Orochimaru took a while to catch up to Hazo in Runecrafting when Hazo was Severe'd and given his need to survive combat against Akatsuki, Dragons, etc I would be shocked if Orochimaru actually had research capstones instead of the combat trio. He excels in Biosealing specifically (a field we have no particular familiarity with to gauge, anyway) and has never been exceptional in any other discipline.
Hmm. Oro
took just over 25 days to learn lithosealing, suggesting an average XP rate of about 5 XP/day (assuming he was spending only on that, which seems like a reasonable assumption). He then caught up to Hazō in about seven days (April 30th to May 6th). If he was still earning 5 XP/day during that time, and spending it all on PS, that would mean he only had to reach PS 5 to catch up to Hazō. I'm not sure what Hazō's effective PS was at that point; his base PS was 11, but I'm not sure if SSA would have been included in Oro catching up to Hazō (given that a. Hazō wouldn't have wanted Oro to know about it and b. its insights are extremely weird); I think our Sealing was something like 51 at the time, so our crossover bonus would have been +17 except for the Severe that makes it +13 instead and penalizes PS directly by 4, so our eff. PS should have been 7 + 13 = 20 without SSA, 28 with it? That would make Oro's highest sealing stat 45 if the "catching up to Hazō" doesn't include SSA, or 69 with it; since 45 is entirely implausible, that puts him at top sealing stat 69.
Alright, I'm convinced. Oro probably does have Sealing-or-Biosealing 69, so we
were better than him (and will be again). It's possible these calculations are inaccurate, but 5 XP/day and top sealing stat 69 are such nice numbers that I suspect they were how the QMs got the time frames in the first place, and I think it's a pretty good argument that they're the actual numbers.
I dont think that sinking X months of XP gains into "Be slightly better at Sealing so that we are marginally better at PS so that Orochimaru is going to respect us more" is something that is going to pan out.
He knows that we are good at sealing, he doesn't respect us because we are (from his perspective) a dumbass kid. Getting higher numbers isn't really going to move the needle much there, because the relative numbers difference is not the main thing factoring into his opinion.
I was under the impression we were already planning to do this at some point, so it'd be a question of reordering rather than spending XP we wouldn't otherwise have spent; and I
would like our 70+ Sealing back. But I take your point.
Edit: though bear in mind the improvement is the same for Sealing and PS, at least numerically. We'd be levelling PS as well so as to reach the new softcap, which is the same as our Sealing level. It's "somewhat" and "somewhat", IMO, not "slightly" and "marginally".
