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Not great to be honest, I think it almost had too much to work with but hopefully there's something usable here!

←Previous Post -- Next Post→ Week Thirty-Five -- The Shrieker The Shrieker is one of those high-risk high-reward fights that populate the game, on par with a Shambler fight in difficulty. That being said, the only punishment for not fighting it here is, to put it bluntly, not getting to do it. The Shrieker would just fly away and move on. But I want to do it because of those high rewards. The trinket it’s offering has a pretty hefty Accuracy buff, and more and more of the team is becoming rabid, so accuracy is in short supply. While we’re here, I suppose I should talk about the other ways The Shrieker quest can spawn. This one is always a Champion-level fight -- the highest there is -- but there are two other ways with other difficulty curves. The first is a bit more associated with a crow, it filches eight of your trinkets and the game asks you to get them back, the difficulty of the fight there involving just how rare those trinkets were in the first place. It doesn’t have a set time limit for completion, though, thankfully. If you want to wait a few weeks to get all your ducks in a row first, it’s patient enough for that. The other opportunity for this fight actually comes as a catch-up mechanic. If you lose eight trinkets (you can lose them for a variety of reasons, but eight is the number because that’s how many you lose in when a fully-equipped party TPKs), the Shrieker collects them all and you can get them back by confronting it. Again, the difficulty of the fight is contingent on exactly what it has collected for you, but these trinkets aren’t going away any time soon. Without this fight, a lot of one-of-a-kind trinkets (Heads, music boxes, Crimson Court trinkets, Shieldbreaker trinkets… the list goes on) would be lost forever. But again, at this moment in time, we’re just fighting for greed. Unlike other boss fights, this quest is literally just this fight, without even a boss corridor leading up to it, so we’re thankfully super light. Even more importantly, the gimmick of The Shrieker is that it flies away after three turns, which will inflict a large amount of stress but still result in a victorious fight, so survivability is key here. Both ABC and Margaret have healing, Doggo can both heal himself and keep his stress down, and Damian is not only inherently hardier than most adventurers at Death’s Door, he also has a suite of heals once he gets too low. We’re also breaking out the Aegis Scales because this is the sort of fight to break out Aegis Scales for. They’re rare, but prevent one instance of damage (though not the effects associated with that damage -- an attack that inflicts bleed will still deal that bleed, for example), which could be all we need. If you want to kill this boss, you’re going to have to contend with a bird that has some obnoxiously high dodge, constantly shuffles around its nest so you can’t just focus the front or back lines, and has three attacks per round. Oh and almost every attack sucks to deal with. The marquee one, Peck, has an increased crit chance, and given we’re already under leveled, those crits are especially devastating. A crit also means an increased chance of the attack’s secondary effect, which in this case means a pretty hefty bleed gets added on top of all that. Two of its other attacks, Caw and Call the Murder (oh I get it) are stress attacks. I forgot that Doggo currently has a Fear of Hellbeasts, which means that the Shrieker with its dual Eldritch/Beast typing gets to do even worse things to our poor Abomination’s mind with these attacks. The last move to address is Regurgitate, and only now am I realizing how vomit-heavy this game is. If we were actually trying to kill the boss here, this move would simultaneously be the most annoying and least worrisome. It’s the most annoying because of the debuff the comes with being covered in bird goop -- a loss of accuracy making an already difficult-to-hit boss even more difficult and a chance for disease -- and it’s the least worrisome because, well, the disease chance is pretty low and the debuff can be cured with some medicinal herbs. Still, when an adventurer is on Death’s Door, any damage is bad. ABC actually received two deathblow checks on this fight, thankfully surviving both, but it was pretty close on the second one thanks to some bleed. This is the danger of dealing with a boss with multiple moves. Sometimes they just get to move twice in a row. The action economy swings both ways. Anyway, that was the big worrisome moment. The “keep everyone alive using heals and bandages and just tank the stress damage” plan worked fine enough otherwise. The only problem is that now we suddenly have to pay up to get everyone’s afflictions back under control. Damian the Flagellant was guaranteed to be rapturous, and everyone else was pretty likely to hit an affliction thanks to being two levels below the quest's expectation. But we're all still alive, that's the important thing. Now we’re back to the money grind, along with hopefully getting our two remaining stragglers over the Level 3 wall. Until then, -r ←Previous Post -- Next Post→