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A Simple Transaction I

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George said:
that's certainly been the case so far; I have some hope that Cut Through will break that cycle, though only if we remain disciplined and prioritize taking actions that will maneuver us safely to the Ruling Ring
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Indeed, we are at point where getting to Ring piecemeal takes a lot of inefficient options - for example, Dominion: War gives you 0.25 scaling Rank while Enhanced Dominion: Blood give the same for Blood for no Arete cost. As such, we can't really afford to be inefficient until get out of Temple.
DkArthas said:
What we need is utility not more offensive ability, SORD is more than enough for that.
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That's what makes Ring a good companion to Cut - Progression++ should directly increase rate at which we advance by 1000% and Ring's general reality warping brings a lot of utility on table.

One downside is that Ring's ability depends on Rank which Praxis doesn't seem to care about, however.
 
vali said:
I'm kinda curious how Rihaku would handle Pillars of Creation over a thousand year period, since giving us 12,000+ picks seems... unlikely.

Though part of me thinks that trying to crash the vote-counting program could be fun.
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Unelemental said:
Jokes aside, timeskips tank Arete generation, so while they're going to be inevitable at some point, I would prefer to avoid them as much as possible.
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I imagine timeskips like that will probably be handled in a way similar to the Most High prologue, which I know is near and dear to many of our hearts. It's one of the reasons I want Stranglethorn now aside from the synergies; while it's quite cool to have these kinds of personal adventures, seeing our protagonist learn and grow over the course of years is even cooler. If we'd switch to an alternate form of fanwork rewards for that period (as we did going from Lesser Remittances to Arete), I think the general impact would be pretty decent.

That would also resolve the pick issue: rather than carefully choosing eleven million different options, we'd instead decide what avenues of power Hunger decides to pursue over the course of years, the same way Odyssial could have chosen to master Adamant Circle Sorcery or train with Apex Flight rather than us choosing a bunch of specific Charms.
 
Wolfy said:
Indeed, we are at point where getting to Ring piecemeal takes a lot of inefficient options - for example, Dominion: War gives you 0.25 scaling Rank while Enhanced Dominion: Blood give the same for Blood for no Arete cost.
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Except that's not true? .25 general rank in combat has a lot more applications than .25 rank applied only to blood abilities.
 
Wolfy said:
Indeed, we are at point where getting to Ring piecemeal takes a lot of inefficient options - for example, Dominion: War gives you 0.25 scaling Rank while Enhanced Dominion: Blood give the same for Blood for no Arete cost. As such, we can't really afford to be inefficient until get out of Temple.
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As long as it's options that don't have Arete cost, though, it doesn't put us further away. I also harbor some hope we can use the power spike from Cut Through to get our remaining Defining Advancements and that those will be enough to survive accumulating the Arete.
Alternatively, maybe there's a 7 Arete Evening Sky option that discounts a 25 Arete option substantially that we can take to tide us over.
 
Byzantine said:
Except that's not true? .25 general rank in combat has a lot more applications than .25 rank applied only to blood abilities.
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Yes? Blood abilities include our healing, sensing, buffing, debufing and then all out of combat utility too.
George said:
As long as it's options that don't have Arete cost, though, it doesn't put us further away. I also harbor some hope we can use the power spike from Cut Through to get our remaining Defining Advancements and that those will be enough to survive accumulating the Arete.
Alternatively, maybe there's a 7 Arete Evening Sky option that discounts a 25 Arete option substantially that we can take to tide us over.
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Ideally we'd not spend anything on magic vote now(aka get Vertex for some cheap short term power) so we can get 7AP upgrade to Praxis.

That should be the most efficient way to go about clearing the Temple.
 
At this point, we really want Ruinous Valor and Stranglethorn. They both have mad synergies with both our current build and each other, and they represent both a 3 and 4 pick vote where we won't spend much Arete.

Combined with the power of Cut Through, I'm cautiously optimistic about our chances to save up for Ruling Ring.
 
Redshirt Army said:
At this point, we really want Ruinous Valor and Stranglethorn. They both have mad synergies with both our current build and each other, and they represent both a 3 and 4 pick vote where we won't spend much Arete.

Combined with the power of Cut Through, I'm cautiously optimistic about our chances to save up for Ruling Ring.
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I feel like there's a good chance we will be offered Forebear's Blade Defining Advancement(s) that better suit our build than Stranglethorn
 
[X] Studying the Blade
[X] Pursuing Technological Solutions
[X] Surgecraft

I too am afraid that the relationship malus to Letrizia will mean more than just being set back to two +s less than before, so I'd like to avoid Bloodwraith it at all possible with the hope that the choice (or a valid alternative) will be offered in the future without us having to go behind our daughteru's back.
 
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I dunno. I kind of like the idea of having a Defining Advancement for each Artifact, much like having an EFB for each. One Defining Advancement would be mostly combat-oriented (Uttermost), one conductive to Rulership (Stranglethorn), and one useful for... magic probably? Or some other kind of utility.
 
[X] Studying the Blade
[X] Relaxing at the Hot Springs
[X] Vertex

Here's my direct reasoning.
We have two main bottlenecks for growing stupidly strong, picks and Arete.
Of these, Arete in bulk is the resource we can generate, but with the highest demand. We want Once and Future. We want Pillars. We want Ruling Ring. We want we want we want so many different EFB equivalents. The highest rewards don't take more than a single pick, oddly enough though! Ruling Ring is the one exception and the tradeoff there is understandable.

If we get Surgecraft we're going to want to spend to get the best potential out of it, and either we do that and be that much further away from a game changing EFB equivalent or we don't and the thing we can only pull out when we're passionate and deeply invested into the fight is that much weaker.
Remember that we're literally on the cusp of SORD GUD, which means that any combat magic has to compete against the behemoth of 'why would Hunger do X when he could instead use the 30+ Arete and many picks he's already invested in getting Sword Praxis?'

High power battle magic is expensive, low power battle magic is made obsolete by the rest of our skill set. There's an argument to be had about utility, but utility that only works when you're feeling deeply passionate and can't be planned around isn't really getting while people strive for utility.

On the flipside, instead of fighting against every single Pillar or Chimera or Slice or other things we want to spend Arete on, Vertex's currency is in picks. Twice in a row now we've just picked Arete costless single picks because we wanted to save, imagine if we could be spending them on multiplicative utility that didn't directly compete against every other Arete hungry option?
It also adds further use to our poor neglected Evening Sky! It already has Doctor Strange Cloak esque responsiveness, imagine random 'stars' detaching from the night sky patterns in order to help us while our hands are busy with SORD, or growing ever brighter as we collect and leverage the wealth we obtain almost as an afterthought directly into power.
 
Unelemental said:
I dunno. I kind of like the idea of having a Defining Advancement for each Artifact, much like having an EFB for each. One Defining Advancement would be mostly combat-oriented (Uttermost), one conductive to Rulership (Stranglethorn), and one useful for... magic probably? Or some other kind of utility.
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I like that too, but only if we're going to take flexible actions rather than going all in on one thing. It's possible the Temple has put us too far all in on combat to have room for that strategy right now and that we will be forced to either take a 7 Arete powerup, take a second Forebear's Blade Defining Advancement, or face unacceptable risk of death.
 
George said:
I feel like there's a good chance we will be offered Forebear's Blade Defining Advancement(s) that better suit our build than Stranglethorn
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Doubling our Willpower value and even further increase of 20% to the Rank is incredibly synergetic with our build though. Like, it's pretty hard to beat that.
 
Redshirt Army said:
Combined with the power of Cut Through, I'm cautiously optimistic about our chances to save up for Ruling Ring.
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It seems to me we should grab the Domains next chance we get, since they are relatively cheap and .25 rank in almost every situation for 2 picks and 4 arete isn't terrible, even without considering the other benefits.
 
Maragas said:
Doubling our Willpower value and even further increase of 20% to the Rank is incredibly synergetic with our build though. Like, it's pretty hard to beat that.
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Another Defining Advancement will have its own stats and Rank and can have more relevant stuff on top than Establishment
Stranglethorn does have good synergy, but that doesn't mean it's going to be our best pick for surviving the Temple.
 
George said:
I feel like there's a good chance we will be offered Forebear's Blade Defining Advancement(s) that better suit our build than Stranglethorn
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It's hard to imagine something better suited for our build than Stranglethorn, at this point.

Here's the full synergy list:
Double Constitution - Constitution is one of our highest stats.
Double Strength - With Ruinous Valor, STR is applied to our Power of Ruin.
Double Willpower - With Cut Through, WILL is applied to our STR, CON, and AGI.

Assuming we already have Cut Through, taking Stranglethorn has our stats go:

STR
Old: 21 STR + 7 WILL = 28
New: 42 STR + 14 WILL = 56

Net: +28 STR

CON
Old: 22 CON + 7 WILL = 29
New: 44 CON + 14 WILL = 58

Net: + 29 CON

AGI
Old: 23 AGI + 7 WILL = 30
New: (23*0.8) AGI + 14 WILL = 32

Net: + 2 AGI

It's an absurd increase to our Might, the hit to AGI is entirely compensated for, and it gives us a huge boost to Willpower in the future, which seems to be a key component of the Forebear's blade's true power.

All that, and it gives us that "deep rooted" ability that will be a huge boost to our assigned task of conquering the human sphere.

It's also a Ring based Defining Advancement, so it goes well with our prior Sword based one - we just need to get a third Cloak based one to complete the trifecta!
 
George said:
Another Defining Advancement will have its own stats and Rank and can have more relevant stuff on top than Establishment
Stranglethorn does have good synergy, but that doesn't mean it's going to be our best pick for surviving the Temple.
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This is possible but unlikely, barring a super good Defining advancement we would be fools not to take.

Maragas said:
Then think about Super Juggernaut Undead Chimera boosting Willpower, Might and Agility by 100% and the Rank by 15%
Rank bonus alone would be 65% combined with Uttermost, Cut Through and Stranglethorn.
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That costs 25 arete, though. A resource we are currently fighting to get enough of to finish the Ring... Stranglethorn costs 0! And Cut Through only costs 18. And just as importantly we don't have the Letrizia +'s for it yet, while we can get Cut Through at any spending point now.
 
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By the way: Everyone seems to be forgetting one interesting little bit. The Ring gives ++ to all stats.

...So that means it gives ++ to willpower. Which doubles by stranglethorn to ++++ which then gets added to our Str, Con, and Agi. With str and con also getting a ++++ boost and agi getting a 1.6 base boost.
 
Byzantine said:
This is possible but unlikely, barring a super good Defining advancement we would be fools not to take.
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Didn't we think the same thing a few updates ago about Ruling Ring being the 25 Arete option we'd go for? I don't think it's as unlikely as you guys say, and while a huge pile of STR and CON is much better than smaller amounts of stats, it's still true that, given we have Uttermost we mostly just need the means to land our attacks.
 
Byzantine said:
That costs 25 arete, though. A resource we are currently fighting to get enough of to finish the Ring... Stranglethorn costs 0!
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Yeah but there is a reason why it costs 25 Arete. Increases our Defining Advancement from 3 to 5, massively boosts Rank strength now and even more in the future when we are Rank 9+, makes most physical conditions invalid for us, doubling 5 stat.
It's on my list after the Ruling Ring.


Unelemental said:
Hmm, I wonder which is superior combat-wise between Cut Through and Once and Future.
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Hmm, seeing as we need to develop the techniques, I say OaF in short term. This is if we don't pick Stranglethorn though.
 
Ruling Ring also comes with a massive hidden benefit of being able to heal all of our lasting conditions, which is a big deal given we don't even know what the penalty is for missing half a lung, an arm, and an eye! Given how nasty the Liver penalty is, it's probably massive.

This is also something to think about for Rune King voters - we definitely have a penalty of some kind for missing an eye, probably to accuracy and range, among other things.

So yeah, I think we totally need to go for it immediately after getting Cut Through. Spending non-arete picks on the Blood purchases, Stranglethorn, Valor, and similar.

...I am idly curious if Ruinous Valor will even have Einhander as an option now. Hunger has rejected the idea IC since the Sword is fully repaired and needs both hands to wield properly, just due to leverage issues. So are we even capable of choosing it anymore? Or has Hunger just rejected the idea as incompatible? We know there is a lot of hidden criteria going on in the background for what we can get.

For example I suspect we will have Valor show up for literally every 3-pick vote we get now, as it is something Hunger feels he needs, and as Slice fate proved Hunger's opinion affects the drops just as much as the enemy being fought.
 
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So just a request but can we not vote for the Arete costing magic when we have so much we want to save for. There is no guarantee that a low cost surge will have equivalent utility to the whole of vertex, particularly the ones that cost lifespan. Not to mention that it would bring some life back to our ignored and crippled evening sky.

I understand that people have reservations in regards to the lifespan cost and how it would interact with letrizia but she does not have to make those vertices and indeed likely would not for a while. Besides if we can eventually turn her into the devouring sorceress like sever fate would have perhaps she will be able to take in some life to supplement any lost not to mention anything else we will do to fix her lifespan problems.

While surgecasting is cool I though we were trying to save Arete and not jump at the smaller shinies in favor of planning for necessary stuff that comes up and EFB. I would also like to save Arete for the next potential appearance of Gardener's Hallow which is just as interesting as surgecasting and has way more utility like we are looking for. This isn't even mentioning that it would take up narrative space that could be occupied by SORD and wasn't that what we chose to pursue when we took uttermost, are we really going to let ourselves get distracted when cut through is in distance?

Please consider voting Vertex, it is more what we need and is legitimately interesting in its own right if not quite as shiny and I'm sure it will have its own developments as surgecasting does. It really needs the vote as it is apparently behind omake power.
 
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