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Forge of Destiny(Xianxia Quest)

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Erebeal said:
What resources would we use for that kind of setup? Currently, the only relevant difference between the plans is the use of Starlight Elixir, which should put us comfortably over from what people were saying?

We do have points lying around to use if we need them. Currently, I was figuring that the best use of them would be to throw them at EPC to try to make sure it's done in 2 turns rather than 3.
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Lemme math Plan Hatei:
Talent 6+ Stone 10+ AS 7 + Vent 8 + Friend 3+ Pill 3 for physical, so 37+2 auto success. This is around 22 success from physical alone.
Arms Meridian: Talent 6+ Stone 10 + AS 7+ Li Suyin 2+ Pill 3, so 28+2 auto success. This is around 17 success, so 4~ overflow, however @Katreus hasn't put the overflow to physical.

If the overflow was on physical, this we could get, with average rolls, up to 26 success. We need 31. That's just too far. Actually, @yrsillar changed our numbers of success. We are at 92/120, so we need 28.

So, if we could put 4 points into omake on physical, and @Katreus put the overflow to physical, we would have fair chance to get mid silver. I still consider it a bit iffy but I guess it's not impossible.

However, @AbeoLogos is right. "Keeping things for later" is, in many ways, suboptimal, and the point it is to always have nice things to use. I'm also not a fan of relying on Omake to bridge the gap between "unlikely" to "likely".
PrimalShadow said:
Look. Unless you are interacting with time-sensitive expectations/requests/threats/etc., you can't gain benefits faster than time flows. If we magically got an extra week to do extra cultivation right now, we would be a week ahead, and we would remain a week ahead, no more, no less, at least as long as we limited our interaction to non-time-sensitive things. Getting a single extra cultivation action in now is going to put you less than a week ahead, and you are never going to naturally beat the +week version of ourselves; or if we did, it would be a matter of blind luck, nothing less and nothing more. There is no way to leverage any sort of normal actions - cultivating SCS, for example - into additional time advantages.
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See, I already said I disagreed on this.

Cultivating SCS can be used to gain additional time advantage as it gives us opportunity cost to gamble we might not have been able to ever take, and so on and so forth.

Take the example on how stealing things got much harder after the Cai meeting. If we had tried and done that in the one week we could have, maybe we would have had gambled for extra time.

"Getting one free month" is not, in fact "just one month". It's one month that we can leverage to gain opportunities we would never had had otherwise.
 
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AbeoLogos said:
The issue I have with holding off on using the Starlight Elixir, I think, is that I have played enough RPGs to know that when I push off using things because they'll be more useful later... I never use them.

We have what, 11 valuable drugs lying around? Reserving, say, 4-5 of those for a particularly specialized big push week is entirely sensible. But historical trends are that we don't value that rate of advancement enough to consistently dedicate our weeks like that, to the exclusion of other activities. We've only the one Sable Light pill besides, which is the nexus of any big push.

My point is, using something nice every week or two should be a goal, but just means to another. We can reasonably expect to land our hands on other resources moving forwards, and we already have more than we can use quickly. This is great! It's a good place to be, but holding back on actually using things that are useful because they may be slightly more useful in the future can be a detrimental attitude to have.

A good example is our use, or non-use, of the Qi Foundation pills. Yes, we had other things going on that makes it reasonable, but I wonder if we couldn't have gotten our hands on one more if we'd used them a tad more liberally. In retrospect, it's almost like that challenge was a tutorial of sorts, that Elder Su was intending to instill the lesson that using resources mindfully but progressively leads to further material gains to leverage in the future.
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Honestly, if nothing else, I want to pick up like four or five different Heart Arts. Probably 2 Heart/1 Spine, because spine makes it faster and easier to learn, and it will hopefully make the personal benifits a bit better so we don't have people wondering if the arts are useful at all. We can slot them all over top Zephyr's breath with one new spine Meridian and it will give us a bunch of option for every circumstance.

And it will be easy to do. That's when I want to use one of our Startlight Elixirs, so I'll be annoyed if we use all of them up.
 
AbeoLogos said:
The issue I have with holding off on using the Starlight Elixir, I think, is that I have played enough RPGs to know that when I push off using things because they'll be more useful later... I never use them.

We have what, 11 valuable drugs lying around? Reserving, say, 4-5 of those for a particularly specialized big push week is entirely sensible. But historical trends are that we don't value that rate of advancement enough to consistently dedicate our weeks like that, to the exclusion of other activities. We've only the one Sable Light pill besides, which is the nexus of any big push.

My point is, using something nice every week or two should be a goal, but just means to another. We can reasonably expect to land our hands on other resources moving forwards, and we already have more than we can use quickly. This is great! It's a good place to be, but holding back on actually using things that are useful because they may be slightly more useful in the future can be a detrimental attitude to have.

A good example is our use, or non-use, of the Qi Foundation pills. Yes, we had other things going on that makes it reasonable, but I wonder if we couldn't have gotten our hands on one more if we'd used them a tad more liberally. In retrospect, it's almost like that challenge was a tutorial of sorts, that Elder Su was intending to instill the lesson that using resources mindfully but progressively leads to further material gains to leverage in the future.
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Also to keep in mind - while we haven't had occasion for this yet, we absolutely can lose a fight, and consequently these pills. But in contrast to pills, our cultivation isn't something our enemies can take from us.

To put it differently, the pill is much safer floating around as Qi in our dantian than it would be as a potentially-lootable consumable in our pockets.
 
All I can say is that I would be perfectly fine with using the starlight elixir or some other type of elixir that proced physical cultivation in the plan. It would save us an action next week so that we can do more things.
 
TheLastOne said:
Honestly, if nothing else, I want to pick up like four or five different Heart Arts. Probably 2 Heart/1 Spine, because spine makes it faster and easier to learn, and it will hopefully make the personal benifits a bit better so we don't have people wondering if the arts are useful at all. We can slot them all over top Zephyr's breath with one new spine Meridian and it will give us a bunch of option for every circumstance.

And it will be easy to do. That's when I want to use one of our Startlight Elixirs, so I'll be annoyed if we use all of them up.
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What kind of circumstantial hearts are you imagining would work well here? I have a touch of difficulty coming up with some myself; the only Heart art one we've seen so far is ZB, and it seems to be pretty universal: protect against ranged attacks / blow away adjacent enemies / boost ally ranged attacks. Admittedly the last one works best when we have a high number of ranged attackers, but that doesn't feel like enough to warrant training e.g. an identical version but which boosts Melee allies instead.
 
PrimalShadow said:
What kind of circumstantial hearts are you imagining would work well here? I have a touch of difficulty coming up with some myself; the only Heart art one we've seen so far is ZB, and it seems to be pretty universal: protect against ranged attacks / blow away adjacent enemies / boost ally ranged attacks. Admittedly the last one works best when we have a high number of ranged attackers, but that doesn't feel like enough to warrant training e.g. an identical version but which boosts Melee allies instead.
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FVM is an heart art, but we have also seen some other different ones:

[] Earthroot Art: A mountain aligned spiritual art, which projects the solidity and weight of a mountain around the user. Primarily defensive, providing defensive boosts to the self and allies while slowing enemies.

[] Crimson Flowing Art: A water aligned spiritual art that allows the user to influence and sense those around them through the medium of blood. Primarily support, mitigates wounds and provides bonuses and penalties to allies and enemies alike

[] Burning Heart Art: A fire aligned physical art, that allows the user to fill themselves and allies with blazing heat and energy. Primarily offensive, boosting attacks of self and allies in the area and preventing exhaustion from wounds.

Furthermore, we can expect, as long as it's "main" heart and later takes other type of meridians, to have heart arts that are focused on giving dodge boost to everyone, or speed boosts, or mental resilience boost, and so on and so forth.
 
PrimalShadow said:
What kind of circumstantial hearts are you imagining would work well here? I have a touch of difficulty coming up with some myself; the only Heart art one we've seen so far is ZB, and it seems to be pretty universal: protect against ranged attacks / blow away adjacent enemies / boost ally ranged attacks. Admittedly the last one works best when we have a high number of ranged attackers, but that doesn't feel like enough to warrant training e.g. an identical version but which boosts Melee allies instead.
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Personally, I feel like we should be stacking debuffs on our enemies. Get them in the mist, and then cripple them even more. Something like Earthroot to slow them for instance.
 
PrimalShadow said:
What kind of circumstantial hearts are you imagining would work well here? I have a touch of difficulty coming up with some myself; the only Heart art one we've seen so far is ZB, and it seems to be pretty universal: protect against ranged attacks / blow away adjacent enemies / boost ally ranged attacks. Admittedly the last one works best when we have a high number of ranged attackers, but that doesn't feel like enough to warrant training e.g. an identical version but which boosts Melee allies instead.
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Heart isn't just boost allies - it's aura effects centered on us. Other examples of heart arts we know exist include

Mitigated wounds (possibly grows into speeding healing, which could save us a bunch of stones in the long run even if it's only on the day scale, plus let us safely take more missions per day), sense others through the water in their blood.

Pen enemies around you with the weight of the earth, raise your defense and your allies defense with the strength of stone.

Fire your and your allies weapons and attacks, turning your assault into an inferno.


And there will be many more. Getting a library we can chose from would be quite useful - we could use the water one while sneaking and outside events to heal faster. We could switch to the earth one if we knew we were going to be facing large hoards - slow them down so we only face so many at once, and armor can be better then evasion while it lasts.

And so on. It's a tool kit. People are too set on having all our arts available at once, but the whole reason we can switch them without losing progress is so we can build tool-kits. It's like an RPG, where you can select a load-out before a mission. This fight poison useful, this fight you want to stealth, this fight is a slog, this fight your up against a single overpowering enemy... And so on.
 
TheLastOne said:
Honestly, if nothing else, I want to pick up like four or five different Heart Arts. Probably 2 Heart/1 Spine, because spine makes it faster and easier to learn, and it will hopefully make the personal benifits a bit better so we don't have people wondering if the arts are useful at all. We can slot them all over top Zephyr's breath with one new spine Meridian and it will give us a bunch of option for every circumstance.

And it will be easy to do. That's when I want to use one of our Startlight Elixirs, so I'll be annoyed if we use all of them up.
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+5 dice to combat art cultivation is nice and all, but the bonus physical cultivation roll is the real value, and the real limiter is more meridians than training time available to be devoted to arts. This runs into the problem of specializing weeks. People don't like to do it too often, and there's valid reasons not to. The minor actions alleviate things there a little bit, but it's still a concern.

Anyway, as for heart arts, I'm partial to a leg/heart art for group mobility. Maybe not immediately amazingly useful, but it's something I want for our military service. It builds on the ranged scout/archer theme. Also the allure of wind arts is too strong to resist.
 
AbeoLogos said:
+5 dice to combat art cultivation is nice and all, but the bonus physical cultivation roll is the real value, and the real limiter is more meridians than training time available to be devoted to arts. This runs into the problem of specializing weeks. People don't like to do it too often, and there's valid reasons not to. The minor actions alleviate things there a little bit, but it's still a concern.

Anyway, as for heart arts, I'm partial to a leg/heart art for group mobility. Maybe not immediately amazingly useful, but it's something I want for our military service. It builds on the ranged scout/archer theme. Also the allure of wind arts is too strong to resist.
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Only if we were slotting them into unique meridians. We haven't done it, but Meridians are actually equipment slots, and they're not locked. You can slot and unslot arts without losing progress.

If changing the slot wouldn't change the element of the meridian (for instance, the meridian is attuned to Darkness and Water, and you unslot that art for another darkness art) you can do it during events. If it would change the alignment, you can do it freely during the week as many times as you want, but not during events. That is, you have to commit to the elemental alignment of your open meridians and can't change it during events.
 
TheLastOne said:
And there will be many more. Getting a library we can chose from would be quite useful - we could use the water one while sneaking and outside events to heal faster. We could switch to the earth one if we knew we were going to be facing large hoards - slow them down so we only face so many at once, and armor can be better then evasion while it lasts.

And so on. It's a tool kit. People are too set on having all our arts available at once, but the whole reason we can switch them without losing progress is so we can build tool-kits. It's like an RPG, where you can select a load-out before a mission. This fight poison useful, this fight you want to stealth, this fight is a slog, this fight your up against a single overpowering enemy... And so on.
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You are right; a toolkit would be useful. However, I have two major objections to this idea.
  1. Does it actually work? AFAIK you can't swap the elemental-alignments of your meridians mid-combat, which means that our toolkit only works so long as the elements all line up. Are you planning to set your equips all the way at the beginning of the week, long before our encounter even starts? If so, just how useful is the flexibility, really?
  2. Is it worth it? Unlike opening new meridians, raising qi, or improving our skills, increasing our toolkit is quite attractive in that learning arts doesn't make learning further arts any harder. That said, we still need to do the learning in the first place, and even ZB, elementary as it was, required 3+15+35=55 successes to progress. Is adding an extra tool to our toolkit really as valuable as the same successes put towards a core art or cultivation or whatever else we might find ourselves doing with our time?
 
Erebeal said:
Personally, I feel like we should be stacking debuffs on our enemies. Get them in the mist, and then cripple them even more. Something like Earthroot to slow them for instance.
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As I understand, the option being suggested here isn't to get one more heart art. It is to get a set of heart arts that we would rotate between as necessary. In that case, we would be looking for situation effects more than general benefits that we want to incorporate directly into our build.


It is an interesting idea. If nothing else, it does probably give us more breakthrough bonuses. I'm just not sure it is a good use of our time, especially since most of the arts are going to be obsoleted reasonably soon.
 
PrimalShadow said:
You are right; a toolkit would be useful. However, I have two major objections to this idea.
  1. Does it actually work? AFAIK you can't swap the elemental-alignments of your meridians mid-combat, which means that our toolkit only works so long as the elements all line up. Are you planning to set your equips all the way at the beginning of the week, long before our encounter even starts? If so, just how useful is the flexibility, really?
  2. Is it worth it? Unlike opening new meridians, raising qi, or improving our skills, increasing our toolkit is quite attractive in that learning arts doesn't make learning further arts any harder. That said, we still need to do the learning in the first place, and even ZB, elementary as it was, required 3+15+35=55 successes to progress. Is adding an extra tool to our toolkit really as valuable as the same successes put towards a core art or cultivation or whatever else we might find ourselves doing with our time?
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Increasing our toolkit is only really useful insofar as we manage to do it well:

1°) Getting arts in 3 or so different types of elements, so that we can switch between them in an event, and not in 20 different type, as not only does it unbalance us but it also makes it much less of a toolkit that we use and only a "well, it's something we must prepare well in advance".
2°) having arts that are clearly better for different circumstances. For example a toolkit that's based more on mobility and first strike for when we are leading a party for ambush, a toolkit that is ideal for defending a position, a toolkit that is idea for running away, a toolkit ideal for taking on a boss-type enemies (so less "AoE" and more "wide ranging buff to single target"), etc.

Basically, if we do toolkits, they must have plannning behind them.
PrimalShadow said:
As I understand, the option being suggested here isn't to get one more heart art. It is to get a set of heart arts that we would rotate between as necessary. In that case, we would be looking for situation effects more than general benefits that we want to incorporate directly into our build.


It is an interesting idea. If nothing else, it does probably give us more breakthrough bonuses. I'm just not sure it is a good use of our time, especially since most of the arts are going to be obsoleted reasonably soon.
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Yeah, I agree. The whole idea of buff is to be able to throw around a lot of them at one time, so it's kinda bad to say we should toolkit them around.

Anyway, did you see my post in the previous page about omake and mid silver in plan hatei?
 
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Currently, if we're planning on doing a lot of spot-swapping of arts, the only economical choice is wind arts. A wind heart art is 5 for the first level, and -15 for each subsequent level. The trick is finding a diverse enough selection of wind arts to gain real use out of it.

And that's the issue. To have a proper toolset of arts for switching around on the fly, they have to be of a narrow elemental attunement, which makes the flexibility of the toolset more questionable. It's certainly worth pursuing, but I don't see it being amazingly potent for a while yet.
 
PrimalShadow said:
You are right; a toolkit would be useful. However, I have two major objections to this idea.
  1. Does it actually work? AFAIK you can't swap the elemental-alignments of your meridians mid-combat, which means that our toolkit only works so long as the elements all line up. Are you planning to set your equips all the way at the beginning of the week, long before our encounter even starts? If so, just how useful is the flexibility, really?
  2. Is it worth it? Unlike opening new meridians, raising qi, or improving our skills, increasing our toolkit is quite attractive in that learning arts doesn't make learning further arts any harder. That said, we still need to do the learning in the first place, and even ZB, elementary as it was, required 3+15+35=55 successes to progress. Is adding an extra tool to our toolkit really as valuable as the same successes put towards a core art or cultivation or whatever else we might find ourselves doing with our time?
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We don't lock our toolkit at the beginning of the week, we chose it at the beginning of an event. So if we have an art that heals a lethal health a day, we only need it slotted outside events, but it greatly helps us. Likewise, if we're going into an event where we're helping a scouty sneaky team of archers, we have ZB or a descendant slotted. If we're going to have to tunnel fight and slog through enemies a realm below us who will try and overwhelm us with numbers we slot an earthen defensive art that raises our armor and penalizes their dexterity. And so on.

So yes. Even if we can't change our load-out in an event, a variety of arts makes us vastly more powerful. This is the difference between the Tier 1 Wizard and the Tier 2 Sorcerer. People kept thinking the sorcerer would be stronger because he has more spells and sometimes can cast them more easily... but the flexibility of the Wizard means that with forewarning, he can tailor himself to perfectly overcome any challenge as if he was a specialist, while the Sorcerer was forced to always be a generalist. The Sorcerers' 'deeper' power didn't manage to match the power of the wizards breadth of ability.
 
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TheLastOne said:
We don't lock our toolkit at the beginning of the week, we chose it at the beginning of an event. So if we have an art that heals a lethal health a day, we only need it slotted outside events, but it greatly helps us. Likewise, if we're going into an event where we're helping a scouty sneaky team of archers, we have ZB or a descendant slotted. If we're going to have to tunnel fight and slog through enemies a realm below us who will try and overwhelm us with numbers we slot an earthen defensive art that raises our armor and penalizes their dexterity. And so on.

So yes. Even if we can't change our load-out in an event, a variety of arts makes us vastly more powerful. This is the difference between the Tier 1 Wizard and the Tier 2 Sorcerer. People kept thinking the sorcerer would be stronger because he has more spells and sometimes can cast them more easily... but the flexibility of the Wizard means that with forewarning, he can tailor himself to perfectly overcome any challenge as if he was a specialist, while the Sorcerer was forced to always be a generalist. The Sorcerers' 'deeper' power didn't manage to match the power of the wizards breadth of ability.
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I'm not sure it works that way. I've seen statements from yrsillar saying we can swap meridian attunement between turns, but nothing saying we can swap them as much as we want within a turn. Is there a specific statement you recall that does state as much? Our ability to select meridian attunement at the beginning of an event would also depend entirely on the kind of event. If we're being ambushed, then we're not going to have an opportunity to select anything because it takes somewhat lengthy meditation to switch those things.

@yrsillar could you help clear this up? Can we change the elemental attunement of our meridians a number of times within a turn, or just between turns? Also, do we get to choose what we have equipped going into an event, or are we 'stuck' with whatever we had equipped for the turn?
 
I think we need to have all the Wind + Spine Arts! Fast Cultivation! Be a bird!

Wait, that probably could happen with the Qi imbalance...
 
AbeoLogos said:
I'm not sure it works that way. I've seen statements from yrsillar saying we can swap meridian attunement between turns, but nothing saying we can swap them as much as we want within a turn. Is there a specific statement you recall that does state as much? Our ability to select meridian attunement at the beginning of an event would also depend entirely on the kind of event. If we're being ambushed, then we're not going to have an opportunity to select anything because it takes somewhat lengthy meditation to switch those things.

@yrsillar could you help clear this up? Can we change the elemental attunement of our meridians a number of times within a turn, or just between turns? Also, do we get to choose what we have equipped going into an event, or are we 'stuck' with whatever we had equipped for the turn?
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yrsillar said:
As for switching, if its same element you can switch during events, different element means switching only during normal turns
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So we can switch them in turn with no stated limit (though lets avoid being silly with it).

Though the ambush ruling IS important. We've been ambushed twice, sort of.

Both time we went into the event knowing dangerous things were going to happen. We went into a dangerous part of the forest knowing we might fight beasts, and we know violence was going to erupt during thunderdome. So those aren't 'true' ambushed out of nowhere ambushes. Which doesn't mean a true ambush won't happen to us.
 
Grosstoad said:
I think we need to have all the Wind + Spine Arts! Fast Cultivation! Be a bird!

Wait, that probably could happen with the Qi imbalance...
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Fast cutivation is Wind + Heart + Spine. Or Maybe Lung too. However, EPC gives bonus to moon and darkness arts, so Wind/Moon/Darkness is the balanced combo that is also fastest learning.
 
Arkeus said:
Fast cutivation is Wind + Heart + Spine. Or Maybe Lung too. However, EPC gives bonus to moon and darkness arts, so Wind/Moon/Darkness is the balanced combo that is also fastest learning.
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Yeah, that's self-reinforcing for all our negative avoidance behavior. Yin, moon fickle, and winds tendency to disengage and remove itself for situations, to overcome by letting go and escaping? Not to mention that moon is explicitly rare, darkness is probably rare, three element arts are going to be second floor so our search goes from free to super expensive, and a toolkit that's all variations on the same theme is not a very good toolkit. It doesn't matter if we have a dozen versions of Expeditious Retreat when we have to stand fast and hold ground against the barbarian hoards.
 
I don't think @Arkeus was advocating a single art that was all of wind, moon, and darkness at once.

Also, wind can be pretty Yang and Yin doesn't even need to involve avoidance, unless you're going to term flexibility as avoidance but at that point you're watering down your objection to the point it doesn't say anything bad anymore.
 
AbeoLogos said:
I don't think @Arkeus was advocating a single art that was all of wind, moon, and darkness at once.

Also, wind can be pretty Yang and Yin doesn't even need to involve avoidance, unless you're going to term flexibility as avoidance but at that point you're watering down your objection to the point it doesn't say anything bad anymore.
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We don't know all the different elemental behavors, though we have good guess work (Meizhen is the endpoint of Yin, Xuilan is very Fire), but we do know air, because we were lectured on it.

yrsillar said:
Water and Wind are next, the first represents resourcefulness, wit, and ability to adapt. The second is related, but different, where Water will wear a path through obstacles given time, Wind will flow over and through without conflict. Wind is the element of freedom, representing wanderlust and curiosity.
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Wind very much has an fundamental aspect of avoidance, retreat, or circling around a problem without ever confronting it directly. Hell, the other character we know has Wind Meridian's open, Han Jian, has a serious issue on not confronting issues and letting them fester.

Water with wear away at something, Wind will let go and move on without letting itself conflict. It's very much the element of drift-less freedom that Ling Qi notes in herself and dislikes. Which isn't to say we can ignore it. Wind has great bonuses, but we should be careful not to go deeper into it then we do then any other element.
 
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