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Threads Of Destiny(Eastern Fantasy, Sequel to Forge of Destiny)

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We did that in the beginning and people kept complaining that it seemed like we weren't doing enough in fights having our own finisher is always going to be a good idea that way if we have to split up we're still relevant combatant.
 
Joseph0o0 said:
We did that in the beginning and people kept complaining that it seemed like we weren't doing enough in fights having our own finisher is always going to be a good idea that way if we have to split up we're still relevant combatant.
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In what way is someone capable of tanking an entire enemy force while inflicting significant attrition on them "not relevant"?

The narratives we are using are the ones that destroy armies.
 
Joseph0o0 said:
We're not always going to be fighting armies sometimes are going to be fighting small numbers of peers
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a finisher will do jack shit against them, you do know that right? In LQ's build, a finisher is nothing more that putting a bow on the already wrapped up corpses of our enemies.... except its worse, because with the drain, she could stop before they die and capture them for information purposes and other things, but with Call to Endings, its just "Freeze! You are already dead!"
And back to the small number of peers.... LQ drains and damages ALL off them regardless, because she is a sneaky, AoE specialist dodge tank. the only reason to want a finisher is to be flashy, which she can do even without one, what with just appearing and making a god damn fort/safe zone out of nowhere in seconds.
 
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Bull every single time we've had a fight with a peer finisher has been relevant trying to say otherwise is pure revisionist history. The first person we ever killed was with call to endings.
Our first ever duel in the inner sect we won with call to endings. The first time we engage the cloud tribe in battle we forced a retreat with call to endings.As we get more powerful it only becomes more relevant the longer you let an enemy loiter on the battlefield the more chance they had to pull out some secret technique we didn't know about that really hurts us finishing an enemy off as soon as they're weak enough is always a better strategy than letting them get slowly whittled down
 
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Joseph0o0 said:
On the subject of finishers getting away from the mechanics for a minute it makes for a much better story to end the fight in a flashy way than to have every fight end and then Ling Qi waited around them for 10 minutes until they fell unconscious
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Why?
Honest question, why?
Having Ling Qi be the slow creeping end of all things opponent instead of flashy showboat is just as valid way to be than do flashy finishers.
It is much more thematic, it plays up the horror element for her opponents, and separates her from dozens upon dozens of Xianxcia protagonists who are all flash and no substance.
 
Joseph0o0 said:
Bull every single time we've had a fight with a peer finisher has been relevant trying to say otherwise is pure revisionist history. The first person we ever killed was with call to endings.
Our first ever duel in the inner sect we won with call to endings. The first time we engage the cloud tribe in battle we forced a retreat with call to endings.As we get more powerful it only becomes more relevant the longer you let an enemy lawyer on the battlefield the more chance they had to pull out some secret technique we didn't know about that really hurts us finishing an enemy off as soon as they're weak enough is always a better strategy than letting them get slowly whittled down
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CtE never been relevant. We killed our first person with CtE because none of the rest of our kit kills people (well, Traveler's End did...); we can knock people unconscious, restraining them, for free! The duel to get into the Inner Sect was already won and then we got a "do you want to use CtE or just let them surrender?" vote. We could have caused the Cloud Nomad retreat in any number of ways (and that was using CtE as a ranged opener, the exact opposite of how its supposed to be used).

Edit: Traveler's End was a much more appropriate finisher for LQ but was removed because an AoE finisher like that broke the world and we've since adjusted things to make it unnecessary.
 
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Is there a list of abilities that Ling Qi has? I'm trying to figure out who I should be supporting, but I'm getting constantly confused.
 
i would also point out that we had a lot fewer and not as well mastered tools/arts. not to mention most of those fight you mention was against people from already well established families, their similarly highly talented retainers, or people above us by some small realms..... and the finisher would have done nothing if the DoT and leech fields didn't wrecked them already.
The one closest to actually beat us, aside from the ice lady diplomat, imo, was the rebel Bai archer who tried to run away.
emphasis on tried, because he was nearing the end of his reserves, and the finisher just supercharged the poison we already got in him.
 
Do you know what this argument been going on for a while between a lot of different people and I think it's pretty clear that none of us are going to change our minds so I'm gonna drop it it's not even relevant for the current vote
 
I feel like there is a misconception that we are choosing between our every DoT skills and single finisher move. We are not. We are choosing between having a finisher and having %1 less accumulated DoT total.

Finisher is worth it even if we don't always use it. There will come a fight where we have to finish things fast because that is how thing go. I would not for example forgive myself if we are late to helping an ally that is about to die because we needed another 5 minutes to finish our oppnonent neatly. A second can be a lifetime in a fight.
 
Tasoli said:
I feel like there is a misconception that we are choosing between our every DoT skills and single finisher move. We are not. We are choosing between having a finisher and having %1 less accumulated DoT total.

Finisher is worth it even if we don't always use it. There will come a fight where we have to finish things fast because that is how thing go. I would not for example forgive myself if we are late to helping an ally that is about to die because we needed another 5 minutes to finish our oppnonent neatly. A second can be a lifetime in a fight.
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Any finisher we can get with minimal time investment is unlikely to be all that useful, and the time spent on getting one, and improving it, is not spent on improving our existing moveset.

And a situation where not having the ability to keep couple dozen more smalltime enemies tied up for couple hours causing deaths of hundreds is equally valid hypothetical.
 
The big question for any high realm combatant is "why is you losing impossible?"

Sword cultivators answer "because no matter what I face, I can cut it"
Shenhua answers "because everything is flawed and I can do better"
The Gu answer "because no matter what I face, it burns"
Xin answers "because all these facts and figures show I win"
Jiao answers "because you are not worthy of winning"
Yuan He answers "because I have my friends and we can take down anything"

So what's Ling Qi's argument for why she is going to win? How does a finisher enter into that?

My view is that her argument should be "because one day you will be alone and there is nothing worse than that". A finisher only gets in the way of this: it forces a binary division when that's not how loneliness works and its suddenness gets in the way of a statement about the nebulous future.
 
JohnnieBoy123 said:
CtE never been relevant. We killed our first person with CtE because none of the rest of our kit kills people (well, Traveler's End did...); we can knock people unconscious, restraining them, for free! The duel to get into the Inner Sect was already won and then we got a "do you want to use CtE or just let them surrender?" vote. We could have caused the Cloud Nomad retreat in any number of ways (and that was using CtE as a ranged opener, the exact opposite of how its supposed to be used).
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yrsillar said:
As she sped through the air, Ling Qi saw the panic growing in the Bai's spirit, an insidious thread spreading ever so slowly and weakening his resolve. She saw his free hand inching toward a loop of beads hanging from his belt, marked with formations that she knew to be those of escape talisman.

Most of all, she saw that his back was open as he fended off her liege. Ling Qi…

[] Laid her hands on his shoulders and sang of the End, to the joyous howls of her fading phantoms.
[] Swooped past and sang of the End, to give her liege the opening she needed.
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Personally using a finisher was the fastest way to finish a fight that, had it gone on fractions of a second longer, would likely have ended in the enemy teleporting away. Setting Renren up to deal the finisher herself would have cost additional moments that, by all accounts, we did not have. So no, we didn't use CtE because it kills people, we used it because it instantly ended the fight - murder was just the means of ending the fight, because none of our non-murder options were instant fight finishers.

So yes, CtE has been relevant. Is it worthwhile? Debatable. Do we care enough about circumstances where we personally need to end a fight right now to invest in it, as opposed to anything else? Perhaps not. Are there other techniques we could develop to work around issues like that without investing in a proper finisher? Depends on the details, but probably - though it's not clear that that would be a worthwhile investment either.

But is there clear utility in personally having at least one finisher in our pocket? In a world in which we can easily find ourselves separated from our more DPS-heavy companions, where enemy reinforcements exist, and where people can pop escape talismans to say no and leave?

Yes.

Dropping CtE may be thematic and it may even be prudent, but it certainly isn't free.
 
Valmond said:
And a situation where not having the ability to keep couple dozen more smalltime enemies tied up for couple hours causing deaths of hundreds is equally valid hypothetical.
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No it is not on the accont of that we already have DoT. Don't pretend we are trying to dump our existing skills in to trash pile. In fact that is the exact argument that is pissing me off. Nobody is saying not get any DoTs. We already have them and will upgrade it as needed. So saying something like this is bad faith argument.

I mean seriously, are you going to really pretend if we were to get an extra finisher move it will kill our existing DoTs? That is you argument?

If so only conclution left is our DoT is so desperately in need every action to be dedicated to it and even minimal commitment to add something else is going to make them worthless perhaps we should look in to re-speccing because clearly DoT build is not worth it. That is the logical end point of what you are arguing for.
 
Tasoli said:
No it is not on the accont of that we already have DoT. Don't pretend we are trying to dump our existing skills in to trash pile. In fact that is the exact argument that is pissing me off. Nobody is saying not get any DoTs. We already have them and will upgrade it as needed. So saying something like this is bad faith argument.

I mean seriously, are you going to really pretend if we were to get an extra finisher move it will kill our existing DoTs? That is you argument?

If so only conclution left is our DoT is so desperately in need every action to be dedicated to it and even minimal commitment to add something else is going to make them worthless perhaps we should look in to re-speccing because clearly DoT build is not worth it. That is the logical end point of what you are arguing for.
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Nobody is saying that.
The time spent getting a finisher good enough to be relevant is time we are not developing other things.
It is not free.
To get a finisher something else has to suffer, that's just the nature of finite time and resources available.
 
Valmond said:
Nobody is saying that.
The time spent getting a finisher good enough to be relevant is time we are not developing other things.
It is not free.
To get a finisher something else has to suffer, that's just the nature of finite time and resources available.
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Nothing is free but you are ignoring the work we have already did, Our DoTs solid, or should be considering how much effort we have put in. If they are not solid enough still they are not efficent enough to bother going for them anyway and we need to re-spec. IF they are solid then we can spare the resources, Either way there is space for a finisher either to diversify a bit or to start moving away from clearly useless DoT tree. Take your pick.
 
Tasoli said:
Nothing is free but you are ignoring the work we have already did, Our DoTs solid, or should be considering how much effort we have put in. If they are not solid enough still they are not efficent enough to bother going for them anyway and we need to re-spec. IF they are solid then we can spare the resources, Either way there is space for a finisher either to diversify a bit or to start moving away from clearly useless DoT tree. Take your pick.
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And they need to be even more solid as we go on.
There is no "good enough", if we want to keep reaching higher realms we need to constantly improve, and spreading thin for something of questionable usefulness is not going to help with that.
 
Valmond said:
And they need to be even more solid as we go on.
There is no "good enough", if we want to keep reaching higher realms we need to constantly improve, and spreading thin for something of questionable usefulness is not going to help with that.
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Perfect is enemy of the good enough and trying to make perfect build will just end up with big blindspots which I can already see is happening.

We need tools, not a single DoT jackhammer.

Also I love how you pretend that a single finisher move will stall our entire progression. Slick.
 
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Tasoli said:
Perfect is enemy of the good enough and trying to make perfect build will just end up with big blindspots which I can already see is happening.

We need tools, not a single DoT jackhammer.

Also I love how you pretend that a single finisher move will stall our entire progression. Slick.
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And you are not trying to create a perfect set of tools?
I am under no illusions that our build is perfect for every situation, but then i also don't expect it to be.
Finisher is of marginal use, if at all, and not worth sacrificing our core competencies for as far as i can tell.
 
ActionKermit said:
I could see CtE as an argument for why LQ's enemy is going to lose. Because everything ends, and Ling Qi will be there to bear witness.
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We only get one argument. If we choose to be "the end that comes for all things" then we instead start going down Zeqing's Way (with all the horrifying consequences we've seen).

That's impossible, of course. We have too many insights pulling us in a different direction, which is why I don't think CtE fits us well. Its not bad in a vacuum but it doesn't fit LQ.

Tasoli said:
Perfect is enemy of the good enough and trying to make perfect build will just end up with big blindspots which I can already see is happening.

We need tools, not a single DoT jackhammer.

Also I love how you pretend that a single finisher move will stall our entire progression. Slick.
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Those blind spots are inherent to being a cultivator, there is no avoiding them and trying will only cripple us. There is no "good enough" in cultivation, there is only "perfect" and "useless". As cultivators progress, ever more stuff becomes "useless" and is discarded. This starts off with fairly irrelevant things like "the time they broke their nose" or "the results of malnutrition" but escalates into things like "their ability to lie" and eventually even "their capacity to love their beloved adopted daughter". By the end of their Way a cultivator is a grotesque caricature of themselves twisted into a godlike ideal.

Will a single finisher stall our progression? Not right now, it won't. But, if we don't dedicate our entire being to a single ideal, we will inevitably stall out eventually and lose to any of our peers that were more committed to their own Ways. That is the nature of cultivation.
 
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