Hm... if you guys are so heavily into Honing, you should consider saving Arete for Blood Advancements rather than buying Flight, since the tactical function of Flight doesn't really benefit from higher INT in most combats. You hit them with the Deathly, there's not much thinking required!
I know you're the QM, and besides that you're also very good at optimizing these fantasy builds. But it seems like the question of whether our purchases to synergize with each other is much less important than the question of whether our purchases synergize with our build.

Falling Stars massively extends Hunger's stamina in prolonged conflicts against numerically superior enemies. It also lets us give the blade a break: we could Deathly Star the first two mild inconveniences we meet each day before even needing to draw our blade. We would still have the third Deathly Star in reserve as a big gun, the same as we do now.

Meanwhile, Honing is extremely useful for fights that do not activate Deathly Star, when we are forced to draw the Forebear's Blade. Because of the shattering's stamina malus, it's important for us to finish things quickly and decisively. Any strikes that we make (using the sword) should be aimed at weak points to maximize DPS and minimize stress on the blade. Combat INT will help to speed up analysis and identify vulnerabilities.


Now that I lay it out like this, maybe we could consider voting for a greedier Grace combination. Two picks are already being invested into power, and Mental Clarion would be good for accelerating Gisena's research rate...
 
So, I can't promise a full 100K in two week(much like last time, I don't think I can manage that) but I think another 50K before our Christmas bonus wears out should be doable. Pretty sure this Vote's gonna end before I finish that first tenth. Say, @Rihaku, if we hit 15 Arete or so, will that affect Build Cleanup? Or perhaps, trigger the option to increase it, or do we not have the Picks for that?
 
Fanwork#1000 words

My choice of Ten Thousand has continued to be my salvation from otherwise untenable boredom. I had thought the flight from Eaman's Hook to the Sweetwater was bad, but the wait to have our contract inscribed at the Stones has been even worse, despite only taking about half as long. At first, I genuinely thought that there might be some sort of magical aura of boredom, perhaps to discourage frivolous use of the Stones, but I couldn't find confirmation of any such thing. It's possible that I just quite liked flying, and that helped me pass the time.

It wasn't too bad for me to handle, though. Demonstrating my Verses to the Madam went fine, she was even somewhat impressed with the sheer stamina I had for spellcasting, though that was moderated by the fact that I was benefitting from Ten Thousand separately from my Verses. The Madam has not taken well to learning Verse herself, unfortunately, but she persisted, achieving her first success with Stitch in Time, which she prioritized for the combination of security and versatility it offered, which I could appreciate.

I'd successfully discovered a new Verse as well, which I'd made a modicum of progress on. I wasn't entirely sure how to translate it into English, as I only had a rough idea of what it did. It seemed to transform items, sort of, in a way that was reminiscent of Problem Sleuth. Incanting the Verse while holding an item transformed it into another, and incanting it again transformed it back. There were some inscrutable criteria for what would transform into what, as well as what I couldn't transform at all, and I could sort of feel that there was more to the Verse that I hadn't really grasped yet. Regardless, it would probably help me carry more cargo once I'd mastered it, given how it tended to have larger objects transform into smaller ones and vice-versa.

My Step Up had continued to improve as well. I'd lowered the incantation length and the cooldown by about a quarter, increased the distance by a couple feet, and was starting to feel the improved intelligence augmentation as well, though I hadn't found a good way to parameterize it yet. There wasn't any expansion to its overall remit, but I had anticipated that would be the slowest area of improvement, and overall I was happy with my improvement considering it'd only been about two weeks since I'd arrived in the Reaches.

And really, that had been just about everything that had happened, up until we finally got into the house of the Stones. The Madam had gone on a number of meetings throughout the city, reaffirming her business connections, showing me off, picking up gossip, as well as eating and drinking more than enough for her size, but ultimately no new business came of it, not yet at least. The Madam gave me a copy of the contract she sent for the house's preview a few hours before we were expected to appear at the stones, which would have been rather unfair if I didn't have Ten Thousand to let me speed read it. Fortunately, I didn't need to litigate anything in it, it was a faithful translation of the informal details she's already given me into the particular dialect of legalese the house dictated for use with the Stones.
The House of the Stones of Law was, appropriate enough, up in the castle proper, on the monolithic bridge that hung over the city. I flew the two of us up, we waited for maybe an hour at the house's door until the party ahead of us in the queue cleared out, and finally we entered the house. The atmosphere was the oddest mixture of office space and ritual chamber, with room dominated by eight stone tablets, each one managing to dwarf even the Madam at somewhere in the ballpark of fifty feet tall and about a dozen feet wide, each with a nearly solid block of text near the top, which was presumably all of the contracts currently enforced. Around the stones were ladders, presumably for the scribes to scale them, and further out were a couple dozen desks and as many clerks dressed in black tunics and pants. One of the clerks headed to a nearby ladder and called a number, ours apparently given the Madam stepped up, and I followed.

The actual scribing was apparently mostly done, and after the clerk read through the contract one more time to confirm, the Madam and I each smeared a drop of blood across our names at the end of the contract, causing the stone to briefly pulse with red light. I could feel something settle on me, a bit like pressure, but only briefly, which I could only assume was the magic of the Stones taking effect. The Madam seemed unperturbed, which made sense, this was probably routine for her. As we made our way back to her riverboat, she seemed rather upbeat even, which was a bit infectious, as I and seemingly the rest of the crew were in good spirits as we traveled up the Sweetwater.

It was a lot more relaxed, now that the Madam didn't feel like she needed to have me in her sights all the time. I spent a good amount of time flying around, getting a feel for how the landscape changed as we went further south and steadily climbed up the foothills of the Shadowback. The weather became gentler, more snow than storm, and the land grew from mostly flat to rippled and bumpy, and more of the trees were the dark skeletons of the deciduous kind than green conifers that were more common further north. The Bellevue farms, mostly fallow for the winter, were carved into the earth, hills turned into terraces, streams into irrigation. I could picture how it might look in summer, once all the plants were grown and green, laying over the land like a verdurous blanket, and I thought it'd be something I'd like to see.

AN: Sorry for being relatively brief this time. A confluence of forces lead me to not really having the energy to put more into this chapter. Chapter 4 will be the last we see of the High Linguist for a while, since it will be the end of his beginning will be followed by a considerable time skip of several years. I'll switch gears to writing at least a single chapter for the two other CYOAs that have come out since then.

-e

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[X] Make Whole + Sealing Protocol Level I
[X] Honing
[X] Save


Switching around again.
 
[X] Flight of Falling Stars
[X] Honing
[X] Make Whole + Sealing Protocol Level I



So there's an interaction in Build Cleanup which I think hasn't been elaborated on that much - Iridescence gives us a 1/day defense against Nullity which is really vital for running Nullity in combat imo.

Rihaku said:
Iridescence - 2 Arete

The sharp light of the stars before which all malice is lessened.

+Protection, +Charisma. Expands the range of effects subject to the Evening Sky, allowing it to passively weaken almost all forms of magic. Even Nullity itself can be once withstood before the Sky recedes.

Right now, Hunger's stats are still lagging behind our powerlevel to my knowledge - I don't want to take Nullity without being able to keep our own magics assuming Gisena spams Nullity in battle.

Also, there have been arguments brought up against Iridescence such as the Human Sphere largely being a sci-fi setting and not having as much magic, and so the value of Iridescence's magic resistance drops. But this is also applicable to Nullity, right? Gisena's Nullity is still mostly relevant in scenarios with a lot of magic.

In light of this, I think we should either stick to Flight + Honing and take a different Gisena build, or take Build Cleanup + Vanquisher/Auspice. The rahwagon is strong but I really don't want to take combat Nullity without appropriate defenses against it ourselves.
 
[X] Archsmith's Hammer + Evoker's Panoply
[X] Flight of Falling Stars
[X] Honing



Sorry Rah, Kuro and Red convinced me that Combat Gisena isn't strictly necessary, so I vastly prefer the option with +Potential and +Artifice.
 
Right now, Hunger's stats are still lagging behind our powerlevel to my knowledge - I don't want to take Nullity without being able to keep our own magics assuming Gisena spams Nullity in battle.

Also, there have been arguments brought up against Iridescence such as the Human Sphere largely being a sci-fi setting and not having as much magic, and so the value of Iridescence's magic resistance drops. But this is also applicable to Nullity, right? Gisena's Nullity is still mostly relevant in scenarios with a lot of magic.

In light of this, I think we should either stick to Flight + Honing and take a different Gisena build, or take Build Cleanup + Vanquisher/Auspice. The rahwagon is strong but I really don't want to take combat Nullity without appropriate defenses against it ourselves.
We have about 40k Ruin Str. We have about 200 Prot for Iridescence. I really don't need to say anything else here, really.

Additionally we have Armor of Midnight upgraded to essentially be available for every fight.
 
[X] Archsmith's Hammer + Evoker's Panoply
[X] Save
[X] Honing


One last ride. Can these few souls overcome the runaway train of Rah13?!
 
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[X] Archsmith's Hammer + Evoker's Panoply
[X] Honing
[X] Save


Switching again, since Overlady Gisena probably is about as helpful survival-wise as being just a bit closer to fully healed.
 
Also, we really need to get Shatter the Pane already. With Armor and RoB we are hilariously tanky, meaning that only the mightiest attacks can do shit to us; once we get Shatter the Pane even that is taken care of, getting us as close to invincibility as we can get. Quickening is not terrible substitute, but we can(and likely will) get stuck protecting our allies or other stuff we care for.
 
DID SOMEONE SAY SAVE

[X] Vanquisher's Grace + Auspice Temporal
[X] Honing
[X] Save


But seriously don't fuck around we didn't get a single power-focused EFB when we could have gotten two so at least take Combatsena for next Hunger Sated target/Apo proc ok?
 
[X] Archsmith's Hammer + Evoker's Panoply
[X] Honing
[X] Save

S A V E. Do it for Adorie's Second companion EFB!
 
There's a second phase of build votes, Sickul. 'Save' just means saving arete for when we can see the other options.
 
There's a second phase of build votes, Sickul. 'Save' just means saving arete for when we can see the other options.

Did that get added, because it looks like we spend the picks on echoes and save the Arete for a future EFB?

[ ] Save - Just buy Echoes and save for an EFB.

Though Honing plus Echoes might go a long way towards getting our stats to where they need to be, and fixing our speed problem with Armaments.
 
Save for an EFB, in the second phase of build votes, I think.
 
I guess that's a way to look at it. I had assumed that this was just the vote on what Gisena does with her research-credits, with a couple of Hunger options thrown in.
i think he's right. the picks we don't spend here get invested into echoes:
How should Hunger spend his remaining picks and Arete? Any unspent picks will be spent on Echo of the Forebear, whose Might now yields explosive value wth the Refinement of Battle.
 
I tried to do an effortpost about the different Gisena builds, but I don't have much to say that hasn't already been discussed. We have 4 problems:

  1. Apo-chan has saved up 7 Days of power for us
  2. We need to reapply A Hunger Sated
  3. Our Sword is damaged, which puts a time-limit on every serious fight we stumble into
  4. We need to chase down and kill the Chains of Fate enemy
  5. We need to conquer the Human Sphere
Problem 2 is a bit thorny: if we go on a Hunt with Grail Keeper active then we can't use ADS because it needs two arms. I think that Grail Keeper is going to be harsher than the thread predicted.​
Problem 1&2 are connected: if our Huntress' Moon target is outside Nilfel then we are in danger of Apo, and if it is inside Nilfel then we use up our leeway from Season's Greetings.​
Problem 3 makes everything harder, although tripling our use of Deathly Star per day mitigates this somewhat.​

So. The options:

Clarion + Apex doesn't solve the short term risks from Apo or Decimator, but it might be the best option for hunting down Aobaru's assassin.

Make Whole + Sealing Protocol somewhat reduces the short term risks by extending how long Hunger can use the Blade. Make Whole also has (very) long-term safety considerations b/c of resurrection. However, this doesn't do much to put Hunger ahead of where we were at the start of the RoE visit.

Vanquisher + Temporal dramatically reduces the short term risks. Rank 9 Gisena can bodyguard Hunger and help him win fights faster. This option also has long term scaling from extra research / artifice time. Temporal combines with her Rank 9 Ringcasting in the domain of time.

Hammer + Panoply does not solve the short term Apo/Decimator problem. Single-use items are valuable Apo-mitigation, once Gisena has some time to tinker. This build is likely to fix the blade eventually, but not as fast as Make Whole. It is massively useful for chasing down the Chains of Fate enemy, and conquering the Human Sphere.


Writing these out, I like Hammer + Panoply because we're already spending 9A on Falling Stars + Honing for DPS, Dodge, and combat INT. Hunger's limited stamina isn't a problem if he can just nuke the first three annoyances he meets each day. With Hunger's personal safety mostly covered, let's invest Gisena's 6A into an option with the potential to provide relevant equipment for the entire Rank 9 Party!
 
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