Macadamia finished a dungeon! He can gain one new ability from this list:
Accessory Essence: Can smif rings with benefits drawn from accessories worn on the head, hands, and legs. Bonus of ring is limited by cost of accessory. Minimum 20 gold value required for +2, 40 gold value for +3.
Dig I: Once per dungeon can expend a hammer or pick to create an opening in a normal wall or floor (not leading between rooms). Only Small characters can use the opening.
Dispel Ring I: Can turn a magic ring back into a nonmagical ring to restore 1 HP per tier of the ring to a nearby ally.
Hammer Proficiency: +1 Atk when wielding a hammer or similar weapon.
It Goes on Your Back: +1 Def if carrying a shield but not wielding it.
Magic Essence: Can smif rings with benefits drawn from undamaged wands and staves. Wands can create +1 or +2 rings, staves can create +2 or +3 rings.
Master of Both Things: +1 Atk if wielding a hammer in one hand and a pick in the other.
Panic: +1 Atk when targeted by an attack.
Pick Proficiency: +1 Atk when wielding a pick or similar weapon.
Ring Synergy: If wearing two rings that increase the same attribute, +1 to that attribute.
Ringsmifing III: Can smif copper, silver, and gold rings.
Scamper: +1 Mov when using turn only to move.
Smif Ring II: Three times per dungeon can combine a nonmagical ring with another item to create a magic ring.
Dig I
Infinite potential. Cost per dungeon to have it available is barely more than a lockpick. Would have gotten us the Rat Chest in this dungeon and saved us several turns fighting Corn Knights.
Dig yes
I like Dig I.
If not, then Magic Essence – this can lead to creation of rings which boost magic somehow.
Gotta add that dig would’ve yielded at least one chest in every dungeon since the rat vault (although obviously we didn’t have Mac then).
1) We could’ve accessed the flame greatsword in the rat vault from the gate locked room below the entrance.
2) The unidentified staff in the manor from the ledge above the entryway.
3) Whatever was in the chest in the rathole here on the farm.
One high value chest a dungeon easily accessed is quite high value just in and of itself.
It is, but we’re talking about one chest, when the contents of that chest are never going to be as beneficial as another ring. I just don’t see how this ever nets out as more valuable overall than Smif II, or really even makes it into the same ballpark.
I don’t think the “Smalls only” restriction on Dig is especially meaningful, given that Ricki at least is generally capable of operating independently, but Dig also requires us to burn at least one Enc just to be able to use it at all, which isn’t great given that Mac’s Enc is cripplingly limited already, and keeping the pick/hammer on another char means burning actions to use it.
So yeah – even just comparing those two abilities, let alone ones that enable new capabilities entirely like Accessory (which could be anything from “great” to “garbage” depending on details that we don’t know yet), this would be a long way down my list.
Access to one more chest certainly doesn’t have no value, but chests are both much more plentiful than rings and generally much less valuable than them, so at a minimum I don’t understand why we’d pick this now.
I would absolutely take a staff or the flame greatsword over a ring. We’re rapidly approaching the point where additional rings of aggression don’t matter much (with Kamau interposing we only need 6 rings of aggression at best, or even less if we tend to keep picking up characters more towards Lohk’s archetype moving forward where attack is less important). We already have 2 silver and 3 copper rings of aggression so the net effect of any rings we make is only +1 attack after the next one we make. We can’t really afford to buy armor to turn into silver rings of protection, and gold rings will be even worse. I think dig will get one really quite good use per dungeon and picks aren’t much more expensive than lockpicks.
Yeah, I get the appeal, I just don’t see the math working out. Armor and weapons drop like flies in dungeons with humanoid monsters, and silver rings are dirt cheap. Saying we can’t afford them because we have other gold sinks (including buying picks :P) is bending reality to fit a narrative.
Being able to get 6 rings out of 2 dungeons rather than 3 means being able to leave Mac at home for an entire extra dungeon each time. That’s worth a lot: not because Mac is a garbage char – we know we can gear him up into a decent one if we have to – but because actually being able to choose who we take is simply massively more valuable than almost any item will ever be: whether that’s for bond progress, or Enc, or suitability traits, and so on.
Even discounting the basic Enc issue that Mac has (which Dig will only make worse) I’d take that extra control, and especially that extra progression, over one more shiny toy that will be accessible by other means anyway.
I’m sure the time will come where Dig would genuinely be valuable as a dungeon-altering mechanic – but there’s no guarantee Mac will even be with us when that opportunity presents itself, and in fact we know that we’ll want to bench him more often than not so that we can drive bonds and abilities on other chars.
Right now, smiffing represents the majority of Mac’s utility, and its restrictions are forcing him into the party whether he’s an appropriate choice or not. Not addressing that millstone first just makes no sense to me, least of all for an ability like this that has even higher restrictions and downsides of its own.
Very much looking forward to when he has Dig V and is reshaping reality at will on a regular basis :P, but right now I see it as a distant 3rd choice at best.
Armor doesn’t drop like flies. We’ve seen exactly two sets of armor drop that were suitable for making silver rings, and cannot buy anything equivalent to replace them. The cheapest armor we could buy to make a silver ring of protection costs 23 gold (chain armor) so the overall cost to guarantee making a ring of protection is 33 gold. That’s over half of a new room for a character. The benefit of one additional silver ring of aggression is marginal, since it will simply be replacing a copper ring of aggression after our next ringsmiffing bringing us to a count of 8 total rings, unless someone is suggesting replacing rings of protection with rings of aggression.
Additional tools have nearly always been quite important or useful for the current or future dungeons. Imagine how easy many of these combats would have been with Ricki wielding a flame greatsword, an item easily available in the rat vault if we’d had dig. We also know that the staff in the manor would’ve been something we would have been very happy with per LSN. That item was on a ledge completely inaccessible to us without using a complicated system of experimental actions involving rope, a spear, and wasting several characters actions several times (or burning corruption on Lara). We could have instead immediately cleared that obstacle with one dig on the platform above.
You have a tendency to treat all new inventory items as if they were just stat boosts and as if they did/do nothing to change mechanics as well, when usually even a new weapon/tool with no interesting mechanics does more additional damage than +1, let alone the additional effects they have like the action savings items like the gardening gloves would have offered us.
Obviously there’s no guarantee that every dungeon will have a great use of dig waiting for us, but the fact that every dungeon since Mac has been available has had one does make a pretty strong argument that we’ll be happy to have it every time he’s with us.
Fair point about silver rings requiring higher-quality gear than loot generally is, but it seems unreasonable to expect that loot both won’t improve over time and will also never be valuable enough to be something we can turn into a suitable armor/weapon purchase. At a minimum we already know that isn’t true for armor, so to me that just detracts from the more valid parts of your argument, but maybe that’s just me.
Not sure why you’ve gone off on a tangent about the “special powers” aspect of some loot, but potatobeasts notwithstanding, even with the vulnerability to fire on the Flytraps etc a Flame GS would still net out at less damage than the Greataxe does. To put that another way, while the GS would certainly have been an Awesome Weapon for us at the time, it’s already been superseded, which is kind of my point. That doesn’t make the GS any less great for the dungeons in between those two pieces of loot, but it also doesn’t magically transform it into a once in a lifetime endgame weapon that we’ll keep forever and ever.
Items like the gardening gloves are practically required to be accessible without specific chars and/or abilities, because LSN isn’t building dungeons based on our character selections the day before. Dig might make such items easier to reach, sometimes – though it wouldn’t have in this particular case – but in many cases it only does so with the benefit of hindsight (or Case) to inform us that this chest is the one containing the Super Helpful Item.
It’s rather like saying “we should have searched the bookcases earlier”, or “we should have tackled the treehouse earlier”. Those things are true, but they don’t represent reality as it happened, because we didn’t know those truths ahead of time.
I agree that Dig is likely to have at least a “good” use in almost any dungeon, but in and of itself that doesn’t give us carte blanche to acquire any item freely and at will. There just isn’t enough knowledge at the time for that to hold true anything like as frequently as you’re trying to suggest.
While Dig certainly has a lot of potential, it’s that over-selling of it that I’m objecting to as much as anything else: presenting its typical value as what that value would only be under ideal circumstances based on knowledge from days or weeks after the point at which those decisions are being made.
The same holds true for the (probably more interesting) other potential use of Dig, opening up paths or Mov-saving shortcuts. We aren’t going to walk into a room and immediately go “okay, we need to demolish that piece of wall there”: instead, there will be days of exploring around to establish that the shortcut is worth it, and that there isn’t an even better place to use this one-shot power in the next room, and doubtless eventually arguments over the shortcut vs reaching a particular chest, and so on.
All of those things are enough of a reason for Dig not to be my first choice right now, and that’s without even counting the gold and Enc cost of it, one of which is pretty significant.
Unrelated, but worth mentioning since it’s apparent in both of the first two examples that came to mind: our current approach of “try to fill the map first” is clearly not working as well as we’d hope.
While the (rather brutal and unexpected) rat king attack would have Remorsed out Kamau regardless, not acquiring the gardening gloves sooner certainly didn’t do us any favors, as you say, and ignoring the bookcases had a similar negative impact in the previous dungeon. I think that’s enough evidence to suggest that a change in the general strategy would be well worth consideration.
This is too late now, but the flame greatsword would’ve been minimum 4 dmg (3 +1 for the enchantment) and would have done fire damage. That would’ve made it a 6 dmg weapon in this dungeon( for everything but the chickens) that used 1 enc. Not superceded by the greataxe at all (in fact strictly superior) and was accessible in the rat vault through a use of dig (hence its relevance). The 1 enc vs 2 for the greataxe for the same minimum damage also would’ve made it a viable choice in any case.
Let’s dig the Dig-1
Please keep this:
in mind, especially when you are bellyaching about the cost of rings from Smif Ring II.
Because the rings will only get more valuable by getting smiffed (and we can sell them to Paws afterwards, potentially making some profit, if we use e.g. a copper ring and some cheap item we find in the dungeon for free), whereas the pick or hammer needs to be bought (haven’t seen any picks drop ever since the kobold warrens) and will be consumed.
A regular pick is listed with cost 7 a heavy pick with cost 17 and unless you count the “warhammer” (for 9 gold) in Paws’ Packs, I don’t think we have even seen a hammer yet.
Mauls are hammers and we saw one this dungeon.
That potential profit on the copper ring, by the by, is at best 5 gold, and requires using an entire enc slot on Macadamia just to carry copper rings. Two as soon as we smif any copper ring.
Smif Ring II.
Our current limit on getting rings is that Macadamia can only smif two per dungeon even if we take him every time. If we end up limited by something else, that’s *good*. It means we can take a different character some dungeons. We just got two more characters we’ll want to take sometimes.
I will note that there was a discussion on Discord about this.
If the Sunny Fun Loot Farm nearly killed us, we cannot take underpowered characters to the Zombie Plague Land, where we must power through everything, and quite quickly, too, because of timers. Oh, and not get bitten, because if this world has stories of plague zombies, then they are likely relevant.
So we will likely end up taking:
Ricki (because mandatory)
Kamau (because no one can afford to get bitten).
Botanya (because life magic is the zombies’ vulnerability)
Sue or Cordy (Because they are supposedly more powerful)
There is no space for Mac on this lineup, but we still need rings, so this ability will help us compensate when we can take him along.
I’d just like to point out that Botanya has not “officially” joined our group yet, so it is unclear if we can pick her to go into the next dungeon. We’ll have to wait for the intermisson to play out (or possibly longer) to make these kinds of plans.
—
I’m also super curious what pet we will get out of the pet egg. I hope it’s the warg. 😀 Or a relative of Manny. ^^
Or maybe we’ll get the option to build a stable/barn at the mansion and then can go and get Manny. (Elephants are employed to help with constuction in India for example. Maybe getting Manny will lower the cost for other Manor upgrades? A girl can dream, at least.)
If Botanya can’t come along, we will probably bring the Pa-Lara-din.
I really think this is a terrible ability to take right now. We could barely afford getting 2 silver rings in this past dungeon. With the massive gold suck that is all of the manor upgrades, 3 rings per dungeon we bring Macadamia into is going to be a stretch. Beyond that, we are already at 7 total rings. Silver rings of protection are quite expensive to make, so odds are the vast majority of rings we make will end up being silver rings of aggression, just like in this past dungeon. In any Kamau interpose configuration we benefit from at most 6 rings of aggression and we already have 3 copper and 2 silver. I think dig is far more likely to be impactful in any given dungeon than having 1 extra attack in the next dungeon after we’ve smiffed 3 rings. That’s really what we are looking at here – we will get to replace one more copper ring of aggression with a silver ring of aggression after the next dungeon we bring Mac to. That’s one extra attack for whatever portion of the dungeon is left after we’ve made our 3rd ring.
The only reason to take Macadamia into dungeons at all is ringsmiffing. He’s really, really weak. If we don’t want or can’t afford the rings he can make, we should be leaving him behind.
Dig doesn’t exactly help our money woes either, seeing as it takes a 7 gold pickaxe to use.
“But dig gets a chest which is valuable!” We could also get more chests by taking in a stronger character. Or take more loot out by taking a character with more inventory.
> 3 rings per dungeon we bring Macadamia into is going to be a stretch
This is bizarre. We have storage space in the manor now. Saving up to buy rings in a burst isn’t going to strain our capacity.
This is literally not true though. Explain what stronger character would have gotten either of the mentioned missed chests. The ability to alter dungeon topography is extremely powerful and possessed by literally nobody else. Besides- we still have no idea what other types of rings Macadamia can even make. Why should we be rushing off to make more silver rings of attack or protection when we don’t even know if they’re ultimately the rings we want?
More inventory capacity -> Carry a set of lockpicks out of the barn -> Easily open the underground locked chest?
Seems pretty straightforward to me.
> Why should we be rushing off to make more silver rings of attack or protection when we don’t even know if they’re ultimately the rings we want?
Ultimately we want gold rings. The reason to take anything but Ringsmiffing III is that we don’t know when that will be an option, and silver rings are still pretty useful in the meantime.
The mentioned missed chests were the ledge chest in the manor and the rat chest here, which, notably, the stronger characters cannot access. Also you’re advocating only taking Macadamia into dungeons where we can afford to make 3 silver rings. In edge cases this could mean delaying making 2 silver rings to get one extra one at some later date, thereby sacrificing 2 additional attack in a dungeon to get 1 additional attack in a later dungeon.
Ultimately we want gold rings of whatever ring is best for an individual character build. We have no idea what rings of magic or any of the accessory rings do, and we are two dungeons away from having max silver attack rings in Kamau interpose configs whether we take this skill or not. There’s also the issue that smiffing 3 rings a dungeon will actually start to make Mac’s inventory management quite difficult, since he can no longer simply wear the rings he plans to smif, but I think that’s more marginal.
Accessory Essence:
We have no clue what other rings are available, so the sooner we get accessory or magic essence the better idea we’ll have of how to direct future ringsmiffing. With characters like Lohk gearing up to be magic damage dealers and the acquisition of a new character that might be focused around summoning plants, it’s likely that other ring options beyond +attack or +defense will be helpful to characters not based around attacking with melee weapons or tanking attacks.
This is obviously just conjecture, but one idea is that accessory smiffing might create rings based on the slot that an accessory occupies, in the same way that gear smiffing creates rings based on the item type used (weapon, armor, shield). Thus far we’ve seen accessories that occupy the foot, hand, and head slot, and each of those could be a different ring type.
Accessory rings might boost ranged weapon damage, or spell damage, or movement. Until we get this ability, we’ll have no idea what other smiffing options are open to us, because Macadamia himself doesn’t know without learning that ability.
It would be awesome if i.e. smiffing wands/staves yielded rings that give +1/+2/+3 charges to Lohk’s channeling. Feels so OP, but also makes so much sense considering Lohk’s ability-learning. But we’ll never know until it’s tried out. I’m not sure if we can affort experiments now. Dig feels way more usable when we’re in pinch, and it’s even upgradeable.
However, I have to stress it: Dig-1 only makes a way for SMALL chars. Kamau/etc will probably have to wait until it’s upgraded..
(I think “with benefits drawn from accessories” pretty solidly kills the “the accessory slot is the key aspect” idea. Which is a good thing really, since being able to migrate even a subset of item properties is much more flexible than “all helmets yield X”).
To go on a tangent for a minute: in fairness, we still haven’t even smiffed one of the types Mac already knows. 🙂
There’s an argument to be made that we “couldn’t” because we know we needed more of the two types we do know about, and I think it’s a fair one despite being inherently grey since we still have no idea what the mag on a Dodge ring is, or what the stacking rules for them are, etc, because it’s more likely that raw Def is the better option more often. But while I’m in that camp too, it’s all supposition, so while it’s the most credible idea it could still turn out to be wrong.
Given our shared fondness for hypotheticals, consider this: if we’d had Dodge rings in this very dungeon, they’d conceptually have been more useful to everyone but Kamau than Def rings were once the “hard” time limit kicked in. So it’s barely even a hypothetical any more, and it seems a pretty safe bet that this won’t be the last time a dungeon or some creature has an ability that essentially negates or bypasses Def. While %age chances are always much less pleasant to rely on than predictable outcomes, they’re certainly better than nothing in that situation. We won’t always be able to hide behind Kamau.
Dodge rings might well have even avoided the rat king in the intermission. Not that we’d have been wearing them anyway, I’m sure, since we were completely blindsided by this, but it’s something to keep in mind.
Anyway: taking this now when we still don’t even have our basic ring needs met seems backwards. Our immediate demand is “more rings” much more than it is “more types of rings”, and given the history with Dodge we’ve got pretty strong evidence that the only path to this ever even being tried out is when we have no need of “basic” rings but are somehow still taking Mac into a dungeon for some reason. That’s only going to happen if we have “spare” smiffing uses, so I’d much rather have more of those first and this second.
It’s not that this isn’t more interesting than “more uses”, because it absolutely is. But from a practical perspective, especially given that we know nothing about what this actually does other than that its output will come at the cost of a ring slot and displace a +Atk or +Def item, it’s easily a worse option right now, and will likely remain one until we start seeing “+1 Fire Damage” accessories etc appear, or something along those lines.
Even if/when we establish what we can do with this, we still need the parts to be available in either loot or shops as well, and to be sufficiently valuable that they’re worth transforming, and for us to have enough gold that we’d rather do that than sell them, and so on. That’s an awful lot of “ifs”, and unfortunately most of them go against what we’ve seen and done so far, as well as the positions we’re likely to be in for a long time yet.
I think this breaks down incredibly quickly when one looks at the properties of accessories we’ve found. What exactly is a +1 ring of dawn mitre and how does it differ from a +2 ring of the same? Dawn Mitre was a 20 gold accessory that let anyone wearing it make a 1 dmg holy bolt ranged attack that lit up the room, so if you have a good idea for how that scales into a silver ring that’s different from a copper one, I’d like to hear it.
As for just needing more rings – we don’t have the capability of making more silver rings of protection yet, really (33 gold per ring is steep, and making them out of armor we are wearing doesn’t actually improve stats at all and would actually lower them if we assume that we smif Ricki’s hide armor), and an additional silver ring of aggression a dungeon adds literally just 1 additional attack, assuming the first thing we do is replace copper rings of aggression with silver rather than replacing rings of protection with aggression. 1 additional attack from a ring is worse than basically every new weapon/item we are finding (see the wand of fire, gardening gloves, etc) for at least the dungeon in which we find the ring, which makes dig a better choice than one more ring.
Beyond that, additional types of rings that enable builds that currently aren’t viable is far more valuable to us than one additional attack in the same way. If we are able to make, for instance, rings of +1 magic attack from hats, or rings that add enc from gloves (or ranged weapon attack), or rings of added mov from boots, our level up decisions can be incredibly different. We are making many of our choices now on the assumption that quite a few of those attributes cannot be improved, but if they CAN be, we’d much rather know now, instead of in 4 dungeons when we’ve already made a bunch of further decisions based on incomplete information.
> I think this breaks down incredibly quickly
It sort-of does in that example, sure, but even so it’s still pretty clearly less wrong than something that outright conflicts with the description. If we’re told “it does X”, a response of “I think it does not-X” doesn’t really have great odds of being correct. (Though it has happened in the past when WOG has been unclear, or misleading, or has omissions, etc).
I think the missing piece here is a full understanding of the ability, and specifically any restrictions it might have. The spellcasting aspect of the Dawn Mitre, for example, might well simply not be transferable to a ring, in the same way that the damage bonus of a weapon isn’t. That doesn’t mean NO helms are workable though: the Darkvision of the Owlbear Cowlbear, for example, almost certainly would be, as would any other constant effect that isn’t physically tied to the slot. (e.g. you can’t turn the Iron Boots into a ring).
We should be hoping you’re wrong though, because if it does work the way you imagine it’s likely to be much less useful to us. Given the limited number of types based on slots, vs the unlimited number of potential properties, they’d need to be immensely broad. (e.g. you couldn’t have the “+1 Fire Damage” of the Dragon Robe as a potential outcome, because there aren’t enough slots to make that workable).
If e.g. every pair of boots translates to +Mov, then that’s infinitely more limiting than a system that allows a +Mov pair of boots to be turned into +Mov rings, and a +SomethingElse pair of boots to be turned into a +SomethingElse ring.
Some known accessories obviously don’t make sense to choose to do this with if that’s how it works: the Crit gear, for example, is flat-out worse than a +Atk ring. If there are accessories out there that offer +1 to healing / damage spells though, destroying those to “learn” the enchantment that we can then put on two rings is often going to be a win (and obviously very much so if we can then also get a second copy of the original item from Paws or a drop).
Let’s assume you’re right though, for argument’s sake. Even if you are – i.e. “all boots become +Mov, and all gauntlets become +Enc”, for example – whatever the nature of the system is, we’re likely to want to take advantage of it. That means making lots more rings of these new types, so regardless of the order we take the abilities in, we’re still very much going to want both. If the system is closer to what I’m expecting based on As Written, we’re still going to very much want both (and, obv, also Gold and even more uses).
Either way, if we’re going to invest in Mac’s smiffing abilities (rather than his combat ones, or stuff like Dig) we’re going to want to fill that whole tree, or at least very close to it, and the only real question is the order. Given how few Silver rings we have, there’s a clear shortfall there in quantity, and there will be again when we eventually get Gold, regardless of our GP/mat issues as well.
In an SP game, or if we’d ever actually made a Dodge ring, or if we’d seen more accessories with desirable and transposable properties drop at some point in the past, I’d have taken this first and +Uses second. That ship had already sailed by the time by the time I even saw this page though even without all those caveats, so the only path available if the goal is to fast-track Mac’s smiffing abilities with the intent to maximize them – which for me, it is – is to take a different smiffing ability that we know we’re going to want long-term anyway, and leave this one for a later date, which is what we’ve done.
Rings from Gear Essence are limited in this way. It doesn’t matter what abilities the weapon has, you make a ring of +Atk. There’s also a very limited number of stats which can get simple scaling +1-3 bonuses. Rings are described as granting bonuses and their creation mechanics revolve around how strong the bonus is. I don’t think a ring of iron boots will be any different from a ring of boots in much the same way our ring of spear and ring of corn spear are identical.
Accessory Essence will pair well with our extra uses since we’ve seen exactly one accessory expensive enough to make a silver ring, so copper accessory rings are more likely and cheaper to make.
My brain got things mixed up, so ignore the “learn” part of the previous comment. We need a fresh enchanted item each time, duh.
I agree with your general sentiment though. Like I say, it doesn’t actually matter which mechanism turns out to be closer to the truth: meta’s scheme is much less powerful, but also much more accessible, so unless the ability is a dud we’re going to want to be able to make rings with it. If it’s slot-based the way meta’s expecting and any of those slots provide something like +Mov or +Enc, we’re going to want to make a lot of them, even if only at the copper level, as you say.
Dig sounds awesome.
Dig I – So useful. So very very useful.