[X] Sightseeing
-[X]++++Gisena
[X] Artifice Gopher


Gisena options are of course the best options!

People voting for three options seem to be forgetting that Hunger just nearly died to a 90% strength apocryphal proc and three picks would make the next one between 100-130% strength. This is a bad idea.
 
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The power options also give 20-50% more strength to the next proc
and down time, which we have, gives Apocryhpa-chan time to work
Are either of the power options providing a 35% or greater increase to our total power in the short-term?
Arguably Refinement of Battle is.
The signs are harder to quantify
We also may not earn enough Praxis Picks for Refinement

(edited a bit since I was being far too pessimistic)
 
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I do think the opportunity to fully tie the bow on the Voyaging Realm is worth it. Especially since the Signs do give us some short-term power, and in that same short-term the Apocryphal must use the opportunities it has instead of making it wholesale. If Apocryphal doesn't proc before we get our first Pillars trip we'd also be in a much better position as well given the clearing of our Conditions and the opportunity to get more picks. Pushing ourselves this time seems fully worth it right now given what it offers, and we are in a good position to mitigate its risks. We should go for it.
 
To repeat the argument for taking the Strain:

Strain allow us to take Intensive Research after taking Regency/Consolidate(in of itself very powerful combo that solves some long term issues). What Intensive Research does is to give us two Hastened Signs. How valuable are these Signs? Well:
Hastening the Fourth Sign costs 1 pick and 7 Arete.
Hastening the Fifth Sign cost 2 picks and 12 Arete.
That's 19 Arete and 3 picks worth of value - and since 3 pick translate into 7 arete, we can tally this as total 26 Arete worth of stuff.

Now, what do you lose by taking Strain? Lesser of two is that point of Mental Stability; majority finds this mostly agreeable so I won't harp on it, but we can recover Mental Stability via Pillars so that's fine. What gets people, however is 20-50%(35% average) increase in our next Apo proc.

Lets us go back to after Temple. You will remember that we got opportunity to choose Apo proc. If you had ability to have Rotspawn receive 115% rather than 80% Apo power for 25 Arete, would you take it.

25 Arete is a lot. And we just need to tank another Apo proc, at 110% instead of 75%. It's not nothing, but given the sheer value of reward it's basically a freebie.
 
[X] Regency
[X] Consolidate Power
[X] Intensive Research
[X] Cursebearer's Strain


"Quack Quack, Q̵͔͠ȗ̷̖͝à̴̼͖c̴̥̾̿k̷̭̥͘!̸͉͇̏̆"
 
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Actually, why was she anti-tech? Guess we'll never know.
Lady Emerald? My guess was that it was a combination of classic elderly conservatism (she was visibly late middle age) and her Grace distribution. She fought by animating terrain, allowing it to express aesthetically appropriate capabilities. Perhaps technology was incompatible with her naturalistic powerset or it skewed the results somehow? Easy to imagine the manifestation of a findross-infused metropolis going wrong somehow. Anyway, thanks for the opportunity to display my knowledge of Sorceress trivia, as encyclopedic as it is useless! Now, if only we knew why Abacus hated Gisena...
You know, Accretion reminds me a bit of Chrysopoeia. They're both about becoming more than humans, and Chrysopoeia DID need you to have a self-image to aim to, kinda like Accretion instead depends on building your own legend, making you distinctive. They have some similarities.
This is a good catch, the self-image aspect of being a Mage-Slayer was never thoroughly explored, though our glimpse of Glaine at the end was pretty telling. There's a similarity between visual distinctiveness offering shortcuts and the need for a coherent legend to successfully Accrete it. Hell, the way masters of the Way can exert themselves to ignore physics looks a lot like Rank in practice, conditioning gets less relevant too. Hunger can manually train Rank now, I wonder if that process has anything in common with Chrysopoeia?
Also I wonder, would Joanian be french?

Also doesn't Hunger know that English is the multiversal language?
Linguistic challenges conspicuously keep failing to come up, I suspect the Accursed snuck a translation system into the Cursebearer package. But yeah, Joanian's analogous to French, the Maiden has obvious parallels to Joan of Arc.
*insert Imperia flashback here
Sweet Accursed, you're (relatively) fresh from the salt mines of the Terrascape. Curious how that whole debacle looked when reading from start to finish, none of the participants are remotely objective about it, myself included.
 
Sweet Accursed, you're (relatively) fresh from the salt mines of the Terrascape. Curious how that whole debacle looked when reading from start to finish, none of the participants are remotely objective about it, myself included.

to be fair I've only read everything up to the meeting with... the terrascape specialist, I don't remember his name, the leader of the rebels. After his claiming the caves I've only skimmed a bit, though I know the general story after that.

I'll probably go back to complete it at some point. I'll say that I liked Imperia though. She was interesting to me, and the way she slowly opened up to Arthur revealed a pretty complex character under her "majestic" persona.

Here is another funny thought: what if Arthur had sworn himself to Enoch's son instead of Alice right when he reached the Terrascape at the beginning? Caroline, while the heroine, was still someone weak, so she'd likely wouldn't have been a great source of strenght at that point (unless her metaphysical importance effected how much strenght Arthur could get from that oath), but Enoch's son (no, I don't remember his name :V )had, explicitely, "a soul too strong for his own soul"
 
For Praxis:
[ ] Study the Blade x2

For Signs:
[ ] Intensive Research
[ ] Consolidate Power

For Fluff:
[ ] Sightseeing
[ free space ]

For Adventure:
[ ] Dungeoneering

So figure out which you prefer. What is it that you want to see more of?
 
People please, let us not boost Apocrypha. We are currently pick starved unless it grant us mercy (ha!) and wait for Pillars to activate so we don't have a convenient source of on the spot power ups. "Outpacing" Apocrypha still let it boost the insignificant Rotbeast into a 3-4 pick fight and give us a challenge of outpacing Ber by requiring us to grind multiple EFBs.

All I'm saying is don't think the 4th/5th Sign or whatever Sword Praxis techniques we acquire might be enough to solve the next interesting time if we boost it over the strength of an unmitigated Curse and we don't have much source of convenient and quick powerups right now. And that is without it suddenly dropping the problem with no time to let us prepare.
 
don't think the 4th/5th Sign or whatever Sword Praxis techniques we acquire might be enough to solve the next interesting time if we boost it over the strength of an unmitigated Curse and we don't have much source of convenient and quick powerups right now. And that is without it suddenly dropping the problem with no time to let us prepare.
This is the safest we have ever been; we are ahead of the curve relative to the curse. We got like four EFBs in the course of three days. We have a sizable reserve of Arete, which acts like a pseudo +progression as Rihaku tries to bait us with shiny spending points. We have the political backing of three different nations, and the diversity of their resources allows for potential synergy. In just two weeks we will get another ridiculous powerup from the Realm of Evening.

Hunger managed fine against the Rot Beast, at about 85% curse strength. Pretend that fight got boosted to 115% power. If you give Hunger Refinement of Battle right before the fight with the boosted Rotbeast, I'm 99% sure the outcome would actually be better than what we saw in canon. Refinement of battle is really good.

Empyrean Signs are of similar potency: remember that the 5th Sign simply negates attacks with less than Universe-scale force!
 
This is the safest we have ever been; we are ahead of the curve relative to the curse. We got like four EFBs in the course of three days. We have a sizable reserve of Arete, which acts like a pseudo +progression as Rihaku tries to bait us with shiny spending points. We have the political backing of three different nations, and the diversity of their resources allows for potential synergy. In just two weeks we will get another ridiculous powerup from the Realm of Evening.

Hunger managed fine against the Rot Beast, at about 85% curse strength. Pretend that fight got boosted to 115% power. If you give Hunger Refinement of Battle right before the fight with the boosted Rotbeast, I'm 99% sure the outcome would actually be better than what we saw in canon. Refinement of battle is really good.

Empyrean Signs are of similar potency: remember that the 5th Sign simply negates attacks with less than Universe-scale force!
That type of thinking is going to kill us. We managed fine against the Rotbeast because we were allowed to snap buy Astral Thorn. Otherwise it would have been a slog of a fight with a lot more casualties and complications. I'm saying now that there might be no convenient snap buys and instant power ups so we don't get to easily cross the gap in power. We got off easily this time because of Gisena. We got off easily the previous time because we got the conditions to snap buy a Praxis technique. Don't underestimate Apocrypha then fucking boost it.
 
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[X] Regency
[X] Consolidate Power

Alright, went back and forth on this but decided to drop my vote on taking Strain, since I'm not too keen on Apo.
Regardless though, that's no reason to switch priorities: we still need Regency to make sure we don't get dragged back into VR after we leave.

Possible typos, @Rihaku?
Human minds gravitate towards the strongest positive stimulus, and prolonged exposure reshapes naturally behavior as a matter of course.
naturally -> natural
They were fortunate not to have given her any more time, lest the entire realm of Nilfel, rather than this single battlefield, haven been reduced to this dire state.
haven -> have
 
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