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Forge of Destiny(Xianxia Quest)

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Arkeus said:
I'm actually half expecting the first upgrade to ZB to be on the first floor of the archive. Basically with ZB going up to mid-gold, and the upgrade beginning at late gold or some such.

I'm also not sure there is going to be a lot of archive level1 art that begins with double same-type meridian, though I guess it's possible.
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We were told we can go up to three meridians on the first floor, so two is super safe unless you're looking for an exotic element. The jump off point for between first and second is a three meridian art using two different elements.
 
I like Against the Wind so much though and the ZB passives. I'd rather open up a (or two) open hearts to test out other 1F Arts until we find a good one to replace ZB.
 
TheLastOne said:
We were told we can go up to three meridians on the first floor, so two is super safe unless you're looking for an exotic element. The jump off point for between first and second is a three meridian art using two different elements.
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There is a difference between multiple different meridian and two of the same. Multiple different one is just a more diluted art, while two of the same is basically one that begins at a higher level (so late red instead of early red, for example).

Those are fairly different concept.
Katreus said:
I like Against the Wind so much though and the ZB passives. I'd rather open up a (or two) open hearts to test out other 1F Arts until we find a good one to replace ZB.
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I wan to check if ZB has an upgrade in first floor :( After all, we never saw any reqs at all for it.
 
Arkeus said:
There is a difference between multiple different meridian and two of the same. Multiple different one is just a more diluted art, while two of the same is basically one that begins at a higher level (so late red instead of early red, for example).

Those are fairly different concept.
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The first floor has a lot more serious arts then people are thinking. We can get real 'serious' arts on the first floor. yrsillar has gone out and commented on this issue before without prompting.

Serous said:
We can prob wait on archive, since even after we master Argent Soul, we still have EPC and meridians to take up our cultivation slots. We can use that time to do 2 10 point missions and get access to lvl 2 to get a good hand art.
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yrsillar said:
Yeah keep in mind the one time Ling Qi was in the archive she was specifically looking arts she could run off of one meridian.
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So yeah, pretty sure we could look for a three meridian heart art on the first floor and find several, never mind a two-er.
 
Killer_Whale said:
What are the plans for this art?
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Train it. Since we can do so passively after the first level, train it till then ASAP and let it accrue on its own from week to week unless we really want the goodies it offers for a specific task.

TheLastOne said:
We were told we can go up to three meridians on the first floor, so two is super safe unless you're looking for an exotic element. The jump off point for between first and second is a three meridian art using two different elements.
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Why specify all three meridians though?

Like, even if we assume that 3 meridian up-front arts are just better, which isn't necessarily going to be true really, it makes a lot more sense to say, "three meridian arts including at least an arm meridian" If anything, it makes significantly more sense to specify one meridian and the elements that actually work with our gear/affinities/other investments (e.g., water, wind, moon) vs a combination of 3 meridians that we hope does something specific.

As to how many options we can expect.... We have 6 types of meridian: Head, Lungs, Spine, Heart, Arm and Leg. That's 6 1 meridian types, 6*6 possibilities for 2 meridians and 6*6*6 possibilities for 3; or 258 combinations of arts up to 3 meridians (252 if no art uses only 1 meridian in its fully learned form). There are 8 conventional elements (and many others). So, we're up to 2064 arts if there is exactly one art of each element at each combination.

yrsillar said:
Ling Qi found the first few that she could locate that only took a single heart meridian. There are upwards of a hundred art scrolls on the first floor
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Note, Yrs has described the size of the first floor as 100+ arts. That suggests 1/20th of possible 3 meridian/element art combos, and less than half of the potential 3 meridian combinations.


So, specifying an exact breakdown of meridian usage, there's a roughly 50% chance, based on WoG that we won't find an art on the first floor of the archive. This assumes that every art that is there uses a specific unique combination of meridians without overlap, which almost certainly isn't true. It's much more likely that some combinations are common and a good number of weirder ones don't exist. We have very little data as to what combinations are common.

Note, that a random combination of meridians may not have the specific effect we want, and, given that we're probably going to want something yinish, in an element such as water (for dress) or wind (for affinity/weapons), most of them will be discardable, as elements that don't match your gear, or the rest of your set, are shit for direct combat where qi efficiency is king, and diversifying gear and art discounts as much as possible just dilutes actual combat power dramatically.

By contrast if we look for "powerful direct attack arts of either wind or water element" we're both telling the QM much more directly what we want to find, cutting out misunderstanding, and getting ourselves a range of elements we can actually use.

TheLastOne said:
So yeah, pretty sure we could look for a three meridian heart art on the first floor and find several, never mind a two-er.
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Note, ZB uses 2 meridians in full. There are, actively, drawbacks to arts that need more meridians to slot at low levels. We haven't really seen examples with clear benefits for having more frontloaded meridians, except perhaps, more at the first level, which doesn't really help if we want to get all the levels of arts we invest in heavily (Note, FVM used 2 meridians at level 1 and none at level 2, SCS used 1 meridian at each level, I don't think either is definitively more powerful).
 
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Shadell said:
Train it. Since we can do so passively after the first level, train it till then ASAP and let it accrue on its own from week to week unless we really want the goodies it offers for a specific task.



Why specify all three meridians though?

Like, even if we assume that 3 meridian arts are just better, which isn't necessarily going to be true really, it makes a lot more sense to say, "three meridian arts including at least an arm meridian" If anything, it makes significantly more sense to specify one meridian and the elements that actually work with our gear/affinities/other investments (e.g., water, wind, moon) vs a combination of 3 meridians that we hope does something specific.

As to how many options we can expect.... We have 6 types of meridian: Head, Lungs, Spine, Heart, Arm and Leg. That's 6 1 meridian types, 6*6 possibilities for 2 meridians and 6*6*6 possibilities for 3; or 258 combinations of arts up to 3 meridians. There are 8 conventional elements (and many others). So, we're up to 2064 arts if there is exactly one art of each element at each combination.



Note, Yrs has described the size of the first floor as 100+ arts. That suggests 1/20th of possible 3 meridian art combos, and less than half of the potential 3 meridian combinations.



So, specifying an exact breakdown of meridian usage, there's a roughly 50% chance, based on WoG that we won't find an art on the first floor of the archive.

Note, that a random combination of meridians may not have the specific effect we want, and, given that we're probably going to want something yinish, in an element such as water (for dress) or wind (for affinity/weapons), most of them will be discardable, as elements that don't match your gear, or the rest of your set, are shit for direct combat where qi efficiency is king, and diversifying gear and art discounts as much as possible just dilutes actual combat power dramatically.

By contrast if we look for "powerful direct attack arts of either wind or water element" we're both telling the QM much more directly what we want to find, cutting out misunderstanding, and getting ourselves a range of elements we can actually use.



Note, ZB uses 2 meridians. There are, actively, drawbacks to arts that need more meridians to slot at low levels. We haven't really seen examples with clear benefits. (Note, FVM used 2 meridians at level 1 and none at level 2, SCS used 1 meridian at each level, I don't think either is definitively more powerful).
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Zephyr's Breath is a 1 Meridian art that uses heart - that is to say we could start learning it with one Heart Meridian.

How library searches work is like this -

yrsillar said:
You guys tell me what kind of art you want, and I make a list of four or five that catch Ling Qi's eye.
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TheLastOne said:
How specific or general can we be? Do we have to say 'Spine', or could we say 'Disease inflicting?'
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yrsillar said:
Just which meridians you want it to use. So say arm art or a combo spine/head art or whatever. You can also specify an element, but if you do there will probably only be two or maybe three choices.
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So we don't say 'x many meridians, including one heart.' We have to say "2 Hearts one Spine." That way he has a framework to think in while building his idea of the arts for us. Remember, we're asking him to come up with 2-5 different ideas. Giving a range of Meridians rather then something specific is neither nice nor fun for him.

edit:

He's loosened the restrictions a little. We can search for arts that fulfill a specific idea now after another poster asked the same thing. Won't track down that post for you though, as I don't remember the context and so I don't remember the keywords to search for.

Think that will take the place of both Meridian and Element, though.
 
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TheLastOne said:
So we don't say 'x many meridians, including one heart.' We have to say "2 Hearts one Spine." That way he has a framework to think in while building his idea of the arts for us. Remember, we're asking him to come up with 2-5 different ideas. Giving a range of Meridians rather then something specific is neither nice nor fun for him.
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Actually, he specifically said we could ask for, say, "Art that have any combinations of arms, lung, heart. Preferably moon". So maybe we'll have heart/lung, or heart/arms, or arm-arm, etc.

Basically, he is asking for ideas.
 
Arkeus said:
Actually, he specifically said we could ask for, say, "Art that have any combinations of arms, lung, heart. Preferably moon". So maybe we'll have heart/lung, or heart/arms, or arm-arm, etc.

Basically, he is asking for ideas.
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Hmm.

Arkeus said:
Those look good, my main issue is that they seem overly specific. OTOH, I guess going overly specific might work.
OK, I'm going to switch to:
-[] any combination of Head/Heart/Spine arts that are wind, darkness or water aligned.
@yrsillar does that work, or can I get super specific like Thor's post above?
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yrsillar said:
Yeah that works
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That's not quite the same. I'm pretty sure he was reading the question as a Head/Heart/Spine art using any of Wind, Darkness, or Water. Because that's how I was reading that answer until you clarified your position just now. Searching for any of Head or Heart or Spine in any combination using any of Wind or Darkness or Water is a horribly wide open search.

And I wouldn't expect to find Moon on the first floor at all. That's explicitly a rare element.
 
So, let's switch topics for a moment. I am not doing this because two weeks ago I predicted we'd hit page 600 and we have clearly not hit page 600 yet and hope to spark 28 pages worth of conversation in the next hour or so.

I haven't really seen a proper action plan review: before the events of the Thunderdome, what do you think we did really well? What are some things we did less well? What opportunities are we good at taking hold of? What opportunities did we miss? And going forward, what do you think are some of the things we should change, having reviewed how we performed in the past?

I'd answer these questions, but alas, I'm packing for my annual leave/vacation so that's going to have to wait.
 
FixerUpper said:
So, let's switch topics for a moment. I am not doing this because two weeks ago I predicted we'd hit page 600 and we have clearly not hit page 600 yet and hope to spark 28 pages worth of conversation in the next hour or so.

I haven't really seen a proper action plan review: before the events of the Thunderdome, what do you think we did really well? What are some things we did less well? What opportunities are we good at taking hold of? What opportunities did we miss? And going forward, what do you think are some of the things we should change, having reviewed how we performed in the past?

I'd answer these questions, but alas, I'm packing for my annual leave/vacation so that's going to have to wait.
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We didn't use our drugs quite as effectively as we could have. The first 'pill day' for instance, we didn't override the physical cultivation with an art, so we could have gotten another free qi roll. We also didn't know about the shopping list at that point - we could have used better drugs.

We could hunt through our actions and find various things that didn't really work out, and then rejiggle out plans slightly, but we honestly did quite well. There's some risks we might have taken that we didn't - I suspect if we had stayed for the third test our standing in the sect would be better... but on the other hand we might have lost. So hard to say.
 
Well, I would say that one of the best things that we did was combo the sable light pill with the cultivation tea. That combo saved us a ton of actions and allowed us to get second place in Elder Su's class.

Speaking of the cultivation tea, one of the best things we have been able to get Meizhen as our ally. She has been one of the major reasons we have done so well in the various tests and getting basic knowledge about the setting we are in.

One of the things I think we did poorly was not branching out into different weapons after our initial pick of daggers. We picked daggers primarily for the ability to do close damage as well as ranged damage during Zhou's test, but we never really moved beyond them after they had served that purpose.

As for the efficiency of our actions in the past, well I think we did generally well. We might have spent more time with Han Jian in order to get something out of him, but if we had done that I'm not sure we would have been able to breakthrough as soon as we did. We were able to keep up with our meridians, keep up with our arts, and have a ton of qi for the stage we were in. We passed Zhou's test, we got the Archive Pass, we have defeated every person we have fought against, and so far we have gotten the sects attention on us. Hopefully, that can continue and we pass the inner disciple test.
 
As people point out- we used pills well when we had them.

We absolutely should have jumped on shopping earlier to get an idea of what was available, and we probably should have found more actions that earn us money in the early days- it seems really likely if we were hunting beast cores with Su Ling we'd have made some extra cash to do the pill-rush. Pills are a big deal, and if we had the money to buy even some halfway decent equipment like our knives earlier it would have made every early fight much easier.
 
One thing we MIGHT have done was, by visiting the town and getting the shopping list before the first test, be ready for shopping after it. Then we could have sold the staff faster, picked up drugs earlier, and potentially started getting foundation pills earlier. That would have made it easier to keep earning those pills, and we could have combined that with the first sable pill then
 
TheLastOne said:
We also didn't know about the shopping list at that point - we could have used better drugs.
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I think that'd be my biggest criticism: in general, we don't explore. Threats blindside us because we're unaware of them and opportunities are lost because we don't know they exist.

It took us:
  • about six weeks to do anything with the staff?
  • a same amount of time before finding the production hall
  • we never explored the mountain in a dedicated 'explore the mountain' act
  • never tried figuring out what the tokens did
  • didn't try asking Professor Su as many questions as we could (one a week would have probably been allowed as she pointed out at the beginning we were allowed to ask questions so long as they were asked respectfully - I think we could have asked whether or not we could get another art from the archive, instead I think we kind of assumed that if we got a meridian she'd give us a pass)
  • never bothered reaching out to girls who weren't apparently alienated by all the other girls in the Sect (srsly: Bai goes without saying, but Gu has no other close female friends either, and it looks like- SHIT I JUST REALIZED IN ORDER FOR HUANG DA TO HAVE INTERVENED IN LI SUYIN'S FIGHT HE MUST HAVE BEEN ON THE GIRL'S SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN, YES? or maybe they ran to a neutral staging ground before he could help them. If it's the former, then Ling Qi's suspicion that he's been watching her sleep is amply justified)
It's pretty clear that the tests the Elders set up more than justify the time spent on them. While we weren't strong enough to take advantage of those opportunities before (tokens we didn't have enough dots in formation for, production hall we didn't have enough resources to take advantage of (unless we sold the staff early), mountain was theoretically too dangerous, and by the time we could explore the mountain, we could also explore specifically for good cultivation places, etc.).

Nevertheless, I know that SV tends to go for the mystery box option, but in the future I would counsel going for the mystery box option more often now that we have the strength to go for it.
 
On the one hand, exploration apparently would have given us a fair amount of unique opportunities. We've gotten some great opportunities from it. On the other hand, I'm not sure we were ready for exploration until after Week 8/9. Before that, we were only mid-Red / Gold and had 1 measly art. In that light, I think we started exploring as early as reasonably possible (and then were very lucky in results).

While it would have been nice to go shopping earlier, we didn't have any resources to spend on shopping before that. Well, I suppose we could have sold the staff earlier, but people were still hoping we might get a wood art sometime soon. I also disagree that we should have switched faster re: weapon masteries. We didn't have resources to buy good DV weapons (our DV4 daggers are pretty dang cheap and cost-effective) nor an art to work with them. Switching now is a good idea - we're in the lull where people are still avoiding us, we basically train with Han Jian and Co. every week in a safe environment without any pressing emergency, and we have an opportunity to take advantage of new weapons (resources; Archive arts).

I actually think that somehow... we managed to do everything reasonably - even exceptionally - well, and we were super lucky on a fair number of rolls where we gambled on finishing things (the AS series for ex. - twice even). When we could go for mystery boxes, we did, but we also did the grunt work to put ourselves in a good position for Thunderdome.
 
I've mentioned it before but overall I think we've done very well and have all contributed to ling qis success however as I stated before I think we might have done Too well. I'm not very good with words so instead I'll try to frame this argument in a way that I can understand.
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Your a new player In an mmo, let's say WoW as it's one of the biggest ones out there and many people have prob played it.

Your just starting off and everything is new and exciting and every item that's better then normal or grey items is an amazing find and awesome ( our first art(zeph) and daggers )

But then suddenly everything changes. You meet some higher level players who are willing to help you out by giving you free stuff and advice ( Bai , and Han)

That free stuff helps you shoot above other noobs and suddenly your getting higher leveled really fast. Not too bad of a problem but then suddenly those stronger friends of yours? They decide to take you to a dungeon and power level you. Now you find yourself a much higher level , access to cool abilities , and really nice gear. No other noob can compete with you because of this and your able to do quest and win duels you wouldn't have been able to originally. ( the test and Han taking us along)

And then you get lucky again and find a location where you can farm mobs and just get stronger even faster . (The vent)

So now you find yourself really high level really fast but you missed out on a lot of the lower level quest, a lot of the concepts and things a person your level should know how to do now through trial and error. You never failed and learned how to be better you just power leveled.

Now you may be the same Level as your other friends but you lack experience on how to play your class well, you don't have all the information you need about many things misc or not that is common to other players at your level , you lack many things and iteams your friends have and it's going to hurt you in the long run.

In conclusion we are a noob who was power leveled and now we are suffering because we never learned how to play the game in the beginning and skipped the tutorial :V:grin::smile:
 
I hate to say it, but a lot of those actions NOT spent on exploration were spent on social links. If we don't expect to put in the work for shinies with Han Fang or whoever, MAYBE we can use those actions elsewhere?

I don't feel we 'power leveled too quickly'- it's just an ugly fact that cultivation matters more than skill and we can be clumsy as hell with a heavy polearm and beat the living crap out of a mere low-Red cultivator working with closer to mortal stats. Much as in an MMO, level really does matter for a lot and equipment does matter for a lot. We missed out on 'something' by rising to the top quickly, but it's not like we can't gain skill as we learn now.
 
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    • drake_azathoth said:
    I hate to say it, but a lot of those actions NOT spent on exploration were spent on social links. If we don't expect to put in the work for shinies with Han Fang or whoever, MAYBE we can use those actions elsewhere?

    I don't feel we 'power leveled too quickly'- it's just an ugly fact that cultivation matters more than skill and we can be clumsy as hell with a heavy polearm and beat the living crap out of a mere low-Red cultivator working with closer to mortal stats.
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    The thing is, I think our relationship with people improves pretty awesomely every time we explore with them. First with Su Ling and Li Suyin and now with Bai Meizhen. There's an associated risk, as shown by Bai Meizhen, but I suspect that if we want to get closer to people, the most effective way is to show off our incredible LUCK stat.

    Of course, when we need it most, LUCK will desert us. +_+

    But, I remember there's a line Toph says about life-changing fieldtrips? We need to spend more time on life-changing fieldtrips.
     
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