I write bugs and sometimes features! I’m also @CoderKat@kbin.social.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • You wouldn’t have 13 feats at a time, though. It’d be one at a time and you just get to choose which one. Perhaps could be further limited by only allowing changing once per short or even long rest.

    But yeah, it definitely starts stronger than it ends. I was thinking the main ways it could sorta be used is as a jack of all trades, because you could probably have proficiency in any given thing so long as there’s no combat involved.




  • Heck, I’d say even give money to those big corps so long as they are being reasonable with the price and availability. Reasonable varies by person, of course. But for me, I’ll pay for any $70-90 game (the normal price for new games now in Canada), but stuff like Sims DLC or how the original Mass Effect only let you get DLC through some dumb BioWare credits are cases where I’d pirate no regrets even with my current income.

    After all, there won’t be AAA games if people don’t pay for them. I have (mostly) no qualms with big publishers pocketing a significant profit on those games if they get made well. Bigger problem I have is with games that get rushed to the point of impacting quality, but that’s something I see more for changing how you approach that individual title. Stuff like mistreating staff (crunch time) is a bit iffier. I still lean towards giving them my money, since nobody enters the game dev business without knowing it’ll involve crunch and I do want the devs to be rewarded for their hard work with a commercial success (cause that’s unfortunately just how success is measured in our capitalist society).






  • Persona is definitely one of those games that really hits you when it’s over. In part I think it’s cause it’s just so damn long. You spend a long time getting attached to characters and it being your daily activity. But also, the format of the games is just very relatable. Sure, it’s got fantasy elements, but the school and calendar format grounds the game into something more relatable. The game’s story is heavily focused on building up friendships.

    Plus that fantasy element plays a part. It’s what makes the game world something unachievable for the real you. You’ll never have the grand, world-saving adventures of the video game. You could make some friends and such, but you’ll never bond over saving the world or catching a killer or the likes. The end of games like Persona tend to make me think a lot about that.

    I’ve seen this called “post Harry Potter syndrome” or “post anime syndrome” before. It’s very common for a variety of works, but I think the recurring theme is usually that you invest a lot of time into a character driven work where building friendships and some kind of adventure is the key element.



  • Honestly, I found it hard to enjoy too, even though I finished the game. The game can be really fun, but it can also get a bit annoying to realize that you have missed something on a planet and if you did, it might take a boring amount of time to find what. The problem is that the save limitations means you basically have to waste a ton of time whenever you were wrong about something or mess up. The ship computer can hint at when a planet has more to see, but it’s not necessarily easy to figure out where to go, how to reach it, or if you’re supposed to do a different planet first to get a hint.

    Fuck Brittle Hollow. I almost quit the game with how much time that stupid planet wasted. A quick save/load function would have made the game massively more fun for me. Replaying stuff I’ve already done because the game has bleh checkpointing is just not fun.




  • Casters often feel at a massive disadvantage for casual fights. For a boss fight, casters are often the strongest, since you’ll blow all your spell slots. But for smaller fights, you want to preserve your spell slots and cantrips simply cannot keep up with martials. I mean, a single attack roll for a spell cantrip vs getting 2-3 attack roles that also do more damage total? Heck, my strongest martials can usually do at least double the damage of a spell caster’s cantrips.

    Though at the same time, when I can blow the spell slot, no martial can outdo the AoE damage of reliable ol’ fireball or the likes. Just I can’t justify using my spell slots on a small number of weak enemies.


  • Second playthrough, trying out dark urge and being evil. It’s really hard, honestly. I’ve lost half of my beloved companions and slaughted some favourite NPCs. It feels really fucked up. Minthara better be worth it lol.

    Despite the fact I tried to be a completionist in my first playthrough, I’ve still been discovering lots of things I missed. The biggest so far is that there was a massive amount of the creche to explore on the exterior. I missed that before and basically only went into the basement. I also last time missed that there were 2 mythrils, among many other smaller things.


  • There’s a lot of common patterns, but you have to understand how URLs work. You have to recognize which URL parameters are tracking ones or even just might be tracking. And that means you have to know how they work and that takes a moment.

    In brief, URL parameters start after a ? in the URL and are formatted like key1=values&key2=value2. You can’t usually remove all parameters because not all are tracking. To further complicate things, URLs can also have an anchor starting with a # character which will be after the URL parameters. You often don’t want to remove that (though theoretically the anchor could in fact contain tracking details).

    It’s often trial and error to see which parameters you can remove. I do this a lot since I write a lot of technical documentation. Clean URLs make the documentation more compact and less likely to break. It’s not just tracking stuff, but sometimes you need to remove temporal data that makes a page display data from a specific time when you want it to just default to the current time (etc).


  • Jeez, where do you live?

    I’m in Canada and have never had to wait even remotely that long in any city I’ve been a pedestrian in. It’s certainly a poorly followed law in that I’ll regularly see people not stop even if they had tons of time, but the majority of drivers do stop. I don’t think I’ve ever waited more than maybe a minute. I’d usually have to wait longer at a light than I would at an uncontrolled intersection or no-intersection crosswalk.

    That said, the most annoying was in Saskatoon, where I went to university. There’s a road going up to the university where there’s a very long stretch with no controlled crosswalks until you get to the very end. I learned to just cross at the end (even if it meant needing to loop back) because crossing at an uncontrolled crosswalk in the middle was annoying. I would have often been on the top part of a T intersection and there were always parked cars, so being seen as trying to cross the road was the challenge there. But even then it usually wasn’t more than a minute and crossing from the other side was a lot easier because it was so much more obvious that you were waiting to cross. It was also a 2 lane road, but usually when one direction stops, drivers in the other lane figure it out.


  • …is there no limit to summons? I realize I was actually assuming I couldn’t use a summoning spell multiple times for the same character, but maybe that’s wrong. I usually try to keep a single, most powerful summon for each character that has one (and for difficult battles, I’ve used summoning scrolls for other characters).

    I considered a few times trying to see what would happen if I summoned more, but figured it’d make the game too easy, anyway. A lot of the summons are quite strong and they have a lot of health.


  • Is luminous armour really that impactful? I was using it till late act 2 or so but eventually swapped it out. It was one of those things I couldn’t tell how much of a difference it made.

    Shadowheart feels offensively really weak and has by far the worst accuracy. While my warlock player character gets consistently 95+% hit chance for her cantrips (and with eldritch blast, theres 2-3 hits), Shadowheart’s cantrips are frequently <50% accurate and she only gets a single hit. I mostly use her as support only as a result.

    When I want to do damage with Shadowheart, I usually use spirit guardians (mostly for when there’s many weaker enemies), that retaliating summon (placing it well means doing I think 60 unmissable damage), or some other kind of summon.

    I admittedly never respeced her and didn’t look at what alternative cleric builds existed.


  • As a warlock, I try to use everyone a little.

    • Except Gale. I just have no use for another mage. I figured I’d save him for another playthrough.

    • I respec’d Wyl into a paladin cause I wanted to try that class out (and have a proper tank) and knew I’d never have a use for two warlocks. It took a while before I truly made use of him, but turns out paladins are incredibly powerful, so he’s now a constant member of my party.

    • The other two typical members are shadowheart (romancing her and it feels natural to always have a cleric) and Astarion (he’s just hands down the best at lockpicking and I do that a ton).

    • I’ve experimented with having Jahera (as a ranger) replace Astarion, but it makes lockpicking harder. Is there really no way to get companions more proficient with skills?? I actually hate Astarion as a person and don’t enjoy rogues (too often I simply cannot get a sneak attack in).

    • I’ve regularly swapped the melee attacker for any of the others (I love Karlak’s personality, but found barbarian just isn’t as good – Laezel as a fighter is a bit better). Halsin was the best tank for the mid game, cause Owlbear is far stronger than anything else. Probably still is. Just feels kinda boring.

    • Every now and then I’ve swapped Shadowheart out for someone. It feels weird to not have a cleric with me at all times, but I don’t actually need her and she’s so bad at combat. I’m probably making a blunder in using her so much, especially since I have a Paladin and so many healing potions.

    • I tried respecing >!Minsc!< to be a monk to give that a try (I’ve had so much monk equipment and it’s one of the few classes I’ve yet to use), but… I must be doing something wrong? The unarmed damage is utterly pitiful compared to any other melee character, even with the best equipment I’ve got. I decided to just bench him rather than figure it out.

    • I only very, very briefly used a hireling, before Halsin joined my party proper cause I wanted to try wildshape (why does he take so long? I genuinely thought he would never join cause he spent dozens of hours waiting in my camp as an unplayable character).