- Location
- Over there
If we're holding Moose back we're still slowing his progression. I feel like the endpoint of this strategy is Moose falling behind in levels until we're about as strong as him, at which point there's no benefit to taking BOF.
- Location
- Over there
Not if the skill gets deleted every time you go down a floor.
Olivebirdy
mook.
It's seriously driving me nuts that there's so little motivation for Invulnerabilty. It's probably in the top ten defensive spells, maybe top five, it's got to be better than an extra 500,000 gold. Complete negation of all damage. Add to that that Taylor specifically has a class that can break one of its main limitations, that it must affect only the caster, that's incredible! And Taylor doesn't have a range limit on it, nor does the target need to be in our contacts. It's much better than Grease, which affects groundbound, melee units only. It's much better than gold, which we can make in other ways. So why is there so little interest? There's lots of ways it could be used in creative ways, from kamikaze attacks to suicide bombing to negating fall damage to playing bait to shielding others. Doing things that otherwise have lethal drawbacks. Taking potions or stepping in traps that would kill us. And it's not only limited to Taylor, imagine what Carl could do with a 'You'll be immune to all damage in five minutes' message. It's a skill that can help anyone in danger we're aware of. It's not just our team in here.
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- Location
- Over there
If Hard Cash gets enough votes to be competitive I'll remove my vote for millionaire.
- Location
- Pacific standard
Sure it's a common race, but at the same time it gave us a skill that we were also really concerned about getting while also synergising well with Leo's current build and viewers.
Housecatkin is dope.
Housecatkin is dope.
Opportunity cost.
Outsourcing avoids having to sacrifice taking classes with abilities which become more powerful as they scale, like Bounty Hunter/Banana Farmer/Boring Ol' Fighter, just to look at examples from Moose. (This is from a god's eye POV - from a player POV, it might just be that you don't have a certain ability on hand, for whatever reasons.) Of course there's undeniably a big advantage to knowing you will always have a key ability on call, rather than losing it if your hired boobytrap expert dies/decides to leave.
But there's also an advantage to greater power scaling allowing you to kill more bosses and gain more fans, letting you get more XP, items and gold, allowing you to kill more bosses, gaining more fans, XP, items and gold... It feels like surviving in the late game at all requires you to stay on the right side of a pretty punishing exponential curve, so it's something to think about seriously, I think.
Now, it might be that this is not commonly a thing because the "transaction costs" on Crawlers communicating and buying/selling services are too high to be practical, or perhaps Borant deliberately tries to disincentivise it somehow. This is why I asked if we could ask Levi - I'm not sure, but it feels potentially quite useful for both parties given some assumptions.
This seems to be... not particularly plausible as I understand the levelling system?
We get to dynamically choose how we employ Moose, just as with any party member, and even as "air support", he's still going to be accruing XP. I'd expect Moose to generally stay a couple of levels ahead of the rest of the party, as he has done throughout the story so far, which is honestly... fine?
(I'd expect this might also be true if we pick Bounty Hunter, FWIW.)
The discussion about Moose has kind of taken over now, I think. I can't remember if I actually voted on Drew's picks before we were voting on our next destination. But for what it's worth, I'll edit in a vote for Hard Cash to my vote!
This seems to be assuming the utility abilities won't scale, and that's a worrying assumption. Being able to disassemble dungeon traps and then reemploy them would definitely scale, and I see no reason the variety of perception abilities available to SED wouldn't scale either.
- Location
- Pacific standard
Picture this: we're on a low budget show on the earth's surface. We have our inventories on because the aliens are just holos, and we're watching a livestream of some crawlers dying. One is about to be torn in half and Taylor just goes "nah"
Olivebirdy
mook.
Excellent!
Beautiful.
I expect to get messages like 'Help! Samuel E.!', and we just stop some random crawler in our contact list's unknown friend from getting cored.
This is where Seeing Eye Dog shines, as Moose would be able to tell us that there's crawlers in trouble and their names from far away.
Incidentally, self-cast spells are actually better for us than LoS spells. Because they're limited, they're allowed to be more powerful in other ways, and we can cast them much farther to any crawler.
Imagine how much power and influence that would give us. Anyone on our contacts would know that we could save them if we're warned ahead of time. What would they not give for a get-out-of-sudden-death card?
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- Location
- Over there
Moose: HELP! TIM E. FELL DOWN A WELL!
Yeah, but that will also be true to an extent of an outsourced "Utility Mercenary" you hire; given that Skill Levels scale on practice using rather than XP. Although adding in items probably changes this somewhat, they can collect a fee for their services and purchase items. Overall, you might expect a "utility mercenary" to end up somewhat worse in their niche than a character participating fully in killing bosses with the same class, and much worse in combat obviously... but that might still be a positive-sum trade if it allows the character with strong scaling abilities to level/gear up much harder.
Bluntly, whilst I think there are certainly likely to be scaling benefits from a lot of utility abilities, they are not necessarily intended to be equal. This is a dungeon crawling game, and at the most fundamental level, our progression depends on the ability to kill lots of bosses. The format kind of requires that not all abilities are equally useful in all contexts, or optimisation has no point, and we know already that optimisation is one major aspect of the game.
Now, there are certainly likely to be "utility" classes which start rather weak, and by level fifteen are going "Haha, fuck you, I'm behind a hundred mimic chests I've charmed to serve me". But in the very rough schema where I'm splitting "utility" out from "combat/magic
/shenanigans", that would probably fall somewhere under "shenanigans". What I'm talking about are classes which genuinely focus more on utility at the expense of scaling power - and we know these exist, because we've seen a lot of classes, and Levi has explicitly told us that all classes are not all made equal.
Taking SED as an example (which is a class I like, and would be my second choice after BOF, don't get me wrong), we know roughly what its abilities are and how they scale, because it tells us in the description. Unless there are some form of "prestige classes", it seems unlikely to me that Danger Sense and Acute ears will beat out Punishing Strike/Murderous Attack/Regeneration in pure combat utility, or that Spot will beat out Plus One in terms of extra resources gained over the course of a floor. Now, these skills are much more useful out of combat, especially Pathfinder... hence why someone with those abilities might rent them out to a party who can thereby focus more on combat or accumulating exponentials.
Now, this is all taking it from the perspective of what is most mechanically "optimal" - which is not necessarily the most important way to enjoy the Quest! (It's not why I chose to vote for BOF.) But if we're thinking essentially in terms of economic logic, looking for potentially positive-sum trades becomes more relevant, I think.
Also, it means there is potentially a way for the Astronomy Club to survive by camping out in safer areas and hiring out members with utilities to other parties (if they have enough utility classes in their group), so I'm interested in the concept for that reason alone.
Re: Invulnerability, I want to point out we don't have a complete description. How short a time are you Invulnerable? What is the spell's cooldown? Our ability to retarget self-spells when we cast them has no cooldown, but that doesn't mean it undoes the spell's own cooldown. I would expect it to be prohibitive; no-sells like this usually have a downside other than just "self-only".
Would you also consider plan Slip and Smack?
(Grease and Invuln)
- Location
- yorkshire
Here's a good question does Leo purr 🤔
Oh hey, hard cash appears to be winning.
[X] Plan Hard Cash
[X] Plan Hard Cash
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- Location
- France
[X] Plan Hard Cash
Olivebirdy
mook.
In that case, we'd probably want a Waterbreathing: Self spell.
The other main drawback is that the timespan of Invulnerabilty is 'a very short time', I expect it to last for a second or two, one blow, maybe extending as Intelligence rises. I expect it to be expensive with a hefty cooldown, we're going to have to use it tactically. But what it does, it does really well. We've got a lot of options with a complete no-sell of a single attack and LoS teleportation.
The 'cast at a crawler' (without the necessity of being in our contacts or within our range) ability has a cooldown of five minutes, so if a far-away crawler can't handle the fight with one cast of Invulnerabilty, they're not likely to get another.
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- Location
- The Soviet Republic of Canuckistan
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[X] Plan Hard Cash
Olivebirdy
mook.
@NewDay, @beowolf and various others, your votes are not formatted correctly so won't be counted. Copy from the tally for the proper format.
Voters for plans Utility is All You Need, Emergencies, and Slip and Smack, Hard Cash is currently in the lead, so if Invulnerabilty is important to you, (more important than Grease, in the case of Slip and Smack) please help it stay there.
Voters for plans Utility is All You Need, Emergencies, and Slip and Smack, Hard Cash is currently in the lead, so if Invulnerabilty is important to you, (more important than Grease, in the case of Slip and Smack) please help it stay there.
Hard Cash is in the lead! until Newday fixes their formatting.
- Location
- Louisiana
[X] Class: Bounty Hunter the Dog
I'm indifferent on the rest
I'm indifferent on the rest
- Location
- Over there
If it becomes the only viable competitor for munch I'll throw a vote at it, but I prefer cash.
