[ ] Superb Nutrition: The power of the King Fish infuses your insides. Gain +0.05 additional Astral Rank.
[ ] King's Blood: The limitless stamina of the Lake's overlord. Heal all active wounds on yourself and your company. For the next two months, you cannot bleed out and all wounds heal at ten times speed.
[ ] Fierce Vigor: The terrible might of its thrashing sinews, fit to part wave from shore. Gain one copy of [Echo of the Forebear], granting +Might and +Agility.
Thinking on these options:
Superb Nutrition gives a pretty small long term bonus, which is basically the opposite of what we should be focusing on at the moment. As such, even if it is hypothetically on par with the others if we were fully rested and relatively safe, it's by far the weakest pick of these three given for our current situation, and should probably be treated more as a benchmark for the relative value of Astral Ranks vs. Ability Pluses for future comparison.
King's Blood gives us around a 10% boost to our strength immediately, since:
You have are at roughly 82% of your health but due to your Accretion Rank are fighting at 91% of full strength.
It also gives us decent health recovery for the next few months, which is probably less relevant because we took the Mantle, but still a nice perk.
Fierce Vigor is the intermediate option: A single stack of [Echo of the Forebear] almost certainly gives less than a 10% overall boost to power, but it's a boost that will stick around after we eventually heal through hypothetical other means, and continue to persist past two months from now.
Personally, given Rihaku's relatively dire warnings about how unprepared we are for an Apocryphal proc at the moment, I'm inclined to go with King's Blood, but there's a decent case to be made for Fierce Vigor too.
Next, Mitigation. The specifics of the choices will determine whether an additional pick is worth 2 Arete, so I'll leave that decision for after my choice analysis.
[ ] Decimator - Direct Mitigation: Reduces drain rate by 12.5%, now 8.75% per year.
[ ] Decimator - Huntress' Moon: Impairs all conventional mitigation attempts by 40%, but dramatically increases the number and availability of targets for A Hunger, Sated. Targets will always be at least minimally challenging or in some way exceptional.
Huntress's Moon is amazing in the short term, and still quite decent in the medium term: In the short term, we're stuck in a dungeon pocket dimension while having the apocryphal curse, and in the medium term we'll almost certainly be fighting a lot of people, either enemies of the government in exchange for the government's assistance or the government itself because we pissed them off with Tyrant. It starts dropping off in effectiveness as we get to high levels of power relative to this universe, and the number of things that count as "minimally challenging" or "exceptional" relative to us start to run dry.
That said, since it's a part of mitigation as opposed to an implicit part of the curse itself...
@Rihaku, if we
do eventually get to a point where we think getting 40% better conventional mitigation is more useful to us than being able to hunt things down to Sate Hunger, can Gisena undo this mitigation? And if she does, would that "reset" mitigation process on the curse by one degree, or would that stage of mitigation be lost forever with no long term benefit?
If we
can go for a mitigation method that's excellent in the short term, and then just replace it with a more fitting one later on, then that would clearly be the most optimal choice. Otherwise, this becomes yet another short term benefit vs. long term growth question - although I'd still be inclined to go for Huntress's Moon even then.
And just for completion's sake: I don't think Direct Mitigation of Decimator is particularly important in the short term: We aren't draining anywhere important, and the difference between draining 10% and 8.75% of our companions per year is marginal.
[ ] Tyrant - Direct Mitigation: A difficult Curse to mitigate. Imparts a very small amount of flexibility in acknowledging (though not obeying) some important laws or customs, if the interlocutor is extremely courteous and subservient.
[ ] Tyrant - Trusted Counsel - A single trusted Lieutenant can attempt to convince you that one law or custom would be sufficiently valuable to comply with that you may tolerate it for a time. The custom may be broad, but not overly so, and may not be changed once your mind is set.
-[ ] Trust Gisena
-[ ] Trust Letrizia
-[ ] Trust Verschlengorge
I'm not quite clear on what the second choice does. What does "tolerate it for a time" mean? That we'll only follow it for a relatively short period? But that seems at odds with the "may not be changed once your mind is set" statement - or is that meant to imply that this mitigation only applies to one single custom, ever?
Some amount of Tyrant mitigation will make our assigned task for Indenture immeasurably easier, but that's a long term goal. In the medium term, it provides a relatively marginal improvement to our survival chances once we link up with civilization, and in the short term, it basically does nothing. I'm not inclined to prioritize Tyrant mitigation at this point.
[ ] Indenture - Companion - Add a companion to accompany you on your travels. You may decide upon the moment of transition.
This won't be relevant for, probably, hundreds of years. And since Curse Mitigation scales more or less independently for each curse, we'll almost certainly be able to mitigate it to at least this degree by the time it's relevant anyway. Pass.
[ ] Apocryphal Curse - Direct Mitigation: Reduces the difficulty of encounters by roughly 10%.
[ ] Apocryphal Curse - Tribulation: Slightly increases the difficulty of encounters, but the Apocryphal Curse will not trigger more than once per month, starting next month.
Now
this is good shit. If even a quarter of our encounters are Apocryphal Procs, this will basically make our life 2.5% easier, forever - and the mitigation gets
more relevant, the more the Apocryphal Curse stores things up: thirty encounters with scrub bandits all being 10% easier is alright, but a fated nemesis being 10% weaker is way better!
Tribulation is decent too - having something guaranteed to be a major hassle show up every month is a different
flavor of obnoxious compared to having to constantly watch your back for the whims of fate, but it's one easier to build a schedule around. That said, the Apocryphal Curse already scales over time between incidents, so the net effect of this is that difficulty goes up, but so does predictability. In the long run, that's excellent, but in the short term where even the base difficulty has decent odds of ending us, and we don't actually
have a schedule to disrupt, no need to enable hard mode just yet.
So, based on my analysis, I'm currently leaning towards picking
Decimator -
Huntress' Moon and
Apocryphal Curse - Direct Mitigation.
My understanding is that the overall mitigation Gisena is able to provide isn't really dependent on Arete - given sufficient time, she'll be able to reach "archmage" mitigation levels on all four of our curses either way, and further improvements will run into the hyperexponential brick wall of Curse Density and require improving Gisena to reach anyway. So the Arete spending option doesn't give us an "extra" mitigation proc in the long term, it just shifts one proc to take place slightly sooner. Is that correct,
@Rihaku ? If it is, then I don't see any real reason to spend the Arete at the moment - two mitigation actions should be enough to cover our actual needs for the next month or two, so we can save up for future Arete purchases.
