Limiting the effects of Rank is incredible and all, but I don't think would be crucial for the Temple because the people there don't seem to use Rank actively. It would only be useful against the Armaments once we bridge the massive power disparity between the superweapons of interstellar civilizations and us. It's good if we dogpiled but if we can't take on their strongest defender it won't matter. I think the additional offensive power afforded by a good Surge would be more useful in the immediate term. We only have one chance to set our Surge anyway, so we want it to be a good one.
Fight the entire Rotspawn army and the Rotbeast for a few more picks, grab the last Vigor Itself and whatever crazy stat boost we get offered after maxing those all out and then 1v1 our way through the Temple like a legend.
It feels like with Cut Through rendering the need for two hands less pertinent, we might want to just wait until Ruling Ring to bother healing it, rather than investing picks in an option that spends a lot of the power on something not too helpful.
I realized something. From a healing standpoint, we can take 2 Augment Dominion: Blood's right now(.5 Rank For Blood Manipulation/Healing). If we do that the power level of our healing goes to rank 4.8. I wonder what kind of progress that might make towards healing all our physical injuries at once?
[X] Upgrade Letrizia's Magic (from 2-Arete equivalent to 7-Arete equivalent)
[X] The King Stands Alone – 7 Arete
[X] Feat: Prime
[X] Check up on Letrizia
Cutting mental and spiritual attacks is worth the detour. Until our Protection improves, we have to parry things. Also: we don't want to spend training time on that trick, we need it for offense.
Frankly, if this and Vanreir haven't demonstrated the dangers of dependence on Gisena for her Nullity, I don't know what could. One evening away against some orphan Nurglespawn, and we're forced to a mutual kill. Similarly is the reason Letrizia should nab some magic. Our friends need to be relevant on the playing field we're angling towards, or we need to let them off before they turn into a character motive.
It looks like SAVEgang has finally faltered... weren't you guys trying to go for 3 EFBs? If you go for raw power this upgrade (All Blood Advancements or Prime + 2 Blood Advancements), you could force yourself enough ahead of the curve that Arete expenditure would likely not be necessary for quite a while.
Anyway, this update was probably the worst 'roll' you could have gotten, since Vanreir was only the third worst matchup for you among the Outriders. If you avoid risky options then SAVEing is definitely possible.
But! I would like to point out we currently have about 4~5 Arete and we could theoretically focus our efforts on generating more Arete to acquire another EFB-equivalent by purchasing the Ruling Ring which only costs about 16 Arete. 7 Arete is slightly more than 40% of that and pushing that much Arete elsewhere might not be the most efficient way of attaining our goal of getting 3 EFBs for each item in our Accretion panoply (Blade, Mantle and Ring). I recall the thread intending on going in that direction after acquiring Cut Through, so we might want to retain some degree of focus for that.
Limiting the effects of Rank is incredible and all, but I don't think would be crucial for the Temple because the people there don't seem to use Rank actively.
I realized something. From a healing standpoint, we can take 2 Augment Dominion: Blood's right now(.5 Rank For Blood Manipulation/Healing). If we do that the power level of our healing goes to rank 4.8. I wonder what kind of progress that might make towards healing all our physical injuries at once?
I'd like to note that going with both Valor and TKSA leaves us pretty much nothing to buy magic system with and leaves Letrizia with a weak version of it as well. Which might be not all that important for you if you don't care about magic, but it's something to consider. 7 Arete Combat Utility Surge could offer us a lot of help with clearing the Temple as well! And it might be harder to sword into existence than TKSA.
[X] Upgrade Letrizia's Magic (from 2-Arete equivalent to 7-Arete equivalent)
[X] The King Stands Alone – 7 Arete
[X] Feat: Prime
[X] Check up on Letrizia
Going with this for now, didn't realize the upgrade for letrizia was a participation bonus definitely on that.
I really would like to argue in favor of rank after all we took utter most and that increases the value of rank +s so we are getting more out of this pick than we bargained for in terms of value. While it would be nice to get the arm back it just doesn't feel quite right to me narratively yet, perhaps it feels a bit much to get both that and cut through at the same time but I feel it would make more sense to wait on it for the story.
The king stands alone is fantastic, and I also really want to help Letrizia. Also I would really rather hold off on options with nerfed stat growth until we can do something about it. That is one the reasons I was in support of vertex is that I was thinking it might make up the difference and I would feel more comfortable voting for shroud options that only give .7 of a stat because of uttermost knowing that we could buff it up to full.
[X] The King Stands Alone - 7 Arete [X] Prime
[X] Upgrade Letrizia's Magic (from 2 Arete-equivalent to 7-Arete equivalent) [X] Check up on Gisena - +Gisena, +?
TKSA isn't just a useful ability for when we go into the temple, but it could even possibly allow us to go after the Rotbeast in a safer manner once were more rested up since it's not much more dangerous to us then the enemy we defeated, which could be very beneficial to our potential growth before breaching the inner temple not to mention what we could gain from saving a civilization like this in terms of support. It's astral rank advantage will be null, and even bringing in other prime tier minions wont help it. Plus you know, saving imperiled civilizations is a really nice thing to do.
I really like Letrizia as a character, and having her power and utility go up is a great way to have her be able to contribute more to various different situations we run into, which means she has even more reason to take up narrative focus. From a purely power gaming standpoint, we know that level level of element can contribute a lot of versatility to go along with their raw power. Having a third relevant combatant in the inner temple could probably help a lot as well, especially if it's a element that might help augment the rest of the powers abilities. Aside from all that, well, given the near impossibility of changing your surgecraft element not taking it would feel a little like stunting her long-term growth. Solar system level biggatons are nice and all, but I imagine their are some enemies raw force on that level probably isn't going to help beat but comparable exotic tier or conceptual effects might.
Aside from that, I just kind of want to see what it is, which I'm not sure we would if we dont pick this option. Rihaku is super talented at making up different powers and magic systems, which is one of the reasons I find reading his quests so fun and the unbounded progression feels nice. I'd love to see what sort of stuff he'd come for for Letrizia over time when he feels like he has more room to write out cooler magical capabilities then otherwise, like a difference between 2 and 7 arete or their equivalent would be.
As for my third choice, most of my initial reasons for picking my Gisena choice apply to her too, and hey, if we can help her get a useful weapon or something while hanging out her capabilities probably mean she'd become a lot more efficent as a combatant as well. Plus, I'm kind of hoping if we put off hanging with Letrizia and don't establish her surgecraft element right away Rihaku might shoehorn in another chance to further upgrade it's utility.
@Rihaku: This is the list of every notable Omake(ish) thing between last update and your chapter drop announcement. I'll sort them into sides in a moment.
I'd like to note that going with both Valor and TKSA leaves us pretty much nothing to buy magic system with and leaves Letrizia with a weak version of it as well. Which might be not all that important for you if you don't care about magic, but it's something to consider. 7 Arete Combat Utility Surge could offer us a lot of help with clearing the Temple as well! And it might be harder to sword into existence than TKSA.
Significant noncombat utility is definitely harder to Sword into existence, though it's possible if you try hard enough! Still, that may be far into the future, whereas a mighty Surge or constellation of Vertexes is upcoming now!
[X] The King Stands Alone [X] Prime
[X] Upgrade Letrizia's Magic
[X] Check up on Gisena
While Zweihander is neat, apparently it'snot quite as neat now that we have Cut Through, both because we're less reliant on raw Ruin power and because barehanded attacks just don't stand up to our SORDing.
Rank though. Rank is always good. And if we take Rank we don't need an additional pick, so we can take Letrizia's magic improvement or reroll. I won't even try to justify TKSA, because Praxis.
Not really set on Checking up on either of them, but it's true that Gisena is the one following us around in the Temple.
This would be quite a nice boost. Leaving us in position to potentially grab Preeminence with higher baseline Rank to make it more valuable when it shows up next, while still giving good immediate power and flexibility if we really need to spend on something beforehand.
Earlier in the thread I mentioned that a winning plan must do better than max Echoes. Here, 4 echoes would get us
[++++STR, ++++CON], ++++AGI.
With the ring unlocks, though, the threshold has gotten higher. If we buy the remaining 2 Fierce Quickening + 2 Vigor Itself we'd get the following (plus maybe a ? if there's a benefit for maxing out the blood enhancements).
(Recall that ++Wits also affects STR/CON/AGI now. This is reflected by the (++)
I predict that any build with a chance of winning will include Ruinous Valor (Zweihander) despite my burning curiosity about One Armed Fury. I'm happy to sacrifice body parts for power, but there's simply no way that we can ignore Hunger's own observation that he needs 2 arms to use his own damn sword. The Stats are therefore at minimum:
+++++STR, power of ruin scales with Strength, Regrow left arm, Barehanded strikes carry full destructive power of the Forebear's Blade.
We gain an arm, which is a tactical advantage that will definitely be appreciated. Our strength goes up by 1 plus less than the pure blood STATS build. Ruin scales with strength. It's a strong power.
That means that with Ruinous Valor the real decision point is what to do with the participation bonus. If we get the +1 pick, there are 3 paths:
STATS: Grab FQ for 2 agility + 1 wits, and again remember that wits now also contributes to str/con/agi as well.
RING: Dominion (War) would be progress towards the Ruling Ring. Now that we have +Wits from Cut Through, it is probably safe to initiate a contest of supremacy with the Moon Ring.
SWORD: The King Stands Alone is an amazing pick for the contingency that we return to the Temple and get ambushed by a specialized R-type extermination unit because they know our growth trajectory after killing Vanreir.
Of these, King Stands Alone is both the most impressive and the most expensive. I don't have the nostalgia for Praxis options so I'm actually more interested in diversifying the Panoply and getting Ring ASAP. Buying KSA delays Ruling Ring considerably because it requires the majority of our Arete production for this update.
So what could we do with the other participation bonus options?
+1 re-roll, saved until the next major roll
Upgrade Letrizia's Magic (from 2 Arete-equivalent to 7-Arete equivalent)
The re-roll is appealing but we don't know our immediate options, so its value is difficult to evaluate.
Upgrading Letrizia's magic is highly appealing; 5 Arete is worth more than a single pick for Hunger. However, Letrizia does not have the same +Progression as we do, so the comparison is not quite exact. Still, ensuring that her new spell casting is relevant even when she's interfaced with Versch would be a good way to add diversity to the team's load out.
Ultimately, I have to vote for things I find interesting, and so it is that I must report FRIENDSHIP ENDED WITH NOT DYING. STATS IS MY NEW FRIEND.
Though I am a Letrizia partisan, Gisena needs a gun and Hunger needs to max out blood enhancements before we upgrade to Ruling Ring. This is my first vote, but I'm at least willing to change if I read a compelling argument.
If Zweihander runs away with this, I expect to switch to
[] Upgrade Letrizia's Magic.
[X] Upgrade Letrizia's Magic (from 2-Arete equivalent to 7-Arete equivalent)
[X] The King Stands Alone – 7 Arete
[X] Feat: Prime
[X] Check up on Letrizia
Going with this for not will probably change it later if we cannot generate more Arete.
I really would like to argue in favor of rank after all we took utter most and that increases the value of rank +s so we are getting more out of this pick than we bargained for in terms of value. While it would be nice to get the arm back it just doesn't feel quite right to me narratively yet, perhaps it feels a bit much to get both that and cut through at the same time but I feel it would make more sense to wait on it for the story.
The king stands alone is fantastic, but I also really want to help Letrizia so for now I am greedy.
Indeed, the value of +Rank is great with Uttermost! It's a good opportunity to take advantage, though...
Hm. Now that I think about it, Magic-Defeating Stance would be really good for you now. Your melee combat abilities have been enhanced into the stratosphere with Cut Through, so the Apocryphal mitigation, ability to fight inside Tides of Nullity, and general exotic attack resistance of Magic-Defeating Stance would be amazing inside the Temple. If you don't want to SAVE, and with Zweihander having a substantial lead, you guys should really consider Magic-Defeating Stance. It costs 0 picks so you could even take it now, and it's probably better in the short-medium term than King!
If you think Zweihander wouldn't be good than I'd prefer Prime over the stats since we have to raise our Rank anyway; we are only above the conceptual when it comes to Sword Moves. More stats likley would have only done so much much against that Prime Spawns.
It looks like SAVEgang has finally faltered... weren't you guys trying to go for 3 EFBs? If you go for raw power this upgrade (All Blood Advancements or Prime + 2 Blood Advancements), you could force yourself enough ahead of the curve that Arete expenditure would likely not be necessary for quite a while.
Saving Arete is good; the King Stands Alone is of limited utility given the Temple doesn't use Rank and we already have group attack options, so for that:
[X] Upgrade Letrizia's Magic (from 2-Arete equivalent to 7-Arete equivalent)
[X] Fierce Quickening
[X] Feat: Prime
[X] Check up on Letrizia
More raw stats and more Rank to improve everything we do, while saving up either for a magic system or for an EFB. King Stands Alone is a subotimal pick for the Temple; it's best feature is the cutting of the non-physical. The outnumbered benefit may or may not come up and may or may not be relevant considering their forces and the Rank stuff is mostly likely not going to come up. That Arete can be spent on better things.
There will be no souls, no contracts, no signing in blood. My offer is that of a simple transaction. I am bound by countless Curses, leaving me a thin figment of what I once was. Take up a portion of my burdens, and in exchange receive a fraction of my power.
Let me be clear.
To you, my power may seem immense, but I am vastly diminished. And my burdens are extremely unpleasant. Their weight will not be greater than you can bear, nor greater than the value of the powers I impart, but you will likely suffer enormously. And until you accept or decline, I cannot tell you more.
...or so the man said. Admittedly, it sounded a lot more appealing to you than the estimates from the doctors— than the tiresome calls from distant relatives— than the ever-deepening white noise of your hospital room.
You are Kurosawa Kuro, but you prefer to go by Vanta, because you're an American born and bred (no matter what your citizenship status might say) and currently, you are just shy of falling out of your privately reserved bed at N. Dohr Memorial Hospital.
It's a miserable winter morning outside, just like the last few have been; beyond your room's broad single-pane window, fog veils everything in the same vanishing hues. Upon inspection, however, you notice the staccato hammering of half-frozen raindrops on glass has ceased entirely; instead, a forest of scintillating crystal rope tethers earth to sky, the silence as immaculate as it is suffocating.
...there wasn't any Quirk that let you do that.
Probably.
You turn back to the tired-looking man (reminds you a bit of yourself, actually, assuming you were exposed to sunlight at some point in your life and decided to carry around a sword) who seems to await your answer with truly inscrutable patience and offer something that could- charitably- be mistaken for a smile.
Indeed, feeling game, you slap the hermetic seals capping off your deeply abbreviated thighs- BMNAP compatibility was practically outdated at this point despite being cutting edge at the time, a fact that still rankles- and bark out a noise almost identical to laughter.
After all, how much worse could it be?
------ Cursebearer, please select two Curses.
[ ] Brand of the Addled - Vanta emits a supernatural aura of incompetence, causing all he meets to disregard him as a reasoning entity. Unless sufficiently convinced, his vocalisations will be dismissed, his actions curtailed for his safety, his surroundings stripped of dangerous objects.
[ ] The Prophetic Doom - Your efforts to change yourself and your situation are continually tested and undone by events to reset to a "status quo." For example, if Vanta heals his legs, a series of increasingly outlandish coincidences will result in yet another automobile incident destroying his legs.
[ ] Affliction of Immutability - Your loss is manifest and irrevocable; only by complete mitigation of this curse can your missing pieces be regained. Phantom sensation in lost limbs becomes permanent. Attempts to circumvent your deprivation through means such as prosthetics or grafts- mundane or magical- will cause anything from outright destruction to a decline in efficiency so overwhelming as to render its presence meaningless.
[ ] Geas of Indenture- Mortgage your future to pay for the present? The term of your service shall be no less than 937 octillion years. Immediately you will be transported to another world and given a task to complete. Nearly every task will fall into one of two forms: you will be required either to kill a predestined 'Chosen One' of some kind, or to conquer some amount of territory.
----- Cursebearer, please select one Remittance.
[ ] This Advantage - "I will awaken your latent potential Quirk as if it had awakened 22 years ago- and you had practiced ever since." Words that make your heart attempt a leap straight through your ribcage. A number describing precisely the length of your hospitalization. A dream you buried even before that.
Unlock Vanta's Quirk: Acceleration, an Emitter-Quirk capable of subjectively accelerating his or other personal timeframes. When active, Vanta accumulates anomalous energy, or Recoil, that he must discharge into an external mass-object upon releasing his Quirk. When Accelerating himself, Vanta's physical needs are gradually obviated; he is released from the rigeur of age, sleep, hunger and breath, although he finds the sensation deeply unpleasant. Once active, Vanta can only increase his factor of Acceleration.
Thanks to those 22 years worth of training, you will possess thorough mastery of the manifold moving parts in Vanta's overbearing Quirk, as well as a small level boost to compensate for your decades of near-total physical inactivity.
[ ] Friends in High Places - One fact of life you've long since gotten used to is this: sometimes, it's who you know that really matters. Having friends in high places can get you out of a tight spot.
And it just so happens that you know an entity some might describe as the Most High. By surrendering all but the core elements of your Remittance- your essence as a progression-type cursebearer- you may instead gain the Favor of the Accursed. Very occasionally, when your troubles are truly dire and beyond your capabilities to solve, you may beseech the Accursed for aid. He will arrive and deal with your problems- though he will also be disappointed.
In you.
[ ] One More Try- The power to try again.
Eight times in total, when you would die or otherwise suffer an unacceptable loss, instead your consciousness is hurled back in time to the moment you entered your current world. You arrive unharmed and fully replenished, retaining all memories and progress. If still inhabiting your native realm, instead you are returned to a crucial moment, long before you finalized your agreement with the Accursed...
...though not without the burden of your Curses.
[ ] AMirror, Endless - Expand your horizons until they encompass the world.
Access the Praxis, the Accursed's personal casting style. A style of magic that emanates completely from the self, relies completely upon the self, and is developed completely by the self. A dream of fairness, defiant against an uncaring universe. And power enough, in time, to make the universe care.
