Lohk finished a dungeon! She can gain one new ability from this list:
Channel II: Can use three 
abilities per dungeon.
Charge Wand : Can use a wand that has no more uses remaining.
Cloth Proficiency: +1 Def when wearing armour with no base Def bonus, or when wearing no armour.
Death Touch: Can deal 1 unblockable damage. The amount of damage cannot be modified by abilities or items.
Herbal Tea II: Starts each dungeon with one Potion of Greater Healing if able to carry it.
Magic Barrier I: Negates all damage from the first magic attack received each dungeon.
Master Accessory: Can destroy a magic accessory to unlock its ability.
Master Staff: Can destroy a staff in order to unlock its ability.
Potion Affinity: Recover 1 additional HP from healing potions. Limited duration potions last 2 extra turns.
Rechannel: Can recover 1 expended use of abilities when an ability is used to destroy a wand or other magic item.
Staff Strike I: Can use a staff to make a melee attack with +2 Atk.
Wand Efficiency I: Wands with limited uses per dungeon have a 20% chance not to be depleted when used.
Wand Proficiency: Can deal +1 damage with damaging wands, or heal +1 HP with healing wands.
So destroying the wand just gives us the ability, but it doesnt cost a star which is nice.
My Choice: Channel II (More uses for healing)
Or fireballs!
Probably depends on the wand/staff/accessory. The Wand of Death Touch had charges but doesn’t need stars. Staff abilities probably need stars, since staves can be used up. A wand that could only be used once per dungeon might need stars.
I generally dislike investing in limited-use abilities. This one is pretty flexible and others need specific items.
Channel II is nice but I vote Rechannel as it has the potential to get us more magic in the long run.
Now that you mention it, Rechannel is the same but better than Channel II.
As long as we have a wand we plan to learn from (which we know we can buy), thats a guaranteed 1 more channel which is what Channel II is.
I’m changing my vote to this one
No way. Unless we plan to eat two wands a dungeon rechannel is at best only as good as channel II. Channel II always gives us 3 uses.
Higher potential, but it doesn’t do anything if we don’t find any Wands. We could buy Wands, but they cost ~30 Gold each! There’s also the problem of what if the Wand is something Lohk already learned from?
I want Lohk to sit out next dungeon
so we will be even more likelly to have at least 1 wand when we do take her in.
I like this abilty a lot
Not in the long run! Rechannel only gives us more magic in the long run if we plan on eating 2 wands a dungeon. We’ve only ever found one wand, and the ones we can buy are expensive. Channel II gives us an additional use of magic every single dungeon whether we have a wand or not. To exceed that you have to have two wands and time their usage so it comes after we’ve used a channel ability already.
My thought is that eventually we will be able to use it with far more than just wands, and for now it can be the same value as Channel II
Other thought: do we know we can’t use Channel on broken wands?
How’d we use Channel on Wands? Did you mean a different ability?
Yes sorry I meant the Master Wand ability
If only we had some sort of Sheet of Character stats which could answer this question… 😛
Master Wand: Can destroy an undamaged wand in order to unlock its ability.
I vote for Channel II.
I’d vote for Wand Proficiency if we had money to get a Wand of Mending for the next dungeon.
Wand Proficiency – Gives use more value per action, per encumberance and per wand.
I just realized that Ricki is going to have a sibling now! The egg is hatching!
Lohk is sad she won’t eat it.
We haven’t seen what it hatches into yet. Lots of critters fry well.
Herbal Tea II is an alternative to Channel II if we only want Channel for healing.
The Greater Healing Potion can (probably) heal more than Lohk’s Heal spell at once. We don’t know how much of an upgrade a Greater Healing Potion is though, so Channel II is probably better.
Only reason i didnt vote Herbal tea is that 3/5 of our characters have small amount of max hp so greater seems overkill. If we get more Max hp or more Party members of medium size I think it is a solid choice.
Unrelated, but I think enchanting either the Swiftblade or the Greataxe with lightning makes sense. I vote that next dungeon we bring both Kamau and Lohk so Kamahu can fuel the weapon himself (using 5 of his vast HP pool) and then get healed by mom-goblin.
For now, I think Channel-2 is the best for us.
However, I see discussion regarding Rechannel vs Channel-2. Many voices say we’d need to carry around 2 wands. Yes. Almost. Please read carefully. It says “wand or other magic item”. I know we don’t see wands often, and if we do, they are often broken (but this skill doesn’t seem to exclude broken wands) – but the “other magic item” is also an option, and we do find magic items like Lens.
Other thoughts:
– death touch. Yeah, weak, but unblockable. We’ve just seen how unblockable damage can kick asses. It may be an ace card when we meet an enemy we’re totally unprepared for.
– master accessory/master staff: see where it goes! we just got master-wand, and we learn skills, and so far this one death-touch is repeatable and doesn’t consume charges. I think ANY such master-xxx skill can do wonders, but their usefullness is limited to learning 1 ability per level up.
– wand efficiency I: whee, encyclopaedia with no drawbacks. And upgradeable. Don’t know the rate, but 20% is 1-in-5, we count on luck, but 30% is like 1-in-3 and starts being usable. But we don’t use wands often, do we?
– wand proficiency: make mending mend more? heck yeah
Lohk feels like the very opposite of Lara. Lara level up, and I wonder which skill is useless the least, and with Lohk, geesh, will we even get enough level ups for her in this game time to get all the cool things!?
We don’t have the abilities that would let her consume anything other than a wand. We’d need master staff or master accessory.
Yes, at this moment we don’t have. But the skill itself allows for that, and we may get that in future. If we go long term with this, to get most of it, as an example, from now:
pick recannelpick master-whatever-#1pick master-whatever-#2
In the meantime, pick some Channel-# to get more charges
In the meantime, eat some wands/staffs/rings/items/etc, and maybe spend level-ups on the skills/spells.
This means building up for at least 3 levels to get the basic abilities, just to be able to start thinking which abilities to pick, at the growth rate of 1 spell per level afterwards, not mentioning other skills like Herbal or proficiencies.. the growth here is insanely slow.
To be comparable with other characters’ growth, it feels like Lohk should have not “pick 1 innate skill, or pick 1 spell from consumed item”, but rather “pick 1 innate skill, AND pick up to 1 spell from consumed item”. Or maybe pick a free extra spell every 2 levels, otherwise it could be in turn too overpowered quickly. Otherwise this character’s arc regarding extracting power from items will be barely useful.
I just hope spells/abilities extracted from items don’t dissipate and disappear when not selected, so that, for example, this DeathTouch will be still selectable after the next dungeon. If it does disappear, then BAH!
If Crit Gauntlets are magic enough for Master Accessory, then they become a 6gp channel star. Might still only work once.
Lohk’s ability to gain new level up abilities is exciting. There’s a lot of reference to limited use wands though, which we just haven’t seen; it depends on whether the undamaged versions of wands we have seen (Magic Missile, Mend) have charges while the damaged version doesn’t track both charges and break chance. Seems unlikely, Mend is very much worded to only work up to a certain point, so needing charges would be weird. How To Play also introduces wands as unlimited use by default.
It’s a shame Wand Proficiency doesn’t work on abilities mastered from wands.
Unblockable damage is brutal to player characters who need to fight in multiple battles and can generally pick fights to limit incoming damage. It’s very limited against enemies which only fight for 5 turns taking lots of damage each turn instead of 50 turns with very low damage per turn, plus most things with high Def have much higher HP. Unblockable does nothing if we have enough damage to get through Def. If not, then it takes a long time to chip away. The ideal opponent here is the Snale, 2 HP with 3 Def.
Cloth Proficiency is much better on Lohk than Lara. Lohk functionally has 4 inventory slots, so she’s much more likely to be using leather armour for capacity reasons. Skipping armour entirely lets Lohk get higher defence in general because she runs out of slots before we run out of defence-boosting equipment.
The main reason to avoid this is because Daisy works really well with Lohk, and the wolf hide armour buffs Daisy. Still, wearing that hide leaves her with two slots, likely one of which we spend on a shield, leaving very little space for wands. We also want to be very careful about attacking with Daisy.
It also enables her to better use the fire robe we have, which is a plus. We aren’t regularly engaging with fireballs at this point, since healing was more necessary in the only dungeon we’ve used her in thus far, but it would make that a more reliable damage source. 4-7 damage is a much better range than 3-6.