A.K.A, the very first storylet/choice you have in Fallen London just came up as an opportunity card in the Cave of the Nadir. Is that supposed to happen? I mean, it’s actually kind of thematic to the irrigo removing all your memories, but I’m afraid I’ll break the game or my character if I proceed…
All is well :)
As someone with much experience both with the Nadir and with breaking the game, I can confirm this is perfectly normal for the Nadir and the game will not break. You are never safe in there however haha
That card is fun to read once, but ultimately is a menace card designed to hurt you for playing it so I recommend not playing it in the future. The Nadir has many distractions designed to increase menace and irrigo without reward (aka menacing cards) and this is one of them.
edited by NiteBrite on 11/24/2014
Thanks, everyone! As I’m more concerned for experience than profit at this point, I’ll give it a go…
I deem that card a rather neutral one, as long as you pick the 1-irrigo option and not the 2-irrigo option. I consider the cards with only non-paying 2-irrigo options the true ‘menace’ cards.
True, the 1-irrigo options are not so bad if you intend to stay past 5 irrigo or don’t have a 5 card lodging equipped or forget to 0 your nightmares before entering etc.
edited by NiteBrite on 11/24/2014
I mean, 1 irrigo with no returns is still a menace, it’s just not as bad as some of the other options.
(Do people usually zero their nightmares before entering? Because I’ve usually used its nightmare reset as a way to rapidly dump say, the 9 nightmares i got while dead)
[quote=WormApotheote]
(Do people usually zero their nightmares before entering? Because I’ve usually used its nightmare reset as a way to rapidly dump say, the 9 nightmares i got while dead)[/quote]
I for one simply never care because, like you said, one most likely will leave that place in a quite serene state of mind.
It really depends on your purpose for entering. Yes leaving the nadir dumps a lot of nightmares and can be used in that way, but it is a -very- expensive method considering it costs stats and wastes your card slots while in the nadir. There are much better alternatives for nightmares reduction out there in london proper.
Ideally you are entering the nadir to grind a specific resource or card. Nightmares cards bloat the deck by adding a huge amount of menacing or non-profitable cards thus making the odds of drawing specific grind cards such as the end of battles (best card) or an unlikely garden (enigma grind) or Do you remember how they came to that place? (end game rubbery grind) or even A weakness in the air (dreams grinding) highly unlikely. If you go into the nadir and all you get is nightmare after nightmare and nothing else, you’ve just wasted dozens of actions on a few cp of nightmares.
Each point of irrigo eats 5 cp of stats across all four stats. Even difficult challenges only give you 3 or four cp. So for example an irrigo of 9 would take 9x5x4 cp away from you or 180 overall. Divide that by 3 and you’ve just spent 60 actions. Now compare that to say, the nightmare confession which reduces 7-17 cp of nightmares an action. at Nightmares 9 you have no more than 45 cp total nightmares. At its worst 7 cp reduction you’d 0 out the nightmares in about 7 actions. Even considering an additional 7 actions to grind up sudden insights, 14 actions is substantially less than -60- actions (also at its best 17 cp reduction you spend 3 actions and 3 for insights ie 1/10th of 60). And you get the bonus of getting better odds of profit while in the nadir. This is just one example, and one method of nightmares reduction, but I hope it helps to clarify why its common practice to 0 nightmares before entering the nadir.
I suppose if you had no intention of grinding in the nadir and just left as soon as possible, the efficiency of the nightmares reduction would increase. Leaving at Irrigo 5 or less is only 1 cp x4 stats per irrigo. A maximum of 5x1x4 or 20 cp at irrigo 5 is like 6 actions which is comparable to the social action at its best. The efficiency of Nadir’s nightmare reduction also decreases if you enter with less than maximum nightmares. For example, if you enter with nightmares 1 that basically takes a single action to removed when not in london (or a goldfish), but in the nadir its enough to bloat the deck and give all the same drawbacks as higher menace.
Note the numbers above assume that leaving the nadir sets nightmares to 0, but it doesn’t actually do that. Or at least it didn’t last time I checked. It would just give a reduction at less than 5 irrigo and at 6 or more irrigo it would set to 1. But that might be outdated information since I haven’t been back in a few months. Can anyone confirm the reduction mechanics of modern irrigo? Does it set nightmares to 0 or halve them or just reduce a large amount of cp? This would be good information to have.
edited by NiteBrite on 11/30/2014
I believe there are only three Nightmare cards in the Cave of Nadir, and they activate at Nightmares 2, 4 and 6, where 2 is the one that can give a Direful Reflection in exchange for Is Someone There? Not that bad in my opinion, but I do try to maximise my chances of drawing one of the two most profitable cards, so I keep my Nightmares down with the goldfish and the bejewelled cane. But I don’t spend any Actions to reduce Nightmares before entering the cave, not even on the rare occasion when they creep up to 3 or above. Well, maybe it’s because that would be such a rare occasion?
The Nightmare cards aren’t bad if you don’t mind spending dream qualities. I try to avoid them because I like to keep my dreams up as high as possible, but they’re not bad.
I guess I’ve been away from the nadir too long and it’s started to affect my memory. Which is an amusing thought given what the Nadir is and does. Apologies, for some reason I thought the nightmare cards were worse than that. I falsely remembered them as all firing at 1 instead of staggered like that.
Three cards (out of 20 possible, or 15%) is nothing to sneeze at when most people going there have only four card hands. Banking them would preclude you from banking three other cards. The low nightmares card being the direful one is a bonus you are right. If that’s how it is then nightmares 2 might not be bad for the nadir. Thanks for clearing that up.
edited by NiteBrite on 11/30/2014
[quote=NiteBrite]It really depends on your purpose for entering. Yes leaving the nadir dumps a lot of nightmares and can be used in that way, but it is a -very- expensive method considering it costs stats and wastes your card slots while in the nadir. There are much better alternatives for nightmares reduction out there in london proper.
Ideally you are entering the nadir to grind a specific resource or card. Nightmares cards bloat the deck by adding a huge amount of menacing or non-profitable cards thus making the odds of drawing specific grind cards such as the end of battles (best card) or an unlikely garden (enigma grind) or Do you remember how they came to that place? (end game rubbery grind) or even A weakness in the air (dreams grinding) highly unlikely. If you go into the nadir and all you get is nightmare after nightmare and nothing else, you’ve just wasted dozens of actions on a few cp of nightmares.
Each point of irrigo eats 5 cp of stats across all four stats. Even difficult challenges only give you 3 or four cp. So for example an irrigo of 9 would take 9x5x4 cp away from you or 180 overall. Divide that by 3 and you’ve just spent 60 actions. Now compare that to say, the nightmare confession which reduces 7-17 cp of nightmares an action. at Nightmares 9 you have no more than 45 cp total nightmares. At its worst 7 cp reduction you’d 0 out the nightmares in about 7 actions. Even considering an additional 7 actions to grind up sudden insights, 14 actions is substantially less than -60- actions (also at its best 17 cp reduction you spend 3 actions and 3 for insights ie 1/10th of 60). And you get the bonus of getting better odds of profit while in the nadir. This is just one example, and one method of nightmares reduction, but I hope it helps to clarify why its common practice to 0 nightmares before entering the nadir.
I suppose if you had no intention of grinding in the nadir and just left as soon as possible, the efficiency of the nightmares reduction would increase. Leaving at Irrigo 5 or less is only 1 cp x4 stats per irrigo. A maximum of 5x1x4 or 20 cp at irrigo 5 is like 6 actions which is comparable to the social action at its best. The efficiency of Nadir’s nightmare reduction also decreases if you enter with less than maximum nightmares. For example, if you enter with nightmares 1 that basically takes a single action to removed when not in london (or a goldfish), but in the nadir its enough to bloat the deck and give all the same drawbacks as higher menace.
Note the numbers above assume that leaving the nadir sets nightmares to 0, but it doesn’t actually do that. Or at least it didn’t last time I checked. It would just give a reduction at less than 5 irrigo and at 6 or more irrigo it would set to 1. But that might be outdated information since I haven’t been back in a few months. Can anyone confirm the reduction mechanics of modern irrigo? Does it set nightmares to 0 or halve them or just reduce a large amount of cp? This would be good information to have.
edited by NiteBrite on 11/30/2014[/quote]
I believe it divides your nightmares by three and rounds down. But I didn’t do an exhaustive test.
Anyway, your calculations seem to be assuming you aren’t doing anything else while regenerating the stat loss from the Nadir; which as long as you’re actually playing (which, admittedly, I haven’t been much the past month xP) should be fairly trivial to do over the course of a week. (A week doing exclusively straightforward challenges and 100 actions/day will easily make up the stat loss)
It would be more of an issue obviously if you’re not playing full time (although then nightmares are also unlikely to be a big problem), or you’re going to the nadir more than once a week for this purpose. but as long as you’re going weekly it turns into a bonus of significantly reducing your nightmares at the cost of slightly lowering average the yield on the nadir.
It’s less a matter of ‘my nightmares are high, time to use the cave of the nadir to grind them off fast’, and more a matter of timing a normal visit to clear a bunch of them.
Yeah you are right. My whole argument sort of collapses when you throw in that the nightmares cards don’t all get added to the deck at 1 level but instead are thrown in staggered. I was thinking your chances of getting any one specific card of desire would be reduced from 7.1% to 5.8% by adding all three cards at the get-go. The issue then isn’t that you can heal in one week, but that you’ve lost a week that you already had and now have to relive. I dunno. I guess the overall impact is barely noticeable percentages with the chance of a direful which is nice. Overall, not nearly as bad as I was thinking.
I don’t know why I get so worked up and excited about a ~0.5% to 1.3% difference in draw success.
edited by NiteBrite on 11/30/2014
FYI, one other useful Nadir card is Woods in Winter.
One of the options ("The dance goes on") gives a full level of Dramatic Tension, which is equivalent to 11 actions of grinding outside the Nadir. If you value an action at 1.64 echoes (Affair of the Box echoes/action rate), this means each Dramatic Tension point is worth ~18 echoes.
(FYI - the wiki claims that getting Dramatic Tension is a rare success, but in months and months of going to the Nadir, I’ve never had a case of playing Woods in Winter and not getting the Dramatic Tension increase, whether I’ve had any when entering the Nadir or not)
[quote=dov](FYI - the wiki claims that getting Dramatic Tension is a rare success, but in months and months of going to the Nadir, I’ve never had a case of playing Woods in Winter and not getting the Dramatic Tension increase, whether I’ve had any when entering the Nadir or not)[/quote]It used to be a rare success before it was changed so that you needed to have finished the (technically) Fate-locked Clathermont content, at which point any changes fell under the ‘no information about Fate-locked content’ rule.
I haven’t seen the card in a while, but I used to save it and use it at irrigo 9 if I couldn’t draw a better card by then. 4 x 60 points of extra stat loss just to get 11 extra Actions’ worth of grinding? Only worth it to the stat-capped. I’ve also made sure to have at last a single point of Dramatic Tension, but apparently I wouldn’t need that? Good to know.