Werne

Internet crapped out on me yesterday so I didn't write this... I once did and from what I can tell, the best way to go about it is to be an alteration-based mage. I didn't wear any armor and relied on armor-boosting spells instead, better mobility and allowed me to wreak more havok with destruction spells since costs go down. The key is to dish out as much damage as possible using the strongest offensive spells available before the enemy comes close enough for you to chop him up with the blade. Poisons help too. :thumbsup: If you're good in alteration and have mods like Better Magic, you'll be able to have equal protection by using stoneskin without armor as you would with tempered armor, and your spells would be cheaper. By the way, do spell cost go up when you wear armor in the base game? The last time I played stock Skyrim was never so I got no idea. Also, by far my favorite build was a Breton shieldmage using primarily alteration and destruction. Cast stoneskin, bunker down behind a shield and cast fireballs. Worked surprisingly well. Since Bretons resist 25% of magic by default and can absorb 50% of spells with their racial power, coupling that with alteration perks like magic resistance and atronach as well as taking the atronach stone made enemy mages and dragons a joke. I'd absorb or resist everything they cast at me allowing me to fire even more spells down range at them and take half damage if I can't absorb it. Against physical attacks, I'd use the shield and skin spells so I had a high armor rating and mobility and could take quite a beating while dishing out AOE spells. Gotta say, I miss that character. EDIT: Thread's dead, Jim. :sad:

I die in two hits too, though it's more because my health is crazy low since I spend almost all points for magicka. :thumbsup:

I tried to be a warrior Nord once, it was awful, too much stabbing with too little immolation. To quote Marcurio - "Why settle for just stabbing your foes when you can roast them alive in a gout of arcane fire?" :D And yeah, Wylandriah is awesome, she's by far my favorite court wizard. :thumbsup:

I started a new game as an Altmer and damn, they're huge! I used to play as a female Breton before which is the shortest character in the game (as well as a female Khajiit) at 0.95 scale. Altmer, on the other hand, are the tallest characters in the game at 1.08 scale. Mirabelle at the College now has to bend backwards just to look me in the eyes. :laugh: Also, I think I figured out why Wylandriah in Riften considers swallowing a soul gem brilliant. She asked the College for greenmote which can only be found on Shivering Isles, so I'm guessing she met old uncle Sheo. Poor woman.

@billyro You know, a detailed normal is only as good as the specular map which puts emphasis on it's details. And useful or not, tiled textures are still abominations in my book. Also, that last one looks good. Not sure how visible will the tiling be but that part of the blade in the pic does look good. Would've been better without those weirdly shaped fingers that are clipping through the hilt though. :tongue: @Ironman Nice. If you end up doing it, do post a link, I could use a laugh.

I don't use tileable textures, I consider them an abomination. Also, I wanted to say a normal map but I was working on a specular and had a brain fart. :tongue: Wish that was a bumper sticker. You can put it on textures though, write "you're an idiot" somewhere in the unused space and call it a hotfix. :D And now a pop quiz for bandits... You see a Breton battlemage wearing Daedric armor conjure two Dremora Lords, tear apart a mammoth, trap it's soul, then proceed to launch a giant across half the map with a thunderbolt. What do you do? Correct answer: Attack him with a pickaxe yelling "Can't wait to count on your coin!" Gotta love those guys, they're not afraid of anything.

It's not that it's hard to make, I can make it no problem, it's easy, but it takes time until you get it right for what you want to use it for. Once you perfected it, then you realize you can't get the the UV right on that thing and the hilt has a seam, which takes even more time. And once you fix the UV up, it takes a whole day just to get the normal map right, not to mention the specular. That's why I use stock photos for wood - laziness. :tongue: As for metal contrast, I know what you mean, but it's not the diffuse that you should adjust. Go play with the specular map.

If you think metal is hard, try doing wood, I bet you'll change your opinion right quick. I haven't done a single sword/axe/dagger with a leather strap hilt thus far, I do only wood. Which reminds me, I still didn't finish my dagger's mesh, gotta make a dragon's head inside the blade's central cut-out. That's gonna be a pain in the arse, I guarantee it. On an unrelated note... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spZJrsssPA0 I haven't been laughing this hard in a long time. :laugh:

I got peanut dust and salt all over my keyboard.

My internet connection is constantly crapping out, not sure why though. And I found this on UESP wiki about Annekke Crag-Jumper... I don't know, having an angry axe-wielding mother in law watching my back doesn't really seem like the best idea in the world. EDIT: Peanuts! :dance:

Not if you're like me and have a +50% archery enchantment on every piece of clothing you wear, use a bound bow and do sneak attacks. :tongue: Though since Miraak started popping up I've been killing them more up-close and personal, I get my souls then. Gotta say though, a werewolf is actually very effective against a dragon once it lands. Attack speed is damn high, damage is damn high as well with all the perks, power attacks stagger him so he can't attack me or fly away and I got a huge reserve of stamina that regenerates damn near instantly. I tear him to shreds before he can take a swing at me.

I sure hope so, Bethesda released FNV five years ago. On the other hand, I wouldn't mind waiting a bit longer for Fallout as long as they hurry it up with DOOM 4. As a side note, I figured something out in Skyrim. As long as I kill dragons as a werewolf, Miraak will bugger off and stop stealing my dragon souls. If I kill dragons as a human, I'm screwed out of a dragon soul. Good thing I like clawing those poor flying bastards to death. :happy: EDIT: Whoa, wait a minute. Last post was 2 days ago?! :ohmy:

Those aren't horrible. These, however... http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/t_original/akqmvdd29hkw6wr4bvts.jpg http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/t_original/rkmor4yw444jtoawuv9g.jpg By the way, where's Thor?

http://cdn.bgr.com/2014/11/assassins-creed-unity-glitch.jpg http://www.twinfinite.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Vk7zNGh.jpg

If you don't know what you're doing, that's the important part. "Overclocking can kill components" and "overclocking can shorten PCs lifespan" statements are like those annoying "no user-servicable parts inside" stickers, the're meant to keep people away from touching things they know nothing about. I'm an engineer so I ignore all of that. :tongue: Set the CPU to 2V and poof, overheat it and it will die a lot sooner, combine too much voltage and too much heat and the death can be instantaneous, it's all common knowledge for us who overclock and we know it because we learned about it. The first rule of doing anything, including overclocking, is don't do it if you don't know how to do it. Would you deliberately and knowingly overheat your components or run them on voltages that can kill it soon? I don't think so. It can happen if you don't know you're doing it, but that's why you should educate yourself beforehand. :thumbsup: By the way, that fireplace idea is not bad. I do have an old PC and monitor lying around, I might actually put it to good use. :yes:

Why are you doing this to me?! That poor unlocked i7, makes me wanna cry. Anyway, it's a damn good PC, even stock, I still think you should overclock it though. :thumbsup: Wish I could afford a 750 Ti, from what I see the things overclock like crazy, decent ones do 1.5GHz on stock voltage.

Oh dear god... Never spread the thing with a q-tip, you got q-tip cotton all over your thermal compound which makes it unable to conduct heat properly. Actually, don't spread thermal paste at all. You also have air bubbles in it because of uneven spreading, making it further unable to conduct heat. Basically, start from scratch. I'd strongly suggest getting Arctic MX-4 or MX-2, you'll likely short-circuit the card with AS5 if you use too much since it's electrically conductive and the 6870's GPU has ICs close to the die, MX-4 and MX-2 aren't conductive. MX-4/MX-2 are dirt-cheap, buy either in a store. After you get it, take the card out, take the cooler off, clean out the thermal paste with toilet paper lightly dipped in pure alcohol, make sure the die and cooler base are both as clean as possible. Don't use wet wipes. Let them dry for a minute after cleaning them, don't touch the die or cooler base with anything other than the aforementioned toilet paper. After they're dry, put a bit of MX-4 on the die, like so: http://www.legitreviews.com/images/reviews/822/TRad2_GPU.jpg You can use a bit more if you don't feel safe with just a little bit, you can't do any harm by using a bit more if the paste is non-conductive, just don't overdo it. Don't spread the thing this time, just screw the cooler in, cooler's mounting pressure will spread the paste. Then pop the card in and see what temps you get. I'm 217% sure temps will be a lot better after doing it properly. EDIT: I forgot to ask, did you by any chance redid the power delivery heatsink? If you didn't, good. Normal boiling point of water is 99.97C (211.9F).

CPU - Overclock it Cooler - See above Mobo - MSI AMD boards are rather notorious for bursting into flames, Intel ones seem solid though Graphics - Overclock it. I want one even though it has 3.5GB of 192MB/s VRAM and 0.5GB of 28MB/s VRAM Memory - Overclock it. Definitely overclock it. 1866 CL10 is just :sick: SSD - It's an SSD, nuff said. Would've went with a 240GB one personally, the rig deserves it HDD - I would've went for a Hitachi (or HGST, whatever they call them nowadays) PSU - Good for overclocking So... overclock? Is that a yes? :D And the resolution is impressive indeed. Still my same old monitor, I just upscaled the render to insane levels, makes the game beautiful. Still can't believe my card can handle it though. By the way, 970 has DSR, I'm pretty sure you can even downsample from 3840x2160 without going under 60FPS. :smile:

How did you apply it and how much did you apply? And since the overheating problem appeared suddenly, try popping the side-panel off while your PC is on and check the fans on the card, see if all of them are spinning like they should. Sounds to me like one of them might have stopped or slowed down. By the way, I don't recommend using AS5 but since you already used it, stick with it. For future reference though, AS5 has a burn-in period of roughly 10 days after which it gets to peak performance (3-4C lower) but even at that point, it's not all that great compared to modern compounds. It was king 4 years ago, nowadays you have cheaper pastes like MX-4 and TX-2 that do the job as well or even better and have no burn-in period. All modern GPU dies are designed to handle constant operating temperature of 95C so unless you can boil water on it, it's fine. :wink:

You know I have a thing for PCs so... specs, please! :smile: Also, turns out my 7770 ain't all that bad. I upscaled Skyrim to 2560x1600 with GeDoSaTo and I got this with 43FPS minimum framerate (pic is 10MB so loading might be a bit slow): Yeah, it's stock Skyrim visually, but it's ~4.1M pixels compared to native ~1.3M. More importantly, I got perfectly playable 2K resolution on an entry-level card. :dance:

Well, I win. And here's what irks me. Today I went through the Yngol Barrow in Skyrim for 1,481,644th time and I still don't know what those blue chirping bouncy balls are. Can't kill them, I tried to set them on fire and it didn't work. Tried to shout them into submission, didn't work either. Tried unrelenting force and they just went flying all over the room. Even dissected Yngol Barrow in CK, found that they are called FXFollowMotes but that's all. Since I have no information, I'll just classify them as faulty tennis balls with a Dragonborn fetish.

Did she say yes? Also, what's up with women and stuffed animals? I bought a metric crap-ton of the bloody things (every time I mess up, which is often), usually kittens and teddy bears, every woman I dated had a thing for those. Speaking of which, I haven't seen more than maybe 2-3 of them around the house and I know for a fact I bought at least two dozen, I doubt she just threw them away. I'm pretty sure I'm going to open some remote unused closet one day and get killed by an avalanche of plush kittens.

You won't know frustration until you try to turn a dead satellite set-top box into a mITX PC case. And to make matters worse, there was even smoker dust and dog hair inside. :sick:

So... is DA:I any good?

I'll be up for all night, got 8 tests this week, three of them tomorrow. Ugh, school is worse than military service. I'd actually prefer being shot at.