Grrl Power #945 – Upgradde with a double dose of indecision
As suggested in the stinger, the lack of labels on these would make this upgrade process either especially agonizing or you’d just shrug and buy whatever. I think a little time spent thinking about the layout is probably a good thing, but beyond that, the best way to learn about it is probably just to start spending points and see what happens.
On a personal note, I really dislike skill trees in games that offer teeny tiny incremental upgrades. I think it’s one reason I hate MMOs. You spend 4 hours grinding out a level then get to buy a 1% better chance to block at attack with a shield. Wow. That sucks. I played a lot of Diablo 2 back in the day, and I’m used to stuff like the Amazon’s first level skill that gives her a 42% better chance to land a critical hit, with ANY attack. That does not suck. I’ve been playing a little Cyberpunk in the evenings, and honestly, my character is usually just sitting on 3-6 attribute points because every time I go look in the skill tree, I see stuff like “10% faster reload on pistols.” or “Move 10% faster for 5 seconds after getting a kill.” Yikes. Truly, I will have become death with powers like that.
Yeah, I know, by the time I get to level 30 and have spent 60 attribute points it all starts to add up, but the individual upgrades just aren’t satisfying. And yes, I also know that a well made game should be balanced whether spending a point doubles my DPS or gives me a 3% chance to recover a mod when I break a weapon down for parts. My point is, if it doesn’t matter either way, then give me a bunch of upgrades that are awesome, not lame crap like the ability to carry 1 extra flare.
I suppose what you can extrapolate from all that is the upgrades on Sydney’s skilltree are for the most part, probably fairly significant. 1% extra chance to block my ass.
Okay. Somewhere along the way, my master orb skill tree file lost a skillpoint. Page 181 (the first appearance of the skilltree) shows that the PPO starts with two pips. Somehow, between then and the time Sydney panic bought the rapid-fire upgrade, I either messed up my master file or just forgot to update it, so either the PPO should have three pips, or I need to go retroactively remove the second pip and leave the PPO with two after the panic buy. I’ve decided that Sydney gets a free power, partially because it’s less work than fixing every page with the skilltree, but mostly because I think it’d be funnier that Sydney didn’t realize she has a third attack type, and the power she thought she bought was already unlocked. Also, I like Sydney, so why not give her a new toy to play with? I do need to go update the skilltree since she bought the third power though. I’m sure that will happen any day now.
I decided this after the last page went up, and didn’t have any time to update the text on this page, but if you look behind her finger in panel, you can see the third pip lit up. I guess she’ll realize it at the most amusing possible time, hopefully in the near future.
The new vote incentive is up! Some of you got sort of invested in Lapha and Garamm, so her she is testing out her new duds. I don’t know if or when they’ll show up in the comic again, (probably more a question of ‘when’) but we’ll have to see if she got any other options besides the tail. Personally I’d go for retractable, venomous fangs, but presumably if you get those, you also have to get a special upgraded pancreas or liver or something, in case you accidentally bite the inside of your own cheek with your fang.
As usual, there are a few variants over at Patreon, and as is becoming more common, a little follow-on comic.
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Poor Sydney. No labels, no take backs.
that makes every choice so much more important and meaningful, just like life.
you misspelled “arbitrary”.
Dave misspelled ‘Upgradde’ in the title line. But it is to be expected. Having a Double D (or more) is the norm for this comic.
Grrl Powwer – The Upgraddening
Or it could have been an attempted reference to Upgrayedd from Idiocracy. Now with upgrayedd (1% more) pimp powers!
This is absolutely, 100% an Idiocracy reference. The officer dude in the movie specifically explains that he spells it with two ds for a “double dose” of pimping.
I was also curious about the encapsulated nodes. So now we’ll know (maybe).
Possibilities that occur to me:
A) Could allow that orb to be used without requiring a hand
B) Could be a general power upgrade that you can only ever select for one of the orbs (which will now be blocked off for all the others when she next upgrades)
C) It will allow her to share that power with / grant it to an ally
D) Combination of A and B (which will likely make her regret not choosing shield) or A and C (in which case, flight is not such a bad option – flying Anvil anyone?)
Sorry, but I don’t much like any of those options, really. While they might be convenient, they would take away from it being Sydney’s powers and that doesn’t feel right, somehow.
Option B is unlikely as she already has a point in an encapsulated node (the air orb).
I also don’t think it would be option A. I don’t think the orbs have a true hands-free mode to them, mostly because it makes the already powerful abilities even more overpowered. But it might be something close to it, where the orb reacts subconsciously. Notice how the air orb jumped into Sydney’s hand while she was drowning and reaching for her air mask.
But remember all the way back in the first Arc of the webcomic when they were doing the weapon testing with the tank and her PPO? When things exploded her PPO instinctively swapped to the shield orb.
Looking at that page, I’m not sure how instinctive it was. She knew what the shield orb was. Also, unless my eyes deceive me, she first switched to the hentorb, which would indicate it was a panic-filled ‘get the other fucking orb now’ move, rather than the orbs doing exactly what she needed done. She did get the orb she needed quickly enough, but not before she got sprayed by stuff.
But she had no reason to go for the air orb, since she didn’t know what it did, yet it was there when she needed it.
I missed that she already had an encapsulated orb. Oh well. Good critique of these ideas otherwise.
Option F: The encapsulated orb gains a higher-than-baseline degree of damage immunity [no idea how they’d test for this]
Option G: Unlocks more upgrade options for the orb that are initially hidden [not that the upgrade diagram needs to get any more complicated]
But we shall see… Maybe.
Going back, I noticed that on the green orb the encapsulated option is already chosen.
Which should disqualify B as a problem
“B” is not possible, since the life support ball has the encapsulated node selected.
Which argues it may be hands-free…
or, more likely, auto-activate.
Yeah, that explains how it jumped to her hand when she lost the bubble underwater.
I’ve suspected A for a while.
Maxima, you can catch bullets. You couldn’t have stopped Sydney from grabbing that orb?
Well, I suppose she isn’t exactly worried about the condition of those bullets after she catches them, but still. I mean, she was able to grab Hench Wench before she portaled easily enough.
I was just going to comment: Another incident where Maxima’s super reaction time isn’t really super at all. I wonder if she’d actually be able to catch any bullet if she’s not already waiting for the trigger to be pulled.
I’d say it is a ‘neccessary’ plot twist.
Even if she has to be ready and waiting for a fast reaction, like you stated,
she had time enought to say: ‘Wait Sidney! Don’t…!’ before contact.
So I would expect some movement if not an intercept.
And talking is a Free Action.
Almost any action by Sydney is the predictability equivalent of fear vomit.
Without necessarily meaning to, I think you’ve hit on the most likely explanation. Maxima did have time to start telling Sydney to wait – which shows that she’d already (subconsciously?) decided to stop her verbally rather than physically.
If her reflex was to go for the physical stop, then she’d have been there. And perhaps several eardrums – or even bones – would not, so her (trained) reflex is towards the verbal in situations where the level of imposed hazard doesn’t match the hazard level of a speeding response. But depending on the mechanism of her speeding, it may not be compatible with understandable speech. If she effectively overclocks herself relative to the external world, then at any useful speeding factor her speech would be shifted to much higher frequencies and probably outside (Baseline Human) hearing range.
You’ve probably struck on it here. From what little I know of military conduct, that kind of physical interrupt is something that’s just Not Done, especially as the situation is not taking place in combat or other sort of mortal peril. Or at least, Not Done from Officer to Enlisted. Even if Maxima might have wanted to, she’s not crossing the line from verbal to physical unless lives are in immediate danger from Sydney touching the orb.
I refer you to the “fear vomit” scenario
I seem to recall it having been explicitly stated that Maxima only caught that bullet because she was expecting it, and had allocated her power accordingly. If she wasn’t expecting it, not only would she not be able to catch the bullet in time, but she probably wouldn’t even know to allocate her power differently until after the bullet hit.
I was thinking the same thing. If nothing else, she could have dashed between the two of them. She wouldn’t need to go full speed on it either, which is good because she’d likely want some of her power into defense to block the inevitable Sidney freakout swing.
Not because she thinks Sidney can hurt her, but rather because if Sidney hurts herself punching Maxima in the face as she swings wildly in surprise, maybe just MAYBE she’ll learn better than to instinctively swing at anything mildly surprising.
Maxima balances her ‘points’ between several attributes. It’s quite possible that while she’s in a ‘safe’ location she allocates points away from super speed for comfort.
Not knocking the author as many have this problem, but I don’t think Dave likes the fact Max has super-speed as it interferes with the plot to much. It’s good for grandstanding and fights, but fixes too many “comedic moments” to let Max use it freely. Really, she’s too powerful for her to let these situations happen.
Same as Sups; if he can end fights just by letting the bad guy punch him without moving with the punch, there wouldn’t be a need for any fights to occur. Villain hits him and shatters their fist = end of fight.
Or, just maybe… The endless droning on deliberating about skillpoint allocating between, let’s face it, übernerds put her in Zoned Out mode… Which isn’t a good thing when ADD Sydney has the speed of a sneaky toddler when it comes to thoughtless moves like this.
Maxima may be super-super, but she’s still human… And all cases where she used her superspeed she was very much alert and active.
And to intercept Sydney she would probably have had to break the sound barrier… indoors. NOT! a Good Idea..
She wasn’t in speed mode, that movement of Sydney wasn’t much faster than the fear vomit moment
Much slower I meant
Hence the being prepared for it. Max’s reaction time seems worse than mine in most of these issues as I have to deal with kids doing random crap and run interference from the next room over faster than she does standing right there. And she’s a super, so has no real excuse. I feel like She’s the one who needs more training rather than her team most of the time. A commander needs to be more than “Me punch good! Me lead!”
Max has shown good tactical sense, commands enough respect to lead, and apparently has a lot of real combat experience/trainning.
None of which is undone by not being able to stop Sydney from touching something from across the room in half a second.
Training a walking WMD with impulse control problems is a very serious matter as well as an ongoing military operation and Max getting complacent with Sydney IS a sign of a bad commander.
Understanding how Sydney’s powers work is very important and Max should have been actively ready in case this exact thing occurred. It’s the third time, after all!
This. Someone stated before the differences between those with innate and active abilities. Quicksilver is speed incarnate. All aspects of his physiology is adapted for speed. For example, he would have been able to stop Sydney, grab a bite to eat, play a few matches of tennis and have a pedicure before anyone would have noticed. If he wanted to.
Another example: In Superman #709, Flash and Superman are in a diner. The server bringing Flash his pie tripped. Supes attempted to help her before she fell, but Flash was faster (“I’ve got this.”). Superman’s inner dialogue was along the lines of “Now that I’ve sped up my senses to match Flash’s speed, it’s like the whole world has frozen in place around us”. Speed is a natural state for Flash because every aspect of his being is in that state.
Max, like Superman and others with similar abilities, has to condition herself to use speed (active), whereas Flash, Quicksilver, Northstar, and the like do it naturally (innate).
You would think that by now she should have a lot of her power put into speed just by default when she is in a casual setting around Sidney.
That would be maddening. A five minute conversation would feel like 5 hours.
Sydney actually seems to have fairly fast reflexes for a human. She also surprises the hell out of people on many occasions, not just the ‘fear vomit’.
I am not dismissing the fact that Maxima COULD have caught and stopped her hand, but for the plot to go forward, Sydney had to make a choice and this is a ‘Sydney moment’.
‘OOPS, and now we have to deal with it!’
Also, maybe ARC-Light has some kind of power cancelling area effect when they do scrys and scans? That might make sense thinking about it. One problem with active sensors in the real world is that they radiate a lot of energy and that can really mess up stuff, let alone delicate things like small scale scans. (Think a submarine’s active sonar going off while you are trying to hear a whisper nearby) So, if they had a lot of really sensitive scanners set up nearby, it might make sense to have a power cancellation system to try and detect anything tiny when Sydney made her choice. Maybe complete garbage, but a thought.
Well, it’s been stated that there are no known ways to suppress or turn off super powers in others. (Don’t remember where and can’t link, but I think it was a conversation about super-prison.) Then again, that might be the sort of thing to lie about in order to keep it a secret.
It was around the end of the dinner brawl.
Even if you cannot turn them off entirely, having someone with such OP powers as Maxima close in during high intensity scans would likely throw the scans off. So, Max is both out of reach and constrained from reaching Sydney somehow?
Reaching, I know, but plausible.
If memory serves (and I’m not sure enough of where to look to go digging for the reference), the comment about no Power-blockers was direct out-of-universe Word of DaveB. But it was specifically related to generic area-of-effect technomagical Power-blockers, the sort that would let ARC (or anyone else) create and maintain a dead space too easily. I don’t think he ruled out the possibility of a targeted blocker, that would limit a chosen individual or group but only for as long as the focus could be maintained. Nor of blocking as a specific Power, that could provide an area-suppression effect but only for as long as its wielder maintained concentration (and avoided exhaustion). Both of those concepts have far more loopholes to hang plot points on, compared to the generic version.
Found it. #363. Stated in-comic and expanded on by Dave in the commentary.
Blocking, sure. He said super powers cannot be turned off by exterior means. That is not what I meant.
I bet that super powers give off all kinds of odd radiation, energy, whatever, that will be majorly interfering with delicate scans/scrys/general observations?
Even without some from of kryptonite, adding a mass of power into an area where delicate observation scans are occuring is NOT a good idea. Think walking into a room with an active X-ray machine while wearing a unlicensed particle accelerator. just IMAGINE the bills the hospital will send your way!
I’m okay with max occasionally not using her super speed since, while she’has these powers and knows how to use them, she’s still just a human, with a human mind and human mistakes. She could easily go “i just didnt think of it at the time” or “i forgot in the moment.”
The Rule of Funny overrides Max’s super speed.
panic vomit is the nemesis of super speed. super confusion is also the nemesis of super speed. Max is only fast when she chooses to be fast, and she was down at normal human interaction speed.
I’d think that super speed would not be allowed indoors. Can you imagine the effect of sonic booms indoors? Think Hulk clap.
Maxima uses a skill point distribution system. If she has her points on Armour, which would make sense as a default setting, then she doesn’t have the super reflexes or super speed. Also, it has been proven in the past that her super speed is not fast enough to counter Sydney grade ADHD
While I know Sydney grabbing without thinking is played up for laughs, the teams know her well enough to prevent that, and Max could’ve just stopped her. Random grabbo point assignment at this point makes you question the competence of people around Sydney a little but :D
tl;dt Agreed.
every grab is random if you don’t have labels, and Sydney has just spent five minutes showing that she gave it enough thought to be able to choose based on a semi-educted guess. There was no need for Max to redistribute her super points to speed incase she’d have to stop Sydney.
TNF the artist showed Sydney with her hand close to 3 other orbs, just pointing, not touching. This conditioned the people there to think of her hand/orb proximity as being harmless at the moment.
I’m thinking Sydney just unlocked auto-cast Featherfall.
(IMO, the encapsulated nodes probably gives minor hands-off abilities.)
Wait, so the scatter beam, or whatever we’re calling it, that she used for the first time on the rooftop against Sciona’s robot wasn’t what she bought in a hurry?
I, and I think many people with me, thought the inner ring unlocked an upgraded version of the attack type unlocked by the outer ring. … I guess this means that the outer ring instead are different attack types, and the inner ring unlocks the secondary way to use that attack type.
Old theory: Outer ring unlocks new ways of using the PPO (beam, rapid fire, bomb, etc.)
New theory: Outer ring unlocks new types of attack (laser, freeze, heat, etc.)
We’re calling it the rapid fire and it is what she unlocked on used against Sciona’s robot
Is it though? She is pointing to the node in the inner ring, the one that was already filled when we got to see the grid the first time. And then there is this part of DaveB’s blurb below the comic “, and the power she thought she bought was already unlocked.”
That would suggest the second outer ring node, the one behind her finger, is what she bought in a panic and is still unknown what it is.
Why didn’t they call Krona though? Last time she witnessed Sydney getting an upgrade it seemed like she could *really* be a help with figuring out the mysteries behind the orbs.
I thought this too. Maybe she’s out of office? On vacation? On a date? There’s plenty of reasons, but o agree that they should have called her.
She could also be about to come in in a few minutes and be very disappointed
Didn’t she figure out how to open the skill tree by spinning the orbs?
Only if a point is waiting. That apparently only happens when she dings while still actively using orbs. The rest of the time, when she dings, the skill tree pops out automatically.
Eventually, I hope she’ll find a way to close the skill tree without choosing a point, because sometimes one wants to defer these choices for a bit. Like, for example, when one’s in an active combat situation.
I’m not sure that it’s been proven whether she can only open the Skill Tree voluntarily when a point is available; I don’t think we’ve seen it tried in a case where there wasn’t.
This is a good opportunity to answer that question: once the Tree disappears after this upgrade, try to reopen it. There’s not realistically going to be a second point available so soon after spending one, and they already have (most of) the investigating team assembled to witness the results and speculate accordingly.
Kora doesn’t work for them, so they might not have unilateral power to contact her unprompted.
And Sydney can’t stay effectively de-powered in the base forever.
I noticed the finger covering the third pip, and thought you were being very clever :)
Oh, come on Maxima, you can catch a fired bullet, you could have stopped Sidney!
Anyway, we have a cliffhanger (at least until thursday).
I’m just thinking, “Hopefully someone has taken a photograph of this so they can help work out what is what, and just in case there’s a hard reset or something.”
Of course such a photo would probably then be Classified, hidden behind enough security protocols and red tape that Sydney would have problems getting to see it.
It would just be a photograph of the black board behind it. When the grid showed up for the first time Dabbler said a few pages later that it was invisible to camera’s and similar things. At least for electronic devices, no idea if the same goes for film.
granted we are on the magic side of the tech scale, but something that appears on film but not the electronic receptor? the idea that living eyes alone see it is bad enough.
also… next time before debating a point. you posed it in front of a blackboard. there is chalk on the floor. Max is really fast. trace the thing.
im disappointed. I expected every senior person, and some junior to have to weigh in on how this point got spent. Dave, you are missing a beat here. all day meetings to stare at the upgrade tree!
“granted we are on the magic side of the tech scale, but something that appears on film but not the electronic receptor? the idea that living eyes alone see it is bad enough.”
It was established early on that there’s something incredibly screwy with the orbs in general, that they don’t appear to actually exist in any way that can be artificially detected. See page 103, when Dabbler tried to scan them and got nothing at all. “Pulse echo” especially implies to me she couldn’t even detect their presence as physical objects.
Yes, it goes for film. Dabbler at one point said something about that there wasn’t really a glow; even though they all saw a glow, there was no actual light involved.
A lot of people are putting out theories that the odd encapsulated node allows some hands off use of the orb. If this turns out to be the case, I imagine Sidney is going to be dumping more upgrades into encapsulated nodes. At the very least, into Shields because that is WAY too useful to not pick up.
But I have another theory. What if those encapsulated nodes are the “infinite upgrade” skills? You can keep dumping skill points into it over and over to get the same stacking upgrade over and over. So, flight speed increases, shield gets more hitpoints and can expand farther. Pew Pew gets more pew. Lighthook can lift more things and go farther, truesight gets expands vision to see a progressively wider range on the spectrum. ??? gets more mysterious. Life Support orb now comes in random fresh scents.
Lifesupport already had the node filled in.
Well … technically we don’t know whether she’s asked for an air freshener… a nice white pine or maybe jasmine?
I do hope that they now taken notes of the skill tree as it, so that based on what ever Sydney unlocked now they can now plan ahead on where to spend the next point on.
To be fair, Xuriel does have an eidetic memory, so yes they are taking notes.
My theory on the ones that connect two orbs is that they allow both to be used when holding either
Oooh, my theory was just that it unlocked a Duo type power for either orb to be able to do
mine is that it’s a new special ability that you have to be holding both balls to use. So maybe the shield+ppo combo would be that the shield becomes a ‘damage aura’ from the outside, and blasts anything it touches.
That, or an insta-swap ability, so that she could instant-switch shield and PPO – even if there’s intervening matter.
With the ADD, I’m amazed she kept her hands off them for this long…
With the ADD, I am surprised she even remembers she has the skill tree open.
Now, I’m aware what I’m about to say may be unpopular.
But why hasn’t Dabbler offered a spell of many arms to Sydney?
Muahahahahaha, just imagine!
Or, hell, free joke.
1- Way too OP.
2- Why would Sydney TRUST Dabbler to do that? She may like Dabbler, but she won’t trust. Demon, you know.
3) Probably a bit harder than a simple cast and forget spell. Then there is teaching her how to USE 4 arms/orbs at once, which would be FAR harder than making extra limbs. (Although if we ever see a ‘future version’ of Sydney or an ‘evil twin’ version, I BET those will have a way to use more than 2.)
4) How long would said spell last and what would it to to Sydney when cast on her? (Probably something NSFW)
re 2: She trusted that “Demon” enough to volunteer having her arm cut off and replaced with cyberware so she could have Hammer Space
And from Dabbler’s view, the easiest way to give Sydney 4 arms might be to make her a succubus.
She straight up asked dabbler to chop her arm off just so that she could get a magitech prosthetic from dabbler.
For point 4, I don’t think it would be as overt as you’re implying. Succubi have a long record of subtlety, after all, even if Dabbler usually chooses to be about as subtle as a brick from 20,000 feet. However, there is also a long record of wayward lower lefties…
Yeah, could be funny. It would have to not work, otherwise too OP. But it might be funny to see Sydney complain about the orbs not working with the third arm and having to deal with other problems until the spell wears off
While we’re talking about magic, this falls under the realm of “my tech is my own”. Dabbler doesn’t share like that.
I think she’d be willing to teach Sydney once it became common for Terran mages to have spells like that. But she’d be more likely to just direct Sydney to take instruction from a Terran mage like Gwen or Zephan.
Hmm… there are bridging powers betwixt the orbs, I wonder what they are.
Shield + ppo -> shoot shields at people.
Comm + hentorb -> molest in stereo at range.
I was wondering if the points in the outer circle of the fire options are the actual fire mode, and the inner ones an upgrade for that mode. i guess that was a wrong guess and Sydney has like 3 types of fire beams all along and neither she or everyone else realize that.
I really hope it’s a wide aperture beam, I love those
Ps: I was also really curios about what that universal branch actually does
So wait… She already unlocked afterburner mode for the fly ball first, then she unlocked FTL travel the second time, and now the new branch. What’s conceivably the upgrade at that point?….. Stealth flight?!!!
stargate manufacture, portal gun (along with glados), free standing portals, the ability to enter fictional worlds (Sydney geeking out and Dave being sued), teleportation, transporter beams, etc.
DaveB only gets sued if he doesn’t get permission for Sydney’s visits first. And even then, I think copyright law generally allows ‘quoting’ if the use is minor and sufficiently attributed or otherwise recognisable (as in previous ‘imaginary’ appearances of Wolverine and Batman).
A scenario: Sydney tries to gate into another universe, is there for just long enough to recognise a few landmarks from one of the Big Two before a recognisable dimension-travelling character tells her to clear off, and she decides to visit the Wearing the Cape universe instead. That’s probably little enough Marvel or DC to fall within the ‘quoting’ exemption. And given that Marion G. Harmon sent Astra to Sydney’s world for an episode in Team-ups and Crossovers*, he presumably has no objection to a return visit.
* The series is recommended, but definitely start from the first book rather than jumping to that one. Things will make far more sense!
as someone who has listened to a lot of Lawful Masses, I’m well aware of fair use. 1. rule of funny. 2. fair use is complex even in the short version. Most often Fair use is determined by lawsuit. Sydney could probably visit any number of worlds and get away with it. it may even qualify as fair use, in fact I think it likely is. however, it only takes one offended corporation and DaveB’s legal bills will be enough to buy a home in San Francisco.
Sonic boom cancellation, so that she can do full speed near ground without leaving a sonic boom so loud it qualifies as a weapon of mass destruction?
Seriously, at her Mach numbers, she should be mentioned by name in arms control treaties.
So many people, many of whom should know better, keep forgetting basic physics.
Action, reaction. Very high speed + low altitude = damage to surrounding areas.
When she was fleeing the squidwards, you could see the boom leaving a trail in the water that wasn’t that much smaller than the splashes from the orbital bombardment. It’s definitely WMD grade.
Maybe the encapsulated node is the help function for the node. Tells you what the other powers are.
and somehow… she either can’t understand the language or hasn’t unlocked the help function.
In regards to the Comball, I had the notion that the encapsulated pip would give Sydney something akin to an Appraisal skill, like from JRPGs and the like. Your suggestions make a lot of sense too.
I’m assuming that the idea has been floated that mystery ball is a stealth ball and the reason it’s not ID’d is because its protecting against observation from spectra other than visible range, right? It seems really obvious in a “wow I got that totally wrong” kind of way to me.
So why did she chose the single connecting point to that orb and not the point that makes it connect to the purple orb?
with unknown abilities/functions you would think connecting the orbs in the skill tree would be a better idea then a lone unknown upgrade for one specific orb?
Choice paralysis just IS.
There’s no “greater” or “lesser” extent.
Re: Lost master file.
No-Prize Contribution.
Who’s to say the skill tree is presented identically every time there’s power level-ups?
What if unlocking stuff causes reconfiguration of the skill tree the next time it’s opened?
Probably not “Why is everything trapezoidal?” levels.
But unlocking certain things can modify their section of the tree, or possibly modify the tree as a whole. Either way, unlocking new options.
U know at this rate, the payoff for what the unknown orb does will be very VERY difficult to achieve
Not necessarily.
If this point causes the flyball to automatically move to her hand whenever she’s falling, then the next upgrade puts that point in the unknown orb’s equivalent spot, and then she’ll find out when the situation presents itself.
But otherwise, yeah, probably.
I reckon the central heptagon, currently with two of its seven sectors filled, is the one regulating how many orbs may be in use simultaneously.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but the central one has three sectors filled already, and lights up as a reaction to the surrounding ring being filled. As mentioned by DaveB on the previous page “The “pizza slices” in the absolute middle light up as points are spent in the surrounding ring,”
She hasn’t attempted to use more than two since the upgrade
How would she though, since she already confirmed she can only activate them with her hands, of which she still only has two.
Except that she has 3 filled in not 2.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-672-engage-your-advanced-math-skills/
You’re right! I was looking at the center thinking it was funny there was two. But I just couldn’t place it!
Given the other guys comment about the linking branches, and it seemed that Syd thinks that buying a “linked branch dot” (as seen in panel 5 between the blue orb and red orb) would allow her to use two orbs when holding just one… found it odd that she selected an isolated dot. Even if it was an ‘encapsulated’ dot (assuming it was, but can’t tell for sure yet)
I wonder what Dabbler is doing at this moment!?
Just wait until Sydney does that “Respec” mission!
Maxima can catch a bullet, but the lead does not care about the needed large number of gravities.Moving fast enough to get in the way and not break Sydney’s hand — an interesting handicap: for the next month you can only use one powerball, as your hand is in a cast — might be more challenging.
It wouldn’t be too hard for her to simply interpose her hand and hold it there before Sydney’s hand got to the orb. It’s not like Sydney’s throwing a punch and will break her knuckles when she makes contact.
But I buy the idea that superspeed comes with super reflexes and with it turned off Max is as capable of being surprised as anyone. And while that would mean it makes sense to walk around with a couple points in speed just as a default to avoid that, I also buy the idea that having the world around you constantly in 5:1 slow motion would have quality of life issues.
Make her wear mittens the next time this happens…
That’s… actually not a bad idea, huh.
Maybe she’ll gain the ability to fly without having to touch the orb itself anymore?
It’d be a huge utility upgrade without shaking up her literal firepower too much.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-659-the-greatest-challenge-upgrading/
Has the three pips, so I think it’s a new thing that you are missing it, in my opinion the best choice would be to fix your master tree and the newest pages with an easily visible skill tree in it.
She already has prescription for mittens for sleeping. Next time, put them on when considering what to upgrade too, please.
I assume autopilot mode probably. Also Max you could’ve stopped that miss “i catch bullets at point blank range”
Sydney vomit shoes take 2
No she couldn’t have, same issue as fear vomit
On the one hand, there’s no way to know what any of these nodes do, before or after buying them, except randomly stumbling across it. On the other hand, every upgrade on the tree is awesome once she figures them out, and it doesn’t really seem very difficult to level up. At least, not yet. I imagine she’ll need to slay a god or twelve to get the last few points.
as much as sydney has used the com ball I think the flight orb is used more. (and will probably see even more use when they finally build/finish building the strike ‘couch’ that was talked about so long ago, with the oxygen scrubbers and such so a smallish team of non-flying members could be moved at the speed of Sydney with the shield up and that is pretty fast)
I love the ‘strike couch’ concept.
The oxygen scrubbers will be on the life support orb, not the flight orb
sydney can only fly others with her by using the shield or I guess lighthook to carry them if one hand is used on flight and one on shield life support orb is not an option unless she decides to go sky diving, drop everyone, or lands
Lack of labels for things like that would make it harder to choose. mainly because if you at least know what the things are, you could decide what is most useful for what you want to use each individual power for. but without a label you are guessing at what things do which makes it harder to decide on what to pick.
a talent tree without the tutorial or infobox… god that would give me nightmares at night…
My 2 cents. I think if the circle in the middle is filled, we will get an 8th ball.
awesome idea, but what kind of?
Not enough information to even speculate.