First, we don't outright need a social art. Our primary goal is strength. We haven't caught up to five places behind Cai yet. It's also perhaps unnecessary to look for a replacement for HDW before we'll even complete it.
1) There are many kinds of strength.
1a) We don't need a
suite of Social Arts the way we do a combat suite or a stealth suite.
1b) At the moment, we're a liability in the social arena; a single Art will mean that we
aren't. It won't make us a major asset, but CRX won't need to spend time covering for us.
1c) Our social skills are either at C or soon will be; in order to advance beyond that we need the lessons an Art can teach.
2) We only need to be 5 places or less behind CRX by the
end of our time in the Sect. We've got a year before that's a concern; prior to that we have the inter-sect tournament.
3) If we have the Art
before we finish HDW, we can start training it immediately after we finish HDW - or even concurrently - rather than waiting for another Archive Dive (which we
really don't want to do), or throwing actions at Exploration to get Events (The Gacha is a fickle mistress).
Second, conceding that the thread may go for a social art anyway, using that to argue against searching for a stealth art in the same turn is completely backwards. We pay for archive access by the month, not by the action. Multiple actions looking for arts in one turn is exactly how we should be doing things.
Third, fade isn't urgent. Our spiritual defenses are...
fine. Compared to physical, ten worse avoid, ten better armor. Also Sixiang's generally more useful against spiritual stuff. Fade is low hanging fruit to train when we get to it. To train fade with ENM would require dragging out mastering ENM--which is to say, deliberately keeping it underpotent.
The fewer types of Arts we're looking for, the more Arts of that type that we find; ergo, the more variety of Arts that might fit our needs are available. We're also limited to
one AP of Archive Dive per turn, so we can only get 5 Arts per turn in this manner. The more types of Arts we look for, the fewer Arts of any one type we find. If we're looking for Social Arts, we should punch in
nothing but Social related keywords; if we're looking for Fade Arts, we should punch in nothing but Fade related Keywords.
Our spiritual defenses are
currently fine, but in the not-too-distant future Fade starts underperforming relative to Dodge, because not only have we already evolved the Dodge skill to Sable Grace (C -> B), we have Wind Thief to allow Sable Grace to evolve even further (A -> S). Fade has no art to let it evolve even once, let alone twice, while Fortitude and Resilience have SNR to cover the C-> B jump. We also lack a technique to boost our Spiritual Avoid that doesn't do much else - the more things a technique does, generally speaking, the worse it does them.
An Art also boosts the speed at which Fade is trained; +1 per die increases the rate of advancement from an average of ~3.5 per die to an average of ~4.5 per die. As Fade is currently rank D, 11/20 from rank C (0/25), it is 34 points from that soft-cap. 10 training dice without a Fade art; 8 dice
with one - or three turns without an Art, two turns
with one. On average, not including Event bonuses and omake points spent.
ENM also trains to max in about 4 AP. We can only devote up to 3 AP this turn without compromising on something else - and we
can't compromise on anything at this time. Therefore, we're training it as fast as we can rather than deliberately keeping it underpotent, though that is a side effect of training it so late.
Fourth, as noted, we don't have the meridians for a bunch of the arts we know we're going to train. Some people are arguing to put off training any of our shiny new arts (and already known arts, SES, HDW), in order to have a large darkness month. (And ignoring that ENM is darkness too) Except we won't be able to use any of the arts trained that month without meridians. Opportunity cost applies here, just as well. Meridans will take 1 AP, now or later, but art training will get faster.
We're at least 2 turns from that Darkness turn (turn 8); more probably 3 (turn 9). We want to set up for the turn as best we can, which means buying drugs, prepping Meridians, scrunching Arts, training SSC, etc, in advance. We did some of that last turn - we scrunched SCS and CDE down to two meridians each from five meridians each and we bought the Darkness pill, for a gain of +6 meridians and +60 dice to Darkness arts for a turn. We're doing
more this turn - mastering EPC in prep for training SSC, training AG in prep for mastering
that, and we'll continue to do more in future turns.
We need to have Fade at C (25/25)
before that turn - preferably already evolved by that point, but that's not likely - in the hopes of Core Sect Tutoring providing a push over the edge.
BKSD is the only one of our newest set of Arts that can be trained and equipped in the available AP (3). SNR comes
really close, and while omake points can push it over the edge I don't like planning on that sort of thing. SES and HDW have known effects; they're good, but they aren't
great, and they already fill the gaps in our build they were meant to fill - the last rank is just a bit of polish. ENM also fills a few gaps in our build (Fade and Stealth Reset), and those gaps don't yet have anything filling them.
We'll also only train ~3-4 Arts that turn, to maximize the impact of major Core Sect tutoring (which only applies to up to 12 AP of Arts) and minimize impact on Base Cultivation -
unless we get spectacular base cult drugs, in which case I have no idea - but without that training all of BKSD, LFotWT, and SNR adds up to 12 AP. We've done the Meridian prep for WT, BKSD takes 1 AP of meridians, and SNR takes two.
Fifth, there's a reason we have unused arm meridians. Namely, we already have strong techniques for attacking and attack boosting. Evening Breeze Flourish is pretty much useless for us, and similar techniques in that vein will likely be less valuable as well. People are taking the worst part of the art, and trying to twist that into a positive.
ENM is not good for us because of Evening Breeze Flourish. It's good for us because of Passing Phantom, which boosts Spiritual Avoid
and can reset our Stealth from
'unsure' to 'unaware'. If we'd had ENM in time for the barbarian encounter last month, I would have strongly recommended pressing on.
We have unused Arm meridians because we didn't exactly know what we were doing when we were in Yellow, and so picked up a bunch of Arts that used Arm Meridians that weren't particularly useful to us. Sure, they fit a need at the time we picked them up, but we didn't need all of them equipped at once - 3 Arm Meridians would've been enough; maybe 4.
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TL;DR: ENM isn't perfect but it fills in the gaps we need it to fill, concentrating an Archive Dive on filling a single hole is better than trying to have one dive fill two or more, we've got quite a few skills that are at or near the C-rank cap that require an Art to break through to B-rank, and social is most certainly a weakness at this time - and weaknesses are to be exploited.
