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We're definitely going to need to see a picture of those "nerd" books! Like...right now. p.s. That's a cute dog. I like the bottom row the best...because COMIC BOOKS! Also, I'll post a picture of my bedside chair (at a later date) to prove how much of a scatter-brain I am with books...

Please post a picture of your precious books. Luckily I moved into a new place recently and we just set up our bookshelf

Let's theorycraft some small group goodness. What are some profession skills that combine well? What sort of combo fields should we be able to execute on the spot? Can we come up with a flexible group comp that, while maybe not totally meta, still lets us play at a high level? How can we use profession-specific tools like barrier, invuln, auras, druid buffs, and so on? These are just starter questions; anything else is welcome too. Once we start developing some ideas we think workable we can put the results in a forums post. Starting tags. Add anyone you think may be interested. @Kenji @RaVem @Jinn Galia @pareod @BlixBlix @Drubid @Winters Engineer

With what seems like a heavy condi meta, we want cleanses as one major thing. Cleanses we can get through self-only skills; party/aoe skills; and/or using finishers (blast, projectile and whirl) through light fields. The thing with using fields is that people need to become familiar with fields and what finishers to use. If relying on fields, we would want to coordinate their use by calling them out so that people can use appropriate finishers through them. The same would apply to healing and water fields. As far as the group composition question, I would definitely want some cc in there. But perhaps thats my personal preference. Maybe something like (1) healer/support, (1) DD/cc, (1) DD/support, (2) DDs? Not sure exactly. I will say that I am trying to only play my mesmer. With that said, I bring a ghetto minstrel build that is pretty much full support. Is this something that would be needed or more beneficial than say a trailblazer-ish condi Chrono? What group size are we thinking when talking about small group?

I'm definitely interested in such a group, and, yeah, I think we have many people who would be interested and happy to work on developing this. TBH, I like seeing people try out different stuff, then making it fit together. We can look to have a group that wins against greater numbers without having to go all GvG on it. Those builds are certainly central to the meta for a good reason, but I'd also like to maybe examine this in terms of role composition. What roles makes for a well-balanced 5 man? (1) healer/support, (1) support/DD, (1) DD/support, and (2) DDs? Or could it look like (1) healer/support, (1) DD/cc, (3) DDs? Or, what if we wanted a pure bomb squad? (1) healer/support, (1) condi DD, (3) power DDs? IMO, in a guild like ours, flexibility in group comps will keep a regular-running, result-focused group together longer than 5 people rolling perfect meta comp and getting immediate results. I've seen firsthand what happens with the latter and, not coincidentally, am the only person from that meta comp who is still in the guild.

Happy Birthday!!

Happy happy birthday!

@CheekyMonkey66 Happy birthday! May you have the best day and year ever.

I'm currently burning through a re-read of the Aubrey-Maturin novels by Patrick O'Brien (in conjunction with a thread in Metafilter's "FanFare" section). It's been many years since I first read these, and it's such a great pleasure to tear through them again. If comics are also allowed here (but bearing in mind that I am not a great comic reader), just this week I received the first two issues of ISOLA which are PHENOMENAL. Lastly, I also received this week the latest D&D sourcebook, Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes. Lots of good stuff in there -- including background on my fave D&D quasi-deity, The Raven Queen. Sorry, no time to play games! Too much to read!

I can’t wait for this! Gonna save up money to get my second tattoo here! https://www.latattooconvention.com/

Here's a photo of my living room bookshelves from December. This photo does NOT include my nerd-books -- I have as many (if not more) in a disordered mess of 3 shelves in my office upstairs. My wife won't let me keep them in the downstairs area -- APPARENTLY not everyone finds my tastes in literature as "acceptable" as I do.