Those Blessed with Talent

[X] No, you can feel something pulling to you, a faint sense of connection. Your blood mingles with its sap, you might be able to bind whatever this is.

 

[X] No, you can feel something pulling to you, a faint sense of connection. Your blood mingles with its sap, you might be able to bind whatever this is.

 

[X] No, you can feel something pulling to you, a faint sense of connection. Your blood mingles with its sap, you might be able to bind whatever this is.

A B rank monster that gives us access to life magic sounds great. The fact that it has a 2nd element makes it even better. I'm almost not sure if it would be good or not if said 2nd element was shadow as well, would that give us the ability to take shadow magic twice and gain more benefits from it? Also kind of hoping we can learn some of those status inflicting attacks, with Little Bees low strength that would be a good advantage.

 

[X] No, you can feel something pulling to you, a faint sense of connection. Your blood mingles with its sap, you might be able to bind whatever this is.

It's another B rank. Defiantly worth it. With the monsters we are getting so far people would nearly assume we are luck based

 

I will note, we're dealing with a plant monster that's currently trying to suck out our life, while drugging us, and our reaction is, in essence, "Oh, sure, nice plant monster. Have some." This *might* not be the wisest move... and even if we do bind it, once we are done, it is likely to still be mostly-starving.

At the same time, we're not necessarily the wisest individual.

[X] No, you can feel something pulling to you, a faint sense of connection. Your blood mingles with its sap, you might be able to bind whatever this is.

 

Little Bee is pretty emphatic towards monsters, she felt bad about murdering the bushes after all. The fact that it is starving probably strikes a chord with her as well given her background.

 

[X] No, you can feel something pulling to you, a faint sense of connection. Your blood mingles with its sap, you might be able to bind whatever this is.

 

[X] Do it.

Plant Minions are boring and XP.

 

A symbiotic plant who can give us interesting whip attacks while it functions as living armor is not so boring.

 

[X] No, you can feel something pulling to you, a faint sense of connection. Your blood mingles with its sap, you might be able to bind whatever this is.

 

Well, these are some pretty one sided votes.

Because it'll be pretty big to include all of it in a post, here's the changes:

• Tiger claw gains petrifying claw addition. Not that you have the MP to use it.
• Prehensile Vines and grasping vines are learned. Not that you have the MP to use them.
• Little Bee unlocks the Life, Earth and plant skill trees.
• Autumn Shade learns poison Claw through the bond.
• ????: Learns Tiger Lily Grace through its bond and acquires bond beast.

 

Alright, once we get back into town, we should start looking into elements and what they can do, even if it is a rough overview, before we make any solid decisions on Affinity. We don't really know what the Elements available to us can /do/, even if they Affinities are probably the 'foot in the door' we need to open the actual trees beyond. For example, while Shadow might let us cloak ourselves in shadow, or maybe shadow-port, light might let us make illusions or frickin' laser beams. Earth, classically in terms of RPGs, would let us boost defense and such, but Air might let us amplify our mobility. Life/healing might, on paper, synergize well with our class, but we don't know if Death might let us provide insta-death /protection/ to our allies, or what else it might do, or what other applications there might be(bitching skeleton armies?). So, yeah, we really should sit and learn this before making a decision, even though it may be a while yet until we have the appropriate XP.

Further observation: abilities and capacities aren't a one-way flow, and perhaps learning affinities might affect the abilities of our beast partners.

 

Mmmh, seems like there is a partial character sheet update- no intelligence Stat so far for ?????, we don't know the class (and we don't see Autmn's class anymore), and it's apparently level 6 now and not 7, but some good info.

Depending on the Int the difference between B+ and B seems pretty big, especially given Tiger Lily, that's interesting.

The Life, Earth and Plant trees are really, really cool. Might be why the stats are a bit lackluster. Also, It's good to know that what one bonded can do can influence another bonded' ability. This mean we'll have to look up specific type of beasts more than ranks, really, for perfect synergies.

Likewise, we are going to need to up Analyze as much as possible.

 

Oops. Stats should be correct for 7, but I'll double-check.


(Monsters have a species instead of a class, so that's correct.)


As for the stats, Autumn's a heavy combatant front-liner whose species gets one set of very nifty tricks and a few shadow things.

The flower will get nigh immortality as it levels and two distinct skill themes.

Autumn's stats are high for his tier, the plant's are low.

 

Huh, that changed? I distinctly remember Autmn being a Scout.

Also, other detail: the 'Studied' tab, for Little bee, means "can learn but hasn't learned", but for our pet it seems different?

 

No, tracker has been learned, last I checked.

 

Studied skills are ones that need to be trained to be bought.

Were you to spend XP on Herbology it'd be listed on that tab under active.

Autumn Shade has one skill studied and bought it. Little Bee has a bunch and hasn't touched them.

 

That's what I said. Tracker, for Autumn Shade, has been learned but it's in 'Studied' tab, while for Little Bee it seems that the Studied Tab is restricted to non-learned skills she needs to pay XP for.

... I guess that would be the 'studied' part of the 'studied' tab, and the active/passive parts are skills whose XP have been paid for... Mmmmh....

Darkened, no supplementary skills tab for our pets? they need to actively study (or be taught) everything they want to learn? Also, for a skill-centric monster, a bit weird ????? only have 1 more skill than Autumn shade when it's 4 levels higher. Which is especially weird given it apparently has been using quite a bit of XP.

Apart from that, I really like how it seems that stat-centric blood bonded beasts would mostly give slight stat gains to other bonded beast as well as some tricks later on, while skills-ones do the opposite (we got quite a few nice tricks there too ).

 

Mostly as a 'let's make less tables for the QM to track' kind of thing, monsters only have base skills and studied ones. Anything that you'd get for free will usually go there.

Hmm, yeah, it's too few. Going to shuffle a few things around and give it 3 more.

Edit: There, gave it a skill to formalize the whole 'still functional despite no eyes' thing, upgraded drain and gave it its first status effect skill. Be happy.

Yes.

 

Now we need a name.

I'm thinking Mountain Peak Blossom.

 

We could always decide to call it Peach Blossom. Just to annoy her when we run into her next that we decided her name was perfect for a blood sucking vine. I think bonding it was great- that regrowth skill could be awesome when we get the exp, but right now our biggest issue is not enough Stamina. We can't use any of our new skills because of a lack of MP. That said we might want to learn Poison Lash soon- only 5 MP for that, and a moderate chance to poison enemies is pretty good.

Also is anyone else worried that Little Bees heath is ??/47? I'm thinking head back to the Inn and have someone check her out, both for that and to make sure the sleep effect is what we were suffering from there, and not poison or blood loss.

 

We do have those health potions, and we need to get Mountain Peak Blossom some food to eat, I doubt the inn staff would like us wrapping our new vine around their prize pig to drain it dry of blood.

 

I love it. Little Bee stumbles back into the inn, inebriated, drugged, low on blood, and covered in a dangerous plant. "I made a friend!"

 

I'm kind of worried taking the high alcohol content health potions when the source of our damage was having Little Bees blood sucked out. That seems like it would make her getting drunk off them a lot more likely, which wouldn't do us any favors when we are out in the middle of a bunch of dangerous woods. Still it is effected by how much game mechanics are in play, drunkness could just be a status effect that happens on chance when you have something with alcohol in it rather than having factors like body size, weight, etc. effect it like in the real world.

Well the health potions wouldn't really do anything about potentially being poisoned, or having drawbacks from low blood either. So while using them could let us explore more for the day it still has some risk even if they work perfectly. Something to decide when the next chapter is up and we see more on Little Bees situation really.

 

Health potions would be kinda useless if they didn't counteract blood loss.

 

Health potions, and conventional healing spells will counteract much anything that's not a specific status effect. They'll cure damage from poisons that deal direct damage, but not poison itself, replenish blood and seal scratches but not regrow lost limbs. Likewise, it shouldn't need to be said that they won't cure intoxication.

Alcohol resistance is primarily stamina's job. Being pretty anemic or otherwise in bad condition may pose a penalty but "you're a small until recently malnourished ten year old with magic powers that give you super endurance" is all already factored together into the single stamina number. Unless something external is changing that, that'll be used.


As for returning, if Little Bee feels her condition is bad and there's no obvious pressing reason to continue right now she will return to the inn for the day.

 

Clearly because she needs to feed the plant and show it off, and not at all because she feels tired, wants a good meal and a good bed.

 

Speaking of our plant, would we be able to learn this eventually? Seems very useful. Certainly more useful on Little Bee then the plant given its rather poor perception and perception growth.

 

That is about what I expected, my main worry was that blood loss actually did count as a status effect. Based on your post I'm going with it doesn't though, so I feel noticeably better about using a health potion now instead of going back. Still kind of worried about poison, but if we are I expect Little Bee will notice when she starts getting weaker again and go back. Well unless she gets drunk possibly, but the combination is a small enough risk.

That explains why our stamina is so low, glad to know it is all accounted for in that already. Also glad to know that after we level some more we won't need to worry about getting drunk off our healing source.

It might not be all that useful to us either, Little Bee only has average perception growth, not a lot of perception, and already has the Battlefield Awareness 1 skill which seems like a similar if more limited version of that. Still if we can get it I expect it would combo well with other perception skills we have like Battlefield Awareness, Comprehend, and Analyze, so might still be worth it. And having a another way to sense people trying to sneak up on us would probably give us bonuses to finding them, so it might even be a way to sort of get around not being able to directly increase attributes. Something that seems particularly good given that we have been ambushed twice in the last 3 updates (The treant and the vine).

 

Side thought: Drunken Master in this world is probably a pretty awesome B-tier, noted for (among other things) getting stronger buffs out of the same potion (along with the traditional "being drunk is an advantage in some ways"). I imagine they'd also have some sort of ability that would allow them to expel a cloud of alcohol and light it off as a breath weapon that cost levels of drunkenness.