DemiserofD

Like, obviously wealth and such are having a big impact in the LONG term. But the recent data on Mexico is what's truly fascinating to me. They anticipated a TFR of around 1.85 based on historic trends. Instead, it has a TFR of 1.23. That's an absurd correction.

But here's a real correlation: 15 years ago, only 30% of mexicans owned a smartphone. These days, it's closer to 80%, and in the younger age groups it's over 91%.

And like...if you think about it, smartphones anecdotally have a massive impact on basic socialization. No need to talk to strangers, just pull out the phone and check reddit!

Are smartphones secretly the driving factor behind crashing TFRs?

It's just odd that assassins are so limited by claws, you know? Daggers are classic assassin territory, why not let them use them? Blocking with daggers, too.

Thoughts?

See title. Was trying to figure out the simplest change to make some bad runewords good to pass the time!

Most melee weapons do too little damage, most people agree with that. At the same time, most people can pretty much skip strength entirely and still be golden because you can get all your damage from other sources.

But THIS is because strength and dex ADD with other off-weapon damage sources, they don't multiply it! This leads to some very strange situations, like a Tiger Strike Assassin with 300 strength only getting about 20% more damage from it.

But here's a strangely simple idea: What if you changed all enhanced damage stats on weapons to be multiplied by strength or dex(depending on the weapon type?)

Kinda like how Enigma gives 0.75 strength per level, weapons would give like 2% ED P

Most melee weapons do too little damage, most people agree with that. At the same time, most people can pretty much skip strength entirely and still be golden because you can get all your damage from other sources.

But THIS is because strength and dex ADD with other off-weapon damage sources, they don't multiply it! This leads to some very strange situations, like a Tiger Strike Assassin with 300 strength only getting about 20% more damage from it.

But here's a strangely simple idea: What if you changed all enhanced damage stats on weapons to be multiplied by strength or dex(depending on the weapon type?)

Kinda like how Enigma gives 0.75 strength per level, weapons would give like 2% ED

Right now Stealth is largely the only thing people use because of that 25% FRW.

But what if Eld Runes gave 15% FRW instead of its current -15% stamina drain? I'm kinda imagining that you'd give most unique armors a socket or two by default as well, at least the lower tier ones. Then you could just throw a few elds in there and have a cool armor AND get the FRW!

I got to thinking, it'd be neat to have a new class that really plays differently from the others. But how? Well, one of the ubiquitous things is re-running the same area over and over again. Let's start with that.

Seer

The Seer is a master of the future: Seeing it, predicting it, and controlling it. This includes controlling time itself.

Their first skill tree is the Pilgrim tree, and one of their biggest bonuses is their Pilgrim Road skill, which allows them to keep shrine bonuses active PERMANENTLY, and to stack multiple of them at once - up to 5 at level 20! This makes them heavily encouraged to explore, find good shrines, and take advantage of those bonuses to do as much as pos

In Oblivion it was Spellsword, because you could cast magic even with a melee weapon. In Skyrim it was stealth archer.

What will it be in TESVI?

I always kinda thought that when I was choosing between Harmony and Melody, Harmony always felt way better, but I didn't know WHY.

I just realized the answer. Melody gives you +3 to bow and crossbow skills, right? Well, the thing is, Harmony gives you 55-160 damage for each element, and when you're using Freezing Arrow or Exploding Arrow, the cold or fire damage gets added to the explosion!

Each level of Bow and Crossbow skills, with maxed synergies, is worth about 68 min/max for Freezing Arrow, and 57 min/max for Exploding Arrow.

Translation: Harmony is basically like it has a hidden +2 to skills, because some of that elemental damage gets spread to the splash. So Harmony is just flat o

I dunno why this one really lingers with me, but it just makes so much SENSE, you know? This thing is CLEARLY designed to punch through armor, it's a big honking spike for pete's sake! And they're not terribly good as-is. It just feels like giving them this as an innate enhancement would give them an actual reason to exist, you know?

Come on, D2 devs. Hear the call of my soul.

I've been playing a SSF amazon and a point of frustration for me is the number of runewords that are just...meh. Like, maybe they were decent when they were first released? But nowadays they're just mediocre or even bad(looking at you, Wind).

It'd be really nice if they gave them some buffs at some point.

I was looking at Wrath in particular, and it got me thinking, this is a really nice runeword for swapping to before swapping to something better for damage like a windforce, but that means sacrificing your other swap weapon, whether that be Harmony or CTA or whatever else.

Which got me thinking...why not just give Wrath a Vigor aura? Like, make it the advanced version of Harmony! That'd

Rares are good in a few cases, but in a lot of them, there are runewords or uniques that so outclass rares that rares are basically not worth bothering with. Rare shields come to mind.

Imagine, though, if rares basically could just keep rolling for additional stats? I'm thinking that basically whenever a rare rolls, it gets like a 20% chance of rolling an additional prefix or suffix, and if that roll succeeds, it rolls again, and again, and again, until it fails. On this bonus roll it could even double up on rolls it has already had.

The chances of getting the 'god roll' would be small, but never zero. Thoughts?

It's been 20 years since the assassination of Emperor Titus Mede II, and the world is on the brink of war.

Following the emperor's assassination and the simultaneous assassination of all his heirs, the Imperial City descended into chaos. Multiple claimants fought over the throne in a bloody uprising known as the War of Eight Emperors. The new Emperor, when finally elected, was paranoid - and not without reason. He himself had been betrayed by the Elder Council as they had attempted to use him to defeat other claimants before turning on him and selecting their own favored candidate. The Elder Council was disbanded, but that wasn't enough; fearing the Legions themselves, but fearing the

In the context of Natalism, I was thinking about emission spectrums lately. In emission spectrums, you don't get more and more light as you add more and more energy; you get the same frequency of light until BAM, you cross the threshold and you get a higher frequency of light.

What if something similar is true of...let's call them 'higher energy states' of human relationships?

I was thinking about incels, for example. An incel has no friends, no job, no opportunities for socialization. Say they go out and try to socialize? What do they talk about? HOW do they talk? They have basically nothing to even begin to get started. For an incel to go from their current state to having a girlfriend,

I was thinking about how melee characters can still struggle a bit, especially slower-hitting ones. Very little reason to choose a slower, harder-hitting weapon over a faster one.

But that gave me kind of a neat idea for a new effect. Not exactly sure what it'd be called, but the basic effect would be, if you overkill an enemy, that enemy blows up and damages all nearby enemies based on the amount of the overkill!

That way, you'd actually have a real reason to choose a big, heavy-hitting weapon! You splat an enemy with a Maul or whatever, and they'll cause a biiiig bada boom, and damage all the nearby enemies too, allowing for the possibility of chains and stuff!

I'm kinda thinking you'd