Forge of Destiny(Xianxia Quest)

mrttao · Jun 2, 2017

tricholysis said:
You're ignoring the part where people (including me) were telling you that FVM would probably pick up exactly what you want. When it picks up the Thunder eventually,

wrong, I am not ignoring it because:
1. you haven't actually made that argument before, you only made strawmen. I cannot be accused of ignoring an argument you literally never made

2. I explicitly addressed this point multiple times when other people raised it in my prior posts. Specifically, I have stated that FVM's attack power growing over levels doesn't change the fact that it takes significantly more successes to acquire each effort (not mention cultivation base increases to unlock it), and that it's actual damage dealing capability would always be lower than a same level yang art that focuses entirely on damage (and probably lower than some lower level arts that focus entirely on damage).
And if we are planning on getting 5 additional arts (to make 8 total). Then getting on that focuses entirely on pure damage dealing would round out our character.

Also you know what, FINE, you won the fucking semantics argument that I never asked for.
An attack art is now "any art that can deal damage, even if 90% of the art is focused on something else". Good on you, I hope you are happy.

Just stop strawmanning. Any of my previous posts where I said "let us get an attack art" (and explicitly defined the term)? just pretend those actually use the definition I explicitly gave and that instead I had said "lets get 1 art which is strong yang leaning and probably arms, which focuses entirely on dealing direct damage and thus gives more burst damage output than other arts; oh, and lets make sure it doesn't disrupt FVM, some ideas are flute sonic arts, instants, flying daggers, etc".

Grigori · Jun 2, 2017

No one else has done it yet so I figured I would:

tricholysis · Jun 2, 2017

mrttao said:
1. you haven't actually made that argument before, you only made strawmen. I cannot be accused of ignoring an argument you literally never made

tricholysis said:
Well, now you're going for a specialised flute-playable art...You think that's gonna be in the Archive?

You want that, you level up FVM.

tricholysis said:
Yeah, that's...that's something integrated into FVM, aka itself.

tricholysis said:
We've gotten confirmation that it'll pick up Thunder. That sounds like a sonic attack to me.

That's just the one from me, m8.

mrttao said:
2. I explicitly addressed this point multiple times when other people raised it in my prior posts. Specifically, I have stated that FVM's attack power growing over levels doesn't change the fact that it takes significantly more successes to acquire each effort (not mention cultivation base increases to unlock it), and that it's actual damage dealing capability would always be lower than a same level yang art that focuses entirely on damage (and probably lower than some lower level arts that focus entirely on damage).

Yeah, so? The counterpoint to this is 'why should Ling Qi care about her DPS?' Does it change her ability to win fights? My position is 'no'. Yours is 'yes'. I'm not strawmanning you anymore than you're strawmanning me...that is to say, probably a little but not nearly as much as you claim. The other positions you present now ('round out Ling Qi by getting a more direct damage art' and 'let's make sure the thing we get doesn't disrupt FVM') aren't nearly so contentious as the yes/no. But at least the second has been addressed by 'yeah the thing we get that does damage more directly that doesn't disrupt FVM is FVM'. Cause eventually it gets a Thunder meridian, and I'm guessing/gambling (if you're uncharitable) that that'll be a direct attack tech. And I think that that's enough.

Arkeus · Jun 2, 2017

tricholysis said:
Right, but I don't really care about Hong Lin specifically...the idea of 'rushy melee cultivator' is distilled in that girl, though. Ling Qi out-debuffed and out-dodged the insect—they have the same gameplan, and Ling Qi just had more dice than it. A different gameplan would apply very different pressures, and most cultivators have a different gameplan than Ling Qi, rather than running the same one as her.

I don't think they had the same gameplan? The monster was focused on direct physical attacks. That those also had a "you can't move part" doesn't mean it had the same gameplan, given Ling Qi was going stealth+ resolve debuff on enemy + indirect attacks, and the monster was going "I rush you and try to keep you in one place to rush you more". I guess it's possible the monster was dex heavy and could have dodged us, but we just don't know. Likewise we don't know what kind of damage it would have done had it pinned us.

Hong Lin also shared some elements with Ling Qi: Speed and dodge, but she was all brawn in her attacks. This Worm didn't seem to be dodge, did have some single target crowd control, but I wouldn't have been surprised if its attacks were mostly brawn.

mrttao · Jun 2, 2017

tricholysis said:
That's just the ones from me, m8.

Contextually, the "you are ignoring" X would be referring to the last few posts.
Not posts from many many pages ago.

And the fact is that I didn't ignore those, I addressed them

mrttao said:
It has AN attack, but that doesn't make it an attack art. An attack art focuses on dealing damage. (as has been mentioned before IC, this is about yin-yang balance)

We have FVM at level 3 already and it still only has 1 damage dealing move (out of 4) that deals plink damage. It is very useful in that it is AoE DoT, and highly energy efficient.
But I believe a dedicated attack art would round up our options well and deal more damage than this.

mrttao said:
And I never said it is incapable of attacking, I literally and explicitly addressed the fact that it still has attack capability multiple times. That attack capability is not its focus, it deals low damage and was only available at higher levels of the technique. Which is explicitly why I want to get an attack art, which I have also clarified to mean an art that focuses entirely on attacking and dealing damage. So that we can deal more significant damage

mrttao said:
But if you are right and it is a DoT that doesn't cost extra then there is no reason to NOT get an attack art. you start off by laying out your DoT and then afterwards you hit them with attacks until the DoT runs out and needs to be refreshed.
Seems pretty straightforward

-------

tricholysis said:
Yeah, so? The counterpoint to this is 'why should Ling Qi care about her DPS?' Does it change her ability to win fights? My position is 'no'. Yours is 'yes'.

If my position is "yes", then it is means I haven't been "ignoring" this question.

Your assumption is that we would always be able to just spend 30 turns waiting for the DoT to kill the enemy. This is wishful thinking. Being able to burst high amounts of damage to quickly take an enemy out is a vital skill for any well rounded cultivator. And we can afford to spend 1/8 arts on such an ability

Arkeus · Jun 2, 2017

tricholysis said:
Cause eventually it gets a Thunder meridian, and I'm guessing/gambling (if you're uncharitable) that that'll be a direct attack tech. And I think that that's enough.

TheLastOne said:
So sound attacks?

yrsillar said:
Yeah, FVM will probably pick up a bit of thunder along the way due to that.

I personally suspect it will be a sound attack focused on deafening enemies but with a slightly higher DV (maybe DV4?). There is also the possibility that it will be a 'passive' "you can now attack people with music, DV5" normal attack.

mrttao said:
Your assumption is that we would always be able to just spend 30 turns waiting for the DoT to kill the enemy. This is wishful thinking. Being able to burst high amounts of damage to quickly take an enemy out is a vital skill for any well rounded cultivator. And we can afford to spend 1/8 arts on such an ability

We could have done high burst damage last fight. We didn't because there was no point whatsoever.

Deathbybunnies · Jun 2, 2017

As far as direct damage arts go, even if we commit hard to being a super conditional/tricky fighter relying on rebuffs and Dots, I'd ultimately like to see us pick up two. One cheap art that we can spam after setting up our Dots without worrying too much about qi, and one really big flashy art for when we're in a situation or up against an enemy where slowly whittling them down isn't an option for some reason - time constraints, or they're just so damn scary our only chance is to go all-out from the start and hope for lucky rolls. These would also work as our "backup plan" in situations where our regular strategy doesn't work (flute's broken, light shenanigans, etc.) They wouldn't be a focus, but they're definitely required at some point.

mrttao · Jun 2, 2017

Arkeus said:
We could have done high burst damage last fight. We didn't because there was no point whatsoever.

That would both use up our knives (of which we have a limited quantity) and disrupt our DoT.
Incidentally, I have argued before we should get a lot of mundane spare throwing knives to mitigate this problem.

Arkeus · Jun 2, 2017

Deathbybunnies said:
As far as direct damage arts go, even if we commit hard to being a super conditional/tricky fighter relying on rebuffs and Dots, I'd ultimately like to see us pick up two. One cheap art that we can spam after setting up our Dots without worrying too much about qi, and one really big flashy art for when we're in a situation or up against an enemy where slowly whittling them down isn't an option for some reason - time constraints, or they're just so damn scary our only chance is to go all-out from the start and hope for lucky rolls. These would also work as our "backup plan" in situations where our regular strategy doesn't work (flute's broken, light shenanigans, etc.) They wouldn't be a focus, but they're definitely required at some point.

Yeah, having a pure direct damage art tree can help in some specific circumstances, but that's why Meizhen advised us to get 4 major arts and 4 minor ones. The point is that it shouldn't be a focus or something important, but just a "for versatility" thing.

mrttao said:
That would both use up our knives (of which we have a limited quantity) and disrupt our DoT.
Incidentally, I have argued before we should get a lot of mundane spare throwing knives to mitigate this problem.

The only time we ever lost a knife was when the enemy teleported with it. We wouldn't lose one. It would also only disrupt our DoT after 4 turns. We basically chose not to do it because there was no reason to take the risk as it's flatly worse to show our direction when the enemy has already lost.

mrttao · Jun 2, 2017

tricholysis said:
But at least the second has been addressed by 'yeah the thing we get that does damage more directly that doesn't disrupt FVM is FVM'.

That argument was made as a reply to me saying "I want to go to the archive and get a hard yang art that deals more burst damage than FVM, but doesn't disrupt FVM".

The person who made it FIRST argued that he disagrees with my definition of the words "attack arts", and then after explicitly saying they disagree with my definition, argued as if my statement of "lets get an attack art" was using HIS definition instead of mine. That is not addressing my argument in any way shape or form.

tricholysis said:
Yeah, so? The counterpoint to this is 'why should Ling Qi care about her DPS?' Does it change her ability to win fights? My position is 'no'. Yours is 'yes'.

^THIS is addressing my argument. even if only in the most basic way of saying "I disagree".

mrttao · Jun 2, 2017

Arkeus said:
The only time we ever lost a knife was when the enemy teleported with it.

Other ways we can lose them is when the enemy's art damages the knife, or when we have to run away without defeating the enemy, thus not getting a chance to collect our knives back. There is also the chances of terrain causing to be lost to us. Such as it falling into some muck or off a cliff.

Also, I didn't say lose, I said use up.
as in, "we throw our knives at him... he is still alive, now how do we attack?" because after we throw the knife we cannot throw the same knife a second time during the same combat. we have to win, then collect the knife from the enemy's corpse so we can use it on the next battle.

And again, throwing a knife disrupts our DoT. so getting some way to deal significant burst damage without disrupting FVM is, in my opinion, a good strategic addition to our toolbox. and worthy of picking up if we are really going to pick up 5 additional arts

Mr.rodent · Jun 2, 2017

Are we still having the Atk art conversation...it's been how many pages already. ..can't you guys discuss ANYTHING else...seriously ....maybe idk pokemon, the cool fan art of li suyin, how we can help her in long run, characters you'd like to spend social in, what we should use mats for given chance , how you thing bai is doing. Funny bai omakes of her and cui dealing with shapeshifting bugs..

"Ling qi may be ignorant sometimes but she is no fool. Begone foul creature *swipes hand and obliterates monster.

"You are upset cousin. These lesser beings display amuse me. Our little mouse is far more complex and interesting then they portray "

"Our mouse cousin?"

*cui blushes*:"it's not like I like her or anything...sssssszzzzzzz

Humbaba · Jun 2, 2017

I think the argument that FVM will eventually pick up some sort of damage tech is a poor reason not to get a low level focused damage art now. I suspect that it might be beyond the next level as the only requirment noted for the next stage is Mid Yellow, not another meridian. Even if we're lucky enough to have it proc at the next level (rather than being several more steps away) it is a minimum of 13 (New aligned meridian) + 55 (art progression - exotic bonus) + 111 (mid yellow soul): 179 successes away. I can almost guarantee that we'll get into a fight where larger amounts of damage would be useful before we hit that many successes, especially since we've got to spread our focus.

By contrast a first level damage art (preferably that doesn't interfere with FVM) should only require 10 + 13: 23 successes and gives us more options if we encounter someone who can get around or deal with our debuffs and mist. 38 successes if you want to get the art to level 2.

By the way does anyone know a useful site for figuring out which elements are Yin or Yang?

Edit: Fixed some sentence structural errors.

FixerUpper · Jun 2, 2017

Grigori said:
No one else has done it yet so I figured I would:

This is lovely.

drake_azathoth · Jun 2, 2017

Yes, I honestly find the pedantry on the other side of the 'attack art' argument very dishonest and annoying. And I don't even really care one way or another. If you disagree that a burst damage art is necessary that's fine, but weaseling about with terminology is just irritating.

Arkeus · Jun 2, 2017

Humbaba said:
I can almost guarantee that we'll get into a fight where larger amounts of damage would be useful before we hit that many successes, especially since we've got to spread our focus.

By contrast a first level damage art (preferably that doesn't interfere with FVM) should only require 10 + 13: 23 successes and gives us more options if we encounter someone who can get around or deal with our debuffs and mist. 38 successes if you want to get the art to level 2.

By the way does anyone know a useful site for figuring out which elements are Yin or Yang?

I can guarantee the opposite. We won't have any enemies that would not be brought down in the 4 turns where we can have both mist up and attacks with our knives before we hit late yellow unless we are fighting against someone significantly stronger, and in that case running is better than using a fighting style that does not suit us.

There are times when a direct damage art might be usefull, but those times are few and far in between and will mainly appear as our peers get more and more arts and versatility themselves.

There is an order in which we should obtain arts, and "mental defences", "perception boosts", "save or die" are all much higher priorities than an ability that, so far, would have had us doing worse in all our previous fights.

drake_azathoth said:
Yes, I honestly find the pedantry on the other side of the 'attack art' argument very dishonest and annoying. And I don't even really care one way or another. If you disagree that it's necessary that' fine, but weaseling about with terminology is just irritating.

It's because people are using wrong terminology in order to push false assumptions. FVM IS an attack arts, and saying it isn't is trying to push a false agenda.

mrttao · Jun 2, 2017

Humbaba said:
By the way does anyone know a useful site for figuring out which elements are Yin or Yang?

Good post humbaba, I agree. In regards to the above question. Probably best not to use external site since most of the elements used here are original creation by the QM. (although the traditional 5 elements do coexist with them)

While some elements lean towards yin or yang, in this quest arts can mostly overrule this.
For example, wood is typically yang, so bai maizhen explicitly told us her family practices yin wood arts. I looked up some tidbits from the QM that I hope are helpful to you:

yrsillar said:
I'll go into detail in the next post, since Ling Qi herself is kinda unsure on that note, but basically it's thing that fits with Yin's themes, I. E dark, flexibility, cold, softness etc... So it can be kinda variable, but basically 'soft' styles will generally be Yin while hard styles will be yang, with some variations due to elemental stuff. Gu Xiulan's fire art is a yang art for example, despite not being a hard style, because the flames and heat part override the other details.

Once Ling Qi learns this stuff, I'll note the aspect of any arts available to you.

Argent Soul is deliberately element and aspect neutral, seeing as it was designed to be used reasonably well by an extremely wide variety of individuals.

yrsillar said:
Yin and Yang, they broad concepts, and she felt like the Elder's lecture on the subject was just a surface explanation. Yin arts were reactive, passive, or and tended more toward internal and support arts. Yang arts were usually active, aggressive, and included more of the 'flashy' external arts typically associated with immortals among mortals. There were many other details, and it seemed that there were many exceptions among the definitions due to the sheer number of arts and the unconventional ways they used qi types associated with one or the other… but ultimately the most important thing was that Elder Su taught them how to feel the difference in the two.

Argent Soul was neutral, balanced between the two energies, her other arts though were exclusively yin. That wasn't surprising for the moon arts she had gained, but she had been a little unsure if Zephyr's Breath had been a yin art or not.

yrsillar said:
Whether elements are yin or yang can vary depending on the art. Metal leans yang though

drake_azathoth · Jun 2, 2017

I think we all know FVM does damage. Pretending that we're dumb enough not to know that after the last update just because someone says 'it's not an attack art' is irritating. The point is FVM does low DoT, and it's a point well-made. You can speculate all you like about where FVM will go, but to say a burst damage art will do more damage more quickly as it levels up is just common sense. Whether we need the burst damage, that's debatable.

mrttao · Jun 2, 2017

BTW. another reason to get a strong yang art whose techniques are all damage dealing is that it might help us balance out our yin-yang a bit.

since so far all our techniques other than argent soul are strong yin. And if we follow our plans then we will continue to collect yin arts.

Having a strong yang art in there to balance it out a bit can help diminish the emotional imbalance that would cause.
presuming of course that yin-yang balance matters in terms of emotional feedback the same way that we know element choices matter

PrimalShadow · Jun 2, 2017

mrttao said:
Which is explicitly why I want to get an attack art, which I have also clarified to mean an art that focuses entirely on attacking and dealing damage. So that we can deal more significant damage

As others have repeatedly pointed out, a direct attack that "can deal more significant damage" is quite likely to be available at further levels of FVM. You keep dismissing or ignoring that point by saying that FVM is not an attack art, which is why I challenged you on that classification.

yrsillar · Jun 2, 2017

Very Nice @Grigori. Have your two points. Please hold onto them until event end though.

Kyr'am said:
Actually, I'm pretty sure that this

was in response to me saying that I'd thought that the fight was only a few rounds. As such, I'm reasonably certain that the ten plus rounds mark was for the not dangerous part of the fight, which combined with the actually dangerous part being two to four rounds means that overall the fight was probably somewhere in the 12 to 15 rounds range. Still, I can ask: @yrsillar, would you terribly mind clarifying exactly how long the fight was?

Also, I had a thought: IIRC we're already capable of literally beating a mortal to death without particularly much effort and we're only Early Silver. If we get our physical cultivation high enough, we could presumably deal with scrubs by just hitting them really hard. Granted, we'll still need proper arts for peers, but the higher up we go, the less of those there will be.

It lasted around fifteen ish, which was the point where the things wound penalties made me feel like it was fine to just resolve it in your favor.

Arkeus said:
I don't think they had the same gameplan? The monster was focused on direct physical attacks. That those also had a "you can't move part" doesn't mean it had the same gameplan, given Ling Qi was going stealth+ resolve debuff on enemy + indirect attacks, and the monster was going "I rush you and try to keep you in one place to rush you more". I guess it's possible the monster was dex heavy and could have dodged us, but we just don't know. Likewise we don't know what kind of damage it would have done had it pinned us.

Hong Lin also shared some elements with Ling Qi: Speed and dodge, but she was all brawn in her attacks. This Worm didn't seem to be dodge, did have some single target crowd control, but I wouldn't have been surprised if its attacks were mostly brawn.

Well since you're already past the challenge, the spit attack would have halved your speed and penalized physical defense dice, or if you failed the strength test, simply prevented you from moving. If it had hit you in melee, it would have procced its other tech, which was a grapple thing. So worm was less about burst damage than Lin, but instead was more of a debuff and gnaw into submission kind of thing.

Arkeus · Jun 2, 2017

drake_azathoth said:
I think we all know FVM does damage. Pretending that we're dumb enough not to know that after the last update just because someone says 'it's not an attack art' is irritating. The point is FVM does low DoT, and it's a point well-made. You can speculate all you like about where FVM will go, but to say a burst damage art will do more damage more quickly as it levels up is just common sense. Whether we need the burst damage, that's debatable.

The problem is that saying "We need an attack art" not only is talking about burst damage, but it's a term that makes the assumption that only burst damage is an attack. It feels like a slick way of dismissing DoT from Dissonance, or Save or Lose from Diapason, and so on by putting them in another category from 'attack'.

Saying "Burst Attack Damage Art" at least makes sure that it doesn't become assumed that burst attack is the 'default' for attack. Given I consider Burst Damage the most useless kind of attack, it's fairly important for me.

mrttao · Jun 2, 2017

PrimalShadow said:
As others have repeatedly pointed out, a direct attack that "can deal more significant damage" is quite likely to be available at further levels of FVM. You keep dismissing or ignoring that point by saying that FVM is not an attack art, which is why I challenged you on that classification.

So... here is a snipped from literally the same post you quoted

mrttao said:
The fact it focuses on other things means it is not an attack art.
And I never said it is incapable of attacking, I literally and explicitly addressed the fact that it still has attack capability multiple times. That attack capability is not its focus, it deals low damage and was only available at higher levels of the technique. Which is explicitly why I want to get an attack art, which I have also clarified to mean an art that focuses entirely on attacking and dealing damage. So that we can deal more significant damage

and from a subsequent post

mrttao said:
2. I explicitly addressed this point multiple times when other people raised it in my prior posts. Specifically, I have stated that FVM's attack power growing over levels doesn't change the fact that it takes significantly more successes to acquire each effort (not mention cultivation base increases to unlock it), and that it's actual damage dealing capability would always be lower than a same level yang art that focuses entirely on damage (and probably lower than some lower level arts that focus entirely on damage).
And if we are planning on getting 5 additional arts (to make 8 total). Then getting on that focuses entirely on pure damage dealing would round out our character.

Also you know what, FINE, you won the fucking semantics argument that I never asked for.
An attack art is now "any art that can deal damage, even if 90% of the art is focused on something else". Good on you, I hope you are happy.

Just stop strawmanning. Any of my previous posts where I said "let us get an attack art" (and explicitly defined the term)? just pretend those actually use the definition I explicitly gave and that instead I had said "lets get 1 art which is strong yang leaning and probably arms, which focuses entirely on dealing direct damage and thus gives more burst damage output than other arts; oh, and lets make sure it doesn't disrupt FVM, some ideas are flute sonic arts, instants, flying daggers, etc".

Basically, this:

drake_azathoth said:
I think we all know FVM does damage. Pretending that we're dumb enough not to know that after the last update just because someone says 'it's not an attack art' is irritating. The point is FVM does low DoT, and it's a point well-made. You can speculate all you like about where FVM will go, but to say a burst damage art will do more damage more quickly as it levels up is just common sense. Whether we need the burst damage, that's debatable.

drake_azathoth · Jun 2, 2017

Saying that we MAY get burst damage via FVM is itself dishonest. We MAY get a technique that creates puppies on demand. So what? Unless we know it's true, we really shouldn't bank on it. It is also very true that a level 4 burst damage technique from an Art oriented around burst damage is likely to be vastly superior to a level 4 burst from FVM.

PrimalShadow · Jun 2, 2017

mrttao said:
So... here is a snipped from literally the same post you quoted

Basically, this:

I'm not talking about dissonance. That's obviously not what you are looking for. I'm talking about potential extensions of FVM, which I think are likely to include an attack tech.

I admit that that isn't guaranteed, but since I don't think burst damage is a priority anyway, I see no reason why we shouldn't wait until mastering the next 1-2 levels of FVM before going off and finding out.

Forge of Destiny(Xianxia Quest)

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