Ok, now a bit more civilized. The general point is that taking Crown creates period of relative weakness/not being able to pick shinies until we get OfA, but is much stronger after that point. So far, people have brought up feasibility of acquiring enough Arete in time and possible dangers involved with not getting build up in time. I was responding to them, and now want to address the opposite scenario - what if we do get OfA without Crown, go to the tower, and then turns out that tower is still dangerous? What's the plan then?
Again, Crown+WDS doesn't need to be outright better than OaF, it just needs to be good enough to act as fallback. Which it is; it offers 0.1 less general rank and 1 less combat rank for somewhat smaller cost; value of combat rank is somewhat not as good due Defensive, Guile and Blood rank being mostly the same, making overall build pretty good.
Like, entire point is that we can afford to go for Crown into OfA because we can fall back to WDS in order to get that 9.275 Blood Casting.
We don't actually want ADS before we get OfA due to losing WDS.You are being very generous in your scenario.
Which is better: OaF + Stranglethorn + several cheap picks or; Crown + A-DS + Stranglethorn/mystery box DA + 2 fewer cheap picks? That's assuming astral beast and random encounters will generate enough picks for Stranglethorn/mystery box DA over a week of travel.
Again, Crown+WDS doesn't need to be outright better than OaF, it just needs to be good enough to act as fallback. Which it is; it offers 0.1 less general rank and 1 less combat rank for somewhat smaller cost; value of combat rank is somewhat not as good due Defensive, Guile and Blood rank being mostly the same, making overall build pretty good.
Like, entire point is that we can afford to go for Crown into OfA because we can fall back to WDS in order to get that 9.275 Blood Casting.