radio414

 

 

On 3/3/2023 at 11:09 PM, LordCowCow said:

 

Catchy. I like the brass 7/10

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OP Suggestion: i forgot how fun tropical fuck storm was so now i get to share them again with their new ep, here they are covering jimi hendrix 7/10

 

Saying Shiki’s name like that was a stupid slip of the tongue. If the girl had been at the van for any other reason, it would have been a peek behind the veil that he would have been responsible for, and if there was one thing Brian didn’t want to be with random strangers, it was being responsible for them. He was doing this paranormal stuff for his own sake and nobody else’s. The fact that the girl had already been brought through was relieving. Of course she had been. Who else would have been interested in that van? He nearly laughed in spite of himself when she said he could have been a Sweeny Todd-esque taco vendor, completely forgetting the assumptions that he had made about her. 

Well, she could still be homeless. It seemed like Shiki was, after all, probably the most normal thing about Shiki if Brian thought about it. Why couldn't anyone working for Shiki also be homeless? It wasn’t like this job paid that much.

“I’m driving to Taco Bell,” he said. “Until Shiki figures out how to give a straightforward instruction. If whatever this is is going to ruin my night, at least I can ruin my night on my own terms. And yours, by proxy, since I’m still paying. I’m Brian, by the way.”

Shiki was lucky he knew how to drive manual. It seemed like nobody else in the world could. There were reality tv competitions involving driving -- not that Brian had watched any, but he had been in the room occasionally when an episode came on -- and there was always a challenge involving a manual gearbox. It seemed like even in a situation where learning how to drive properly would be beneficial, people still refused to do it. That didn’t make the van easy to drive, of course. It ran only slightly better than it looked.

No matter where he was, it always seemed like there was a Taco Bell nearby. This fact didn’t surprise Brian -- he knew how the franchise model worked -- but he was glad for it. It meant he didn’t have to endure driving for too long. He pulled into the parking lot and rubbed his palms; he hadn’t relaxed his grip since the girl had asked him those questions. “Alright,” he said. “Let’s- wait.”

He had just spotted something in the rear mirror. In the back of the van, next to the TV, was an ominously unlabeled VCR tape, the kind of ominous that made Brian swear it had not been there before even though it easily could have. “Yeah, hold up,” he said. “I think this is it.” He checked to make sure the tape was wound properly and stuck it in the slot.

“When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.”
-1 Corinthians 13:11 (NIV)

---

Skipping, it turned out, was really hard. There was the expected mental effort of ignoring the absurdity of someone her age doing such a thing and hoping other people did the same, but Melissa hadn’t really put together before she started that it was basically jogging pace while everyone else was just walking. She had to slow herself back down and ended up at more of a “spring in her step” sort of gait. It was the sort of thing she still had to devote mental effort to, though, since if she forgot about it, she ended up just walking again.

Still, the conversation surrounding Melissa did interest her. Any opportunity to learn more about Prana was a good one, even if it was a little disappointing that Fiona and Kelsey didn’t have much new knowledge to impart. There was one thing, though, a peculiar commonality between Melissa’s Ambrosia and Prana that she didn’t expect. “There was a popular card game back home on my world too,” Melissa said. “Actually, now that I think about it, the whole world was kind of set around Duel Monsters. The biggest reason most people had a deck was so if you got in a fight you could settle it over the table. Not to mention the arenas, the nationally-broadcast competitions, the fragments of artificial intelligence jammed into a select few of them that granted control over the world, uh…”

She wondered if that made any sense at all to people it wasn’t the norm for. “I had a deck full of these fallen angels called Darklords. Monsters, spells, traps, fusing them together, redeeming them to power them up. I don’t know.” She realized she was walking again and pepped her step back up.

Kelsey said, “Kinda sounds familiar, but I don’t know much about it.”

Melissa shrunk back in on herself again. “I didn’t really expect you to, just reminded me of home is all. Sorry.” It was false hope. It had to be. She didn’t even like the game that much anyway. Maybe it was so much the better that “yoogeeoh” or however Fiona pronounced it was different. It could be fun to learn something new, something with significantly lower stakes than the Duel Monsters back home.

Thankfully, before she could completely isolate herself from the conversation, they arrived a That Ice Cream Place, and, as the little tagline in the shop’s logo said, “It’s impossible to be in a bad mood at That Ice Cream Place®!” Melissa was a bit paralyzed by choice, so she just got a vanilla sundae with chocolate sauce. That, at least, was familiar to her, and it tasted even better than it looked. “What’d you get?” she asked everyone else.

---

“[…]including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
-C.S. Lewis, expanding on 1 Corinthians, On Three Ways of Writing for Children

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Weeks Fifty-Five and Fifty-Six -- Grinding Up

I mean, I promised this. By the end of these two weeks -- spoiler alert -- all but one of these restored-to-twenty-four adventurers is going to be Resolve Level Five or better, and the one that we have left lagging behind will still be more than serviceable in the upcoming fights when we get back to those. That does mean, however, that I’ve got a doozy of a team lined up for the first of these two weeks.

Oh my god, of all the teams I have had to not recommend on this show, this is the not-recommendiest. Josephine is a lot of useful things, but the Antiquarian is not a front-line class. The closest thing this team has to a damage dealer is Nammo, the Warrior half of The Sisters, which means the whole party is going to be dancing around as the pair tries and figure out what they’re doing. This isn’t entirely a bad thing, like, of all the parties to be constantly shuffled around, this party does have Euryale who can slither around the battlefield when she loses her human disguise, and both Alhazred and Josephine are placement-agnostic. There’s also plenty of healing to go around, both the mental and physical kind, so we’re not dying quickly even if we can’t kill anything quickly either.

This is still a Veteran level dungeon. We’ve seen these for the past several weeks. It’s what we’re used to, so all this isn’t too difficult. I discounted in that lead-up just how good blight was in the Ruins and we’ve got two sources in the party: Junjeong and Josephine. The two of them combined frequently burned down one threat while Alhazred worked on another. We also got a pretty high-dodge team composition. At one point, the entire team dodged getting yelled at by a ghoul, and how do you even dodge getting yelled at?

And then sometimes the ghoul did that

Another stroke of luck with scouting ahead was finding a secret room, which, since this was an exploration mission, counted to our number of rooms found and let us dodge a prospective room battle. We got out of this fight so unscathed that I immediately turned around and put Alhazred in the next run.

Now, a pattern you might pick up from these runs is that whenever I act particularly excited about a team, something goes wrong and whenever I point out all the problems with a team, all those problems seem to disappear. This is a little worrisome since you can’t level out of these dungeons and I’m going to inevitably fall into bad habits, but also, this is a really good team to just clear out big enemy parties. Everyone focuses on the back rows and then suddenly the front rows are significantly less threatening. Nothing more to be said about that. There are even two -- technically three -- secondary healers to keep people alive.

Of course, when you run into a miniboss and you don’t have his natural stun counter, then maybe there are some issues. Not a huge number of issues because again, everyone can hit the back rows where The Collector will be, but at the same time, the three actions from level five enemies are, uh, they’re bad! They hurt! And when they’re not hurting, they’re healing the Collector’s health back. So this happens:

And then this:

I could have quit right then and there, but I think there was a part of me that had still accepted Alhazred as a bonus, as a gimme that we could lose since we had lost once before. This is not an optimal way to play Darkest Dungeon, especially not with the stipulations I’m using, but it is how I played. I should say, Fearful on an Occultist isn’t the worst thing in the world. The worst thing it will trigger besides compounding stress damage is the afflicted party member will run towards the backline, which is negligible with this party setup. It still sucks, but once Alhazred’s health is topped back up, he’s mostly functional.

More annoying, though, is the other big status effect an adventurer gets here.

Congrats, ABC, you’re a vampire now. I don’t have any blood but the run was basically over at this point, I was just taking a rest to free up some inventory space and got greedy with my camping skills. We got ambushed and I was immediately punished for it.

Still, these are only small difficulties, and, more importantly, they’re fixable. Next week, I suppose we’ll give that Viscount a visit, and maybe see if we can’t crawl our way all the way to the boss in one go. We’d better. We’ve only got one invitation, after all.

-r

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22 hours ago, LordCowCow said:

 

violin good 7/10

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OP Suggestion: more katie gately keeping me extremely hyped for the end of the month 8/10

 

 

is it pronounced job or job

 

On 2/28/2023 at 6:03 PM, LordCowCow said:

 

upscaled animation : / but i'll pop off for some eurobeat hell yeah 8/10

On 2/28/2023 at 11:54 PM, The Chayncemaniac said:

 

strong start with the riff but feels like the most generic lyrics imaginable like there are parody country songs with the exact same lyrics 5.5/10

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OP Suggestion: new naima bock song starts pretty good and just gets better as the song goes on 7.5/10

 

Rubber Bullies

As soon as Sibyl resolved to start tearing up another ceiling of the place, a BANG! erupted from the kitchen, and the door splitting the two rooms flew off its hinges, went all the way across the room, and crashed into the wall on the opposite side. Standing in the now doorless doorway was Vi, her shoulders heaving with every breath, her parasol extended out in front of her like the thrust of a spear. When Vi walked into the room, it was with almost exaggerated stomps, each one punctuating a spoken word. “I. Am. Going. To. FUCKING. Annihilate. Whoever. The. Fuck. Did. That. To. The. Kitchen.” She reached the door and speared it again, this time enveloping it in her increasingly overwhelming aura before wheeling around to launch it back towards a corner where it collided with one of the treadmills, destroying both of them in the process.

The whole building settled a bit, both in the sense that the only thing heard in the aftermath was Vi’s huffed breathing, with even Adler, who had strolled in just now, standing there in stunned silence, and in the sense that things that probably should have been making noise, like the continued collapsing of the workshop just a room over (or floor, depending on how you looked at it) no longer were. They weren’t making noise because they’d stopped in their tracks.

Two things happened in quick succession: The first was a resounding “Fine!” which seemed to echo from all four walls and even the ceiling and floor of the recreation room. “Fine, you win, okay? I’ll stop. Just please, please don’t mess things up too bad for them.”

The second was a message buzzed in on all three of the Moray Clan members’ phones. Adler took the opportunity to read it aloud in a mocking impression of what the fates actually sounded like. “Heyyyy besties,” he said. “Good job today, they didn’t even kno what hit em. Anyway anyone not licking their wounds too hard might be headed ur way now so get out while the getting’s good, k?” Adler looked up from his phone. “Guess that means you’re in luck, uh, Babs, was it?” Then, to Vi and Sibyl, he said. “Anything else catch your eye that needs doing? And yes, I remembered the shopping trip. I may be lazy, but I’m the honorable sort of lazy.”

Soft Power

Caesar stared at Override as he received the new treaty as though he were trying to wring out all the possible implications of the latter’s pronunciation. “I feel as though I should yell at you,” he said. “I want you to know that, regardless of your intentions, I feel very disrespected right now, not just that, but all these things we have discussed today. However, because I recognize your intentions as misguided at worst, I will not subject you to some of my… darker impulses. I also just want to make things clear: I know the reason your boss sent you to me last.

“He’s a loose cannon. Caesar needs to be held in check.” He said it in falsetto, sounding nothing like Director Sekelsky, though intentionally so. He coughed a few times before his voice was back to normal. “It’s social pressure is what it is. I know what happens when too many lines are crossed. We’ve all heard the stories or seen the remnants of battlefields before the construction crews come in and build everything back up again. If even one of them -- Ophiuchus, who I respect, or The Fates, who I despise -- were not on this list, I probably wouldn’t on principle. But I’m playing by the rules here, you see?” He opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out a fountain pen.

He didn’t sign it yet, though. He thought better of it. “At the same time, you were the ones proposing payment, weren’t you? How about this: Legion?” He motioned with his free hand and Legion shut down the projector, turned the lights back on, and came over to his side. “You are going to carry some of Legion around, that’s all. Just give me a few extra eyes for a day or so, how does that sound?”

Caesar opened up a different drawer on his desk and replaced the pen with a pocket knife, with which he pricked Legion’s index finger and guided his hand across the remaining dotted line of the signatories section. “I’m offering this to you willingly,” he said. “This is my mark, take it as you will.”

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OOC

 

 

 

On 2/25/2023 at 9:03 PM, LordCowCow said:

 

the video description says why a miku concert on giving day is significant but not who the vocaloid on stage is

nor did said vocaloid actually do a lariat like if she's not knocking another virtual singer to the ground what's the point

i feel lied to 7.5/10

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OP Suggestion: bonus dry cleaning as a follow up to one of my favorite albums of last year 7.5/10

 

The girl didn’t react how Brian expected. She was jumpy but not in that weird druggie sort of way, and while she did accept the offer of food instead of money, she didn’t do any of that “God bless you, sir,” stuff. She kind of laughed and mumbled, and Brian could only stare. Maybe he just didn’t understand women. This one got out of the way, so he went to the driver’s-side door, climbed in, and surveyed the scene.

Shiki’s camper van was just as much a run-down piece of junk on the inside as it was on the outside. There were still dishes in the miserable little sink, for one, and he was pretty sure the interior of the mini-fridge still smelled of cheese. Either way, he didn’t want to open it and check. The purple shag carpet in the back by the bed had seen better days, and the less said about the state of the microwave the better. At least all the stuff for actual jobs was there -- flashlights, cameras, a spirit box, the works. Brian wondered what the girl would think about all that. It was a weird image thing, would she think he lived like this? Would she think the only thing he did for fun was watch old VHS tapes on an even older television set? It didn’t matter, Brian thought. He wasn’t about to apologize for Shiki’s mess, especially to some girl he was driving to fake Mexican tacos before whatever job Shiki had in mind.

He found the keys in their usual hiding place and rolled down the window with the little hand crank. It always took a bit more effort than he expected, but he managed. “You getting in?” he said, looking at the girl through the mirror. “Just look out for the door, it doesn’t close right unless you really slam it.”

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Week Fifty-Four -- The Brigand 12-Pounder

The wild whispers of heresy roused the rabble to violent action. Such was the general air of rebellion that even my generous offer of gold to the local constabulary was rebuffed. To reassert my rule, I sought out unscrupulous men skilled in the application of force. Tight-lipped and terrifying, these mercenaries brought with them a war machine of terrible implication.

I’m starting to think this Ancestor guy isn’t a good dude.

Really, the hardest part of this week is just finding four adventurers who haven’t leveled out of Veteran-level dungeons and can also reliably deal with the Fuseman. One of those is an obvious choice, maybe a second at a push, but the rest? Well, here’s what I ended up with:

I would not say that this is a reasonable party. Doggo is priced into transforming if he wins the speed roll, which is probably fine with Sethera and Margaret there to help lower stress, but on the other hand, that’s still not a great look going into one of the game’s longer boss fights. Margaret is also the primary healer here, which we’ve managed before, and should be fine as long as we take some extra food, bandages, and antivenom. Dismas is the key holding everything together. The bandits the 12-Pounder summons might be tougher than the 8-Pounder’s but they’re still bandits, which the Highwayman is really good at dealing with.

This is the only fight worth talking about in the lead-up. Sure, there was some other stuff involving a ghoul and some dogs that might have been threatening, but the party is secretly all damage dealers, so it wasn’t much of a threat. This one, though, exposes a slight problem with the build, which is if Dismas does go first and shuffle to the front, the party only has Margaret to deal with the back lines. I wouldn’t call that the reason we suffered five critical hits here, especially since the Batteries seemed more interested in blighting our team, but that meant Margaret had to focus on healing a little more than she should have for such a routine fight. We weren’t ruined or anything -- our equipment is too good for that -- but things did get weird for a second there.

As mentioned before, the bandits this thing summons are tougher. You’ll notice, for example, the Fusilier is stealthed like all the other Veteran-level Fusiliers. It also adds the Bloodletter to its pool of possible summons, which can definitely add some problems. But that only works when the 12-Pounder summons more than just its Fuseman, and I regret to say that the reason this fight isn’t more interesting is that, for three turns in a row, it did just that.

The Outlaw Fuseman is not a tough enemy. It’s not designed to be. It’s supposed to always go last and fire the cannon, soaking up damage for the real threat of the boss fight. But when the party is being buffed by Sethera playing music, the proper trinkets, and rabies(?), the party had no trouble managing it turn after turn. The Abomination isn’t technically recommended for this fight because of how grindy it can get, and the stress of being a beast does add up, but by the time Dismas landed the finishing blow on the cannon, Doggo had only gotten up to, like, 50 Stress -- well within acceptable parameters. 

There’s one final surprise the game threw at me this week. I was debating whether to save this for next week’s post or just throw it up now, but it’s too interesting not to share now.

Yes, sometimes the game will be extra nice to you and let you bring one adventurer back from the dead. Normally this is an opportunity to get back a hero with some really nice quirks you lost to a fatal misplay, but here it’s even more valuable. Here, we get back our one (1) Occultist we lost earlier. Now, coming back from the dead is a bit traumatic, so Alhazred’s equipment and skills are all reduced to level one, and he does come back at the level he died at, so he’s severely under-leveled compared to everyone else now, but he is worth grinding for. Everyone is.

See you next week for grinding,

-r

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Estellise managed to kill the eye with her second shot. The plan had worked, which meant there was just one more and a whole load of zombies left to go. They also had to deal with the consequences of his actions. Successfully getting the attention of the zombies meant they were now nearly on top of him and Lana. As the one nearest him lunged forward, Chris instinctively dropped back, his magic string at the ready. It unfurled a little, and he saw it still hanging in the air,  but he hit his heel in the fog and fell onto his back, and the zombie fell on top of him.

For some reason, Chris’ mind went to think of that time he fought Leo outside of the Drooling Dragon, how Chris had ended the fight with a kick to the unmentionables that his opponent had only just avoided. The same trick wouldn’t work on a zombie, Chris thought. A zombie wasn’t about to remove its deadened fingers from their grip around his wrists, trying as hard as it could to pry Chris’ sword arm out of the way of his neck and other fleshy bits. He tried anyway, but it was nothing doing. Maybe if he had boots enchanted for strength instead of speed or even just those sabatons he’d seen knights wearing. That was something he could steal, right? And just get those enchanted instead?

What the kick did do, though, was shift the zombie in a way that he could move his off-hand again, and actually pull on the spool. He teleported to the spot he’d left the string, but he hadn’t accounted for position and fell on his back again. At least the ground was soft enough to be just a “hurt” sort of fall instead of anything serious, not that he had time to rate the pain as he scrambled to his feet. The zombie was still pawing at the fog where Chris had been, not knowing what had happened there, and Chris was tempted to give the thing another kick just for good measure. He thought better of it, and instead just ran up and chopped its head off.

Chris looked over at Lana who had just finished dealing with her own zombie, then looked at what Lana was looking at. All the remaining zombies were now bearing down on the two. “Oh,” he said. But he tried to calm down. “Uh, hey, that’s just -- one… two… -- what, two each between all four of us? And the eye, which is the most important part, but, you know, progress.”

 

For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come.
-1 Timothy 4:8 (NIV)

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After bidding Rei farewell, Melissa returned to the group. Nobody really noticed her coming back, but she didn’t mind. It gave her more time with her own thoughts for a bit more elaboration on what exactly it was she wanted. She didn’t want to just figure out her limits while in the middle of a fight. There were ways she could find some of them without being in a life-threatening situation (or a simulation of one). Smaller things, sure, but, like, now that she was more used to her sphere of influence, did she need to see where she was spawning an angel or could it be behind a wall? Could she learn to stand in a way that she didn’t fall over when going under? And movement, how long was that going to take to get used to? She could start that right away, but that would mean drawing attention to herself.

Well, everyone was moving out, saying goodbye to Aduain and Grigoriy who were splitting off and going their separate ways, but they were still talking amongst themselves. If she was going to do anything, she had to do it now. It was such a childish thing, though. Like, yeah, even if she wasn’t the youngest member of their squad (though in fairness, had anyone even asked?) she certainly felt like it, but that didn’t mean she had the demeanor for it. It was practical, but nobody would be able to understand why.

She took one step, then another. It felt normal to walk. It felt normal to just walk alongside everyone else to the nearest ice cream place just a couple blocks away from the arena. But that wasn’t going to get her home, was it? Really, normalcy was just going to shift her perception of home to Prana, and that was another can of worms Melissa didn’t want to open. She didn’t want “Ambrosia” to become just a nebulous goal with an ironically divine name. She didn’t want to forget Gabby or Jun or Elizabeth or anyone else, even if she had somehow managed to make new friends in the meantime.

So Melissa stopped walking. It was one more bit of tension added to the pile of all the other things she was trying to manage on Prana, but no matter how she looked at it, she had to do the best with what she had. It meant being more the person everyone expected her to be, but parts of those fictional Melissas weren’t so bad, were they? Melissa the conscript, Melissa the summoner, Melissa the celebrity… The weight on her shoulders was still there, but the realization lightened her load just a little bit, and she turned her next steps into a purposeful skip.

Even in his younger years (and, at the ripe age of twenty-six, those years were certainly far behind him), Brian had never been the type of person to run around on a playground going up and down a four-foot slide for some petty amusement. Now, he just trudged across the mulch lot in the middle of Dagen Park to the asphalt one on the other side, not even paying the jungle gym any mind at all. His hand instinctively reached for a pocket on the inner left side of his coat and came up wanting, cigaretteless. God, he thought, cold turkey was the worst way to go, but he also had to prove to himself the value of his own will. He could stop this if he wanted. Just as he would have stopped going down those stairs a month ago.

He could have taken up a different vice. No, perhaps his new vice was whatever this new nonsense was. It certainly would explain why he was enduring the cold such as it was. It wasn’t even raining, which would have given a reason for the miserable weather. Instead, the weather was just miserable of its own accord. Brian jammed his hands back in his pants pockets and shrunk further into his coat. Only just a little bit further.

Shiki had directed him to the van like Shiki always had, even if this time it had been somewhere other than just outside his house. Maybe the heat was fixed this time, Brian thought, and he could experience some semblance of sanctuary before committing himself to whatever ineffable task had been given to him, but he wasn’t holding out much hope. The van actually looked worse than how he remembered it, not helped by the fact that it had apparently attracted a loiterer in the meantime.

Brian had always assumed the reason Shiki lent him such a shitty mode of transportation was to avoid such attention. If you saw a nearly inoperable car you didn’t really care what was inside it, he figured. Even if it were easier to break into, the contents surely wouldn’t be worth the effort. And yet, as he stepped onto the concrete and shuffled even closer, he could make out someone poking around the van. They had to be the desperate sort, then. His hands balled into fists in his pockets. It wasn’t that he was about to fight some vagrant over something that wasn’t even his to lose, but it put him in the right frame of reference for what he had to do next.

“You looking for money or something?” Brian said. “I’m not gonna fund a drug habit or anything but I can buy you something from Taco Bell or whatever I guess.” He pointed at the van. “I am going to need to get into that, though.”

source

Quote

You can reveal this card in your hand; your opponent randomly chooses 1 card from your entire hand, then you discard the chosen card. Then, if the discarded card was not "Danger! High Voltage!", Special Summon 1 "Danger! High Voltage" from your hand, and if you do, draw 1 card. If this card is discarded: You can target one "Danger!" monster in your GY, except "Danger! High Voltage!"; add it to your hand, then dicard 1 card. You can only use this effect of "Danger! High Voltage!" once per turn.

my psct-fu is out of date since i haven't made a yugioh card in a few years but sometimes you relisten to a banger song and remember that there's a yugioh archetype with a similar name and while you want to make a shitpost but also you want to put some effort into it and make it look nice. that's not just me, right? for the stats i just stole from danger! chupacabra since the effects are similar.

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Weeks Fifty-Two And Fifty-Three -- The First Champion-Level Dungeon

I was going to make a crack at how the title technically isn’t true thanks to last week’s shenanigans, but it actually is true because Wolves At The Door (I got over myself thanks for asking) was a Darkest-Level quest, not a Champion-Level, a distinction that doesn’t actually matter that much outside of experience gained but means you get this rambling sentence instead. Many of these adventurers are still woefully underprepared for this step-up in difficulty, but, like I said last week, the game isn’t giving us much of a choice anymore.

I chose The Cove because it was the easiest of these quests on offer in that it was short and of the Scouting type, which meant we’d have to see fewer rooms and, therefore, take fewer fights. I mean, hallway fights in the Cove are spooky, but its Champion enemy is also the least annoying of the four, so it’s a give-and-take there. The party is pretty solid too. Both Paracelsus and Amani are stellar in the Cove, Euryale can both manage The Goliath’s stress problem and stem the bleeding we’re going to experience, and The Goliath, well, he hits things really hard.

Because things have to go wrong immediately, we encounter the Champion-level enemy in our very first fight. Meet the Squiffy Ghast, a fiddler who is going to stress out the party to no end. The biggest gimmick when encountering it is its movement. It has two moves, one that shunts it to the enemy’s front line, and one that has it make a full retreat to the back, not only changing what moves can even hit it, but what moves the enemies can do. You’ll notice in this screenshot that it’s also pretty hardy at 53 health.

That being said, this fight is fine. I know I was doomsaying things for a second there, but the snails are manageable through a combination of Amani’s ability to pierce their armor and Paracelsus’ ability to inflict a DOT that’s over half of their health. The real annoyance comes in the second fight.

Guess who’s back? That’s right, after retreating to the Courtyard for so long you might have forgotten, the Crimson Court is slowly creeping its way back into the main game, and they insist on stressing out The Goliath if it’s the last thing they do. Two instances of Maddening Whine cause his stress to skyrocket, and some ill-timed misses let them get The Thirst off. I didn’t pack any blood, because of course I didn’t, but that’s not a concern in a short dungeon. What’s more a concern is what happens next:

Like the Flagellant (and The Sisters, but that’s another Marvin Seo original and not part of an unmodded game), The Thrall only has one outcome when he reaches 100 stress. In some ways, it’s even a positive, in that his damage nearly doubles and he yells things like “NONE ARE SAFE FROM ME!” But he also has one of the most debilitating status effects in the game now: he’s literally berserk. Frequently -- like, fifty percent of the time -- The Goliath is going to smack a random party member for a good chunk of damage. The only blessing here is this doesn’t take up his attack for the round. If I were in a riskier sort of mood, I’d consider sending a berserk Thrall into a dungeon by his lonesome, but that’s for a different save where we could get more than one.

What happened next was probably inevitable. Between The Goliath, these new and improved enemies, and Euryale focused more on calming The Goliath back down than actually doing her job healing the rest of the team, both she and Paracelsus get put on Death’s Door, and that’s where I had to call it. If you look at the map, we weren’t scouting very much and still had to clear at least two more rooms. It wasn’t going turn out well no matter how you looked at it, so retreat was the best option left. I didn’t even wait to clear those remaining groupers, I just up and left. Another Cove expedition failed, then. That place truly is cursed.

To drown my sorrows I went back to the Veteran-level quests. Thankfully, the game had populated one in the Weald, so completing this one sets up a fight with the Brigand 12-Pounder for next week. This party is pretty synergistic. Yui can get through a Giant’s HP bar ridiculously fast and benefits from Joan’s camping skills, while the rest of the party is a perfectly serviceable mark makeup.

See, why can’t the Cove have fights like this? Where everything just dies in one hit and nothing hits for that much damage? I mean, I know the reason, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be wistful about what we’re about to leave behind.

Even this isn’t an issue. it’s the most threatening fight the game can throw at this level, but between Joan and ABC doing increased damage to anything Junjeong marks and Yui doing massive damage already, it’s not a problem at all. With a camping log, we can even ignore all the stress damage that crone would otherwise do to us. I’m going to miss this.

But! We can only move forwards. The Brigand Pounder will likely level up most of our remaining level fours, and after that, we’re probably going to either start preparing for the Darkest Dungeon or take care of this Curse problem by preparing for the Viscount. Both prospects are equally intimidating.

-r

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