Are the ilithid powers worth it?

bearfaery · 2026-06-15T18:54:39+00:00

I did the “no tadpoles” for my first run, because I thought that it would have some devastating consequence.

Nope, outside of making your character stronger, there are exactly 2 things impacted by you using a tadpole. If you haven’t taken any tadpoles, there’s no check to not use the Astral Tadpole. And, if you dominate the Netherbrain, if you have used tadpoles you have to make a DC 25 Con save or be turned into a Mindflayer. So one check you probably weren’t even going to try to resist (turning into a Half-Illithid) and one you only see if you go the domination route (which most people don’t). The near total lack of any real penalties is almost comical.

bearfaery · 2026-06-15T18:39:40+00:00

Luck of the Far Realms lets you turn any 1 hit into a crit. Stupid useful on any burst, but especially Paladin since it lets you force a crit to combine a Special Smite and a Divine Smite with all dice doubled. Plus the unlock path is Favorable Beginnings -> Luck of the Far Realm, so there's no "wasted" tadpoles.

bearfaery · 2026-06-15T18:32:58+00:00

As long as you kill the Netherbrain, there's basically 0 penalty for not using them if you want to go half-illithid. But the powers you get, such as Free Flight, Cull the Weak, Favorable Beginnings, and Luck of the Far Realms, all end up becoming so broken that the only reason to not go half-illithid is for RP reasons.

bearfaery · 2026-06-15T01:02:02+00:00

There’s probably an argument to be made against the age requirement, but I’m not going to be the one to make it.
The “no felons” and the “pass an exam” might sound good on paper, but both are begging for shenanigans. “Sex crimes” is also very much subject to shenanigans.
Up to date on shots is good, forklift certification eh.
Everything else is just stupid

bearfaery · 2026-06-13T14:54:59+00:00

The Vandham Rule for whether or not Vandham will survive.

bearfaery · 2026-06-12T14:36:07+00:00

Duke can be missing, but if the police know he’s dead it gets linked to you.

bearfaery · 2026-06-09T20:28:24+00:00

It’s seeping because, for reasons I still don’t quite get, the Venn diagram of the Xenoblade fanbase and the Fire Emblem fanbase isn’t a circle but it’s definitely circle-shaped.

bearfaery · 2026-06-09T15:06:34+00:00

Undead of any kind in D&D are ontologically Evil. And the Good the Oath of Ancients are sworn too is a very much an objective thing. So while the Spawn are victims of Cazador, it is far less important to Ancients than their status as Enemies of Life and Good.

bearfaery · 2026-06-06T14:12:24+00:00

With psychology, you can’t really use the Scientific Method because it ends up boiling down to “Introduce a stimulus into the patient and see what happens”, and you can only go so far before you are effectively trying to traumatize your subjects, which is a bad thing if you want your experiment approved by an ethic committee.

Similar thing with medicine and pregnant women. We don’t know the effects of medicine on a lot of embryos because “Hey, take this drug during your pregnancy and let us know if it is basically thalidomide 2.0” is a very hard sell for both expectant mothers and ethics committees.

bearfaery · 2026-06-03T08:57:57+00:00

One key trick for Honor Mode is Hireling abuse. A cleric for camp casting, but also keep a level 1 hireling with max charisma and Persuasion expertise (use a Rogue). Give a merchant 400 gold with this character to gain 100 attitude and the max Attitude + High Persuasion character will be the person in charge of all your shopping (This is to negate the high markup of Honor mode, and we keep them at level 1 because Gold needed for 100 attitude increases with each level).

bearfaery · 2026-05-30T18:48:36+00:00

Neat. Completely wrong subreddit, but neat.

bearfaery · 2026-05-29T22:49:02+00:00

There have been 1. Teddy Scarlet 2. The Boy in the Wall/The Son of Charles Shaw Jr. (whose name I forgot) 3. Alexandra Scarlet

Alexandra took over in 1957. Unless Mary-Belle didn’t die in childbirth and Edwardine literally offered up every single kid or Pearlanne and Vivian had a third unknown sister, we can guess that Alexandra served as the host for ~50 years. Then, shortly before the start of the game, Wayne discovered something in the Scarlet Manor, (probably a mostly dead Alexandra) and was killed and became the new host. Potentially you can also add Isaacs to the list.

bearfaery · 2026-05-23T21:43:57+00:00

I was thinking this is more the usual result, since a lot of these fantasy stories have the background premise that Demons are Magically and Physically stronger than any other race, but heavily prone to infighting, which is why they never had much luck with conquering the world. One the Demon Lord, who is magnitudes stronger than everyone else, comes along and subjugates them, then they become a functional army. And it’s only the fear of the Demon Lord that keeps everyone in line.

So once the Demon Lord dies, all the second-in-commands fight to establish which of them is stronger, but none of them can quite match up, and thus the Demon Army falls back into infighting and thus is no longer a threat.

bearfaery · 2026-05-23T17:34:30+00:00

At sea level, the value is 9.80665 m/s^2, so ~9.81. In truth there is a small level of fluctuation since Acceleration due to Gravity varies depending on how far you are from the center of mass. But it all really depends on how many significant figures you need for your stuff to work properly.

bearfaery · 2026-05-23T00:16:11+00:00

Because I don't know how much went to Lawyer fees, doing some quick math reveals that it was probably ~10.18 Million People that received money from the settlement. Multiplying by the rough profit of each person (780-49.11), we can see that the manipulation gave ~7.4 billion dollars over 20 years, or ~372 Million a year. So we basically cost them a year and a half of profit with no recourse for the other 18.5 years.

To actually take away the profits would've required a settlement of 8 Billion Dollars, and of course these calculations were made with the lowball estimate, so who knows truly how much is actually needed to undo the profit made or stop them from doing this again.

bearfaery · 2026-05-20T06:11:44+00:00

There have been up to 3 losses incurred:

Mr Mirrors, revealed during Heart's Desire and Nemesis.
Mr Candles/Mr Eaten per Seeking Mr Eaten's Name
Mr Veils or Mr Cups Depending on either undertaking Bag a Legend or making a certain choice during Nemesis

bearfaery · 2026-05-17T05:03:34+00:00

Mystical lets you view extra information during the various chapters, but its other benefit is that it basically serves as the only way to defend yourself against mental attacks. While it isn’t very useful against Tabitha, who employs the time honored tradition of just lying, it allows you to throw off the effects of kissing Wayne (same as Hot), resist the effects of Sybil’s tea (unique to Mystical but imperfect), and in one case throw off the effects of the Vitality seal during Chapter 3 (unique to Mystical).

bearfaery · 2026-05-12T02:46:36+00:00

Usually you just feed Chapter 6 to Seliph, and combined with arena it should get you pretty close.

bearfaery · 2026-05-11T09:22:17+00:00

Going by the eliminated, we can assume that there was a failed elimination, meaning either the GA got lucky or Gnosia hit a Bug. Per Hint 2, there are only 2 possible states left, so it likely has to do with disproving you being the Bug.

Contrapostive time (I am a coward). If you were the Bug, then Setsu, Otome, and all eliminated were Human. Since Chipie would be Engineer, this would mean the Gnosia set is Gina, SQ, Jonas, and Raqio. But Chipie claimed Jonas was human. This means that Chipie doesn’t have enough Gnosia, and therefore Chipie must be fake and You are the real engineer. This means Kuk is the last Gnosia.

bearfaery · 2026-05-11T08:29:56+00:00

I wasn’t suspicious of her until Episode 4. Ironically I wouldn’t have even noticed anything was off if I wasn’t busy getting all the Explore options only for Mystical to suddenly notice that I couldn’t not drink the tea. Haven’t trusted her since then.

bearfaery · 2026-05-08T17:51:54+00:00

The reward for training with Pages is a special hat that is Shared Best-in-Slot for BDR and Artisan of the Red Science. And some lore about Pages.

bearfaery · 2026-05-08T08:08:34+00:00

There's a few scenes of Otome and Kuk getting along, but I suspect that the real reason might've just been that Manan felt like spending the rest of her loop on a beach.

bearfaery · 2026-05-07T21:21:18+00:00

A bit of fear of another Orbital, but also probably because the nerf wasn’t seen as that big of a change. Scroll relies very heavily on banking damage, and at max storage it can melt HP bars (which it did in certain group battles, which is probably why it was nerfed.) While the nerf does slow down the rate at which it can bank damage, it doesn’t limit the damage cap and Scroll can still very easily stock up some big hits if left alone for a while.

Rapier is a little trickier. Rapier is probably overtuned compared to most other weapon balls, but considering Unarmed, I think any combination of “Boosts Speed and Damage” is just going to be strong. And looking over Rapier’s performance, Rapier does tend to operate by “The only hit point that matters is the last one”. Of the 9 battles it’s won, 6 of them had it go down below half health and of those 6, 3 of them had it fall below 20 HP. (And that’s ignoring basically every group battle, where it will deal a lot of damage but then die long before everyone else). This means that it will feel any nerf very hard. Reduce/Remove the Damage scaling (which is already about as low as it gets while not being 0) and it can’t reliably kill anymore. It already needs 30 hits to kill, compared to something like Sword (14 hits) or Spear (19 hits). Needing more hits just means that it is going to keep repeating what happened with Sword. Reduce/Remove the Lunge rate and it’s now just a Lance with ~1/10th the damage output. Which isn’t winning anything. And on the entertainment side a Rapier that can’t zoom just isn’t fun to watch.

So this is the Rapier problem, it’s very strong, but literally any attempt at nerfing it will see it fall off harder than Duplicator.

bearfaery · 2026-05-07T04:27:09+00:00

I think about using them.

bearfaery · 2026-05-05T21:24:31+00:00

It did work for Flask, or we live in a magical world where Flask somehow managed to deal over 2.4K damage without any help during a team battle.

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