I want to talk about rare pills for a moment.
By "rare pill", I mean anything we can't buy in the sect shop. Here is a listing of all the rare pills we currently possess, in order of how useful they are to Ling Qi:
Sable Light Pill
Grants a bonus Qi expansion roll for EACH Meridian and Yin Art taken.
Grants minor bonuses to Meridians and Yin Arts.
Usable with:
- EPC
- SCS
- FVM
- ZB+
- Meridian Opening
Can be used to provide 4-7 bonus rolls, depending on how well we set up this pill use. The maximum level would require combining closed-door-cultivation and tutoring, with no room for non-applicable actions like raising Zhengui.
Eightfold Path Pill (x2)
Grants a 50% increase to bonus dice provided by Spirit Stones and Pills to arts that use the eight standard elements.
Grants one free Meridian Opening roll.
Useable with:
Can be used to provide 1 bonus roll, and also increase up to 5 arts by ~40% (a bit under 50% because the bonus doesn't apply to everything), for a total of up to ~3 bonus actions worth. That maximum is only achievable if we commit to training each of the above five arts in a single week.
Highsun Pill (x2)
Grants one free Physical Cultivation roll.
Grants minor bonus to Meridian Opening.
Darkmoon Pill
Grants one free Spiritual Cultivation roll.
Grants a minor bonus to Qi Expansion.
Skyblood Elixir (x2)
Grants moderate bonus to cultivation of Wind and Heaven arts.
One fourth of successes from Wind and Heaven arts are added to Spiritual Cultivation.
Useable with:
Provides 1/2 an action's worth of bonus successes.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Alright. Now how do we use these pills?
First, it should be noted that the Skyblood Elixir folds nicely under the Eightfold Path Pill. Furthermore, they synergize nicely, with the Skyblood's moderate bonus getting boosted by 50%, and the Eighfold Path's 50% bonus increasing the successes that then get added to Qi.
Second, the Darkmoon Pill and one Highsun Pill should be taken with the Sable Light Pill, since we are going to be using lots of both Meridian Opening and Qi Expansion on that week.
That leaves only one more Highsun Pill to be assigned, and since that doesn't quite fit anywhere we can leave it aside for the moment.
Now, this means we have three solid "pill weeks" ahead of us:
- Eightfold Path Pill + Skyblood Elixir (training ZB+, FSA, AM, AC, and FVM)
- Eightfold Path Pill + Skyblood Elixir (training ZB+, FSA, AM, and AC; FVM is likely maxed out by this point)
- Sable Light Pill + Highsun Pill + Darkmoon Pill (probably training EPC, possibly training SCS, and using all our other actions on Meridian Opening)
Now, questions of order.
We are probably going to take the first Eightfold Pill Week on week 30, since that is the next even-numbered week after this one (and we only train FVM on even-numbered weeks). This conveniently falls within our month of Elder Tutoring, so we should be able to use the two tutoring slots to take AM + AC or something, which means that after we train the other three arts we still have an action left over for Zhengui/EPC/???.
We want to train the Sable Light Pill next, if nothing else because if we don't, we won't have the open meridians to keep training several of the eightfold-path arts. Some people have floated the idea of doing this on week 31, but I am skeptical of our ability to set it up by then. To be used right, SLP requires tying up the ENTIRE week, including all but one of the minor actions - and 30 sect points on top of that.
Once that is done and we have the meridians, we can of-course move to the second Eightfold week. This one is easier to arrange since it doesn't need to involve FVM; we will already have finished it for Yellow.
