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A Simple Transaction I

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[X] Artemisinin
[X] Direct Mitigation
[X] Pillars of Creation

Preliminary vote, may change depending on Arete. Though admittedly it would require a whole lot for me to not vote for Pillars. If we have the Arete I don't know if I would choose Serendipity or Elder Sign.
 
[X] Artemisinin
[X] Direct Mitigation

I'm undecided on the Advancement(s), but feel surprisingly strongly about not complicating our Apocryphal mitigation with something like Golden Hour or Serendipity. Decreasing the difficulty of procs is far more valuable than lowering their frequency; we're more likely to survive a slew of weaker adversaries than somewhat less common attacks by stronger foes. Straightforward Apocryphal mitigation is virtually required to run the gauntlet of probability in the long term. Don't get sidetracked by these shiny temptations, just think of how good it'll feel to have the Apocryphal Curse down to 72.5% strength inside Hunger's first couple months as a Cursebearer!
 
[X] Artemisinin
[X] Direct Mitigation
[X] Pillars of Creation


Rihaku said:
Elder Sign + Foremost Blade is worth a strong look... especially combined with Fisher King, you could be looking at 12+ Accursed Favor less than two months into your Cursebearing life!
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and then die soon after due to getting tricked into allowing 4-pick fights! As far as I can tell, the pick value is tied very directly to the risk we face, so I don't understand any way that pursuing those fights can be expected to be beneficial long term.
 
[X] Artemisinin

I don't like Foremost Blade at all as a mitigation, and it costs a bunch of Arete. Also, fuck Fisher King. What a huge waste of Arete and picks that could've been saved, the whole thing much more easily handled with Honing + Iridescence.

[X] Direct Mitigation

Golden Hour looks good, and is probably synergistic with Pillars, but simple and direct is the way to go with the greatest challenge we face. Cut Through.

Serendipity is amazing, APK rides again. But missing out on a month of Pillars is...too inefficient....

[X] Pillars of Creation

At last, the Hour of Tasty Fruit-er...Victory, is at hand! More precisely, 21 days of it.

[X] Iridescence

Sweet sweet magic resistance...

Anyways, if we manage to get up to enough Arete, I wouldn't be against Pillars/Elder Sign or better yet, Pillars/Serendipity. It might be better to save up Arete to speedblitz Ruling Ring during our first Pillars Vacation, but that can keep waiting, whereas a unique mitigation/unique advancement can't.
 
Hirorubie said:
I believe it can, but it will eventually run dry, so to speak.
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Redshirt Army said:
At base, it's been strongly implied it can only do so a limited number of times. With something like Foremost Blade, that likely becomes unlimited.
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Ok, so at the very least it represents a fallback option if we can't find an acceptable target before the Decimator's Affliction turns back on, which is nice. We'd probably want to upgrade Foremost Blade to require less dangerous fights before we started using that particular mitigation strategy, though :V
 
DarkSideBard said:
[X] Iridescence

Sweet sweet magic resistance...

Anyways, if we manage to get up to enough Arete, I wouldn't be against Pillars/Elder Sign or better yet, Pillars/Serendipity. It might be better to save up Arete to speedblitz Ruling Ring during our first Pillars Vacation, but that can keep waiting, whereas a unique mitigation/unique advancement can't.
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We don't have Opalescence yet, IIRC, so we can't buy Iridescence and Pillars, since we only have two picks.
 
Aabcehmu said:
For the sake of Pillars + Elder Signs, I'll get to work on Ruby.
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Elder Signs is good, yeah. Double teleport is actually super strong - right now, we can go somewhere, but we need to wait a day to get back. With Elder Sign we can hop to and back within moments, which has a lot of usefulness. On the other hand, upgrade to Enclosure are nice in general, but they would be completely bonkers with Bring to Heel. Plus, we preemptively upgrade super powerful 5th Signs and allow Hunger to help in their research!
 
vali said:
It's interesting to compare the rings of Hunger and Time to each other. I believe the Accursed purified the ring Hunger? Did he change something fundamental? Could we replicate this on the Gisena's ring to make it more compatible with her? And yes technically that's murder but it's a ring not a person and it's probably evil, which may or may not change the moral calculus.
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Nah, not murder - brain surgery, possibly without consent, and for the purposes of mind control. It's different!
vali said:
Here's Seram in the Manifest Realm. Notice the description of the sky. Pink and teal clouds, not quite opalescence but decidedly abnormal.
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Huh. I wonder if the symmetry stuff we've been seeing means that we'll be fighting Super Seram. Maybe a version with mastered Chrysopoeia? Infinite T1 stats are on par with middling T2, which would sort of fit with an opponent we have to scale really hard to beat.
Wolfy said:
One big difference between this and Rank is that ISH, as far as we know, doesn't cap out.
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Um. Neither does Rank? At the very least it doesn't with To Shatter Heaven applied, but Letrizia said that "in theory you could go even higher, but the only way to even reach Rank 10 is by building around a Curse".
 
Aabcehmu said:
We don't have Opalescence yet, IIRC, so we can't buy Iridescence and Pillars, since we only have two picks.
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Rihaku said:
You can also write in if you'd prefer to buy Honing, Iridescence etc.
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When we had the Fisher King vote I remember the Honing package being offered at a rate that made it seem like Opalescence + Iridescence was packaged together now as 1 Pick 2 Arete, perhaps from absorbing Tower (all that Prot was just a bunch of Opalescence O.O) and from Rihaku's comment that still seems to be the case? But it's possible that I'm misreading the situation.
 
Rolling for encounter.

-e

Regular encounter. Rolling for training interruption.

-e2

Training completed, then encounter.
Aabcehmu threw 1 20-faced dice. Reason: Encounter, DC 15 Total: 13
13 13
Aabcehmu threw 1 20-faced dice. Reason: Training interrupted, DC 5 Total: 17
17 17
 
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Wolfy said:
Elder Signs is good, yeah. Double teleport is actually super strong - right now, we can go somewhere, but we need to wait a day to get back. With Elder Sign we can hop to and back within moments, which has a lot of usefulness. On the other hand, upgrade to Enclosure are nice in general, but they would be completely bonkers with Bring to Heel. Plus, we preemptively upgrade super powerful 5th Signs and allow Hunger to help in their research!
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Nightmare Flight is also a perfect defense if Hunger can react fast enough, he can just keep it charged and peace out whenever someone cuts loose with an attack his Rank can't simply ignore. Useful, especially since this week's Silver charge was expended against Augustine.

Also, huh, Artemisinin is an anti-malarial drug, mitigating Decimation on both sides of the fourth wall.
 
HoratioVonBecker said:
Um. Neither does Rank? At the very least it doesn't with To Shatter Heaven applied, but Letrizia said that "in theory you could go even higher, but the only way to even reach Rank 10 is by building around a Curse".
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It's apparently Astral related, and Astral is only on ISH 2. Still, Rank should cap out eventually.

As an aside, we could get SitS now, provided we've got Fisher King. We'd need a couple of Arete, but it's doable. It's not something I'd want to get over Pillars, but massive NotDying and conditional Rank 11.5 Combat/Blood Rank is always something to consider. Plus it doubles OaF II in future - +0.4ISH for all our stats and abilities really is something.

But yeah, Pillars into Ruling Ring sounds way too good.
 
I should probably be persuaded away from Serendipity, but I won't abandon Foremost Blade. That mystery box just looks too nice!
Anyway, I'll try to get two Philosopher updates out before Wednesday, but it may take votes to tear me away from Gideon the Ninth long enough to do so!
 
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[X] Pillars of Creation

I don't have the spare fucks to really consider the other stuff right now, but I plan on mining and if I'm mining I should be voting for something.
 
I do think people are sleeping on Foremost Blade quite a bit. So far, what we've seen of Huntress's Moon shows it to be a sort of Apocryphal Curse Lite, pointing us squarely at the targets that would cause the most problems for us to deal with.

Being able to become sated from any fight of sufficient difficulty is a massive qualitative difference in that regard - four pick fights are too rich for our blood as things stand, but there's a number of pretty obvious avenues to reduce the difficulty - first and foremost Fisher King, since reducing the difficulty of a fish based four pick encounter by 20% while keeping the full Decimators Mitigation is obscenely good, especially in combination with Pillars of Creation to create an infinite supply of such encounters.

With further mitigation, it's very easy to see how some time down the line we'd be able to turn a Major Curse (!) into "Hunger must fight a two-pick fish in his paradise dimension every so often".
 
TooSlow said:
[X] Artemisinin
[X] Direct Mitigation
[X] Pillars of Creation

Direct mitigation only becomes better each time we take it.

++ Progression may allow less risky fights to provide 4 picks.
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This would be an amazingly cheaty work around, but I don't think it scans. The mitigation is explicitly about difficulty, so it won't work like that.

Instead of thinking about Ruling Ring's ++Progression as increasing the number of picks we get for the same effort, think of it as increasing the amount of advancement each pick is worth.

So Advancements that were 4 picks may only require 2 picks after RR, and 1 pick might get 10 times the stats, but 4 pick fights won't change difficulty.

Nice try though. If you were right then Foremost Blade would be so overwhelmingly superior that we would absolutely have to jump for it, even if it meant delaying Pillars slightly.
 
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