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.
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I quite liked the skill system in Minions of Mirth.
As you started using a new type of weapon, that skill would slowly grow as you used the weapon, with no regard to the player’s overall level, so at first you were completely pants at using it.
I spent quite a while running around and fighting skeletons unarmed, just for the occasions that my weapons would break.
I miss that game…
(I can run it locally, but that’s not the same as messing about on a shared server)
In case there’s any other MoM veterans, I played a Drakken Ranger/Wizard/Shaman.
Tripleclassing was fun, but you had to allocate how much exp went to each class, and it took twice as much exp to level up the second class as the first, and double that again to level up the third class.
(Never let the second or third class fall behind too much… trust me… )
Oh, some fans have managed to get a server up and running…
As if I didn’t have enough to waste my time on…
Proficiency then? I like those tthe of skill trees.
I don’t really like the idea of the rapid-fire being retconned to always be available, because Sidney pretty clearly notices a difference in the orb as soon as she starts shooting with it. But maybe the rapid-fire is the option on the third branch, and the first two pips are the reason her basic pew-pew shot is so powerful. After all, we’ve never seen the un-upgraded version of her main gun.
That’s how I’d interpreted it, as well. The first point on the ring of the ‘crown’ unlocks a given attack type, and then the second point inside the ‘crown’ upgrades it in some way – be that power, fire rate, sweep angle, or anything else dependent on type. That would explain why the main gun is so powerful compared to the rapid-fire; it’s a two-point buy rather than a one-point.
Between the Express Anvil elevator down to the pool, the general chaos of the conversation with Detla, being forced to run 20 laps, and all the off-screen time, I’m impressed Sydney went this long without accidentally grabbing an orb.
After all that distraction, and with the ADD, I am surprised Sydney even remembers that she had the skill tree open
Is a 1% chance to block your ass a buff or a debuff?
OK, only mentioning this because it is funny.
In Russia they are trying to tighten government’s control over Internet. This frequently results in Russian Internet censorship agency, Roskomnadzor, blocking certain resources. Every time a new one is added to the naughty list, somebody always says “block your anus, Roskomnadzor!”
-Adds “block your anus” to the International List of Colorful Language-
My running theory is that the encapsulated nodes are either
A:) the Tutorial/Help Menu for that orb
B:) Innate/Handsfree mode
C) Self activation.
The airball came to her hand automatically when she needed it. It’s the only one that previously had that button lit.
But Sydney can use her mind to move the balls, she fought Math with them if you recall.
But not the ability to activate them without using her hands.
If she could use the orbs through thought alone, she would only be limited by her ability to mentally multitask.
…And alien species that made them presumably could do all that multitasking in their head. So, it is not really a limitation for them.
Also presumably the species either did not need a tutorial or could get it elsewhere. Point-spending for something that could be just told to the user seems like it would only be useful if it was intended for random people not in the super-intelligent race to get.
Ultimate advancement , has instruction booklets separate from their games like an NES game lol.
be a real kick in the pants if the encapsulated one just labels the options for that orb…but maybe only labels the pips already chosen; but again only for that orb.
“Just start spending points and see what happens” is only recommended if you have either a way to respec, or are certain that you will unlock everything eventually…
Now imagine the orbs have a level/skillpoint cap of… lets say 30 and no way to respec….. becomes even more painful when you unlock some sort of tooltip shortly before running out of points and realize that you won’t be able to reach any of the “really” amazeballz abillities!
At one point per three months or so (reader time) Sydney will never get that far in our lifetimes.
If this tech had that kind of limitation, then at some point the earned points would activate respec … add a point in thing X and take it away from Y. Given that this is Nth tech, it’s unlikely to have such a low limit.
There may not be a limit built in to the Orbs, but there may be an effective limit built into Sydney and/or the plot. If it takes three months to unlock a point, and there are a couple of hundred points available, then that’s 25 years’ worth of runtime. Or if hazardous experiences unlock them faster, then if Sydney keeps rolling those odds she will eventually lose! (Ignoring the anthropic factor: that however unlikely it is for Sydney to survive a given situation, the worldline we see will be one in which she does because otherwise DaveB loses his protagonist and the story ends. To paraphrase Pratchett, “in a million universes, this is a very short book”.)
Storywise I expect her point acquisition to spike as the threat/danger level of the comics in general does though. Power creep style.
End of the day, Sydney is already one of the most powerful supers on the team. No matter what she picks, she’s only likely to get better.
There may be an ‘optimal’ build… but it doesn’t really matter. Everyone else just has whatever the superpower lottery gave them.
Encapsulated Nodes: I don’t believe they are hands-free pips, they might be innate/instinct nodes, automatically summoning the ball into hand and activating the right ability (if unlocked) without user having to consciously think about it (might save lives if it also triggers when user is unconscious). Having more than two of them unlocked might cause a situational priority list to pop up that the user can preset Auto Trigger Hiarachy like in the Final Fantasy 12 Gambit system. I also don’t believe they are Infinite/repeatable nodes. If they were, they would empty themselves near-immediately after putting a point in them or be empty again the next time the skill tree opens.
Shared Nodes: I don’t believe that it will unlock a combo skill that can be used if either one fo the orbs is held, but a combo skill that can be used if both orbs are held. Might be wrong, though.
Double Connection Nodes: there are some nodes that have two lines connecting them to one preceding node (Flight ball has two of them, one at the start of the faded branch and one at the end of the other faded branch; Forcefield ball has one at the end of the three-point branch, one node before it trails off; Molest-orb has one at the end of the branch that already has three nodes unlocked). These probably are nodes that have additional conditions to unock them, other than just “have the previous node unlocked”. Maybe they are nodes that need two skill points to unlock.
Fade Trails: There are some branches that don’t just end, they trail off into a fading line. the two Fade Trails on the Flight ball may suggest that it is merely “fog of war” type fade that will become uncovered as the branch gets unocked, but the Forcefield orb only has three total orbs before it starts to fade, less than the Flight orb, and the Flight orb and PewPew orb both have one that starts fading immediately without having any nodes. Maybe these are second tier grids that will unlock when the pizza is full or when all current nodes on the respective orb are unlocked.
I would love to have a picture of the skill tree fully labelled and with the different node types and connection types explained…but that would incure spoilers.
I’m betting the fade trails open new branches when the source node of the fade trail is lit.
Take a look at the comm orb in the eight o’clock position, and the line descending in ITS eight o’clock position, on the prior page https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-944-something-about-interrupting-a-colonel/ .
It looks like it was a fade, then selecting the point that led to the fade opened up a new (empty) line.
Maybe the fading trails are lines that extend into a higher dimension, and if she were an Nth, she’d have no trouble seeing the higher dimensional parts of the display.
Re: ” I also don’t believe they are Infinite/repeatable nodes.”
+
Re: “Fade Trails:”
I think the existence of Fade Trails, especially on the flight ball, indicate a set of infinite upgrades might actually be possible. Pre-lightspeed, there was the obvious limit of lightspeed and a faded line going past. After getting warp drive, though, another faded line appeared later. I suspect distance/range/speed can be upgraded non-stop.
Okay, Syndey grabs the FlyBall and is forced to chose a point associated with that. I didn’t see her use her other hand to indicate which point, so did the Skill Tree read her mind and know which of the remaining Flyball points she wanted to activate?
The Orbs do seem to react to Sydney’s thoughts, so it makes sense that all she had to do was focus on the encapsulated point for it to light up.
The only other Orb that has an Encapsulated Point active is the Environment/Airball.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-541-bubble-untrouble/
Perhaps it is intended as an autonomous function, that the point causes the Orb to respond to Sydney when she is in trouble.
When Sydney was underwater and had lost her face mask, she wouldn’t have been thinking of summoning the Airball since she didn’t know what it could do yet. The Orb seemed to come to her on it’s own.
That’s a good one to have autonomous, but the force field orb might have been better. Either could end up sparing her serious damage in an emergency.
The PPO has 3 pips: https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-659-the-greatest-challenge-upgrading/
I was thinking that the linkage between Orbs might allow some degree of use of the abilities of the linked Orb when holding the other Orb in the linkage…
After all, IF the Orbs are a personal space vehicle (for which they meet all the criteria) having to stop traveling periodically to renew your breathing mix is KINDA ANNOYING! Her Aetherium Causeway only works between known points (if it can be preset to a point, we’ve been given no indication of that); so, lots of boring, time-consuming, standard FTL flight, while stopping a few times an hour to renew the air supply…
Speculation in the comic is that the balls are for a species with more than two hands. Also speculating that Sidney might be able to use two balls in one hand if she practices a bit first.
Pretty much what I am thinking on the links too. Lets you use the com ball’s illusion as an origin point for other powers. Flight can use PPO powers to clear a path, auto shield at high speed, or maintain atmosphere.
Problem is not all the orbs have clear synergy for linking.
Since the one-per-hand thing is the biggest problem with the balls individually, I’d expect that the ‘connecting’ pips may allow an instant or teleport-based exchange. So if Syd has duct-taped one of the orbs to her hand, she could insta-swap so that she’s suddenly holding the other, inside the duct tape, while the first takes its place in the orbit around her head. It’s a little-ish thing but could have a fair number of power-stunt applications.
In particular, If most of the balls trapped in a tiny chamber of concrete, but she can teleport-swap the one in her hand for one of them regardless (presumably putting the original ball inside the tiny chamber), then Syd is more difficult to neutralize.
Maybe the pip is the safety from https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-167-sydney-beam-activate/ ?
I dunno 1% chance to block my ass could be very powerful in the right situation :p
It sounds like it could well be a ‘backhanded blessing’ type of point. Congratulations, you are now 1% more protected against Evan’s Spiked Tentacles of Forced Intrusion. But you’re also 1% more vulnerable to rations which don’t contain enough fibre. Choose wisely…
Considering how fast Maxima is / should be, she sure was slow on stopping Sydney from grabbing the Fly ball.
Yet another reason I’m less than impressed with her as time goes by. Mostly I think she acts way too smug, always with the assumption she’s the baddest bad ass in any room she’s in.
I totally get her feminism though. Women in general are treated awful poorly by a lot of men and it’s disgusting, I don’t know if I could live life being talked down to all the time.
Nah, Math & Achilles are smug.
Max is more of just generally confident.
To be fair, she usually IS the biggest badass in any given room she happens to be in.
At this point, I think Sydney was dithering about how to spend the upgrade point past the limit of Max’s patience. A “late” reminder about not absentmindedly grabbing her orbs will teach her the lesson about focusing without delaying the upgrade even LONGER.
wait, didnt the other short girl… uh, the hacker one… could read it?
what happened to that part of the story?
she couldn’t read it only see more details, seeing the code inside them. But it would be like a non-programmer suddenly seeing the code for how a video game works and trying to decipher what does what.
Krona’s powers seem to give her a windows option on hacking reality, so for this comparison she was starting at the base code of the orbs; but that doesn’t mean she could understand it, or even interact with it. Chances are if Nth tech the encryption should take into account beings with reality warping abilities.
Probably mentioned at some point, but imagine of the orbs reset between wielders. So Sydney would’ve had to start at level 1 instead of 20(guessing as I’m feeling lazy and don’t want to track down the first level up to count spent points).
Wouldn’t surprise me if she did, though upgraded while sleeping or such…
Or the first X levels are “tutorialized” to show what each thing does and how the upgrades work… But Sidney being Sidney accidentally hit Skip and the points the Tutorial forces you to place got automatically placed.
this is all assuming the skill tree isn’t something the ORBs made for Syd so she could understand it
Unlike everybody else, I’m going to talk about the blurbs and game/upgrade/theory crafting. The way I see it, most of the little piddly upgrades trend toward minor upgrades and stretching out the upgrade tree while also trying not to introduce something else that has to be balanced in some way.
I’ve usually seen the ‘wild and distinct’ upgrade stuff in single player oriented games, both because it lowers the skill floor to something manageable for PVP, or it is easier to account for things in level design. Wild and distinct upgrades that alter things significantly might trivialize a specific boss or enemy, or [i]not[/i] having a specific upgrade might make one unbeatable through some form of gating, or require you to grind out a high level to get a low level skill you skipped because you were diving head first into a specific skill chain. This creates issues if a skill point unlocks an ability.
Your own comic, by nature of being a written than interactive medium, has an advantage in that area, in that you can do whatever you damn well please since the character and challenges are written the same, and any trivialization of a challenge can be mentioned later (such as dropping a rock with a tracking spell on it through a portal) and make the characters react accordingly.
That all said, I do recall a series (I want to say it was System Apocalypse by Tao Wong) where the AI assistant actually blocked the main character from seeing the basic upgrades that did really basic generic stuff like ‘10% chance for crit’ and forced him to save all his upgrade points for the really wild shit like ‘short range teleport’ that unlocked at a higher level. Main character was salty until he thought back on what he likely would have done and agreed with the AI that he would have blown his points on generic shit instead of the class specific stuff.
passive ability to fly? No need to hold the orb?
She will always have to hold the orb, or at the very least touch it, but if it is now a passive skill, she can now fall unconscious out of a plane and the ball will summon itself into her hand.
Simultaneously a great choice and possibly the worst, provided that my assumption about what that node does is accurate. I think those encapsulated orbs are a context-sensitive automatic select; the life-support orb automatically went for Sidney’s hand when she needed air, so I think that this node would do the same thing, basically serving as an automatic feather-fall. Which would be great, but also difficult to test, and (I think) we already know that the orbs’ ability to accurately assess whether they are needed isn’t perfect. We saw the life support orb went for Sidney’s hand when she was already reaching for her SCUBA mask. So, assuming that my assumption is correct, could this create situations where the orb goes for her hand when she doesn’t actually want it to?
I’d assume the “auto select” only works when Syd isn’t actively trying to use a ball
Still a PPO pip missing from this and last comic as shown CLEARLY here:
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-659-the-greatest-challenge-upgrading/
If you look closely you can see it behind her finger. DaveB also acknowledged the PPO having three nodes filled in his blurb.
I’m just gonna say, this comic is EPICALLY re-readable. I followed the link back to the panic upgrade and just wanted to binge all the way back up. Well done, @DaveB.
this has become a bad habit- ill follow a link back… and read a couple of pages forward.
I regularely restart from the beginning when I don’t want to wait for the new page. Never gets old, many hours of gut bursting fun.
Maxima couldn’t react with enough speed to stop Sydney? :p
It is well-established that Maxima can react in a flash to things she’s more-or-less expecting, but not quite as well to things completely out of the blue (like, for example, panic vomiting onto her boots). If Sydney has one innate superpower, it is that she is the out-of-the-blue instigator.
I thought they wanted to check on a linking branch? Why did Sydney upgrade a pip without a link, encapsulation, or tree tied to it?
BECAUSE she’s Sydney… need i say more.?
Mystery Ball is a Universal Ball?
Once a certain power is selected and locked with the enclosed pip, and the brownball has enough pips. It can be used to control that selected power set.
So instead of holding flight ball and shield. She would hold the brown ball which would run the flight and shield selected. This would allow her more freedom with ball selection in other hand.
Basically brown ball runs a script and multipowers selected.
Only problem is Sydney doesn’t know how to lock in a preset power.
That’s my new guess on brown ball and the lock like pips. Brown ball needs a pip spent to be able to use a locked power from another orb that has that linked locked pip selected.
She then could build a power set up in the brown ball.
Say Fiery comet of Death (aka SMOD) to plow though massed enemies at speed, while protected and having a flaming corona field outside the shield itself
Or Submarine mode shield air comm and hentai orb… let’s her search and pick up treasures underwater ala submersibles.
Ultimate might be forming an attack ship to space hop and carry others.
Then of course there’d be that one that tempted her cause tropes and cause it would shock everyone and be funny.
The Rolling Hentai Orb of Molestation… which she’d of course alter later so that it would act like a Beholder by locking in a PPO power…
Subduify is not a word. The opposite of “amplify” is “attenuate”.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/attenuate
In many cases, the difference between those two sorts of upgrade is one of notation or perspective.
For example, in World of Warcraft, back when I played, players got the +1% sorts of upgrades. However, the way the math worked out, relative to the chances one had before, so long as one was up against an opponent of the same level in both cases which are in all other respects the same, the level 1 character would start with either 0% or 1% chance to do a lot of that stuff. If one looks at what one could do before versus now, the level 1 to level 2 upgrade was somewhere on the order of a 50% to 100% increase in capability.
I haven’t played Diablo, but I have played games like that before that claim that you’re getting some large percentage increase rather than a small percentage increase, and in most cases, it worked out to you only getting that large increase with respect to what you could do before. You wouldn’t be having a critical hit 42% of the time. Rather, you went from something like a 0.7% chance to score a critical to having a 1.2% chance to score a critical. It looks like a huge increase, but it’s crap.
All of that having been said… in most games, it’s more complicated than that. The bit I said about World of Warcraft’s opponents being the same level as the character and otherwise being identical to each other? That qualification’s necessary because in that game, the chance of every offensive action is very much relative to ones opponent. If you’re going up against an opponent who is 10 levels above you, it doesn’t really matter *what* your chance to do anything offensive is, because the level difference affects the math so severely, you’ll only hit something like 1% of the time. But even if you are at level parity, all of your offensive capabilities are relative to your opponent’s defensive capabilities, so even if your detailed character stats said you had greater than a +100% to your to hit, you could still miss, because by that level, your opponent probably has an official dodge chance that is close to or greater than 100% as well.
Disclaimer: I haven’t played World of Warcraft in years. But across the years I played it, its combat system grew more complex with every update, including those that claimed to simplify it, so I doubt things have somehow managed to get less complicated.
All of the updates that I was around for that claimed to simplify the combat system only made it less numerically complex at the previous max level for characters. But as these were expansion updates, they also moved that goal post, and by the time you got to the new max level, the math was once more pretty fiendish. Also, I think many of those updates merely made the interface less complicated. For example, in vanilla WoW, spell casting classes could learn more powerful versions of spells they already knew as their level progressed. At some point, that system was simplified. The character would still get the more powerful version of the spell as they levelled, they just could not choose to cast the weaker forms of it any longer. While I certainly did make use of that ability to finesse my spells, back in the day, by the time my mage was level 70, she had enough ice bolt spells to fill out an entire action bar of 12 keys. But the weaker spells all used my character’s level to determine if they’d hit and if they’d crit, so the only math differences they provided were the damage ranges and the amount of mana they cost.
Skill trees in games are always a crap shoot, (and I hate the ones that have a cap where you can’t fill out everything, as I am a tad OCD in the completionism angle *why I had to stop playing Pokemon games until i got that under control as I had to get everything even if that meant spending extra money on a second gameboy, a link cable, replaying the whole game to get everything I wanted, and then using cheats for the event specific critters.
hence…empty spots in table…also why some multipath games where you could only do certain side quests to get certain endings I always failed at like Mana Khemia and the 2nd and above ArTonelico games.
on the skill tree front then I need to be able to fill all the pips out. But even then I could put them into three categories.
1: waste points
2: Incremental
3: Quick road to godhood.
the third feels like its rarely a skill tree and usually a list, like collect the points and spend them on a certain stat like Okami, some Zelda games, or Dragon Quest Warriors. More of a skill sheet. Basically you can spend these points to upgrade your health, mana, stamina, or a special attack or spell. and they are all noticeably useful right away.
the first one is the one where you have to unlock skills in certain branches along side other branches that may be several things you don’t need just to unlock the option to unlock something useful. A game that did that off the top of my head was God Wars, like…I am wasting points in combat styles I don’t even use on this character because they have to be filled out to open a branch to a useful spell that also works with another combat style’s branch, like why do I have to boost both spears and axes upgrades to get this spell.
but then you have the worst, like DaveB said, the incremental, where you activate the spot and its like *you have increased your defense against fire by 3%. Sometimes this goes with the waste of points branches. I think Rogues Galaxy was like that, you ended up having to activate all these random upgrades that were so subtle I never figured out what most of them really changed, to get to the big attacks and spell upgrades.
My money is still on the unknown orb being for Healing. She’s never tried using it while injured as far as I know. Of course like she mentioned early on, having regenerative powers in comics tends to be a one way ticket to eating a lot of shit in battle. xD
if she’s been unconsiously touching it when sad or hurt it might explain her sudden mood swings or abillity to shake off trauma. Problably with a flashback montage showing that’s she’s been using it all this time without thinking about it
Wouldn’t healing not fall under life support? That would be the air orb.
There is a VERY FINE LINE between making a choice too small or making it too big, especially in rpgs, where choice is supposed to matter the most.
I’m actually working on my own rpg right now to solve this specific issue.
Is it possible that pips have different unlock.methods than just spending points? That could both explain the change in pips and provide a story justification for doing extremely stupid things with orbs to “see what unlocks”
Yet again Sydney’s confusion aura manages to confound Maxima’s five star super speed.
Boy, if she could upgrade either that or her spicy breath the world powers would need to negotiate a new weapons of mass destruction treaty!
given her stance doesn’t change I don’t think she had any actual investment in stopping Sydney, does Maxima WANT her to spend a point in a specific spot? Does she know what an outcome will be?
No, they are getting the better look at the skill tree which is what they wanted and that’s all it comes down to, how Sydney spends the point, on purpose or accident doesn’t matter and no matter which one she is doing what Zephan advised by spending it on the odd looking node.
Good points. Plus see my treatise on the next comments page. Specifically point 5).
Max is fast enough! If she REALLY wanted to stop Sydney from touching the orb, she could have caught Sydney’s hand. She is standing like 5 feet away.
I’m betting the encapsulated nodes unlock hands-free mode, which Sydney discovers through hijinks
i had a thought on one of the dots for the Comm Ball, in that perhaps one of the encircled dots might allow her the entire Orb Skill Tree on demand so that, if Sydney is preoccupied when a new pip appears she can collapse the skill tree & finish what she’s doing before spending the new pip. With the ability to “wait until later” to spend a new pip also means that Sydney would be able to do a “take back” as long as she hasn’t yet committed to a choice.
Being the Comm Ball, it seems to be the orb most likely to include a “line of communication” to…I don’t know, something like a usable instruction manual perhaps?
The encapsulation graphic looks like the connector graphic except it dead-ends.
The connector graphic looks like it combines the power of two orbs.
The encapsulation nodes combine the power of an orb with … itself? what would that even mean?
Combining flying+flying might get you telekenesis.
It’s not so easy figuring out an unlabeled UI; perhaps the labels are simply not visible to human senses.
Does she get a points reset option at level 20?
nah, she has to go to the skill priest/priestess inside the adventurer guild hall at the hub zone town.
But she’d only know that if she played from the beginning or got the booklet.
joking aside, as there were already points, and going off the hypothesis this could be a Nth civilization toy, it could be like she picked up someone else’s game and just started to play it with no idea how it worked, what the goal is, or any of the instructions as she doesn’t have the manual, or the booklet…which…
wait…what if the unknown orb is the inventory and bonuses with the manual, collections, and that sort of stuff…but when activated would only be visible to a multi-dimensional being’s vision.
I would recommend a pair of gloves until she is ready to pick her upgrade.
Has the theory that the Amazeballs complex incorporates an as yet undiscovered degree of sentience been proposed yet? The fact is that it/they “chose” Sydney when she was diving and bonded to her, but was it due to her relative proximity or something else that “attracted” it/them? A recessive Alien gene perhaps? I can’t imagine a weapon of such power and diversity being designed to bond with anyone who drew near if it’s original “owner/host/ designee was out of action or dead. Questions, questions.
yeah its pretty much a given that the orbs are sentient at this point and that they chose syd for more reasons then she was close by
Linky-link!! The original skilltree wallpaper. Also, noticing that the last ‘unknown ball’ has the two zig-zag trees, both with five slots, one with one filled, the other with two filled. Will be interested to see if either of those trees involve ‘number of balls in simultaneous use’ — if the first, 1+ slots (so up to 6), if the second, pure number (so up to 5).
Maybe the connectors somehow increases the compatibility or something? Maybe the reinforced tabs make it so she doesn’t have to hold the orb for a weaker version of the power, basically giving it a passive? Maybe the tab is like the mutators in the Grim Dawn skill trees which they can be very very bad like with the Demolitionist’s stunjack mutator that makes them into weak spamming weapons with none of the original benefits? If that’s the case then I hope she has a reassign button (I hate it when games make you pay for that. What is even the point, is the money supposed to be magic? If you’re doing it as a doctor or psychologist or whatever then it makes sense).
Personally I generally choose to not go for anything that has below 10% chance of anything especially if it’s to activate something unless the entire game revolves around tiny percentages (like DDO) or there are multiple levels of it recursively getting stronger (like Grim Dawn and Sonny). I still prefer to go for passives if that’s the case.
Well, unless it’s an enchantment or something or it does lots of damage as a bonus. If it’s something to add onto equipment I generally prefer to look for other options but I’ll still go for <10% resistance enchantment if there are no options since any resistance is better then none. If it causes targets to insta-gib including bosses then I don't care how many zeros after a decimal there is till it reaches the one, I'm still getting it even if it just wrecks the boss' health bar instead it's still worth it especially if I unleash dakka on everything in the direction the targets are coming from.