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.
Poison Resistance III: +6 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.
Pretty Straight forward here: Cloth Proficiency since we’ll want her to use that poison Robe all the time.
I actually think this is a bad pick for this dungeon. Lara’s defense in just the robe is going to be abysmal. Cloth proficiency does not fix that, and it’s not really going to enable her to engage non-poison enemies.
Like if she’s using the cobra hood, the poison robes, and the siege sword her defense is 0 against non-poison damage. Taking cloth proficiency brings that to 1. If we’re bringing Lara with that setup she’s never going to be safe fighting non-poison enemies. We either need to bring different armor for Lara when she’s not fighting poison enemies, or commit her to not fighting regular enemies in melee.
If we gave Lara both defense rings, the heavy gauntlets, and the heavy boots she’d still only be at 5 defense after cloth proficiency. That’s not gonna be enough to engage in most combats with regular enemies. We’d be better served bringing backup armor and taking poison resistance, or just not wearing the robe and taking poison resistance.
This makes sense to take if we think we can make a valid build with the robe that can engage regular enemies, but that seems impossible with the siegesword and cobra hood. It’d be a bit better with the heavy helmet (max defense 7 with all of the above), but I’m not sure that’s what we’re going for.
Siege sword was a slightly questionable pick of enchant for exactly this reason. Means no shield and a def penalty. It was clearly the best we had, but still causes problems.
There are a few other things to say:
You’re deliberately ignoring pet defense. She gets another 1 from a mushroom.
We’ll be able to take the occasional hit. No remorse. Lara has 9 HP plus any healing.
The inability to get her def up using rings is because we don’t have silver def rings yet. That will trivially be fixed the next time we take Macadamia into a humanoid heavy dungeon. Or don’t lose our mule on the way out of said dungeon and take him the time after. This is strictly a temporary problem.
The hood… isn’t actually very good yet. It’s situationally +2 atk from ignoring poison immunity*. It’s barely competitive with a basic helmet, which reliably gives +1 def. It’s entirely outcompeted by a full helmet if you’re ignoring the opportunity value of inventory slots, as you are in the body armor comparison. It’s true that the hood would be better if we were doing more poison damage. Like, say, because we were using the robe.
Contrawise, the robe has excellent power for a single slot. Something that continues to get more important the more equipment we get. We should be designing builds around our rare items and filling them out with commons, not the other way around. for Lara, those items are our enchanted siegesword, the robe, and the hood.
*don’t nitpick me about poison resistance. enemies would need 6 to give a +3 atk equivalent. more likely it’s all of +1 atk against most poison resistant enemies.
The point is that we’re discussing fighting poison enemies. Cloth proficiency adds one defense against those enemies and poison resistance adds 2. It’s strictly a worse pick for the only enemies we’d be fighting while wearing robes in this dungeon. Cloth proficiency is better for fighting regular enemies but that isn’t the use case we’re building for in the upcoming dungeon.
Like the exact situations in which it makes sense to have Lara wearing poison robes are the exact situations you’d rather have poison resistance III over II.
“in the upcoming dungeon”
There’s the problem.
The longterm build I’m aiming for is siegesword, hood, robes, 2x SRoD, gauntlets, boots, mushroom. 11 damage, 8 def with cloth proficiency, and four slots open. 15 def against poison. Upgrading that to 17 def against poison is a waste of an ability.
You’re assuming we’ll never ever use robes except against poison using enemies. But that doesn’t have to be true, and I don’t think it’s optimal. Robes are efficient per slot. They’re just not great for the temporary issue of general defense. We have a solid base of operations. We shouldn’t be making ability choices around a single dungeon.
We don’t have two silver rings of defense and don’t even know when we’ll be bringing Mac to another dungeon. Robes are basically only worth using if you think you’ll be fighting enemies of the elemental type they defend against (ignoring things like the Monk robes). Given we know we are taking Lara to the poison dungeon, this is a suboptimal pick. If we want cloth proficiency it can easily be taken after the poison dungeon, but I’m not convinced we will ever want to deck Lara out as described. The robes only provide 1 additional poison damage for a slot if you aren’t fighting poison enemies, and 1 dmg/slot isn’t actually that great when you’ve had to monopolize all of the defensive rings for a character with plenty of space. How are we supposed to get a Mac or Lohk to acceptable defense levels when Lara has all of our rings? I guess the build described works in 6 dungeons when we’ve brought Mac to 2 or 3 of those, but it’s not great between now and then for anything but the poison dungeon.
Sorry for the separate post. I’m ignoring pet defense because it’s also probably not super safe to bring small or larger pets to the well, given we can’t protect pets larger than tiny from hazards like drowning. We might be able to work around that by having the mushroom blow itself up to spawn a tiny one, but I’m not completely certain that’ll be the way we go yet.
Going from 3 combat pets to zero is a pretty dramatic decrease in power. I assumed that wasn’t on the table. It does open up the option of having Lara drown more, but as a character with a built-in ranged attack I figured the better idea was for her to avoid that most of the time.
Attitudes may vary, but I tend to regard mushrooms as expendable/consumable. Worst case isn’t that bad.
I guess we need to make assumptions about how the well’s going to be. I was thinking that it wouldn’t have too many drowning-required turns if it’s meant to be beatable. But reconsidering “Not gonna lie, this one might be tough”, it might not be intended to be beatable without being built around specifically.
In a robe, she’ll only be able to engage enemies that deal poison damage, because she’ll be depending on the defense from Poison Resistance. +1 from Cloth Proficiency doesn’t get us to safety on anything but the weakest mobs, but +3 from Poison Resistance makes it even better, while on non-poisoning enemies she’s going to need to use real armor.
And to be clear, if the goal is to fight poison enemies, Poison Resistance adds 1 more defense than cloth proficiency and works no matter what Lara is wearing.
Cloth Proficiency isn’t mathematically as good as poison resistance and better armor.
My Pretties.
If we equip Lara with a tiny mushroom and set it off, that’s 2 unblockable AOE poison damage. We have very few options for dealing with groups of mobs rapidly, this is one of the very few things we’ve seen with the potential for clearing groups.
I’ll add that group clearance is more important in non-Kamau configs. Cleave removes the need for this to some extent, but without Kamau we don’t really have other options.
The big question is whether we’ll have a mushroom with us in the well.
Agreed!
Poison Use.
Powerfull effect at a cost, it’s like Lara Corruption but the costs is only money.
Poison Use also makes Lara a VERY proficient user of ranged weapons, venom glands being one of the few ways we can make ranged weapons stronger.
Poison Resistance III: We’re gonna go into the poison well, Lara already hits like a truck, and this will give her 9 defense against poison with the robe and siegesword before any other equipment. If we’re going to make her squishy, this is the best way to counteract that.
Could you math out cloth vs poison resist 3?
Cloth resist is better on all enemies that don’t do poison damage. If an enemy doesn’t do poison damage we already don’t want Lara in combat without significantly more armor than the 1 cloth proficiency provides when wearing the robe. Against all poison enemies this adds 1 additional defense which is the main use case for having the robe in the first place.
Also importantly taking poison resistance means the poison resistance works on all poison enemies even if we put Lara in chain or bat hide. If we take cloth proficiency we are only going to benefit when fighting enemies while wearing the robe. We’re only going to fight enemies when wearing the robe when they’re poison enemies, so it’s always gonna be better to have poison resistance than cloth prof.
The numbers.
Robe + cloth: 4 def vs poison (1 normal), +1 poison damage, +2 free inventory slots
Chain + PR III: 5 def vs poison (3 normal)
This math looks wrong to me. Robe + cloth would be 1 defense vs normal, 8 defense vs poison(1 normal + 3 robe poison + 4 poison res). Chain and poison resistance III would be 3 defense vs normal and 9 defense vs poison(6 poison +3 normal). Robe and poison defense 3 would be 0 defense vs normal and 9 defense vs poison.
The only situation cloth proficiency wins in is fighting a normal enemy, and at that point 1 defense isn’t gonna do anything.
I’m ignoring the 4 poison def she already has, accessories, pets, etc. It’s a comparison of the things that would be different. Adding ten lines of ‘and cigarettes and gauntlets and boots and web binding and…’ to each side doesn’t make it any clearer.
My point is that taking cloth proficiency doesn’t mean you can suddenly fight non poison enemies, or are even at all likely to be able to do so safely. The only reason to take cloth proficiency is to improve the ability of Lara to fight non poison enemies while wearing gear dedicated to fighting poison enemies. She will still suck at fighting non poison enemies even with +1 defense, and will be worse at fighting poison enemies than if you’d put her in the exact same gear and taken poison resistance III.
Poison Resistance III
Venomous Sting II
Ranged attack is probably our weakest point. With the rotfang hood this gives us decent ranged damage without any resource cost.
Also it might have a III.
Beanstalk is really good Ya’ll. Going for that one.
D’oh. Wrong post and can’t delete. D’oh.