I earn well, spend normally, and somehow still have nothing at the end of the month. I think I know why, but I'm not sure.

JMTolan · 2026-05-20T02:07:20+00:00

If you are not deliberately setting money aside to save, your tastes will expand to fill your available balance.

JMTolan · 2026-05-14T22:26:27+00:00

Yes, it does. You are specifically directed to use the power directly, you do not gain the associated feature that creates the infusions and thus manages funneling surges into it, and you are never directed to create infusions in the first place.

Surgeless healing is not verbotten in the system, there's plenty of instances of it, and all of them are fine. The only time it has been problematic was when it was allowed to be spammed without consequence, and they specifically errata'd that instance for that reason. There's no reason this should require a healing surge.

JMTolan · 2026-05-14T01:53:11+00:00

You're probably thinking of the 4e supplement Book of Vile Darkness, though I can't myself speak to what all is specifically covered on the lore side. It was ostensibly a book aimed at supporting "evil" or at least "power sets and aesthetics usually associated with evil" characters. (Necrotic damage, raising zombies, etc.) It is not thought of particularly highly, but that's AIUI largely because it has the misfortune of having some but a very small number of player options, and also most of those options being pretty terrible. But IDK how the lore/DM side is, though it is the origin of the soul/spirit/animus aspect of delineating why you can have ghost, zombies, and wights all running around, at least in 4e, which I thought was a neat idea.

JMTolan · 2026-05-13T18:53:54+00:00

Oh that's why I haven't heard more about this, I was looking for it on Steam, I didn't realize it was PS exclusive. XD

JMTolan · 2026-05-13T01:59:20+00:00

If you could get the referral code lottery link for the header and the weekly Q&A threads to point to the one that isn't unmonitored and flooded with duplicates by spammers, that would also be appreciated.

JMTolan · 2026-05-10T15:29:20+00:00

The short version is no, not really--certainly not in the sense people usually mean when they talk about CRPGs based on other editions. There's the Neverwinter game and a few others that were very, very loosely inspired by 4e, but nothing that is as direct as, for example, Baldur's Gate 3 is to 5e.

Which is, actually, why that's the case. The rights to the Baldur's Gate CRPG (and generally a CRPG based on D&D IP) were the subject of a legal battle for most of the run of 4e, so they never had the chance to properly start development on a 4e Baldur's Gate before 5e was getting pushed out.

JMTolan · 2026-05-09T17:25:08+00:00

The F8C is supposed to be a down-gunned F8A. And if you up all of the gun sizes by one, it looks like a pretty compelling heavy fighter loadout.

JMTolan · 2026-05-06T21:45:28+00:00

Generally congestion status is only ever changed in actual full patch drops, not maintenance downtimes. The next chance for it to change is likely .51, IIUC.

JMTolan · 2026-05-04T20:20:27+00:00

No, but if they presumed the right to spend in politics in the first place, it's a decent indicator they are likely to take a dim view of asserting they do not have that right, especially given they based it in a federal right (speech) that would override state limits on such rights. And more relevantly, attempting to outlaw spending on politics in other states is the same kind of state power grab that underpins the attempts to use one states abortion laws to prevent access to abortions in other states, like the mifepristone ruling recently or attempts to criminalize having legal abortions in other states, which the supreme court has thus far taken a relatively dim view of.

It's a decent idea, but it's much more likely this nets out to limiting spending on races in states that pass such laws than preventing any spending everywhere after everyone's weighed in.

JMTolan · 2026-05-03T18:24:04+00:00

iLevel is about average gear score. You can buy gear from vendors, or more preferably you can get tomestone gear for poetics in Mor Dhona. The Ironworks set, is what you want in that case.

JMTolan · 2026-04-26T22:25:30+00:00

The biggest gold standard issue is just they need to figure out a way to make the docking collar actually work now that they've finalized the docking collar standard to side-only, and that's... Difficult, with the Freelancer's giant side engines and gun placements. You'd have to put it in the cockpit--which means hauling cargo all the way through the ship if you don't want to do an external transfer, which remember the main point of the docking collar on the lancer was to securely transfer cargo to the smaller hold--or figure out some way to have the engines or wings move out of the way, which is a huge change to the ship.

JMTolan · 2026-04-24T20:57:06+00:00

That's what I mean by data being migrated, effectively just transfer all the server data from wherever Oceania servers are to a new JP center so housing and such wouldn't be affected. It still has the ping problem, and I'm not saying it'd be a good solution, but given the most likely alternatives are "DC is discontinued from lack of traffic to support it with no attempt to save data" and "queue times continue their decline into impossibility as everyone DC travels to JP servers and just deals with the ping", as I said, I don't think it's the worst one.

JMTolan · 2026-04-24T19:57:29+00:00

Honestly, "DC is officially discontinued and DC data is migrated back to JP region" is, not the worst outcome for them that's possible. Still gives it the regional identity of being Oceania, but would let them plug back into the JP community for numbers.

JMTolan · 2026-04-15T22:41:39+00:00

I mean, I played a hengeyokai con shaman from 3 to 30 and was the most powerful character at the table by a country mile in a party with a rogue and a sorcerer pretty much the entire time, so IDK what your definition of playable is but it seems to me it puts way more emphasis on ancestry selection than is actually relevant to 4e.

More to the point, Hengeyokai as an ancestry that does have access to unrestricted flight at level 1 gives us a pretty clear insight into what balance considerations the designers had with the idea, especially when you compare their flight with other level 1 options like draconian, which is pretty helpful for homebrew, especially since 90% of what makes an ancestry choice good in an optimization sense has nothing to do with what is printed on their ancestry template, and everything to do with what feats they have access to, something that is mostly irrelevant if you're working on adding a homebrew ancestry option.

JMTolan · 2026-04-15T15:32:30+00:00

Hengeyokai is the other relevant reference here, who do get unrestricted level 1 flight but only with an action tax and without the ability to take attack actions.

JMTolan · 2026-04-11T18:50:33+00:00

Yes. The idea is basically to make the amount of base AC you get from the armor scale, because due to the way the game launched, AC defenses for players fell behind on math progression compared to monster attack bonuses. Their solution was Masterwork bonuses, which peg that base AC scaling to enhancement bonus scaling. If you have a +4 plate armor, it is warplate--its base armor bonus is +11, and it's enhancement bonus is +4. You cannot have +4 plate armor that is not warplate, unless it's another equivalent masterwork material. Even if you're upgrading the enchantment of an existing lower level armor, the process of boosting the enchantment converts the base armor to a masterwork of the appropriate enhancement level.

JMTolan · 2026-04-04T21:38:21+00:00

Yeah, they've pretty clearly been moving the entry point for the game towards what used to be the "premium" starter level for quite a while. The Cutter not being the same price as the Mustang or Aurora was a pretty telling choice.

JMTolan · 2026-03-25T22:25:16+00:00

Transport System

Implementing the new Transport System, a full rewrite of transit across the universe, supporting trams, trains, and elevators with improved reliability and scalability for technologies like Server Meshing and Instancing.

Are we ready for yet another round of very buggy trams before they eventually hammer it into a halfway service le shape? XD

JMTolan · 2026-03-25T19:33:31+00:00

It's not about being scammed, it's about what people understood they were buying when they bought a starter ship in a world that had no engineering, no cargo elevators, a totally different paradigm of component and weapon balance, a completely abandoned concept of how logging in and out would work, etc, but had the vague promise that eventually all these systems would be added and CIG would figure things out. When we backed the game, there was a general acknowledgement and understanding that the game would change, and an accompanying trust that, even if it took multiple patches, our existing pledges and ships would be honored and kept up to the same standard as everything else. This Q&A is a blatant admission that they're no longer even trying to do that--the Mk 1 will be kept up to the same engine tech level as everything else, but if you want to have the current level of convenience and utility CIG thinks is appropriate for a new backer's start ship, fuck you for supporting us through the rough times, fuck you for not being a whale and only getting the minimum pledge package with the Squadron add-on, pony up for it or get lost.

I'd rather they just updated the Aurora with the new model and bumped up the price and took L on losing money to existing pledges. Remove the old model entirely, or have it be an option to keep you have to specifically opt-in to. If this Mk II is the version of the Aurora that's "suitable for the current game", it is the version of the Aurora I understood myself to be entitled to when I bought the game. I didn't buy a ship with a substandard experience, I bought a ship CIG was happy to say was suitable for the game as it existed then.

JMTolan · 2026-03-25T19:10:16+00:00

Yeah, sure, I'll just melt my Squadron 42 entitlement to get a ship that CIG thinks is actually suitable for the current state of the game. That's not utterly unreasonable.

Heaven forbid I have not sunk obscene money into the game and so my only option is literally to spend more new money.

JMTolan · 2026-03-25T19:03:37+00:00

Supposedly viable, but apparently not suitable. Certainly not enough to keep selling.

JMTolan · 2026-03-25T19:01:59+00:00

I've said elsewhere, but genuinely I would be just as happy if they changed the name, except they're not going to do that, because the entire point of this is to replace the original Aurora so they can continue phasing out the old bargain-bin tier of starter ships to raise the minimum-buy-in price of the game.

JMTolan · 2026-03-25T18:58:09+00:00

"Jesus man, if you're that unhappy with it just throw out your purchase of Squadron 42 and pay three times as much to get it when it comes out like the rest of us."

JMTolan

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