So what are our goals? On scale to 0 to 5, they are as follows -
Level 0: Don't die. Continue down the street.
Level 1: Basic amount of Dwindlings before we move on. This means about 6~10 - some in armor, some in relevant masks. Basic escape plan should accomplish this.
Level 2: Major amount of Dwindlings. Ideally about 20~25. This would let us move most Masks we need to 50 Potential range, upgrade our armor and relics and all that. That might sounds like a lot, and is indeed a major amount of power in practical terms, however consider that we could've gotten 20 earlier by just committing
Level 3: Get all our masks to 60 potential, including ones we are yet to make(Glass, anti-Somber, storage etc). Each member of team has three triple boosted personal relics. About ~60 Dwindlings.
Level 3 represents a huge increase in power, and is what I'd consider every non-escape plan can realistically strive towards. Even lesser levels are in good enough category right now, but this is holy fuck tier of power increase, and given what we saw in literally today of in game time, we can get there. We have weeks. After this it becomes matter of depth vs width - at some point adding more distinct relics hits diminishing returns, and while having mask for each occasion is neat, we can only wear one. Level 4 is where we go into depth, getting a relic or Mask that is just way more powerful than the standard.
We know how to do this, based on what Jephris told us. The limitation of Arcanist is that there has to be a flow, so there has to be a certain density of environmental mana for her to manage to push it in object of certain mana density. Simple put, there is a diminishing return of how hard Mask/relic can be made in normal environment. The solution is to provide environment of higher mana density, which would allow Jephris to create more powerful item. There are two ways to do this - theoretical one is to create some kind of mana drain mask that would just eat mana until it explodes, however this is likely impractical for many reasons.
The practical one we just saw in this update: kill a Kaiju and it explodes into bunch of mana. Our goal with Plan Jaeger is to hunt down this singularities of mana, slay them, and then instead of just letting mana run wild, we commit it to artifact, or mask, of great power. To wit, explosion of needle Kaiju created mana event that implies it alone had thousands of Dwindlings worth of mana within itself, just comparing the size of Burgeoning vs how much we get of partial Dwindling of a city block.
Thus we have:
Level 4: Create super-Dwindlings worth thousands of normal Dwindlings to empower select abilities or artifacts, by hunting down powerful super beings
This is what Plan Jaeger strives for, and this is what I think we should strive for in this world. If something goes wrong we can always Spectral Flight and run away, so we can afford to be bold.
Level 5 is just "Ascension tier", if we managed to do some theoretical super rituals, but those are beyond something we can accomplish right now, I just like having open upper bound.
As an aside, I am very high on recreating Webweaver. We have a potentially very powerful social build it can slot right into, and its ability to copy abilities(or to let our allies copy our abilities) might have many useful implications. Imagine Contamination while we are also Arcanist, or using Linneas' ability to buff each other in a loop, or just having access to Midnight super senses etc. But that is something for later.
