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The relationship between the PC, the gods, and Misery gets a little more attention in the showdown fight, but the various "gods" seem to have somewhat limited influence outside their domains. I think they're more gods in the sense of just being really powerful entities than they are in the sense of having any particular cosmological significance; several of them explicitly say they just got to where they are by being old and powerful. It's mentioned several times that the PC's ability to communicate with the gods is practically unheard of, it's not clear that the average person would even be aware of all the gods let alone have any serious belief in them.
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Sep 20, 2017 22:15
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I think the lack of detailed world-building in this game does tend to confuse the issue of what the "gods" are, and where their domains lie. It's not very clear whether a god's realm is on its own plane of existence or if it's located in the same physical "world" where the kingdom of Siralim resides; this also applies to the location of the other kingdoms (including Misery's), as the game also does not clarify whether these other kingdoms are located (one of the chats with Gonfurian suggests that you're invading other kingdoms' territories when running around in the gods' realms and resulted in the various kings and queens being mad at the player although Warlord missions do imply that there are other kingdoms that you can trade with/explore/raid, but it's also not clear if your creatures use your teleporter to get there or if they travel there traditionally ), even though things like Misery's bounty on your head suggest that the various kingdom's in Siralim's world know of and communicate with each other. The fact that the only visible part of the kingdom of Siralim the player sees is the castle location that serves as a hub also muddles the extent of what a "kingdom" and a "realm" in this game actually is.
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Sep 20, 2017 23:20
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rgon842 posted:I think the lack of detailed world-building in this game does tend to confuse the issue of what the "gods" are, and where their domains lie. It's not very clear whether a god's realm is on its own plane of existence or if it's located in the same physical "world" where the kingdom of Siralim resides; this also applies to the location of the other kingdoms (including Misery's), as the game also does not clarify whether these other kingdoms are located (one of the chats with Gonfurian suggests that you're invading other kingdoms' territories when running around in the gods' realms and resulted in the various kings and queens being mad at the player although Warlord missions do imply that there are other kingdoms that you can trade with/explore/raid, but it's also not clear if your creatures use your teleporter to get there or if they travel there traditionally ), even though things like Misery's bounty on your head suggest that the various kingdom's in Siralim's world know of and communicate with each other. The fact that the only visible part of the kingdom of Siralim the player sees is the castle location that serves as a hub also muddles the extent of what a "kingdom" and a "realm" in this game actually is. So the natural conclusion here is that all the kingdoms exist in a Realm without a God, and Mysterio's ascension here is being put towards the purpose of becoming that God. I'm sure something else in the game ends up contradicting this, of course.
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Sep 20, 2017 23:30
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Update 34: The Prestige Now that we have Lister's cooking expertise, the number of favor-boosting meals we can make increases dramatically. You still need to be on the upper levels of conventional cooking upgrades for most of them; we're still short of the final upgrade, but what we have is good enough for now.  There are a lot of different gods competing for our attention right now but I'm going to focus on Zonte next. In addition to having a very handy reward, his realm is very generous with buffs (which we probably really need right now, to be honest), spell gems (which we definitely need), and breeding formulas (which aren't strictly necessary but are interesting and potentially useful.)    We've got a hole on the team I've been meaning to fill, but there's a bit of a problem. Somehow or another we've run critically low on crystal.  Which means...  time to grind. So long, SnakesOnABrain. You won't be missed.  We nabbed the legendary material for this a while back but I never got around to using it. It's a support-y type ability so I'll stick it on a support-y artifact. It'll still be a while before it's ready, though.  Onto the dungeon. Getting some buffs going quickly should help ease our new recruit into the level curve.  What I really want is Pink + Red for a favor boost. Failing that, I like Blue + Yellow for more buffs. Unfortunately I can't do either combo here.  I'll settle for a couple hundred crystal instead.  Got a quest for a Piety Candle. Getting a big chunk of favor never hurts, especially since Zonte's realm is usually crap for favor rewards.  We already have one of these, but it's a bit pricey. Getting a cleaner copy would have been nice if it wasn't for the annoying split attribute dependency.  Our only physical attacker already has a way to get Splash, but still nice I guess?  This has been a pretty lucky game for eggs, although this one's not especially useful beyond breeding fodder.  A pretty decent panic button. Party-wide barrier is always nice and if you have multiple casualties you get a really meaty barrier for the survivors.  Intriguing!  Debuffs are common enough at this point to be a big problem, and I haven't been able to find as many resistance enchantments as I would like. It's nice having a physical attacker that doesn't get shut down by Scorn, though.  Picked this up at the spell vendor a few levels ago and I forget if I ever showed it off. Elemental Tome gives everyone in the party a random spell with 0 mana cost. It's a good way to break stalemates; fire it off a couple times and there's a good chance you wind up with an infinite source of magic damage, or at least enough stat boosts to power through.  Such as this right here.  Pow! Not only did I get a better attack spell for Rahm, it's also free to cast, so I don't have to worry about the enemy's MP drain spells.  Counterspell is normally supposed to be specialized against low MP targets but just like Magic Missile it turns out if you boost Intelligence enough it just murders things outright.  Ran into a new flavor of efreet. These guys are potentially kind of nasty, but they require a lot of setup; as random enemies they're not too threatening.  Elemental Tome winds up giving us a chance to see Corpse Shield in action, despite not having any Death casters (the random spells don't give a drat about class.) Things started out pretty ugly but this should buy us time to turn things around.  The squishies go down easily enough, but manticores still get hella defense. This... is gonna take a while.  Another alchemy table with no good combinations.  Nice! We've only got one physical attacker, but he's a hell of an attacker. And splash damage continues piling up even after the initial target is dead...  Shamefully, the next fight forces us to admit defeat. The combination of the gargoyle providing free armor-piercing Chaos Bolts to a magic-heavy enemy formation with a familiar boost that simultaneously shuts down our own magic offense just adds up to be way too much to handle.  You lost 10% Power Balance as a result of casting the cloaking spell. Running away isn't guaranteed to work, costs power balance, and also forfeits any realm sidequests you're working on. Thankfully we've completed both of our quests for the level.  lovely dryads: now in spell gem form!  Oh dear.  The Hunter Director's ability, in addition to having a fabulous name, hits random enemy for 65% of their attacks' damage... and fires once for every Hunter in the party. Every single one of these assholes gets to attack 7 times. And the extra 6 attacks are all based on the damage of the first attack, so if they hit something squishy for major damage they get to spread the pain across your entire team.  For a lot of players, getting hit with 42 attacks per round at this point in the game is a party wipe. Miraculously, our rear end gets saved by what passes for Siralim's type chart: as Nature creatures, they're predisposed to attack Life creatures due to type advantage, and our only Life-type creature is an amaranth with obscenely high defense. In a more diverse enemy team, this wouldn't matter because as soon as something wounded anything else they'd focus fire the weak link. But since they're all the same type and they prefer using their brokenly powerful attack over trying to throw spells at us, our single amaranth tanks the entire round of attacks.  Once you weather the initial onslaught, they're pretty squishy.  We don't have the Manticore Conqueror, but we've got a formula for it, so we can chain breed as soon as we manage to fill it.  More hunters.  Even though Zonte often gives out as little as 300 favor per level, we get enough from the meal bonus + quest bonuses to get us to the next favor threshold.  I'm working on a small gift for you, but it's not quite ready yet. I will send for you when it is complete. That sounds promising.  Baby version of Ethereal Knives. You can hit 6x as many targets for 1.7x as much mana, so... not really super great.  Now here's a double edged fuckin' sword. Mana Bomb is a nuke on par with Final Oblation, but it requires much less setup: just mash provoke and boom. On its own it's only modestly powerful, but with a few mana boosts and a bit of intelligence investment it will wipe fights. The good news is that the enemies have random artifact boosts that aren't min-maxed as well as what you can put together. The bad news is that they're way higher level and don't need to optimize in order to Mana Bomb you into oblivion. It's a drat good thing that gods stop giving you creatures automatically after the first level, because adding Djinn Evokers into the encounter pool basically means random party wipes unless you have appropriate countermeasures.  Most (all?) of the gods' favored monster families have a single member that you obtain through breeding instead of favor. We just found one and it's one we can already make.  Been a while since we ran into this.  Oof. This might take a while.  Fortunately, Elemental Tome rolled one of the most abusable spells in the game. Equality is the opposite of the Abyssal Spectre's stat-draining attack; it sets the target's stats equal to whatever their highest stat is, no limitations. There are plenty of creatures that can ramp up a stat to astronomical levels; Equality lets you translate that into godlike power across the board.  We don't have anyone specced for unlimited stat gain... but we do have a smith specced for pretty absurd defense. That'll do.  The reward isn't anything impressive, although more crystal is appreciated.  Garlikid?  We've seen these schmucks before, nothing dangerous here.  Not great, but burn can be pretty good on its own.  The second chest is a bit more interesting.  That's two formulas that we're waiting on Silver Imler for.  Speaking of formulas, it's time to review the ones we've got! Alcazar is kind of like a reverse Bastion, buffing other creatures when they provoke. Overall I'd say that the Bastion is much more powerful: in a single action it can buff the entire team's defense. The main advantage of Alcazar is if there's another creature that you really really want to tank hits due to good when-hit triggers; Alcazar gives it buffs without diverting attacks with its own provokes.  Corpse Explosion is the offensive counterpart to Corpse Shield, a weak mass damage spell that gets stronger the more enemies are dead. It's not terribly powerful in general, but getting an automatic mass damage effect every time any enemy dies, which you can easily turn into multiple mass damage effects... that is indeed pretty crazy! It does take a little bit of setup, since you need to lay down some debuffs, but it's pretty easy to see how well this guy would combo with the grimoire's Rapture spell. Lay down two layers of debuffs (one of which increases damage taken!), kill something, blast everything twice--and if anything dies, start the process all over again! The only trouble is keeping the Leper alive that long.  Pretty much just a clone of the Winter Aspect, but worse, because he's a dodge tank with bottom-tier speed. Much less reliable than the Winter Aspect in general, too; the aspects all get a 30% autododge chance which at least partially makes up for their mediocre speed (although they're not nearly as badly off as the yeti to begin with) and the Winter Aspect's freeze proc is 100%, even if it is single target only.
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Sep 21, 2017 03:21
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Taint reaped again
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Sep 21, 2017 09:29
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Update 35: The Bodyguard This just isn't quite working out. Time to bring back our Apis Defender. The first time we brought him out, we didn't really have the resources to pump up HP. Things are a little bit different this time around.  Sadly he can't save the squishies from magic damage, but that kind of HP pool will eat a lot of attacks.  Worst spell ever. This rear end in a top hat hits like a train, I need him to stay down.  That's better.  Pretty great, especially with the boost from the rune. That's 300+ HP a turn for the apis.  Sweet! Normally I prefer stats over status but frozen is good enough to be worth considering.  Things are looking up   There are a number of different "Arrow" spells, all based on speed and usually inflicting some status on top. The damage makes for a decent emergency backup for speedy monsters, but the statuses are usually top notch. We don't have any poison spells so this is hugely appreciated.  Elemental Tome with multicast gets pretty crazy in a hurry.  I've built up a stack of Pandemonium Tokens again and I'm in pretty good shape to handle whatever happens, so I start to go through them. The first few are boring--monster spawn, Exalted Emblem, the usual. Then I run into this.  I've been waiting to show this off for a while.  ...just not for the reason you might expect.  No Power Balance from the tokens, but at least I've still got an emergency fairy. We're starting to get back to a worthwhile balance.  Come on, I just got this one.  This is "Titanite", a random quest object. It doesn't do anything special.  The reward for finding it does cough up a breeding formula we can use, though.  At least one of the pandemonium tokens gave us a map. Pretty handy.  birb++  Another diabolic horde formula. There are a million combinations for switching between different members of this family and there is literally a single formula that they all depend on as a jumping-off point.  Oooooh. We've got access to this one right away and there are plenty of great sphinxes.  We've also got access to this one right away and there are basically zero great carvers.  Interesting. This ought to be fun.  Due to Multicast, the stat buffs from Dark Transformation fire three times in a row. Sadly they don't compound because they're based on the stats at time of initial casting, but +930 speed is still pretty absurd.  Like, "I just did 2000-4000 damage to all enemies" absurd.  Finally got a combination that lets me get favor.  With Multicast even mana vortexes aren't a huge threat--getting silence isn't such a big deal when I've already wiped all of the enemy glass cannons with a triple opening salvo.  Heh. Poseurs.  There are various elemental enchantment spells that take the formula of a stat boost + buff. I'm not a big fan of this one, although it could be valuable if you wanted to try dodge tanking.  This really is shaping up to be a great run. Two favor alchemies in a row.  I forgot to check what the miniboss yeti does and it doesn't really matter at this point.  Triple-casting Snowstorm is just mean. Giving the freeze a low chance to proc doesn't matter when you can brute force it until it sticks.  Nice! Arcane is 30% mana regeneration, so if you cast this on something with 40 max MP you wind up getting six times as much mana back as you spent. Getting Ward is just gravy.  A little situational, but a semi-reliable way to get mass freeze? Yes loving please.  Niiiiiiice.  Back home it's time to re-up on our recipe.  Oooooh, this spell is fun. Not super impressive for a dedicated caster because they can already blow up glass cannons, but a defense/support monster can do a lot of damage with this. It gets even better when you've got something with really nasty on-hit effects. If you pair it with Curse, you can even wreck high attack/high defense monsters that would otherwise soak their own attacks.  Holy poo poo this is a nice find. Normally this sucker costs like 20 MP, you could not possibly ask for a better spell to have the "cast using HP" trait.  Breeding time! This guy's ability is basically Splash on steroids--sure, it only triggers on kills instead of regular hits, but it does three times as much damage and can chain itself onto other targets. They got the name wrong, though. It's rip and tear, duh.  This guy is actually better than most of the carver family but he still has plenty of chances to randomly gently caress you over. Sure, if you start getting into trouble he can quickly turn into an offensive powerhouse but note that he does not harvest Defense--so if your tanks start taking damage it's entirely possible that he harvests them and then immediately gets splattered because there's nothing protecting him anymore.  Birb time! The Palace Familiar is kind of an all-or-nothing strategy since it's one of the few stackable familiars. Even on a full birb team a single Palace Familiar is probably going to be fairly marginal, but get 4 or 5 of these things and maybe one of the other familiars and you can enjoy some obscene stat boosts. Of course, there is a minor issue of Sorcery having gently caress all for stat-altering spells...  Oh. Oh my. These guys are pretty broken. Giving enemies -30% on any one stat would be fantastic; -30% to all of them is insane. Of course, you do have to deal with the constraint of having to stack your team with 6 monsters of the same magic class... ...except, of course, the basic sphinx that you get access to around level 10 or so automatically makes your entire team the same class, so for two team slots you effectively cut enemy power levels by a full third. And the sphinx justiciar still gives out decent bonuses on top of giving you an automatic mono-class team, so it's not like you're wasting that 2nd slot. And even then, if you really need those other 5 monsters, there are spells to set your whole team to a single class. This thing is just sick; the difficulty curve is going to go out the window for a bit. Which is fine by me, since it gives me a bit more room to expand the roster without getting curbstomped.
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Sep 21, 2017 21:33
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So does Nilethak actually show up in the game proper? Feels like kind of a waste if he doesn't.
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Sep 21, 2017 22:00
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Update 36: Gods of Egypt Godspeed, Graboid. Things are about to get really unfair for the enemies.  Really, really unfair.  Just pop a couple shards to speed things along...  (Sarea slowly weaves the energy around the artifact, enveloping it into a glowing white cocoon of raw power. Suddenly the cocoon bursts, filling the room with a nearly intolerable radiance. As the room's lighting slowly returns to normal, Sarea grins and hands the artifact to you.)  So. With a Sphinx Justiciar setting the whole team's class to the same school, the Sphinx Zealot is hitting enemies with -30% to all stats. With this cloak, that's another -30% to their Attack and Intelligence. At this point, enemies have just under half their normal offensive stats and -30% defense and speed. Plus their mana is cut in half, so they're probably not going to be able to cast any big spells unless they have autocast triggers.  Aaaand we're back at max Power Balance. This should help fix our resource problems.  Between the defense hit and the type bonus from the sphinx our damage output is looking a lot more consistent.  The level was kind enough to spawn a Piety Candle for us even without a quest for it.  Woah. Lots of new faces here. The Death Crafter is a fuckin beast. Artifact bonuses make up a pretty big chunk of your stats so this winds up being a huge boost across the board. Think of it this way: if you give a Crystal Smith a max defense shield, he shares 50% of that defense bonus with everyone. If you have a Death Crafter and give everyone max defense shields, they each get 15% of the defense from 5 other monsters for a total of 75% of a single shield's bonus. So effectively he's 50% better than the already-strong Crystal Smith, but it works with stats other than defense and you can mix and match as much as you want.  The Death Guard is kind of meh in comparison. It can be a little useful in the long, long run on when enemies massively outspeed you due to the exponential level scaling and will be critting you left and right, but by the time you reach that point you probably have other solutions.  Alas, we're not allowed to capture any of their cores. So we just pound them into paste instead. The new sphinx + sloth setup is pretty gross.  Three in a row!  The realm quests just involve talking to random NPCs. They're no different than any other collection quest and nothing interesting ever happens as a result of "recruiting" these people. I can only assume Damaos and the other guy just quietly murder all the people when they show up.  This one's a bit too specific for us.  Not very impressive. Way too expensive for a modest buff, and while the autocasts are nice they're not exactly super reliable.  You'd think the game would take "x% of potency is based on speed" out of the list of random traits for spells based 100% on speed. Oh well.  Even with gratuitous stat nerfs, watchers armed with defense-piercing spells are still pretty scary.  Here's an interesting fellow. Most phoenixes do things triggered by resurrections; the Ancestral Phoenix actually triggers resurrections. At its base, it can kill something and immediately resurrect it to instantly proc all your other phoenixes. Getting a free, reliable, party-wide resurrect out of the deal is a pretty sweet bonus too. The one catch is arranging things so that your phoenix can reliably kill a teammate without leaving them so vulnerable that something else finishes them off first. If you can finagle a sacrifice-for-benefit spell or ability onto your phoenix you can set up a reliable kill and get whatever bonuses you'd normally get from the sacrifice for free. For added benefit, you can get something that has really good triggers on death and pack in even more bonuses.  Finally! Sand Giants are one of the very first monsters you encounter, but most of the giant family relies on other giants or equally-rare Gargantuans, so it's usually a while before you find a way to breed any others.  Miniboss time! These guys are old news.  We're actually pretty close on this one.  None of the artifacts are anything interesting. I think this might be the first helmet we've found, though, which might be useful for some tanky type someday. Saves us a little bit of granite forging one, at least.  Let's keep this train rolling.  Been a while since we found one of these.  We have access to this one buuut it's still a gorgon.  Finally ran into a moss golem that decided to abuse its ability. So annoying.  Yeessss  YEESSSSSSSSSSSS  I've already moved it to your castle. You'll find it in your spell room. This isn't super important by itself, but later on you need this to get some other upgrades.  This will also be important.  Kind of meh.  Kind of HOLY poo poo. This doesn't sound like a lot of damage, but you can stack up some pretty ridiculous amounts of spell spam. You can build some really solid super-high level strategies around this guy; get your hands on enough spells with "cast at the start of battle" triggers and you can instantly win fights with this. Letting them loose into the enemy pool can be painful, but they're not nearly as dangerous on their own as the Mana Bomb djinns.  Another elemental enchantment. It's nice, I guess, in that it does two good things. Not a lot of synergy to make you go "wow!", though.  Can't do anything with this yet.  Here's the Mountain Priest--we haven't seen them "in person" yet but we've got a shield with its defense buff powers.  Already got this one without having to wait on cracking the Diabolic Horde breeding chain to get it.  Fuckin nice. Nature magic is great for big disaster-themed attack spells. Having a strong attack spell is great and removing buffs is a nice perk, but the real jewel here is the autocast trigger. In the hands of a powerful caster this has a good chance to set off a chain reaction: kill a couple things, fire it off again, kill something else, fire it again, etc. The triggered copies are cast at a damage penalty, but with enough power behind it that doesn't really matter much.  Also nice! I could do without the trigger on this but this is super handy; a fast monster can use it to get a slower monster's provoke up faster, and it's awesome for popping provoke triggers more quickly/more often (e.g. Final Oblation.)  Almost forgot about this.  So glad that I didn't  I fukken love Imlings.  Miniboss time.  Welp, was short. This guy's one of the more interesting mummies, but we'll get into that some other time.  A 3-in-5 chance to skip an enemy's turn at the start of every battle? Yes please. The rest of the loot is uninspiring.  There are a bunch of big ticket rituals competing for attention at this stage of the game. Keep your Power Balance topped up--don't be afraid to buy up bottled fairies if you're going to be doing any breeding.  I've been saving up Deity Points for a long time in anticipation of this. This is the other big reason to play a Sorcery mage. The MP cost penalty is somewhat prohibitive, but there's nothing stopping you from sticking anything with an autocast trigger on whatever monsters you want. And, of course, if one big spell is all you need you don't need to worry too much about cost. This is a great way to get all of those big powerful Nature spells onto your suped up Sorcery casters.  The Arcane Vault is located in a new area of... outer space?... south of the summoning brazier. It's mostly intended for later on when you have more spells than you know what to do with. But it's new, so I might as well show it off.  I've got plenty of duplicates, so... sure, why not.  Out pops a gem of Spirit Offering. It's... pretty niche. Even a summoning build isn't necessarily going to be casting this all the time; there's no guarantee that your summons will be able to put the intelligence to any use.  On to the new breeding options. The Cosmic Giant's ability is... sort of useful, capping any given damage instance at 25% damage. It can even protect him against one-shot-kills, but only to a very limited extent, since anything that does 125% or more will kill him right through his ability. If you can pair him with some way to continually refresh small amounts of health he can still be a really durable tank.  Oooh, definitely one of the better efreets. Effectively grants your team immunity to Burn, while also giving them healing over time, while also fueling abilities that get powered up from debuffs. The one weakness is that if your efreet goes splat, your team is still on fire and they're no longer getting healed from it.  Basically the starter gorgon, but for magic. Her proc rate is a little higher, but the main value of the deranged gorgon is that her stun ability is free. I guess you could hook the witch up with Magic Missile or something for free stun on demand, while also getting it as a rider on spells. Only single target, though, which rules out a lot of useful attack spells. Aaaand that just cleared level 39. Next up: Misery himself.
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Sep 22, 2017 22:32
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Update 37: Misery So, the final battle with Misery is exceedingly unique. It's even more of a puzzle battle than other story bosses and demands a very specialized approach. We have most of the pieces we need to beat it, and could probably squeak through with enough luck, but there are a few things I'd like to pick up first. Fortunately, the vendors' inventory is recycled every time you save and load, so if you're shopping for something in particular you can continually reload until you find what you're looking for.  Oooooor you can get lucky and find exactly what you need on the first try.  Better than that, actually. I probably would have settled for just one or the other of these, but I reaaally lucked out and got both.  It's been a long time. Welcome back, buddy.  Why not.  This is it.  What is the purpose of this incessant violence, Mysterio? Why do you bring naught but suffering in your wake? Is there motive to your tyranny? ... Hmm, as I thought. T'was your so-called gods that sent you here. Then, I implore you to heed my words: There is nothing to be found above nor below. And your gods? They exist naught but in your mind. Misery raises some interesting questions about the cosmology of the world. He's one of the most powerful entities in the universe short of the gods themselves and he's skeptical of their very existence.  What? Do you truly believe it is you who is just, and I evil? You are gravely mistaken. But, though you are blind to this truth, I care not. You stand as the final impediment to the revolution this world so sorely needs, and I will not tolerate your interruption any longer. Prepare thyself, King Mysterio. It's never really established quite what makes Misery such a bad guy. We know why he's our enemy, because he's opposed to the gods who are our allies, but is he really particularly evil beyond that? I mean, probably, he's got a skull for a face and his name is goddamn Misery after all.  So. Misery. This fight completely breaks all of the rules, which is appropriate given Misery's schtick.  That's right--after spending the entire game building up sick ability combos, the final battle completely takes them away from you. The ability description is not quite 100% accurate, in a couple of ways. For starters, you do get some benefits from artifacts. You still gain artifact buffs. Mana bonuses do not go away. For another thing, Misery has several special abilities that his description does not mention. There's a sort of damage cap in place for him--any given damage instance is capped at a small fraction of his HP. Also, he gets like 5 goddamn attacks a turn.  Without abilities, you only really have 2 options for beating Misery. Either you grind like hell, or you abuse the hell out of status. gently caress grinding, I'm taking the status route.  The Spell Mastery perk is a huge help here. A lot of buff/debuff spells are relatively affordable, so being able to stick them on whoever has the best stats for them without being limited by class is fantastic.  Between Weak and Protect, Misery is doing 1/4 normal damage--and still doing over 50% damage to our squishier team members.  So we need to get some damage up ASAP. At our levels only the very strongest team members have any hope of doing damage at all, but he has no defense against most statuses (other than turn-skipping status, which all bosses are immune to.)  This is a particularly nice spell for this fight since it's a 2-for-1. Burn provides damage over time, blind randomly cancels out his attacks--and he throws enough of them out that blind will do decently on average.  More DOTs.  A little bit disappointing, but every bit helps.  This qualifies as good damage against Misery, given our levels.  Even so, it's immediately dwarfed by indirect damage.  Curse inflicts damage back every time Misery attacks. He attacks 5 times a round no matter what, so it adds up quickly.  Unfortunately, I've made some bad decisions this time around. I forgot my bleed spell was on the Viper Occultist and never bothered resurrecting her, so I've been missing an important source of damage. (Also, bleed is the easiest way to see the damage cap in effect--it normally does 40% of current health in damage, but will only do about 230 or so to Misery, for multiple turns in a row.)  Curse turns out to be juuuust enough to do it, though. We make it through the first phase of the fight by the skin of our teeth.  Given standard RPG conventions it should be little surprise the final boss is a multi-phase battle.  The second phase is... more or less scripted, though. You really only need to worry about getting through the first phase.  Because we've got a little help from our friends.  Vertraag appears before you in plain view, holding a gigantic Nether Orb in his hands. It starts to glow, enveloping you and your creatuers in a vibrant white light.  HEROES NEVER DIE  So here's the fight's gimmick. After every single turn anyone takes, one of the gods will randomly intervene. I'm not sure what exactly multicast has to do with being the spooky ghost pirate god of the sea, but I'm not complaining.  Gonfurian's benefit is a bit more obvious.  Azural is still boring.  Our offense is a bit lacking, but this should help pick things up a bit.  Especially with this.  Oh, this is fun. So, remember how Misery takes damage every time he attacks because he's cursed?  Thanks to Multicast we can cast Sabotage 3 times in a row. Each time it's cast, Misery is forced to attack 3 times for next to no damage--but still suffers the full brunt of anything that's triggered by his attacks, such as curse damage. So that's 2000 damage by the time the dust settles.  At 5% damage, even Misery isn't much of a threat.  Even Torun is feeling helpful today.  Yseros tops off wounded party members. Note that's a full heal right there.  When Misery finally gets a turn he summons 5 more enemies to even the odds. It doesn't really help; it's still a 21v6 fight.  There are 15 of you right now. Meraxis is evidently not the God of Being Able to Count. I suppose there's a reason he hands out intelligence debuffs...  Surathli will periodically hand out more resurrections, but we don't even need any.  There's some sort of weird interaction with Misery's ability here--Detritus is smacking him for 125 damage, not sure why Splash is down to single digits.  Tartarith just straight up takes out a big chunk of the enemy HP. Which gives you an idea of just how absurd Misery's HP is in this stage.  Don't think that I missed the opportunity to snag a new creature here, either.  You still suck, Aeolian.  Aaaaaand here's where the battle just gets hilariously lopsided in your favor. Lister just straight up skips all the enemies' turns. Normally bosses are immune to turn order manipulation, but Lister don't care.  Regalis is not particularly useful but at least she's not being gross.  I've been systematically nailing Misery with whatever defense-draining spells I've rolled from Elemental Tome.  At this point I've actually managed to bottom him out completely.  Somehow, he's still taking really low damage from our attacks.  Now things are just getting silly. Vertraag effectively does the same thing as Lister. So, every single time you take a turn there's a 2/15 chance that all the enemies get shuffled to the bottom of the turn order.  Our Curse ran out some time ago and Hedwig's MP regen isn't enough on its own for us to cast it again, but another casting of Elemental Tome gave us a free copy. This should help speed things up.  Here's another great use for Spell Mastery. Steel Storm has a built-in cast on hit trigger, but there aren't a lot of Sorcery creatures that are built as primary attackers. Being able to stick it on Detritus (who is currently attacking 8 times per round) lets you get a lot more mileage out of it.  Even with all the buffs from the gods his damage isn't great, but it helps.  Erebyss gives you a nice healthy defense buff, just in case the enemies actually get a turn.  Misery's big doomsday spell is looking pretty sad right about now with all the buffs and debuffs the gods are handing out.  Everybody's getting cursed today.  This should help keep Detritus from killing himself on the curse. Three casts with buffed intelligence should give him a decent barrier.   Curse damage is based on the target's attack, which has been getting buffed to hell by the gods and whatever miscellaneous strength booster spells I rolled. Now multiply by 9. Then consider that Misery has already eaten 8000+ damage and still isn't dead when the dust settles from the Sabotage spam.  The speed buffs/debuffs aren't wholly useless; between the two of them, you eventually start critting almost constantly. That's another 2000 or so damage. Still standing.  Somehow, the barrier holds through 8 curse procs.  Savage Spores is Berserk for every creature on both sides. Since everyone gives and receives more damage it's effectively 2.25x damage on all sources.  That's finally enough.  With Misery's weird damage-lowering abilities down, our divinely buffed damage gets pretty silly.  It is done.
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Sep 24, 2017 18:54
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 What a good birb.
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Sep 24, 2017 19:41
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The real game starts here 
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Sep 24, 2017 21:09
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I think Meraxis was saying one "new" god, as in there's room for only one more.
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Sep 25, 2017 00:13
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Tallgeese posted:I think Meraxis was saying one "new" god, as in there's room for only one more. Evidently gods are enumerated by a single half-byte.
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Sep 25, 2017 01:02
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The fact that it feels like we've only just started when we just beat the final boss scares me.
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Sep 25, 2017 01:07
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Update 38: Ever After Well, we've done it. We've overthrown Misery and claimed the power of the gods. Amusingly Misery still has the standard two boss chests. They don't really have anything special.  There is this, I guess.  Back at home, Mysterio starts to look a little... different.  We have so much to thank you for, Mysterio, and we shall be forever indebted to you and your kingdom.  Mission accomplished.  First order of business for a newly ascended god: go get shitfaced with the miserable sycophants that hang around your house.  You can now travel to Nether Realms via the Teleportation Shrine. For more information about Nether Realms, visit the library. (The game also gives you instructions for New Game Plus at this point, but we've already done that.)  There's about a 1:10 ratio of main storyline:postgame content in this game, it's pretty insane. We've basically just started the game proper.  El Dios Mysterio in all his glory. The flames are a cool touch, although maybe a little bit overdone. They kind of distract from the rest of the outfit, which seems a bit neglected by the apotheosis process.  Now that we've beaten Misery there are a couple rewards we can collect.  Grimoires are capable of casting powerful spells - so powerful, in fact, that Spell Gems can't even contain their power. Imagine the possibilities if you were able to get your hands on one! Please keep an eye out for these pages, and if you happen to find any, bring them to me. Talking to the librarian lets you start the sidequests to get grimoires, assuming you don't hatch your magic books out of random eggs you found like a normal person. It takes something like 200+ fights just to get the first book, so it will be a while before we get all of them.  I'd like to give you a gift as thanks for your dedicate to this kingdom. It's an extremely rare creature with a peculiarly specific hatred for the holidays. Anyway, I hope you'll find it useful! The material vendor randomly has a freebie for you.  Very randomly.  There's a lot more to explore in the postgame, but it's not all immediately accessible. For right now the main gameplay difference is the opening of Nether Realms, which have even steeper enemy level progression and some additional powers besides. Also, the expansion patch creatures like basilisks and abominations start showing up naturally in Nether Realms.  This escalation of difficulty makes this the perfect opportunity to start dabbling in ill-advised team reworks.  Step 2: Add a bunch of MP boosts across the board to help accommodate the big new spells we have access to from Spell Mastery.  I actually manage to burn through our stash of Essence doing this, which doesn't happen often. I wind up having to resort to the gambling dwarves. The grinding minigame for essence is a guessing game. You get 3 guesses to find a certain spot along the bar, and each guess gets marked with a bar to show how hot or cold your guess is (blue = way off, yellow = sort of close, red = very close.) Fortunately the detection is extremely generous, because there's no way you'd reliably be able to narrow down the exact spot in only 3 guesses.  It still winds up being mostly driven by dumb luck, but it's generous enough that you can make a pretty reliable amount without much effort.  Birbs assemble! You might think that 3 familiars are a pretty dubious birb party, but the Raptor Occultist is named after a bird and the Sphinx has bird wings so they're honorary birbs. The crystal smith... represents the worm that the early bird gets? Yeah I got nothing. But the new additions are too squishy to survive without him.  The last level before Misery was level 80 enemies. Nether Realms are a big jump in levels that only gets wider as you go deeper.  We have a bunch of favor with Surathli to cash in from the time when we only had access to a few gods' recipes, so now's a good time as any. It helps that Surathli is super generous with buffs, which should help smooth out some of the team's growing pains. Nether Realms get a slight color filter applied over them so they look a little different. Other than that the levels themselves are the same as before.  Surathli finally decided to start answering my wishes.  Just... not very well.  Check out the sweet turn 0 stun.  The Emerald Paragon is definitely new. Paragons have abilities that alter the rules for both sides of the fight. But... what's that (1/2) he has?  This is the main feature of Nether Realms: every enemy gets an additional random trait on top of whatever they naturally have. The player can have 2 abilities on every creature thanks to artifacts, so I suppose this just evens the odds, but there's a lot of room for things to go catastrophically wrong with bad trait combos.  The familiar boosts help a bit, although thanks to the Paragon there's going to be a lot of HP to chew through.  This should help. Now that the Sphinx Zealot is the same class as the rest of the team his ability is back up to full strength.  BOOM.  My Sorcery caster is dropping giant rear end Nature spells to trigger cast-on-death Life buffs. Spell Mastery rules.  Oof. This is going to be painful.  In retrospect, collecting Krampus from the material vendor was a bad idea since their ability is bad news for sphinx parties--they cause enemies to take drastically more damage for having multiple creatures of the same type. Oh well, it's not like I was going to forego the material vendor. He has good stuff.  Spell Mastery: still awesome. Now my beefiest tank can resurrect squishies on the cheap.  The best thing about this particular copy of Earthquake is that it has a cast-on-kill trigger, so it frequently sets off chain reactions. This goes off about 4 times in a row to end the fight.  This brings the new familiars up to level 20, which means I can activate sigils now. Since they're based on the party's level, a level 1 sigil is actually substantially weaker than random enemies around here. They don't have the extra abilities that random monsters get in Nether Realms, either.  The result is pretty one-sided even with the sigil penalties. That's about 8 levels for the familiars and 1000 or so of each resource thanks to the sigil's boosted rewards.  The loot is a bit disappointing for a primal sigil. Oh well.  Fights triggered by map objects don't get the nether realm bonuses, either, so these are relatively safe.  Speaking of fights triggered by map objects... we seem to be doing ok, so I'll skip the chance at more buffs in exchange for a shot at some extra favor.  Of course, you still have to earn it.  You gained 75 favor with Surathli, Goddess of Light. Even if you get glory from every wishing star--and Surathli doesn't decide to stiff you--it can be tough to get 500 favor per level from her. Realm quests help tremendously here.  Uggggh. This rear end in a top hat just effectively doubled all the enemies' HP. The extra nether attributes can be a huge pain in the rear end. Thankfully Earthquake will cancel out a buff and take out most or all of the barriers, but they'll still eat Earthquake itself.  BIRB FIGHT! Thankfully none of them had any attack spells worth mentioning.  More of these assholes.  Getting a Piety Candle quest helps speed things up quite a lot.  Old news. The Heirloom of Arcana is a nice find, though; I think I might have enough to make a starts-with-arcane artifact.  The Divination Candle allows you to offer a Core in exchange for a Charm. Charms allow you to pull specific creatures from another dimension into the realm you're in. I've already placed it in your castle for you. Use it well. The Divination Candle is Surathli's special gift. It lets you generate items to spawn shitloads of a specific enemy type. It's a good way to farm lots of cores of a specific type, and has a couple other uses besides, but we'll get into that later.  That gives us enough Deity Points to get another spell slot. With Spell Mastery there's even more demand for spells, although right now I'm just going to shove a bunch of garbage sorcery spells onto people to maaximize the Occultist's bonus. Aaand... I just realized I forgot to buy any of the other rewards off Surathli. Oh well, we'll be back.  There's a bit more loot to collect, but none of it's particularly interesting so I move on to the miniboss portal. The arena gets a different random color tint.  There's a new basilisk type, so I drop everything and spend several rounds trying to extract a core.  Unfortunately I kind of lost track of the turn order. Basilisks are exactly the wrong creature type to gently caress around and stall for cores against.  Once Rahm goes down, I'm stuck at an impasse. I don't have the MP to cast any offensive spells except Magic Missile and I don't have the MP to resurrect anyone. The enemies can't beat Brimjob Jr's defense except with the occasional random crit and Brimjob's lovely attack isn't enough to do damage to them. Shamefully, I am forced to admit defeat.  Your power balance is reduced to 100%.  You're not allowed to flee from fixed fights, so this is equivalent to a death.  Back at home, there's a new ritual available for us--but it's going to be a long ways off. Especially since I want to get cracking on that new cooking.  This Divine Candle is a gift from Surathli, Goddess of Light. It allows you to convert your Cores into Charms, which can be used to summon large packs of the Charm's creatures. Aside from expending a Core, the conversion process also costs 10000 Brimstone. The Divine Candle also gets stuck down in the void and looks like some kind of ugly rear end fruitcake.  Creature roundup! We actually managed to score this guy off of Misery, which doesn't happen very often. Not a bad utility for summoning parties.  Krampus is pretty scary. At first glance he's just a devil that punishes mono-class teams over any specific class... but unlike other devils he boosts all damage, not just whatever he manages to dish out. If you've got a spell to change the enemy team's class this actually makes him a killer support, since one spell effectively gives you 3.5x damage on everything. Of course, theme teams and sphinx teams basically do his work for him.  This guy is pretty weak on his own but you can potentially combo him with heal triggers to create a feedback loop. A Charity Sanctus, for example, tosses the heal right back onto the slime--with the right support you can immediately heal off any non-lethal damage the slime takes from attacks, while also dishing out huge party heals.  I died to acquire this guy and he's not even one of the better basilisks. Devastating against most magic-based parties, pretty useless otherwise.
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Sep 26, 2017 22:54
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I got bored with this game about halfway through. The grinding got to me. I'm enjoying seeing all the parts of the endgame/postgame I never had the patience for. Keep up the good work. Play lots of postgame content. Show off all the new features. EDIT: you can probably also breed that basilisk you don't want into one that's better? right? this game often let's you breed sideways? namad fucked around with this message at 10:16 on Sep 28, 2017 |
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Sep 28, 2017 09:53
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Basilisks and other postgame creatures from later content patches don't have breeding formulas--that's why it lets you capture any of them, at any time.
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Sep 28, 2017 13:42
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Update 39: Edge of Tomorrow Shamefully, since we lost last time before tagging out at the teleportation shrine we have to redo Nether Realm level 1.  Back at Eternity's End, because why not. We need to collect power, we need to speed up rituals, and Vertraag is fairly high on our priority list.  Spending a couple Pandemonium Tokens to try to get our power balance back up and get this instead.  It's a repeat, sadly. I pop a couple bottled fairies and move on.  But the creature turns aggressive and attacks! One of our sidequests for this level involves talking to runaway creatures to coax them back. Basic collection quest except sometimes it triggers battles.  I burned through a few thousand granite bringing our artifacts up to snuff with our new levels, which makes things go quite a bit easier.  Got a few hundred ritual energy from this thing, which tops off our first ritual.  Nice. I prefer Equality but this is a great way to nerf an enemy into the ground, and it's basically impossible to resist.  Ouch! I'm not entirely sure why this bunch is hitting so hard, none of their random nether abilities seem to account for it.  This, on the other hand...  ...is sadly all too explainable. In the long run exploring Nether Realms gets really difficult if your build is the tiniest bit fragile, because there are so many things that can derail it.  We're forced to flee, but at least it's not a wipe.  It is a terrible tragedy when birb turns against birb.  ka-ching  Now then, I'm sure you're wondering why we gods covet the Exalted Emblems so much, and the answer is quite simple, really: the more emblems we have, the more powerful we become. Tutorial gods gonna tutor.  This thing's got some potential. Bosses and their entourage are immune, but otherwise it's a great way to skip enemy turns that doesn't get resisted or randomly fail the way that status does.  In most ways this guy is a straight upgrade from the redeemer; -50% defense usually means a lot more than the 1.5x damage that Vulnerable gets you, it's completely stackable, and not resisted. The redeemer can get a damage multiplier on static damage through Vulnerable, but that's the sole upside.  Eternity's End tends to spawn its own boss portals, so we've got multiple minibosses to tackle.  First one is pretty disappointing.  Second one turns out to be slightly trickier--ghouls hurt! But at this point we don't have much to sweat except a few particularly nasty random traits.  Interesting.  That finishes off the level and both of our rituals.  Between this and the reward from Lister we now have access to every cooking ingredient and style.  Meraxis has something we really want, and his realm is insanely lucrative to boot, so we're going to be spending some time there soon.  We also have access to a new feature in Daily Realms, which Axel here will open portals to.  Daily Realms are slightly special levels which, as the name suggests, you can only do once per day. They're slightly smaller and have fewer enemies than normal, and enemies scale based on your level and your current streak of successfully cleared Daily Realms. The normal level rewards are basically all there, except there is always only a single quest to clear all the enemies, with rewards that get better based on your daily streak.  The very first fight turns up a new postgame monster we can nab. Vulpes get autocast chances on spells even if they don't actually have an autocast trigger, which is pretty fuckin breakable.  We can handle Nether Realm enemies with 25+ levels and 40+ gene strength, so stuff that's actually scaled to the party is a breeze. We finish off the handful of enemies without breaking a sweat, but we can still finish looting the rest of the level.  The main reward for clearing the daily realm is a wholly new type of crafting material, which we won't even be able to use for some time. When we can, though... yeah, this stuff has possibilities.  Well, I've got a formula or two that needs the Gatewatcher, but we're a long way from getting that shade.  Our miniboss perk still on Daily Realms, which makes them a good bit more lucrative. We roll them pretty easily and get some loot we can theoretically use right away.  We can use this one too, except it's a creature that's unlocked by default. BOOOOOOO  Apparently today is Cerberus Day but we don't have the specific banshee for this one.  At some point we completed a material set for this. Silence is a huge problem for us, so getting immunity on our main caster is a big deal.  Vulpes and their abilities tend to feature prominently in turn 0 win setups. They're a little unreliable but if you load them up with 8-10 big nuke spells (easy to do with Spell Mastery) you can count on getting something off, and then it's just a matter of surrounding them with the right support to turn that into a wipe. They do have some of the highest Speed in the game, which is a bit redundant for creatures that specialize is doing things before anyone gets a turn anyhow--but if you have ways for them to do damage based on Speed you're in for a hell of a treat.  These guys still aren't that impressive, but they're a great way to avoid stalemates. Assuming you can keep them alive. And actually manage to connect with their attacks. Yeah, they're still pretty bad.  One of the more interesting mummies--the curse-spreading mummies all work too slowly for this to be much use, but if you've got a curse all enemies spell these guys leverage it into a massive offensive boost. Unfortunately their utility tends to drop off once you take out the first few enemies.  Kind of an odd one. Ents don't really have a very coherent niche but they're mostly pretty awful outside the Mend bonuses. This one can occasionally save you some trouble from a particularly annoying artifact but there are much more reliable ways of dealing with those situations that don't eat a team slot.
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Sep 28, 2017 22:23
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I've been inspired to load my old saves. I'm now up to realm level 39. Only a bit behind the thread (although like a year ago I got to realm lvl roughly 36 or whatnot). I'm running a combination of an aberngation build and support spells protect/snare/scorn/poison/burn (beauty of spell mastery). Wonder if I'll beat misery. Can't wait to get some nether realm tips from your LP. EDIT: I beat misery too, I have no idea what to do now! heh. namad fucked around with this message at 17:42 on Sep 30, 2017 |
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Sep 30, 2017 11:52
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namad posted:EDIT: I beat misery too, I have no idea what to do now! heh. Long term, your end goal is to get shitloads of favor with all the gods, which will also give you various things to do in the meantime. Short term, once you get to Misery-type levels there are several castle upgrades with fun little sidequests: Arena, Daily Realms, Warlord (get Improved Stable first), Fortune Sphere (need to level up into the 70s and get the Arcane Vault from Zonte.) Those help give you things to do. Clearing Nether Realms is also an important goal for reasons beyond sheer grinding, as will become apparent once you get a few levels in.
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Oct 1, 2017 14:55
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Thanks, played all afternoon, now I have a fortune sphere! Can't wait for your next update. P.S. where do I get portal keys? namad fucked around with this message at 00:20 on Oct 2, 2017 |
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Oct 1, 2017 23:15
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Update 40: Gladiator Another flavor of elf. I'm not going to even try to grab him this time, though, because I'm not loving around with that Krampus. Having 1 off-type monster is not nearly enough for comfort.  Imler party! Gosh I want some better Imlers, although I'm not sorry to be fighting these old crappy ones.  It's unusual to see frozen creatures appear in the action queue at all, but these guys are't truly frozen. Abilities like this make debuff-powered traits really sing, although you need to watch out since they also power up certain enemy spells/traits.  Repeat.  Kind of a stinker. This amounts to zapping random enemies with a weak spell about 5-7 times on average. Not really worth 29 MP and split stats.  0 damage? That's troublesome.  Turns out he lucked into winding up a fraction of 1% HP, which with his ability means he takes a fraction of 1% damage--enough that several hundred damage still rounds down to 0 after the reduction. He's functionally invincible.  Of course, as soon as he gets healed, he starts taking real damage again. Now I can flatten him.  Gargantuans are still a pain in the rear end to break into.  This one I can actually use, though, and there's another wyvern I can chain into off the windrider.  Decent counter to anything with runaway stat gain. Ouch, that's a big price tag though. Even with Spell Mastery you either need to be a native death creature or have a lot of mana boosts from artifacts to cast this.  Centaurs are pretty good and as a postgame creature they're unlocked by default, so this might be a good way to harvest some overpowered creatures.  Yet another carver to add to the pile.  Another day, another Daily Realm. You can't set the destination on daily realms, so they're a good way to diversify your favor grind.  Since we beat yesterday's daily realm, the enemies have ramped up in difficulty--to the tune of being 50% higher level than our party.  Despite this, they're still weaker than the lower-level enemies we've been fighting in the Nether Realms since they don't have the automatic gene strength scaling that enemies in normal realms get--their gene strength is based on ours and I've done almost zero breeding for stats.  This is the third repeat I've gotten this update (there was another one off-camera.)  This is new, at least.  The favor bonus from the chef actually pushes us over a threshold when we're outside of Meraxis's realm, so this is going to have to wait.  Going to be some time before we can use this.  The truth is, I'm just really bored and wanted to say hello. I wish I had some other way of passing the time... Pushing onwards, we head back to The Swamplands to cash in our reward with Meraxis.  Meraxis may not be terribly interesting, but he is incredibly generous. This is one of the best spells in the game--being able to trigger 5 (!!!) attacks out of turn on demand is just absolutely bugfuck nuts. You can abuse cast-on-hit triggers to create endless loops--the game cuts loops short after 20 or 30 triggers, but suffice to say you can stack a bunch of on-hit effects to just absolutely obliterate everything this way. The new pilwiz by comparison is just some dude.  Amusingly a hunter rolled a second hunter trait, so he gets two free attacks with every regular attack. Good thing this wasn't an all-hunter party.  Speaking of which, we run into an all-efreet (al-efreet?) party shortly afterwards. These play together better than some creature families since there's a mix of things that spread burn and things that punish burn, but they're still way less dangerous than most of the explicit "tribal" families.  Man, as soon as I get a gargantuan I'm going to be drowning in new breeding options.  Stockpiling bottled fairies is always a good idea. Great for recovering from a loss or a breeding spree.  Now this is a handy spell. Not the most powerful attack, but the defense boost is a nice extra. A great no-brainer for one of my faster casters.  Yeah, this is going to be a staple for some time.   It occurs to me that I've been socking away deity points with no pressing goal to spending them, so I dip into a couple of the minor sorcery perks. This is not remotely reliable by any stretch of the imagination, but hell, can't hurt.  A miniboss coughs up yet another elf. That makes 3 different varieties, each of which turns off a different trigger for enemies (one disables defend triggers, one disables critical hit triggers, etc.)  I'm pretty desperately short of power, so I start burning through sigils in the hopes of drumming up some more.  Waspids are another family that are a pain to break into. They're an interesting twist on tribal effects, but it will be a while before we can get into them.  I go ahead and grab a centaur from that centaur sigil while I'm at it.  And another centaur randomly pops up in a different sigil fight. Centaurs are all about extra attacks, at full strength, with no real costs or penalties. They're generally pretty sick; there's a good reason they don't show up until the postgame.  We've got a Vulpes sigil to harvest from too, although being able to autocast healing spells before anything has a chance to act is not terribly useful compared to being able to nuke them before they move. I suppose if you're using the Altar of Blood punishment that makes damage persist between fights it could be a lifesaver, though.  There we go. It takes several times longer than most rituals to complete, though, and for now I've got better things to spend my resources on than buying up shards to blow through this instantly.  Creature roundup! Centaurs are buff as hell and get an absolutely unfair number of attacks. Pair this guy with absolutely anything that debuffs all enemies and you can smash all enemies at once.  Full damage counterattacks are almost disappointing in comparison, which says a lot about how crazy centaurs are.  Elves still aren't terribly interesting and exist mostly to randomly show up and mess with your setups.  Note that some of the Vulpes have a chance to autocast their own spells and some of them give your whole party a chance to autocast. Healing yourself before you take any damage still isn't going to be useful, but if you're a life mage there are a couple perks that can make it actually good.  This guy is actually fairly great if you have a way to quickly and reliably stick bleed on everything. Drop a Rain of Blood spell and this translates into one of the better heal-over-time abilities, especially once you get into higher levels and enemies have way more health than you do; healing on enemy turns is really super good.  This is a pretty meh ability, but it gets a lot better if you have some method of defending out-of-turn. Kind of hard to build around, though. More of a nice extra than anything else.  This guy is more useful than most of his carver brethren, since at least he has something he can reliably do. It's extremely niche, though.  A lot of all-party spells are going to be fairly situational, so grabbing them won't necessarily accomplish much and may actually mess you up, if you wind up loving up your creature types or something.  This one is a tiny bit better, since at least spells that target all enemies are pretty reliably designed to gently caress 'em up. the holy poopacy fucked around with this message at 22:59 on Oct 2, 2017 |
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Oct 2, 2017 00:35
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Any reason the Pilwiz Guardian breakdown image is so much bigger compared to... any other screenshot in the update?
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Oct 2, 2017 02:08
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AweStriker posted:Any reason the Pilwiz Guardian breakdown image is so much bigger compared to... any other screenshot in the update? I guess he just really wanted us to notice that this guy was pretty good.
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Oct 2, 2017 03:59
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Update 41: Tremors II: Aftershocks Back at Eternity's End for another daily realm.  We score yet another breeding combo off of the Wyvern Windrider.  With 2 daily realm wins under our belt the enemy levels are starting to get pretty ridiculous.  Again, though, an extra 70ish levels still leaves them less threatening than what we're running into in the nether realms.  We are going to need higher rep with Vertraag in the not too distant future, so this is a good place to wind up.  The rewards for clearing the daily realm are starting to ramp up along with the levels.  Picked up something even better randomly from a miniboss treasure. Generally speaking Siralim follows the RPG convention that physical attacks tend to be better for single target damage and spells are better for multi target damage; being able to convert physical attacks into multi target damage, even at a steep damage reduction, is a huge help.  Old news.  On to the next Nether Realm.  Pretty meh compared to some of the other arrow spells.  That's... oddly specific.  More of these jerks.  More of this jerk.  Hello! What have we here?  Eh, not one of the more useful dragon abilities. It's a good way to mess with monsters with defensive powers but that's a fairly small pool and most of them aren't especially threatening. Having spells that can force a provoke makes it a lot better, but there are ways to get defense reduction without as many hoops.  Nice. I generally prefer poison over burn, but either way it's a meaty bonus and you can build some nice DOT builds with the right support.  Oh poo poo. Defense ignoring spells are amazing and having a high autocast chance is a sweet, sweet bonus on top. In the right hands this has a high chance to cripple or kill an enemy right at the start of combat.  This is just for the starter Ophan that you can extract from freely. Lame!  Not too shabby--being able to remove debuffs can be clutch, slapping them onto enemies is just gravy. A bit expensive, though.  This is the Volatile Phoenix's damage-on-resurrect ability, in lance form. Not bad, but lances are basically the worst artifact.  IT BEGINS  Another great find, this lets us get full value out of our familiars without having to run 6x birb. It's pretty expensive both in MP and turn usage, but it's potentially worth it, especially in longer fights.  Like so. I can hit quadruple digits against squishies without much help but I wouldn't be nearly hitting this hard against the tougher targets if it wasn't for maximum birb power.  Now this is a goddamn sweet spell. In the hands of a strong spellcaster the mass heal alone is worth the cost, being able to dish out damage at the same time is a great bargain.  As it happens, the wizard hat also has a trait, making this the 3rd artifact trait this run (4th if you count the legendary material from the daily realm trip.) It's a pretty sweet bonus, especially if you like stacking defense as much as I do.  Let's keep this train rolling.  Floor 5 looks suspiciously like a boss arena.  Like a very specific and familiar boss arena. Yup, nether realms have boss refights.  They've learned some new tricks since you last fought them. The good news is that the random minions do not get the random extra trait that enemies in nether realms typically get. The bad news is that they get an extra copy of the Ceaseless Gladiator's trait instead. Oh, and it's more powerful this time around.  If they're healing ~1600 HP a round, that puts their maximum HP at 4000. That would take a long time to grind through even if they weren't healing, so step 1 is Rain of Blood to counteract their regen. It's not perfect--bleed deals 40% of current HP, they heal 40% of maximum HP--but it goes a long goddamn way.  The Ceaseless Gladiator itself gets a new special trait. You can't really afford to drag this fight out, because this guy is continually getting stronger.  We need damage, and we need MP. Maximizing the familiars' ability by making the entire party count as familiars helps out with both. With 6 "familiars", every party member recovers 24 MP a round, deals 90% more magic damage, and ignores 60% of enemy defense with spells.  With this kind of support even our second-tier attackers are dealing great damage, but it's still slow going between the constant Shell and healing.  Thankfully, we have an answer for the boss's ever-ramping attack score.  Not only does Humility take an axe to his boosted attack, it also set his defense to bottom tier levels. That'll pretty much do it.  Mopup still takes several rounds, but it's just a matter of time.  The reward for beating the nether boss refights is a guaranteed, unique legendary material with a trait you can't find anywhere else.  You also get the standard boss chests, of course, although there's no guarantee you'll get anything good.  This is a nice find, though! Like grimoires, shapeshifters are also lategame quest creatures so getting one early (ish) is a stroke of luck.  They're not super practical, but they're certainly fun as hell. Essentially they let you build up a perpetually increasing list of traits until you wind up with some ridiculous combo. I like the nature shifter because there are relatively nature creatures that have abilities which will potentially screw you over, although if you're unlucky enough you could roll the wrong wolpertinger and start killing your own guys with random death spells or something.  Things like this are why I love Imler parties so much, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. Use your Imlings as kamikaze missiles, then clean up with brutal boosted hits from your Imlers when the Imlings inevitably get splattered.  Meh. It's a neat little perk and all, but it's tough to build an engine around it. By the time you get a build set up to really abuse it you'll have better things to do than rack up random buffs.
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Oct 2, 2017 23:02
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Straight White Shark posted:
Does this apply to attacks generated from traits and stuff? Because I could already see that being hilarious.
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Oct 2, 2017 23:41
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Kyrosiris posted:Does this apply to attacks generated from traits and stuff? Because I could already see that being hilarious. Yup. Part of what makes this game so incredibly breakable is that there are very few triggers that are actually tied to actions, so just about everything can be triggered out of turn. Even effects that trigger on defend/provoke can be triggered by other spells/abilities setting those conditions.
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Oct 3, 2017 00:43
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Update 42: Beyond Thunderdome Another day, another Daily Realm. This time we're hanging out in the Kingdom of Heretics. With 3 wins in a row, the Daily Realms aren't loving around anymore.  We spot a new creature, the Stag. Stags are similar to Vulpes in that they're all about autocast triggers, except they're based around the Cast When Hit trigger (that is, when an enemy hits you) and they don't actually trigger anything themselves--they just improve existing Cast When Hit properties. Unfortunately I don't really have a chance to grab it--I'm not going to take any chances with enemies almost 200 levels above me. We're not really missing much, though.  In the end, though, the enemies are just too much. We managed to brute force the first few fights, but between the spectre crippling our stats and the banshee eating our MP we're hosed.  Back home, the miscellaneous item vendor has a couple runes we haven't seen yet. There are a couple runes for Shell and this is the worse one in general, although obviously if you're going to try to dodge tank it's a must-have--not only is it a large dodge bonus, you're going to really really want Shell anyhow to catch the random stray hit.  We've already seen the equivalent for burn, so it should be no surprise that there's a poison version as well. We still don't have any nature runes, so this is a must have.  That wasn't what I was shopping for, though.  There we go.  Esteemed King Mysterio, Please accept this Arena Invitation as a gift of my gratitude for your hospitality. I look forward to watching you fight in the arena! -Vashstine, Arena Master! So the Arena is a unique little minigame, but you don't get unlimited access. Once you unlock the Arena you will start finding invitations as random loot. One invitation, one play. The game is kind enough to give you a freebie when you first build the Arena, though.  We've got a new room across from the stables.  In the arena, you'll compete in a series of five battles against other magi. The more opponents you defeat, the higher your reward! Ah, but you won't be using your own creatures here, oh no. Instead, you'll draft your own team from a sample of creatures we keep here! The arena is all about making the best of your situation using only the tools at your immediate disposal. At the end of each battle, your creatures will recover some of their Health and all their Mana. Oh, and keep in mind that Cards and Deity Perks have no effect in the arena! So here's the arena's main gimmick: you've got to assemble a team of randomized creatures and take them against a gauntlet of random AI teams. It sounds annoying, and it can be, but it's really forgiving in a lot of ways. The enemies are the same level as you (with later rounds getting a very slight level advantage), which is a huge relief when you're used to fighting enemies a couple times your level. It's a great time to cut loose and just smash faces with monsters that wouldn't really be viable in later stages.  Each of your 6 creatures must be selected from a pool of 3, so there's a significant element of luck of the draw. You can press Q to take a mulligan and get a new set of 3, but you can only get one reroll per slot and it's final. If there's something okayish to use it's probably a good idea to go ahead and use it instead of risking getting stuck with a slate of duds. The choice for the first slot should be obvious.  Mend is pretty good, especially since you don't get fully healed between fights.  Another heavy hitter. Raw stats count for more in the Arena than they do elsewhere and this guy's got really high base attack.  Which we can buff even higher.  Perfect! A tank par excellence is exactly what we need.  Kind of a dud, but we could use a spellcaster I guess.  Here we go!  Sometimes it can be hard to build a coherent strategy for the Arena since your spells and artifacts are all randomized... but sometimes it throws you a softball.  The troll is loaded for bear with attack spells. Thanks to Equality he'd be able to put them to good use, but his Attack is even higher now thanks to the priest.  That'll do.  Round 2! What the...  This blob thing is a Bard, another postgame creature class. It's certainly one of the more unique creature concepts, I'll give it that. Bards mostly convert stats, which is cool and all, but 40% of a stat isn't going to be terribly useful unless you have a way to ramp it extremely high.  Even if you do, in the arena environment you'd be better off just ramping up one stat and using it to bash faces in. Like so.  Round 3 passes by so quickly I barely bothered to screencap it.  Round 4 is a little bit trickier. The Krampus isn't such a big deal since I don't have more than 2 of any given type, but the HP boost from the Ruby Paragon (wait, why is it green?) means things are going to take a while.  Of course, that just means even more stat boosting.  The last round gets a little bit more fanfare.  The Death Crafter there means we're facing a bit higher stats than normal.  It doesn't matter.    Here's your prize: 1250 Arena Points! It's always a pleasure to watch you fight, King Mysterio. Come back soon! After fighting in the Arena you get special funbux based on how many wins you got.  The guy next to the arena master lets you cash in Arena Points for prizes, including unique creatures you can't otherwise obtain. We've already seen this guy's ability in action. If you have a way to get your HP down to a tiny fraction this can make you functionally invincible.  Multistrike is pretty goddamn good, but it's not super reliable or convenient to trigger.  Kind of middling. Effectively double HP and consistent healing if you're a dedicated tank (and why would you do anything else with this guy?), which is all well and good, but in the long run damage mitigation is more important and he doesn't really have much to offer there.  Still not a fan of gorgons, but I appreciate being able to spread stun passively (even if it's unreliable) over having to spend actions on it. Being able to negate attacks on top is excellent too. I still doubt I'll ever shell out for this unless it's for breeding purposes.  I complain about random procs a lot but this one is probably worth it. Instakills are really good and the 20% HP threshold is pretty generous. This kind of ability is a godsend against heal-heavy enemy parties and also just generally helps speed things up.  The arena creatures are the big ticket items; at 5000 points, it takes 4 flawless wins to save up for them. There's also a wide vareity of smaller stuff, with the next tier down are runes at 2500 apiece, which might sound pretty steep except that these are also unique to the arena.  This is just mean. You can also buy: Uyi (Chaos): Enemies with Blind have a 50% chance to attack their allies when they miss. Uza (Death): Enemy creatures with Curse now also take damage equal to 50% of their target's Intelligence when they attack. Xio (Nature): Enemy creatures' buffs are ignored while they have Stun. Extra damage from Curse is pretty awesome. Turning Blind into pseudo-confusion is fun, but negating enemy attacks is still the more useful part of Blind. Bypassing defensive buffs while stunned is ridiculously situational.  You can also buy random treasure drops if you have nothing better to do. This is equivalent to a boss chest, and you can get crappier chests for 125/250 respectively.  Buuut considering that 500 will also buy you a guaranteed legendary crafting drop, that's probably your best bet if you're not saving up for the bigger items. The spell gems also cost 500, which is a pretty awful deal.  This comes from another centaur. Your heavy hitters probably have better things to do, but stick this on something with a really crippling attack and you can just devastate enemies when they autocast spells.  Weirdly, this doesn't come from any of the Apocalypses despite it being their schtick. I'm not impressed; if something is a big enough stalemate for this to kick in, you're probably doing next to 0 damage anyhow and ramping that up by 25% a turn still isn't going to get you anywhere.  So you may have noticed that I'm carting around a new team. I've had these guys hanging out in the stable collecting residual XP, but they're not really ready for primetime dungeons yet. But, since they're over level 20, we can run sigils without having to even leave home base.  I've loaded the Skyward Vulpes with as many big attack spells as I can, which he fires off at the start of battle. Thanks to the Raven Batmaster, he uses his sky-high Speed stat to cast them, which thanks to the Frenzy Ghoul gets boosted even further from the rest of the party's Speed. Granted, his damage isn't exactly impressive--he's still only level 30 or so while the sigil's levels are based on the level 90-something Crystal Smith. But for free turn 0 damage it ain't bad, and it'll only get better from here.  I bought 3 of these from Meraxis when they unlocked and I wish I bought more. Cuz here comes the fun part:  Every casting of Fury Swipes lets the Delirious Ghoul attack 5 times. Every attack steals a huge chunk of speed. Even with occasional misses he's getting 500-700+ speed from every casting.  That translates to 25-30 extra speed for the rest of the party too. Not exactly mindblowing, but it helps.  More importantly, the Delirious Ghoul can now cast spells running off his outrageously high speed. In retrospect I should have given him some more mana so that he could drop some nukes, but he can still overkill creatures three times his level with Magic Missile.  I've still got Elemental Tome in my back pocket, so he occasionally lucks out and gets a free nuke anyhow.  Elemental Tome also rolled this, which I desperately want a real copy of. Thanks to Swiftcasting there is no real downside to massive intelligence penalties and Multicast is insane.  Next sigil. Already the Vuples is doing a lot better.  I've also got this. Somewhat worryingly, it's not enough to drop the spectre.  Having speedy creatures to siphon stats from makes this even better, plus I picked up Berserk somewhere.  Turns out there's a reason the spectre survived 1000+ alpha strike damage--and also a reason it took 6500. It's still pretty impressive, though.  Oooooh. What have we here? This ought to be fun.  It's not a strictly magic-only party, but the tremor making spells randomly fizzle is still a giant gently caress you. Took forever to get to this point, but now things should go more smoothly.  We're running out of sigils that don't have intolerable penalties, so let's step up our game a bit.  Fury Swipes is not kind to the Apis Defender. Its redirect power is rapidly burning through health and it ran out of speed after the first Fury Swipes casting.  The Bastion is going to be able to infinitely boost the enemy's defense if we leave it alone, so it needs to die ASAP. Thankfully we have defense ignoring damage at our disposal.  Oh yeah. Did I mention that I have a multicasting multitargeting attack spell that has a chance to trigger on every single one of the 5 attacks from Fury Swipes?  I've put this off for a while in favor of big ticket items, but we've got a lot of dead-end sigils cluttering up our inventory. This will help us fix them up. I start up the Improved Stables ritual at the same time; on its own it's just quality of life stuff, but it does unlock another important feature down the road.  Now that's just fuckin mean. I start up one last sigil and 5/6 enemies get frozen before the battle starts. Incidentally, the 6th enemy happens to be the only one I naturally outspeed. These guys are turbofucked. That should be enough for now; next time we'll test out the waters for the new team in a proper dungeon. But first, I need to decide what to do with that Fleshwarper Coin! One coin will buy one new skin for one monster. It's permanent, but thankfully if the monster gets bred away or otherwise lost you get the skin back, so if you can breed up their stats and still keep your snazzy skin for their descendants. All of the "serious" skins are collected on this page, plus there are the retro skins of varying levels of goofiness. Let me know if there are any requests; currently the Sphinx or War Crafter skins have caught my eye for general aesthetics + being creatures that are likely to see a lot of use across parties, or possibly the Familiar or one of the Imling/Imler since they're likely to eventually see repeats in the same party and it will help keep them apart.
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Oct 3, 2017 21:59
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celestial_occultist.png because you're going to want a certain occultist eventually anyway.
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Oct 4, 2017 01:05
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Update 43: Fight Club It's been a day since I failed the last Daily Realm, so we can try again. Since we don't have a win streak going enemies here will be at the minimum level, which should be a cakewalk after tackling level 2 and 3 sigils. It's nice that we wound up back here, I bred away my imp shaman a while back and need to get some replacements.  Nice find! Kind of a niche ability, though, since most sources of invisibility go away at the start of the turn.  The vulpes (I really need to remember to name these guys) utterly demolishes an enemy birb party with a 4-spell opening salvo.  I just now remembered that I have a hit-all spell with a built in cast-on-hit trigger that for some reason I did not equip on the guy that's attacking 15 or so times per round. Whoops.  This speeds up fights immensely.  Hey, a new creature type! The shadowy assassin lady thing is a Nix. They're another spell trigger manipulating family, basically the Cast On Hit equivalent to the stag's Cast When Hit.  Correction: was a Nix. This is the one drawback of the vulpes...  Got a nice haul off the miniboss portal. There's two new usable breeding formulas here, plus this great little number. Screw everything I said about Drain Life, this hits everything for similar damage for all of 1 extra MP.  Similar to Mind Tricks, arguably better since it lets you spread around nasty on-hit effects.  Many of these updates span a day or three of realtime, so I went back to do another Daily Realm and wound up back at the dimension of assholes.  Managed to snag that Nix.  The level boost coming from yesterday's successful run means that I'm not wiping things out with my opening salvo, but the enemies are still a long way from posing a threat.  Welp, so much for having to make a decision! Daily Realms are great for finding these things but this is still fairly lucky.  Thanks to the meal bonus we hit a reputation threshold with an actual non-lovely god while slumming around here.  It's something, I guess.  Like Brain Freeze, but arguably better since it doesn't require the enemy to cast first.  On to the Nether Realm proper. The enemies are quite a bit tougher in here, but so far we're holding up ok.  I even have my very own, custom-made wine goblet! It's golden, and studded with jewels. Fitting for a god of my status, right? Next time you visit, we should drink wine together! I find it amusing that the elephant god wants to hang out and get sloshed.  The rune is theoretically nice, but you need to find a way to have your creature have enough dodginess to trigger it and also be able to do something meaningful with their attacks.  Pretty sweet! Definitely risky, though, these guys are glass cannons and aren't going to survive long while provoking.  Ouch. As awesome as Fury Swipes is, abilities that punish attacks get painful in a hurry.  Thankfully we have ways of removing that rear end in a top hat.  We cut it a bit close, but I've got spells that can run off speed even without needing the raven's special.  I still don't care about the dumb monkeys, but for what it's worth this unlocks two of them since I've got a formula for breeding spring into summer.  It's kind of funny how nicely the Pilwizes play with Meraxis's realm and its free debuffs. You won't always get Bleed, but the odds are decent enough.  Scored an invite back to the Arena.  Double sirens are obnoxious. Thankfully the enemies aren't terribly threatening (the bard is doing more harm than good, honestly) so it's just a matter of biding my time. Which means plenty of feet to eat.  Oh hell yes.  Oh hell no  I got sloppy and forgot that Minor Resurrection costs 8 after the penalty from spell mastery, so I'm stuck in another stalemate.  Back to the arena, I guess.  Not as happy with my lineup this time around. Being able to spread fire and poison is pretty great and I've got some decent hitters in here, but I've got no healing at all despite two life creatures.  I muscle through the first few rounds on the strength of the Berserker Fiend, but the combination of a basilisk and several dangerous threats in round 4 proves catastrophic. I whiff a hit on the basilisk and get stunlocked.  Amazingly, I manage to pull through--barely--thanks to the burn + poison combo.  Unfortunately Round 5 is about the worst combo imaginable. Shellburst and double Dissections mean that the enemies have no shortage of defense-piercing damage in multiple flavors, so there's no way in hell I can stop them from finishing off my badly wounded party.  RIP dumb arena team.  I proceed to blow my points on legendary materials. This one is from one of the best Sirens; it suffers from being overly reactive, but if nothing else it's great for punishing random spell triggers.  That's two losses in short order. My luck wasn't entirely terrible, though, as our creature collection is coming along nicely.  I missed the screenshot of finding him, but salamanders are more or less to spells what centaurs are to physical attacks--meaning they just get absurb amounts of free automatic triggers. This guy is arguably one of the worse salamanders, but is still pretty breakable. Pair him up with the right phoenix party and you get tons of free spells.  Also picked up that brown basilisk from the first sigil fight. Not one of the more impressive basilisks, although you could combo it with another basilisk ability for an added layer of insurance--getting Shell every turn makes it so the enemies have to get two damaging attacks or spells off between turns to avoid triggering whatever other abilities the basilisk has.  Managed to get that stag finally, as well. It's probably the best of the bunch; load it up with a bunch of Cast When Hit spells and you can trigger huge spell cascades.  Got the Nix equivalent too. The proc rate on Nixes isn't as generous as on the stags, but it's a lot easier to trigger a ton of on-hit triggers.  So let's take a look at those breeding formulas. This guy is a real beast: if you max out the spell slots perk and get him an artifact with double extra spell slots, he'll dish out quintuple damage against virtually any non-Sorcery creature and also hit Sorcery creatures for at least half that, usually more. He still suffers from the terrible speed Watchers get, but generally that's a pretty insane damage multiplier.  This guy has a very sane damage multiplier. It's a nice perk, but not very abusable. It is stackable, so if you finagled it across your whole party you'd maybe be looking at something respectable. That's a lot of work for not much benefit, though.  Very unique way of shutting down enemy spellcasters. On its own you're not going to do much, but combo this with other mana screw abilities (like, say, the mana reduction from Sloth) and you're going to shut down most enemy spellcasting. It won't do anything to stop autocast triggers, though, which are going to be a problem.  Pretty bad. There are much better ways of lowering enemy speed.  Behold! This is one of the most important abilities there is; I suspect this is the occultist jon joe was hinting at earlier. I prefer having this in artifact form since occultists are a bit squishy for carrying such a key defensive ability, but I'm not in a position to be picky.  Springtime is one of the worse monkeys. It's out-of-turn healing, so that's good, but it's very limited, and it's hard enough to build a dodge tank without also having to build in enough health and defense that they don't immediately get pasted by anything that hits them.  Kind of gimmicky, and overall I prefer winter, but counterattacks are fun. Pair this with the rune from Meraxis and you can get double dodge counterattacks. You still need to find a way to get him a decent attack ability, though.
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Oct 4, 2017 23:18
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Update 44: Se7en The Viper Occultist never really quite panned out, but her genes will live on.  What's this? The librarian has a present for us! It's clever for the game to have the librarian give you so many gifts. In a way it's kind of a reward for extensively using the rename function, as is proper and good.  We're pretty full up on occultists, but oh well, it's free.  You may have noticed a new guy hanging around the library as well--these guys only start appearing once you unlock the Arcanist. They're just there as a tutorial for the sigil system, in case you somehow get to level 20 and get the arcanist without having any sigils of your own.  There's now a quest goal to complete a sigil, so why not?  Very good! Very good, indeed! As a little reward, here are a few more sigils! Thanks for hearing me out! The reward is... more sigils. Eh, they're handy for grinding sometimes.  There's also another guy for major sigils.  Whoops. Confusion is rare and frequently fails to do anything, but when it does it can be catastrophic. Amusingly, due to how the action queue is processed the ghoul continues Fury Swiping and finishes out the battle while dead.  We got a new griffon, but it's not one of the good ones.  Again the tutorial mage gives us a sigil dump for our efforts.  The arena's hallway has its own secret passage to get around, but it's not terribly useful since you don't need to visit the library that much.  There was only skin request, but since we've got an extra coin I'm pretty happy to do this one. It helps that the Delusion Occultist's sprite isn't very impressive on its own, so this is a pretty clear improvement.  While I'm at it, let's get some new goodies for the newly christened 2Ghouls1Cup. With this he has an excellent chance of getting a free splash off each casting of Fury Swipes.  Doing yet another Daily Realm and we're back here with Zonte.  The saddest mono-family party.  I was wondering when one of these would pop up! Cards are yet another super-rare loot drop that can only be obtained through battle: any given creature has a tiny chance to drop a card of their type when killed. Each card gives a specific, permanent bonus just for being in your collection; the effects are generally pretty tiny, but there's never any cost to them so they're pure bonus. This one isn't super impressive, since there aren't really many Sorcery creatures that really care about their attack--even the Brim Smith only cares about the attack on his artifact, not his base attack. Oh well, it's free.  Another new creature.  On to the Nether Realm.  Whoops. The Phase Spellblade makes enemies take damage based on their speed every time their attack, so my strategy of "get something with insanely high speed to make a million attacks" is not a good plan. Luckily I've got plenty of resurrect chances.  This is weird and random and can potentially backfire, but it's definitely fun as hell.  Whoops. This is one of the wyverns' spell reflection traits and it's annoying even though the ghoul that rolled it doesn't really have the stats to be super threatening. Worse, the enemies rolled an anti-magic twofer--one of them has the power that drains a chunk of mana every time I cast anything.  They're pretty squishy, which is good because I could be in serious trouble otherwise.  One of these days I'll get that green and yellow basilisk without blowing it up first.  Oof! Speaking of twofer abilities, the Moss Golem gets two abilities that trigger on defend and one of them completely messes up my spellcasting.  He left me exactly enough MP to completely ruin their day.  I take it back. This is the saddest mono-family party. It's been a long time since I've wiped anything this quickly. If I seem a bit harsh about the seasonal aspects, consider: TwoGhoulsOneCup's unboosted opening salvo hit 5 for 5 against enemies specifically designed to be primo dodge tanks. There's some element of luck in that, but... not that much.  I've got a breeding formula to get deeper into the skeleton tree but I'm still blocked by gargantuans   Lots of repeats.  Here's that nasty siren ability that we scored a material for from the Arena. Thanks to the new Occultist they can't do jack poo poo.  We've seen these guys a couple times but I haven't paid them much attention. They're an inverse of the Forsaken's usual "start out powerful and get weaker over time" schtick. They'd be devastating if you paired them up with a batmaster, but on their own they're not particularly remarkable--this one only caught my attention because my ghoul is eating about 1000 Speed a hit from it. As a result these guys wind up eating a Necrosis spell to the tune of 4000 damage.  I was excited to see a legendary material hanging out in the open for the taking, but it turned out to be a really sad efreet power.  That's crazy specific.  So is this, but we can actually chain into it using the wyverns we have.  The Plague Doctors here are another postgame creature (there are really a disturbing number of humanoids in this batch... there's probably a reason these guys didn't make the cut for the original game.) They're another debuff-based family, with a more specific emphasis on turning debuffs to your own benefit.  With party-wide immunity to Scorn this turns into a really powerful way to shut down a whole lot of enemies. Also, more Arena Invitations.  Whew, cutting it close. Krampus is still scary even when you only no more than 3 of the same type.  Oh hell yeah. This guy may actually supplant Brimjob Jr in the future.  Another huge find! This might not sound like much... but we've got a formula that can breed one of the deadly sins from the Accursed Pit Worm, which opens up even more breeding options (in addition to being badass in its own right.)  The Accursed Pit Worm is another flavor of passive damage. It's mostly notable in that it gets devastating when you're down to only 1-2 enemies, compared to the standard pit worm model that still only damages each enemy once per turn.  And here's the big guy himself, Gluttony. Kind of a gimmicky ability but when you have an effect that runs off of piles of health it's tough to beat. Arguably the Forsaken Swampdweller is a better way to get a giant health pool, although if you get an artifact trait for one of them you can always combine the two...  I'd need a lot more defense investment across the party to replace the crystal smith entirely, but I'd be seeing huge increases in other stats.  Picked up another dryad along the way. Not exactly impressive; it's not that difficult to get most buffs party-wide to begin with.  Hey, we can make this rear end in a top hat now. I might have a use for him...  Griffon squads are fun, but they probably don't have this guy in them.  Now that we have access to a sin, we can finally breed this guy. This definitely opens up some possibilities... Crystal Smith + Planetary Amaranth + Lich Overseer adds up to just obscene amounts of defense, and by this point we've got a couple ways to turn that into damage while also no-selling attacks completely.  One of the better mites, this thing means tons of revive chances... as long as you can keep it alive, which is easier said than done because it's squishy as hell.  Not super impressive, but it triggers a lot more reliably than most wyvern abilities and is a combination power up/denial. I wouldn't have minded having this guy around for the Ceaseless Gladiator refight--1 in 3 chance to swipe Shell from each enemy would have been handy.  And here's the Occultist the librarian gave us. It's got a sort of built in Elemental Tome, and things like Fury Swipes mean you can spam it en masse, but being limited to Sorcery spells is kind of a damper. I suppose at least you could hope you roll Elemental Tome as a freebie spell so that you can diversify from there...
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Oct 5, 2017 23:16
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Update 45: Easy Virtue Time to burn through those arena invites.  Feeling pretty good about this team. Got a good tank, several good hitters, and unlimited spells on tap from the lich.  Then it turned out that I had two Dark Transformation casters. Each Dark Transformation doubles the target's stats. With the lich having enough mana for two castings, that's an 8x multiplier for a creature of choice.  Really puts the "murder" in murder of crows. I blow through all 5 rounds without anyone falling below half health.  Next invite! Little more support-heavy this time.  This could be a problem. I forgot about this guy until it was too late to do anything about him (realistically there's not a lot I could have done in the first place due to being silenced.)  Since everyone shares the silence debuff the centaur gets to attack roughly a million times. Thankfully the arachnalisk draws the majority of the attacks.  That should put a stop to that. As it happens, the sphinx rolled double resurrection spells. So at least I'm not totally hosed from deaths.  After that, things go pretty easy. I think the arachnalisk must have rolled a very Int-heavy artifact, because he's busting out some serious magic damage. It's a shame his MP is so lovely, he had a couple big nukes that he might have been able to do real work with.  Let's see if we can make 3 in a row. Feeling really goddamn good about this team; the spectre and grimoire make a return, I've got great damage mitigation from the amaranth, damage boosts from Krampus, and the troll berserker is easily in the top 5% heavy hitters.  Man, the arena just loves giving me this spell and I just love getting it.  Krampus rolled a decent attack spell and is in an Intelligence-heavy family, so he quickly becomes my go to target for transformation.  I could save up to get one of the arena creatures after one more win... but fuggit. I blow half my arena points on more materials. This is one of the Plague Doc traits. Other materials: Horned Horseshoe - Spur of the Heavens: This creature's attacks have a 50% chance to move a random ally to the top of the Action Queue. This gets really fun with Fury Swipes in the mix. Plague Rat Poison - Creeping Death: After this creature defends or provokes, enemies that have Poison take damage equal to 3 turns of this debuff. This comes from one of the Smogs and is a great feature in a poison build. With the poison rune and the right supports it's pretty easy to turn this into a very respectable nuke.  Back to the Daily Realm grind. We're up to level 300+ monsters due to our win streak.  Fury Swipes vs. arachnalisk teams means there's really no way to avoid poison, so it's a good thing we can end this quickly.  I should be able to make this, except I neglected to get any spare Pit Guard cores and bred my only one away. We're not missing much.  I found out that with swiftcasting, Corpse Shield powered up by two dead party members gets 2000+ health barriers. It's a fantastic spell.  It's still not enough, though, and once again the 4th Daily Realm proves to be a bridge too far.  In addition to the Arcanist I've finished the Improved Stables ritual, which gives us a new helper around the stables.  Several dozen hours into the game, you finally get the ability to unequip poo poo from your rostered monsters.  Anyway, I'm here for this beauty. It occured to me that 15% of the speed from all my artifacts is even better than 5% of the total speed from all my creatures, so the Frenzy Ghoul is out.  While I'm at it, time to pump up the Vulpes a bit further. More spells means a bigger start-of-battle salvo, although one of these slots is getting earmarked for Fury Swipes--it's always been annoying that my fastest monster wasn't equipped to participate in my main tactic, but I didn't want to give up attack spell slots.  Finally bothered nabbing this guy's core.  Man, this is an insanely good spell to have an autocast trigger on. I'd dearly love to be able to fit it on 2Ghouls1Cup but I've got too many other great cast-on-kill triggers that I already can't fit.  A shapeshifter is nice enough to serve up another elf for me. I almost have a full set now.  This is a duplicate, but I was never able to make the other formula so it's still handy.  Hey, got a new bard from a miniboss fight. I generally like these kinds of bards better than the ones that give you split attribute dependence on your attacks.  Seriously, you could probably swim in it. It's at least fourt imes your size. I hate to be rude, but I'd really like to drink alone, if you don't mind. Come back later and maybe we'll have a chat! The favor reward Meraxis gives for minibosses pushes us to the next level. If you haven't figured it out yet, we're buttering up Meraxis to get our hands on that goblet.  At rank 4 he has another spell for sale, but it's pretty meh. If you're going to be relying on Taunt you probably want a better source of Taunt and there are better defense boosting spells than this.  The new tier of pilwiz is another good one, though. Between this and the guardian you can turn any bleed effect into HP + Mana regen for the whole party, and this even has the added bonus of denying MP.  Another minotaur formula that we can actually make right now, but it's still not very good.  Most damage spells in this tier have some kind of drawback, but generally they're not as severe as blowing up your own party. With the right setup it can be beneficial to deal damage to yourself... but generally you're not going to be doing impressive damage to the enemy team without nuking yourself into oblivion, so in that case it's more of a chip damage option for weak casters.  Back home I snag a much better attack spell from the spell vendor. This is a great asset for a defense-heavy build, although it's kind of MP intensive.  Let's do this. Spam extra turns for days. It'll be a while before it's ready, though.  We also cross the 25000 Power threshold, which lets us get... whatever this is?  Well this just got a lot easier.  This makes 4 out of 5 ghoul types.  I miss the roaring basilisk once again. They're just too dangerous to spare a lot of time capturing on.  Sweet! This lets us complete one of the virtue quests.  This guy is pretty great, but we need the wight first.  It's not Dark Whispers, but Multicast is still really drat good, especially since we still have the rune. Casting Dark Whispers + Fury Swipes means an extra round of attacks compared to just casting Fury Swipes twice.  Aaaand another virtue quest down, although this one's gonna take a lot of breeding.  Whoops. In retrospect 15 consecutive attacks is not a great idea when staring down a valkyrie.  I decide to take advantage of multicast to put up a giant barrier as insurance against it happening again... and it turns out they have the spell that reverses barriers into damage. It's a very good thing the enemies are still stuck with Scorn, because I don't know that I would have survived this otherwise.  Quite by accident I stumble onto an entirely new way to murder enemies with this setup. At some point I stuck Elemental Barrage onto my occultist, which lets him recast the last 3 spells cast in the current battle... which is generally going to include 1 or 2 nukes from Michael J's opening volley. With Multicast up that turns out to be more than enough to deal with most monsters.  Kind of like the Burn equivalent of the poison ability we got on a material from the arena. Get a meaty burn going and this will level the field.  A bit niche, and hitting an extra target is largely irrelevant for a spell designed to punish specific enemies, but this packs a pretty big punch. I've got other priorities though.  Hey, our old friend is back! Being able to attack roughly a million times makes for a lot of loot drops. I think it's scaled to the amount of damage done, though, so it's not as much as I had hoped.  It takes 16000+ damage, but it finally goes down for our first Treasure Golem kill.  We claim the Treasure Golem's bounty... but at what cost?  Its drops are basically equivalent to a boss chest, but we still didn't even get anything good.  The spell vendor has another upgrade for us--this is an attack spell, so we can feed it to our vulpes and 40% of the time it will shut down enemies before they can act.  Another fantastic find! Once I can get this on Brimjob's shield it's going to make for some hilariously beefy protection on our most important party members.  So let's look at some of those creatures! We saw this guy as one of Andrick's undead lackeys. As an enemy it's annoying, as a party member it's unreliable. Still, if you were going to try to go the dodge tanking route you absolutely want this guy on your team.  This guy is pretty handy for hunter teams--when you're effectively attacking 42 times a round you don't necessarily need a big damage fraction, but spamming resurrection rolls gives you a terrific safety net. The main drawback is that it gets actively worse the more of your creatures die since you will roll fewer and fewer times.  One of the better minotaurs (which isn't saying much.) The wording is a bit misleading; the healing boost means as soon as he attacks he'll be healed to full unless he's at very low HP, in which case he'll only be healed to almost full. Overall he's not much different from the crusader with a heal-on-attack effect, except he gets the extra perk of getting additional healing from other sources.  Unicorns generally have a problem in that they don't have worthwhile attacks to use for their trigger-on-attack effects, but this one's got it worse than most because it actually has to do damage with its terrible attacks to do anything at all.  Missed this guy on the last update--he's from the Occultist Spellbinder the librarian gave us. This is a pretty great way to safeguard your first turn--pair it with the right anti-magic and passive damage defenses and you're basically guaranteed to survive long enough to act.  Self-replenishing Shell is pretty amazing, but that's not what we want this guy for.  (The Bringer of Charity chants an incomprehensible hymn. Your Unicorn Holycaster cheers happily as its body begins to change right before your very eyes.) I present to you: The ultimate paradigm of temperance, the Caritas Sanctus! Hah, looks like someone made a copy & paste error with the virtue dialogue.  Since, obviously, this guy is the actual ultimate paradigm of temperance.  We've already seen Charity in the random enemy pool. It's a pretty big healing booster and a great fixture for any healing-centric party.  This, on the other hand, is one of the dumbest and most harmful abilities in the game and I am utterly thrilled to introduce it into the enemy encounter pool.  Our new bard. Not much use to the speed demons team, but it's got its uses.
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Oct 8, 2017 16:58
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Looking forward to seeing exactly what combinations you decide to go for after you have access to the arcane spell gem forge.
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Oct 11, 2017 00:31
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Gonna be a while--I've played ahead through the next 2 bosses and it's probably going to take at least the next 2 more before I get it up and running. But yeah, it opens up a hell of a lot of possibilities.
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Oct 11, 2017 00:38
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Poor little treasure golem, it just wanted a friend. Ambiguity is gone, Mysterio definitely are the villain.
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Oct 11, 2017 03:56
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Update 46: Night of the Living Dead Boss time! (You and your creatures are quickly surrounded by Andrick's ghouls, leaving you no choice but to fight your way out of this putrid graveyard. Lay these heathens to rest once more!)  Andrick and his crew actually have 0 new abilities this time around; the only difference is there are more of them. Luckily their heavy hitter blew his attack on Brimjob.  Half of them go down in the first volley. They manage to take out 2Ghouls1Cup, but it's a bit late.  Andrick has some impressively beefy defense, but spamming a dozen or so of these at once takes him out before he can resurrect his entourage.  Andrick's unique drops are all summoning-focused, but this one isn't terribly impressive.  Not the saddest smith, but not very good.  Time for something new. We've got a lot of breeding ahead of us.  Going all out defense for this team.  Which means it's finally time to bust out the Phase Knight. No sense boosting defense up to ludicrous levels and then getting splatted by fixed passive damage.  Whoops, kind of been neglecting Deity Points. Being able to refill your MP at will is ridiculously good and getting Multicast on top of it is just insane. It still costs a turn so it's not completely broken, but this would have saved a lot of embarrassing losses with the last team.  I also max out the spell slot perk while I'm at it. Again, this would have been more important with the previous team... but the Lich Overseer's ability scales with the number of Death spells equipped so this is just extra stat fodder.  So! Here's our new thing. Amaranths, in addition to passively boosting everyone's defense, are pretty goddamn speedy and this guy has the biggest speed booster I can give him. He can outspeed enemies pretty reliably and tosses Profanity onto the Bastion, forcing him to provoke.  The Bastion's ability hands out substantial defense boosts whenever it provokes. Even if something forced it to provoke outside its turn. So our team's already-sick defense gets a huge boost, and the Bastion is now redirecting attacks to itself.  A while back we picked up a wizard hat with the Memento Mori trait, which damages attackers for 50% of your defense. And I have a lot of defense.  But that's not all! I also have two copies of Clawing Shadows, which runs off the caster's highest stat instead of their Intelligence. And Brimjob has 5000 or so defense.  Also, one of those copies hits an extra target.  Good for poison builds, but a bit passe.  That's a pretty thematic artifact. Great for abusing the hell out of on-hit effects; give this to a Nix with the right cast-on-hit spells and you'd be able to get one hell of an opening volley.  More fortresses! I've already got my favorite one, though.  More occultists! I've already got my favorite one, though.  Subjugation is a trait one of the Watchers has. It's basically the Coast Watcher's "deal extra damage based on how much more Intelligence you have than the target"... but for defense. Shamefully, I completely neglect to find a place for it. Help I have too many ways to crush enemies with my ridiculously high defense.  Between runs I spotted a new rune from a merchant. Good for crit builds, since they scale with speed and it's easier to get Grace than it is to get a 50% speed bonus.  Somehow I built a strategy based around provoking and reflecting damage and forgot to get any form of Taunt on my provoke creature. Now things should kill themselves much more reliably.  *Super Mario Bros invincibility star music* Also, hey, another Vulpes. It's only for dumb healing spells though.  Occasionally the enemies manage to drag fights out slightly longer if they have resurrection powers or lots of Shell. Things get really silly after 3 or 4 of the Bastion's provoke boosts.  Here's something new. Spirits are more interesting to life mages since they've got the toolkit to make healing triggers really sing, but they're not bad in general.  I much prefer Water Enchantment, I can't think of a lot of builds that rely on everybody throwing physical attacks around.  I wasn't able to fit the Celestial Occultist in, but that's not really a big deal. Basically as long as I can provoke the enemies will happily kill themselves off, and if they silence themselves that just speeds up the process since they've got fewer alternatives to attacking and instantly dying.  Did I mention that the Bastion's provoke ability also boosts Speed and that I have a defense ignoring spell that scales based on Speed? Just in case somehow all my other methods of obliterating the enemy fail.  Still short a one of the Fiends required, but honestly it's nothing to write home about anyhow.  Kind of funny that I'm getting all of these Doom Fortress recipes while my Bastion is just casually wiping encounters.  I run into Sloth in the flesh, turning our ability against us. This would probably suck if I actually used Attack or Intelligence for anything in this build!  That's something I guess.  An ice find.  Picked up a death shield with one of the mummy traits. This is even better than the Doom Mummy's offensive counterpart; being able to cut incoming damage down to 10-25% normal in one fell swoop is awesome. Still suffers from the issue that it gets weaker as enemies die, though.  Manage to break the 100k damage mark thanks to some annoying defensive powers leaving me stalled for a while.  I'm pretty sure I've got a recipe that relies on this guy, so this should be good for a twofer.  With a little grinding I could get a Shogun from the arena, but I'm not a huge fan of most of the paragons so that's kind of on the back burner.  Back home to do a little housekeeping. Now that I've got the stables upgraded I could grab this guy, buuuuut I don't have an awful lot of use for him just yet so I'm going to go for the next tier of citizen recruitment instead. Gimme dem sidequests.  Just what I was looking for!  Because my build just isn't broken enough yet.  Ding! Two flaming shards plus my stock of leftovers finishes the citizen recruitment instantly and gets me both my artifacts back. Still working on that Fortune Sphere, but it's close.  Not a part of my current build, but this will still do great things someday.  Now we're talking.  But I sense that you are different. You take great care in planning your decisions, and remain patient even when time is not on your side. Let us commemorate your patience by creating a permanent reminder of this virtue - a Sanctus. Please bring me a Forest Gargantuan. It is the ideal creature to use for the transformation process. Stupid gargantuans! Also, take note: this rear end in a top hat hiding down here won't even show up if you don't have the Arcane Vault room unlocked. I guess it's kind of apropos for the representative of patience.  But even you are not immune to the temptation to loaf around the tavern all day. In due time, you'll grow tired of adventuring and decide to journey into your cups instead. You must not let this happen. A sacrifice is in order. Bring to me a Colossal Giant - a slow, lumbering, lazy creature - and let us ensure that your motivation is never jeopardized. I can't help but notice that the traits that make a creature an ideal representation of sloth are awfully similar to the traits that make them an ideal representation of patience.  This round of recruitment also gives us a third sigil guy for primal sigils.  It's got random stat swaps, but gently caress it, gimme enough turns to provoke and I don't care.  Even if my base defense gets scrambled, I still have an obscene amount of defense boosts.  I don't win the legendary material from the sigil--but amusingly, I get an artifact with a basilisk trait anyhow. This one's pretty nasty, although you have to voluntarily restrict your spell list if you want to use it to its full potential.  Of course, the old guy gives us a sigil dump for beating a primal sigil.  Let's see.. these pages belong to the Pyro Grimoire! It used to belong to a chaotic pyromancer - a master of fire magic. (Katrina shuffles through the pages, flattening out the wrinkled ones and ensuring that they're all facing the same direction as each other.) Now we just need to tie the pages together using this enchanted binding, courtesy of Sarea! ...and there you have it! Good as new - a Pyro Grimoire! As much as I'd like to keep it here to study it, I have a feeling you'd make better use of it. I'll send it to the stables so you can pick it up later. The stables are a terrible place to keep a book! What kind of librarian are you, anyhow?  Firestorm (14 MP): Enemies take a moderate amount of damage and are afflicted with Burn for 3 turns. Inferno (8 MP): Extends the duration of the enemies' Burn debuff by 1 turn and increases the debuff's potency by 100%. Raze (6 MP): Enemies take damage equal to 2 turns of their Burn debuff. The Pyro Grimoire has kind of a theme going on, moreso than the other grimoires. It's got the tools to dish out some ridiculous burn damage... but Inferno really wants to be spammed, so having it locked on a single creature is of limited value.  Is bad   Now we're talking! It's really unreliable, but turn manipulation is strong enough to be worth putting up with this much randomness. If you've got some means of generating a million weak attacks you can chain together a ton of turns.  This guy actually opened up when we got the two Sanctuses last time. Pretty meh, but if you're doing a dodge build... why not?  Nominally this is the more offensive counterpart to the Bastion. That's pretty good, but as demonstrated I prefer using the Bastion to ramp up defense and turning that into offense also.  Same as the other assorted angels. Weak is pretty decent and sources of it aren't super common, but overall it's still pretty meh.  This guy is what I needed the Bile Slime for. It's a pretty nasty ability but needs a lot of work to maximize its potential since you need to both attract and survive a lot of hits. The Sabotage spell would be a nice place to start.  Grabbed this guy right at the end of the run. It's... ehhhh. Most big spells aren't single-target.  100% mass freeze chance? HELL. YES. If the enemies don't have any freeze resistance it's really easy to build an infinite turn engine around this.  Speaking of freezing, there's also this guy available as offspring from the Frost Phoenix. It's not too shabby--with a healing-centric build you can get dizzying levels of defense pretty easily and, well, I've demonstrated pretty well why that's good.  We've already got the legendary material for this ability but the Smog itself isn't too shabby; a slow tanky creature is probably what you want to give this kind of ability to anyhow since it needs setup time.  Yeah, not really feelin it.  If you've got a Life Mage this guy is even better than the Bile Slime--throw around enough mass heals and you've got turns for days.  This isn't too shabby if you've got a bunch of freeze on hit or similarly nasty abilities, but even with double chances it's not going to be terribly reliable. Generally you're better off maximizing number of attacks rather than chance to activate.
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Oct 11, 2017 23:15
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Am I misunderstanding how lich overseer works? It says it boosts a given creature's defense by 7% times how many death spell gems that creature has? Meaning for this to be good you have to give lots of death spell gems to each of your creatures? right? Or am I totally misunderstanding this and the 7% is cumulative spell gems? Meaning I could put like 5death gems each on two death mages and get 70% bonus defense for everyone? even if the other four creatures have ZERO death gems on them? is this why this is working so well? namad fucked around with this message at 01:16 on Oct 12, 2017 |
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Oct 12, 2017 01:08
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namad posted:Am I misunderstanding how lich overseer works? It's the latter. "Your creatures have 7% more Defense for each non-temporary Death Spell Gem each of your creatures has equipped. This trait does not stack." Normally, this would require you to stack your party with death creatures to get much benefit (although the lich itself can get up to 8 spell slots just from perks + artifact bonuses, and later on there are plenty of ways to stack it up even higher.) But thanks to Spell Mastery I can just cram in death gems every which way. There's an equivalent for each spell school and primary stat (counting Health.) The Raptor Occultist that has shown up in most of my spellcasting parties so far is Intelligence from Sorcery gems, the Imp Necromancer that I have a breeding formula or two kicking around for is Speed from Nature gems, and I forget the exact names but one of the gargoyles gives attack from chaos and one of the ophanim is health from life.
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Oct 12, 2017 01:17
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So, to give an idea of the math behind this, here's a shot of the Lich Overseer: His base defense of 160 is fairly bad but because I chain bred him through a bunch of spare parts he's inherited enough stats to boost him up to 233 (the "Other" category is miscellaneous bonus from perks, cards, etc.; I've sunk a few deity points to buy 2 or 3 percent extra defense.) Of course, he's still like half the level of the long term party members who are themselves 50 or so levels behind the enemies we're fighting, so this is still quite low overall. Brimjob is wielding a heavy shield artifact with a total defense bonus of 824, of which all his teammates gain half. So even though the lich has no defense on his own artifact that pushes him up to 645, which is starting to get kind of respectable. There are 20 death gems equipped across the party (most of them just whatever useless crap I had on hand), so his own ability increases defense by 140% to a whopping 1,548. That's high enough that even the nether realm mobs we're fighting stand up and take notice. Then the planetary amaranth gives the whole party an additional 30% defense multiplied on top of the lich's bonus, putting him up to 2,012. At this point even enemies three times his level are pretty well hosed--but if that somehow wasn't enough, as soon as I get a chance to act I can make the Bastion provoke for 30% more defense, so he's up to 2600+ in the first round and scaling up higher ever round after that. This is the flimsiest member of the party by a large margin. The Bastion and Crystal Smith have about three times as much defense. Also, the enchantment I just finished on the smith's shield means he gives the party members on either side of him an additional defense boost equal to 65% of his defense. He has 1,281 defense pre-multipliers. Between the lich and the amaranth, he's adding 2,164 defense to whoever is next to him--who, because of the way these various bonuses interact, gets the lich and amaranth bonuses compounded on this bonus. On top of assuredly already having sky high defense on their own because of all the bonuses I already had before I threw in that enchantment. The long and short of it is that I'm walking into the next dungeon with about my main tank having about ten times as much defense as would be reasonable for this level, which will easily instakill anything dumb enough to attack him. Maybe something with a high HP multiplier like the forsaken swampdweller would survive trying to attack him, assuming I haven't had time for more than 1 provoke boost tops.
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Oct 12, 2017 02:19
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| # ? May 2, 2024 22:10 |
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What level is your character? I notice I never see that in screenshots, even ones in which you're spending deity points. I'm starting to think that even though I've been cheating and stealing breeding recipes from the wiki and I'm character level 160. Your party is 3or4 times stronger than mine and I doubt your character level is as bloated as mine. Heh. So many pro-tips learned from you though that I never would've figured out on my own! I have however added dreams of ice and diligence to my abnegation team (after seeing those traits in this thread) and if I don't have any deaths in the first round then from the second round and onwards I'm invulnerable. Still have the problem that sometimes I just die in the first round. If I was a life mage not a sorcery mage I could stack speed on my regal golem and end up with massive round1 defensive bonuses, but I think sticking with sorcery and grabbing a lich overseer or maybe the Imp Necromancer will serve me better. If I had imp necromancer I might be able to ensure going first and then just do something like silence every enemy and blind them, or scorn them and mana drain them some sort of combo like that.
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Oct 12, 2017 03:42
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