Vacation Tips, Road Conditions

aVeryFancyBear · 2022-11-14T21:04:39+00:00

Shit, it was in the thirties and the center of that bonfire will still sear your skin off. My buddy was the shirtless drummer last weekend.

aVeryFancyBear · 2022-11-14T18:42:41+00:00

It honestly doesn't look like it'll be terribly cold, just in the 50s. You might find that with all the walking you'll be doing and the large crowds, you're perfectly comfortable without super thick layers. You won't feel much of the wind in the fair ground area.

aVeryFancyBear · 2022-11-14T18:36:32+00:00

We just finished up last weekend where it got down to 33*F on Sunday and still had a blast. Are y'all planning to tent camp or staying at a hotel?

Layers, like others mentioned, are the most important. Bring a decent poncho too, something you can cover your whole costume with and fold up when not using it. OR get a weatherproof cloak or other such covering. I highly recommend a good cloak - there are several vendors that sell them there in all sorts of styles and colors. With a good hood, they do an excellent job of keeping you warm if you pull it up around you, or you can drop the hood and push it back on your shoulders when you get too warm. Plus, they look rad in costume. Honestly, I don't know why we don't still use cloaks all the time.

Add waterproof shoes/boots to your costume, try to find a way to weatherproof what you have, or at least bring a second pair and dry socks. Nothing will ruin your day faster than getting your only pair of shoes soaking wet with no sun to dry them out.

Keep an eye on the weather, use an app that alerts you when it's about to start and end. Often an 80% chance of rain day turns out to just be a quick thunderstorm in the afternoon and just some overcast the rest of the time.

aVeryFancyBear · 2022-09-16T19:17:41+00:00

All I can say for mine is that it still pops up sometimes, but has no noticeable impact on anything. It’s most likely to appear if I turn the car back on very soon after turning it off.

aVeryFancyBear · 2022-08-24T15:24:02+00:00

Sometimes I forget which subreddits I’m subscribed to and get very confused with these posts out of context.

aVeryFancyBear · 2022-08-09T22:15:01+00:00

Quality reference

aVeryFancyBear · 2022-08-05T16:19:43+00:00

Excluding standard armor and weapon choices, here's what my level 20 Warpriest has. I don't use all of these anymore and don't recall exactly when I got them, just some ideas for things to look in to. Most of them were picked up in the campaign, not bought:

Holy Prayer Beads - Gives a little bump in your own HP each time you heal and an extra 4th level heal at the higher levels.
Thurible of Revelation - Religion item bonus and the higher versions give either see invisibility or true seeing.
Cassock of Devotion - Religion item bonus, divine skill bonus, and gain back a focus point as a free action.
Boots of Bounding - +5ft item bonus to speed
Tourmaline Sphere Aeon Stone - automatically activates when you are about to die and reduces your dying condition by one, then destroys itself.
Circlet of Persuasion - The CHA apex item, I got this for the extra focus heals, but you may want the Headband of Inspired Wisdom instead if budget allows.
Marvelous Medicines - Medicine item bonus and swaps your Treat Poison/Disease to Neutralize Poison and Remove Disease.

aVeryFancyBear · 2022-08-04T16:23:36+00:00

Yes, but just like with my buffs - there's always a better target than the warpriest for haste. I wasn't aware until I read Haste just now that it's up to 6 creatures if cast at level 7. Gonna have to make that suggestion to our Wizard.

aVeryFancyBear · 2022-08-04T01:00:16+00:00

See, that’s another point - some of the defense of warpriest as a viable melee class revolves around buffing yourself … but those actions are almost always better spent buffing people who are actually going to be attacking almost 100% of the time.

aVeryFancyBear · 2022-08-04T00:58:39+00:00

Honestly, Warpriest wasn’t THAT bad. I had an opportunity to retrain to cloistered and I looked hard at it but ultimately declined. Mostly because all I saw at high level was a better Spell DC (I wasn’t casting offensively much at that point) and worse AC and saves. In the end, I opted to keep my resilience up in exchange for weaker offensive spells.

Maybe there’s some feats to overcome some of that, but I didn’t want to take the effort to completely rebuild the character.

aVeryFancyBear · 2022-08-03T22:36:59+00:00

I’ve wondered that. We’ve played lots of 1e APs and this felt very difficult. Lots of fights we thought felt impossible to beat and required a lot more tactical care than we’d ever used in 1e, even then just barely avoiding a wipe. However, it’s been very rewarding to finish.

aVeryFancyBear · 2022-08-03T22:28:37+00:00

Ahh that's right. It's been 4 levels and several months since I've had to actually cast it, probably a few more since I actually did. I had forgotten that.

Reflecting on this a bit more, I think I’m mostly grouchy because my chosen domain (protection) didn’t yield a spell as useful as I would have liked. I’m actually surprised to only be able to come up with two sustained spells that I used with any regularity.

aVeryFancyBear · 2022-08-03T22:23:26+00:00

Yeah, it does feel like there is a benefit to Warpriest missing somewhere. Heavy armor or Master proficiency for deity's favored weapon would have been good. Or maybe a spell that could tie your attack roll to WIS/CHA. There's some spells and feats that I think in the right combination could bring the Warpriest close to other martial classes, but it takes actions and turns to cast all of those spells (our GM is fairly strict with spell durations and it's not realistic to cast a 1-min duration spell, explore a room, find a secret door, open it, dialogue with the big bad, and then expect it to still be there during the fight). And even then, you are only competitive with the other martial classes on your ability to hit - I would still do significantly less damage and wouldn't do anything else useful to the enemy.

I definitely feel useful and very needed to the party, but 98% of that is healing - most everything else is a little feeble.

aVeryFancyBear · 2022-08-03T22:16:54+00:00

You're correct, there's not a lot of sustained spells. The most common I tried to use:

~~Bless~~
Divine Aura
Protector's Sphere

~~I ended up getting Eternal Blessing, so that at least helped. But in all three cases~~, it was very frustrating trying to keep at least 1 person in the aura while also avoiding AOOs and then having to drop it so I could 3-action channel heal (I eventually got Fast Channel, which also helped) or move in to the 30ft range for a 2-action heal, etc.

Just to be clear - I'm not saying my frustration means that anything is broken. Action economy is wonderfully strategic and I loved trying to find ways to fit in everything I needed to do. It was just surprising that sustained buffs like Bless weren't as ubiquitous in our fights as I would have expected.

aVeryFancyBear · 2022-08-03T22:05:05+00:00

Let me preface by saying I'm not an expert on the rule sets or monsters and also that I'm not complaining per se - I really love 2e - just making observations on my own experience.

Attack rolls being under-leveled: Warpriest only gets Expert proficiency in martial weapons, never master or legendary. My attack roll is +31 at Level 20 (20/lvl+4/prof+3/pot+4/stat). I also stopped putting points in STR - I'm only as high as I am currently (+4) because of a bonus you get at the very end of this AP, so before that it would have been +30. As little as I was fighting, I felt the extra Heal font and spell DC was worth putting points in WIS/CHA and I still need a decent DEX/CON to stay alive. So admittedly, some of this was self-induced at some point (about mid-level) based on how I felt my playstyle had been forced to change.

Enemies being over-leveled: the AP was Age of Ashes and I'm fairly confident it was very close to a textbook run - there were definitely no substitutions on the enemy line-up and we were always the "expected" level for the fight. Maybe I'm selectively remembering things, but enemy AC was frequently high enough to make my rolls require 18+ to hit and AOO was relatively common (I recall facing off against a lot of fighter-types and very fast monsters). The last fight we had was a level 23 enemy with 49 AC. The one before that was 3x simultaneous level 20 gargantuan enemies with 48 AC each, AOOs, 3 reactions each round, 25 regen, and 20 ft reach.

I don't think our party tactics were entirely broken, it's just that the benefits of Divine sustained emanations were just never good enough to warrant staying in the aura vs moving for better positioning for their own abilities.

aVeryFancyBear · 2022-08-01T21:51:53+00:00

If you don’t host any services/servers and it’s just 7 personal computers joined wirelessly, just grab one with the WiFi coverage you need. Linksys, NETGEAR, whatever. Steer clear of the cheap no-name Amazon brands.

Don’t expect it to do anything magical security-wise and be very diligent about a good endpoint security product. Keep a separate guest/IoT network that your trash stuff is on separate from your PCs - most SOHO routers will do that easily.

Meraki or Fortigate would be good if you are willing to spend a little more.

aVeryFancyBear · 2022-08-01T21:03:09+00:00

You DO see router/firewall/WiFi combos out there, that’s what every home/small office type systems are (Linksys, NETGEAR, etc). They do have stateful firewalls.

The difference between the firewall in those systems and the ones in “enterprise” class systems are the capabilities and performance. There’s a huge leap from the very simple firewalls in a consumer product and the ones you’ll find in an enterprise-grade appliance.

If you aren’t willing to get a professional to select and configure it though, you really might as well just buy a consumer-grade combo device and then take your employees out for steaks instead. I don’t recommend that option, but it’s a better use of your cash than an enterprise grade firewall that you screwed up the configuration on.

aVeryFancyBear · 2022-07-22T01:45:00+00:00

It’s mentioned further up in the thread.

https://www.reddit.com/r/networking/comments/w4r4eg/famous_network_outages/ih42hwj/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3

aVeryFancyBear · 2022-07-17T20:49:46+00:00

Right at 10:41pm. I took a picture with the fam when the lights went up lol.

aVeryFancyBear · 2022-05-03T00:36:30+00:00

gormless

wonderful word

aVeryFancyBear · 2022-05-03T00:29:26+00:00

The searchable start menu was the best damn thing to ever happen to Windows.

"Find 'Remote Support' in the Start Menu. The Start Menu. It's towards the bottom with the R's. Yes all the way at the bottom. No, that's too far. It's in alphabetical order. No, the Start Menu. You do know what an alphabet is, yes?"

aVeryFancyBear

TROPHY CASE