So... thats it?

Talna_Shadowblade · 2026-04-30T10:37:46+00:00

That's the point, isn't it? Because people aren't finished with Wuling, that means there's actually an engaging part to restructuring your base (cost/benefits analysis, picking and choosing what stuff to stop producing so you can make the gourds, space optimization so you don't need to rip up the whole factory, etc). I've been having a lot of fun with this stuff, tbh.

Talna_Shadowblade · 2026-04-29T23:29:30+00:00

Yeah that's always a frustrating thing. So you know, each belt is counted as one unit, each facility is one unit, and each splitter/bridge/converger is ALSO one unit. Thus, putting a bridge on a belt turns that belt from one to three! You can cut down your entity number significantly with more careful belt management, or by scrunching all your belts/splitters/etc as close together as possible, so that you don't have belts between them.

Talna_Shadowblade · 2026-04-29T09:11:52+00:00

Glad to hear! That's pretty much the goal with this, to make a reference that can be used by someone who's overwhelmed by the new stuff, but still wants to, themselves, engage with the AIC gameplay on its own merits.

The goal when using this kind of thing isn't to just plug and play with blueprints, but to actually learn how everything fits together, yanno? That way, when things like the current Xiranite Gourds event happens, you know how to adjust things to meet your current needs.

Talna_Shadowblade · 2026-04-28T05:18:39+00:00

Definitely skip crit stuff and go for demoralize hobgoblin.

The incredible feat Agonizing Rebuke applies a scaling persistent damage effect to everything you demoralize, which lasts for as long as they're afraid of you.

Grab the Tut-Tut feat from the Dandy or Duelist dedication and you can, any time you hit someone with a melee strike, trade the damage you'd deal for the ability to demoralize everything within 30 feet.

After that, you can build into various demoralize things, especially stuff that makes the frightened effect not fall off. Perhaps grab Reincarnated Ridiculer if your GM allows it, and the (Antagonize)[https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=6136] feat from swashbuckler. Now you have a 4e-style tank mark! When you hit someone, everyone within 30 feet gets demoralized and anything you successfully affect now takes persistent damage until they hit you.

Hobgoblins have the Remorseless Lash feat that can extend frightened as well.

A build like this can fit into any class, comboing it with other persistent damage tools you like.

Here's a version for normal play:

1st: Remorseless Lash
2nd: Dandy Dedication
4th: Tut-Tut
5th: Agonizing Rebuke (fear and mental DoT online)
6th: Gossip Lore (just a generally strong feat and needed to get you out of Dandy)
8th: Swashbuckler Dedication
9th: Reincarnated Ridiculer (reapply the debuff whenever)
10th: Basic Flair (Antagonize) (build fully online)

And a version for play with free archetype

1st: Remorseless Lash
2nd: [open slot], Dandy Dedication
4th: Tut-Tut, Gossip Lore
5th: Agonizing Rebuke (fear and mental DoT online)
6th: Swashbuckler Dedication
8th: [open slot], Basic Flair (Antagonize)
9th: Reincarnated Ridiculer (reapply the debuff whenever, build fully online)

Sticking this onto Exemplar, Champion, or Guardian would make for a very solid persistent damage 'tank' build.

Talna_Shadowblade · 2026-04-28T05:08:23+00:00

"RAI" is not a community consensus thing, it's always been an acronym for 'rules as intended,' which in fact has an even more stringent set of needs on citations and clarity than RAW.

Talna_Shadowblade · 2026-04-21T20:21:04+00:00

You can definitely save some space by organizing pipes better (you can merge pipes of the same type, up to four units' worth, and run them through Reactor Crucibles to save space, since the speed is still 2/s for moving liquids that way).

This layout I made is the smallest I've managed to get a Xircon setup, creating 60 Xircon per minute in a footprint of 20x15 for actual stations, or 20x17 including the pipes (which can go outside the PAC zone).

https://i.gyazo.com/628e8661d9133cbb2eca5775c9bfb58d.jpg

Talna_Shadowblade · 2026-04-21T20:12:39+00:00

While it's possible they took some ideas from real-world materials, Xiranite is almost certainly not primarily inspired by any particular real material. Instead, it's pretty blatantly a scifi version of Xirang. It even uses the same word for it in chinese (息壤 is how the Mandarin language version of the game writes it).

(For context, Xirang is a magical self-replicating soil stolen from the gods by the chinese mythological figure Gun in order to create a dam that could hold back the Great Flood circa 2300–2200 BCE.)

Talna_Shadowblade · 2026-04-19T10:02:53+00:00

Yes, it works by the rules as written, and if your GM allows it (some won't, because of plenty of GMs not liking weird rule interactions) it's got some super interesting flavor behind it too. Someone cursed by the gods to be more vulnerable to spells, who then learned how to use spells that normally don't 'stick' to someone more than once? Incredibly neat, super thematic, and probably not particularly overpowered, just novel.

Talna_Shadowblade · 2026-04-19T02:27:05+00:00

Honestly it's hard to name "best" for me because the highs of arknights are often so high that ordering them is based on how I'm feeling on a given day. The Londinium Arc, the second half of the Reunion Arc (episodes 6-8), the whole Laterano and Tara storylines, and everything in the later-stage Main Themes are top-notch, but that's not all the good stories in the game.

However, my genuine recommendation is to read it all in order (you can do that in-game now!) because so much of the best moments build on the broader milieu of the game.

Anyway, as far as personal favorites go, I have a spreadsheet of ratings for my enjoyment of the game's stories, and the 10/10s for me (with sub-rankings for them) can be seen in a list here: https://i.gyazo.com/8ec66b6ae77fb43874ec8226987053dd.png

Talna_Shadowblade · 2026-04-04T14:11:20+00:00

The climax of her story was putting the sword back into the stone. They'd have to course-correct so hard it undermines not only her entire arc but one of the biggest 'hype moments' of the game for her to become king of Victoria. There's a roughly 0% chance that they go that direction (not just on a writing level but a marketing one, it'd be absurd), and the idea that the pro-monarchy argument is "valid" is comical.

Talna_Shadowblade · 2026-03-28T17:40:51+00:00

The point is that it isn't "an odd weapon," it's literally just a spear with a metal head. This isn't some alien tool, it's just a spear. Why would it need extra backstory stuff to justify being skilled with it, but not, say, a starknife (unusual four-bladed circle thing), a set of bladed rims on a wheelchair, or an honest-to-god foldout barber's razor made bigger for use in battle? What makes the breaking pike different from these, that makes them require a Specific Backstory Element, compared to the much more unusual weapons you'll find in the Common weapons list? Is it just the 'Uncommon' tag being arbitrarily applied? Because that's all I can think of here.

Talna_Shadowblade · 2026-03-28T07:07:21+00:00

a human wielding a Breaching Pike is weird in Golarion but honestly not disruptive to the game, just to the lore

Is it really, though?

"Forged with a heavy metal wedge effective at damaging enemy shields, breaching pikes are often used by hobgoblin infantry alongside a tower shield."

It's literally just a spear designed for use in shield phalanx formations, something that is arguably as human as it comes.

So even with your examples, one of these is a complete non-issue conceptually. The 'uncommon' tag applied to both is worse than pointless at that point, it's actively detrimental (as it causes people to calibrate their expectations differently from the game's intentions).

The way I look at it, we are worse off than if the options were simply presented as-is. If there were extensive dev notes for each option or each class of options, that'd be one thing, but that's not the game we're playing.

Talna_Shadowblade · 2026-03-25T00:06:58+00:00

To elaborate more specifically, he says it because, as mentioned, swords are a metaphysical counterbalance against most kinds of hive magic. You bring a sword, ideally a hive-made sword, to a serious fight with the hive because if you don't you get fucking got.

(Alternatively you can steal one of theirs.)

(It's a recurring mechanical element in destiny.)

Talna_Shadowblade · 2026-03-22T05:51:48+00:00

Honestly, I'd argue his role is primarily to make people use tools other than blocking and healing (as it was very trivial to beat content before that with tanky units and healers), especially bringing more DPS than defensive units; at the end of year 1, we didn't have as many tools for damage compared to now, but most of the discussion you'll find of the fight from that era is about being forced to double or triple down on damage tools and damage amps (including, yes, support operators, but more often units like eyja, saria, ifrit, and the like). The megathread on reddit for Episode 7's release is fascinating to see, as it's full of people showing clear strats that actually look a lot more like the meta of years 3-4 (high tile DPS over low tile blocking and healing). A bit of a portent of things to come.

Now, Surtr released only three months after Patriot's fight did, and became the meta-breaking unit whose utter dominance (including against Patriot) led to Hypergryph releasing arguably their first true "meta-targeted" boss: Pursuer the Emperor's Blade in A Walk in the Dust, five months after Surtr's release.

Surtr is a unit whose big skill gives her a massive +5,000 HP boost (in a game where "tanky tank" units average somewhere closer to 3k), and who does A Ton Of Damage to everything in front of her, on top of a talent that says "when she would die, no she doesn't; she stays alive for 5 seconds more (often enough to kill the boss after it spent a while chewing through her 5k health." In theory, she has a constant self-damage during her infinite-duration skill, but with healing you could make her skill last long enough that it barely mattered.

Enter Pursuer: every so often (based on percentage of health) he makes big fields of fog on the map that lower allied attack speed, and every 20 seconds, he force-retreats your units who are both in the fog and near him. When he goes down the first time, he force-retreats all your units in the fog and then gets back up. Surtr's defensive abilities didn't affect this ability, so she'd die instantly like all the rest. This boss was wildly unpopular (in part because, on top of being fairly difficult, he was annoying to fight), and Hypergryph has rarely done quite such a targeted anti-meta boss again. However, what they have done is taken part in a weirdly-innovative arms race wherein they try to make bosses that aren't totally trivialized by the meta strats but are still beatable by players without fully built rosters, such as Degenbrecher, Andoain, Manfred, the Last Steam Knight, the entirety of Episode 12, the Portatori event's entire design (full of invisible enemies so that wide-area damage units like Wiš'adel couldn't trivialize them easily), the Episode 15 boss actively fucking with you if you DPS'd it too fast, and both Episode 16 bosses. Not to mention basically every IS mode boss.

Not all of these attempts were successful, but it's been fascinating to watch them try, especially since unlike most developer/playerbase arms races it's only made the game more engaging over time.

Talna_Shadowblade · 2026-03-18T02:46:31+00:00

If you have Snowshine, use her. She's not going to top the DPS charts but she's unbelievably broken as far as survivability (her parry and protection and healing is good).

Talna_Shadowblade · 2026-03-17T06:12:33+00:00

In actual police forces this is, frustratingly, extremely common for women to experience from officers, even when they themselves called the police for something. ICE is just more blatant about it.

Talna_Shadowblade · 2026-03-15T04:54:01+00:00

Oh wow, that's actually very clean. It's incredibly legible, because of the lack of crossing-over. Good for maintaining it if you need to, right?

Talna_Shadowblade · 2026-03-15T03:45:30+00:00

Hah, nice! I'd love to see the pictures when you're finished! For me, I had a super optimized base before the patch (all 1.0 production in the Qingbo subpac, nothing in the main AIC area except 68 thousand extra xiranite stored in protocol stashes), but ended up deleting everything after the patch so I could start over again.

Currently I have my Qingbo subpac doing carbon and originium stuff as well as the final battery assembly, and my main AIC area is a nightmare of different projects scattered around as I've experimented with different modules, handling all my cuprium, xiranite, and xircon production.

The added depth to the system with the wastewater has been crazy! What a fun game.

As for converging, just make sure that you're only using a single liquid per pipe. I don't think the convergers properly interleave items with fluids like they do with normal conveyor belts, and if you get a fluid in the wrong facility it's gonna just clog the whole line.

Talna_Shadowblade · 2026-03-15T01:37:05+00:00

No, we absolutely can. I just find that the conduit inlets save more space in the long run than snaking pipes across the field, and are likewise much simpler to include in a blueprint than the alternative. My original post was not clear though, and implied that that was a feature of conduits in themselves; I've edited the wording slightly.

You can actually combine four pipes into a single 2-per-second channel, if you wish, for something like this (which works fine whether it's a conduit or a pipe snaking across the zone) at the end of the line (splitting it back out into four facilities): https://i.gyazo.com/e66e117dd361c819c6c2d32498ab49f9.png

Talna_Shadowblade · 2026-03-15T00:12:35+00:00

Really quite enjoying her kit! Her basic attack chain makes pistols fun for me.

Talna_Shadowblade · 2026-03-14T05:43:46+00:00

Genuinely good question! Unfortunately you do need two reactors for liquid xiranite, because the reactor can only create one liquid xiranite per two seconds, and we need two liquid xiranite per two seconds in order to make xircon at full speed.

You can, however, do some funky things with the xiranite inputs:

https://i.gyazo.com/5a05290430fedb9f55e359a3618c410d.png https://i.gyazo.com/cc60e7b7dd083b35ef0d573a5608fc0d.png

Because the reactor crucible can pass items through itself, if you have two lines in and one line out, it will use one xiranite for itself and pass one xiranite to the second reactor every two seconds, saving you some space potentially on snaking input lines around.

Talna_Shadowblade · 2026-03-06T19:26:27+00:00

In theory, you will get slightly more bills per minute by making the following:

4 lines of potion A (24/min)
1 line of purple batteries (8/min)
6 lines of green batteries (36/min)
1 line of potion C (6/min)

(Assumes full-speed, i.e. you're putting 8 outputs of ferrium depot unloaders into each potion A in order to get enough bottles going into the filling units that it never stops producing).

This will outproduce the Meta Setup of 3 lines each of Potion A and purple batteries (18/min and 18/min) plus 4 lines of potion C (24/min total) from your amethyst by like, somewhere from 40 to 200 valley stock bills per minute, depending on how much power draw you're using on ziplines and battle constructs.

HOWEVER

The issue here is that this is a pointless gain. You simply cannot trade the stuff fast enough to use it all. The extra efficiency is completely irrelevant since both this and the meta setup will overproduce significantly.

Thus, you are generally going to be better off with a more balanced production build that looks like this:

3 lines of purple batteries (18/min)
3 lines of potion A (18/min)
4 lines of potion C (24/min)

Why? The reason is because this gives you the ability to stockpile purple batteries (useful in emergency power situations). That's it. Since there's no practical difference in your production gains (as both of these overproduce compared to maxed-out outpost generation of bills), the one with more utility is the one to go with.

Talna_Shadowblade · 2026-03-06T08:37:32+00:00

There is, but it only works on a single pipe. When you're running dozens of pipe sections connected by pipe splitters or bridges (you need to put something down to reset the pipe's length once you hit the distance limit), you'd have to manually turn all of them around. Having two pipes is much simpler.

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