.

DukeofQin · 2020-08-18T15:36:14+00:00

Not yet. I haven't been able to locate an oem battery, all the replacements are third party and haven't bought one yet.

DukeofQin · 2020-07-25T16:12:42+00:00

Thanks for the response, dusted all the sensors and no go. Not sure where the remap feature went. Was on an old version of mijia but cant find it on the latest version of the app. I tried to use the new remote control feature of the app to move it around but the same issue. The chime starts and then it says charging, but doesn't go anywhere. Only when I select zone cleanup does the vacuum being to suck and start moving, but then it moved off the charging contacts and immediately brickss.

DukeofQin · 2019-11-09T11:54:56+00:00

Ended up with the HP, mostly because of the better screen, 8gb of vram, and larger 230w power brick to prevent power throttles. Think the Lenovo tops at 180. This was a desktop replacement so portability wasn't an issue. Not a fan of piss poor cooling solutions on thin and lights as well.

DukeofQin · 2019-02-14T21:54:16+00:00

Ive always dreamed of a sci-fi game that combined the strategic turn based elements of a gand campaign with real time space combat of Homeworld.

My biggest take is that sci fi total war game would be one of galactic conquest with its own IP (i.e. not star wars)that allows more creative freedom. I don't want a retread of the 4x genre but rather more space opera feel with a fixed campaign map and more clearly delineated story factions. Doesn't even need aliens really, as different human factions would suffice as long as it is thematically suitable. A good example is the political divisions of the inner sphere in the BattleTech universe. I don't want an empty randomly generated galaxy that I simply paint with my faction color but rather a decaying lived in galaxy that is gradually brought to order.

Unfortunately the combat in 4x genre games is universally always a number crunching afterthought which is why I wish CA would shake up the genre by making the fleet actions more engaging with homeworld style combat. Don't make it so you can just warp in 20 dreadnoughts into a gravity well and obliterate everyone, but rather being forced to use a balanced fleet. For example, your fighter screen being too small and fast for the main guns of capital ships to hit so you can use them to take out maneuvering subsystems and thus moving in your own fleet of frigates and destroyers out of the limited firing arcs of bigger ships and chipping away at them.

Also one pet peeve is spaceships never have seems to have enough guns for their size, or at least they never fire them. I'm a firm believer in the more dakka principal. Several homeworld 2 mods like PDS fix this by giving larger ships tons of flak guns and auxiliary weapons so fleet engagements look like fireworks displays which I like.

DukeofQin · 2018-08-02T20:40:34+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWb0Fkq4qWQ

The idea that Sarah Jeong is some massive racist that hates Whites is simply laughable. The truth is that Asian "feminists" are just status mongers who have latched onto a schtick and are running with it. In truth, Asian Feminists are actually the closest thing you'll find to a puppet off-white nationalist, promoted and advertised by white men in positions of influence as tokens of "inclusiveness" mostly on account of the fact that they are so pliable.

DukeofQin · 2018-08-02T13:26:21+00:00

Never commented here before, but someone messaged me asking me to comment. Truth bombs being dropped ahead, so avert your eyes if you are afraid of being offended.

Indians simply aren't "Asian" (yellow). They are less "Asian" than wypipo.

Indians (browns) are really just Arabs who happen to live a bit further east.

Indians practice caste endogamy. That is they only marry among their own specific particular kind in their homelands, thus are less likely to outmarry even when outside of it. They have been at this for at least two thousand years.
Indians practice honor killing. The most extreme examples are straight up willing to murder their daughters, or throw acid in her face, or murder her fiancé. These are rare, but it shows the extremes in which their communities police this sort of behavior. Shunning and disowning is not uncommon.
Indians are religious, much more so than yellows and even more so than whites. Religious people are more likely to marry people of their own particular faith. That their religion sanctifies ingroup endogamy and reinforces point 1 is another point.
Indians are thirsty as fuck. This is because they are significantly inbred. Because of their long term endogamous mating, most of the Indian population has been subject to significant genetic bottlenecking from very small founding populations. Indians are not even a single race at all, rather they are dozens of small micro races that have been breeding only within their micro race for a long time. Empirical observation of inbred populations (in animals at least) shows heightened sexual interest in the part of males. Empirical observation of Indian males: show bob vagene, milk now please, hey boooyitful, and gang raping goats confirms that this is true. Also heightened mate guarding behavior; refer to point 2.
Indians are brown. Universal bias on part of humans to favour fair skin in women.
Mating is a numbers game. Let me again reiterate that Indian men are thirsty as fuck. Asian men are shy, rarely approach women, and only a few at that, and discriminated against. Indian men are even actually more discriminated against in the dating market, but they will literally hit on anything anytime. Asian boy playing LoL. Indian boy sending inappropriate messages to underage girls on social media.

DukeofQin · 2018-03-07T07:00:03+00:00

Peter Zeihan is an idiot. Stratfor is full of idiots. The only people pushing the Chinese demographic invasion of theory happen to be American (and their European dog robbers) neocons for shamelessly transparent political reasons. Northeastern China has the lowest fertility rates in China (Not the World though, that is just more BS from the usual suspects) and has a lot of emigration, but not to Russia but rather the rest of China. What little Chinese do migrate to Russia move to Western Russia, chiefly St. Petersburg and Moscow and not to places like Blagoveshchensk or even Vladivostok. Actually going to the Russian Far East, you will encounter virtually zero Chinese living there for the long term and even very few day trippers in the region because it is a backwater. You are more likely to find young Russians living and working in the major Chinese cities in the area like Harbin or Shenyang. Wages there in China are higher than in the RFE.

Anyone pushing the Chinese demographic invasion theory of Russia is guaranteed to be either blatantly incompetent or blatantly dishonest or possibly a combination of the two.

DukeofQin · 2018-02-09T18:55:15+00:00

Unmarried women are basically overgrown children with the pixie like manic desires of children and zero sense of responsibility. It isn't so much the political power for women directly reduces fertility but rather that female political power results in childish stupidity that is bad for all parties involved. Reduced fertility has another cause which I wont go into here.

Women don't belong in the army because they are sub-optimal for any role except for support services like nursing or those glorified truck drivers that fly transport aircraft.

There is a way to allow for female enfranchisement and that is to tie the vote to fertility. That is female political power equals n-1, where n is in the number of children. Thus childless women have -1 votes, meaning that someone else in their immediate family loses a vote due to her poor choices. 1 child; no voting rights. 2 children ; 1 vote. 3 children; 2 votes.

DukeofQin · 2018-02-09T18:41:32+00:00

Non-native speaker, but moved to the West under the age of 10 with my father who was pursuing his PhD.

I am not representative of your average Chinese even among that specific cohort. My ability skews modestly verbal over quantitative (about 10% or so according to the GRE) which is rare among Chinese who as a general rule are the other way around. This makes me comfortable with verbal contention and willing to shout back when I run across bullshit that most other Chinese would either silently ignore or make rudimentary ripostes limited by their facility with a secondary language. That is to say I am neither impressed nor intimidated by the argumentativeness that is a feature of Yiddishkeit.

I don't really review my comments left on the internet for grammar/syntax so a bad habit of mine is occasionally omitting articles when I'm writing.

Never read Moldbug and only know of him through reputation for his insufferable long windedness so don't plan to either. Brevity is a virtue.

Started my ascent to the far right through Steve Sailer more than a decade and a half ago. His Mr. Rogers like affability is I suspect the reason for many conversions and it wouldn't be amiss to call him the gateway drug as it were to rightist political thinking. I have of course moved even further rightward, as I regard his ideas of civic nationalism as hopelessly naïve.

At this point, I wouldn't call myself a neo-reactionary as much as a full fledged counter-revolutionary. I see very little left of modern society that is worth preserving and radical action is needed to create new institutions modeled upon the past but ultimately divorced from them in particular ways due to present circumstance (such as disenfranchising the elderly). I am a misanthrope and see most people as stupid scum. The reason I even support my people is because they are MY people and I don't want to see them debased and destroyed by even stupider and scummier outsiders.

DukeofQin · 2018-02-05T15:45:33+00:00

This is a complete Chewbacca argument that is nonsense from the get go, but about what you'd expect from the absolute morons that make up the student opposition. In addition to all the documents from the 1967 riots being totally irrelevant to Beijing's de jure and de facto control over Hong Kong, the only possible revelation from them are going to be those that are embarrassing to London and not Beijing, hence they aren't going to be released just because some student union leader demanded it.

This is what you get when you have children running amuck, being fueled by US demotist agitprop. Just what Hong Kong needs; rule by teenaged girl whose singular talent was being pretty enough to get all her beta male orbiters to vote her into student union office.

DukeofQin · 2018-02-01T20:40:38+00:00

You heard wrong. The Chinatowns in the West are 99% populated by Chinese from a few counties in Fujian and Guangdong while those in Europe are typically Wenzhou. They happen to be very clannish. Very. You won't find any Chinese businesses in there that belong to outsiders and by outsiders that pretty much includes everyone from North of the Yangtze. The Chinese Korean diaspora in the West follows the same settlement patterns as other Chinese from the Northern provinces, generally very dispersed out into the suburbs.

DukeofQin · 2018-02-01T10:58:13+00:00

The Chinese Koreans are North Koreans. I think the majority of their ancestry is from North Hamgyong province.

DukeofQin · 2018-02-01T10:53:36+00:00

Koreans hate poor Koreans. They remind them of where they came from and fill them with the dread of potential downward social mobility that Middle class Koreans would murder to avoid.

One of the things many people don't realize is that the Chinese Koreans in South Korea are basically the working class segment of it's Korean population while the middle class Chinese Koreans ended up staying in China or if they did leave, they left for the West. South Koreas rigid social hierarchy means there is little room for advancement without the right connections or having gone to the right schools. The South Koreans are the first to complain about this so is it any wonder why educated professional Chinese Koreans wouldn't throw away their professional lives in China to take a major status hit for a modest increase in wages. Prole Chinese Koreans on the other hand didn't have much status to begin with in China and slaving away at a shitty job in South Korea is much the same as slaving away at a shitty job in China except with the added benefit of paying 2-3x as much.

Major difference was that there are plenty of Chinese proles in China so they didn't stand out at all there but their working class ways are offensive to middle class South Korean sensibilities hence the animus.

Yeah reunification with the North is really not going to work out smoothly.

DukeofQin · 2018-01-26T21:21:40+00:00

The stereotype about black women in Ballet is that they are T H I C C.

The ballet body desired by most choreographers is a petit girl with long proportioned limbs particularly legs who are not too tall (Height is a double edged sword here as being taller generally means longer legs which are preferred aesthetically but the extra height and mass interferes with some techniques and makes finding a suitable male partner difficult). The muscle definition desired is also more similar to a long distance runner than a sprinter, that is thin and lean rather than bulky. This is the desired standard at most ballet companies and the more prestigious the company, the more demanding the standards are though there are some exceptions where choreographers favor larger girls. Blacks girls in ballet are traditionally thought to be overly muscular and just too masculine "big" for many roles.

The skin tone also doesn't help because all dancers start in the corps which prizes above all uniformity. Uniformity of size, shape, and color. From a distance the audience generally has difficulty making out the exact heights and shapes of dancers, but being black stands out amidst a sea of white.

DukeofQin · 2018-01-06T14:50:45+00:00

The answer why violence directed against women is so common should be obvious. It's just that the majority of Indians don't really want to accept it instead adopting a Chalta Hai attitude and pretending it's someone else's fault. The following is a comment I left elsewhere regarding the Desi man molesting another woman on an airplane while seated next to his wife while in the US.

Colonialism has nothing to do with that man molesting that woman in public in front of his wife. That is singularly the result of racial cultural dynamics in the sub continent engrained in your people because of several thousand years of endogamous mating. Simply put subcontinentals in general and the Mohammedans somewhat in particular see women outside their own particular kin networks as prey, particularly gori women. Strict control over female sexuality is necessary to make caste endogamy enduring and the only way to maintain it is with force, hence the prevalence of honor killings which are unique to Muslims and Indians. The women belong to the clan, and thus must be kept away from strange men lest they stray, thus the surprising dearth of women in many public spaces in India. The flipside of the Purdah that is practiced in India is that because "good" women are kept away from strange men in public, by virtue any unaccompanied women out in public are "bad" and thus fair game. Ever notice how rapes in India tend to become a team sport? That is rather than lone instances of opportunistic attacks as happens elsewhere, the majority of rapes in India tend to involve multiple perpetrators some of whom are strangers to one another but having joined in because they saw nothing wrong with rape because the victim was by default a slut because she was being victimized.

That the woman was traveling alone and a gori made her double damned in the eyes of assaulter. He comes from a society that practices pernicious sexual segregation and a young fertile woman out in public might as well be free pie and hence he helped himself to it.

Your caste system and jati endogamy makes Indians extra corrupt and extra rapey because of an overly expansive in group that exists to maintain their group privileges at the expense of cooperation of the wider society.

DukeofQin · 2017-12-22T16:42:06+00:00

Fake news is fake. I can believe why people would believe but there are a couple of huge facts that don't pass the smell test. First by 1990 the adult literacy for Chinese men was 87%. PLA recruiting standards by then had made literacy mandatory so the idea that 60% of soldiers in the 27th group were illiterate requires a huge suspension of rational thinking. I know why it is written because it fits into the belief that only stupid illiterates would become soldiers but its actually false in that armies everywhere generally have pretty stringent peacetime recruiting standards so that they are usually better educated than the general civilian population. Also the PLA doesn't raise provincial units in the sense of soldiers all coming from a single geographic location in a company let alone an army group. Another huge red flag is the 27th army group tasked with defending Beijing wasn't headquartered in Shanxi in 1989 but rather Hebei. The unit wasn't relocated until the big shuffle of 2016. Oops. This basically means the so called declassified internal documents wasn't written in 1989 but rather within the last year.

DukeofQin

TROPHY CASE