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quote:Faster movement speed is now unlocked before you even leave your castle for the first time. Oh thank god. It takes forever to unlock faster movement speed in 2. It is literally faster and easier to just beat the game and do a new game plus with the increase movment speed than it is to unlock it in game.
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Nov 21, 2017 22:18
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Huh, weird that they'd call out auto-cast spells as one of the things getting cut.
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Nov 22, 2017 01:10
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Hot drat, that's some news. Guess I'd better get rolling if I want to get things somewhat reasonably wrapped up by March.Leraika posted:Huh, weird that they'd call out auto-cast spells as one of the things getting cut. Not really that surprising. They lead to infinite loops, instant victory builds, tons of in-battle spam, just lots of ugly scenarios in general.
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Nov 22, 2017 01:15
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To be fair, you can do a lot with autocasting double digits (I'm sure even triple digits of spells are possible) before anyone can even move. Hell, most of my wrist pain when playing this game is pressing E from fast forwarding through spells. I think there's a skip spell animation option, but I've been using that as an indicator of what spell's being cast, since it'd probably just fly right past my view otherwise. >:
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Nov 22, 2017 01:18
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Sorry, I was being facetious. Will be interesting to see what they come up with to replace it, though.
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Nov 22, 2017 05:40
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Happy Thanksgiving (or Thursday, as it is known overseas)! I'm thankful my relatives are all traveling this year. Update 54: Death Becomes Her  Civil war! Why must brother fight against brother, Im against Im?!  Well, for starters, because this guy is an rear end in a top hat. Like half the Imling/Imler traits are death triggers.  That's better.  The basic Imler effect (heal Imlings when they're attacked) isn't very good but it's a great counter to Fury Swipes and other strategies that rely on a lot of small hits.  But it turns out that when you attack 40 times in a row, with multiple cast-on-hit attack spells, each of which gets cast 4 times, it doesn't matter so much that they can heal off any regular attacks because the flurry of spells at the end is enough to take them out from full health.  Found a new stag! This one's got its uses; you can get some extremely reliable self-healing going, effectively letting you duplicate the Patch Up synergy that that Imling party had going in a single monster. Unfortunately, the current build isn't particularly good at precision aiming so I wind up pasting it before I can get a core.  Ugh, this rear end in a top hat is blocking my imling abilities again. It's his native ability, so I can't even Black Hole it away.  Murder is always the answer.  This thing is basically the endgame of the bat family and it requires two other advanced breeds.  Hello! Handy little bard ability here.  This is fun! The spectre that I rolled with Dark Transformation has an ability that lowers enemy stats whenever it gains the respective stat. And it's got 3 rounds of buffs to all its stats coming from multicast Dark Transformation.  We breeze through the rest of the level pretty easily. One of the new tasks from the Fortune Sphere is to acquire and beat a level 3 Primal Sigil, so let's knock that one out. First step, acquisition.  That was quick. I kind of forgot to take any screenshots of the rest of the battle; turns out battles don't last long when the enemies don't get 200+ extra Gene Strength.  Hmmm. Randomized stats + block attacks is a bad combo. Can't really use this.  This I can use, though. Not that it's especially useful.  I blow through another sigil to get a Primal Sigil I can definitely beat.  The constant resurrections are a bit annoying, but whatever. More time for more dark transformations.  Heyyyy, actually got the legendary material from the Primal Sigil! And... it's the worst of the stat buffing priests. Oh well.  As an added bonus, those sigils finally bumped me up to the 50k power threshold.  There is one other task of note. I have a task from the Fortune Sphere telling me to "Defeat the boss at Nether Realm 23." Which is a bit odd, because normally there's no boss at Nether Realm 23.  In this case, though, the task actually forces a boss arena to appear if we go to that level.  As you may note, it's a repeat. However...  The boss fights that the fortune sphere generates for you don't really "count", so the regular boss immunities are gone.  Between that, and the fact that it's several dozen levels behind the enemies we're used to facing, it's a pretty short battle.  That rounds out a second set of tasks. The rewards aren't quite as good this time, but it's still a decent haul when you consider that I'm getting two boss chests for free too.  I also get a new set of tasks, naturally. Nothing particularly interesting this time, although amusingly enough I get the same boss task a second time.  None of the chests have anything good, but the vendors back at home have some nice finds. This is the last Familiar ability and it's a doozy; with a full Familiar party you're adding an extra cast to 90% of your spells, which makes for a hell of a lot of spam.  There's also this. It's not nearly as useful as the corresponding trait for Silence, but if you've got an anti-magic setup it's still pretty potent.  Speaking of bosses, we're up to the next real boss.  The Deathwalker refight doesn't actually change things up much. Last time, we got around her immunities by obliterating her with ability damage, but I didn't actually bother bringing any damaging abilities to the table.  The good news is, splash damage is not considered damage from an attack.  I take my time buffing Heinrich up as much as I can. I only really get one shot at this; once the flanking enemies are dead, there's not much I can do to Deathwalker.  So just picture this happening 40 or so times.  In the end, it's just enough.  The Fire Salamander has the cast-on-death trait I've abused before, so a couple of the enemies manage to resurrect themselves. Deathwalker's down for good, though, which is all that really matters.  Deathwalker's unique material is another pseudo-tribal trait, and it suffers from the same problem that Shackler's did, which is that a lot of the best Lepers don't stack. There are still a couple good ones, though.  Not a bad spell to have if you're loading up on easy on-hit triggers.  Creature roundup is pretty scant this time. This guy's middle of the road as far as the carvers go; it's nice that all of his possible outcomes are beneficial to you, but you're not going to get any healing unless you've got an attack big enough to break through enemy defense, at which point you might as well just murder them. the holy poopacy fucked around with this message at 22:27 on Nov 23, 2017 |
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Nov 23, 2017 19:27
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Straight White Shark posted:
I believe you've got these images backwards. 
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Nov 23, 2017 22:06
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Doh. This is why I shouldn't try to rearrange things at the last minute.
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Nov 23, 2017 22:29
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How much breeding of mediocre or bad or entirely synergy driven creatures do you do to pollute the spawn tables? Are there breakpoints for when to do it or not?
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Nov 24, 2017 20:08
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Tom Clancy is Dead posted:How much breeding of mediocre or bad or entirely synergy driven creatures do you do to pollute the spawn tables? Are there breakpoints for when to do it or not? As much as possible, really. One has to take care with tribals, but other than that as many abilities on the enemy side that are useless to you, the better. In general, you should look at any one breeding result and think to yourself. "How useful is this to me, and also how useful is this to the enemy?" An important part to remember is that enemies are almost always higher level than you, so even abilities that look mediocre on paper can screw you up when on the enemy side. I personally tend to "backfill" stuff when I remember it spawning randomly, but it's really up to you. But you really can't go wrong with throwing as many bad abilities out there as you can - if you can keep your power balance up, of course. The less you see stuff like Mana Vortex in the field, the better.
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Nov 24, 2017 20:14
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Honestly I've neglecting it--I don't bother breeding 99% of the stuff I show off. Breeding is pretty expensive, and by the time you get into the postgame and can afford to keep yourself in bottles fairies managing the encounter pool becomes less important because nether realms will hand out random abilities regardless. And then, yeah, there's a lot of stuff that's more dangerous for the enemy than it is for you. Things with a ton of random variance, or things that negate certain abilities (tremors, elves, harpies, wyverns) can wind up screwing you over despite being pretty weak overall. I still probably should do some more dryads and aspect monkeys and what have you the next time I have some fairies to burn.
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Nov 24, 2017 20:58
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Straight White Shark posted:Honestly I've neglecting it--I don't bother breeding 99% of the stuff I show off. Breeding is pretty expensive, and by the time you get into the postgame and can afford to keep yourself in bottles fairies managing the encounter pool becomes less important because nether realms will hand out random abilities regardless. And then, yeah, there's a lot of stuff that's more dangerous for the enemy than it is for you. Things with a ton of random variance, or things that negate certain abilities (tremors, elves, harpies, wyverns) can wind up screwing you over despite being pretty weak overall. I've been actually fairly successful by using pandemonium tokens instead of fairies. Breed down the power balance down to minimum, go into a map, spam tokens until you get the max power balance thing, repeat. The game drowns you in them anyway. Still, I'm glad power balance is going to go away in 3. Yami Fenrir fucked around with this message at 21:27 on Nov 24, 2017 |
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Nov 24, 2017 21:19
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Yeah breeding is a huge pain in the rear end. You are talking about entire map basically gets you one breed and you can totally make a monster you have made before but in a different combination. I wish bottled faries were more common, you could reduce the cost, and there was a food for finding more faries.
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Nov 24, 2017 22:43
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Update 55: Unbreakable I burn a few shards to finish off our new artifact enchantment. Damage Control reduces all damage to the party by a whopping 65%, but only while the user is near max health. So capitalizing on it takes 2 things: 1) Additional layers of damage reduction to whittle down damage to manageable amounts 2) A way of redirecting damage away from the Damage Control user  The Apis Protector is a must-have for direction, obviously. The Infernal Guard helps provide additional damage reduction coverage to adjacent creatures. And then there's this, which gives out stacking damage reduction vs. spell damage based on the number of enemies afflicted with Curse. We've still got a mass curse spell in our pockets.  So here's the new lineup. The Chaos James Workshop has nothing to fear from physical attacks thanks to the Apis Protector. To help keep him safe, the new Infernal Guard (the orange one) reduces damage on himself and adjacent monsters by 50%. So all physical attacks go to Apis Christ at about a quarter normal damage. Also, the Infernal Guard is holding the crazy shield of Bulwark, so he's boosting the HP and Defense of the creatures next to him too.  And Apis Christ is holding our gem of Lifeline. So every time he gets hit there's a decent chance he heals himself to full.  Face the Phase Knight is providing his usual damage reduction for passive damage, which stacks on top of all the other damage reduction. So the left half of the party is taking... about 1.25% normal damage from abilities and debuffs, compared to ~2.5% for everyone else. Mockery cuts incoming spell damage by 15% for every enemy with the Curse debuff. With 5 enemies cursed, that means spell damage for the left side of the party is just over 6%; if I got all 6 enemies, it would be under 2.5%. At this point, the party is practically immune to damage from spells, abilities, and debuffs. As long as Apis Christ can handle incoming attacks, we're golden.  The Brownie Captain is our win condition. As usual for attack spammers, he's holding the Double Take spear and is basically set to doublecast Fury Swipes on himself every turn. Amusingly, one of the enemies rolled the Apis Protector's redirect ability. So all 20 attacks go straight to him... which kills him from the HP penalty on the redirect triggering a billion times. Thankfully Apis Christ doesn't really have to worry about the HP cost on Vigilance, since it gets passed through the Phase Knight and all the other layers of damage reduction. Instead of taking 200+ damage every time he absorbs an attack he takes about 3 or 4 damage. Even with misses, suffice to say that enough of these land to wipe out the defense on those two.  Of course, this means the dragon scout is wiping out the brownie's attack in the process. But that's not what matters here.  The gem of Fury Swipes the brownie is using has a cast-on-miss trigger, which he triggers a lot since he's badly underleveled and has way less speed than these guys. That lets him get some swings in after the Siren Oracle is out of the way.  There's that spell damage reduction in action.  ugh  The sphinx is there to reduce enemy stats to more manageable levels, thanks to double sphinx power from his artifact. But he's also a serviceable caster when the enemy's defense has been reduced to nothingness.  Of course, just about anybody is a serviceable caster against defenseless enemies.  JUST DIE ALREADY. This is 10k+ damage for most of these things; something has a hell of an HP boost power. A few more casts take them out.  Apis Christ gets reaped. Now the entire enemy team redirects attacks to themselves. It would be amusing if they just kept redirecting from each other and paying the HP penalty until they died, but in practice attacks just get redirected randomly. Sooo... since all of my attacks are already randomized from Fury Swipes, all they've managed to do is to add an HP cost to every attack they defend.  They get exploded either way.  At some point I remember I've got this sitting in my inventory. The Apis is no kind of spellcaster so this is 0 damage under normal circumstances, but once I zero out everything's defense it's a few hundred free damage every time he gets hit. Which is a lot.  Next faith threshold  We're almost there, which is to say we're a little over halfway there. The last favor bucket takes obnoxiously long to fill. Devour is a pretty drat good spell. It can get pretty silly if you build around it, but even on its own it puts most single target stat changing spells to shame. Granted, there's usually not a lot of point to using single target stat spells outside of Equality or Humility, so that's not saying much.  Meh. Conceivably useful for alpha strike builds, but it's a lot easier to fire off volleys than to take stuff out with one big boom.  Has this come up yet? Regardless, it's a really drat handy attack spell. At these levels the enemy team will pretty much always outspeed you, so when your team's turns come up all the enemies are going to be in the bottom half of the queue... and the multiplier gets pretty big at that point.  Free egg? It's one we already have, but why not.  Some interesting stuff, but it will be a while before we have access.  Once again bards prove to be deceptively dangerous. I suspect either their abilities don't do what they say they do or there's a math bug in their implementation.  This doesn't look like a big deal, but knocking 10% of James Workshop's health off means three times as much damage coming at us--and we're already in trouble.  RIP.  I burn a bunch of shards to finish us off on the biggest construction yet.  The Arcane Refinery pops up even further south into the void. No quest NPCs are hiding here, thankfully.  Between Daily Realms (which I've been slacking on) and tasks from the Fortune Sphere we've got a modest but appreciable selection of options.  Gem dust is still quite rare and enchanting spell gems is really expensive, so for now I stick to bumping up Apis Christ's odds on Lifeline.  Strongholds are obnoxious, because when they're faster than you they prevent you from spreading attacks around and they won't kill themselves like Apis Protectors/Vigilance users do if you spam a million attacks.  Still, once it's down to 0 defense it's not going to live forever.  Go ahead, waste your turn. I can wait.  Nice find! This pairs nicely with Fury Swipes spam if you can build around it; the Double Take + Fury Swipes combo basically means 20 attacks from a single action, so you're dealing total damage equal to your Screeching Barrage monster's speed. At this stage that's a couple thousand easily without even trying too hard. For added fun, stack this on a pulse bat's gain-speed-on-ally-attack and you're essentially doubling your speed (and thus your damage) every with every Fury Swipes combo.  It turns out attacking 20 times in a row is maybe not the greatest idea when there's a counterattacking valkyrie on the board.  Then again, counterattacking 20 times isn't such a great idea when you're cursed, so... it kind of works out.  Due to the way the action queue works, Lifeline won't go off until the entire sequence of attacks is resolved, which is kind of useless if you're already dead. But at leastthe valkyrie took herself out.  Spotted a new salamander type. I think this is one of the less useful ones personally, since it's not as easy to reliably trigger. The good news is that most of my damage comes in pretty small increments, so I don't have much to worry about.  Oh gently caress yes. This guy's not such a big deal by himself, but I've got a hell of a breeding/swapping chain waiting on him.  Reapers are kind of a liability for this build, since the whole idea is to force the enemies to slowly whittle away the Apis and that means the reaper will connect at low HP more often than not. Still, most of the reapers aren't terribly impressive; this guy's damage gets completely shrugged off by the time it goes through the Phase Knight's ability damage filter.  More treats.  Really, who needs a good reason to carry ice cream in their pockets?  You unlocked the Cat (tan) costume in your wardrobe! Ok.  The spell vendor has an extremely interesting tidbit for us. At first glance Timewalk seems pretty useless: it doesn't grant any extra actions and it doesn't modify the turn order. It has some marginal use for speeding away buffs/debuffs. It can force burn/poison/bleed damage, but there are better ways to do that. But if you've got any abilities that trigger automatically each turn... well, now you've got a way to trigger them on demand. And remember that the entire basilisk family is built around having outrageously powerful abilities that only trigger if they get two consecutive turns without being hit with attacks/spells. Now guess what happens when you multicast Timewalk on a basilisk. The only wrinkle is that Timewalk defaults to targeting enemies, so you can't have a basilisk trigger Timewalks on itself. Otherwise it would be trivially easy to set up infinite loop kills.  So. Let's get breeding. Most of the Imling/Imlers are loosely paired off, and the pair this guy is part of is themed around having a 2-man teamup. It's... not great, but as we've seen, if you get enough damage reduction you can work with it pretty well.  More importantly, that guy lets us breed this guy, who is... still not great. You can use him as a safety net against lethal damage, but there are a lot of failure cases where spreading the damage around will just get everybody killed. Especially since imlings are extremely fragile by nature and will take massive damage and pile it onto everyone else. You need to build in some serious healing sources to keep their team alive. That's not why I care about him, though.  I present to you: the ultimate paradigm of kindness, the Humanitas Sanctus! This is why. I'm not sure why a creature built to spread damage around is suitable as an avatar of Kindness, but oh well.  Kindness is pretty awesome. At its base, that's a pretty decent boost to most stats (not so much speed), more if you're using a stat-heavy artifact. It gets even better, because you can use it to compound stat bonuses from other creatures--in particular, things like Rampart that only affect adjacent creatures can be spread around more. And if that wasn't enough, you can keep pumping their stats higher and higher and reap the benefits.  But we're not done yet! The Humanitas Sanctus lets us breed into another sin and it's another doozy. If you're looking to build an unstoppable super-monster to bulldoze everything, this is an interesting chassis. You can stack your team with creatures like the Forsaken that have huge stats with drawbacks and absorb their boosted stats. Instead of having a triple health monster and a double defense monster that decay, you get something with triple health and double defense and no drawbacks. Granted, the rest of your team is going to be decidedly suboptimal--but what do you care? You're rolling around with way higher stats than you're reasonably supposed to have.  As an aside, the Silver Imler also works for the breeding formula for this guy. Like all cerberuses (cerberi?), the penalty of locking your own spells sucks. Obviously, it's a great way to expand your team's spell access--and crucially, it does not randomize the properties of the spells that get shared, so if you've got a gem loaded with ridiculous multipliers and triggers you can easily spread it across the entire team. This can sometimes turn into a double edged sword, but suffice to say it's fun as hell. If you're not playing a Sorcery mage, the estimates of its usefulness vary a bit. On the one hand, this lets you get Chaos spells on non-Chaos monsters even when you don't have Spell Mastery; on the other hand, Chaos generally isn't the most useful school of magic, so the usefulness of the spells you can share is limited. But if you just want to set up ridiculous volleys of cast-on-start nukes that your whole team can roll with, it's adequate enough. So... that's a lot of new toys. I've already played through to the next bosses, but there's going to be some teambuilding to do for the leg afterwards. Which means it's time for a vote! What's the next team build going to be? Team Bernie promises to spread the wealth and generate prosperity for all. Team Trump promises to MAKE SIRALIM GREAT AGAIN--by ruthlessly exploiting his fellow teammates! Team Hillary promises a return to machine politics by packing the team with her
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Dec 1, 2017 06:12
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I gotta go with Bernie because if it's what I think it is, that team will be hilarious.
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Dec 1, 2017 06:35
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 Let's do it.
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Dec 1, 2017 07:36
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Update 56: Krampus The presence of a Bastion slows me down a bit due to its tendency to provoke attacks away from its teammates. This is a bit of a problem since it gives time for the enemy to whittle down the Apis Protector, which lets them start knocking off James Workshop's HP...  ...which cancels out most of my damage resistance. We just barely pull through.  Screeching Barrage is the ability we just found a legendary material for. I love being able to completely no-sell poo poo like this.  These guys could be pretty annoying if they actually had some variety. As it is, they're pushovers.  More doggies!  Uh... oh. Krampus is a bit of a problem; with the sphinx turning the party into a mono-type team, Krampus effectively multiples all damage by 3.5x, basically undoing all of our hard-earned damage reduction.  Abort! Abort!  I'm pretty sure I've shown this off, I just find the juxtaposition of the spell effect with the cast-on-start trigger amusing.  A great ability for when you definitely only care about attacking as many times as possible and not at all about dealing damage. I could give this to the brownie for maximum smash, but 1) Double Take means that double-casting Fury Swipes for double attacks already effectively gives him 4x attacks on his own action, and 2) he's leveled up enough that he's actually doing some damage once everything's defense is gone and the penalty would slow down fights quite a bit.  We wound up with another nether boss task from the Fortune Sphere. As you can see, quest-generated bosses aren't obligated to go in order.  We were foiled last time because Phobos's counterattacks don't trigger on 0 damage hits, but this time it lets us attack a million times without repercussions.  It also transpires that they don't counterattack spells that they themselves are hit by, so you can nuke them with impunity.  The final blade dancer just barely manages to get enough damage through Apis Christ between lifeline triggers to take him out, but he gets finished off in the process.  There's another warlord task as well. Now that the Fortune Sphere is finally done we've got power to spare, so why not?  In fact, I've got enough power left over to start knocking out all of the incremental upgrade rituals I've been neglecting.  There is an ability floating around out there that causes your opponents to start the battle at 80% health. This is a problem if you're relying on an ability that's only active when you're above 90% health. The damage is done, so Black Hole won't even fix the problem.  Drain Life will fix a multitude of problems, however.  The proc rate on Tremors is supposedly 30% but I swear it's closer to 90%   Found a new Vulpes, but it killed itself while I was trying to extract from it. It'll turn up again eventually.  New Nix, as well.  This time I manage to snag it before it dies.  Interesting, but not super useful. This is from one of the golem variants we haven't seen yet, and basically gives them a second life as a random creature.  One of the worse spirits.  The main problem about hoovering up enemy traits with Black Hole is that occasionally you absorb a cerberus or forsaken or other trait with major downsides. Oh well.  Not super useful, but you could make it work in a build where one creature relies on teammates dying. Like a full Iron Imler/Tainted Imling party.  GAME OVER RETURN OF KRAMPUS  Another loss, but in return I find a pretty huge upgrade for Apis Christ. This comes from a different member of the Apis family and it's an absolutely huge defensive boost for anything that doesn't rely on attack damage. Which, at this point in the game, is most things. It helps that Apises have halfway decent base attack.  The later levels of Improved Forging just unlock the school-based Lance and Shield artifacts. Other than Black Crystal Smith abuse, there's not a lot of use for them.  Still, might as well clean up the upgrade list.  Here's something new.  Conveniently, we immediately run into a miniboss encounter with the new guy. He's got some potential, but at this stage it takes a whoooole lot of optimization to make him work. Incidentally, check out that HP total on Apis Christ  Unfortunately, Grit is probably counterproductive for Wall Giant builds since they rely on both Attack and HP for damage. Found a shield with a wolpertinger trait. Chaos does include some really fatal spells, so while firing off a million spells is always fun you're going to kill yourself with this sooner or later.  I really like getting materials with tribal traits but this is one of the worst griffon traits.  Yet another smith. There are enough of these to fill out two of most families.  So many legendary materials, so little use for them.  Welp. Back to the drawing board. I think it's safe to say that the sphinx is off limits until I can find a way to deal with Krampus.  The Delusion Occultist is always a welcome addition, though. I've also been neglecting Cloud of Embers for too long. It really is an amazingly efficient nuke, which is important when you're dealing with the MP penalty from Spell Mastery.  The AI is mostly random, so it's easy to forget that yes, it's smart enough to be able to activate all of its traits. One reason it's important to prioritize enemies with resurrection abilities.  You unlocked the Enchanter costume in your wardrobe! Finally we manage to get through a level without wiping out on Krampus, and randomly get rewarded with a new costume. I think this might be a reward for one of the Improved Transmuting rituals.  That's not what I'm here for, though. I figure as long as I'm attacking 40 times a turn, I might as well stack some more on hit effects.  One of the gems of Aftermath we got from Tartarith has cast-on-start. The brownie captain's Fury Swipes gem has cast-on-miss. His speed is pretty bad, so there's a decent chance that he will miss at least one of the attacks he gets from Aftermath. So now he has a chance to start the battle with a bunch of attacks from Aftermath, that have a chance to turn into even more attacks from Fury Swipes, every single one of which has a chance to freeze the enemy. So most of the enemy party's turn is skipped outright before they have a chance to move.  They try to return the favor, but only land one freeze.  Wrong wolpertinger. It'll turn up eventually.  There are way more than 6 members of the Diabolic Horde and they're mostly good, so even thouh they don't stack it's still useful to be able to pack in some extra traits.  Oh shiiiit. Valkyries are a big enough problem for massive attack spam strategies, and this one is packing a random stun on every attack.  Fortunately we can stall out the stuns long enough to claim victory.  Oh gently caress yes. Not only is this little fella completely badass, we've got a hell of a breeding chain depending on them. We don't have any Magma Golems, but that's actually an easy problem to fix.  This is pretty handy for turning huge defensive buffs into massive damage. Just have to make sure you don't get nailed with Warp Reality before you have a chance to nuke everything.  Things are generally going a lot more smoothly now that everyone's caught up on the level curve and I'm not randomly wiping against Krampus.  Hello there. Haven't seen one of these in a while since I've been ducking Daily Realms.  We've already seen the relevant revenant for this trait. Being able to stick it on a better casting chassis is a huge upgrade to an already good ability.  Back at home, we start cashing in our completed rituals.  Well, it's a trait at least.  As always, the best part of the harpies' abilities are the names. The effects... not so much.  We're almost maxed out on salvaging, and we've got a sigil task to complete from the fortune sphere, so let's kill 2 birds with 1 stone. A couple sigil fights will give us the power we need to wrap up the salvage upgrades.  Easy enough.  And after that, the only remaining task is to complete a realm quest at depth 23. That's a cakewalk at our current level.  The Doomguards' offense isn't that great, so they're leaning on Mind Control/Mind Tricks to make enemies kill themselves off. It's pretty glorious when their defense is flattened. That thing has Splash, too, so it's about to take half that damage in its own face(s).  The rewards are pretty uninspiring this time, but it's not like it took a lot of work.  That gets us just enough power, which means...  That takes care of that.  Finishing all of the blacksmith and salvage upgrades gets us a special gift, and it's not just a goddamn costume this time. Pssst... King Mysterio... I have a present for you. Say nothing. Just take it. (Ianne winks again.) You received a Hammer Lord creature! It has been sent to your stable. This is a pretty goddamn nice bonus.  But first, we might as well actually make use of all those salvage upgrades. We have waaaay too much goddamn garbage in our inventory, and now we can finally get some good from it.  Salvaging lets you break down artifacts you don't want into random materials. Early on the rate of return is pretty lovely, but with all the salvage upgrades you can get a pretty decent haul. Of course, the flip side is that by the time you finish all the upgrade rituals you're going to be swimming in basic materials anyhow...  You can get rare materials too, but you're going to have a hard time scraping together enough to be useful. There's some vague bias towards getting materials that the artifact actually has slotted, but it's nowhere near reliable. (Also, I think there's a bug where buff/debuff slots wind up giving materials for certain default statuses regardless of what the original status was.) And you pretty much get nothing extra back from smashing trait artifacts.  On the plus side, you can rarely wind up getting a legendary material from whatever random garbage you feed in. And I have a lot of random garbage. Breaking all of our non-traited artifacts (minus a few high level pure stat artifacts) yields the following: Stripped Pincer (Whetted Bones): This creature starts battles with 75% more Attack and Defense, but loses 25% Attack and Defense at the end of its turn. Like most of the Forsaken traits this is mostly just useful for min-maxing, so portability is a nice perk. You can use this in an Envy party, for example, and Envy will pick up the boosted Attack and Defense for itself. Sturdy Tree Trunk (Defer Pain): When this creature takes damage, 50% of the damage is delayed until the start of its next turn. This isn't terribly useful on its own, but the deferred damage counts as an ability damage proc so you can pair it up with a Phase Knight to reduce the deferred half to almost nothing. Still, 50% damage reduction for a single creature is not an amazing ability. Velox Ear (Velox): This creature's non-temporary, stat-manipulating Spell Gems each have a 40% chance to be cast automatically at the start of battle. I've already got a glove of this, but I guess another doesn't hurt. Volcanic Ashes (Smolder): After this creature attacks a creature with Burn, the target takes damage equal to 4 turns of this debuff. Only really useful in full burn parties, which at this point are probably going to have a Pyro Grimoire and can just Raze away. Granted, dropping 40 or so Fury Swipe hits at 4x burn damage a hit is probably going to put Raze to shame. Discolored Brick (Necrotic Protection): Your creatures take 50% less damage while provoking. This trait does not stack. This could be useful in a Stronghold-based version of the damage reduction build I have going, but you'd have to figure out a way to get the Stronghold to be provoking from the start. White Ooze (Concoction): When this creature is attacked, it has a 50% chance to resurrect a random ally with 50% Health. This definitely has some potential... although it suffers from a structural issue in that, if you stick it on a tank, it's probably going to die before any allies, and if you stick it on a squishy, it's not going to survive enough hits to be useful. You could make some interesting setups with this, though, and if nothing else it could help improve auto-resurrect setups. Hard Marble (Shield Aura): After your creatures are attacked, they have a 50% chance to gain Shell. Nice. Grassy Fluff (Everglow): Your creatures recover 100% more Health when healed. You can get this early on from the Willow Spirit, but this is handy if you can't fit one into your party. Works way better when paired with auto-heal traits. Black Claymore Blade (Black Hole Halo): This creature's attacks have a 30% chance to afflict the target and adjacent enemies with Stun for 1 turn. Man, this would be crazy on the Brownie Captain's attack spam build. Or really any attack spam build. Like I said, I had a lot of garbage to salvage. I'm not even done with bookkeeping stuff yet, but this update's running long, so I'll cover the rest next time. But first...  Creature roundup! This guy is pretty great. Obviously, he saves a lot of valuable artifact slots. But even more importantly, you can't put more than one auto-buff on an artifact at all, so the Hammer Lord lets you layer multiple buffs across your whole party. This is handy because it lets you, for example, build a semi-functional dryad party. Even beyond enabling weird gimmicks, though, it's just a nice bonus in general.  Not super impressive. You can stack a lot of uncastable spells (Lifeline, Rend, Steel Storm, etc.) and enjoy a big damage multiplier for free, but you're still left having to find a way to pump their spellcasting up enough to be useful in the first place. And you have to give up all utility spells for it.  The big problem with heal triggers is that, barring certain Life Mage abilities, you have to actually take damage in order to be healed. And you have to take damage without dying, so at these levels you can't just rely on the enemies doing damage. If you're going to go to the trouble of engineering lots of healing opportunities, there are better triggers than this.  There are a lot of smiths and this is the worst one, straight up. +75% damage and a decent debuff is a pretty standard, fairly mediocre ability. A slightly higher damage bonus that only works on 1/5 of enemies and requires a bad artifact type with no additional effects is really bad by comparison. On another note, I'm quite sorry that I've gotten so behind on the LP. About a week ago I lost the thumb drive that I had most of my working files on; nothing truly irreplaceable, but still a pretty significant setback (and a big bummer as well, there was a lot of work on it.) Happily I found it in the laundry Friday, so now things should be getting back on track. the holy poopacy fucked around with this message at 05:38 on Dec 11, 2017 |
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Dec 11, 2017 05:36
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Straight White Shark posted:Hello there. Haven't seen one of these in a while since I've been ducking Daily Realms. You've got the same image posted twice, here, I think. Aside from that, it's good to see this still going!
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Dec 11, 2017 12:15
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Great thread that got me playing this again, although now I am stopping after reading some of the improvements in 3, especially the breeding changes. gently caress you gene strength.
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Dec 30, 2017 16:57
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Hand Row posted:Great thread that got me playing this again, although now I am stopping after reading some of the improvements in 3, especially the breeding changes. gently caress you gene strength.
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Dec 30, 2017 17:46
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I just wanna say that this is a hidden gem of a game. It's somehow a LOT better than siralim1 despite basically being the same game. I almost slept on siralim2 after finding siralim1 a bit boring. This thread, and the quality of siralim2 after I picked it up have been a blessing. I hope to see a similar let's play if/when siralim3 comes out later this year, for sure.
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Feb 15, 2018 23:49
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Straight White Shark posted:...now things should be getting back on track. *cough*
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May 16, 2018 05:43
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Siralim 3 just released in early access on steam. I feel like this is an appropriate place to plug it. If you're a fan of this thread, and want to support the developer, buying in early would probably help him out. https://store.steampowered.com/app/841770/Siralim_3/ Personally I think I want to wait for it to come out of early access so I don't burn out before it's "finished".
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May 27, 2018 18:26
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Holy poo poo they added shinies. They do know how to suck you in.
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May 28, 2018 02:12
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Well, Siralim 3 has gone EA... but I promised I would slay some gods, so let's get cracking. Update 57: Look Who's Back  Your power balance is now 20%. Ever have one of those crazy benders where you just black out and wake up six month laters in an extradimensional void with no idea what you were doing or how you got there? Me neither. Let us never speak of this again. .jpg) I blow through a couple dozen pandemonium tokens trying to get my power balance back and manage to wind up leveling up Torun and Vulcanar's favor without even trying. Not my top priority, but considering how grindy favor is I'll take whatever I can get. .jpg) Our archnemesis is back, but outside of our underleveled recruit he's not much threat when you're not running a monotype team. Speaking of which, check out all those buffs from the Hammer Lord! Partywide protect and mend come courtesy of the new Hammer Lord's buff-sharing powers. Partywide mend is one of the better Ent traits by itself, and partywide protect is something so good that no traits come even close, so getting both from a single trait is a fuckin steal even if you have to spend a couple artifact slots on the buffs. .jpg) We've got a breeding formula asking for one of these, so this will be super handy. .jpg) Not super reliable, but being able to damage + (potentially) disable is awesome. Especially since some traits proc damage spells specifically. .jpg) Another great find. .jpg) Mass Curse + Mind Control is a nasty trick on a Centaur Chaser--its trait turns its attacks into AoE weapons on all targets with the same affliction, so he winds up smacking his whole team and then getting annihilated with curse damage. (Adding insult to injury, he also procs the enemy spellblade's aura damage 5x too.) .jpg) This is the Abyss Banshee's ability, which keeps enemies at exactly 50% MP. Coupled with other mana denial abilities you can really shut down enemy spellcasting, although that's a lot of investment that won't even stop them from triggering autocasts. .jpg) All in all things are going pretty smoothly now that our little Krampus problem is taken care of. The extra 50% damage reduction layer from the Hammer Lord's protect buff doesn't hurt either. So, time for some housekeeping. First, let's go visit Torun. .jpg) (You glance toward the base of Torun's altar and notice a decapitated imp's body laying motionless. Clutched in the imp's left hand is a small chunk of pineapple.) This is what Torun considers "being friendly." .jpg) An extremely niche spell, but it's a good way to mess up enemy traits that depend on being at very high or very low HP, if they're powerful enough to prevent you from knocking their HP down the old fashioned way. .jpg) While we're here, I've conjured up a couple generic golems to unlock some of their transformations. .jpg) Successfully extracting a core from a Nature creature gets us a Moss Golem, which we've been seeing for a while. I don't like to unlock these guys early on because their hit-all Snare attack is obnoxious to deal with, but they randomly popped up on their own anyhow so we might as well. .jpg) Picked up a lance with a harpy ability. This one passively spreads confusion around the enemy team. The proc rate is pretty low and confusion is unreliable in general, but purely passive debuff abilities are nice. .jpg) A few fights later we manage to get a core from a Chaos creature, giving us a Magma Golem. We've also seen these guys, so we're not unlocking any new enemies here, and they're not that much trouble anyhow... but we've got a hell of a breeding chain that relies on this guy. .jpg) The fruit vomiting "puzzle" in Torun's realm has a few other effects that I haven't shown off yet, like this. .jpg) Waspids are a fairly one-note tribal family type. A few waspids just provide general perks to other waspids, but their real raison d'etre is this: .jpg) The soldiers have a massive quad damage kamikaze attack. That sounds fairly pointless... except the yellow waspid's ability has a 50% chance to resurrect each dead waspid every time it attacks. Aaaand there's also a waspid hiveleader that triggers a weak attack from every other waspid on the team every time it attacks. Put it altogether and your hiveleader can launch massive wave attacks that cause half the team to rip themselves apart and then the other half to put them together again, over and over and over. By itself, it's still not tremendously effective--at this stage of the game, plain attacks just don't cut it even with multipliers, and the whole-team swarm attack is weak enough that the soldiers are left with a net multiplier of less than 1--but it's a great way to trigger death and resurrection effects. Get some phoenix traits on a waspid team and watch enemies evaporate. Irritatingly, though, you can't actually extract from any wild waspids--and there are only a handful of breeding combinations that you can use without having a waspid already. .jpg) After we're done with Torun we pop over to Vulcanar's to say hi. .jpg) Anyway, I think I can trust you with a few new items to help you on your journey! They're vital to your adventures, and without them, you'll surely perish. No, of course they're not free. This isn't a soup kitchen. Vulcanar's pretty full of himself, his stuff is good but not vital by any means. It's an amusing little commentary on the tendency of RPGs to have NPCs "help" you by allowing you to spend money on their stuff. .jpg) Anything that lets you trigger attacks with spells is great, so this isn't bad, per se. But you can easily get spells that let you trigger multiple attacks, which is usually going to be way more effective. .jpg) You unlocked the Breeding Master (green) costume in your wardrobe! Back at the castle, all of the new breeding chains we've unlocked are enough to earn a new character icon. .jpg) We're a little short on power for the next upgrade, so I run a few sigils to drum up extra resources. .jpg) There we go. .jpg) Boss time! Not before I pocket a few extra resources, of course. .jpg) (Scylla, in particular, seems to remember you with unrivaled disdain. Though it is at first taken aback by your arrival, Scylla regains its focus and summons its old partner from the depths of the molten underworld once again.) So... is Charybdis yet standing here, or is it being summoned from the depths of the molten underworld? Be consistent, Siralim narrator! .jpg) Scylla & Charybdis are still pretty straightforward. Their new thing is that they power up the whole enemy team on death instead of just their partner. .jpg) Under normal circumstances a +100% defense bonus could be tricky to deal with, but 200% of zero is still zero. .jpg) Even at 0 defense boss creatures can be pretty beefy. As always, a quick multi-Dark Transformation is a good way to ramp up in a hurry. .jpg) They're beefy enough that even this isn't quite enough to take out .jpg) The legendary material for Scylla is a bit niche, but if you've got a death/resurrection party going you can ramp things up pretty quickly. Particularly since the volatile phoenix's damage is based on Speed. .jpg) Now for a breeding bonanza! Most sources of Burn last way too long for this to be of any use, and the best way to ramp up burn damage (Inferno) also extends duration. But there is at least one combo that can turn this into a serious offense. .jpg) The obsidian efreet lets us breed to this guy. As with all the Paragons, this guy's ability applies to both teams equally, but this one in particular generally works to your advantage: at this stage in the game your team combo is generally going to give you the edge in a long fight, your main concern is a key piece getting ganked before you can get set up. (Note here that the Hammer Lord's ability to turn an artifact with Protect into party-wide Protect means he's giving your team 50% damage reduction, without the drawback of also giving it to the enemies. Again, Hammer Lords are really good!) .jpg) The Frost Phoenix already sort of does this, but just in case you really want to make sure the enemies never get a turn again you can combine them. .jpg)  I mean, there are more broken things you can do than a bunch of big meaty stat boosts, but they're so darn fun. .jpg) Naturally, there is an Imler equivalent. .jpg) Unlocking the red Imling/Imler pair lets me breed other red themed creatures. These guys are pretty cool; their ability is much weaker than Sloth (which does the same thing, but also 30% less Intelligence and 50% less MP), but it's another layer and also stacks with itself. .jpg) And we're not done yet! We've been waiting on the crimson manticore for this guy. This is... really, really good, spreading damage around in a way that goes through defense and ignores the damage penalty on multiattack spells like Fury Swipes. The key drawback is the "other enemies" part; you can spam Fury Swipes on this guy and shred the enemy team with fixed damage, but once you get down to the last enemy you'd better have some other way of dealing with it. .jpg) Like a lot of the Apocalypse traits, this one is a decent emergency option for dealing with stalemates. There are better and easier ways of getting around MP limits (such as the Meditate command that every sorceror has access to), but this one has the critical advantage of being able to completely work around MP denial abilities. .jpg) Nature spells have a lot of great nukes, so this is a pretty good support for spellcaster teams.
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May 30, 2018 18:45
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Great to see you back in action again! Now to try and remember what's happening.
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May 31, 2018 22:14
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NAME REDACTED posted:Great to see you back in action again! Now to try and remember what's happening. I seem to recall this section is basically "grind to unlock all the monsters and push your numbers higher"? But yeah, glad to see you back!
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May 31, 2018 22:23
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At this stage of the game, virtually all of the remaining content is gated behind deity favor. So... grinding deity rep is going to be the main focus for the foreseeable future. I'm working my way through Nether Realms for boss refights along the way, but all the big stuff is behind hours and hours of deity grind. Vertraag and Yseros are our top two priorities, since they unlock one of the most important upgrades in the game (and many of the other gods' favor items won't be relevant without it anyhow.) Aside from the digression in the last update, I've been spending all my time in Vertraag's realm trying to max him out so I can move on to Yseros.
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May 31, 2018 22:52
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Update 58: Bern.jpg) It's just as well that I keep forgetting to spend the deity points I'm racking up, since our next breeding project demands a few upgrades. Repeatedly breeding experienced monsters lets you punch above your weight because of higher Gene Strength, but if you try to get above +20 GS, you have to wait and do a ritual to hatch your egg. Which sucks, so it's worth investing in the breeding perks to get around the limit. I'm not going to go much above 20, but I go ahead and pump it up a few levels. (The description of the perk is inaccurate, too--each level doubles the limit, so instead of getting +20x3 I'm getting x2^3. I can breed up to GS +160 now if I really wanted to.) .jpg) I've already got a Humanitas Sanctus from the quest, but I want to pump it up a bit. Manually breeding a creature with something that it doesn't have a recipe with just produces another copy of the original creature, with the normal breeding boosts. Throughout the game I've been summoning random bullshit for breeding purposes and leaving it to passively level in the stable. Some of them are mostly redundant, so I burn through a bunch of them to breed a better sanctus. The better its stats get, the better the whole party's stats get. .jpg) A few generations later I wind up with this. I guess that's probably good enough for now, mainly because I'm running out of power balance to spend. .jpg) We're not done breeding yet, though. Time to pop some more fairies. .jpg) Gonna need some of these. .jpg) And one of these. Velox is the Vulpes ability that gives all attribute-boosting spells a chance to autocast at the start of battle. .jpg) We're not ready to throw a bunch of newborn monsters into the dungeon just yet, though, so it's time to tackle a Daily Realm to get them some XP. .jpg) I forget what my Daily Realm streak is at, but evidently it's high enough to actually punch through my defenses. .jpg) Yeah, I guess that'll do it. This guy is a problem, since the Bastion's retribution damage is my main damage source and Phase Knights block 95% of it. .jpg) A few rounds of compounding defense boosts are enough to take care of that problem, though. .jpg) The next few fights go pretty smoothly. .jpg) That is... a very big number. I probably shouldn't have bred these guys into the random encounter pool; at these levels the extra damage from their ability gives them an almost unblockable instakill. .jpg) Nonetheless, we pull through and finish out the Daily Realm. .jpg) There's a treasure map on the level too, with what turns out to be a very lucrative chest. We already have a copy of True Light, but a second one should be really drat handy. .jpg) This is kind of garbage. Dumb carvers. .jpg) The chest also coughs up a trait artifact. It's not very good either. .jpg) Racking up kills also levels up some of the new artifacts to open up another enchantment slot. .jpg) All of these Daily Realms give us plenty of fodder for spell gem mods, so I splurge a bit to pump this one up. .jpg) Even after all this prep the new team still isn't really ready for primetime, but our current slate of tasks has a level 29 boss to fight that should be good for some easy experience. .jpg) So here's our new gimmick: Bernie's gloves give all his stat-modifying spells a 40% chance to fire at the start of battle (and the most powerful one, Devour, has an independent 60% chance to fire on top of that.) Our three Palace Familiars cumulatively boost the effectiveness of all our stat-modifying spells by 2.25x, and Bernie shares 15% of whatever stats he gains with the rest of the party. His spell loadout includes no less than 4 party-wide Defense boosts with various secondary effects; Soul Harvest decreases all enemies' Intelligence and gives it to Bernie, Righteous Storm damages and decreases enemies' Attack, and Cloud of Embers is his only pure damage spell to deliver the deathblow. .jpg) Other than Devour, True Light is the real gem here: it strips away a ton of defense from the enemies and simultaneously boosts the party's own defense. And, again, 15% of what Bernie gains is also added to everyone else's defense, creating a force multiplier effect on these party-wide boosts. Also note that most of the enemies are defending for lack of anything better to do. The familiars have an almost purely passive role on the party, so they're carrying purely passive artifacts. In recent levels (for a certain value of "recent") we've picked up artifacts with the abilities Reroute to Remain and Unknown Entity; the former starts all enemies out with Scorn, preventing them from attacking, while the latter increases the cost of all enemy spells by 10 MP. So they can't attack, they can only cast cheap spells, and judicious use of Mana Leak will stop them from casting anything on their turn short of rolling a spell that casts from HP. .jpg) It doesn't take long before we can move on to damage spells. .jpg) That takes care of that. I still want to take it a bit easy until I get some more levels on the newbies, so we're starting a few levels behind. .jpg) I try to burn through some Pandemonium Tokens to recharge my power balance and wind up hitting the Pandemonium King again, and this time he brought an extra Mouth of Hell. Still not terribly difficult. .jpg) This is a recipe for a new creature... but we still don't know how to get a Gargantuan in the first place. .jpg) This one we can use, though. .jpg) Multicasting Devour isn't quite as good as Dark Transformation... but if I transform Bernie, he can't share his stats anymore. Still, this is plenty good enough. .jpg) For all Bernie's defenses there's not much I can do about "set HP to 1" effects. .jpg) Things get a bit sloppy, but Drain Life bails me out once again. .jpg) Free Imlings! .jpg) Interesting... but again, I don't have any recipes to break into Waspids. .jpg) But you've grown so much since then. Mysterio, you are a worthy, noble, and just king. Your people are lucky to have you. Vertraag is kind of a suck-up. Also, apparently, a liar. I've mentioned a couple of times that your role looks a little bit more like the traditional RPG antagonist role than the protagonist one, and there are some hints throughout the game's story narration that maybe you're not such a good guy. Admittedly, these hints mostly come from your enemies, who are probably a bit biased... ...but canonically, they are 100% correct. The storyline in Siralim 3 (which has now released in Early Access due to the delay in the LP) is all about the leader of a different kingdom standing up to the evil main character from Siralim 2. I have not had a chance to sit down and play it (probably for the best, I still have a long way to go in this run!), but I wonder if Vertraag has the decency to be ashamed in the sequel about his role in this one--as I recall he kind of took point on this whole "empower the King of Siralim to acquire godlike power" project. .jpg) At any rate, we've now hit max rank with Vertraag, which puts us halfway to our next major goal. This combines with a special item from Yseros to unlock one of the most important upgrades in the game. .jpg) His spell isn't super impressive. There are easier and better ways of getting Multicast. The party-wide part is extremely nice, of course, but the penalty is kind of a non-starter unless you've got a specific build that needs to spam spells but doesn't care about intelligence. .jpg) An ability staff!... that inflicts Blight and does nothing else. Yawn. .jpg) Creature roundup. Vertraag's last creature is pretty useless--for us, anyhow. It could be really annoying in the hands of enemies. .jpg) We picked up another Griffon, who's pretty fun--who doesn't love more turns? Believe it or not, though, this guy is still just scratching the surface of what griffon squads are equipped to do. .jpg) The Tortured Leper is a great way to power up abilities that care about having lots of debuffs. As an added bonus, the "fake" debuffs take priority over any real debuffs that try to get inflicted, so you're effectively giving your team a few random immunities. .jpg) An extremely weak pseudo-Bleed effect. I guess it helps you get around abilities that only function near maximum health (a la the Storm monster family), but there are better ways to do that. .jpg) Lastly, the Troll King also breeds into this guy. That's up to 50% extra damage against full health enemies, not a terrible bonus for your alpha strike. You can even chip away at enemy health and continue to enjoy most of the benefit for a while. Overall, still not really awesome, but probably better than most of the ones Vertraag sells you. I guess maybe he can use the incompetence defense re: deliberately enabling a genocidal maniac.
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Jun 1, 2018 21:23
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... Pit wraith obliterator + overmind sounds like a pretty good combo, although probably outclassed by a lot of things. +50% damage every time the overmind attacks? Not bad. Please tell me the max HP reductions are temporary.
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Jun 2, 2018 11:37
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Update 59: Enchanted.jpg) With Vertraag's favor at max tier, it's time to start working on the second half of our favor-boosting project. Luckily Yseros has a fairly lucrative realm, both in terms of treasure and favor generation, so this shouldn't be too painful. .jpg) Freebies are always welcome. .jpg) Got another Pandemonium King while trying to recharge my power off a stack of tokens. His random spell spam can be pretty dangerous even with all the buffing we've got going on. .jpg) I've loaded the familiars up with utility spells, so despite their general weakness they have a variety of ways to help deal with dangerous enemies. The Pandemonium King doesn't get any free spells if it doesn't get any turns. .jpg) I burn through my remaining pandemonium tokens without a power boost, so I have to take the dregs of my fairy stockpile. .jpg) Now that we're making progress through the Nether Realm again, relying on random spell spam just isn't cutting it. Turn 1 multicast on Bernie becomes my go-to strategy so that he can ramp up with big buffs ASAP. .jpg) Even with 1300 or so favor per floor it's going to be a while to max Yseros. I need to hit 1500, then another 3000, then 5000, then finally 7500. .jpg) Krampus rears his ugly head. This could be a problem since 5/6 of my team is Sorcery. .jpg) This is really a particularly nasty enemy team. The lich is giving the enemies enough of a defense boost that I can't just plow through everything with Cloud of Embers. I've hit Krampus with enough debuffs that Bernie could kill him, but he probably can't kill Krampus and ding the basilisk at the same time. If Bernie focuses on Krampus to save Ken Ham, the basilisk's ability will trigger and stunlock the party indefinitely. If he pokes the basilisk to disarm its ability, the damage multiplier from Krampus is probably going to get Ken Ham murdered, leaving Bernie without any support. And while Bernie has enough buffs on him that he might be able to take on most enemy groups himself, the brownie and medusa here are extremely dangerous--the brownie can cut down Bernie's defense in the same manner that our previous team comp relied on, and once Scorn wears off the medusa's physical has a 50% chance to proc stun. At which point Bernie has no way of dealing with the basilisk, guaranteeing that it will stunlock him until the brownie gets his defense low enough that he can be killed. .jpg) Which is all to say, it's time to bail. .jpg) We've seen formulas for this guy before, but this is waaay easier to fulfill. .jpg) I swear the proc rate on tremors is way higher than the 30% it claims. I'm lucky if I'm able to get 1 spell in 4 off. Thankfully nothing here is all that dangerous. .jpg) The Barrens don't have as many miniboss portals as Eternity's End, but there's still usually an extra one per level, which makes for decent loot. .jpg) War Golems are the source of the double-action ability we've been carrying around in artifact form for most of the game. They're pretty tricky to get, which makes some sense considering the raw power of this ability, but by the time you manage to get one legitimately it's probably slipped from "massively overpowered" to "not bad I guess." .jpg) I'm not entirely sure why these guys are hitting so hard, but this ought to take care of it. .jpg) I wasn't able to fit a Phase Knight into the current party, so I actually have to worry about indirect damage. That makes pyro grimoires actually pretty dangerous. .jpg) Luckily I'm still not to the point where burn can kill faster than 2-3 turns, which gives me plenty of time to recover. .jpg) Hit the next tier up with Yseros and got a surprisingly good spell. Defending is a huge buff (and good for all sorts of triggers) but it's a terribly inefficient use of a turn. .jpg) Most of the apises are pretty great but this is... sort of meh. It's actually not bad in some regards--debuffs are a major threat, so blanket immunity massively outweighs the damage vulnerability (damage tends to be all-or-nothing at this point, so 35% probably isn't going to make any difference), but by itself it does absolutely nothing to support the team. At least it's available fairly early, so if you get an early rank up with Yseros maybe you could use it. .jpg) That represents 30% of our defense after a round of buffs. Obviously Bernie gets the lion's share thanks to Devour, but remember that he's sharing 15% of his defense with the rest of the team. .jpg) At first glance, this kind of sucks--single target buffs are already pretty inefficient, and this one carries a penalty too. On the other hand, speed modifiers in the middle of combat have no effect at all on initiative, which is the main reason you ever care about speed, and at these levels the enemies are going to have a massive speed edge regardless. Kind of regret not taking this out for a spin now, actually. .jpg) We complete a bartering mission and get a new artifact. We've already got another artifact that does this, and we can make Redstone Imlers that have it innately, but cool I guess. .jpg) More importantly, that was the last task to cross off for the Fortune Sphere. This ability comes out of one of the elves and shuts down enemy death triggers. Extremely niche, but if there's an enemy floating around that really, really fucks with your build I guess you might want it. .jpg) I assume the gem names were assigned basically at random, or else cast-at-start probably would have been given something more valuable than moonstone. .jpg) Almost maxed out on transmuting, but juuust a little shy on power. .jpg) Low level sigils are kind of a joke at this point. Enemies in the regular dungeon are already several times stronger, so fights that are based on your level are pushovers unless they have a big multiplier. .jpg) Back to the dungeon for more grinding. After this thing facetanks several five-digit hits I begin to wonder why it's not dying. .jpg) That's... a lot of health. It's done this several times already and the total keeps climbing. .jpg) I'm not entirely sure why Boastful Protector is not acting as a zero-sum buff/debuff cycle as described. It might be interacting funny with this somehow; if nothing else, this definitely kickstarted its giant health stack in a big way. .jpg) Still, sitting there provoking doesn't provide much in the way of threat. It goes down not too much later. .jpg) I run into two Imler/Imling groups in a row. Free core buffet! .jpg) The wall giant and pyro grimoire are both serious threats, enough that I have to bail. .jpg) I spot a treasure golem, but it flees after a single Devour so I don't have a chance to murder it. .jpg) A boss fight brings a pyro grimoire AND an enemy packing Humility for another double threat. The AI seems to be smart enough to look at who would get hit the hardest and targets them with laser-like precision, which could be a problem. .jpg) This doesn't look good. .jpg) Luckily, the grimoire burns through (  ) its MP, so once I get a couple guys back up I don't have to worry about burn anymore and I'm able to squeak through..jpg) I'm not as lucky in the next fight---no grimoires, but one of the enemies randomly rolled their own mass burn spell. .jpg) Hey, nice! Been a while since we picked up a card. Attack is probably the least important stat and sorcery creatures aren't particularly inclined to use it, but free stats are never a bad thing. .jpg) Obviously, I don't leave Siralim very often, so I'm in no position to help it realize its dreams. Maybe you could take it with you instead? You received an Unchained Djinn creature! It has been sent to your stable. We finish our transmutation upgrade ritual, which gets us a free critter for maxing it out. .jpg) With transmutation maxed out, transmuting craft materials becomes a lot more attractive. At this point transmuting a legendary material usually gets back another legendary in return, plus change. .jpg) It's still not perfect, though. Sometimes you'll get downgraded to a couple of uncommons. This does work both ways--if you're really lucky, you can get a legendary material while transmuting a pile of uncommons. This is a pretty decent use of all of the random buff/debuff materials you accumulate, but you go through a lot of brimstone that way. .jpg) Critter roundup! The new djinn is kind of a disappointment compared to the reward for maxing out the blacksmith. The best case scenario is to get some way to trigger a defend right at the start of combat to wipe out all the enemy's MP, while using abilities that either start you out at 0 MP or make having 0 MP desirable. Although, the fact that those kinds of abilities exist raises the question of why you don't just use them together and skip having to try to trigger a defend before the enemies move. .jpg) Again, immunity is great... but this guy's going to have a hard time doing anything useful with it. .jpg) This, on the other hand, is awesome! We've already seen it on an artifact, which is a pretty great use of it since it demands such unusual priorities for your artifact anyhow, but if you're not lucky enough to find one these guys will do in a pinch. .jpg) Ladies and gentlemen, the elusive Actually Good Carver. Still better as an artifact ability, but you can do fun things with this. Give it an artifact with a priest buff-on-attack power and he'll dish out huge stat buffs while also going ham on the enemies. .jpg) We picked up another ent along the way. It is still bad. Could conceivably be useful with abilities that limit damage instances to X% of maximum health... but those all have a cap on the maximum amount of damage prevention, so you still need other layers of defense to prevent one-shot kills. At which point you might as well just take another defense pump and try to shrug off attacks altogether instead of hoping that some of them randomly heal off the damage from others. .jpg) This is neat in theory, but even if you have a team build that dies on purpose you usually don't want to stay dead. And then if you actually try to build around this, your juicy damage multiplier gets whittled down as you take out enemies. Hope you actually are able to take out the most dangerous enemies first because otherwise you're going to be facing them 1v1 with no damage bonus. .jpg) Now we're starting to get into the really interesting giants. It's a bit risky since it leaves you unable to counterattack at low health, but as long as you can keep your HP up your health is generally going to be higher than attack (and giants certainly have the build for it.) Although what makes this ability really sing is that there are much bigger ability bonuses available for health than there are for attack. For example, we've got a weapon of Grit (add the creature's attack to their defense and max HP, then zero out their attack.) In this guy's hands it would be a pure attack boost that would also send his defense and HP skyrocketing. .jpg) And then, of course, there's this guy. Ridiculous amounts of defense have been a constant feature of my team builds for more or less the entire game, which this guy converts into absolutely huge piles of HP. That has some merits from a tanking perspective--it's generally a lot harder to bypass a pile of health than it is to bypass defense. But the real treasure is if you manage to stack it with the Tower Giant's ability so that you can dish out crazy amounts of damage with that pile of health.
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Jun 7, 2018 23:00
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I'm consistently impressed by the variety and scope of abilities on all the monsters in this game. I would have serious trouble coming up with enough unique gimmicks to fill a bestiary even a quarter the size of the one in this game. Sure, some of them are duds, but an awful lot are "huh, yeah, I guess you could do some interesting stuff with that." And even if the creature itself is bad, there've been a lot of traits that become much better when put on an artifact and handed to another creature.
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Jun 8, 2018 21:47
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Is there a Siralim 3 thread? I couldn't find it and I cannot deal with the Floor 18 boss 
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Jun 16, 2018 21:27
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Just wanted to say this LP got me to restart this game. I've currently got a team in about the same place you are - grinding deity stuff mostly. I got an artifact with the Wallflower trait (Cast a random spell on defend or provoke) pretty early on and have put together several teams based on huge alpha strikes and status bombs triggering off of the Guardian Force spell. Right now the only thing that seems to be able to touch me at all are story bosses and high-level sigils where the gene strength greatly outweighs mine (I've done a bit of gene breeding). I'm looking forward to trying out Siralim 3, but I'm pretty sure they've taken out the particular mechanic that I've used to break the game, so I'll have to look out for entire new ones... Thanks again!
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Jun 18, 2018 15:39
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