By the way, do we want to do Calm Charges for this fight? Since, well, year's ending and all.
We still have a crafting action featuring burning Aspects for +3 successes each after this, so not unless it's an emergency.
If we're running the risk of Gabriel just getting us before we're ready, shouldn't we have more Attack Speed so that we, you know, can react faster? Simply being That Fast could be the difference between actually getting our buffs off and not getting our buffs off.
We're doing one buff and I think we get it off first either way. If we're going speed it's for the rest of the fight, not that one buff. So far you're the only one suggesting this so I'm not switching unless other people do as well.
Also I'd echo those who've said maybe our eye shapecrafting would be better spent on reflexes or muscles, but I also know that @DeadmanwalkingXI loves his Kindle-Spinners with the same intensity that a Labrador loves unattended cooked meats, so I don't think we're getting too far with that one. 😅
That's not really it, it's not about any specific Trick and Kindle Spinner isn't a particular favorite (for the record, I think my
favorite Attack Trick is probably Flashfire Cleave, but it's situational), it's about the ability to shift from ranged to melee as the situation dictates without needing to worry about sacrificing damage.
Our Kindle-Spinners are already at +4 Damage from Ignition, Tracking Eyes is like, overkill at this point. It's like, 7-8 damage with Target Tracking Eyes at this point.
7 damage without, 8 damage with. Of course Sharpened Flashfire Cleave is currently 9 damage to the person, 12 damage to their armor with the current slot allocation. If you think 8 damage is overkill, well, there are higher damage attacks to drop in melee than at range. I actually don't think that's overkill, I'm just noting.
And we've seen that all the really good fighters (read: everyone we've seen who has Shapeshifting) tend to like, specialize their Shapeshifts slots.
Uh...no we haven't. We have exactly zero evidence of this. Like, most foes we fight have maybe 2-3 shapeshifting slots, of which at most 1 is even in damage, and we don't get hit for damage very often, so the combination of factors means a lot of our foes
can't specialize like this, and of those who
can I don't think we've literally ever gotten hit with both a melee and a ranged attack where we knew the original base damage and could thus infer shapeshifting slot allocations like this.
Like, Sten hit us with both, but the ranged one was a Trick and we don't know its base damage, and the Threaded Elephant hit for massive damage with both, but then it would and isn't a good example either way...and I can't think of anything else where we've even seen both their melee and ranged numbers on damage absent intervening variables (well, not anything else that uses shapeshifting slots, anyway).
It's possible this is true, but saying we've seen it is just factually inaccurate.
e: Plus like, it would be worth trying it out in a controlled combat environment to see how it fares. Instead of never considering it at all.
I mean...the fight isn't gonna look that different based on damage getting reassigned? We could figure out whether we'd have done marginally more damage with one damage up reassigned from ranged to melee, sure, but it wouldn't mean much one way or the other. Given our high damage numbers either way, one specific fight will almost always come down to, like, a few hits that actually get through and do damage...whether those are melee or ranged is gonna be a little bit of a crapshoot if we're actually mixing them up, and down to circumstances if we decide to heavily favor one over the other.
Like, if Gabriel turns out to be very susceptible to Mire Ward, then we probably stick to melee and the shift to melee damage is correct, but if he's instead wrecking us in melee and we need to get some distance, suddenly we'd regret that choice, and then if he can actively prevent us backing off we're maybe back to melee being better...unless Sparkbomb turns out to be decisive in which case it's ranged we wanted. We don't know which at this point, and whichever it turns out to be doesn't mean a lot for other fights against other foes.
