Forge of Destiny(Xianxia Quest)

[PrimalShadow]

That's the Argent Arts I thought. Not the generic arts. There's nothing special about ZB.

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Nothing special except that we got it from the sect.
I concede that we've only seen the interdiction here in application to Argent Arts, but I think it is unlikely (though not impossible) that other arts follow other rules with respect to sharing. Yes, those Arts are less important to the sect, but they still belong to the sect, so given the setting I would expect them to enforce infosec there.

 

[DeAnno]

We have a ramshackle build of things we stole, were gifted, randomly earned, or desperately bought.
First off, elemental alignment. We have some crazy elemental alignment going on here, that makes it exceedingly difficult to do any type of item scheme. We have all of the Imperial 8, most of the Traditional 5 (just missing metal TRF!), and then Darkness and music to go along with all of that. We are a kaleidoscope of colors to anyone who sees us and checks our elemental alignment.

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All of this is true, but the thing is, it doesn't matter, for a few reasons.

1) We just bought items. We don't need new items for some time, especially since there is no huge fight in our near future after the tourney probably, just a slow boil of fights. So our mess of elements is inconvenient long term, but doesn't matter now.

2) Similarly, despite our build being a ramshackle mess of random stuff we collected, it actually functions pretty well. Sure, parts of it aren't doing much, but we have all bases pretty much covered and all serious bases covered by strong Arts.

I agree we need to fix our elemental cohesion by getting a set of new Arts that has smaller spread, but we don't need to do it now. Right now, at CL7, despite the inefficiencies, our build works. We might as well use our working build we worked so hard to train until it is obsolete around CL9 or so. At CL9, then we can make new, actually responsible, choices about elements and Art setup as we prune expired Arts for shiny new Arts that start up at CL9 instead of CL7, and will be better and last longer. At that point, we can buy shiny new items to fit our efficient new arts, replacing our old out of date items which will have served their usage time by then.

Basically, having an inefficient spread is inefficient, but we have already paid the prices for it at this CL. We don't need to fix it now, fixing it now is actually counterproductive. We should powerlevel with it, slightly goofy as it is, and then fix it at higher level, getting better items and Arts in the new setup.

This is the plan that dovetails well with our excessive tourney prep for the past 3 months or so. Basically, we had our gear all the way into Arts, and now we are grinding the gears of our transmission completely back in the other direction to powerleveling, since our Arts have been invested and set up to "good enough" for the next few levels already.

 

[Erebeal]

Nothing special except that we got it from the sect.
I concede that we've only seen the interdiction here in application to Argent Arts, but I think it is unlikely (though not impossible) that other arts follow other rules with respect to sharing. Yes, those Arts are less important to the sect, but they still belong to the sect, so given the setting I would expect them to enforce infosec there.

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I dunno, I mean look at the description of FZ:

The evolution of the emerald seas wind arts focusing on the fleetness and encompassing nature of wind. Grants the user and their followers fleetness of foot and quickness of action.
​

It sounds like the Zephyr line is a group of fairly common generic wind arts in this province.

And we only learned about the "can't teach to others" thing now specifically in relation to the argent arts.

It's a good question though: @yrsillar, will we be allowed to teach non-Argent arts like ZB or FSA to others outside the Sect?

 

[Horium]

Not to beat the dead horse, but I at least never expected us to go Yan Renshu route with the bone golems, but I rather view them as a sort of emergency allies/fallback fortifiers.

What makes them potentially useful for us is that Ling Qi is a support.

We don't need them to be particularly strong, as it is likely that Ling Qi will be able to offset at least some of their weakness due to her specialization.

If she was a face-puncher, the bone golems would be almost useless.

 

[Arkeus]

Actually, there's another note there: it's kind of tempting to grab a bunch of low level arts here while we're at the Sect so we can teach people and our family things. Our low-level art library, once you remove the argent arts, is really very limited - and has huge holes like a complete lack of perception arts. I would actually be tempted to try to find a perception art that starts at low levels and continues up and learn that, just because that would have a lot of long term value for us.

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It completely is. We know a liege is supposed to provide art to some measure to their people, and if we want our reds or elite yellows to be any good we need them to have art coherency as a group unit. Getting them specific things to make sure they are useful to us is great. FZ/FSA is a good beginning for our archer units, but we need much more than that.

As much as I'm lukewarm on the Argents in general, I think AM is fairly efficient at what it does for us, even if it does it in kind of a so-so underpowered way for a while. As you say, we would likely need to replace one art with two, so I would put this at the bottom of my priority list for general shuffling.

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AM stops at early green, and we are getting to Green 4+ next year. Unless you are proposing our main perception art should be the equivalent of say TRF2 right now as our main defensive art, that just won't cut it. We need to replace all our arts that finish at late yellow early green quickly next year, and sometimes utterly scrap the art type from our build.

TRF is a really high quality Art that we'll have a tough time finding a replacement for next year. I doubt it's possible, or at least not competitive with other options of how to spend our time and resources. AM is a lot easier to replace, especially with the suggested 2 art approach.

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I'd argue that because of how good TRF is for us, if there is any chance of getting TRF+ we should dedicate significant effort to it. TRF+ should get to Green completion I think, and would last us until Cyan. If there is no chance of getting TRF+, then we still should dedicate some effort, before leaving the sect, of having a replacement ready to begin learning (though we'd keep TRF equipped for a while longer there).

Nothing special except that we got it from the sect.
I concede that we've only seen the interdiction here in application to Argent Arts, but I think it is unlikely (though not impossible) that other arts follow other rules with respect to sharing. Yes, those Arts are less important to the sect, but they still belong to the sect, so given the setting I would expect them to enforce infosec there.

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Ling Qi specifically mentioned that she should get non-argent arts in order to be able to teach them outside the sect. We also know all arts in the archive floor 1-3 can be bought, and that argent art are not in the archive level 1-3.

 

[Alectai]

Eh, to be fair, I suspect that starting in Cyan, we have to hand-craft our own Arts rather than get them from others--unless those Arts are similiar enough to our own Way that we can cross apply them.

There's no massive legacy of people who went down the same paths that we're going in the past to draw from--which is probably another bar in the way of young Noble Houses becoming formidable. New clans need to design their arts from scratch, while mature ones have a sizable storehouse they can draw from and only need to design arts depending on their interpretation of the Path.

 

[DeAnno]

AM stops at early green, and we are getting to Green 4+ next year. Unless you are proposing our main perception art should be the equivalent of say TRF2 right now as our main defensive art, that just won't cut it. We need to replace all our arts that finish at late yellow early green quickly next year, and sometimes utterly scrap the art type from our build.

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I'm not saying we don't need to replace it next year. I'm saying replacing it can probably wait until it's two levels deprecated when we hit CL 9 (Green 3). I think it'd be wasteful to replace it at CL 7, and probably still not necessary at CL 8.

The main thrust of my point is that we should powerlevel to CL 9 (physical/spiritual/cultivation art), because our setup is basically good enough for CL 8. I'm not very interested in arts at all after the tourney, I'm interested in Cultivation Levels.

 

[Erebeal]

I'm not saying we don't need to replace it next year. I'm saying replacing it can probably wait until it's two levels deprecated when we hit CL 9 (Green 3). I think it'd be wasteful to replace it at CL 7, and probably still not necessary at CL 8.

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That's fair. Otoh, getting more perception and actual spiritual defense arts are arguably things that would be good to do anyway.

That being said, a lot depends on how fast the requirements for base cultivation escalate. The longer it takes, the more it starts being a good idea to get your arts up to scratch in the mean time rather than being left behind.

 

[Arkeus]

Eh, to be fair, I suspect that starting in Cyan, we have to hand-craft our own Arts rather than get them from others--unless those Arts are similiar enough to our own Way that we can cross apply them.

There's no massive legacy of people who went down the same paths that we're going in the past to draw from--which is probably another bar in the way of young Noble Houses becoming formidable. New clans need to design their arts from scratch, while mature ones have a sizable storehouse they can draw from and only need to design arts depending on their interpretation of the Path.

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Well, we have a couple things we might be able to do as getting Zeqing arts to Cyan is likely and we could plausibly get Zhengui cyan art too (Sixiang is probably going to be gone/trailing behind). Beside that, we might be able to grab some moon arts. But yeah, we have probably lost the opportunity of getting a master to hand down their art to them. SCS+ is unlikely to get, let alone for Jiao's very own Cyan and Indigo SCS versions.

I'm not saying we don't need to replace it next year. I'm saying replacing it can probably wait until it's two levels deprecated when we hit CL 9 (Green 3). I think it'd be wasteful to replace it at CL 7, and probably still not necessary at CL 8.

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I was expecting us to hit CL8 a month or two at most in the inner sect but latest vote does push it back maybe a month if we are unlucky yeah. Still, 'replacement' should begin to be learned before an art is completely outdated, as the replacement itself will be worse than AM for the first couple levels. Given AM is our only perception art and our only dedicated spiritual defence art, that would be 2 key point of our art suite that would seriously lag behind everything else.

It's not like TRF where we also have SCS and PLR and AS to prop up our p.def.

 

[Erebeal]

But yeah, we have probably lost the opportunity of getting a master to hand down their art to them. SCS+ is unlikely to get, let alone for Jiao's very own Cyan and Indigo SCS versions.

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Gotta suck up to Grinning Moon. Go on all the moon quests. Be a cool moon cultivator. Pray at the temple. Then the moon will give us shinies, right?

Right?

 

[DeAnno]

I was expecting us to hit CL8 a month or two at most in the inner sect but latest vote does push it back maybe a month if we are unlucky yeah. Still, 'replacement' should begin to be learned before an art is completely outdated, as the replacement itself will be worse than AM for the first couple levels. Given AM is our only perception art and our only dedicated spiritual defence art, that would be 2 key point of our art suite that would seriously lag behind everything else.

It's not like TRF where we also have SCS and PLR and AS to prop up our p.def.

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So this would be my plan

1) We will probably have to replace AM with two new arts eventually anyways. This means we will need some new meridians in all likelyhood dedicated to the task.

2) Bang out some new meridians for the first new Art. Keep AM for this period, while the new Art is small, build it up to reasonable.

3) Trade AM's meridians out to the second new Art, after the first is established, meaning we don't lose coverage in as gross a way.

Alternately, we could just be gross and bang out tons of meridians and let AM hang around being half-deprecated for a while, it has reasonable passives and we are great at banging out tons of meridians (though the limit might be scary if it shows.)

 

[Arkeus]

How do you know that with such clarity Arkues? Where does such confidence about what is in the pale manual come from? Have the actions taken to understand the manual really been enough to understand the pale manual? How many actions have we taken to learn from the pale manual? We don't know what is in the pale manual. We know what Li Suyin found useful. I don't think she tried to short change us or hide anything from us. However, we really don't know what everything that is in the book. We may have a rough idea of all of the puppet formations but we know from Li Suyin that there are other formations in there that she has not told us.

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I'm trying to look for the actual quote, but I am pretty sure I know this because either it was said instory that we had found the last formation we were willing to work on, or it was said somewhere else insaid. Maybe @yrsillar can correct me if I am misremembering.

Ling Qi, while not being as good for translating the finnicky details as Li Suyin, is still good enough to know what type of things are in it, and that she wants nothing to do with them.

You're wrong on this point.
Every Art we cultivate, and even our raw spirit/body cultivation is under a increasing difficulty progression. It always starts with massive return for little effort.: How many actions do we need to level up a 5th or higher level Art to the next level ? How many actions do we need to level the same Art from scratch to the first level ?
Having Formations provide a huge benefit for a low amount of actions is well within the rules of the game. Eventually we'll reach a point where we'll need months worth of action to gain any significant increase in our formations, but we're far from that point.

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We already had that massive return, and formations are not arts. They do not have 'levels'. You can make them better by studying them and changing them, but they are no longer the same formation.

Furthermore, Ling Qi has massively invested in being able to learn art faster. FVM for example get up to 46 dice and ten autos from various breakthrough and other investments that are neither pills, tutors or site. Li Suying likewise is massively investing in formation and probably has gotten breakthrough bonus and spirit beast bonus toward them. Ling Qi has not learned to learn formations yet. Not to say she shouldn't, or can't, but we are not at the point where formations are a low hanging fruit. They are not.

And yet I also feel that you are not listening. Funny.

The question is, are the scouts good enough? If they are not then we should spend time improving them. If they are then frankly we will never use them. The horror becomes better as the cost of scouts goes down. You just said we need a massive amount of scouts for the horror. If we reduce the cost of the scouts then we reduce the cost of the horror by X where X is the number of scouts used.

The horror serves a purpose of remote strikes agaist targets that we can not easily reach. Getting 21 mouse sized things to an area is way easier then getting a single human even if that humans is stealth based. The reason? Because the scouts level off of our stealth so as we get stealthier so do they. They have a small sized which massively increases their stealth roles.

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The scout is based off our stealth without stealth autos, or our capacity to bypass formations, or gear, and so on. Scouts are still much better at stealth for us than for someone non stealthy... but they are not even close to being as good at getting in an area than a stealth based cultivator. They have good specific roles for recording, or for infiltrating places while we distract someone, or for preliminary scouting when we are wary of the defences of a place and the cost of the scout being caught isn't high.

They do not actually replace a stealth based cultivator, like how the horror does not actually replace a mid yellow cultivator as an ally.

Not to beat the dead horse, but I at least never expected us to go Yan Renshu route with the bone golems, but I rather view them as a sort of emergency allies/fallback fortifiers.

What makes them potentially useful for us is that Ling Qi is a support.

We don't need them to be particularly strong, as it is likely that Ling Qi will be able to offset at least some of their weakness due to her specialization.

If she was a face-puncher, the bone golems would be almost useless.

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Yes, Ling Qi makes them so much stronger than they would be otherwise. OTOH, that means she has to be around for that to happen... and in that case, I would prefer a summoning art like AE and so on.

 

[Yun]

In regards to themes of a build who don't we simply play to the strength of having Zeqing as a teacher for another year, will probably bind Hanyi as a spirit thus helping with the continued cultivation of Zeqings arts even after they've been mastered, and have Zhengui to tank, which makes singing a duet with Hanyi about a party everyone is invited to being just a little bit further into the blizzard.

Furthermore Ling Qi should eventually be able to include new songs into the play by turning new trials that serve as obstacles that must be overcome to reach the party, and with enough dedication it'll become a rather impressive art suit that has excellent synergy. Because if they try to turn back all that awaits them is an ice cold death, and AE would allow for a gradual drain of their Qi as they take damage. There are other ways one might take her current build, and this is simply the first one that came to mind.

Lastly something to keep in mind is that picking up an art to burst down a commander seems like it is something more thematically appropriate for a cultivator who aims to become a superhuman in the line of a spirit beasts whereas Ling Qi is more growing to become akin to a spirit.

 

[Karnax626]

AM stops at early green, and we are getting to Green 4+ next year. Unless you are proposing our main perception art should be the equivalent of say TRF2 right now as our main defensive art, that just won't cut it. We need to replace all our arts that finish at late yellow early green quickly next year, and sometimes utterly scrap the art type from our build.

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IMO you're overestimating how far we'll get with base cultivation by the end of next year. Green/Bronze foundation seems like a much safer bet, considering we can expect to reach Cyan by 19 at the absolute earliest.

If we could focus solely on it then maybe, but as is we'll have our arts, obligations to Cai, jobs for the Sect and God knows what else taking up our time.

Even reaching solidly foundation should be pretty good, as it allows us to start working on modifying arts.

Lastly something to keep in mind is that picking up an art to burst down a commander seems like it is something more thematically appropriate for a cultivator who aims to become a superhuman in the line of a spirit beasts whereas Ling Qi is more growing to become akin to a spirit.

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Pretty sure spirits/spirit beasts don't work like that. The difference between them is whether their domain is internalised or externalised, not what they do with their power (burst, tank, support etc).

 

[Alectai]

Yeah, I'm inclined to agree. We should be at Foundation/Threshold by the time we leave the Sect, but getting higher than that is a bit unrealistic. We were told after all that Cyan would be a four, five year project even for our Talent.

Our goal should ultimately be to get ourselves in a position where we won't have our progress choked by a lack of Arts, or ability to repurpose Arts, by the time we're through here.

 

[Arkeus]

IMO you're overestimating how far we'll get with base cultivation by the end of next year. Green/Bronze foundation seems like a much safer bet, considering we can expect to reach Cyan by 19 at the absolute earliest.

If we could focus solely on it then maybe, but as is we'll have our arts, obligations to Cai, jobs for the Sect and God knows what else taking up our time.

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My personal guess is that Green 3/ Green 5/ Green 7 all have significant bottlenecks, and I expect Ling Qi to barely manage to get past that first bottleneck thanks to her very solid foundation, but that the rest will take a very long time.

@yrsillar has implied heavily Suyin Sempai and Ruan Shen were both in the outer sect last year, and they are both Green 5. While they have the advantage of great resources, I don't think it's unrealistic for Green to get longer and longer as we go up, so the first few levels could go fairly fast.

Still, even Green Foundation is the step where we'll need to be getting new arts everywhere, as not only would FZ/FSA/AM/AC/AS/TRF be overlevelled, but FVM/SCS will also be capped. Given the sect is the one place we can count on having 'easier' access to high quality art, we must make sure we have successors/replacement to all our arts by the time we leave. Well, except for AE/FSS/PLR. FSS+ should be something we can get without problems once we get to Green 5 though, and AE either is something we might not want, but if we do want it it will last us to Green 6 likely (cap green 5). PLR is basically until Cyan.

 

[Alectai]

To be fair, we'll probably get to browse the Cai Clan's archive before we get set up in earnest, because one of the upsides to being a ducal seat that makes a habit of purging the disloyal is that you've probably looted a shitload of arts over your career that aren't very useful to you but you keep around just in case.

Still, I can see us--over the course of a year--assembling a coherent art suite that'll take us through most of Green. And once we're in Cyan, stuff like archives becomes less useful for us anyway because we're mostly working our own Path by then.

 

[Karnax626]

@yrsillar has implied heavily Suyin Sempai and Ruan Shen were both in the outer sect last year, and they are both Green 5. While they have the advantage of great resources, I don't think it's unrealistic for Green to get longer and longer as we go up, so the first few levels could go fairly fast.

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Where was this implication? I can easily see them being within a few years of us, but 2 years seems too little to get all the way to Green 5 unless they were either on the level of the monsters or had similar talent to us/Ji Rong.
The only way I see it being possible is if they were in the Outer Sect for more than one year, then only got in last year.

 

[Arkeus]

Where was this implication? I can easily see them being within a few years of us, but 2 years seems too little to get all the way to Green 5 unless they were either on the level of the monsters or had similar talent to us/Ji Rong.
The only way I see it being possible is if they were in the Outer Sect for more than one year, then only got in last year.

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When we talked to Yrs about how strangely Chu Song reacted about Suying, he mentioned that Chu Song knew Suyin Sempai and recognized her movement tech/spider bomb. When we had our first meeting with Ruan Shen, he was basically preening all the time about being an "older brother". While the latter might only imply 'recent' inner sect arrival, the former about Chu Song strongly implies Suyin Sempai got in last year.

 

[Ayashi]

AM stops at early green, and we are getting to Green 4+ next year. Unless you are proposing our main perception art should be the equivalent of say TRF2 right now as our main defensive art, that just won't cut it. We need to replace all our arts that finish at late yellow early green quickly next year, and sometimes utterly scrap the art type from our build.

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Imo the best thing about Argent Arts is that we are pretty much guaranteed they have successor arts. Hence AM+ is going to be available in Inner Sect.
It'll probably be a specialization on one of AM strong points, imo Perception vs Spiritual defence vs Debuff purge. Of which what we'll really need is the first.

Actually, there's another note there: it's kind of tempting to grab a bunch of low level arts here while we're at the Sect so we can teach people and our family things. Our low-level art library, once you remove the argent arts, is really very limited - and has huge holes like a complete lack of perception arts. I would actually be tempted to try to find a perception art that starts at low levels and continues up and learn that, just because that would have a lot of long term value for us.

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I kinda agree on the overall point, but iirc the library Arts are also Sect propriety, and we can't teach them to other people either, not even to other Sect disciples. So teaching them to outsides is more than a little dubious.

We're going to hit Cyan at some point and be forced to develop our own Arts. I think it's entirely reasonable to have the system force us to make a lot of low rank Arts before we can make something directly useful to us (Cyan+). Which gives the opportunity to make whole Art suites from the ground up. Definitively better than trying to patch random library low level arts together.

On the other hand, this is a good question to ask an Elder of the Sect or someone like that counselor of the Sect we meet after hitting Green.
I mean, we can't be the only commoner turned noble that realizes (s)he'll need to teach her budding clan at some point...

 

[Neshuakadal]

On the other hand, this is a good question to ask an Elder of the Sect or someone like that counselor of the Sect we meet after hitting Green.
I mean, we can't be the only commoner turned noble that realizes (s)he'll need to teach her budding clan at some point...

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I really think this is a great post. Finding those resources should be priority one. Just so that we can get everything in order and start acting with knowledge instead of pure guess work.

 

[AbeoLogos]

We can freely teach Arts we learn in the archives to others. They're solid Arts, but not proprietary. Sect Arts are Sect Arts, and they're not even available in the archives. Even in the Inner Sect, Sect Arts aren't something you just get access to, they have to be earned.

 

[Ordis]

Ruan Shen is probably a few years older then Ling Qi since when asked about meridians and the white room he mentions if he was a few years younger he'd have been able to use it too.

She didn't want to admit that it was partially to avoid selecting something he was not knowledgeable in, so thankfully, she did have some legitimate questions as well. "To be honest, it is in regards to the White Room Lady Cai has so generously provided us," she replied.

"Such good fortune," he mused with a sigh. "Ah, that I might have been a few years younger. I'm afraid the workings of such a wonder are beyond me."

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[archangis]

That is going to have the Empire come down on us.

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Not if we don't use empire nobles.

The Huang for exemple eat people via their arts, probably for power. They can do it because they don't eat nobles, so nobody care.

 

[Arkeus]

Not if we don't use empire nobles.

The Huang for exemple eat people via their arts, probably for power. They can do it because they don't eat nobles, so nobody care.

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People certainly care. Killing mortals purposefully is not something that's condoned. If the Huang actually did this with any regularity they would be slapped down hard.