Lara finished a dungeon! She can gain one new ability from this list:
Antivenom I: Once per dungeon can restore 2 HP to a nearby living creature that was damaged by poison on the current or previous turn.
Cloth Proficiency: +1 Def when wearing armour with no base Def bonus, or when wearing no armour.
Drink Poison I: Once per dungeon can consume carried venom to recover HP equal to its damage.
My Pretties: When an owned pet deals poison damage it deals +1 poison damage.
Night Eyes: +1 Atk in rooms with no light.
Poison Resistance I: +2 Def against poison.
Poison Use: Can use venom when attacking.
Spider Sense: +1 Atk and Def against spiders.
Venomous Sting II: Makes a ranged attack that deals 2-3 poison damage.
Night Eyes
Cloth proficiency!!
My reason for voting Cloth Proficiency:
It’s like Leather Armor that doesn’t take up an inventory slot while she doesn’t have better Armor, which is enough of a reason after the inventory problems this Dungeon.
It’s not a lot of Defense, but the Ring of Protection can at least bring her upto 3 Defense and another Ring would bring her upto 4. It also goes well with the Fire Dragon Robe if we don’t sell it and find a Fire Weapon.
It’s not a lot of Defence and it becomes absolutly useless any time we actually need Defence on her.
Any time Lara needs to take actuall hits we will need actuall armor for her. Cloth Proficiency will be useless when we actually need it and worthless otherwise.
Waste of a skillpoint.
Lara would’ve had 5 defense against fire in this dungeon with the robe and no other equipment. Cloth proficiency is likely to be a straight buff in important situations like that.
Cloth Proficiency!
This allows us to clear out an inventory space and sell Lara’s leather armor. Enc is at a premium, and we likely only have 33 total slots available (34-1 hilt). Even 1 space is incredibly valuable at that point. It’s basically like taking half a big haul plus getting one additional innate defense. It pairs really well with the flame robe we got to boot.
we can get Cloth Proficiency once we get Robe that is actually usefull for anything else than a Boss of a single Dungeon.
I’d prefer to smif the leather armour than sell it.
1 more Def for our tank!
Agreed!
“It’s basically like taking half a big haul plus getting one additional innate defense”
Well.. not. BigHaul gives +2Enc, and here we have 1 and with a condition. I see your point, but this skill at best “gives us 1 enc point” only when we decide that Lara is fine un-amour-ed, and if she’s fine with no real armour, then what do we need the def for then? Why not take +2def/poison and make her tank against any greenrats/centipedes/spiders/scorpions/etc?
Please note that ClothProficiency has no number, it is not an upgradeable skill that will give us +2 at next upgrade or something. If it were, it would be something of a completely different impact, but now it sounds very “so-so”.
I think this skill may be important IF Lara overdoses Corruption and transforms and IF we can still control her afterwards. I expect she’ll get spidery in some sense and won’t be able to wear any armour except clothes. But for now? I fail to see why that’s better than ie. any of the 5 skills at the bottom of the list. Any of them sounds much more usable at this moment.
Cloth proficiency is a buff to the robes. Anytime we would want her to wear robes it’s helpful. For instance, in situations like the salamander Lara in the robe would have 5 fire defense with cloth proficiency without using any other equipment. That’s only one point less than she’d have in plate and with only one enc consumed. As we find other robes to cover other elements this only gets more flexible.
Poison resistance!
Okay hear me out. We saw with this last boss fight how important and useful elemental defense can be. We’ve already seen plenty of enemies that do poison damage (the plague rats, the centipede, spiders, scorpions) and I don’t expect that number to go down over time. Having poison resistance would allow Lara to safely fight groups of enemies that use poison damage much more easily, because she would have essentially 3 innate defense against them. The primary difficulty we’ve previously had with using this ability was lack of enemy information, but with our obtaining the encyclopedia and our large gold reserves, we should be able to get enemy info relatively easily moving on. I think that means that buffing poison defense will end up helping us far more frequently than it seems like it would upon initial glance.
It has also been said on stream that we should know the damage types we take, that just doesn’t always get mentioned because we don’t have abilities that care about damage type.
The venom bats are crying. They have been overlooked again. Never anybody takes them serious. 🙁
If we expect to find poison robes later on for Lara. That will be elemental defence overkill.
It’s fine to have a bit of special type of defence since it’s more cost-efficient (balance for how rarely it will be usefull), but if we endup with all Lara defence be poison it will be awfull.
If we end up choosing Poison Resistance that means we won’t ever want to wear items with Poison Defence on Lara.
If we end up buidling Lara as a Venom-Mancer with Poison related items that buff it’s def we will end up with 1 (or2 with cloth) Base Defence and 5+ Poison Defence. That’s like trying to make sure Kamau will never again have a level up.
Night eyes!
Given how frequently we seem to be in fights with no light and Kamau blind interposing, this seems like it’s basically a flat +1 to all of Lara’s attacks. Seems pretty good
It’s good, but will be dungeon dependant. Consider the Chapel, which had half its rooms open to the day outside and the other half patrolled by walking sun-heads. Light sources are also a side effect at times, like from the Hearth and holy water.
Of course, most dungeons seem to be dark and lit by torchlight which we can douse.
Lara skills are hard choice (since all of them are bad)
but Night Eyes and Poison Sting are the only potentially usefull ones.
The rest are to conditionall.
Not that Eyes aren’t (need to be dark)
or Sting (%chance for 1 more damage)
but everything else is either even more specific (Poison Defence, good luck finding poison enemies) or out right not usable for it’s supposed goal (Cloth Proficiency, if we need Def we will wear some armor making it wasted skillpoint)
you have my upvote.
Venomous Sting II
This isn’t bad, but as we’ve seen this dungeon, there’s a lot more damage to be had by using weapons.
Which makes sense – Venomous Sting requires no inventory space.
the goal is to keep dumping Lara skillpoints into it untill it’s as good as weapons
Sting is a skill with levels. There will be III and IV.
not like she has better options.
Actually, at this point, NightEyes may be better, since it gives flat bonus (when dark) and this means the Sting becomes “2 in light, 3 in dark” which is better than “2-3 at random” (rng cannot screw us, we know exactly what’s happening). But you’re right that the Sting at level III or IV may be very handy, of course assuming we actually can level it up so far. We have no idea. But I’d try that right after taking NightEyes.Venomous Sting does not use atk.
Damn, it got me again. Thanks!
Also, heh, I totally forgot she has PoisonProficiency, meaning our current String is not 2-3, but 3-4, since it’s a ranged poison attack.
But we don’t have any good range weapon and this one will also upgrade the corruption 8 dmg attack, ideally we won’t want to use it, but when we will we want it as strong as possible. Also we don’t know what venomous sting 3 will bring to the table.
It doesn’t upgrade venomous barrage.
Since there’s confusion: Poison Proficiency was worded as increasing poison damage, which is why that works on ranged attacks and includes Barrage. Boosting attack or boosting Sting won’t help with Barrage.
We also just got a very good ranged weapon. Venomous Sting I and a double crossbow shot can deal 8 damage at range without using corruption (though with using bolts).
My problem with Venomous Sting II is it’s random damage. We’ve been making our attacks based on guarantee damage, so we’d usually be treating it like it’s 3 Damage (With Poison Proficiency’s +1) instead of 3-4.
There’s no guarantee that there will be Levels III and IV. It’s very likely though, but what if III is 3-5 Damage instead of 4? I believe LSN siad there’d be deminishing returns for upgrading a skill and we’ve seen with Ricki’s Trap Detection III, so I’m pessimistic about the idea of keeping on upgrading the same skill being worth it.
I totally expected the upgrades be like
I: 2
II: 2-3
III: 2-4
IV: 3-4
V: 3-5
Or something like that, with slow progression of both MIN and MAX. Of course, if it ever goes that high as V. However, I just noticed that this plan grants actually pretty flat 0.50 avg dmg per level, so it’s not “diminishing”. Whoops 🙂
I second Venomous Sting II because knowing how the damage scales from level to level would be pretty useful when it comes to determining whether or not it’s worth investing more points into later.
Also, Lara’s magical abilities offer her a lot of versatility, and Venomous Sting is no exception. It can potentially be used to chip away at tougher opponents from a distance (or just for sniping enemies that are far away), it deals poison damage (and is our only source of that type of damage that isn’t reliant on finding/buying poison or spending a corruption point), and it even benefits from Poison Proficiency so it would actually deal 3-4 damage per hit, which is pretty decent.
Furthermore, it’s one of the only magical abilities that Lara has that doesn’t cost corruption to use, and it can’t be ‘disarmed’ from her because it’s not a weapon- meaning that in scenarios where we want to avoid using weapons (like when fighting a Rust Monster for example) we can still use Venomous Sting. Or, if we lose our gear somehow (such as by being imprisoned and having it get taken away) then she’ll still have access to Venomous Sting even while everyone else is disarmed (though in such a scenario I imagine they’d all be thrown in anti-magic cuffs of some sort; she’d still have access to her powers once those were actually taken OFF, though).
That being said I totally understand why people are going for Night Eyes right now since she’s been used as more of a secondary Fighter then as a Mage. But since she’s our ONLY Mage right now I feel like it makes much more sense to try and build up her unique magical powers rather than trying to make her into a second Kamau going forward.
How about “my Pretties”?
I don’t want to spend corruption excessively, but this was a -very- good use of one point. We had a spider for big portions of the dungeon and with this skill, it would have been an even bigger help.
So I’m inclined to take this skill early, while we still have corruption to spend (also there might be a permanent pet that deals poison damage).
When Lara has a permanent pet “that deals poison damage” (Can anyone think of a pet for Lara that doesn’t? Fluffy bunny reducing the atk values of all enemies by 3 points because of its cuteness? Not with Lara!), then “My Pretties” is my first choice.
My main argument against this is that it might entice is to use corruption even more. I think we need to be very stingy with it. But yes your point is sound. We have the room now and it was VERY helpful.