I see, so in the long term the difference between favor and grace is that favor gives more mitigation focused on the high end and grace gives a get out of jail free card for every geas task. Honestly I'm still leaning for favor, since I feel grace will just be burned out now and we won't see it in a long time, but it does feel more equal now. Assuming that those voting for skipping the favor don't start a mass switch for twilight cladding, possibly saving grace for later.
A Simple Transaction I
- Thread starter Rihaku
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I see, so in the long term the difference between favor and grace is that favor gives more mitigation focused on the high end and grace gives a get out of jail free card for every geas task. Honestly I'm still leaning for favor, since I feel grace will just be burned out now and we won't see it in a long time, but it does feel more equal now. Assuming that those voting for skipping the favor don't start a mass switch for twilight cladding, possibly saving grace for later.
No, we are literally outscailing her.
Of course, then there's the question of major procs. Something like Grace would do well to protect us from slipping up during endless eons of our Geas. However, you need to realize that more power means less % of needing that wish, which is the decision point here.
As I've said earlier, I do consider any plan that doesn't involve either Favor or Aobaru buff bad. Like, burning our wish right away means that you both lose power of Favor and safety net of Grace, which is full on ???.
Pretty much, the only two viable combinations are advice/favor and advice/aobaru/grace.
Apo itself needs to ramp at her own pace. As such, we need to ensure certain rate of progression to remain above her natural scailing, so she can only threaten us with "major" procs instead of grinding us down with standard procs. Pillars was a good long term value tool for that reason, for example, although ensuring that our power growth remains consistently strong is still a priority.
Of course, then there's the question of major procs. Something like Grace would do well to protect us from slipping up during endless eons of our Geas. However, you need to realize that more power means less % of needing that wish, which is the decision point here.
As I've said earlier, I do consider any plan that doesn't involve either Favor or Aobaru buff bad. Like, burning our wish right away means that you both lose power of Favor and safety net of Grace, which is full on ???.
Pretty much, the only two viable combinations are advice/favor and advice/aobaru/grace.
Enohthree
Hypersane
Assuming an average task length of 500 years or so, and that we waste it immediately, that's still a promise of roughly 936,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999 defensive Lesser Wishes. Long term investment indeed!
HoratioVonBecker
Imperfectly Aligned
Okay, so. Not sure whether Seraph Halo or ARCHMAEG is more effective at empowering my Soul Evocation, which I presume is already pretty 'holy fire' themed, but in retrospect Party of Heroes eclipses them both - I grabbed two sets of Protagonist And Companions, which means a total of 90(!) Arete worth of powerup! (In 10 sets of 2 and 7, which means it's probably a lot closer to 25 Arete in terms of 'real' power. Oh, and it also gives the Rank portion of Companions of the King.)
Still, that's really solid. I may or may not have lost my Least Wish for trading in the Quill with its' own Consolidation Vote, but if I have - and, considering that I don't value a Least Wish all that highly; it's more or less just a year of my own time - it's actually even better, because I get another Quill I can either keep for +Luck and 2 picks 2 arete, or trade in, again, for another artifact. (Probably a second Moral Halo, or maybe a second Maeg Staff. Noble Praxis would be kind of cool, actually. Presumably it's actually designed to be useful, at least in the long term, and it probably provides the best long-term scaling.)
Final build:
Two Maeg Staves - +Int, +Wis, +Wits, ++Will, 7-Arete Soul Evocation, Noble Praxis. (Which can eventually be refined into Royal Praxis!)
Moral Halo - +++ All Stats, +.5 External Rank.
Ten 'Party of Heroes' Bracelets - Grants Minimum Rank: 3, 2-Arete Soul Evocation, and a 7-Arete Advancement. 7-Arete Advancement can quite possibly be Noble Praxis access, going by the Staff options.
Honestly, this is possibly even stronger in the long term than Inheritor: Librarian + All Paths, although probably not stronger than those plus Further Beyond Baenlixnaire's Deliberation and access to the Imperial Numerals. It's got solid early power in Soul Evocation, and apparently Praxis buffs to other magics are a thing, so it's possible that my presumably-heavy-on-healing-type-stuff Soul Evocation could fill in for the Praxis' main weakness while drawing on it for relevance.
Fun! I half-expect to reach Wolber tier with this build, although the gap between Imperial Praxis and Royal may be enough to overcome the fact that he has lots of Curses and I don't have any. Also, he's good enough that I kind of think he'll be joining someone's Retinue eventually, which would totally obviate that idea. (Also, this omake scenario almost certainly takes place after victory for Team Accursed, so possibly I don't even have a good shot at joining someone else's Retinue myself. Although my Bracelets do make me a good vector for expanding that Remittance further...)
I think an underrated aspect of Favour is the type of mitigation it gives. All other Apoc mitigation we've gotten so far has lowered how dangerous the Proc is by 5-10%. Favour instead has a 5% chance of stopping any apoc proc regardless of any mitigation levels or apocryphal buffs (which we decided to take for some reason 👀).
A 1 in 20 chance of stopping any apoc proc is a major bonus. If we assume 1 proc a month (that's a very conservative estimate) this Geas task will have a minimum of 600 more apoc procs, that's 30 times that Favour will save us on the low end just during this Geas task! It might even kick in for this buffed proc!
A 1 in 20 chance of stopping any apoc proc is a major bonus. If we assume 1 proc a month (that's a very conservative estimate) this Geas task will have a minimum of 600 more apoc procs, that's 30 times that Favour will save us on the low end just during this Geas task! It might even kick in for this buffed proc!
We'd have to take options to increase our power every time a proc happens but we only have to take Grace once to benefit from the defensive wishes it provides. And there's no way Favor will provide enough power to render every Apocryphal proc irrelevant.
- Location
- Pindorama
It does render 5% of all Apocryphal procs irrelevant though; when you consider there's a chance it triggers every proc vs the Grace saving us only once pear Geas, the safety they provide start becoming a lot more comparable. Unlike Geas defense it is random, but it may actually help us a lot more over the course of our journey, even if the chances of it saving us outright are low. After all, even if something can't kill us or overturn us it can still cause painful losses, like the Tower vote showed; and Favor would help protect against that too. They are both just different forms of Apocryphal Mitigation at the end of the day; I wouldn't discount either of them.
That's not how it works.
We can only benefit from defensive wish once per task.
It doesn't have to.
It only needs to make failing Apo proc half as likely as Grace build. At that point you need two defensive wishes for Grace build to compete as at that point Grace build is more likely to fail, use wish to survive and then fail again than Favor build is to fail a single time.
Of course, this kind of long term consideration is whatever as we can get relevant stuff anyway. More important is that we can't afford to take Grace with intention of burning it right away, as it would mean that we are much susceptible to get slowly withheld down.
Basically banking wishes is not realistic choice here, while Favor and Grace are somewhat similar in value.
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Look, if we'd taken Serendipity, I'd be much more interested in Favor. 5% is much more valuable when it adds to 14%. Since we didn't, though, and instead went for decreasing the curses power, and will probably continue to do so, I don't see it as useful.
Is that for sure? We've had an insane growth rate, and while the Rotbeast and Ber can be explained by the boost from letting us pick the procs, and our current problem by a combination of Strain and a major proc, but Augustine was given the perfect tools to defeat us despite Mitigation and having an even more absurd growth rate than previously right before the war. We've been told multiple times that she isn't limited power-wise and that she could repeatedly throw Odyssial-level challenges at us if we're unlucky, so while I can accept that 'independent threat rating increase' is part of her rules, I'll need more evidence for that.
Having to roll for Apo 5% less feels really good, however. If we are assuming average proc a month, that would make it, what, around 900 dedictilon Apo procs we didn't have to even try to survive.
How would you "outscale" her if her power was directly correlated to ours?
We were more or less throwing Augustine fight(saving everyone, getting greedy picks such as Fisher King or Tower etc) and we would still win that fight anyway. Which is telling of how relatively weak Apo is, really, when even with our greedy gameplay and access to endboss and us running into mage's center of power it only managed ~three pick fight.
- Location
- Pindorama
?????
Both Grace and favor work in terms of averting procs, so are they both bad or something? Apocryphal procs only hinder us and easily qualify as the biggest danger of this Quest, one that can charge up to hit us all the harder. Avoiding as many as we can is in fact in our best interest. I really don't further understand this argument because Serendipity was competing opportunity-cost wise with Pillars, and most people would agree that the latter is more valuable; no one would think Serendipity is actually bad. So if we recognize it was good but couldn't take it due to opportunity cost, why not take something like it now? All as an ancillary benefit of Favor.
Like, do you think adverting 5% of procs is bad or something? I don't get it.
We would have won against Augustine, we just would have some sacrifice to go along with it. We could have also played the lead-up to fight better to be honest, but even then the risk of death was 0%. Geas protection would not have actually help against Augustine, amusingly enough. Presumably if we did side with the actual competent person and not the Royals, the Apocryphal would have had much more difficulty threatening us; and we did fact receive warnings about this before the faction vote that as usual we glided over in favor of morality, so.
Through Mitigation, which makes 'standard' procs less dangerous.
And yes, we made quite a few suboptimal decisions concerning Augustine, but when I look at Ber's growth rate during the Temple arc and at the Augustine proc, they don't really look comparable to me in the absolute sense, which should have been the case if Apocrypha scaled independently of us.
Quote I've posted was before we've get more mitigation. Plus, you'd never use term "outscaling" in that context anyway.
I have no idea what point are you trying to make? Ber had higher relative growth, but he had more time to grow. Augustine had higher absolute growth, but she also had access to better tools and Apo was stronger at that point.
Grace is certain to activate when we need it most unlike Favor. Being able to negate 5% of all Apocryphal procs is not that great when it is such an unreliable mitigation and the Apocryphal only has to succeed once to kill Hunger.
Then what have we been doing every time the Apocryphal curse procs?
Which is guaranteed to work.
If Apocryphal procs that will cause certain death are common enough for 5% negation chance to matter then nothing we do is going to allow Hunger to survive the Apocryphal.
- Location
- Louisiana
I mean realistically how many geas tasks are we gonna see, this one task lasts a max of 2500 years, minimum of 50. The game hasn't seen a single year yet. Even including timeskips I don't see us having many Haeliel interrupts. It's more for if you want a good epilogue than if you want a safer game, and I feel like for the game itself I'd rather the 5% apocryphal proc mitigation, and the massive power boost.
- Location
- Pindorama
Ah, I remembered the quote existed, so checking the Statement Index:
So the answer is that it scales imperfectly sometimes and and doesn't scale at other times, and occasionally doesn't threaten our safety at all. This Curse is really indecisive!
But Rihaku did say getting some immediate power would be wise, so there's a real chance that the next proc directly threatens us and more power would be relevant:
That's why I'd much prefer Exaltation to win with Grace rather than saving our Wish here.
Hey, with Gisena, Companions of the King, etc; we easily might need to be killed more than once! Not to mention it compensates for the fact it might not save us by being there literally every other proc, and not only saving us but adverting any of it's consequences entirely! They are much more comparable in value than you imply.
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As for the second half, what I meant is that having Serendipity makes similar forms of mitigation better, which it needs to be even the equal of Grace in that regard, since Grace specifically triggers on procs that beat us. And it needs to, because I'm not entirely convinced the OaF bonus is better than Exalting Aobaru (it definitely isn't in the short term, and I'm less interested in continuing that path than other EFBs).
If the Apocryphal curse were to drop a 5 pick on us with Favor we'd only have a 5% chance of avoiding it. With Grace we'd have a 100% chance of avoiding it.
Thanks for the quotes. Though concerning Aobaru's Exaltation, it's only really helpful for the next proc if it improves his power quickly enough to be comparable to our own or stronger. It doesn't say Haeliel invests him with immediate power, but rather talks about Progression and 'ultimate ceiling'. It's very useful over the longer-term, but is he going to improve quickly enough to matter during the next proc?
Then if Apoc dropped another 5 pick fight a month or two later we would have a 0% chance of avoiding it with Grace and a 5% of avoiding it with Favour.
90.25% chance of two five picks vs 100% of one, I think I'd rather fight one.
It would allow him to help in crafting magic money thing, so it does something right away. I'm assuming that it would make him somewhat more relevant against the proc; otherwise there's no Favorless build that doesn't immediately burn the Wish.
