XCOM 2 Catch-All

So what happens if you do a VIP elimination mission and you just shoot them dead? Bradford specifically mentions that you can just kill them if necessary. Is the reward less?

No Intel.

Usually worth a bunch of intel... Maybe even bonus missions?

I wish I enjoyed this game half as much as people posting in this thread. It does absolutely nothing for me. I find the gameplay boring, tedious, needlessly punishing, and poorly explained. The writing is awful. I mean, really, really bad. The voice acting is pretty sad, too. The graphics are okay, but they could be so much better. The models and environments are okay, but the textures (particularly skin and hair) and particle effects could be much better. The art design doesn't do much for me either. I guess I was expecting more of a polished experience.

Sorry to take a big dump in the thread, but I had to get that off my chest. I wasted $60. I wish I could give the game to someone who would enjoy it.

BadKen wrote:

I wish I enjoyed this game half as much as people posting in this thread. It does absolutely nothing for me. I find the gameplay boring, tedious, needlessly punishing, and poorly explained. The writing is awful. I mean, really, really bad. The voice acting is pretty sad, too. The graphics are okay, but they could be so much better. The models and environments are okay, but the textures (particularly skin and hair) and particle effects could be much better. The art design doesn't do much for me either. I guess I was expecting more of a polished experience.

Sorry to take a big dump in the thread, but I had to get that off my chest. I wasted $60. I wish I could give the game to someone who would enjoy it.

Can't you get a refund on Steam?

I'm thoroughly psyched for the game and bummed that my birthday is a month out instead of right now.

BNice wrote:
BadKen wrote:

I wish I enjoyed this game half as much as people posting in this thread. It does absolutely nothing for me. I find the gameplay boring, tedious, needlessly punishing, and poorly explained. The writing is awful. I mean, really, really bad. The voice acting is pretty sad, too. The graphics are okay, but they could be so much better. The models and environments are okay, but the textures (particularly skin and hair) and particle effects could be much better. The art design doesn't do much for me either. I guess I was expecting more of a polished experience.

Sorry to take a big dump in the thread, but I had to get that off my chest. I wasted $60. I wish I could give the game to someone who would enjoy it.

Can't you get a refund on Steam?

Didn't buy it from Steam. Green Man Gaming had a big discount when the game was released.

Vargen wrote:

Wait, why are people talking like the automatic sword attack does damage? In my experience it just slows things down with extra animations and "missed" messages.

Agreed, it carries some absurdly high chance-to-hit debuff, to the point of rendering the skill near useless. I enabled a quick "perfectly accurate sword strikes" mod for the second playthrough to see if that makes it an interesting decision over the free move thing. Probably not really, but should at least be fun now.

Downloading the game now, after some dithering about whether to splurge on the Steam controller (I didn't). Can't wait to see what everyone's so excited about.

I suspect that a fair amount of granularity is manifesting because the skill simply doesn't come into play very often, which suggests that it really could be better balanced as an autohit skill.

I always choose Implacable because my Rangers kill regularly and the extra movement is almost always welcome. In the case of a sword kill, the Implacable skill allows you to attack where you otherwise should not.

So Implacable is a movement skill that turns out to be an attack power, while Bladestorm looks like an attack power but ends up being a marginal utility skill.

BadKen wrote:

The writing is awful. I mean, really, really bad.

I know what you mean about the writing. But I have to say, I'm really enjoying the story. Like, the way it's presented in the missions and the way you build your resistance network is really working for me. I've restarted the game on Rookie because I think that'll be more fun while I learn the systems, but I still want to go back and hammer at my most recent Veteran mission. The goal is to rescue a Grenadier who got captured while delaying the enemies so everyone else could make the evac zone. I just can't leave him there. The writing might be a real weakness, but XCOM 2 is doing an excellent job presenting the story through gameplay. And honestly if I had to choose one or the other, I'd rather have my video games tell me stories the way XCOM 2 does than have the best cutscenes written by my favorite author.

Diablo III had a similar issue. As horrid as the writing was in that, the gameplay really sold me on being a badass who could credibly tell the lords of Heaven and Hell that he'd whoop their butts if they didn't behave.

Opinionated opinions on aiming percentages and shooting through walls incoming:

I actually think some of the stuff that looks like bugs aren't. Like the percentage dropping when the alien is right next to the solider: yeah, the graphics look like it should be an easy shot, but the aiming curve actually drops at very close range for many weapons (like sniper rifles) because the enemy is actually too close. It makes sense from both a realism and gameplay perspective that in some circumstances that's actually a harder shot to make in the heat of combat.

For shooting through walls, most of the buildings in the game are destructible, and real guns can shoot through multiple average house walls, let alone the damage plasma guns do. So it's actually a kind of realistic to allow some shots through full cover like that and I'm fine with fudging it a bit for gameplay abstractions.

That said, there are clearly some clipping bugs too.

Boudreaux wrote:
BlackSabre wrote:

Just as an additional tip, completing story missions reduces the Avatar project by quite a lot too. I just completed one and it took it down by 5 bars. I'm now at 1 total progress Time to pickup some extra materials and intel.

Are those missions you get from researching the starred items in your research options and completing the objectives that are called out? I've been delaying those as long as possible. In the original XCOM seems like those were the ones that moved the story along faster and brought in stronger enemies and more difficult missions before you were really ready. Maybe that's not quite the case here.

Not quite. There is a special kind of research you need to do (you'll understand once you get it) that will open up the mission. The mission gave me two objectives. One reduced it by 3 and the other by 2.

Tamren wrote:
Gremlin wrote:

A flare gets dropped on their incoming location the turn before they arrive, and they don't take action until the turn after they drop.... But it's a lovely feeling when you do manage to pull it off.

You know what else feels really good? Putting two blademaster rangers on the enemy drop zone and watching them get diced into sushi the moment they step off the bird.

kazooka wrote:
Razgon wrote:

Does anyone know how to use the skulljack after the initial use? I can't seem to make it work on advent officers afterwards.

You're no longer using skulljack, you're supposed to use skullmine instead, which is a researchable project in the thing that's not called the foundry anymore. Confusing since the icon still sticks around. I haven't found anything else to use skulljack on. Not sure why they bothered with two separate icons.

Might be a use later on, I keep them around for skullmining but if you truly never need to skulljack again they should just remove the icon or combine it with skullmining once you get the upgrade.

There is a use later on.

Gremlin wrote:

For shooting through walls, most of the buildings in the game are destructible, and real guns can shoot through multiple average house walls, let alone the damage plasma guns do. So it's actually a kind of realistic to allow some shots through full cover like that and I'm fine with fudging it a bit for gameplay abstractions.

That said, there are clearly some clipping bugs too.

Yeah, but then you'd need to make it part of the gameplay systems.

Right now as the player there's no practical way to tell which walls/ceilings/floors you can/can't shoot through. Clearly the AI does have this info. Not to mention there are multiple issues here, the first is paper -thin walls that you arbitrarily might be able to shoot though, the second is line of sight.

I don't care if you can shoot me through walls, unless you've used some kind of scanner, if you've got no line of sight you shouldn't be able to (unless it's low accuracy spray and pray). Hits through walls should potentially have reduced damage too...

It can create an incredibly frustrating experience.

Sure bullets can penetrate walls, but they don't do so in a straight line. As soon as they hit a thing they start to tumble, and who knows where they'll go. Not that I expect games to be realistic, however.

I haven't been having the shooting through walls problem, but that's probably because I generally don't engage in buildings at all. If the aliens are in buildings, they're grenade meat. I'm not going in there.

Just a quick heads up. I had a couple of save files corrupted on a mission where chryssalid turn up. Google search says this is a thing. So go for
that extra save. Loading a pre-chryssalid mission and selecting a non-chryssalid mission is a workaround. Glad I didn't go for Ironman on my first run.

Mr Crinkle wrote:

I enabled a quick "perfectly accurate sword strikes" mod for the second playthrough to see if that makes it an interesting decision over the free move thing. Probably not really, but should at least be fun now.

I play with modded melee weapons. I find that the base stats are too much risk and not enough reward, especially when you play on Veteran or Legendary. The damage simply does not compare to firearms at all, even with perks. Instead of simply making swords 100% hit I made the following changes:

These are the original stats and the changes I made:
RANGERSWORD_CONVENTIONAL(Damage=4, Spread=1+1, PlusOne=0, Crit=2, Pierce=0, Shred=1
RANGERSWORD_MAGNETIC(Damage=5+1, Spread=1+1, PlusOne=0, Crit=3, Pierce=0, Shred=2
RANGERSWORD_BEAM(Damage=6+2, Spread=1+1, PlusOne=0, Crit=4, Pierce=0, Shred=3

RANGERSWORD_CONVENTIONAL_AIM=20-5
RANGERSWORD_CONVENTIONAL_CRITCHANCE=10
RANGERSWORD_MAGNETIC_AIM=20
RANGERSWORD_MAGNETIC_CRITCHANCE=15+5
RANGERSWORD_MAGNETIC_STUNCHANCE=25-5
RANGERSWORD_BEAM_AIM=20+5
RANGERSWORD_BEAM_CRITCHANCE=20+10
RANGERSWORD_BEAM_STUNCHANCE=+25

The original base damage of 4/5/6 was far too low, so I buffed it up to 4/6/8 which scales much better to lategame enemies. I then rebalanced the aim and crit bonuses to scale to lategame defensive bonuses. I also increased critical damage to 150% and made all levels of sword shred armour. For skills I also buffed the blademaster perk to +4 damage instead of just +2. I know this sounds overpowered but, for comparison the most damage you can do with the stock tier 3 sword is 10 on a crit, compared to the 15 damage you can do with a shotgun crit. My modded sword can crit for 14, but it also has a large degree of variance, Spread 2 means that the damage is randomly spread from 2 points up to 2 points down. The sword would thus crit for 10-14 which compares reasonably to shotguns that can crit for 13-15. As well later in the game you will rarely hit for max damage because a lot of enemies dodge hits.

I am having a BLAST with my rangers now. The fact that they deal reasonable damage and can shred armour makes using them a high risk-high reward thrill. I am enjoying the game easily twice as much now compared to my tutorial game.

LarryC wrote:

So Implacable is a movement skill that turns out to be an attack power, while Bladestorm looks like an attack power but ends up being a marginal utility skill.

To be fair I AM playing with modded weapon stats. But I still think Bladestorm is a great skill. Consider:

1. Enemies are not dumb, they know that if they stand beside a guy with a sword they are going to get hit next turn. So if a ranger ends the turn next to an enemy shooty unit they will try to get away, this triggers bladestorm! So if your ranger is beside them because he sword attacked on the previous turn it lets him get two attacks which is incredibly valuable. You can even get a third attack if you move beside an enemy and rapid fire into them. The overwatch trick also works if you park the ranger in the middle of the enemy drop zone.

2. It's always worth having your rangers up front against melee foes because bladestorm will give you free hits you would not get otherwise. If your rangers use overwatch they can get twice the attacks per turn against charging enemies. In places with chokepoints they can also stop enemies like lancers from moving past them.

3. The skill that makes the next enemy hit after a kill miss the ranger can also trigger on the enemy turn if they use overwatch or bladestorm.

4. Reaper is amazing, grenade a whole pack of enemies and chop them up one by one in an unbroken chain. The first hit never misses and this triggers the ranger's other abilities. So if there are 3 enemies and the ranger kills two this way, the third will always miss him.

Also one big tip that I found, Holo-Targeting increases melee accuracy too, this can change those risky 88% melee hits to 100%.

Tyops wrote:

I don't care if you can shoot me through walls, unless you've used some kind of scanner, if you've got no line of sight you shouldn't be able to (unless it's low accuracy spray and pray). Hits through walls should potentially have reduced damage too...

It can create an incredibly frustrating experience.

Agreed. There are other problems with the game but this is the most gamebreaking of them all. There are just too many cases of aliens shooting through solid buildings. And while this cuts both ways like in cases where MY soldiers reaction fire through buildings at invisible aliens it just detracts too much from the gameplay.

It's especially frustrating when you combine it with the bug that stops rooftops from rendering when you need to see them, and stops them from UN-rendering when you need to see inside a building.

What Firaxis needs to do is go through the level builder and make absolutely sure that every terrain piece is 100% opaque. I suspect that damaged terrain is a large cause of this because I got into a firefight in a warehouse once and I noticed that the "scorched" and blackened portions of roof were essentially windows because they allowed full vision whereas the undamaged roof did not.

My other major gripe is how fire works. Fire is an all consuming destroyer of worlds in this game. The moment you start a fire they just eat through buildings like the Red Faction nanorifle. It's ridiculous when half the map just randomly explodes into dust and I've had soldiers spontaneously combust from just being near burning buildings.

What is XCOM2?

I feel that a lot of people, especially here, know enough for this to be kind of a weird question, but it seems like there are still some gamers who are interested who have not played XCOM in any incarnation, are put off by the "difficulty" stories, or simply had the wrong impression.

Firaxis' modern version of the storied franchise is thematically based off of the original alien vs. human conflict, which itself was fueled by American UFO folklore. If the alien stories out of the X-Files exploded into open armed conflict, XCOM is the theme setting you'd end up with.

In terms of game design, it's basically D&D, or of the D&D-style of turn based tactical game starting around 3d ed. If you designed a D&D campaign with a UFO theme and then made a computer game out of it, you'll end up with Firaxis' XCOM games. It even has the old-school square-tiled board. Characters have classes and have distinct functions in combat based on those classes. Of course, they're all gun-based and the enemy is aliens, not dragons. You even start at 4-man squads and graduate to 6-man squads. Very D&D.

What's different? What are the campaign rules?

1. Deadly.

Your soldiers die, they stay dead. If they're reduced to 0 HP, they will most likely be instantly dead. No negative hitpoints. Upgrades or lucky chances allow your soldiers to "bleed out," but only specially equipped soldiers can stabilize them, and it requires a use of the equipment each time. Oh, and you have to carry them out afterwards. Under enemy fire. Fun.

XCOM operatives and aliens also have reduced HP compared to D&D standards. The highest rank, most armored XCOM agent can top out at about 20+ HP. Even 5th level Mages average about that much. Damage ranges on powers and weapons are capped to match, but it usually only takes a couple solid hits to take anything out. Most minor aliens fall in one hit (or less).

2. Cover is EVERYTHING.

You don't have AC. Everyone has a different base chance to hit and that's it. This is modified by distance, elevation, and cover since almost everything is ranged combat. Full Cover gives -40% chance to hit to the enemy that's attacking you. Partial Cover gives -20% chance to hit, respectively. These translate as -8 and -4 to-hit penalties in D&D. Pretty significant. If you have no cover, you also get something like +50% critical hit chance, up from about 10%. You do NOT want to be out of cover. Ever.

Cover is directional. If you or an enemy can move to the "other" side of a terrain feature that gives you or them cover, the benefit is waived for that unit. You want to flank your enemies. You do not want to get flanked. Most terrain features are destructible. If you can blow up a creature's cover, you can probably kill it very shortly afterwards.

3. Group Initiative.

All sides move all their units at once. XCOM moves, then the aliens move, then XCOM moves.

4. Encounter Trigger.

There is no Initiative Roll. There is no Surprise. Enemies are awakened by specific (hidden) tiles on the map. If any of your units passes over the tile, the alien group is awakened and they all get 1 Immediate defensive move action. If patrolling alien groups are awakened by stumbling onto XCOM, they get one defensive move action before XCOM's next unit is allowed its turn.

5. Overwatch.

On the whole, there are nearly no Reactive, Instant, or Immediate Actions in XCOM. Some powers can be reactive, but those are few. The only general exception to this rule is Overwatch. Overwatch allows you to interrupt enemy movement with an attack at a penalty. The normal Overwatch shot is only 70% as accurate as a regular attack and has 0% chance to critical, but may be preferable if all enemy units are in Full Cover. In addition, Overwatch can be abused to allow XCOM two functionally consecutive attack turns against aliens.

From the above rule modifications, it is easy to see that XCOM's squad layer is a tactical game that's all about the Art of the Ambush. XCOM in XCOM2 is a small ragtag operation with barely half a platoon of rotating soldiers at their disposal. You cannot win prolonged engagements. You must strike first, and strike hard. If you plan well and are lucky, you will strike last.

In a perfect engagement, you'll have two turns of actions and attacks before the enemy aliens even get to make an attack of their own. You can take them all out without even allowing return fire. Of course, not all engagements will go perfectly, and the aliens will have defenses to prolong engagements or make attacking them hurt.

In the worst case scenario, you'll fail to take out an alien encounter before they attack, as well as trigger two other encounters-worth of aliens and they all get to have a whack at you before you get to go again. Since everyone on your team is essentially a Mage, you may not always survive this. That's okay. There's a Memorial for your soldiers and you get to write the Epitaphs yourself!

Tamren:

I think you're starting to conflate a lot of things.

I, too, think that the weapons that deal melee damage need to be scaled up. Bladestorm would be much more useful if they were. In fact, I think they need to deal more damage than guns because a Ranger out in the open with a field of enemies is going to be dead unless you're using Smokebombs or Flashbang. That's a defensive limitation guns do not have. They should deal more (not merely equivalent) damage. Rangers also have to actually move up next to an enemy to attack in melee, some enemies explode, yada, yada.

Bladestorm is nice, but without auto-hit or even auto-kill, it's not quite as nice as Implacable. Your Ranger blocks a Lancer by forcing the Lancer to attack him. So the Ranger attacks the Lancer, misses or doesn't do enough damage to the Lancer to kill it, and then he gets hit and proceeds to slump down, Unconscious. No thanks. I'd rather shoot from a safe distance.

Untouchable is nice. It can trigger after anything. Bladestorm would need to be autokill to work well with Untouchable. Implacable works well as-is. If you have Implacable and Untouchable, you can kill multiple enemies with Reaper, then move directly into Full Cover and entice enemy attacks, knowing you have the defenses of Full Cover and Untouchable. Works well.

It is notable that most enemies with melee-only options have high damage compared to the attacks of their peers. Granted, the Ranger has a gun, but to make melee and Bladestorm palatable, the risk-benefit balance has to be right.

LarryC wrote:

What is XCOM2?

That's a pretty good explanation of what XCOM is, and should maybe be linked to from the first post.

Granted, I'm familiar enough with the game I can't gauge exactly how effective it is as an introduction, but I have seen enough other people who have mostly heard about XCOM for the first time with this game that it fills a definite need.

Gremlin wrote:
LarryC wrote:

What is XCOM2?

That's a pretty good explanation of what XCOM is, and should maybe be linked to from the first post.

Done.

I had very, very minor issues or bugs throughout the campaign, but they seem to be making a huge appearance in the last mission. Framerate drops, buggy ragdoll corpses, unexpected freezes, and the last portion, the visuals go bonkers. Looks like an 80's disco. Flickering, solid, neon colored light that would probably cause seizures to those prone to.

Here's an image, just imagine it flickering repeatedly with yellow, cyan, white, green, all the basic windows 3.1 Paint colors. I've spoilered tagged it just in case, although you can't tell pretty much anything from the screencap. Also, I've added own spoiler tags to block objectives, etc, for those who want to see how bad it got.

Spoiler:

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/frIRD2p.jpg)

Tkyl, I'm sure you guys are reading tons and tons of forum threads across the net regarding bug reports and such, just wanted to let you know about this one. Would it help if you knew my pc specs? Off the top of my head, I know I have an nvidia 970 card, but I can pull other details if needed.

EDIT: Forgot to mention, but some other info. This first happened yesterday. Today, I was still getting my ass kicked with the loadgame, so I decided to load another save on the geoscape right before entering the last mission, to try out a different squad. And it happened again. It only happens in the last room, and I believe it might be...

Spoiler:

...too many enemies on screen. The framerate starts to slow down, and then its fine but the flickering neon colors begin. I was able to complete 2/3 of the final objective, but enemies kept spawning in, and I believe it hit a number that crossed some threshold, and that's when the flickering began. Before, when it was around 12-15 enemies, it was OK, I lost count as to how many more came, but I believe that might be what caused it.

54-ish hours in I'm noticing some bugs, but I'm still really enjoying the experience. I finally have gotten XCOM mobile to the point where AVATAR isn't getting away from me, and I'm really enjoying myself now. Also, some cosmetic mods have started popping up (how did they not include berets?) so that's been fun. I can't wait to see what additional content they've got planned. Hopefully the return of Dr. Vahlen? So far it's never been revealed what happened to her.

LarryC wrote:

I, too, think that the weapons that deal melee damage need to be scaled up. Bladestorm would be much more useful if they were. In fact, I think they need to deal more damage than guns

Yup, this is why I buffed the damage numbers in my game. The sword simply does not scale to higher levels. It does 4/5/6 damage which just barely edges out pistol damage at 2/3/4. And unlike the pistol it doesn't have lots of fancy multishot abilities. That's why in my game I upped the numbers to 4/6/8 with better criticals. They still can't match a shotgun for pure damage, but I also added shred 1-3 and the ability to stun enemies which is something guns can't do. So with a tier 3 sword you can crit for 15 damage, shred 3 armour and have a 50% chance to stun. But it's still a HUGE risk to use the sword at all! You can miss, the target can dodge and there are many enemies that can kill you in one shot even with endgame armour.

But the payoff for all this risk is that when it works, it feel GOOD. It's fricken AMAZING when you watch two rangers charge headfirst into a pack of six chryssalids and not just kill but straight up MURDER them all without taking a single hit in return. I don't think it's overpowered at all because you are weighing total annihilation of the enemy directly against losing a soldier instantly. Victory or death.

LarryC wrote:

So the Ranger attacks the Lancer, misses or doesn't do enough damage to the Lancer to kill it, and then he gets hit and proceeds to slump down, Unconscious. No thanks. I'd rather shoot from a safe distance.

This isn't any different from any other class missing an overwatch shot and getting hit in the face. The only difference is that rangers can get an extra chance to hit back. And while weapon scopes don't work on the sword, holo targeting and perception modules do. It's not hard to achieve 100% hit with swords because they come with +20% accuracy by default which is the max short ranged modifier for most guns.

LarryC wrote:

If you have Implacable and Untouchable, you can kill multiple enemies with Reaper, then move directly into Full Cover and entice enemy attacks, knowing you have the defenses of Full Cover and Untouchable. Works well.

I can confirm that this works great. In one case my ranger chain-killed three advent in a row after they were weakened by grenades. He didn't miss a single swing and on his last move I put him out in the open so that he could draw fire from a turret and flip it off as it automatically missed. But without the boosted damage from my mods this just isn't viable compared to using a shotgun instead or investing in the other side of the perk tree.

Also here's a look at the Evac All mod. It's amazing! Go get it! It should be part of the base game because it saves so much time and looks awesome while doing it.

Just for style I decided to evac off the roof of the advent factory. See those bodies on the roof? Just before I was about to rope my guys out the enemy decided to call in a dropship right beside us. Two words: turkey shoot.
IMAGE(http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/495763483649381387/D01F2C671ABADBDFF7F584BCF88BB51ED769E869/)
IMAGE(http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/495763483649381500/01900AAB86505DA63097029E46621124E569A60D/)

Tamren wrote:

Victory or death.

Lok'tar Ogar!

So... you're saying your rangers are orcs then?

Spoiler:

Andromedon

Maaan, f*ck these guys. On first introduction that thing is a beast to fight, but then another one showed up! Gahhh! I need to beef up on my Grenadiers apparently.

@LarryC:
Add to your explanation:

"to make it easier to understand for Nintendo boys and girls:
Xcom is like Fire Emblem with more depth of gameplay (without rock-paper-scissors) and better graphics, but your characters don't have a private life, i.e. they can't marry or get children."

Coincidentally, Xcom 2 and the new Fire Emblem are released almost at the same time this year. I thought about buying it, but after playing Xcom 2, I can't get back that easily to a tactics game without heights and a proper cover system... (even if the characters have feet now).

Storywise, Xcom is not the best game out there, sure. But it is plain fun to see almost every sci-fi creature that you can think of mashed up in one game. You get everything from your Roswell alien to a more frightening version of your AT-STs from Star Wars. It's just a little bit weird that your main engineer and your science guy have more back story than the characters that you spend most time with. It's kind of a lost opportunity, e.g. the game generates background stories for your characters and there is one text that says that a character strangely wasn't captured by Advent... I haven't finished the game yet and I doubt that they will do anything with this, but how awesome would it be if one of your guys turned out to be a traitor in the end?

Amoebic wrote:

Okay, I made a bunch of squad inspired by the companion characters for Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, and Dragon Age Inquisition. I didn't include DLC characters or some of the more difficult ones like Iron Bull. Just need to finish the descriptions on a few. I just don't know how to share them with you?

Okay! I did the thing, here's the link
Dragon Age Characters by Game (Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age: II, Dragon Age: Inquisition)

I don't have a Nexusmods account, and I don't want to pay for one, but if anyone else here wants to upload my DA character pools to Nexusmods, you're welcome to do so.