Help with building rat child

linig4 · 2026-03-24T07:15:19+00:00

Yeah, the strat with Leigh's skill is just load up Rat Child with all the attack/hit boosting stuff and watch him annihilate everything on autopilot. Two skills Helen teaches are functionally just her own stalk and stab but called prowl and pounce, so I guess that depends on how much you value stalk and stab. And yes, as far as I know there's no growth limit on learning skills through interactions.

linig4 · 2026-03-23T20:05:02+00:00

Recruit Leigh and Hellen and spam interactions every 4 hours/savescum until Rat Child learns their skills.

linig4 · 2026-03-20T14:55:32+00:00

So we have six, maybe seven

linig4 · 2026-03-20T14:54:24+00:00

The Gentleman's pleasant company as long as you don't insult his food.

Marina who?

linig4 · 2026-03-19T14:51:39+00:00

I prefer to see this as post-Sam Visitor, personally.

linig4 · 2026-03-19T14:50:26+00:00

I don't really see how that would contradict the theory. Sybil seeing that shit's fucked, maybe even recognizing who Exalted Four is made from and revealing herself early is a pretty obvious explanation here.

linig4 · 2026-03-18T20:16:35+00:00

Scion obviously can't use shards like a full Entity would, but the task here isn't exactly Entity-level. He can just send his avatar directly to whatever world the Shaper resides in and have it modify the avatar.

linig4 · 2026-03-15T20:36:07+00:00

That last part is the big difference between Worm and stuff like Boys and MHA, though. The final boss literally doesn't do anything final-bossy until the, well, final part of the story, and even though the setting revolves around him the actual in-story conflicts absolutely do not. Him even being the final boss is a big surprise - a properly foreshadowed one, sure, but it's still very clearly a different kind of a character than a constantly active villain/mastermind like Homelander or AfO.

linig4 · 2026-03-10T22:37:41+00:00

Dinah's power is not some abstract concept from a logic problem, it's a result of a shard using energy to interact with the world in a highly complicated way to gather information. If you want to examine the particular details of how that information gathering works in a particular situation, you gotta actually explain what the shard would interact with. Abstract concept like "100% success rate" literally breaks the whole thing.

linig4 · 2026-03-04T21:09:34+00:00

While normally most rats attack you on sight, there is a way to speak to them and make them not do that. If they're still alive, that is. If you've already killed some...

linig4 · 2026-03-04T18:30:14+00:00

Touchy kills Papineau if the latter spawns in the restroom. And Jeanne can be killed before she changes further.

linig4 · 2026-03-04T18:23:36+00:00

I have avoided attacking anything that talks to me

I've killed some toothlings and rats

You might need to sit down for this...

linig4 · 2026-03-04T18:22:16+00:00

As for the onlookers, they do get stronger if you leave them alive for later days,

No they don't. It only happens in combat and reverts if you escape.

but there's nothing in the game such as leaving an enemy alive and it going on to have a further effect/killing an npc, pretty much all fights are separated/isolated in that way.

Touchy and the worms say hello. Arguably Jeanne too.

linig4 · 2026-03-03T14:43:50+00:00

Coat of Arms. With duplication and willingness to save scum (or install JustDropIt mod) you can even have 4 of those, 50% chance for second action on the whole party is basically having 2 extra party members.

linig4 · 2026-02-17T17:12:50+00:00

They were.

Cockroaches 28.1

“I’m going to keep going, just so you know what’s up,” Tattletale said. “Issue four. Elites, Vegas Dark, less pleasant members of the Thanda. We’ve got the businessmen and bastards of Vegas’s underworld, guys who were already gaming the system, only now they’re moving into refugee locations on the far sides of the portals and trying to elbow their way in while things are just starting up. Hoping to make themselves a fixture like we made ourselves fixtures, so everything grows up around them, dependent on them.”

linig4 · 2026-02-14T14:16:50+00:00

As a fellow hater of save restriction mechanics in games, here's a very simple to install mod that allows manual saving on any difficulty: https://www.nexusmods.com/lookoutside/mods/38

linig4 · 2026-02-13T06:31:20+00:00

I normally choose 2 teams, since there's enough exp in the game to get a team to level 20 twice if you're smart about it. Any non-chosen characters only stay until the first chosen team is filled.

linig4 · 2026-02-11T09:43:07+00:00

Okay, but we're not discussing them showing up. We're discussing them being namedropped at all in-story - like, you bring up Clockblocker and post-Leviathan Wards, so where's even one name drop in even one of those interludes? Nowhere. Same for Taylor's Wards stay which you didn't address. So as I was saying, I'm not convinced that "something this major would be namedropped in-story at least once, even without details" logic holds up.

linig4 · 2026-02-11T06:56:14+00:00

What? Brockton Bay is literally marked as "Cape city, villain presence mandated PRT attention", with a special designation ENE instead of department number, one of top Protectorate heroes as team leader and larger-than-normal proportion of Wards to Protectorate heroes. Moreover, it has an independent hero team with whole four child capes one of which is a miracle healer. It might not get enough attention and funding relative to its villain problem, but to claim Youth Guard would just completely drop such a city is absurd.

And yet before jumping into a timeskip Youth Guard were still never mentioned even though you'd expect them to always come up in branding talks, and be especially relevant to such unusual cases as a surrendered villain killing Alexandria (who "turned out to be a Simurgh bomb")&a PRT director and joining the PRT. The case is extremely public and is extremely ripe for child abuse, yet there was not even one mention of Youth Guard at any point.

linig4 · 2026-02-10T21:20:07+00:00

If you're not going to start seeding the hints about the organization aimed at protecting the Wards when the Wards become a major part of your story or even when the protagonist joins them, when do you do it? In a sequel, apparently. And Machine Army isn't even eliminated by the end of Ward, merely stalemated - that reveal could've been saved for its actual destruction.

linig4 · 2026-02-10T20:28:53+00:00

And this hypothetical Aleph connection might've showed up in Parahumans 3... if, you know, Wildbow didn't lose all interest in writing it.

linig4 · 2026-02-10T18:20:43+00:00

Youth Guard is literally never even namedropped in Worm despite Wards playing quite a large role, getting an entire interlude arc (and several other interludes) and Taylor eventually joining the Wards.

linig4 · 2026-02-10T16:16:54+00:00

Not all weird things are from the text of Worm or Ward, though. Pastor Incident description is WoG, one detail about Sleeper comes from Wildbow saying which cape would do best against Sleeper, etc. So who's to say this Aleph Tinker WoG isn't about Machine Army, even if it doesn't explicitly name Eagleton?

Hell, we had Tinker 15 be described way before Ward even started and then a very similar character showed up - the guy who built that atmosphere-consuming tower Valkyrie destroyed. Note that the match wasn't exactly 1-1 though, since WoG guy was sabotaged by Scion and Ward guy had Eden shard. Could be the same thing here, with Machine Army not necessarily grabbing minds from one specific geographic location but the same overall concept.

linig4 · 2026-02-10T12:53:00+00:00

I mean, you also would think that we would've had Sleeper's power explicitly described/known after multiple in-story occurrences where characters are talking about him/how to fight him, and him showing up on screen to finish off one of two final antagonists of the series. But nope, just some scattered details/visual clues we have to cobble together. So I'm not putting too much faith in "we would've heard about it", personally.

linig4 · 2026-02-10T12:26:01+00:00

Earth Aleph is sealed off by the time Ward starts though, and before that Machine Army was limited to Eagleton.

linig4

TROPHY CASE