I’m trying to get an impossible theorem so I can upgrade my suite at the Bethlehem. Right now I’ve got 28 out of the 49 searing enigmas needed, and I’m trying to find a better source than cramming uncanny incunabula into the turbine at the University. I’ve done that 6 times and received a princely 9 SEs – a loss of 1,312.50 E (6*25 UI @ 12.50 E each for 9 SE @ 62.50 E each). I don’t mind the expense, but this is (with the exception of marriage) the only thing that I’m doing in Fallen London these days and grinding that out would be too boring. I’ve got a watchful of 200, plus 68 from my various items, so I imagine this is pretty much the best return that I’m going to be getting from the turbine.
What are my other options? I just spent a week and a half with the Sisters on Hunter’s Island because I though I recalled that a rare success at the well would give SE, but got only glim (and a few hundred journals of infamy and tales of terror, which I fed into the turbine for… 1 SE). Is there anything else that is at least theoretically grindable?[li]
First of all, my deepest condolences on your poor luck.
I’m afraid that I can’t advise on a better grindable source for Enigmas, though I note that the output of the Turbine seems more or less random; I made 15 runs at 259 Watchful and came out with the below:
Ones: 5
Twos: 1
Threes: 2
Fours: 4
Fives: 0
Sixes: 3
This averages out to 3.13/run, and a loss of 1750 Echoes. With a truly random distribution of 1-6 Enigmas/run, the mean is 3.5, so I came out slightly below. If it isn’t random, I hate to think how much that could deteriorate with lower Watchful.
[li]Edit to add: This is of course too small a sample to decide whether or not the damn thing is random. Furthermore, I think the Turbine’s existence shows that there is no better Enigma grinding option. Otherwise we’d all use it!
[li](That said, maybe someone has found one and is withholding the information so that it won’t be nerfed. But maybe I am just paranoid.) edited by Cocytus on 3/11/2014
And last but hopefully not least for now, expeditions in the Forgotten Quarter may give one. Yes, even the lowly Thief’s Cache. And I have no idea how rare that one is :D
Not as a recommendation but just sharing a data point. It does occasionally emerge from Shrine of the Deep Blue Heaven loops, but in the times I’ve tracked it, it’s emerged about 5% of the time. At an optimal rate of about 50-60 actions per loop for highly watchful characters, that’s a huge amount of looping for not very many enigmas. As much of a proponent of that loop as I am, even I wouldn’t recommend that for an enigma grind.
On a Heist, Baseborn & Fowlingpiece, 5 pts, awards an Enigma on a rare success. I have received 9 Enigmas on 37 awards, which required 538 actions. 60 actions per Enigma, which may be far from optimal - I am grinding MW, just thought I’d throw in the data for consideration.
Also in Cave of the Nadir - An Unlikely Garden. So, basically, you have two cards that pop Searing Enigmas in Cave of Nadir if you go in with a ton of Confident Smiles. I have also, generally, had better than average luck with the Fidgeting Writer, and it would certainly be less costly than losing 1300+ echoes…
2x Burglar’s Progress (the heist’s carousel metric): minimum 10, but sometimes 12 or 14. Average of 14.4 actions/heist over 44 heists, so I’d estimate .75 MW CP/action.
Does burglar’s progress cap? If you were just interested in MW you could try to stay on a heist playing the safe 1x burglar’s progress cards for as long as possible to maximize the MW/action.
[li]
I don’t know if it caps, but that would not be easy - they are non-discardable and I rarely get safe passage to 5 points. The way around that, acquiring inside information, either before or during the heist, is counter-productive in terms of per action. Since I am also getting 2.05 PPA (so far, at 648 actions), I’m okay with things as they are.
I tried the Heist. It’s pretty good, yeah. I would not do it just for the profit (even if it is 2.05 PPA with a chance of Enigma), but for MW it beats spamming social actions all day. Pity you can’t actually do more than one Heist in a row because you run out of cards. Having 30 actions does not help with this one(
BTW, how do you run it to end up with 14.4 actions on average? edited by Fhoenix on 3/13/2014
Just try not to take more than 6 actions to get progress 5? There are about eight actions to raise casing, start, and finish the heist that you have to take, but raising progress to 5 should take anywhere between around 4 and 8 actions depending on how lucky you are (and how large your hand is).
Since the heist deck is so small I think it helps to go in with only one card in the deck. Because if the first card drawn is a good one it would be good to be able to get that one again when the next card is drawn, instead of the deck automatically drawing the next four cards (for five card lodgings) before I get a chance to play the first card. Because then all those cards are guaranteed to not be the good card that I drew first. This is quite easy to keep up when doing several heists in a row, since I can just draw the surplus cards in the Flit like I usually do.
Another thing to pay attention to is that when a player enters a new deck-area the action counter is secretly reset, so it’s best to wait until after a new Action has just been received. Going in or out of a heist (or the Cave of Nadir, or a menace area etc) right before getting the next Action seems to waste almost ten minutes of Actions. Not sure how the counter for cards works in that regard. I should probably keep an eye on that, even though it would require sitting around and watching for a few minutes.
All this being said, I have guesstimated that I spend about 15 Actions on average on a heist, and in eleven sealed archives I’ve only found a single Searing Enigma. So my ppa is closer to 160. Which can still be good enough when adding the Making Waves. And I’m also waiting to get caught so I can finally make an acquaintance out of the forger. Not going to make it easy for them though. I want to see how long it takes to get caught, not how quickly I can turn myself in.
I did no know about the action reset. That explains some things.
And I was asking because at first I thought people would buy Info/Keys. I was cautious about getting caught, so I was buying those. Turns out you can breeze through the Heist without owning any. A pity you lose all the Casing/Info/Keys in the end. I lost 19 levels of Casing on my first attempt because apparently I was doing Thefts before and forgot to cash in all that Casing.
I would caution that the client counter often gets out of sync with the server offset. It will re-sync when it goes to add an action to your candle. I wouldn’t be suprised if what you were seeing is the client simply reloading with a fresh instance.
[quote=Theus]It will re-sync when it goes to add an action to your candle. I wouldn’t be suprised if what you were seeing is the client simply reloading with a fresh instance.[/quote]The ongoing synchronisation would only be responsible for the times I see a new Action and instead of ten minutes I have 9:45 minutes left until my next Action. Which would also explain why, when I seem to have 0 Actions left but I’m very close to getting a new Action, I might still be able to click on "Go" buttons that aren’t locked, because the server knows that I have an Action, but my client does not.
The ‘new deck’ reset for the Actions candle can set it back a few minutes as far as I’ve seen. Well, I wasn’t sitting there looking, but when one minute to next Action has turned to two minutes to next Action before ten minutes has passed, I drew the conclusion that the client count was set back to the server count, which was reset without the client finding out until it thought it was going to get a new Action. I’d also read about that as an explanation for the guy who suggested that FBG was cheating him out of time, possibly to get him to pay more Nex to refresh Actions. So that’s how I knew what to watch out for.
I only mentioned that ten minutes could be lost as the extreme possibility. On average I guess one would only lose five minutes. Unless one is careful to make sure to minimise the loss by waiting until a new Action has been received. The count also appears to reset for the deck, but that is shown immediately, as the whole deck is cleared. If those two counts aren’t close to each other, a player would have to decide which count is more important: a new Action or a new card. I assume that the reason for that desynchronisation is that it’s easy for the deck to top out while the Actions keep being added to the candle.