Threads Of Destiny(Eastern Fantasy, Sequel to Forge of Destiny)

Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
It's worse than worthless actually. It's actively negative given all the arguments and salt it would produce.

If you want to get only mildly reductionist, this entire thread, and the last one, are giant flaming piles of arguments and salt. Anything else is just more of the same, so ehhhh, I don't see the issue. I also trust yrs not to just give us a shit art here - if we get an art at all, there's a real chance we don't.
 
[X] Accept the blessing of Hide
If I wanted to take a blessing I'd take this one tbh. We already have a few offensive-themed arts we could disassemble. Now we need parts for our defenses. Or whatever else this art might do.
 
It's incredible to see you claiming that one side isn't in the wrong when that side broke the Oaths that kept the spirits from slaughtering mortals in the first place. Had those oaths been kept to, there would have been no civil war, no massacres, none of this. But that side wasn't the least bit concerned with that, now were they? They just acted without considering the consequences, believing that daddy dearest would protect them and that of course one of their own would be chosen to be the next King.
And on top of that, when one of the old guard was chosen as the King instead and ordered them to stop, then went full revolt-mode instead.

Thing is, that makes it harder to get good offensive arts from any source, so it's a weak argument that we should seek offensive arts less often.
Not quite. It means that any offensive art we run into is less likely to be good, but that matters much more for one-off sources like this one than "pick your favorite" sources like the Sect Archive or the Cai Library.

We can be more or less certain there are fitting defensive arts in the Archive, but since Moon and Music are both somewhat rare, there may well not be any excellent fits for offense.
We don't need Moon + Music to make a good offensive art; we only need Music + Mid Range. And I find it hard to believe that the archive won't have something good there.
 
Considering that Arts are fundamentally just expressions of a Cultivators Domain, and the "Boon" is something that is to be placed on Ling Qi that she will "Carry with her into the waking world"

I don't think we have to worry about the resulting Art not fitting Ling Qi's own fighting style. If anything, she's going to wind up getting a slice of the King of the Forest's Domain and wind up expressing it as an Art through her own self. Kind of like how the various spirits in the guys entourage are themselves clearly affected by it.

So these concerns about whatever the resulting Boon not being compatible are overblown, I feel.
 
Because all the guesses for Hide aren't as problematic. They're all things that could be useful.

Fang otoh has a lot of "god please no" options.
Do you honestly believe that QM would put in a complete trap option in the guise of a "boon"? That just doesn't make sense. Either both are traps (unlikely and equally nonsensical) or neither are.
 
The Boons could also be a Talisman, or an Insight bonus, like our current Boost to Motion Arts.

That being said, I do like the idea of Fang over Hide.

[X] Accept the blessing of Fang
 
Considering that Arts are fundamentally just expressions of a Cultivators Domain, and the "Boon" is something that is to be placed on Ling Qi that she will "Carry with her into the waking world"

I don't think we have to worry about the resulting Art not fitting Ling Qi's own fighting style. If anything, she's going to wind up getting a slice of the King of the Forest's Domain and wind up expressing it as an Art through her own self. Kind of like how the various spirits in the guys entourage are themselves clearly affected by it.

So these concerns about whatever the resulting Boon not being compatible are overblown, I feel.
Yeah from that perspective they should be fine, but some of the concern obviously comes from the more meta idea that Yrs sometimes has shown difficulty making arts that are worth Ling Qi's time. *looks at AE sadly*

Myself I don't share that particular concern tbh, I was on the fence and Erebeal's words made me change my mind to thinking "You know what being Selkie-like would be amusing" because they amused me.
 
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Considering that Arts are fundamentally just expressions of a Cultivators Domain, and the "Boon" is something that is to be placed on Ling Qi that she will "Carry with her into the waking world"

I don't think we have to worry about the resulting Art not fitting Ling Qi's own fighting style. If anything, she's going to wind up getting a slice of the King of the Forest's Domain and wind up expressing it as an Art through her own self. Kind of like how the various spirits in the guys entourage are themselves clearly affected by it.

So these concerns about whatever the resulting Boon not being compatible are overblown, I feel.
What you are saying would be true for Domain Insights into Arts, but it is not true for Arts in and of themselves. The lesson we take from an Art when we finish it will be personalized to us, but the Art itself is a fit for the originator, not the person practicing it.

Now, we can hope that the King will be generous and give us something tailored to our combat style, but that is all we would be doing - hoping.
 
We don't need Moon + Music to make a good offensive art; we only need Music + Mid Range. And I find it hard to believe that the archive won't have something good there.
Also we don't actually need that at all. We have good attacks from Zeqing. What we'd want from an offensive art would be either summons, group buffs, or stealth/sneak attack buffs.

And the description of these blessings sounds much more like personal boosts rather than group ones, which would focus things down to a weapon agnostic non-melee offensive stealth art, if it's an art. And unfortunately blessing of fang sounds way more like some physical melee thing.
 
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Do you honestly believe that QM would put in a complete trap option in the guise of a "boon"? That just doesn't make sense. Either both are traps (unlikely and equally nonsensical) or neither are.
Consider that we got PLR as a reward for doing well at the Moon Gala.

Is PLR a high quality art? Absolutely.
Is it a good fit for us? Eeeeeh. It is not terrible, but it relies on skills and masteries we didn't have and didn't especially synergize with our build. We decided to incorporate it into our build because the quality is too good to turn down and because we liked to Moon element, but if we had been able to choose the art we got I strongly doubt that is the art we would have gotten.

So its not that one of the options is a trap. It is just that, given the decent chance that the art will be high quality but only a mediocre fit, I'd rather have a mediocre fit to our already-scattered defense than a mediocre fit to our reasonably-compact offense.
 
On the other hand, our defense is top tier, while our offense is lacking. We have more ways of getting better defense.

A top tier boon to offense in exactly what we want.

I find it very dubious that a White Moon Spirit won't having something fitting.
 
That was not even to mention his entourage. In his wake, trees writhed, nightmarish faces forming and disappearing in the lines of the dark, and the shadows seethed with hungry eyes that gleamed in the night. She saw predator and prey alike among the unnatural darkness, shadowed even to her gaze. Wolves stalked amidst stags, and the earth writhed with vermin under the hungry eyes of raptors perched in living branches. Behind him stretched a vast swarm of beasts, more than she could ever name. Yet there was something unreal about it, the vast menagerie, the forest made manifest, was eerily quiet and dim, and remained behind him, as if it were only his shadow.
summons, group buffs

He look like summon specialist to me, "fang" may be summon/group offense.

But I think hide is safer choice.
 
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On the other hand, our defense is top tier, while our offense is lacking. We have more ways of getting better defense.
Our offense is pretty top-tier too. It is just that a lot of our offense is in the form of debuffs instead of direct damage, because that was our combat style. Even then, we have FSS for offense, and there is a decent chance that we will get a successor to it.
 
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Adhoc vote count started by Aranfan on Dec 27, 2018 at 6:50 PM, finished with 5391 posts and 113 votes.
 
Our offense is pretty top-tier too. It is just that a lot of our offense is in the form of debuffs instead of direct damage, because that was our combat style. Even then, we have FSS for offense, and there is a decent chance that we will get a successor to it.
We just had a fight where FSS was not cutting it.

If this is a pure offense Moon art of quality similar to PLR it's going to be obscenely good. Especially if it starts at our level.

Not to mention offense plays very well with the Blooy Moon's theme.

So it's arguably a stronger pick, in the absolute sense, than Hide.
 
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So it looks like the Weilu split was between a faction that wanted to urbanize and the "originals" who tried to return to the old ways. No wonder Renxiang doesn't think too highly of them; to her they must seem like enemies of order and progress.

"Yet many were unhappy with our wayward brethren, and so when he passed, it was the Elder Brother, who walked the true path, who was crowned. When he politely requested that the foolish ones tear down their ugly blights, and return to the true way… they refused, how mad of them." All around him wolves snarled and birds cried, the dulled cacophony of the forest rising in fury.

Oh, of course, it was your side that was being polite and rational, and the others must be insane. Surely the other side doesn't feel the same about their own position.

[x] Ask for something else, despite the risk
-[x] Ask that Shen Hu and any mortals be spared the hunt

Yes, this is probably pushing our luck. I'm voting for it anyway.
 
To be honest, it seems pretty clear what happened here, and how 'Both sides can be in the right'

This is almost certainly post-Unification (Or at least very close to it), close enough that complex society was beginning to form, and the real benefits of Agriculture started to really kick in. The Bai were fine because they were terrifying vengenance-sneks, so they could build grand cities and any spirits that had issues could go stuff themselves. The Zheng were fine because they were party animals who basically bribed the other spirits with booze and offerings of stone and statuary to appease them while they expanded.

The Weilu... Were not so fine, they were getting slowly but steadily out-competed because the deals they had set up with the spirits of the wood for safety limited how much space they actually had to keep up with food production so as to not get run over by the other First Founding Clans that didn't set up their initial prosperity through long generational spirit deals.

Tensions were steadily rising, and while the old patriarch kept a lid on things by refusing to outright censure them for expanding beyond ther bargains, he couldn't erase the anger the spirits had at the continual urban Weilu expansion.

And eventually--as with all men--he died, and in the subsequent succession, a hardline traditionalist took power and dropped an ultimatum. "Withdraw to your agreed upon territories and dismantle your structures, or we will do it for you."

Naturally, this was unacceptable, because by this point, the population had risen to such a degree that burning out all the outlying farms that were keeping everyone fed would kill potentially millions, and effectively cause the collapse of the Weilu anyway. So the Reformers said "No, we won't do this thing."

And cue the current situation. Two reasonable standpoints that nonetheless were incompatible, because neither side could afford to back down.
 
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