scream all you like, your gods can’t hear you

Great gaming weekend!  

Lobotomy Corporation:

• Control Department: One Sin, Beauty and the Beast, Fairy Festival, Attitude Adjustment
• Information Department: Grave of Cherry Blossoms, Warm-Hearted Woodsman, Porccubus, Skin Prophecy
• Training Department: Punishing Bird, Der Freischutz, Rudolta of the Sleigh, some kinda blank painting

A catalog of amusing deaths and resets: First, I got ganked by Violet Noon. haha!! nice one!!

Second, Space (“Lazy Employee”) is the information department’s resident layabout. I decided it was time for him to earn his keep, so on day 12 I bumped his temperance to IV (the minimum safe threshold to work with Porccubus), his fortitude to III, and sent him to train fortitude with Porccubus. On about his sixth trip into the chamber, klaxons sounded and I got a notification: “Space is dead.” Sure enough, I saw him laughing manically before his head exploded and his headless corpse fell to the ground.

???

Thing is, I had all the information I needed to anticipate this outcome, I just didn’t put it together. Porccubus’ EGO gift (“Pleasure”) gives a bonus to sanity, but penalties to work efficacy and speed. I saw that earlier and thought, “That’s not a good tradeoff, I like work efficacy and speed.” I did not realize that work efficacy/speed is temperance. If you are on the margin, the EGO gift will push you below the safe threshold and you will die.

I can’t even be mad. It fits the flavor perfectly.

Speaking of perfect flavor, I love Rudolta’s insight work table. If you have 4-5 insight, your success chance is low (you are too insightful and you know Santa doesn’t exist). If you have 1 insight, it’s also low (you are too dumb to “get” Santa). But if you have 2-3 insight, that’s just right! Yay Santa! High success!

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Final Fantasy XIV: Silver has retired from the static. He’s got too much irl work to commit to raid every weekend. It’s sad to see him go, but it’s been coming for a while; he was the one to drop Saturdays from the schedule, and he has to leave early every Sunday. Hope his schedule opens up soon (not even for FFXIV purposes, just general work/life balance).

Kan’s filling in for the rest of the tier, which means we get to prog both Saturday/Sunday. We hit enrage on Hegemone! (at like 20+% lmao, scam of the century. We later got a more proper enrage at 9.99%.) It’s a neat fight (snek girl!) although everything after Cachexia I is a complete blur to me. I was vaguely getting the hang of Cachexia I by the end of Sunday’s session. I don’t feel like explaining the entire mechanic, but here’s my end of things:

• Pre-position north.
• When the debuffs go out, CHECK YOUR NUMBER. CHECK YOUR COLOR. Green = go to SNAKE (NE clock). Purple = go to WING (NW clock).
• Exception: If you see Donovan on your side, he has north priority, so go SE/SW respectively. (Do not clip other people with your spread!! You have plenty of time, so give others a wide berth as you proceed to your clock position.)
• Hang out for a while. This whole thing takes a while.
• numbers will eventually start calling first wave, second wave, etc. That’s when you GO IN to bait predation. Don’t go all the way in, just be closer to the snake/wing than anyone else. 20 seconds = first wave, then 8, 12, 16 in order.
• At the end: Color-coded halfscreens! Switch sides!

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Gloomhaven: The revolving door continues! Two missions ago, newbie retired Sunkeeper and became the Doomstalker. He had one mission to be our resident edgelord, and then HGR retired Diviner and became Nightshroud. After our next mission I’ll likely be retiring Quartermaster.

Current roster:

• Achaius, Quartermaster (tank, melee/ranged dps)
• Dante, Savvas Elementalist (extremely squishy magical dps) (made more squishy by the fact that his personal goal is to exhaust 15 times so he just goes suicide bomber constantly)
• numbers, Orchid Spellweaver (magical dps)
• meisnewbie, Doomstalker (ranged dps)
• HGR, Nightshroud (fast melee dps, goes invisible a lot, supreme edgelord)

I’m not unlocking a new class so I’ll have to pick a repeat. Should I pick Quartermaster again?? I do like the class a lot. Being able to refresh my tower shield every turn is broken. I have basically only two attacks (giant club for 5 melee damage, scroll of lightning for 5 ranged damage) but I use them constantly due to my absurd card recovery. It works like this: I use my club and/or scroll, then use Refresh to gain back two discarded cards. Then I club/scroll again and use my major stamina potion to recover them and Refresh. Then I can use them again and Refresh again. It’s ridiculous.

That’s not actually why I’m thinking of a redo. It’s because with Sunkeeper’s retirement and my imminent retirement, our teamcomp is suddenly super squishy unless I pick a new tank. And I’m not really interested in Sunkeeper or Inox Brute. However, picking the same class again is kind of lame. Eh, whatever. I’ll figure something out.