Ricki gained the Big Haul I ability!
Kamau gained the Cleave ability!
Kamau’s bond level increased!
Kamau’s bond has reached a threshold. It cannot increase again until certain requirements are met.
Lara gained the Night Eyes ability!
Lara’s bond level increased!
Macadamia joined the party!
Daisy was recruited as a pet!
All expended HP and abilities are restored.
Intermission 5 will now begin!
…after a two week break.
NOOOO NOT THE 2 WEEK BREAK
Thank yor for all the fun, and for not blowing up stuff wi th emperor’s powers/etc for all the inventory management each turn 🙂 If next episode is goign to be half as fun as the latest one, that’s going to be epic 😀 Have an awesome break!
Two dark, dark weeks..
Hmm, I wonder if we get special bond ability only after meeting mentioned requirements. Anyway, thank you LSN for such a great game comic, have a good rest.
Called it, we can’t keep getting bond points without clearing the condition associated with the bar. Assuming that is a bond dungeon, we have a strong incentive to do that bond dungeon as soon as possible to get back to increasing bond.
I put the wrap-up stream notes back on the last page of the dungeon. Biggest news: It was really frustrating for LSN to keep moving items around, often for just-in-case scenarios that didn’t happen.
Macadamia having 2 move as well means we have several options for where to put Daisy. I think it mostly comes down to Ricki or Kamau. Ricki will be wearing wolf hide armour, needs defense to avoid Remorse and game over, benefits from extra attack to help punch through enemies in small-only areas, and gains extra move. Kamau is human, covers others with his defense, and will generally be in the thick of combat using Interpose so Daisy would be safe while attacking.
Shopping thoughts:
– Two copper rings for smiffing. Very important.
– Bolts for the heavy crossbow. They stack to 6.
– One spare thieves tools. We left all our extras behind, but we really don’t need to bring three sets in and leave more behind again.
– Lucky rabbit’s paw. We don’t know what we’ll need next, but it’d be really nice if we somehow converted all the heavy treasure we’re lugging around into whatever we need most mid dungeon. (What does that have to do with a paw? Who knows…)
– Maybe a wand of mend, we have lots of cash and it’s light.
– Free up space. Magma shield is good to keep, probably double crossbow, maybe heavy pick. All these heavy items are weighing us down…
Macadamia:
– Lie down
– Try not to cry
– Cry a lot
We probably want to buy some lenses too. Space is going to be our biggest concern imo. Plate, robe, leather, hide, pick, cross bow, oxidicer, rat fang, rat tails, magma shield, encyclopedia, hilt – it all adds up quickly.
Sell the encyclopedia
The encyclopedia is great. Assuming we value lenses in normal circumstances precisely at 10 gold, using the encyclopedia gives us an expected value per lens use of 13 gold. Thinking about it a different way, it lets us reliably use lenses at a cost of 7 gold each. (50%*10+80%*10+20%*0)
I think that encyclopedia is actually a bad item. In the last 2 dungeons we had 2 serious problems: inventory space & time limit. The encyclopedia has these effects:
1) It takes 1 slot.
2) It gives us a 20% chance to waste a turn, crippling our action economy.
3) It does not allow us to know in advance whether an inventory slot will be freed after using a lens.
As a result, using encylclopedia will noticeably reduce our efficiency.
Furthermore, magic lenses are not THAT useful. We deduce most enemies’ stats through experimental methods anyway.
Except we don’t deduce behavior from fighting enemies, because we always interpose them. Behavior is super important, as we can see with the owlbear. Turns out we’d only need 3 defense on each melee group member to effectively soak its damage. Experimental method would have told us it did 6 damage. Lens also help with deducing damage TYPES, which is probably going to be very important for Lara’s future combat style, given she’s meant to wear robes which as we’ve seen thus far primarily provide elemental defense, rather than base defense. Given we just added in a new character and got cleave, action economy isn’t going to be so critical that we won’t be able to justify using the encyclopedia, particularly at the start of dungeons.
We’re supposed to know damage types from being hit by them, that has just been loosely applied. That still doesn’t tell us the split for cases like the spider which deals 5-6 damage but only 1-2 of it is poison.
Yeah, when Kamau stacks defense that high it’s only given us concrete numbers from many enemies at once. Now that we have the offensive power to drop most enemies in one shot, we have fewer data points to pin down how much we’re wasting.
I just noticed that:
5gp10gp lost resale valueI’m assuming when Ricki maxes bond with someone and gets more powerful, she’ll pick up the ability to use a lens like ability once per dungeon.
The book is a Tool/Treasure, it can be sold for full price.
First of all: Enjoy your break, LSN!
And @shopping:
-yes to one set of thieves tools
-yes to rings
-yes to paw (I think we might be able to buy stuff with it mid-dungeon somehow. Not that it would have been too much use up until now, because we never had spare money, but on the other hand, if we can SELL mid-dungeon, too, then we could GET spare money mid-dungeon as well…)
-maybe to wand of mend (its really expensive and it would be a shame to leave that one behind, and/or a wand of magic missle – for Maca – might be more interesting, also we’ll have to see how much coins we will have to our disposal)
-we also should get a torch, please (yes, we have night eyes on Lara now, but we don’t know yet if we need Kamau to see stuff occasionally)
-yes to keeping the magma shield!
I would like to suggest things to sell, too:
-at least the gold shield and one of the others (we don’t need 5 shields for 4 people and while there are a total of 10 (12 with the kofi-bonus chars, both numbers counting Ricki) recruitable team members altogether, we’ll never have more than 4 people going to dungeons at the same time), the question is: one of the regular ones or the spiked buckler?
Or both? We have two 2h weapons (pick and great-sword), after all, a shield can’t be used by people wielding those.
-the double crossbow (yeah, I know we just got it AND it deals 5 ranged damage, but it weighs 2 AND it needs ammo. crossbow bolts stack up to 6, so that’s only 3 shots with a full stack, that’s not very “cost efficient”, space-wise. OTHO, we seem to be getting supplied with bolts for free thanks to those trap chests… :P)
-the oxidicer (while it is a shame to give up a unique weapon like this and the only mememto of our beloved Rusty, it does have a break chance and we all know our track record with those. We’d best sell it and get something unbreakable in its place. Or gift it to Lohk or something, or ask her if she can stash it until we can get our base with some storage/cosmetic/trophy slots.)
I’m inclined to keep the whip, the big pick, the great-sword and the rat-fang dagger (4 weapons for 4 people – not counting the hilt here, because Kamau doesn’t share that one – sounds good to me, and while it would be probably more optimized to get another great-sword instead of the whip and deal 3 damage to non-big beasts, too, the option of “shoo-ing” them from one room to another as mentioned in the wrap-up-stream is intriguing. Also “only” 2h weapons – we still got the fang and the hilt – would seriously limit our shield usage abilities).
If we were to sell any of these, I guess the great-sword would be my choice (pick deals more damage and would enable us to break boulders, if we ever encounter those again, even if it is heavier).
We don’t have any armour to spare (leather armour, robes, wolf-hide armour, plate), so unless we can/want to buy any upgrades (e.g. sell leather/robes, buy something with more Def instead), I think we’re good.
I dunno how often we’ll encounter fire damage (other than people wielding torches), but if we could teach someone to do fire damage (I’m thinking of maybe an alternate spell for Lara) that would be awesome! (But I guess it might have been the “burning greatsword”, that we missed, that would have given us this option…) Because iirc, the robe does give +1 Attack when dealing fire damage, too. That combined with the “cloth proficiency” on Lara (we don’t have it yet, but we might get it in the future) makes me want to keep the robes.
I’m on the fence about the book and the potion of rage. Selling them would give us some money (as it would have with selling the crit gear last intermission. I wanted to suggest it, but by the time I got online, there were already so many votes on other suggestions that had “keeping them” in it, even though they didn’t really trigger often enough to justify keeping them) and some space and if the rest of the players are similar to me, we might end up never using either item (“we WANT to get more space by using up the lenses” when it comes to the book and “we should save it for a -really- tough battle, let’s not use it just YET” when it comes to the potion. Yeah, I am aware of these arguments not making a whole lot of sense, especially if we end up having to leave stuff behind in case of the potion, I just can’t stop thinking along those lines regardless. 😛 )
I think we sell a shield and keep the spiked buckler to smif at the start of the next dungeon. That way we can see what a dodge ring does. I also think we should sell the whip, keep the double crossbow, and keep oxidicer. Still mulling it all over though. It’ll depend on what Paws sells and what if anything we get from the kobold dad for fulfilling the 2nd goal.
I think smiffing shields will only be worthwhile at the gold ring tier – low dodge chances by definition cannot change anything about our strategies, and its a def point we need to have to have others fight alone that we won’t have throughout the whole dungeon.
Counterpoint – dodge on Kamau is likely to be more valuable than 1 armor since it procs per attack. Breakeven point for a 10% dodge chance ring would be 4 3 damage attacks, which isn’t super unlikely.
Expected damage isn’t a great measure, as we don’t have a massive number of turns to average out. Randomness will be chunky, and we get far fewer trials if the first ones are unlucky and cost us HP. We also only gain benefit until dodge pushes incoming damage below our Defense threshold, so there’s an upper bound which brings expected value down.
Let’s take the 4×3 attacks. With 11 base Def, then +1 Def from a ring of protection is strictly better because it drops our HP loss to 0 forever. With 10 base Def, we can take either guaranteed 1 HP with ring of protection or a 34% chance of 0 vs 66% chance of 2 (Bernoulli trials, chance of four 90% hits in a row is 66%, we don’t take less if we dodge more than one). With 9 base Def, we take either guaranteed 2 HP or the same chances but 34% 0 vs 66% 3. Even the expected values here favour static defense… But if we also take down one of those 3-damage attacks in the first turn, then we have a decent shot at taking no damage for the entire encounter.
I do like that it encourages spending Kamau’s HP. It also lets us push more defense onto other characters and not shuffle items around for mob groups. With healing to patch over the unlucky streaks, it makes things more suspenseful.
It also gives us a chance of proccing counter attack sometime. I don’t think I’ll end up really advocating for dodge rings in the end, but that depends in large part on what sort of magnitude we get on them. Assuming the progression for non dodge rings is +1,+2,+3, knowing what the dodge ring base magnitude is will let us judge whether dodge rings are ever going to be a thing. I personally think getting that intel now for the cost of not selling the spiked buckler (6 gold) and not smiffing a ring of protection or aggression is worth it.
I want to see the broken Oxidicer, I’ve a feeling it might have some other gimmick.
If nothing else, fire robes make a torch act like a longsword. We have confirmation that there are no dragons left to fight (as far as Emperor-fearing citizens know) and haven’t seen any other sources of fire damage, so I don’t know if fire robes pass the “worth bringing to the next dungeon” test, especially since we have a magma shield. We shouldn’t hold onto things and take up inventory space just because we think they might be useful several dungeons down the line. We will keep finding cool stuff.
The thing about inventory space taken by ammo is that it isn’t taken up for very long.
Agreed re the broken oxidicer. I’m expecting a gimmick that lets it rebuild into the normal oxidicer (by say, sacrificing a rusty item to it), and while broken it just acts as a dagger. With the fire robes, I’m only really hoping to hang onto them until we get proper storage (after the manor?). I also sorta hope we’ll find something like the flame greatsword we missed that will make running Lara in the robes more appealing.
Actually, I’m REALLY curious what would be the result of smiffing the Oxidicer into a a ring. Would we get simple +1 atk? or +1 atk and ability? or would we hear that this copper ring is not a good fit? Maybe we should try?
According to Macadamia, it doesn’t matter what the item does, though according to Gear Essence the bonus of the ring can’t exceed the base bonus of the base item. Oxidicer plus copper ring will produce a regular ring of aggression, +1 Atk. A theoretical silver ring of aggression for +2 Atk could not be smiffed from a pick or the whip, because their base bonus is +1 Atk even though they can randomly or conditionally add more damage. We could smif such a ring with the Oxidicer, or a regular longsword, or a greatsword.
Upgrading Ringsmifing should let us use different ring bases, which should smif better rings. Picking up new Essence abilities should let us smif different types of rings. I think that Essence abilities are more likely to get us rings with abilities.
I am happy with these choices. We have clearly seen the need to be able to carry more equipment. Perhaps less so now that we have a ringsmif. How much do those rings sell for? Cleave will be useful. Night Eyes should be useful. Well done all round.
Smiffing rings for profit can work if we find the right equipment to do so and have it be worthwhile. They’ll sell for 10, and rings cost 5. So anything with a sell value of 5 or less can be profitably smiffed. It will not be worth doing this until we have at least 8 rings to cover our party’s needs.
We can either smif rings using shitty equipment we find in dungeons or buy daggers for 3 gold.
Sure, but that’s a lot of trouble for 2 gold profit. It also won’t even be relevant until, at the bare minimum, three dungeons from now when we have a full set of 8 rings. The smif shitty equipment angle doesn’t really hold up when we can’t smif broken equipment. Anything more than a buckler/longsword is better off just being sold rather than smiffed, outside of enc concerns.
Have a nice break. See you in a while.
Everyone check out DragonTamer on “Enemies” page. Little spoiler alert, but I think we already know that’s coming 😀
Gotta catch em all!
Got the 30% drop this time.
So Ricki has Dungeon Eyes, and Lara has Night Eyes.
I want Kamau to get Heat Vision next!
Why limit our wishes, let’s go straight for superman’s XRay Vision, or also superman’s Laser Sight (Eyes?), or why not some Future Sight (win all gambling 4evah!), or just good ol’ Visions and get more weird custom panels xD