[quote=Waterpls]So, you need to draw "A presumptuous little opportunity" 8 times per Tear. For 15 Tears its 120 cards.
And for conversion (from Strangling Willow Absinthe) you need 24.5 Church favours per Tear. For 15 tears its 367.5 Favours.
For 3 mounths you need 5 Favourable Circumstance per day. Not sure how much it costs in actions, probably a lot even with 30+ BDR.
875 Bottle of Strangling Willow Absinthe per Tear. 13125 for 15 Tears.
A Boxful of Intrigue reward is 35 Absinthe for 14 actions, so its 5250 Actions. Or ~45 days grind. edited by Waterpls on 9/29/2017[/quote]
If you’re starting with zero tears at this late date, realistically your only option for making it happen is paying a substantial amount of money to run the Gallery of Serpents, which will (among many other rewards) produce about 4 tears per $20 of cash turned into fate.
(But also, your calculation for the number of favourable circumstances needed is wrong – 3 months = 120 days = 1 favourable circumstance per day)
[quote=Waterpls]So, you need to draw "A presumptuous little opportunity" 8 times per Tear. For 15 Tears its 120 cards.
And for conversion (from Strangling Willow Absinthe) you need 24.5 Church favours per Tear. For 15 tears its 367.5 Favours.
For 3 mounths you need 5 Favourable Circumstance per day. Not sure how much it costs in actions, probably a lot even with 30+ BDR.[/quote]Here’s the math for grinding Favourable Circumstances at highest BDR:
At 32/33 BDR, you can get to Notability 5 just through the Amanuensis card, so that’s 9 actions (2 actions to call up the card and use it each time after drawing it the first time). Then you need 8 CP MW for the next level of N, which is ~5 actions using the tier 3 conversion. Then two more actions to call and use the Amanuensis card. Then say ~8 actions to get 12 CP of MW and two more to raise N to 7.
So ~26 actions to go from drawing your first Amanuensis card to Notability 7. But to save yourself from waiting for the Amanuensis card again (since you’d be at 0 N after cashing it in to Favourable Circumstances), you’d have to spend ~10 more actions to get to Notability 8, putting the total at 36 actions, plus one more to call up the final Amanuensis card. So 37 actions from start to finish to get yourself FC, meaning you can (fairly easily) grind one per day.
However, that’s at 32+ BDR. At 30/31 BDR, a you’d only have to add a few more actions in total when raising MW for the next Notability level, probably around 4 more actions. So just over 40 actions to grind it up.
Also, I wouldn’t expect people starting from zero to really be doing this, it being nearly October already. In the past people have spent much of the entire year gathering supplies for it.
Notability 8 is bad idea. Somebody should gift 1st point of Notability. Alt or friend.
Update: Oh, its disabled. Nevermind then. edited by Waterpls on 9/29/2017
To realistically have a shot of grinding it in time for this year, what’s the minimum number of tears/night whispers/threnodies you need to have already amassed?
2/3 of the way, i guess. 10 Tears, 100+ Threnodies, 10+ Nightwispers.
Slighly less if you can grind Threnodies in Foreign Office, Broken Giant with Velocipede Squad, have materials for Fidgeting. edited by Waterpls on 9/30/2017
2/3 of the way, i guess. 10 Tears, 100+ Threnodies, 10+ Nightwispers.
Slighly less if you can grind Threnodies in Foreign Office, Broken Giant with Velocipede Squad, have materials for Fidgeting. edited by Waterpls on 9/30/2017[/quote]
If your BDR is high, I think you can be behind that point and still be fine. Assuming you start your day off with a Rubbery Hound breeding, that’s 21 days to get 100 threnodies, and assuming (conservatively) you produce a Tears every 2 weeks, you’ll have 6 tears more than you do right now by the time you’re using them – assuming no use of fate for Gallery of Serpents. Night Whispers are pretty trivial from Fidgeting Writer.
Right, and if you do the 39 actions in Flute Street in a single go, first thing in the morning when you have 39/40 actions and 5 cards in your deck, you can even get a nice 5 bonus cards from the deck doubling.
By the way, something that I forgot to mention in the OP but is super relevant here:
Society favours are your friend for the Tears grind. You can gain them from the Society card, from Park and Palace, from the Young Stags, from A Visit with the Wry Functionary, from Shepherding Souls, from the Clay Sedan, and probably a couple of others I’m forgetting… and each one gives you on average 5 points of MW when you redeem them with the Slowcake’s Amanuensis card. You can redeem all the favours with a single draw of the card (it loops back to the card, it doesn’t consume the card), and then at Notability 5+ you can top it off with a Say Nothing for even more MW. This makes hitting Notability 6 and 7 very simple.
I prefer to just go to Notability 7, then focus on Sinning Jenny’s (w/ a Church Favour draw at the end) to speed up drawing the card for Notability 1 again.
(Also, just more generally, since you described Flute Street as tedious – by far the best way to use Flute Street for anything, whether it’s Dire Reflections or Rubbery Hounds, is ‘once per day’ in a single go rather than sitting down there for ages. It’s an extra 15 actions for the travel there and back, but the additional card draw will totally make up for that, and that way you’re not feeling ‘stuck’ down there.
[quote=Optimatum]There’s lots of references to having a 10-card deck or two candles, so might want to note Exceptional Friendship as one of the ideal Fate things.
For Cider owners, you can also spend five carnival tickets to gaze into Heart’s Mirror while wounded and go to the slow boat, then instantly come back. The best source of tickets I know of is during the FotER and provides 10 tickets per action plus some other odds and ends. With that source you’re spending 2.5 actions (plus whatever you do to get wounds) to double your deck twice. Depending on deck clutter this might be better than the finishing school.
Or you could just Seek to get an even better weapon! Totally worth throwing away all the needed items you might already have.
[quote=Televangelist]
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)
I did the math on this a year or so ago: if I’m remembering right, it was very slightly more efficient to grind Broken Giant through the Velocipede Squad than to grind Strangling Willow via AotB and upconvert. Now that you need Favours for upconversion, I bet it’s even better. Some people will be locked out of the grind though if they chose the wrong ending to the Fate extension. edited by Optimatum on 9/28/2017[/quote]
[quote=Dudebro Pyro]Is upconverting from Absinthe really the best way to get Cellars? I always thought the side-streets option worked out cheaper.
Also, I’d appreciate a tip on which ending for the Velocipede Squad I should take, as I’m going to finally buy it soon.[/quote]
If you’re looking for Broken Giant, you’ll want to go with the Riot in Watchmaker’s Hill (Shops are burning!). The VS shamelessly pilfer it from a wine store.
Sidestreets cost 15 echoes (and an action) for 1 cellar, iirc. Upconverting used to be significantly cheaper (12.5 echoes of broken giant and 0.2 actions - and it also bonus roughly 0.4 echoes of stuff on average, with the rare success estimated at 5% chance or so, I think). Now it costs a favour (per 10 cellars), which makes it meh, but still better than sidestreets.
Re: Getting Cellars, after some discussion on reddit to confirm my idea, there’s also hunting a Plated Seal, Breeding it into a Hound of Heaven and handing it to the Bishop. The cycle should take around 40-42 actions (depending on how quickly one gets Troubled Waters 10 at zee), and gives out 3 cellers and 6 broken giants. Comes out quicker, and you’ll never lack for Church favours, however few are needed with this method, since the cycle also gives three of them. edited by alekth on 10/8/2017 edited by alekth on 10/8/2017
[quote=alekth]Re: Getting Cellars, after some discussion on reddit to confirm my idea, there’s also hunting a Plated Seal, Breeding it into a Hound of Heaven and handing it to the Bishop. The cycle should take around 40-42 actions (depending on how quickly one gets Troubled Waters 10 at zee), and gives out 3 cellers and 6 broken giants. Comes out quicker, and you’ll never lack for Church favours, however few are needed with this method, since the cycle also gives three of them. edited by alekth on 10/8/2017 edited by alekth on 10/8/2017[/quote]
Hmm, so about 70-80 actions per Airag? Seems like you’d be waiting on opportunity cards a lot at Zee, unless there’s a quicker non-card route to the Seal that I’m missing…
[quote=Televangelist]
Hmm, so about 70-80 actions per Airag? Seems like you’d be waiting on opportunity cards a lot at Zee, unless there’s a quicker non-card route to the Seal that I’m missing…[/quote]
More along 50-60 actions per airag. Going through the whole 8 times leaves you 2 broken giants short of 35 cellars, in around 320~336 actions. 2-3 actions to convert broken giant into cellars, 21 actions to convert cellars into airag. You’ll need to even out the broken giants from somewhere, or have an extra round every once in a while, but it’s not too bad.
Raising Troubled Waters to 10 can be very fast with the more reckless pinned storylet, but I think I prefer to rack in some progress in the journey as well (with the extrapolating from the maps choice). Once you have the seal, you still have to make it back to London, and it becomes tricky with troubled waters 10. edited by alekth on 10/9/2017
I remember a discussion some time ago about this, and I think it came out to either 4 or 5 actions of Making It Up as You Go, setting you, on average around 80% of the time or so, around 7 AJE and some odd CP, with a chance of going as high as 8+AJE. Zeal-hunting takes like 2 actions if I remember correctly, and then depending on your luck with cards it takes another 5-10 actions to reach London without any extremely poor luck.
So optimistically, given 23 actions to breed the Zeal (and turn in the Hound for the wine), it could be possible to complete the cycle in 35 actions on a very good run (I think I’ve done that before actually), but 40 is a more conservative estimate, and the average is likely around 38-40ish. edited by Dudebro Pyro on 10/9/2017