T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’ve still been busy.
I’m probably going to be busy this whole month, so I’m probably not going to have time to play much more than one or two games.
What time I do have, I’ve spent playing Binding of Isaac: Rebirth. I think I’m doing good, I’ve fought through the chest area. I’m still confused why I went from a Womb, to a Cathedral, to a chest. Not the standard lineup of areas. Idk how I ended up in the chest, but it was certainly a place.
I’ve been mostly avoiding the wiki and just going in blind, with the exception of checking what some items do. It bugs me when I pick up an item like Rosary Bead and it just says “Faith up”.
What’s everyone else doing?
Top 64 Videogames
Lists of 'best games ever' are dumb and annoying. But like a self-loathing hipster I made one anyway.
A Lack of Vision and Leadership
People fault EA for being greedy, but their real sin is just how terrible they are at it.
Deus Ex and The Treachery of Labels
Deus Ex Mankind Divided was a clumsy, tone-deaf allegory that thought it was clever, and it managed to annoy people of all political stripes.
The Best of 2011
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2011.
Shamus Plays WOW
Ever wondered what's in all those quest boxes you've never bothered to read? Get ready: They're more insane than you might expect.
Baldur’s Gate 3 continues, very slowly. I made it to the Shadow Lands, and, so far… not a fan of the Shadow Lands. The gimmick of “stand here not there, or take damage” is not one I enjoy. It does not help that the game tells me to stand in the light, but the big glowing bulbs along the path are not actually related to the light. Eventually fought a guy for his lantern, and am pretty sure I managed to break the script; I grabbed an item, and the main character just froze in place, and no one will acknowledge that I’m holding the item, and I can’t camp because the main character is frozen in place. Then I tried to save to see if loading the save would knock things loose. I guess I hit Load instead, because it loaded instead of saving, and the autosave had not kicked in. So now we get to redo a solid bit of the Shadow Lands. So so far, not a fan of the Shadow Lands.
On the plus side, the Point of No Return was actually completely fake, and I can warp back to Act 1 whenever I want. Which is good, because I forgot to ever deal with Spider Hole, or that build-a-bear quest with the Underdark’s underbark. Or that other quest, with the other thing. Although that one’s probably behind the fire elemental, and that thing’s not getting out of the way for this party, not anytime soon.
Some things do happen past the point of no return. For instance, if you haven’t resolved the goblin situation it autoresolves for you, and all of the Tieflings die (or most of them, I’m not sure, I’ve never done it that way). From a practical standpoint this locks you out of some merchants, and some good merchandise.
Huh. I could have sworn I’d tried to go back and it wouldn’t actually let me. Like, I clicked on it and got a message that said nope no backtracking. Well that’s convenient.
After you complete the gauntlet of shar you cannot return at all. Entering the shadowlands just resolves some quests for you if you haven’t finished them yourself.
Palworld: Sweeping all the bosses of the lower lands before exploring sky island – while almost getting level capped.
Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links: Playing while on the road. Not much to say about it.
Scrap Mechanic: I acquired orange seeds, so I can craft sun shakes now. As I know from youtube a new encounter with the trashbot is waiting. I’m not looking forward to it. The first fight I could cheese after a dozen deaths. I don’t know if I can cheese the second one. Does a glitch welded flyer with a gattling gun fit in the elevator?
Analog:
Rajas of the Ganges went well with my brother and a friend.
Mistborn: Deckbuilding – Hero Realms with twelve different resources to juggle and three different victory conditions. It’s okay, but not knowing Sandersons books I prefer the simpler game.
Also the apps for Root and Viticulture with pass & play. It’s not easy to get back into Root after an extended pause.
As a Sanderson fan I’m keeping an eye on the recent spate of game, but so far they haven’t really been in genres I’m especially interested in, unfortunately. Still, the fact that we’re getting them hopefully means we’ll see more variety in the future.
Got in another run of Suikoden V. All recruiting, though, so nothing really interesting other than some character moments where different characters interact with each other (with one really arrogant character calling a different one arrogant for a bit of hypocritical humour).
Also finished Korriban in Knights of the Old Republic. I was trying to trigger the possibility of either converting the female Sith or getting the headmaster to acknowledge me, but I guess I messed it up and wasn’t going to actually join either of them, so I ended up having to fight them, lost once due to my not really paying attention but the second time around used Force Wave and that cleaned it up nicely, as my character has a relatively low Wisdom but a LOT of Wisdom boosting items which with her high Dexterity pretty much lets her handle whatever gets thrown at her.
Back to Rimworld, and another gravship exploring the world that’s been expanded by mods and seeing the weird sights and animals. I got a little worried when I got a quest opportunity called ‘The Proud Engorged Tentacle Monster’ (I’m sure I didn’t install any of THOSE mods!) ….but it turned out to just be some people asking me to look after their pet tentacle monster for a few days.
A bit later, I got a quest babysitting a pair of legally-distinct-and-entirely-original ‘giant floating eyeball monsters with eyestalks’ for someone. I guess on this rimworld, rich people are so jaded that they have aberrant monstrosities as pets, and are also so rich that they’ll pay massive amounts to strangers so they don’t have to be around said horrific pets.
By default, the game speeds up child growth up until the kid becomes 18. They go from 0-18 in the span of three years…which in previous games has led to some very odd situations:
Geoff and Onesan were 33 years old.
Their kid Alex and her husband Fugly were 22.
Alex & Fugly’s kid was 18, and engaged to be married.
So this game, I deliberately set the child ageing to normal (i.e 0-18 in 18 years). This has been better for generational logic, but the game’s random storyteller has burdened me with a lot of children joining the colony (orphans etc) who are set to stay kids for a very long time. I’m having to consider child soldiers, since my overwhelmed adults simply don’t have enough combat ability to see off raiders and other threats.
Good thing I have that mod for kid-sized armour…
Yeah, realistic children aging really put into perspective how slowly time passes on the rimworld. Another option, which I’ve been considering more recently, is setting everyone to the same accelerated aging as kids have by default. Most colonies I play only last a few years, so a 30-year-old is effectively always going to be the same and never have to deal with old-age related conditions. With everyone aging faster (it’s all arbitrary anyway, given the custom calendar) I might actually see some generational turnover.
I’m guessing the creatures were from Alpha Animals? I think I vaguely remember something like a tentacle monster. (I’ve played with it on occasion, I really love the accelerated healing psycast it gives if you’re also using Vanilla Psycasts Expanded.)
I might well try accelerated ageing for everyone – I also have the issue that I don’t stick with a colony long enough for aging to really matter unless my colonists start off really young or old. My milestones are ‘child becomes an adult’ and ‘already old colonist gets age-related condition’ without much in between.
The tentacle critters are from Alpha Animals, yes. Specifically the Ocular Forest ‘Dimension of Maaaaadnesssssss!’ biome.
The semester is ramping up, so I’ve mostly just been working my way through Baz’s Campaign in Manic Miners (a fan-made campaign overhaul with some neat ideas, but also much-too-high energy crystal collection quotas) and playing How To Fish with some friends.
How To Fish starts with you and your friends crashing your boat on an island, where you begin a pattern: you fish up creatures, feed/sell them to someone on the island who gives you money, buy items from a shop (with increasing variety on each additional island), fight a boss or three, and eventually get coordinates to the next island. (We’re just on the fourth island after 6 hours of playtime, so I suspect it’ll end before too much longer.) It’s silly and fun; after you fish up a fish you have to kill it, initially by punching it, then by using increasingly powerful firearms. There are also bosses to fight, sometimes deliberately summoned, sometimes randomly fished up. Bosses are no joke: they only stick around for a limited time (so you have to kill them quickly), but are also absolutely murderous and will relentlessly hunt you down.
If you do go down, one of your friends can run over, pick up your rag-dolling body, and deliver a few slaps to the face to revive you; it takes about two seconds and is hilarious to watch every time. We tended to go down a lot in boss fights, but it kept the action moving and it was super easy to get back in the fight (unless a seagull swoops down and begins carrying your body off – pro tip, make sure to clear out any seagulls before beginning a boss fight).
Overall it’s quite a fun game to play with friends. It’s amusing to listen to the soothing sounds of fishing rods being cast and reeled in, interspersed with intermittent gunfire as your friends subdue their latest catches.
Had to take a short break from DiRT Rally 2.0 dailies due to illness, and getting back into them is an experience indeed.
Took a party up to level 20 in the Beneath the Stolen Lands DLC for Pathfinder Kingmaker so as to be able to make new level 20 characters and test their combat effectiveness.
And I’m kinda getting the Doom 3 urge, so I may be putting some hours into it. It’s been years since I played it last, so it’s gonna be interesting seeing how many goody closet codes I can find.
Wrath of the Righteous continues, to an unhealthy degree, but that’s not the game’s fault. Though being a triple threat of playing the dnd game, and also rotating between planning 6 different dnd builds, and also the crusade management and combat, makes it very effective at eating all of the time.
I have unfortunately come to the realization too late, that the default companion builds are not builds. Well, clearly some of them are, but these are builds meant for people who don’t know anything about dnd (which is fine), playing on easy mode (which I am not). And just like the 3.0 playtest sheets, the spontaneous spellcasters have functional builds because otherwise they literally wouldn’t work, and everyone else does not (well the archers are fine, but that’s because there’s barely enough stuff for them to fill out a single character so they’ve only got one build at all). Camellia’s build is like “yeah, she’s a noble but she’s got a *dark secret*, and she fights with rapier because she’s a noble, and she likes fighting so she has the Battle spirit,” and so on, with no effort made to make it synergize. But I’ve already been complaining about Camellia (how is she so fragile when she’s got the same or better AC/hp than everyone else?), what’s new?
Well, Sosiel the Cleric had taken Spell Focus: Conjuration. Okay sure, that leads to Augment Summoning, we can have two summoners. And then he does not in fact take Augment Summoning: he takes Spell Focus: Enchantment. W. T. F? He has *zero* spell penetration, so even if he’s got a good enchantment spell (he does) the DC doesn’t matter because it will just fail. Meanwhile his portrait has him wielding a glaive (proficiency gained from his deity, someone gave the nice one a proper weapon for once) so you might think he should go swing it, but he’s actually very bad at that. Oh, and he took a Mythic Channeling ability that improves his Pathfinder Channel Energy ability (I mock because they clearly decided clerics should in fact be healbots, just adding it for free on top of their spells), which sounds good: the other healer has it. And the other healer gets 10 or more out of it, while Sosiel gets 4, because Sosiel is not a Charisma caster.
Nenio the Illusionist spent a mythic point on increasing her fire damage DC by 1. Sure this goes with her expanding her spell focus in to Evocation, and she has spell pen, but she hasn’t taken any fire spells and didn’t even finish maxing out her illusion bonuses first.
And of course, none of these spellcasters have taken so much as a single metamagic feat. In a game that lacks the standard tabletop ability to prepare or cast spells in higher level slots if desired- wasteful, but good if you don’t have anything useful to put in the higher slot, and while the lists *look* good and long this game functionally has less spells than the player’s handbook (hell, where’s Delayed Blast Fireball and Meteor Swarm? the most basic arcane pyromancer doesn’t even have any endgame spells!).
So yeah. The spontaneous casters just work (mostly), but the rest it looks like you’re just supposed to make them work because something something magic items. The wizard and eldritch scoundrel don’t need to take good spells, because you can just buy them. No one needs to take metamagic, because you can just buy metamagic rods (expensive, take up all your combat item slots, the the daily uses compared to the mythically enhanced spells per day totals are squat). The most consistent non-archer character is Ember, who starts as a spontaneous support caster, and can roll to put an enemy to sleep every single round for free until they’ve all had a roll, after which she can spend her turns maintaining a buff. And this is extra hilarious because their deliberately unoptimized “easy’ builds for the prepared casters, *still require the player to pick the prepared spells*.
In particular, the non-casters refuse to engage with the mythic armor system, which pretty clearly seems to have been implemented specifically to shore them up. In the d20 system, AC doesn’t automatically scale, so it tends to stagnate pretty hard after a while. My characters were hitting AC 30 by level 5, and here at level 10 they’re still mostly around 32-34, at maximum buffs, but bosses are regularly hitting 35-40 attack (blah blah char-op only cares about miss chance etc). However, anyone who takes an Armor Focus feat qualifies to take two different Mythic Armor Focus feats, one for defense, and one for attack. These can easily add several points of armor class, several points of attack and damage, or like d6 10 damage, on every (melee) attack. This helps heavy armor characters catch up a bit to lighter armor classes with tons of easy always-on damage boosts (just *one* level of rogue could give Camellia a proper build by saving a feat, boosting a critical skill, and giving her some damage for the 6-8 levels you have to wait for her “build” to work- meanwhile the Slayer is just insanely busted), and should compensate somewhat for the inflated scaling of monsters. But none of these default builds go there at all from what I’ve seen (and having to take control, I won’t be seeing unless I deliberately drop a save to rebuild check).
Oh and those rebuilds? Turns out it was exactly three free, which I used “fixing” and then actually fixing my build, and giving Seelah the Paladin an actual build. Except because I let nearly every character take one or more bad levels on the expectation they were going somewhere with those decisions, I need to pay to fix them. And it’s not the like 1k 1k per last like I think it was in Kingmaker, no this is *10k*. Then 20k. I’d have to roll back to the finale of Act 2 to fix like one of those builds before it started bumbling, the rest are just unsalvageable.
-Ember has been fixed: she now has Bolster Spell, and maxed out Spell Penetration/Greater/Mythic so she can land them, and an extra ring I bought that just makes all your fire spells deal a ton more damage, so now when she blasts the hp bars actually go down. I kept most of her spell list and those I replaced mostly on theme, and even though the Restless Slumber is not quite the improvement I thought, it’s still good (I also gave her Cackle to extend her protection ‘hex’, which is on brand ’cause she’s supposed to be all Looney Lovegood laughing and nice, but the game clearly only has one Evil Witch Cackling sound effect that does not match at all, big disappointment). But that still leaves Sosiel, Camellia, and Nenio.
-Sosiel *could* have mythic armor, or summoning, but he has neither, and even if I pivot him that just means he’s carrying deadwight.
-Nenio could actually be fun, again Phantasmal Killer is one of the only SoDs they haven’t nerfed, and there are a ludicrous number of DC boosts you can apply and a metamagic to force rerolls if they succeed. But she also needs other metamagic just to fix her ability to prepare spells because of their rule-breakingly rigid system. She could be doing all of this right now, but she’s not.
-And of course Camellia’s whole build and theme is contrary to itself. She clearly wants to stab people, so she’s playing a dedicated support caster class. She has the Battle spirit so she can fight, which perfect for Str characters, so she’s all-in on Dex. She’s clearly evil, yet refuses to take any of the evil cursey hexes like Evil Eye or Misfortune or just Slumber and murder them in their sleep because they’re not about stabbing? But no, instead after nothing but combat buffs she pivots into two bad early game status mitigation effects. I don’t even. Is this some sort of deliberately troll? She’s constantly sniping at Ember but Cammy, girl, Ember is MVP. Ember regularly tells 20′ tall demons and side-region bosses to shut up sit down and go to sleep, and they just do. The only thing that slowed her down was undead, and that could be additively fixed at any time. You, Camellia, make negative sense, and your bad choices go all the way down to 1st level where they cannot be fixed, only dodged with convoluted workarounds that still leave holes. I cannot fix a dex-based full casting build that refuses to use the class’s primary supernatural abilities. The only on-theme build for her is to *stop taking levels of her primary class because it does not benefit her desired playstyle at all*.
I’ve also seen some more of how the game supports summoning: with ridiculous uber items. In addition to the club I bought which summons a Huge Elemental on kill (I am 10th, so 5th level spells- oh and don’t forget the demon summoning glaive they gave me before that), and the holy beer mug from earlier and the opposite day book with 10% chance for its summons to attack you, I now have a belt which summons something every time you cast a 6th level spell. Which again, only two specific mythic path combos can even do at this level, but come on. Will I use it? Obviously, but this stuff is clearly busted. To the point it’s kindof insulting. You’re telling me you put all of these completely broken summoning items in the game, literally all main characters will have at least one daily from their mythic path, you obviously want this to be a thing, *and yet you just left the summon monster spells sucking?* I checked the stats, and the 5th level normal mass summons are just barely starting edge ahead of the 2nd level summon undead I’ve had for ages, while every single one of these items is clearly better than any normal summons. Is it cool as hell that I can turn one quick summon a small army of skeletons, followed by a super skeleton or something, which then causes another free summon to appear? Yes. And maybe the game will have a fight where that’s actually appropriate, but generally it frames its giant battles as dungeons, not just one giant mosh pit I can flood with dudes.
I’ve picked up the succubus ranger, yup, sure is a ranged build. It doesn’t look like her no-animal variant (which again, you can’t remove) ability to share favored enemy effects is working, but I haven’t tested it in detail yet. However, as a ranger the main difference is she has a tiny handful of spells, so I’ve ordered her into the 24hr spell route, and eventually she’ll be able to cast Animal Growth. If she can crash-cram some Trickery ranks for lockpicking I’d be able to dump Camellia entirely. Oh, but you finally got Woljif back after he abandoned you, leaving only one “rogue” support option for a whole act finale? Yeah, and now he’s being a whiny b— about everything, not fun.
Regill does indeed continue to be ‘Reasonable Evil’, which is to say, he clearly takes pleasure in being mean to people (which is little-e-evil) and I doubt he had proper consent from those guys he mercy-killed before, but to be fair he is right that in the end your fragile feelings don’t mean jack when it comes to saving the world from demons. Yes, the frontline infantry is meant to protect the backline damage-dealers, and his response to this? He calls them a meat wall, and his suggestion is to make them heavily armed and shielded so they don’t die instantly. Mr Evil says the sacrifical meatshields should be good at not-dying. But he *is* a dick about it. The evil part would be constantly taking fights where you don’t have enough artillery to end the fight before the frontline is dead, but he’s not in command of that- I am (and I have impossible prognostication powers from reloading saves).
The attack animations did indeed start running out pretty much immediately. I ran into the problem that her TWF Shield build needs 17 Dex for ITWF, so she can’t take it until I find her a 4 dex item (or level up while buffed and make sure she’s always buffed, again this is a neat 3.x ruling they’ve implemented that most games would not).
Oh nice, Sosiel has SF Conjuration, now his Grease spells will really work to make the enemies’ lives hard… oh wait, right, Cleric.
I like Sirocco. It ain’t Meteor Swarm, but fire damage + knockdown makes Arcane casters a weak, pale shadow of the ISO standard Kineticist (Fire, Extended Range, Earth, Bowling Infusion, Deadly Earth, Water, Cloud). Instead of Bowling Magma Deadly Earth + Steam Cloud (now I wonder if Steam can be Foxfire Infused…) you can have Tar Pool + Sirocco. And you get limited casts per day. And you can’t use Fury’s Fall + Elemental Overload to up the trip DC. But still, it’s better than nothing.
Yeah, if Cammy were Shadow instead of Hunter she’d be a lot more workable, although for a Dex build I would kinda want someone who could use the Deliverer’s Divine Anathema to disintegrate enemies (with everyone having innate Gang Up it’s trivial to set up sneak attacks), maybe with a bit of a dip in Knife Master and dual-wielding kukris. Unfortunately Cammy ain’t quite virtuous enough to make that work.
Ah, Sosiel. His central conflict: ‘I’m a gentle man of peace who wants to make art’ vs ‘I’m in a literal war against demons and kinda love violence’. Which does explain why he’s so badly optimised, but is still frustrating in terms of his stats. No, don’t give him heavy armor, he can’t get close enough to the enemy to hit them and even if he does he’ll suck at it!
Don’t know how you feel about mods, but the game really improved for me when I installed one that lets you completely respec characters – even to the point of picking new starting classes and stats at level 1*. Which really fits one of the reasons people might play a number-crunching RPG (especially Pathfinder!). Sosiel is a lot more fun as a divine half-caster (I went with Inquisitor) who can fight up close like the story wants to say he can. Camellia is much better as a pure rogue who can contribute BEFORE being buffed by spells**. Sure, honey, the voice in your head is an actual spirit that’s affecting you, you’ve not just crazy!
And naturally, Nenio is much better as a sorcerer, because f&%k Vancian casting. Also, you can give her the ‘Create Pit’ spells that just feel like bullying the enemy by pushing them into a hole and laughing as they try to climb out.
*It’s been a while, but it might have been Toybox? I know that one allows you to do a hell of a lot, but it’s been a while since I played WOTR. Still, proper respecialization is definitely something you can mod in.
**This system REALLY makes me appreciate D&D 5e’s Concentration system…
I used a mod to change Nenio to Brown Fur Transmuter. Arcanist uses casting system kind of similar to sorceror, but still runs off INT, which is central to Nenio’s schtick. More importantly from my min/max point of view, brown fur transmuter is absolutely bar none the best buffer in the game.
I don’t have a problem with mods, but this is the sort of game that I’d want to make *my own* mods, and they don’t have a mod kit for that. BG3, I didn’t finish the mods I was working on, but I could make (most of) the changes I wanted. To mod this game I’d have to go learn how to program in Unity, and then how to mod this game specifically, and then actually make the mods. The Toybox mod would probably allow fixing some things, but not others, and there are too many fundamental game errors for that to be sufficient (can I change the casting time on various “summon” spells and modify their effects? welp. I suppose giving every caster Heighten Spell for free would fix the slot problem at least). Being able to fix some things is in many ways worse than fixing none at all.
So I’m treating this as a standalone game, where you use what’s broken and ignore what’s not. If mounted combat is available from 1st level and anyone who doesn’t have it can’t keep up, that means you make your party all mounted or no-mounted (and to be fair, none of their default companions use mounts at all, I made those choices). Slumber Hex works on almost everything? Ember is now MVP. Standard summon spells suck but everyone’s allowed to summon a pile of skeletons? Welcome the Holy Army of the Dead, hey the “Spirit Paladin” summons are also undead see I’m not even wrong (I mean, they could have *made* Good variants, they just didn’t, there’s another mod that doesn’t exist, etc). I was *trying* to take that path with the character builds, but again, I realized too late what their builds are actually for, which is being bad to they don’t break the game on easy mode.
It’s also just kindof annoying how looking at the Nexus page, there’s like 350 mods, and 2/3 or more of them have the “AI” tag. It’s mostly just generated character portraits (the most popular being one to add them to all the un-portraited NPCs, which as with so many things would be best for a first-time blind run, which is not when you start modding, same way you don’t first-time blind ironman), which I’m split on- I shouldn’t have to pay the price of a whole-ass modern videogame commissioning an artist to make a character portrait so I can play a game, or trawl the internet for hours or days looking for a piece to use (without permission, not that this use case really warrants it). But games had already solved this with 3d character creators and using still images of those for the portraits. This Neverwinter Nights 1 style throwback (in a *very* NWN style game) is kinda cool, but also incredibly limiting. And of course most of those that aren’t generated pictures are just assembled packs of pictures they trawled from the internet, although that one had a(n incomplete) list of sources at least. I didn’t find anything for the word “summon” outside of Toybox, and same for a couple other searches I don’t remember.
Regarding builds- Sosiel really doesn’t need much to fight, just Armor Focus/Mythic and a mount. Looking at how they’ve given me an item, allowing a “Wild Cohort” feat for a reduced level animal companion would be perfect, oh wait no that’s another mod. Probably not allowed multiple Natural Bond feats, otherwise a Cavalier dip would do the job, and I need one more level before the Trike statue can be ridden by Medium riders. Nenio actually does take one of the Create Pit spells without prompting, and I know just how effective they are from Kingmaker, but the terrible AI (movement) means that they clash completely with summoning and the energy resist/DR of non-undead foes means the pits will just draw out the fight, and Ember can already divide and conquer them.
The funniest basic build point I think is that if Camellia took some evil hexes, she wouldn’t need to change class *and* she would be the best partner for Ember whom she so despises. Evil Eye/Misfortune to wreck their saves before Ember delivers the Slumber is the dream team, it looks like Witches (and by extension Shamans, who steal their “hex” system) were designed specifically to synergize the more you put in one place, a “coven” if you will. On the one hand I’m tired of Cammy being a b—-, so I’d like to dump her, but also I kinda want to see if/where any of this uh, rivaly? goes.
Sosiel needs impossible domain: community so that he can give the team an amazing buff once a day. Giving him animal domain is also good, so that he can ride a mount and survive a round of focus fire.
Mercenary cleric is heaps better than Sosiel, because you have them take Erastil as deity and get those two domains without burning a mythic feat.
Aha! I hadn’t considered Impossible Domain, ’cause I didn’t know that also gave out ‘free’ animal companion. I’ll put that on the wishlist for him then, if he gets rebuilt. Just a likely 50k more in expenses to fix him and Camellia, but then I suppose I don’t *need* most of the items in the shops- I’m not really using Nenio or Ulbrig, or Lann now that Aru has showed up, so the ~75k of extra buffs for them don’t really matter. I’m probably going to regret buying that silly summoning club though, without Keen Edge Scimitar my own damage has dropped to nil, and Seelah’s Keen Longsword Bless Weapon is my main dynamo (and she doesn’t have the summon buff feats) so I can’t just have her use it instead. Of course if I’m dumping Woljif and benching Nenio, I have no source of Keen Edge because the game won’t let me scribe scrolls of it for some reason, but Seelah still has that Keen Longsword I can just GMW, so it’s only my own bonking that’s behind. And how that I have the merged spell list I’ve got more slots than I know what to do with and don’t really need to attack.
Well, I haven’t dumped Woljif completely yet- I’m letting him have a chance riding the baby Triceratops to see if it’s just moving full attack and untochability that he needs, and yeah that does the trick. He just needs to stop whining. It’s *really* easy to see why so many people complained about 3.x’s (superior, tactical) single vs full attack system until they just got rid of it completely in 5e. It’s so one-sidedly more powerful and if even one character has it, they *all* must have it. Especially when you’ve also accepted the idea that melee characters are the “main DPS” of the game, and have oversized parties, the idea that the monsters should get a turn (where they can cast their own AoEs and SoDs) when your party should so obviously be able to bum-rush and 1-round them, it becomes quite frustrating when you can’t. If/when/If I do another playthrough I might ban mounts. . . except one of the other things I want to do is actually use a Lizard for once, which they have in this game. But not for Nature Oracles, no, you get a wolf or horse only because reasons.