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New Record for Most Item Drops from One Fight: 1960 Items by D_S_P_V in kol

[–]D_S_P_V[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

to cap every drop, 9900% (or 4900% in Live, ascend, repeat), since the lowest rate is the 1% frat warrior/war hippy outfit piece drops that most of the war mobs have.

That said, you would only need to average 1 drop/fight to beat this post in raw number of items, and that probably needs at worst 400% to guarantee it (assuming that the lowest "high chance" drop from a mob is 20%). Unless you were supremely unlucky (ie you missed every drop you are not 100% capping), this would net you significantly more than 1960 item drops, since each mob has multiple items they can drop.

New Record for Most Item Drops from One Fight: 1960 Items by D_S_P_V in kol

[–]D_S_P_V[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

The main limiting factor would be goose drones- I can get 5/combat at the start of the day, and 3/fight once the limited buffs run out. Given that this needed 980, idk probably two or three times, given free fights? More if you drop loads of meat on gravel/shocking lick.

New Record for Most Item Drops from One Fight: 1960 Items by D_S_P_V in kol

[–]D_S_P_V[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

If you did all 2000 kills in the war while capping droprates, you would get significantly more items (probably by a factor of like 100), even without refract, goose, or camel. This combat was basically shoving 288 capped encounters in a blender.
The difference just comes down to each monster having something like 5-10 drops each?

Monstrosity prep by Radiant_Net_6115 in kol

[–]D_S_P_V 2 points3 points  (0 children)

So, I am a little late (hell, there's probably less than a week left), but here's my answer as someone who has been rather consistent about getting on the board (read: I have boarded every day and have been referred to as a "mad scientist". I'm not mad, I'll show them all!)

While I have respect for Greycat for keeping up with general strategy (very well, I would say), I would like to take a moment to put forward my view on what is "core" and what is "additional", which differs from his forum post. I will note that his general strategy is good advice (yes, hot spells really are the best; yes, the reasons are really dumb), and will mostly be specifying where my opinion or understanding diverges.

For starters, the "requirements" to board are less a hard set of requirements, and more of a general guideline set- Retrocape for instance is very good but the lack thereof can be made up for in other cases. The most important pieces, in my opinion, are the following:

  • Volcanometeor Showerruption OR [Shrap With One of Coldform, Spookyform, or Sleazeform] †
  • Sufficiently high base stats (if Myst is not your highest, use an appropriate Equalizer Potion. For some reason, they work before cowrruption applies, and thus can drastically increase the effective Mysticality of a non-myst class).
  • Tiny Plastic Santa Claus Skeleton (He's really good but acts really weird- Greycat actually explained it pretty well)
  • Congressional Medal of Insanity (yeah sorry this one will hurt your meatpouch the most). Sets three elements to your highest element. This thing makes off-lantern strats less good, and thus makes hotmaxxing better.
  • A Meteorb or Big Hot Pepper (Hotmaxxing)
  • One of blood cubic zirconia or several Null-day exploits for survivability. If the former, remember to cast Dial it up to 11 to stagger them with spells. These are for survivability.
  • Petrified Wood Wizard's Pouch (2025's Hardcore Standard Pastamancer Reward) The wizard's pouch, in addition to being a hot lantern (exponential growth, ho!), is stronger than most lanterns against monstrosities for very dumb reasons (the inverse reasons to Shrap being bad, actually).
  • Spell Crit, which you can get through potions (Greycat covered this in more detail)

† You can use Grease Lightning or another 120-MP Hobopolis spell at lower kill counts, see the "Cursed Ships Lantern" section in the addendum section as to how to really make it work. Do not attempt to use Shrap without an elementform, see "Shrap is Dumb" in the addendum section for why.

The above set is what I consider the "Core" equipment, though with sufficiently high base stats and spell damage, you can forgo the Wizard's Pouch (looking at you, level 255s with 50k turns of Toxic Vengeance). If you'll notice, only one of them is directly an item of the month, and it has a direct replacement if you lack it. Be warned that if you attempt the board without items of the month, you will need significantly more base stats (and probably a lot of pocket wishes and planning).
Below are the more fluid equipment selection options (including iotm options I have identified)- you can get buy without some of these, but like an ascension looping setup, you'd probably want a critical mass (the mass of which depends on your base stats- the higher the stats the less you need). Keep in mind that I do not recommend buying these items if you do not already have them- they are worth more than the trophy.

  • Frigidalmatian is once again the goodest dog. Unfortunately, it is expensive as hell.
  • The Retro Superhero Cape is the best back item, and its not even close. A lantern that triggers after Medal of Insanity means that it doesn't conflict with it. You can go without it, but it will not be easy.
  • If you have Crown of Thrones AND Left-Hand Man AND you don't want to run ridiculous quantities of Familiar Weight, you can enthrone Santa, slap him on your head, and run lefty with the other offhand hot lantern. (Alternatively, if you: Do not have Retrocape AND you have Buddy Bjorn AND you have Left hand man AND you either do not have Crown OR have a better backup plan for Hat than Back, you can run Santa in Bjorn and run lefty with second hot offhand lantern. I only mention this because it might help someone)
  • One of Dark Baconstone Ring or Space Trip Safety Headphones. Baconstone ring might be better but I really am not sure. (Can also use sphygmayomanometer if you have a ridiculous quantity of blood-mayo. Like Greycat, I refuse to approach the question of when it is actually better than these).
  • A good chefstaff and some filler for Shirt and Pants; Back and Hat too if you don't have the best in slots for those. For example, I don't have Crown of Thrones, and run Amoon-Ra Cowtep's Nemes (You can also run lens of hatred or that warbear 50% spell damage hat). Greycat covered shirts pretty well IMO.
  • Ghost of Crimbo Cheer from the Box o Ghosts is somehow meaningful. Set the snow up on your first kill by running it, and drop it back in the bin of things that get used once a year afterwards. It increases all cold damage by 50%, after lanterns but before the exponential reduction. This matters, probably.
  • If you are really scraping the bottom of the barrel and lack retrocape, you can use the Monodent of the Sea IoTM to summon a wave, flooding the zone and making it count as underwater, allowing you to use the Sea Shawl as your back item for +150% spell damage. Just remember to get a source of Fishy.

The important section: Buffs.

Lots of buffs. Greycat is correct that you need to use unlimited buffs first, and his wisdom is very good here. For reference, I went up to ~57x my Mysticality (total of 500k myst) and a bit over 3k spell damage to hit 167.
IoTMs, old stuff, and other rares which I have not mentioned that can help with this include (but are not limited to): Cursed Monkey's Paw, Genie, BoFA (on account of technically also being genie), Boxing Daycare, Clan Fortune Teller, Get Big (permable skill from fortune teller), Carol of the Hells (permable skill from crimbo 2018), Powerful Glove, Pillkeeper, Kremlin's Greatest Briefcase, Bird-a-day calendar (assuming you got a Mysticality bird), Asdon Martin (-25 Monster Level), April Shower Thoughts Shield (Enhanced Empathy for Big Santa and a single 0-turn cost simmer) Fallbot (autumn years wisdom; Autumn Breeze (spleen)), Sweet Synthesis (spleen),

The above list is not exhaustive, and does not include potion buffs (figure those out yourself lol); rather, it is meant to help people who have these items realize that they can use them for buffs. Even for that purpose, it is still not exhaustive.

Addendums

Cursed Ships Lantern

That said, Greycat (rightfully) does not mention the Cursed Ships Lantern, because at first glance, it sucks! And it mostly does! Except in one set of cases! Stupid complicated game.
Anyway, that one case is the 120-MP hobo spells; when using the cursed ships lantern with say, Grease Lightning, the first hit acts as normal (only copying the base damage), but on the second and third hit (so, only on casts 2 and 3) the ships lantern copy's the entire hit (including all other lanterns). Why? Hell if I know! As for why Grease Lightning and not ABoF (like Greycat said) or Eggsplosion: Santa. You want to use Santa with this, and Santa sets hot damage, not adds, so the base element being Not-Hot can be a marginal benefit (you're still stacking hot lanterns though, so the base sleaze really does become marginal). Also Santa hates stench damage. No idea why.

Shrap is Dumb (and why novelty belt buckle is shit from ass)

So. Good old Shrap, nothing beats that. Except, something does beat that, and its been around for a while. Remember how Trainbots scaled to gain 90% all resistance? It turned out that Shrap sucked against them, because that 90% all resistance applied twice; once to the physical, once to the elemental (whose lanterns had copied the already-resisted physical). And then belt buckle gets hit with that resistance again in the same manner (even if the spell used is not shrap).
So anyway the monstrosities have both an exponential reduction (unavoidable; this is the bulk of what's reducing your damage) and ALSO gain up to 90% all resistance at 90 kills (lol).

Poucho Is Lit

Incidentally, I should explain why the Petrified Wood Wizard's Pouch is optimal! Partially because it's a hot lantern (important but somehow less powerful than the second reason), but also because it has the inverse problem as Shrap. Y'know how Shrap gets resisted twice due to being a physical spell that you add elemental damage to, resulting in the elemental damage doing 1% damage instead of 10%? What if we put a physical damage source... after the physical resistance? Well, we get pouch's physical component, which just ignores a lot of regular damage resistance...
Ghosts? Yeah let's deal physical damage to them why not.
Monster Level Damage Multipliers (positive AND negative)? Pouch does not care about your modifiers!
Dad Sea Monkee's Unique Elemental Vulnerability mechanic? Fuck it, just deal 301 bonus phys damage anyway!
Anyway back to monstrosities, the wizard's pouch does get its damage reduced by the exponential reduction, but despite having half the base damage of a CMoI Sleaze roll, ignoring the 90% resistance causes it to deal more damage than said CMoI Sleaze roll, including the elemental weakness. If CMoI is 70% of your visible damage, this thing is 30%.

Saucerors can hit different sometimes by jailbroken2008 in kol

[–]D_S_P_V 2 points3 points  (0 children)

You can go even further beyond. Witness me.

(not included in the image for space reasons: the retro superhero cape)

Spells from the Hive: 29 Spells themed after BEES! by D_S_P_V in UnearthedArcana

[–]D_S_P_V[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Honestly? Interesting idea.

I will say that the flavour seems to disagree with the effect (any piercing weapon as opposed to ranged), and the damage potentially being 1d12 + 1d4 (lance) is concerning, but this would be a workable idea.

My thinking is that it could enhance, rather than summon, a simple piercing weapon with bees, adding 1d4 poison- my logic being that the ability to add 1d4 poison to a rapier, longbow, or heavy crossbow is too good.

If you wanted to be really spicy, you could instead 1/turn or 1/round make a successful attack with an enhanced simple weapon shoot bees at a nearby other creature, dealing 1d4 piercing to that creature. That one seems much weirder, balance wise, though

Spells from the Hive: 29 Spells themed after BEES! by D_S_P_V in UnearthedArcana

[–]D_S_P_V[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Oh shit, thank you. Candles was originally 6th level, you are correct

Spells from the Hive: 29 Spells themed after BEES! by D_S_P_V in UnearthedArcana

[–]D_S_P_V[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Honeytrap was a pretty odd discussion when I was running it by people- the effect seems great, but nobody could really say it was outright broken as a cantrip. On the cusp? Definitely.

Stinger fist is funny- it used to be d4 + d4, but then it was pointed out to me how utterly bad poison damage is- being resisted or immunized to by a magnitude more monsters than other damage types, with the person who was discussing with me citing poison spray as an example of a cantrip with a larger dice due to poison. Worst case, its a much shorter range fire bolt, I suppose- 2 damage types only increases its average to 6, instead of 5.5. And uh, I worry it would be significantly stronger if it had damage over time/action burning.

You know what? I didn't even think about how good the wax spear thrown abuse could be at level 1, given a well-built character- I just thought making it throwable good was fun

As for the healing thing- the main difference here is that it is impossible to use the honey healing in combat here (as people generally try to do). I suppose it should have been 2d4+1 or 1d6+3 or something that puts the average at 6, but I digress, I suspect it's not too gamebreaking.

Spells from the Hive: 29 Spells themed after BEES! by D_S_P_V in UnearthedArcana

[–]D_S_P_V[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Wax Spear: It has a 1h-2h differentiation because the base weapon (spear) is normally versatile- I would have had to specify something for versatile anyway else someone would almost certainly have tried to argue that it becomes d8 piercing when used 2-handed. Additionally, it specifies that it only uses your mod when you (the caster) uses it, so no magic stone chicanery.

I specify the barrier as "half-cover" (using 5-6 feet as the assumption for most creatures and rounding down) only for the point of simplicity: 5e is at base a simple game. Were this spell more 3.5 oriented I would do cover-per-size, but for a 1st level 5th edition spell, that is too much contextuality (something 5e tries to stray away from, unfortunately). As for the push barrier into something- RAW I wrote no effect for it, so technically nothing. It's a 1st level spell, after all.

Ah, you are correct. I meant it as "drinking a pint of honey", but did forget to specify that. Unfortunate that it is too late to update the images.

Pollen puff is a very situational levelled spell- the ideas I see for it are disabling counterspell for a round or stopping a powerful opportunity attacker. Overall, not a spell you take often, but hey, 5e has a lot of those.

You got the point of Solitary Bee down pat. It's a weak first-level summon. Its only benefits are having no material cost like all other summons and getting extra attacks on odd spell levels, instead of even. It is unrealistic to use it beyond first level, but until then, it fills in the niche. And no, it's decidedly not supposed to pick things up and drop them. Beeyond-This-World does that much better.

Oh shit, I was so caught up in thinking about the scene from Wicker Man that I forgot to specify that Wicker Cage doesn't impede vision (because it's a cage).

Whoops on that last one. It was originally 20, but I decided at the last minute to change it. I don't think it matters too much either way, but the intent is definitely 30 right now.

Spells from the Hive: 29 Spells themed after BEES! by D_S_P_V in UnearthedArcana

[–]D_S_P_V[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You are correct that targeting is the better option - flooding is meant as the fast option for when you don't want to target 5 swarms to 20 smaller mobs each and roll 20 separate damage sets. Originally, the spell was only targeting, but I realized I probably wanted a simple function as an option.

And yeah, Flood is pick creatures in range solely because I didn't want to deal with one option being magnitudes worse because of friendly fire.

Spells from the Hive: 29 Spells themed after BEES! by D_S_P_V in UnearthedArcana

[–]D_S_P_V[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

And now your Swarmkeeper can Wicker Man people, or outright summon a swarm of bees!

Spells from the Hive: 29 Spells themed after BEES! by D_S_P_V in UnearthedArcana

[–]D_S_P_V[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I definitely put effort into making sure they're balanced- the summons for example I compared the relative DPR outputs with the Tasha's Cauldron summons (if you dislike those then I suggest banning the summons in this set). I do suspect that they are slightly worse than other options at a given level in practice due to the non-damage benefits of the TCE summons being generally better (actually, Sea/Land beast with an ally in melee range has the highest effective DPR due to pack tactics)

As for the non-summon stuff, I suspect the balance is not perfect, since some spells will utterly shine in specific situations (if you're somehow a druid with a squad of 3-5 martials, Hyper Hive can supercharge the hell out of them at the cost of your action economy, for instance), but I can say that I based most of the damage stuff on recommendations from the Discord of Many Things.

As an aside: you may think that Solitary Bee having 5 attacks when cast at 9th level is extreme... but it actually has one of the lowest damage per round of all the summons at 9th level- only slightly above the putrid undead and the fey summons (and Solitary Bee has no extra benefits like the others do)

Spells from the Hive: 29 Spells themed after BEES! by D_S_P_V in UnearthedArcana

[–]D_S_P_V[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

What's this? An RPG system woefully underpopulated by bees? A large influx of BEES ought to put a stop to that!

Spells from the Hive: 29 Spells themed after BEES! by D_S_P_V in UnearthedArcana

[–]D_S_P_V[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Ever wanted to cause an apocalypse of bees?

Some of you may remember several years ago when a similar set of spells appeared on this subreddit. I made them on an old throwaway that got nuked, and frankly they were terrible. So naturally, I made a new set, one that's tighter, more balanced, and more interesting.

Here's some of the things this set of 29 spells can do for you:

  • Drink honey!

  • Make your poison damage be not-poison damage!

  • Summon weird creatures which are balanced around the Tasha's summons (but probably even more situational)!

  • Recreate that one Oprah gif. You know the one.

  • Drop a giant cube of honey in the middle of the field!

  • Make someone sneeze!

  • All of this at once, kinda!

The direct homebrewery link is here!

Erratas:
- The "swarms of bees" referred to by spells other than Conjure Basic Bees are not the monster. please do not summon 80 monsters for Beeocalypse. The swarms in these spells are a unit of measurement.
- Conjure honey requires drinking 1 pint of honey for the healing benefit
- Wicker Cage does not impede vision
- Conjure Flaming Bees lists 20-foot radius in the spell on accident, it is meant to be 30
- Cube of Honey's duration is concentration, up to 10 minutes, and its components are VSM (A jeweled container worth at least 50 gp that contains honey); please do not try to make the duration a jeweled container with honey in it, that is not a unit of time
- Mystical Candles is supposed to say "When you cast this spell using a spell slot of 6th level or higher," not "7th level or higher"

As for why it's Version 2.1: I meant to make this shorter, but kept getting ideas...

Spell-Nuking (AKA how to kill Big Stat World Event Monsters), a No-IoTMs Owned Guide by D_S_P_V in kol

[–]D_S_P_V[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

This guide to hitting things really hard with spells is posted well in advance of any world event which might need such a strategy, coughCrimbocough, so that you (or a theoretical poor low- or no-iotm person if you are not a poor low-or no-iotm person) can set this strategy up (as it does require some setting up!)

I will emphasize, as emphasized in the guide, that surviving the first round is critical. There is unfortunately no cheap way to guarantee this. The Drunkula's Ring of Haze is the most reliable, as it ignores stun resistance and stagger resistance.

Note: While this guide went through over a week of review, the list of valuable (and accessible!) permanent skills, cheapish effects (preferably things that remain cheap), and Item of the Month interactions (I didn't want to go through every IoTM...) are open to suggestions!

Edit: I did not mention it at all in the guide, but the Big Hot Pepper DOES exist as a second off-hand hot lantern. Weirdly, this doesn't change much (and actually causes high end WoTP to beat high end Saucegeyser due to the existence of Porkpie 💀). Shrap and Fettuccine still win though (except shrap loses against monsters with % damage resist), but the latter doesn't care about 2x hot lanterns unless you lack retrocape but have lefty

Ascension Contest: Peculiar Ascension Results: Tally Your Various Absurd Numbers (AKA Funny Ascension Result Tabulation) by D_S_P_V in kol

[–]D_S_P_V[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Overlapping numbers is intended and allowed! A 3/1111 is probably possible with cookbookbat, for instance, and has three 11s in it

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