Speaker4thesilen
Superpower: Common Sense
- Location
- Noneya Business
Did we just get our first 'Mugging the Monster' moment? Great update and I'm looking forward to finding out what form our loot will take.
Threads Of Destiny(Eastern Fantasy, Sequel to Forge of Destiny)
- Thread starter yrsillar
- Start date
- Original Users' Choice!
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
Time's a resource too, and he lost what, like two months' worth out of a year? And couldn't make proper use of exploration or trials for a chunk of the rest.
Cecylene
Eternal Idea Engine
- Location
- Massachusetts
- Pronouns
- He/They
Let's not forget he also lost out on his red stone stipend for two months, as the rules required you pick them up in person.
So he lost time to cultivate and research, resources to cultivate in the form of Red Stones and any Sites he has managed to find (I shudder since I remember how multiplier stacking was the be-all-end-all of the first Thread), opportunities to find better Sites/face trials/Pill Gacha, and connections like hooking up with a Sect Elder or Sun Liling even earlier and getting a cash train flowing two whole months early and potentially changing the tide of the Outer Sect conflict from the get go.
Ji Rong got absolutely stuffed, because it is known that his Talent is capable of letting him Mono-Focus his build and match Ling Qi's Realm despite being two months behind her absurd cultivation schedule.
Eh, a bit disappointed Ling Qi didn't try to persuade them away from violence. I was hoping for a bit more diplomacy.
Correct me if I am wrong in thinking this, but LQ would have shown a bit more hesitance in going for the kill if they were human, right?
Correct me if I am wrong in thinking this, but LQ would have shown a bit more hesitance in going for the kill if they were human, right?
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That was most likely option 2, since it kind of sucks for an ambush predator, when the prey walks in and tells you to knock it off, you aren't that subtle.
- Location
- The Star Kingdom of Manticore
The spiders didn't have to launch the ambush. If humans had done the same thing Ling Qi would have responded the same way, too.
Also, he got his library card stolen.
Like, we didn't use ours too much because we got super lucky with the Moon noticing and liking us and snowballed from there. Losing access to those Arts early on would definitely make it a lot more difficult to get started on finding and getting other opportunities.
- Location
- Finland
Problem with option 2 was that it also had Ling Qi announce allegiance to the Cai, which would probably have put the spiders into fight or flight mode, and having little room for flight, that would almost certainly have meant fighting to death.
This was a good result, not the best possible one, but that was in the hands (claws? fangs?) of the spiders, not us.
I'm afraid the news about the Hui Lord and their loyalty kinda dashed any hope of peaceful interaction long term.
This was a good result, not the best possible one, but that was in the hands (claws? fangs?) of the spiders, not us.
I'm afraid the news about the Hui Lord and their loyalty kinda dashed any hope of peaceful interaction long term.
- Location
- The Star Kingdom of Manticore
Yah. The spiders being Hui loyalists meant that peace wasn't on the table.
He would have hit the same bottleneck as all the other Greens in Forge so he's not really two months behind us anymore.
They could have switched from quietly planning an ambush to quietly trying to sneak out.
I don't see how that would have gone worse for them.
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- Location
- Finland
Sneaking would not have gone worse for them than fighting, but would they think that to be the case? I don't think most of us considered the fight to be so one sided beforehand.
But i am not sure sneaking out was a realistic option. Where would they go?
If there is a Hui Lord here, they can't just abandon them if they are loyal, and the Lord might not be willing to just move even if they had somewhere to move to (which i doubt).
Cecylene
Eternal Idea Engine
- Location
- Massachusetts
- Pronouns
- He/They
He got stuffed by virtue of those who hit Green early in the Outer Sect benefited far more the longer they were Green due to getting access to better arts far earlier than others, and his high level of Talent means he would have had more Meridians and thus access to more/higher level arts sooner.
Ji Rong was also forced to mono focus more than just a little to rapidly close the two month gap, imagine if he had a Spirit Beast for the Tournament fight how badly that could have turned out for us.
In the Outer Sect the Green Blttleneck matters less than simply having access to Green Level arts and being able to Max them out, as we the thread are fairly certain the Ji Rong has a full Talent I'm rating if not Two on Ling Qi, so he would be cultivating a full 10-30% more efficiently making those monthshe lost the equivalent of Ling Qi being forced to lose out on two and a half months of time which would have caused us not to receive Travellers End nor would it have given us the ability to have our music ignore environmental conditions. He got stuffed plain and simple, and Ling Qi has very much enjoyed the knock-on effects of that ever since.
- Location
- Greece
CRX and Meizhen (and Liling) have a realm and time advantage, in addition to slightly higher quality. They are not as far above us, however, to be "of much bigger quality". Between pros, the realm difference is much bigger factor: imagine 2 grandmaster level chessmasters, then give the slightly less skilled one 1 additional pawn. The skill levels are so high, that even such a small addition of power means the less skilled grandmaster trounces the stronger one every time. This is life in the upper skill limits, every advantage skews titanic. By contrast, a grandmaster could probably break a rando with 2 or 3 additional queens.
Wang Chao is less than that, but has bigger Realm difference, if I remember correctly.
There is a reason I didn't use the nobility rankings as quality rankings : it is incredibly misleading. Remember BINO being shit? Remember Kang Zihan being given the works? That is not how the world works per se.
First of all, trailblazing barons probably match counts (for the slowest ones) to viscounts to maybe even ducals in quality. The problem with young baron families is weak foundation, their founder, however, is often extra stronk personally, the kind of person that draws fortuitous encounters to themselves in addition to being a genius. Problem is, most of these guys get sent to danger until they die, and their clan gets a severe reduction of power levels when they do so. Even the ones that do not die early tend to not accrue enough resources within their lifetimes to set a decent foundation. Plus they walk unknown paths with limited resources, making changing realms that much more chancy. Most young families end in the second generation, and most of the rest get to be scrubs for a few generations (if they are lucky) or for forever (if not). But overall? anyone who thinks that some are low quality because of birth is not paying attention to the reason the Empire implements certain policies.
Then there is the flip side: noble famillies aren't uniform in quality either. Reminder that everyone in the inner sect advances their position just because of what being in the inner sect says about your talent, that BINO sucked comparative to even viscount and count class combatants, and that Xiulan got a major boost of status because of her stunt, and that to any nonducal becoming cyan sets you for life. The outer sect was rifraff, nobility or not, and most of them weren't even the bottom of their families, families wouldn't send their most pathetic doods because they were jousting for rank. And our year was a monster year. Han Jian, a pretty high-quality marquis level noble is probably at best of equal quality compared to Su Ling and Gan Guangli, ie not even the monster commoners, and mudboy (rip) would bury him even in the same realm despite being from a lowly baron family.
That is not to say that nobles with talent do not exist. Not only do they exist, but their background makes them like tigers with wings. All 4 ducals in the sect are highly talented (Bai got heavy acknowledgment for proving herself a superscion, Xuan has the interest of the twin admirals even if his political situation is shaky, Cai is custom made and Sun Liling has more resources than the average ducal could throw about and still lost, but resources count in quality so in the same tier she goes). However, the difference isn't as big as one would think, due to the way this quest has implied that geniuses tend to get fortuitous encounters that equalize the resource disadvantage somewhat. Still, fortuitous encounters do often make for more unstable and minmaxed but fragile builds at the very least, meaning there is a definite quality advantage to being a noble, just not an unbridgeable one as some people tend to suggest.
Then there is the fact that the quality scissor closes as people move upwards between colours, as the realm changes judge for quality. If the lowest quality Cyan restricts their realm and techniques to Green 1 and fights a low quality Green 1, the lowest quality Cyan will take the fight, cuz advancement to cyan has weeded out people to the point every Cyan is in the top 15%* of quality for a Green. Admittedly, quality can and does get upgraded, so a high Realm may even be much higher than that. As we have seen with general Xia, even with realm restriction on, super high realms clown on frikking CRX quality-wise. Still, I imagine that the highest the Realm, the lower the quality gap between scrub and master.
In conclusion: do not be classist guys, we are objectively near the top tier, and while we aren't the "highest quality person evar!!11!!1!11!" like in most xianxia, at best people who aren't realm restricted higher realms or the ancient Emperor reborn have only a relatively slight advantage in quality based on their resources and build soundness.
*skewing higher than 1 in 10 because greens die/do not advance for reasons other than quality
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- Location
- The Star Kingdom of Manticore
I think this type of discussion is really interesting, however a quick question before I really dig deeper into this. You use the phrase trailblazing baron. What does that mean to you? Is it just first generation nobles? If it is, I'm not sure I can agree with your quality rating of that. We know about Nie Ai, a first generational noble, and while she is good I don't think she matches a quality count or viscount. So what is a trailblazing first generational noble to you?
- Location
- Greece
You said the words yourself, a QUALITY count or viscount, by which I think you mean an inner sect dude. Nie Ai is better than the average noble by mere dint of being decently ranked in the inner sect. She just isn't monster quality.
Reminder that nobles self select for quality too, when giving high positions. It is why they give a lot of births. We and Ji Rong joust with the exceptional, but the lowest quality tralblazing barons could only beat the average count or viscount clan member of their realm, not their elites and everyone inner sect is at worst on low elite tier.
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- Location
- Cali
Ji Rong's raw talent is superior, but Ling Qi has much much much better allies partially due to the interest that the Moon has in her, partially due to her personality fitting more people with resources. I think we'd still hold our own against him even without his handicap. Also, it seems like Ji Rong, whose spirit weapon is a mirror that he breaks, is plain unlucky.
- Location
- The Star Kingdom of Manticore
I am now not really sure what your first post was discussing. Right now I think you are comparing good quality, for example people in the inner sect, to poor quality, for example people in the outer sect. I am not entirely sure this is helpful, because those are such massive groupings of people and I am unsure we should even be comparing poor quality to good quality right now. It feels a lot like comparing apples to oranges.
There is value in knowing what makes an apple or an orange, especially when we start making our own arts, but where Ling Qi is right now it feels far better to compare quality to quality and try to find the small advantages others have. As you said before everyone is a grandmaster now, some just have extra pawns.
Knowing what those pawns are would help Ling Qi identify her own advantages and see if she is leveraging them as well as she could. It is here I would like to discuss the idea that quality is a very poor identifier. It is very vague and their are countless ways to measure it. Even the broad strokes I am using, the inner and outer sect divide, is a poor measure since it leaves GG, Han Jian, and Han Fang in the poor quality section. Such a statement would be hard to defend. Yet such a divide currently is the quickest and easiest ways to group cultivators Ling Qi knows about.
The idea of using quality as a comparison tool is just so large and vague that I feel it to be mostly unhelpful. Yet it can be used to narrow down search parameters into a more useful scale. If instead of comparing a quality cultivator, here judged by inner or outer sect, to another random quality cultivator we instead compared a quality cultivator to a quality cultivator of the same rough skill sets than we can get a much better idea on how those cultivators compare to each other.
This brings us to Ling Qi. Her skill set is roughly divide into two. Combat and social. Comparing Ling Qi to others may be tricky however as her skill sets don't appear to be very common in the sect. Combat wise we haven't really seen another cultivator who focuses to such a degree to large scale effects as Ling Qi does. It is one of the things I am most interested in seeing in the future. Someone who fulfills a similar role and who has, at least partially, similar skill sets. Socially we do have at least one aspiring diplomat in the sect. Meizhen. I... I really don't know how our diplomatic skills compare though, since she doesn't seem use diplomatic skills outside of her friend group.
This leads me to the strongest woes I have about our build. While our build is powerful because it gets the jobs we are given done, we don't know how we compare to others with similar roles. Where do we lie on the hierarchy of our roles? Whos better than us at our job and what advantages and weaknesses does that show in our build? Given that witnessing such people may never happen, or happen to late to really change our build, it seems that we will have to continue as we have. Given how well its worked so far I am hopeful about the future.
One thing I am increasingly seeing as a powerful advantage though is our sincere negotiation. In the Empire, especially the Emerald Seas, being able to tell when someone is lying may be very valuable. As well as stopping people from knowing your lying. Our Sincere Negotiation skill bypasses most of that dance by always telling the truth. It seems to be a very different style of interaction than most are used to. It could be a fairly large comparative advantage to other diplomats who may spend resources trying to get around defenses we don't actually use. On the other hand it might not and our social approach may need more comparative advantages. Something I am planning on keeping my eye on for the future.
To wrap up this fairly long post: I don't believe comparing poor quality to good quality, however you judge those, to be useful in Ling Qi's current state of development. Comparing quality to quality is also unhelpful as the category is so large. Comparing people who do their jobs well will likely give us the most useful amount of information. Ling Qi doesn't have people who seem to fulfill comparable jobs. This is annoying. The biggest comparative advantage we may have in the social field is Sincere Negotiation which could sidestep an eon old arms race.
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- Location
- United Kingdom
Our archive pass was more useful than you're implying, considering we didn't just use it for Arts. We also used it for info gathering, like the phases of the Moon, info on Xuan Wu/Volcano Tortoises, our loot from the Hidden Moon quest and probably other bits and pieces that I'm not remembering at the moment.
- Location
- The Star Kingdom of Manticore
Are you implying that Ji Rong was more than a two dimensional bruiser in the outer sect? That sounds like Hui sympathies to me and is very sus.
- Location
- Greece
My posts may have been confusing because they assert 2 different, if related, things. First, they were contesting the assumption that in universe quality correlated strongly with class (baron, viscount, count etc) while also using that as a pivot to prove that Ling Qi's quality is near the top of what is presented in the story (first emperor type monsters may be still a tier above everything, but apart from that, we are at most surpassed by a third of a tier by some). It was not implying that trailblazing barons> all, it was implying that class is only one predictor, and not even the biggest one, because I was responding to responses on my original comment about our place compared to the wider world and the way class ties into all this.
But if you want me to talk bout Ling Qi's place in the inner sect quality wise, I can discuss that too, for I have opinions (that may well be wrong) on that subject as well about people undervaluing Ling Qi. Not everyone is of an absolute top quality here, as your post implies or we wouldn't be blazing upwards the sect ranks with ease. It is just that... well, how to put it... in online competitive game terms, everyone in the sect ranges from diamond 1 to (whatever the top rank is called) 5. In such a comparison, we are, I'd estimate, (top rank) 3, Wang Chao is (top rank) 2, CRX and Sun Liling are (top rank) and Meizhen is (top rank) 5,* with a hypothetical first emperor class character and suppressed higher realms being e-sports tier. Our quality absolutely bridges gaps against inner secters with some advantages against us.
Han Jian and Gan Guangli, on the other hand, are not "poor quality" per se, but compared to people in the championship, they were... Platinum 5 or 4. They may have bridged that gap in the past year tho, quality can and does get improved. The guys that may actually be lower quality fighters, (maybe even, gasp, gold) now that I think about it, are the production class advancement track, because even while I think that being capable of equiping yourself is a big enough advantage to offset that, it is still better to equip bodyguards and be the supply train.
But yeah, you are right in that counters are more important than quality when everyone is competent, I am just using quality as an abstract of showing that realm and class are not everything there is to powerlevel, not to create a ranking system which I cannot do without full information. In short, despite my attempt at ranking some people above, I am mostly using it as a demonstrative tool to show what our relative place in the world is because questers tend to undervalue us based on comparing us with monsters, not as a tool to find "who would win". In short, our objectives are different. You want to compare Ling Qi with others to help her grow, I want to instill the thread some perspective about the world to make it less timid. I think both should be done, mind you, just that this is the reasin we seem to talk about different, if strongly related, subjects.
*Assume the e sport in question has 1 as weaker and 5 as stronger rather than the oppossite.
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- Location
- UK
Huh, thinking about over the last two years Ling Qi started as a scared peasant who would sneak everywhere outside of lessons, became a flighty airhead as she cultivated and got more confident, became a wannabe Bai as she copied Meizhen's diplomacy methods, then I think shifted back to flighty airhead with the whole sincerity thing while having a horror movie monster split personality when serious.
Wonder how this all looks to people who don't know us and didn't see all this happening first hand.
Yeah, she definitely got possessed, just took a while for the dress to learn acting.
The green bottleneck matters for the fact he is the same level as LQ in cultivation.
Beyond it, there is the fact the gap between them only increased during the months in the inner sect, as he himself said after their duel, and this is despite LQ spreading out over social and utility art and changing combat role
- Location
- The Star Kingdom of Manticore
I think the word "quality" has been hampering my understanding of your argument quite a bit. "Quality" is word with a lot of baggage in this quest. Arts, sites, pills, and resources are all compared using the word quality. When I replaced the word "quality" in your argument with the word "effective" I think I understood your argument much better.
For sect given missions, Ling Qi is at a 100% success rate. Some missions only succeeded because Ling Qi was there. One can't get much more effective than that. However, Ling Qi has a very specific role/skill set/job in those missions. I think it is unfair to compare people with vastly different roles/skill sets/jobs because, for example, if you had Ling Qi try and fulfill Cai Renxiang's role/skill set/job Ling Qi would be very ineffective.
I think the largest problem I have with how you have presented your premise. The groupings you've created are simply too large and this invites ambiguity and confusion. For me I have started separating people into roles/skill sets/jobs. This allows us to even define what makes a monster. Before it was vague and based only on feelings and a select group who held the position from the start of the quest. I would define monster class cultivators as people at the top of their peers in a role/skill set/job group. Sun Lilling for example is the likely the most effective duelist in our peer group. Ji Rong is also an excellent duelist. But he is worse than Sun Lilling. This makes Sun Lilling a monster, as she is the most effective duelist. Cai Renxiang is the most effective disruptor, she's a monster. Bai Meizhen is a problem child because I don't know what exact role/skill set/job group best fits her, however I have faith that whatever group that is Meizhen is the most effective at it in our peer group. This brings me to my most interesting idea so far.
Li Suyin is a monster class cultivator, and the perfect proof of your argument. Your argument, as I understand it, is that neither social rank or realm have much, if any, impact on a cultivators "quality" (for me effectiveness). Li Suyin is the best example of this. She is common born and in her role/skill set/job of formation crafter is arguably the most effective. She's breached the 500 rank, is making breakthroughs in a very new field while making advancements in a separate field. The sect is also pouring resources to her and the sect would not do that if Li Suyin was ineffective. Xuan Shi might be able to contest the title of most effective formation crafter, but the mere fact that is a conversation to be had is proof of the idea that being ducal doesn't make you the most effective at a their chosen role/skill set/job.
TimEd
Meteor maker
Ji Rong is not only studying on those things he missed before (governance, etc) but also still suffering from the fact that his faction lost.
Remember the boost to materials we got from the Cai when we reached Inner Sect? Especially the entirety of that Arts Archive? Ji Rong would be lucky to retain the resources he got.
It's a dang miracle Ji Rong is even as close as he is right now.
Varder
Tired Cultist
- Location
- Hell
I'd agree with you, but not after I saw CRX's spirits unleash a nuclear bomb at her command. LQ's fairly close to them in spars, but when all gloves come off ducals have some tricks LQ can't match yet. And CRX is explicitly the weakest ducal out of three in single combat, so Sun and Meizhen are even more terrifying.
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