Ray-Drenched Cinder

It seems the new content requires a new item, which seems to have no reasonable way to acquire. The amount of grinding this requires is staggering. My choices are 400 echos at about 300 actions, 100 red connections at 460 actions, or 5 skulls for a potentially greater number. Am I interpreting this correctly?[li]

No, you really aren’t.
First off it doesn’t take all 100 of your revolutionary connections so you only spend 50 levels of them.
Second, 400 echoes is chump change for the time when you can start doing nadir. 5 skulls can be acquired relatively painlessly in the forgotten quarter, for less than 400 actions if you are lucky.
I should note, that after the first couple of runs(which you will spend searching for irrigo items) any further visits can easily reward you with 625+ echoes as long as you know what you are doing.

I can squeeze myself for 400 echos, but the cost just seems prohibitively high. I have 20 red conections, so I’d have to gather most of them. It took me atleast 100 actions to gather my first and only skull from a rare success in the quarter- in retrospect, it seems like using the airs adventures was a very bad idea.

You should check out the sunless sea kickstarter, specifically the updates. They allow you to play a short story that always awards an item worth 312.5 echoes+ some varying goodies. That should help you.
on that note if you need to &quotsqueeze&quot yourself for 400 echoes you might want to do some other storylines first, then come back later. When i was entering the nadir 400 echoes was an easy thing to get… especially after grinding my arch to 5 which got me more than 1 searing enigma(62.5)
edited by Dmitri Zhiriakov on 9/7/2013

It not so much the function, as the principle of the thing. It seems like a massive investment to be progressing in this storyline.

It really is the principle of the thing. The Cave of the Nadir is endgame content. There are plenty of other things to do until the requirements do not seem as steep.

The idea of gating content is to provide you with a sense of when that content is appropriate. If you need the magical key to enter the Creepy Dungeon, and that key is held by a powerful wizard that is difficult to beat, the game is telling you that the Creepy Dungeon is scaled for people who can defeat the powerful wizard.

I also found the Nadir plotline very expensive. And I particularly sympathize with the part about getting skulls. I wouldn’t say that the five skulls can be acquired &quotrelatively painlessly&quot - it took me well over a week of solid hammering on the Forgotten Quarter to see one skull. Also, Dmitri, in grinding to Arch 5, I don’t recall ever seeing any reward worth half as much as a Searing Enigma.

In short, the quest for the Nadir can be heavily based on luck. I…didn’t have it. The same goes for profiting off the Nadir experience. Ultimately I found questing in the Nadir to be more counterproductive than useful - aside from the plot related things.

There is a difference between the particularly defeating the powerful wizard and accumulating wealth- The wizard requires you to have a sufficiently developed and effective character, where as accumulating wealth only tests patience- I can sell enough resources to gather 400 echos, but I feel it’s a lot to invest in a adventure that has already demanded a prohibitive amount of resources.

[quote=Dorian]The wizard requires you to have a sufficiently developed and effective character, where as accumulating wealth only tests patience[/quote]If these things are so different, why is there an industry based on selling pre-levelled World of Warcraft characters?

I dislike grind. Failbetter include a lot of grind in Fallen London, for their own (perfectly understandable) reasons. But they’re no different in this than the creators of a great many RPGs. Or actually, they are a little different; their reward mechanisms are not so carefully calibrated to exploit players’ susceptibility to behavioural conditioning. I imagine this is because they find such things as icky as I do.

if you really dislike grinding, and you’re not just annoyed that this content departs from the click-click-gratification model other games have trained you to expect, you should approve of the Nadir, and lobby for more stuff like it.

It takes a lot of actions from the start of your first Expedition to the end of your first visit; that’s good for Failbetter. There’s enough content and structural complexity that, even so, it’s not tedious; that’s good for players. Admittedly, it doesn’t give you shiny things every step of the way, but we’re all aged six or up, so we can defer gratification, right? (Right?) Then, once you’re in, it’s extremely profitable; lots of Echoes, few clicks. (There is randomness; my last visit netted about 15 Echoes; the one before, about a thousand.)

Failbetter can do this without breaking the FL economy, because they allow entry only once a week. Which is good for them, because along with the profession payments, it encourages occasional players to keep checking in, and good for us, because it prevents Nadir grinding, which would quickly become unfun. And because it’s an alternative to grinding generally. I don’t want an Overgoat enough to grind for one, but in some months that Cinder I invested will bring in the necessary returns.

I find that my (real life) job fills my delayed-gratification quota quite nicely.

Kinda offtopic , but seems some of you know the most effective method to grind for echoes in the nadir. I just flip cards until catafalquerie shows up , is there another way?