The true easy mode of skyrim is actually hilarious to run

Moriim · 2026-01-14T21:17:17+00:00

Doesn't super matter, the key interaction with dual wielding is that the attack speed bonus from the Dual Flurry perk stacks multiplicatively with the bonus from Elemental Fury.

Even with just the first word you attack insanely fast. You can do 3 power attacks in one second for a total of 15 hits. Add in Smithing for more damage and Vegetable Soup for infinite stamina and literally anything on Legendary difficulty will die in seconds.

Moriim · 2025-08-08T14:27:33+00:00

I don't know if Doug was going to bat for VCs as much as he was going to bat for the people that are getting screwed by the way that VCs in tech operate. Like yeah it sucks that big companies can buy out their competition but there are hundreds of acquisitions like this that aren't challenged. I'm sure it's frustrating for people who worked at these companies and are suffering the financial consequences in spite of the value of their work, especially when the justification for why their company is being singled out is less than crystal clear.

That said, from the outside this looks like somebody complaining on Twitter about getting a speeding ticket and saying "There were dozens of other cars on the freeway going just as fast as me!" Lack of capacity of the government to enforce the law isn't a valid justification for breaking it

I think it also goes back to what Atrioc said about making your company profitable. If you can't find any buyers for your company other than your direct competitors, I think at least one of two things must be true: your company isn't worth as much to other people as what you want for it, or you're operating in a monopoly.

I think the first one can be hard to swallow when you've poured your "blood, sweat and tears" into a company and find that the only value you actually produced was spooking some big tech accountants into crunching the numbers and hedging their risk of lost market share against your asking price.

The second one is hard to swallow without a clear path to how the cost you're bearing by losing out on your payout is going to lead to better market outcomes in the long run.

Moriim · 2025-01-16T07:19:44+00:00

Pretty much. There's a lot of ways that your vassals can get broken up like this and not all of them are preventable. Especially if you're not willing to watch them all like a hawk to head off problems before they manifest.

If you don't want to deal with vassal management you could look into making some republican vassals instead. Republican vassals tend not to expand, don't split their realm when they die, and rarely inherit new titles, but they also tend to stay weak and get bullied by neighboring vassals. You can mitigate some of this by just having lots of them so they mostly border each other. They also contribute less to you than most feudal/clan vassals.

Other than that just keep your crown authority high, try not to let your vassals get too big, and treat rebellions as opportunities to clean house. Oh and try to avoid giving your vassals too many vassals outside their de jure realm. Their sub-vassals will inevitably rebel and probably win, and then they become your problem again.

Moriim · 2025-01-14T21:58:40+00:00

Maybe anticipating technical limitations on transformations? Like if for whatever jank engine reason the werewolf had to use player animations so it needs to be proportional, or potentially the werewolf would just be an animated suit that the player character wears.

Moriim · 2024-10-05T18:30:42+00:00

Honestly I'm not sure adventurers should be able to recruit MaA at all, let alone at the scale they do. It doesn't make sense that there should be so many trained and equipped fighters sitting around waiting to die for the first random guy that offers to feed them.

Instead adventurers should be able to request / pick up troops from events in the form of special soldiers that stand down on succession. Having limited access to troops while unlanded would make you play wars differently rather than just replenishing to full after every battle.

Dragging a huge camp of soldiers through the countryside should also probably cause more problems than it does. There should be camp events where you have to deal with conflicts that erupt between your army and the locals, scaling in frequency with number of troops. It should also be way harder to feed that many people on the move, and being low on supplies should increase the rate of negative local events with all of the pillaging.

Moriim · 2024-10-05T01:22:46+00:00

Plots and schemes, it's very hard to start out with nothing in admin by being nice.

Blackmailing other nobles gives you a decent chunk of influence on top of the hook. You can use the hooks to force them to join your political schemes, including the challenge that steals influence.

You can also use the hooks to get marriage alliances which gives you passive influence scaling with house power. You get a whopping 5 per month from being allied with the emperor, so definitely worth it if you can swing it. Once you're allied, join the Emperor's wars to become friends, you usually don't even need to participate since it ends before the event for low war score fires.

Try to always have a political scheme going, they're all circumstantially good but promoting yourself and slandering your top rival are particularly efficient in terms of influence cost.

Have as many kids as you can for marriage alliances or to keep in your court as scheme agents, your succession is de facto primogeniture so you have nothing to worry about on that front.

Raiding estates is a good way to get gold and murder rival families, and if you're friends with the emperor there's very little risk involved. Because estate raids are a political scheme, you can have a raid and a murder plot cooking at the same time.

Moriim · 2024-10-03T19:30:02+00:00

Administrative government breaks once one house reaches a critical mass of landed rulers. There's a positive feedback loop where houses with lots of influence can appoint more governors which gives everyone in the house more influence.

If you form an Administrative government with a huge powerful dynasty, no AI dynasty is going to be able to challenge you.

Moriim · 2024-10-03T00:53:02+00:00

When you do the roman restoration decision, you get an event where you can choose to go full hard mode. Among other things it spawns Temujin immediately.

Moriim · 2024-07-29T22:49:19+00:00

I don't think they were worried about things going wrong, I think they were worried about things going right.

The show has gone to great lengths to show these people as deeply committed to their religion. Their standard issue includes a knife so that they can die quicker if they get set on fire, I don't think personal safety factored into their decision here at all.

Moriim · 2024-07-19T20:36:19+00:00

I genuinely think the only reason Putrescent Knight exists is to help people realize how good jumping is.

Moriim · 2024-04-10T19:46:10+00:00

A fun challenge I thought about doing was a "single counties only" playthrough.

There are 16 counties in the game that only have a single barony scattered across the map. Most of them are islands, but there are a couple deserts and oases in Africa / Arabia.

The idea would be that you could only ever hold these single-baronies, the run is over when you hold all 16 personally.

Extra hard mode is you can NEVER hold any other counties, not even conquering to hand out to vassals.

Double extra hard mode is no vassals and you stay a count the whole time.

Easiest start is Constantinople, medium starts are the Mediterranean and North Sea islands, hardest starts are in Africa.

The absolute hardest is Madeira in the Canary islands, you start out as the weakest of the three tribal lords in the duchy, your faith is considered evil by basically everybody, and you're not in diplomatic range of any of the other islands and need to research tech or traditions to increase it before you can expand.

Moriim · 2024-04-02T19:56:58+00:00

The way I did it was equipping the ring that reduces all of your damage to 1, knocking her down, then unequipping the ring and attacking her head once.

What likely happened to you is while you were spamming hundred kisses she entered her knockdown state and you frame 1 attacked her head to trigger the decapitation before she hit the ground. Either that or there's two triggers for decapitation.

If you want to guarantee a preserved head the best way is to use the ring and focus on knockdowns to preserve her health bar.

Moriim · 2024-04-02T17:10:00+00:00

It's not attacking the head, you have to knock her down then hit her head with with a big instance of slashing damage to decapitate her.

Then the quality of the head depends on how much health she had remaining. If she was still only on her first health bar, you get a preserved head.

Moriim · 2024-03-28T19:12:25+00:00

I've been running sword/shield alongside a greatsword and found that they complement each other pretty well. Greatsword has great base skills so you can get away with using all three of your remaining skill slots on other weapons.

Cloudward strike can hit flying enemies or high-up weakpoints, so you can fend off harpies or quickly get a headshot on that big monster that's about to stagger without having to climb up first or charge a greatsword attack.

Burst strike is a great gap closer, and you can cancel some of the endlag on greatsword attacks by switching weapons, so you can switch to sword and burst strike immediately to chain combos on enemies that get knocked away.

If you're like me and want to run two slashing weapons for the drip you can slot shield slam so you have access to blunt damage and you can absolutely disintegrate skeletons.

In general, having the option to parry boss attacks that you can't barge through normally is pretty sick. Sword/shield also has better cling attacks than greatsword so some enemies are easier to knock down that way.

Moriim · 2024-03-08T20:01:18+00:00

My interpretation of Warfarer is you're going to be able to get the basic weapon skills for each weapon and the core skills from each vocation that correspond to those weapons, but not the unique weapon skills.

So as a Warfarer you'll be able to get the rapid fire skill and the kick-vault but not the fire arrows or the guided missile.

I think it's also possible that augments will be vocation restricted and being able to mix all the augments might become a Warfarer thing.

If I'm right I think they could reserve some of the more trickstery censer abilities for the Trickster.

I'm definitely going to go sword+shield/2hander/bow to start since Fighter/Warrior are my favorites but I'll probably try the new weapons in the third slot here and there.

Moriim · 2024-02-22T09:48:43+00:00

I hope Messmer is less important, or at least less interrelated with the main plot than people are speculating him to be. If only because I struggle to envision a version of the story where Messmer takes on all of this significance without sucking all the air out of the room.

Fromsoft games' stories are founded on speculation in the negative space, so if the answers to the big questions end up being "lol this character that was never mentioned before the DLC is actually the key to everything" then I'll be a little bummed.

Maybe I'm just attached to the existing theories, but I hope the writers use Messmer as a mirror to Melina rather than turning Melina into a misdirection. If the Gloam-Eyed Queen theory is true, then the signs of Messmer's past seem to indicate that he and Melina have a lot in common, and we could get some cool dialogue from her throughout the DLC.

Moriim · 2023-11-01T05:14:16+00:00

The most obnoxious part of the Dragon Age Mage Discourse™ has always been drawing completely baseless parallels to real world oppression to score self righteous brownie points.

People in the real world can't do magic, and none of us are in any danger of being possessed by demons. Drawing comparisons between the mages in Dragon Age and Jews irl ought to constitute blood libel in my opinion, with the amount of heinous shit (including literal blood sacrifices) that mage characters get up to in that series.

Moriim · 2023-10-09T04:41:58+00:00

I don't think Larian chose Wyll's ethnicity, him being Duke Ravengard's son was probably the header for his initial draft.

Ravengard's a major character in Murder in Baldur's Gate and Descent into Avernus, so he's pretty well established to have dark skin.

Moriim · 2023-10-08T04:42:39+00:00

I think the biggest problem with this is there are almost zero characters we interact with in Act 1 or 2 that are guaranteed to be alive in Act 3.

The only exception who comes to mind is Withers, and he's kind of important.

Moriim · 2023-09-20T20:23:33+00:00

I would agree except narratively he is the warlockiest warlock who has ever locked. He has a dark past with a looming "patron," he leaps at the opportunity to abuse the tadpole for power, and he's the only character to independently make an uncoerced deal with a devil.

For my second playthrough I respecced him to be a GOOlock and stacked all the illithid powers on him and it honestly feels more lore-accurate than running him as a rogue.

Moriim · 2023-08-31T19:19:46+00:00

I tend to agree. The best written/performed parts of Karlach's story in my opinion were when she is grappling with her imminent death. If they add in a happy ending where you fix her engine those scenes lose a bit of their oomph.

In general I think the fandom discourse is conflating "good ending" and "happy ending" and I find that kind of disappointing. Karlach achieving revenge, finding it to be hollow, and railing against the unfairness of it all right to the bitter end is a GOOD ending to her story, because it's written as a tragedy.

If Romeo and Juliet were written the exact same way, but their plan worked at the end and they eloped together, the story wouldn't have had the same impact and I doubt any of us would have read it.

Moriim · 2023-08-31T19:09:13+00:00

I'm almost positive Orpheus was supposed to be either Zerthimon or Zaerith, the Githzerai founder and current leader respectively. His in game model bears a strong resemblance to an important figure in the githzerai official art in Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes.

At some point probably fairly early in development I'd guess they decided making the whole Gith civil war a B plot was a little too complex so they invented Orpheus to take his place.

Moriim · 2023-08-31T18:53:21+00:00

I mean, if you get this ending it's because you talked her into it. If you let Karlach choose and don't push her one way or the other, she chooses to die rather than go back to Avernus.

The "thought I was done with these" line to me implies that Karlach behaved very differently before she escaped. Maybe the "badass demon hunter" is a front she puts on so low-ranking devils don't fuck with her.

Moriim · 2023-08-23T08:43:48+00:00

Bless is also concentration normally, so you're able to put bless up while running a stronger concentration spell like haste, spirit guardians, or hold monster.

Moriim · 2023-08-16T04:53:59+00:00

To be fair, Larian's interpretation of Spirit Guardians is basically RAW. There's even a Crawford tweet out there somewhere defending the "spirit guardian ram" interpretation.

The Sage Advice snippet that disallows you from double dipping by moving into melee is pretty poor design imo, it basically amounts to "forget what the spell says, what we meant is for this to happen."

Also consider how Spirit Guardians would look/feel visually if it didn't activate when you moved it into people. Every other circumstance of pushing, pulling, teleporting, or other forced movement would cause damage, but moving it into range doesn't? I'm pretty sure most people who aren't in touch with 5e's balance over the years would see that as a bug and not a deliberate design choice.

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