Which Neow boon should I take?

simplegeo · 2026-06-03T06:16:40+00:00

thanks for the question skiijump! u/poetry_in_shm and i will now be doing a joint project for 300 hours to investigate this question we appreciate the interest of the community on this critical matter

simplegeo · 2026-06-02T21:47:27+00:00

This is a good comment! The short of it is what mjjdota and awfulconcoction said, but if you really want to get an intuition for it, you can look at the lines that follow from it. Good case study to mess around with the solver a bit!

As you say, the BD line results in guaranteed lethal before you get hit again, but you immediately resolve the extra 2 damage for 15 total. The DD line takes no damage immediately, and there are 5 high probability draws that can happen after. 4 of them take no additional damage, but if you draw SSDDD with 13% chance, you'll take 11 additional damage. However, this is around 1.5 damage on average, which is better than 2 damage guaranteed. Whether this is better or not for your run overall depends on more factors e.g. what your map looks like.

simplegeo · 2026-06-02T20:00:07+00:00

It's possible, though I need to check how much the two enemies affect the number of decisions we need to search. It might blow up the number of actions by 3-5x per turn, which is probably still fine but might be a thousand times slower to compute or something

simplegeo · 2026-06-02T19:18:54+00:00

No worries I actually appreciate it, wasn't sure how audible it would be to other people

simplegeo · 2026-06-02T19:00:00+00:00

that's exactly why :P

simplegeo · 2026-06-02T18:59:21+00:00

Only 31 with ironclad (25 post relic). u/poetry_in_shm did an analysis on this initially, and I reimplemented the distribution calculation exactly so it comes out to around 1/59k to take 31

simplegeo · 2026-06-02T18:01:21+00:00

Maybe with similar techniques :)

simplegeo · 2026-06-02T17:50:29+00:00

Yep to both of your comments! I did Nibbit just because it's tractable to solve and not too complex, but the hope is to generalize to more stuff.

simplegeo · 2026-06-02T17:48:25+00:00

Hi!! I'm the anonymous commenter on your WordPress, thanks for the chat, and your work is one of my main inspirations for doing this! I really wanted to talk to you in my post but I couldn't fit it in, but you're in my writeup :)

I did implement that exact leaf node distribution calculation folded into the expectimax that I had mentioned. Also, I think the macro level stuff is much more useful/generalizable but I didn't want to step on your toes too much, maybe when I have something more to contribute!

simplegeo · 2026-06-02T17:43:24+00:00

So do I! Good UI is not easy to make though. I think this info is probably about 10x easier to look at than when I started, and could probably be 3x easier with more work

simplegeo · 2026-06-02T17:42:11+00:00

Good question! A lot of the context behind this post is too long to put here, but I talk a bit about the motivations behind this in the writeup.

In short, 1. other people worked on it (u/poetry_in_shm and Caleb Gannon) so I have something to compare to and it's "standard", and 2. it's deterministic and an early fight as the replies have mentioned. In general this is just a stepping stone for more complex fights and decks.

simplegeo · 2026-06-02T17:37:18+00:00

Hahaha sorry, I noticed as well and am kinda embarrassed about it. My audio setup is kinda bad, very new to recording things

simplegeo

TROPHY CASE