"There is no struggle too vast, no odds too overwhelming, for even should we fail - should we fall - we will know that we have lived." —Anomander Rake
From Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen.
Okay I didn't even know you could get that ability from the monastery, I swear the amount of stuff to find in this game is ridiculous. Also I really should use Minsc sometime, always get him too late to use him much. Next run I'll get him before the other companion quests and bring him along to go smack some vampires.
Yeah I really need to use consumables more, I remember the void bombs from my first playthrough but since then they always just end up sitting in my inventory along with every other consumable in the game except for the one or two times I remember speed potions exist.
So Half-illithid warlock Tav + storm cleric Shadowheart + Minthara hits like a truck apparently. Everyone has initiative bonuses, so first turn Minthara hastes Tav, Tav casts black hole to cluster all enemies together, then Hunger of Hadar's them, Shadowheart then calls an upcasted Call Lightning with divine strike and obliterates everything. You can delete half the health of almost all the enemies in the first round if you get lucky, and they all get severe movement penalties from the black hole and hunger of hadar. Plus Astarion multi-classed rouge/fighter/gloomstalker with action surge and crit bonuses can pick off like 4 enemies in the first round too. Then Minthara smites the survivors into oblivion.
Fun times.
Definitely takes some time to get used to his style. The writing quality definitely improves though, Gardens of the Moon is widely considered to be a rough start to the series. His characters also get better but the way he writes them is also a deliberate choice. I believe you can find a short essay he wrote online somewhere explaining why he chose to write them the way he did.
Overall though Malazan is a wild ride. The scope of the story just keeps expanding and it still somehow manages to stick the landing by the end. Never read anything else like it.
When I was in like grade 10ish in high school one of our teachers showed the class this meme or a similar one and one of the other kids went "wait, does that happen?" in a genuinely confused tone. Almost the entire class just stared laughing and the teacher had to explain that no, it doesn't happen because the earth is not, in fact, flat.
What I also like about GTK's scrollbars is that the scrollbar only auto hides when the scroll area completely looses focus. As long as the mouse cursor is hovering anywhere in the scrolling region the scrollbar is visible, so you don't have to scroll first to see where the scroll position is.
