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[Egan_BW]

yes yes black swordspear

[Devastator]

Easy enough to find an enchanter, and the materials smith recommends one.  You aren't lucky enough to get one who worked on Valterre (too young), but you still pick up a few names for later investigation.  A swordspear is marginally unusual but it's perfectly fine.

What kind of enchantment do you want to get on the Banemetal Swordspear?  And what amount of overall power are you looking for?

[King Zultan]

Could we make it more powerful that a +5 like a +6 or +7?

[Devastator]

+6 is possible but it'll be very expensive.  +7 would require some questing and be extremely expensive.  To be more specific, I'd need more specifics as to what you want the weapon to do.

[syvarris]

+7 is an option at all?  Well uhm.  Yeah, that sounds like something we'd enjoy having.  I'm totally fine with doing some questing to make an artifact swordspear, but "settling" for +6 seems reasonable.

As for enchantment... well, mana drain is the obvious one, and the reason we've been interested in a bane metal weapon.  It'd be even better if it could restore Trence's mana, instead of just buffing damage, but either is fine.  Draining mana from the enemy on every hit, in exchange for some benefit--either higher damage or mana restore--is what we want.  It specifically must function in Trence's hands, though it'd be nice if it works for Alice too.

Edit: an alternative option would be for the benefit to be curing the tired/exhausted status effect if the drain is successful.  So a hasted Trence could use Double Slash twice, and if the drain succeeds neither is tiring.  If the drain fails, the second double slash presumably fails, or is downgraded to a normal slash.  I'd like this effect more than a damage buff, and less than a mana restore.

[King Zultan]

+7 is an option at all?  Well uhm.  Yeah, that sounds like something we'd enjoy having.  I'm totally fine with doing some questing to make an artifact swordspear, but "settling" for +6 seems reasonable.

As for enchantment... well, mana drain is the obvious one, and the reason we've been interested in a bane metal weapon.  It'd be even better if it could restore Trence's mana, instead of just buffing damage, but either is fine.  Draining mana from the enemy on every hit, in exchange for some benefit--either higher damage or mana restore--is what we want.  It specifically must function in Trence's hands, though it'd be nice if it works for Alice too.

+1

[Devastator]

There's no particular reason why the weapon wouldn't work on Trence as well as Alice, given that it'll be a spear with a slightly unusual end.  It's close enough that just stabbing works fine.  Interactions with dragon is an entire pot of worms and likely an extended discussion and examination that could take days, so for the moment you leave that jar unopened.

The original Bane Sword enchantment (~10 mana drain, +2 ranks of damage if successful) is too strong to be paired with a +7 weapon.

For a +6 weapon it's just on the ragged edge of possible, and you'd need to both quest and pay an alchemist to get materials together.  And likely both pay the moon and stars.  Expect a price tag on the order of 20 upgrades and several valuable individual items.. both materials to use and stuff to recruit others who'll be needed to assist.

For a +5 weapon is something actually doable.  You'll still need to quest, but the suggested materials are more like 'hunt a high level creature' instead of 'rob three people in different cities AND hunt a high-level creature.'  Still, expect a price of about ten upgrades for this.

There are two things that could make this much easier.  First, accepting a big restriction on the weapon.  It's outright stated that if you made the weapon only effective against incorporeal creatures, ie, only good for ghostbusting, +7 would be quite doable and almost trivial.  Bane metal is good for this.

Second, cutting the benefit in half, to a smaller drain and one rank of damage.  On a +5 doing two alchemical swaps, one to a blank and one to the reforged swordspear, would do it.  Total cost would be about 4 upgrades for the fresh +5 weapon and time from an alchemist.

A +6 would be some light questing, the kind that could be solved with more money instead.  Expect a cost slightly more than a +5 with the full enchantment, say 12 upgrades or so.


As for the other proposal, mana restoration, this is generally easier than more damage.  At least for small amounts of mana.  How much regen are you talking about?  1 point?  2 points?  3 points?

[Devastator]

You are Sessha Naver.

After hearing it discussed at how adding a big restriction on the weapon would make it more powerful, one thought comes to mind.

"What if it only worked on humans?"  Only Arngrim is a dwarf, and the others are all humans.

You're never, ever going to be free of the assassination work, are you?

[syvarris]

This is an interesting conundrum.  We've got a few options listed here:
--10 upgrades: +5, 10MP buff that makes it deal +7-level damage to enemies it can drain
--4 upgrades: +5, 10? MP buff that makes it deal +6-level damage to enemies it can drain
--12 upgrades: +6, 10? MP buff that makes it deal +7-level damage to enemies it can drain

And we can go presumably  go cheaper if it's an anti-human weapon.  If we go this route, the 10 upgrade one seems best, making it human-only so it's a tool for nuking Spar and Dorren.  This is a spear mostly for Trence, and one which won't affect our general adventuring much at all.  In most cases it'll be a regular old +5 spear, which happens to REALLY devastate any human mages we encounter.

The other option here is mana restore.  If the spear restores 3 mana to Trence per hit he lands, that's some serious mana regen potential.  It's only four hits to largely pay for itself, which hasted Trence can do in two rounds, including the buff action; in certain cases, it might be able to significantly restore his mana.  Wave slashing a group of four twice would be expected to restore 24 (!) mana in one round--numbers high enough to make regular dragon usage entirely reasonable.  But... it relies on enemies having mana, and stops charging Trence once they run out.  If the average fight only has 10-15 mana available for Trence to drain, all it's really doing is depleting enemy mana without a cost.  When we face the Concordat, this would likely be a weapon for Alice, since she gets a lot of value from harrying Dorren or Arngrim, and small mana restores won't be something we care about.

On the upside, it's definitely useful for one or the other; if the mana drain is low, Trence can get big mana restores out of it.  If the mana drain is high, Alice can apply appreciable drains to Arngrim and Dorren.  Oh, and if we go this route, we don't want to make the drain human-only, because I'd expect us to run into a lot of MP-holding monsters and nonhuman casters while adventuring.

I think the second idea (mana drain of 3 per hit) is probably the worse one, given the information we currently have.  It's more useful in a less dangerous and less important context, and is less assured to be significantly useful at all.  On the other hand... I still prefer it, because it makes more of the game interesting.  Being stronger because we're a dragon more often is more fun than being stronger because our sword has a Really Big Number.  _{There's also the fact that we could buy like 30 mana potions instead of a 10-upgrade spear, though this spear does still have the utility of damaging Dorren's mana in the 4S fight...}

How much MP does the black blade drain on hit, right now?  Trence can hit mom with it to find out!

Would mana restoration amount scale with the drain amount?  Would +5 mana on hit be reasonably achievable?

Are the pink lands or pits of borlia known to have a decent density of monsters with MP?

[Devastator]

How much MP does the black blade drain on hit, right now?

About 10, varying per hit.

Would mana restoration amount scale with the drain amount?  Would +5 mana on hit be reasonably achievable?

They're independant, but as-is, you could restore up to a third of the average drain.  More than a third is a jump in cost.

Are the pink lands or pits of borlia known to have a decent density of monsters with MP?

Most monsters have at least some mana.

The pink land is too dangerous and has never had a proper survey of the monsters there, beyond three facts.

1.  There are far, far more monsters than there should be for an uninhabited area.  Normally monster density goes way down in areas without people.
2.  The monsters in question are really really scary.
3.  Holy fuck there are some stiff goddamn encouters.

The pits of Borlia have a highly variable ruleset and normal combat physics don't apply regularly there.  There will be places where mana drain doesn't work, or where mana restoration harms mana instead.  Other places may have restrictions like no weapons or no magic effects.  Other places will be fine.  The pits of Borlia are super dangerous because they're unreliable and unpredictable.

[NJW2000]

I don't love the idea of a secondary MP-costing activation-requiring buff for Trence that also needs to land attacks for full use. We can up our breath attack just by collecting and using enough sequential dragon forms (wind or fire next), and up all slashes by using blade+element dragon... I'm sure we'll want to make him an artifact glaive at some point, but I'd rather see a passively occuring buff, or one that's in play from the get-go, as there's so many other things we might need Trence to do and spend MP on in a fight.

MP restoration is frankly not that interesting, as the hardest fights will require MP potioning Willis, and he should have battle aura up anyhow. MP drain is nice but not nice enough for it to be a priority on Trence, as he's our most reliable damage so can't always think about mana draining casters.

So my first instinct is to relatively cheaply make this into something Alice always uses, with the aim of eventually harassing Dorren with it. Especially as she's a bit underpowered until she dedicates herself to another god.

...

There is, however, one caveat.

Clearing Tired on Trence is frankly insane, especially with haste - the opportunity cost of the activation pays for itself on the turn after, we can slash 80% more frequently on subsequent turns or breath attack every turn or... I don't know, but I'm fairly sure it's at least as powerful as another haste as long as it procs on attack.

I don't know if this is just blue-sky thinking from Syv, or if Dev suggested it might be doable to him on Discord, so this really depends.

Question: how difficult would it be to make a Bane-metal swordspear cure Tired on successful buffed hit - compared to, say, adding one or two ranks of damage ? Is this something Bane-metal would even be suited for?

Sorry about this - I know we probably don't want to go down the "Armour Penetration" route...

[Devastator]

(Nah, this is the time for equipment.  You've got money, you're in an important location for equipment, and the primary goal of act III is to gather stuff for attacking and defeating the Concordat.  You are the ones setting the pace and you are the ones deciding what weapons you want to bring to battle.  My worry about 'armour penetration' is forgetting stuff and doing stuff wrongly, but at this point I've got the character statistics and combat mechanics down pretty solid.)

"Clearing Tired or Exhausted is most commonly done through training.  If you can get better at doing something, you can learn to do it without it being so draining on the body.  As for stuff like Stamina, that's better done on armour or boots instead of weapons, and Bane Metal doesn't have anything to do with that."

(As for equipment..  there are two ways to do that.

One is to use something like the berzerk status effect.  This lets you use a single tiring move every turn instead of every other turn.  Mechanically, it removes tiredness at the end of every turn instead of every turn you do not use a tiring move.

The other way is to use an enchantment that improves Stamina.  This adds additional levels of tiredness, and allows you to use tiring moves when already tired.  With Stamina, though, you still fail to recover tiredness on turns when you use tiring moves.)

[Egan_BW]

How strong of a mana-drain effect could we get if we focus on only that to the expense of damage? Basically a mana-draining baton rather than a weapon.

Think I prefer overall to deal unreasonable amounts of damage to humans. It is what the four swords would want for us, after all~

[Devastator]

"Ignoring damage?  Probably as strong as a moonbolt, no problem.  That's about 20-ish mana.  Could maybe add a moonbolt effect to that, to double it up."

[King Zultan]

A mana eating wiffle bat or one that can only hurt humans don't seem like the best kind of weapons especially with all the money we'll have to spend to make them.