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Forge of Destiny(Xianxia Quest)

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tricholysis said:
Meanwhile FSA and TRF are pretty okay. Well, they're lower level. And we can't be arsed to put in the time to max FSA. And we just haven't had the time to max TRF, since we got it late.
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Really? I'd say TRF and FSA are pretty damn awesome at this point.

TRF lets us give multiple people on our team an extra health box and defenses on top of that as an INSTANT action. That is really, really solid - I wouldn't be surprised if we started reaching for that as our primary defense instead of crescent grace, at least against Physical Attacks.

FSA gives us the ability to attack at massive range, and actually finish enemies quickly if necessary. It was crucial to letting us beat the Hungry Giant, and to let us beat the Shaman before that. I'm quite satisfied with it.

Now, TRF is still better than FSA. FSA is routinely sidelined in our plans and tactics because, well, it's just not impressive. Meteoric Shower or whatever that tech was got a 'pretty neat we can do this thing for 11 qi that blinds people'...after Ling Qi got an item that mitigates penalties. TRF got a resounding 'Yes I'm glad we spent that Elder lesson on this art'. The thread is just more impressed and happy with arts of high quality.
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I think you are misremembering. The thread was pretty damn pleased with FSA. The first tech gave us the ability to pierce Armor and deal unblockable damage; the second tech gave us a disrupt ability. Both of those are super-valuable.

Our latest ability from FSA isn't actually the main part of the art; we just got that ability, after all, and it is still underdeveloped. It is the same way Formless Shade was a lot less interesting before it became an instant this turn, or the way Elegy was much less interesting when the Resolve test required only one success instead of two. Our latest art is always supposed to be somewhat "raw"; it will get better as a mainstay at the next level.

Now, what art is Ling Qi picking up, that not only is being picked up LATE and therefore won't be a focus of plans a la TRF's levels, won't have the TIME to max a la FSA's sidelining, not only is lower cultivation base than the impressive and strong arts that she has, AAAAAND is also LOWER QUALITY by a HUUUUUUGE margin?

...

hm.
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It should be noted that thanks to our Eightfold Paths Pill, we will probably be training ZB+ at least three times (this turn and then two more); I expect that alone should be enough to get it to a respectable level.
 
tricholysis said:
You'll notice I've (belatedly) been suggesting a general Wind art search for something more grade-appropriate for Ling Qi. Almost anything, as long as it's more advanced. Ling Qi's good at Wind, I'm sure she can handle it.

She's a big girl, she should be past reading The Hungry Caterpillar 2. She'd have much more fun reading Harry Potter.
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No, I meant what sort of general characteristics you'd want from a wind art. Say you'd been given ree reign to design one of an appropriate level, what is your ideal?
 
[X]Fleeting Zephyr: An evolution of the common wind arts of the south. This branch focuses upon utility, guiding the user and their allies on fleet spring winds, granting them speed and fleetness of foot to escape or flank their foes.
 
[X]Fleeting Zephyr: An evolution of the common wind arts of the south. This branch focuses upon utility, guiding the user and their allies on fleet spring winds, granting them speed and fleetness of foot to escape or flank their foes.
 
tricholysis said:
You'll notice I've (belatedly) been suggesting a general Wind art search for something more grade-appropriate for Ling Qi. Almost anything, as long as it's more advanced. Ling Qi's good at Wind, I'm sure she can handle it.

She's a big girl, she should be past reading The Hungry Caterpillar 2. She'd have much more fun reading Harry Potter.
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Why do you think other wind arts in the second floor of the archive will be better than ZB+? Like seriously, what evidence do we have that ZB is worse than other archive arts? The only other archive art we know anything about really is FSA, which you yourself said was on a similar tier.
 
PrimalShadow said:
It should be noted that thanks to our Eightfold Paths Pill, we will probably be training ZB+ at least three times (this turn and then two more); I expect that alone should be enough to get it to a respectable level.
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Just a side note here... but with the Sky pills we got, stacked with the Eightfold path pills, we are talking 2 actions to get to get past level 3, and then another action to get past level 4. Wind heart arts are dirt cheap for us to train. If we can expect that this art follows the same progression path as either TRF, or AM then we should be getting past level 2 with just this training session. -5 successes in general for all arts (making ZB+ either a 15 or 25) and then -15 for all other stages after that is a huge boon. Elder Jiao should be able to get us past level 2 of ZB with just this action. Combine that with eightfold path and Sky pill and we are at level 4 in 3 actions.
 
Thor's Twin said:
Just a side note here... but with the Sky pills we got, stacked with the Eightfold path pills, we are talking 2 actions to get to get past level 3, and then another action to get past level 4. Wind heart arts are dirt cheap for us to train. If we can expect that this art follows the same progression path as either TRF, or AM then we should be getting past level 2 with just this training session. -5 successes in general for all arts (making ZB+ either a 15 or 25) and then -15 for all other stages after that is a huge boon. Elder Jiao should be able to get us past level 2 of ZB with just this action. Combine that with eightfold path and Sky pill and we are at level 4 in 3 actions.
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Maybe... The massive jump AM just had has me worried about other arts.

Otoh, the closest precedent here is fsa, and that's super easy to train.
 
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Adhoc vote count started by Killer_Whale on Oct 10, 2017 at 5:16 PM, finished with 32350 posts and 48 votes.
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Erebeal said:
Maybe... The massive jump AM just had has me worried about other arts.
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I mean, we get +6 dice to wind arts from Clear Skies and White Hart Elixir; then we get +9 dice to wind arts from Sky pill; That equals +15 dice to wind arts. Combine that with the +30 dice from stones and we get 45 dice minimum to our attempts. Add another 22 dice from Eightfold path pills and we have 67 dice to throw at wind arts.

Add in 7 dice because it is yin aspected and we are at 74 dice towards ZB+. Another 6 because of our talent and we are at 80 dice for wind arts. Train with Meizhen for an additional 5 dice and we have 85 dice to throw at ZB+. And that's without finding a good wind site to train at. If we find a good wind site through exploration or more wind pills in the market or Yan Renshu's hideout, we could reach 90, 95, or even 100 dice being thrown at a wind art. And each stage takes -15 successes, which means we will be dramatically increasing the ranks.
 
PrimalShadow said:
I think you are misremembering. The thread was pretty damn pleased with FSA. The first tech gave us the ability to pierce Armor and deal unblockable damage; the second tech gave us a disrupt ability. Both of those are super-valuable.
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But given the raw choice—would you rather have an art of a level equivalent to TRF or one equivalent to FSA? Would you rather have ZB+ or a Wind art beginning at Early or Mid Yellow?

tryrar said:
want
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Personally what I want out of Ling Qi's Wind suite is offensive capability and mobility while keeping Ling Qi's role as support in mind. If I were to go hunting for a Early/Mid Yellow Wind Art then FSA and its more support-y derivatives would appease me. I don't have a problem with successor arts, I have a problem with ZB+. A Thunder/Wind support-y sound thing would make me happy. I would not mind something that let Ling Qi kick out blades of wind or ash. Something to make platforms of wind for allies to stand on or to mess with enemy footing would be neat. I'm open to lots of things, as long as the arts are appropriate to Ling Qi's ability. Why is she playing around with something an entire cultivator bracket below her? It is literally below her.

Dieb said:
Why do you think other wind arts in the second floor of the archive will be better than ZB+? Like seriously, what evidence do we have that ZB is worse than other archive arts? The only other archive art we know anything about really is FSA, which you yourself said was on a similar tier.
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FSA's quality isn't important—I might as well assume all late red archive arts are about the same, since art quality really isn't something the thread has power over. It's not really true (ASA had 6 levels to FSA's 5) but it's what I have to work with.

What I'm saying isn't 'get a better art' but 'getting a more advanced art would be better'. Between a Late Red art and an Early or Mid Yellow, which would you expect to have the ability to be more relevant to Ling Qi at Late Yellow? Which will grow into Green? Not ZB+—maybe ZB++ is Green or Late Yellow or something. We can't skip straight to ZB++ or else Ling Qi would eat penalties, but there are other Early/Mid Yellow Wind Arts, I'm sure. Ling Qi has related arts under her belt, even—she's got 6-ish levels in Wind arts already. What more would a art beginning in Early/Mid Yellow require, than a basic grounding in the element? She's even got Wind Mastery for breakthrough. Surely that's enough to learn Early Yellow Wind arts.
 
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Thor's Twin said:
Just a side note here... but with the Sky pills we got, stacked with the Eightfold path pills, we are talking 2 actions to get to get past level 3, and then another action to get past level 4. Wind heart arts are dirt cheap for us to train. If we can expect that this art follows the same progression path as either TRF, or AM then we should be getting past level 2 with just this training session. -5 successes in general for all arts (making ZB+ either a 15 or 25) and then -15 for all other stages after that is a huge boon. Elder Jiao should be able to get us past level 2 of ZB with just this action. Combine that with eightfold path and Sky pill and we are at level 4 in 3 actions.
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You keep counting ZB+ from "level one". Pretty sure it doesn't do that, and stacks on top of ZB. So the first level is ZB4.
 
[X] Driving Zephyr: An evolution of the common wind arts of the south. This branch focuses upon offense, driving forth allied missiles on the scathing eastern winds to strike home in the heart of the enemy
 
[X] Driving Zephyr: An evolution of the common wind arts of the south. This branch focuses upon offense, driving forth allied missiles on the scathing eastern winds to strike home in the heart of the enemy
 
tricholysis said:
But given the raw choice—would you rather have an art of a level equivalent to TRF or one equivalent to FSA? Would you rather have ZB+ or a Wind art beginning at Early or Mid Yellow?
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For your first question, I would be fine with either; I think they are of comparable power level.

For your second question, I don't know. I'd strongly prefer not to pick EITHER if that was an option, which is why I pushed against ZB+. If we are forced to get one or the other, I can't sy I have a strong opinion on which is better.
 
The thing about the art archive is that by elder jiao's admission there are bad arts in there. Like the lightning art. This makes any art search with a specific goal in mind slightly more dangerous because we could pick up an art with a downside and not know about it until later. ZB is an art we have experience with and thus is less likely to have unknown downsides.

One thing to consider is that ZB and its following arts are common arts that every group in this region would have access to. That is way they are in the archive because no one would bother hiding them so many people know about them. But that doesn't make them bad. Every art in the archive, much like the formations, are in there because there is no point to hiding them. Either they have crippling deficiencies but are cool looking, like the lightning art, or common. That is fine however. We don't need to reinvent the wheel, with our arts or our tactics. What has worked well enough for others that it was worth remembering will work well enough for us.

We have seen so little in what arts are capable of at our level. We can only compare what we have to what others are doing at our level. FSA seems superior to those arrows we got attacked with during the thunderdome. We have yet to see a fellow student cast an area of effect debuff with one success like ZB. I think ZB strongest aspect is that we can target the weakest link to debuff the strongest person. That is really good. My hope is that driving zephyer will expound on that aspect. (Really though all the upgrades seem really good)

All this talk about ZB being a trash tier art is a little unsettling. The original ZB is an art that is meant to get people with no support, like how we are, quick, fast ways to engage meaningful with their peers. ZB did a great job with that. The successors to ZB then would also be meant for people like us who do not have family arts to fall back on to meaningfully engage with their peers starting at late red and gold. It's an art who might have been custom made for people with no families and no influence. It does it's job and it does it well. To me a trash tier art would be that lightning art the Elder talked about.

Since we have no idea how effective the arts we are represented with are compared to other arts we really shouldn't be angry by perceived power differences that might not even be there.
 
PrimalShadow said:
For your first question, I would be fine with either; I think they are of comparable power level.

For your second question, I don't know. I'd strongly prefer not to pick EITHER if that was an option, which is why I pushed against ZB+. If we are forced to get one or the other, I can't sy I have a strong opinion on which is better.
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You think Elder Ying stiffed us? With a rough equivalent to something Ling Qi could get for free? Really? You think a late red art is comparable in power level to something that begins in yellow? The realm difference aside, ignoring matters of kind, is FSA so egregiously standout to equal a yellow art, or is TRF so horrifically lowly?

If I exaggerate it—would you think an art for a Green is comparable to an art for a Red, assuming the arts are both made as excellent as possible?
 
tricholysis said:
You think Elder Ying stiffed us? With a rough equivalent to something Ling Qi could get for free? Really? You think a late red art is comparable in power level to something that begins in yellow? The realm difference aside, ignoring matters of kind, is FSA so egregiously standout to equal a yellow art, or is TRF so horrifically lowly?

If I exaggerate it—would you think an art for a Green is comparable to an art for a Red, assuming the arts are both made as excellent as possible?
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No, but that's an art TWO levels above, which is a big difference. A late red compared to an early yellow in't that much more of a jump, and you know it.
 
Thor's Twin said:
Well, we know that ZB+ has five levels, and arts around 5 to 6 levels are what we are accustomed to, so unless ZB is supposed to be an 8 level art, I don't see how it will begin at ZB4.
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Why can't it be an 8 level art? If you start low enough, it is easy enough to have lots of levels.

tricholysis said:
You think Elder Ying stiffed us? With a rough equivalent to something Ling Qi could get for free? Really? You think a late red art is comparable in power level to something that begins in yellow? The realm difference aside, ignoring matters of kind, is FSA so egregiously standout to equal a yellow art, or is TRF so horrifically lowly?
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I think that Elder Ying owes us exactly as good an art as we paid for - which is none at all. Picking out a good art for us is already our luck, and more than fulfills her obligation as a tutor. Expecting an art and a high-level one at that is sheer arrogance and greed.

I don't really care about whether an art begins in Late Red or Early Yellow; why should that one rank make a big difference? What matters more is where it ends, and we don't know where TRF ends yet. Maybe they both end at late Yellow; that would put them on pare with each other.

I'm not sure what you mean by that last question.
 
Neshuakadal said:
All this talk about ZB being a trash tier art is a little unsettling.
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I'm not arguing it's a trash tier art. ZB has a purpose, and ZB+ also has a purpose. I imagine that ZB+ would be perfectly serviceable, maybe even outstanding, if used in the appropriate level of conflict. But Ling Qi fights above that level of conflict, and by the time that she gets ZB+ up to where she is now, she'll have moved on. I don't want her playing catchup with a dragging art. If we were timely about ZB+ then I wouldn't complain. But we haven't been, and we can't make up for that time now. Do you give a 12 year old a book called Run Spot Run? No, they can read just fine. Even if they enjoyed Go Spot Go in the past that doesn't mean they need to also read Run Spot Run. They're past it now.
 
@yrsillar do those 5 levels include the three from ZB or does the 5 start after the three invested in ZB?

If we were to learn a second branch, would those seperate meridians also need the 2 from ZB or would we just start that branch without them?
 
Arts do not stay at the level they started at either. A good example of this are the families arts. ZB might just be the poor mans family art going up all through green.
 
PrimalShadow said:
I think that Elder Ying owes us exactly as good an art as we paid for - which is none at all. Picking out a good art for us is already our luck, and more than fulfills her obligation as a tutor. Expecting an art and a high-level one at that is sheer arrogance and greed.
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I don't care if she did stiff us. That she was fair is great. But you're missing the point. I'm not using Elder Ying as anything more than a way to push the credit of TRF, to show that TRF is worthwhile and is judgable as such at least partially because it has a higher base cultivation than some of Ling Qi's other available arts. It's an art described as a mainstay of an old noble house, not one made by Joe down the street. it has weight all on its own, and that Elder Ying is judged as fair and not miserly in teaching her students because of TRF should be another point in its favor.

But this?
PrimalShadow said:
I don't really care about whether an art begins in Late Red or Early Yellow; why should that one rank make a big difference? What matters more is where it ends, and we don't know where TRF ends yet. Maybe they both end at late Yellow; that would put them on pare with each other.
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This is just a circumlocution—I don't care what your evaluatory method is. You admit here that one art could be better than others (that is, you admit my point)—you just also say 'but my method means that we can't know for sure'. Which is useless as an evaluatory method, because you need a method to give you information so that you can make improved decisions. If your method is 'just pick whatever and hope it goes far' then your results will be more haphazard than someone who uses any systemised method at all. Even if the particulars of the situation ensure that their outcome is worse than your random guesses, their decisionmaking was better.
tryrar said:
No, but that's an art TWO levels above, which is a big difference. A late red compared to an early yellow in't that much more of a jump, and you know it.
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But it is a jump. Why need to make a jump at all? Tall people don't live in houses with one meter roofs—it's too much of a jump. They also don't live in houses with two meter roofs, and if they do then they bump their head a lot and complain about it. Maybe they have no choice, because that's their house and they live there, but maybe they just move somewhere else instead of hit their head all the time and develop a back problem from crouching. Maybe they comfort themselves with the fact that at least they don't have to crawl. They still hit their head and they're still miserable.
 
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Thor's Twin said:
Just a side note here... but with the Sky pills we got, stacked with the Eightfold path pills, we are talking 2 actions to get to get past level 3, and then another action to get past level 4. Wind heart arts are dirt cheap for us to train. If we can expect that this art follows the same progression path as either TRF, or AM then we should be getting past level 2 with just this training session. -5 successes in general for all arts (making ZB+ either a 15 or 25) and then -15 for all other stages after that is a huge boon. Elder Jiao should be able to get us past level 2 of ZB with just this action. Combine that with eightfold path and Sky pill and we are at level 4 in 3 actions.
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Well, the annoying thing with Wind arts are that we still don't have a wind site.
Neshuakadal said:
The thing about the art archive is that by elder jiao's admission there are bad arts in there. Like the lightning art. This makes any art search with a specific goal in mind slightly more dangerous because we could pick up an art with a downside and not know about it until later. ZB is an art we have experience with and thus is less likely to have unknown downsides.
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Well, keep in mind that Elder Jiao has his preferences. He is known for being incredibly Ying, so a pure Yang art being criticised by him isn't exactly surprising.
tricholysis said:
I'm not arguing it's a trash tier art. ZB has a purpose, and ZB+ also has a purpose. I imagine that ZB+ would be perfectly serviceable, maybe even outstanding, if used in the appropriate level of conflict. But Ling Qi fights above that level of conflict, and by the time that she gets ZB+ up to where she is now, she'll have moved on. I don't want her playing catchup with a dragging art. If we were timely about ZB+ then I wouldn't complain. But we haven't been, and we can't make up for that time now. Do you give a 12 year old a book called Run Spot Run? No, they can read just fine. Even if they enjoyed Go Spot Go in the past that doesn't mean they need to also read Run Spot Run. They're past it now.
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ZB+ being in the second floor archive pretty much means it's significantly higher quality than FSA. Think of it as slightly lower quality than AM or AC, both of which begin in late red and have 5 levels too.

That's the comparison you should be making.
 
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