I assume quite a few people are shooting for a Noman Tattoo this year. However, the guides out there to help you along the way are somewhat outdated, and they focus more on how to spend your Pails and Tears once you’ve got them than how to prep for the season – which is the biggest thing that’s changed this year.
Since there’s not a combined info thread for everyone prepping for 2017, I decided to put all my research into one place. Feel free to suggest additions.
Also, if it sounds like I’m being excessively practical about this, and not really coming at it with Fallen London-esque whimsy, blame Failbetter for making endgame content where if you fail you lose months and months of preparation, not me. :) When the consequences of failure are so staggeringly high, people take it upon themselves to figure out how not to fail.
Bottom line: You want a lot of Pails, and you want a lot of Tears. As a ballpark, you probably want materials for 20 pails (aka 20 Night Whispers, 140 Storm Threnodies) and 15 Tears to feel comfortable heading into Sacksmas. You’ve got a long time to accumulate the ingredients for both – and you’ve probably been doing so already. But how to get them?
There are some key changes this year. The main gist is that because of the conversion to Favours, your success is now much more dependent on high card draw over a long period of time – perhaps months – than you were in the past. The components of both Tears and Pails will require a very large amount of favours to create in an efficient and timely fashion.
Let’s start with fate-locked content that you’ll ideally want to have:
- Sinning Jenny’s Finishing School. This is a huge engine for both card draw and favors, which will be crucial for your production of Pails and Tears.[/li][li]The Soul Trade, if you’re willing to side with the Shepherds (you should! we’re nice!), for Church favours generation.[/li][li]The fate-locked boosts to your BDR. Peculiar Rubbery Enhancement from Flute Street, the Golden Spiked Rosary and Tanned Mask from the Feast of the Exceptional Rose, the Ratwork Velocipede, the Bifurcated Owl. Your ability to rapidly generate and regenerate 7 Notability over and over again, whether on command or via cards drawn from your deck, will be a major determinant of how quickly you can produce Tears.[/li][li]Some extra fate for expeditions to the Gallery of Serpents, if you’re far short of your Tears goals and Sacksmas is right around the corner. $20 worth of Fate will on average get you about four Tears, and tons of additional rewards besides; it’s the best exchange of real money for Tears that you’ll get.[/li][li]If I remember correctly, several of the Exceptional Stories offer Tears as a possible end reward (or was it one of the Seasons?) – that might be a last-ditch way to get a few more on short notice. I don’t remember which ones, but someone else here will.
You’ll also want a remote address, obviously, to maximize your deck thinning.
Beyond these, for Tears you’ll want:
- Strangling Willow Absinthe (probably from The Affair Of The Box, though if you have a lot of Casing it could make sense to do some Thefts of Particular Character into Tales of Terror and side-convert some into SWA from there)[/li][li]Church Favors, which are now required for the up-conversion; if you have high BDR, this is likely to be your biggest chokepoint, since you’ll be getting the Presumptuous Opportunity card [/li][li]A five-card lodging (for the Nadir once a week, to maximize your odds of drawing End of Battles for more Airag)[/li][li]Membership in God’s Editors, as another source of Church favors.[/li][li]A lot of echoes, if you’re a Shepherd, so you can generate huge numbers of Church favours whenever you draw the CVE card.
For Pails, you’ll want:
[ul][li]Night Whispers, which are simple enough to obtain – Casing in the Flit → Thefts of Particular Character → Tales of Terror → Fidgeting Writer → exit with Night Whisper.
[/li][li]Storm Threnodies, which are more complex to produce, and which drive all the other needs below.[/li][li]An Overgoat, which you’ll use to rob the Bazaar for 8 actions every time you draw the card, using a second chance each time (which doesn’t require an additional 8 actions, don’t worry) to give yourself a functional 75% success rate.[/li][li]Tons and tons of Urchin favors. An incredible number, honestly.[/li][li]A Winsome Dispossessed Urchin, as another source of Urchin favors.[/li][li]A Gang of Hoodlums, in order to best accumulate Casing in the Flit.[/li][li]Access to Flute Street and Monster Breeding in the Labyrinth of Tigers, so that you can start your day by getting a Rubbery Hound from Flute Street. Ordinarily, the 39 actions it takes to go to Flute Street, get a Rubbery Hound, and come back will mean you miss out on a ton of card draw, so it’s far from optimal. But if you do the 39 action part in Flute Street when you first wake up in the morning and have 40 actions in your candle, you don’t have that problem… each morning, I now flip cards until I get enough useless ones that I’m at 39 or 40 actions and 5 cards remaining in my deck. I then dip down to Flute Street, grab myself a Rubbery Hound, and come back up immediately, resetting my deck to 10 cards. Breed it throughout the rest of the day by Pulling Out All The Stops, and you’ll save a lot of effort acquiring Urchins Favours.[/li][/ul]
(Note that the Pails grind can also be simplified dramatically by doing the Exceptional Story Hojotoho! and choosing what I’d consider to be the ‘bad’ ending, which gives an option in the Foreign Office grind to obtain Storm Threnodies directly, totally obviating the need for Urchin favors. But I’m going to assume that you don’t want to do that, because it would mean you have no soul.)
For both Pails and Favors, if you’re at the end of the endgame and seriously planning on a Noman tattoo, your limiting factor this year will likely be favours generation (unless you’re not within 1 or 2 the non-SMEN BDR cap, in which case your limiting factor for the Tears will be pails). Aside from getting all the items you need, the things you can do to boost favours generation are fairly limited: your Connected Pet (I set mine to Urchins), your choice of favours from the end of Finishing School (I go with whichever one is the road block for me at this very moment), and then simply thinning your deck as much as humanly possible, plus drawing as many cards as humanly possible – which means copious use of Finishing School as well as careful use of Polite Invitations, the Nadir, etc. when you have exactly 5 cards in your deck to maximize the ‘doubling’ effect of leaving and entering those settings.
What does this look like in practice, for me?
[ul][li]Until I’m where I need to be on Storm Threnodies, I’m taking advantage of the 40 action build-up overnight by starting my morning with the Flute Street carousel, spending 39 actions and 100 foxfire candles to get a Rubbery Hound that I’ll then breed into Storm Threnodies with spare actions throughout my day.[/li][li]I’m drawing all my cards in a location that doesn’t add cards to my deck (though if you were really desperate for Church favors, you could draw in Spite, which gives a card with a very inconvenient way of getting another favor)
[/li][li]Each day my actions are split between Sinning Jenny’s to draw more cards and thus favours, Affair of the Box to get more Strangling Willow Absinthe, and Casing in the Flit to get more Journals of Infamy which I convert to correspondence plaques and then onward to Aeolian Screams and Storm Threnodies. If my progress on one front starts to pull way ahead of the others (tons of wine or plaques piling up, or favours count nearing 7), I shift my focus accordingly.[/li][/ul]
edited by Televangelist on 9/28/2017