streetfelineblue
Posts: 1459
9/5/2013
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Specifically, lucratively grinding Watchful (and Persuasive). That is: when the stat cap is raised (something that seems to be happening quite a lot as of late), when I haven't any specific need for a good or a connection, I can easily do the Affair of the Box to grind Shadowy and the Velocipede Squad for Dangerous, netting a hefty income in Echoes (the Affair of the Box has the added treat of increasing Empire's Kingmaker, though I never actually used it for anything ^^). Persuasive doesn't really have such an alternative, but it does provide better alternatives to simply spamming Unfinished Business in the form of work at Mahogany Hall (the Pygmalion ventures always net more than 1 Echo per action).
The big problem is Watchful. For my stats, in London the alternatives to Unfinished Business (like A Colleague with a Problem and The Committee for Semiotic Safety at the University, or Reaping the Academic Benefits and A Tour of the Quarter in the Forgotten Quarter ) all net less than 1 Echo per action, though some give some extra in the form of bonus Connections. In these cases I usually grind Watchful at zee, ususally at Hunter's Keep or Corpsecage Island (I have a knack for collecting Prelapsarian Archaeology work, even though it's not really profitable), but I still miss an easy, affordable source of Watchful based income in London. Am I missing something, or really the only alternative is to grind Debating the Nature of Primordial Shrieks in Unfinished Business and put trust in the rare success to scrap up that little extra Echo?
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Twitter: @streetfelineblu
Blue's LiveJournal
Blue's Echo Bazaar profile
Blue's Night Circus diary
Link to Ocelot's Enigma Ambition hint page; PM for clarification. No direct solutions provided.
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Flyte
Administrator
Posts: 671
9/6/2013
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A guide to grinding stats and Echoes in the Forgotten Quarter:
- Put The Airs of the Forgotten Quarter on your Mantelpiece, so you can check its numerical value by visiting your profile.
- Repeatedly play the Seeking Curios and Secrets in the Forgotten Quarter storylet. Often you will only have one option (ignoring the Aristocratic Academic). If you have to choose, See the sights rather than Speak to private individuals, and Speak to private individuals in preference to A meeting with the Dean.
- If you have the Hell's coursers option, check the value of The Airs of the Forgotten Quarter. If it is 96+, it's time to go on an Expedition. Otherwise, select Hell's coursers and repeat step 2.
- Trade in Whispered Secrets for 20+ supplies, then Seek a shrine of the Deep Blue Heaven. Choose the A sign? option. It gives you four Progress for free. Then pursue the Expedition as normal. (Either use the safe two Supplies option, or use Sudden Insights and cancel if you fail the Watchful check on the first attempt. Supplies are too expensive to waste.)
- Collect your Unpredictable Treasure/Eyeless Skull and return to step 1.
This will raise all your stats, with a focus on Watchful. It's more profitable than Unfinished Business and gives more interesting items.
If you run out of Whispered Secrets, try bartering for them with the Tiger Keeper, who will give 1100 in exchange for 1000 Jade, Deep Amber or Rostygold. Grind Jade through Unfinished Business if you want to raise Dangerous/get the most Echoes per action, or Deep Amber at Mahogany Hall if you'd rather raise Persuasive.
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Trodgmey
Posts: 164
12/17/2013
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I've felt for a couple months now that for a near-max (~180) Watchful character, the Corpsecage Island/Shrine of the Deep Blue Heaven loop was particularly lucrative, but the sheer number of possible rewards made it very difficult for me to pin down. I'll get into the math below, but the summary is that the loop appears to average >1.5 echoes/action.
The general loop goes something like this:
Zee voyage to Corpsecage Island, and on the island, select the following actions:
Digging up bones and rough justice
What's written here?
See what you can dig up
A message long cold
The shore near the jetty
Writing it all down
Tarry a little (because of the odds, I calculate this as yielding 15 prelapsarian archaeological notes on average)
Depart
That's a 22 action run, which if all successful (with the "tarry a little" caveat), will yield 418 cryptic clues, 264 prelapsarian archaeological notes, 40 map scraps, 125 proscribed material, and 1 zee story.
Loop on this and a zee voyage (my average action count: 23.5 actions and an average of about 1 echo worth of value from cards) as long as you can stand. If you just loop once and head back to London, it's the 45.5 actions needed to loop, plus the extra 23.5 to get back. The more loops you do without returning to London, the more the cost of that extra voyage drops. For these calculations, I leave it out, because theoretically you could do 100 loops and make that cost .235 actions per loop.
Once back, convert all of your prelapsarian archaeological notes into expedition supplies (1 action + 10 notes => 1 supply). Then complete the Shrine of the Deep Blue Heaven loop as quickly as you can. Based on techniques discussed elsewhere, you can reasonably easily get this as low as costing 18 supplies and 8 actions.
Based on 21 loops where I collected data, the average sale value of the treasure came out to 66.675 echoes (not including the one time I got an Eyeless Skull, which is excluded for hopefully obvious reasons). That ranges from the paltry return of 1 Storm Threnody and 200 Whispered Secrets (14.5 echoes, one time out of 21 tries) to the mega haul of two Night Whispers (125 echoes, six times out of 21), with the most common result being somewhere between 30 and 62.5 echoes.
This took me a bit of time with my LibreOffice spreadsheet and converting units. Start with the expedition treasure alone it comes to around 57 actions/expedition, which if just compared with the 66.675 average result is paltry. However, the Corpsecage Island loop and the zee voyages, if effectively normalized out for just the actions it takes to gather the supplies for one expedition, give you an additional 20 echoes. Add that in to your treasure haul and split it over the 57 actions, and my result is about 1.52 echoes per action, and a set of loops that at least gives you a bit of variety in your grinding.
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Trodgmey -- an otherwise pleasant chap with a peculiar obsession with the first four cities.
http://www.fallenlondon.com/Profile/Trodgmey
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heresiarch
Posts: 13
1/10/2014
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Flyte wrote:
...If you have to choose, See the sights rather than Speak to private individuals, and Speak to private individuals in preference to A meeting with the Dean.
Waiting until The Airs are 96+ in order to force the A sign? option is pure brilliance, but if I may suggest: if the intent is to grind Watchful, then always select A Meeting with the Dean. It costs 3 actions, but it yields a flat bonus +5 Watchful in addition to the regular stat increase, which for those for whom the Seeking Curios options are all straightforward, works out to +2 CP per action (1 for straightforward challenge, 5 bonus, divided by three actions). This is the best option for high-level watchful grinding I've found.
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"...London Bridge is rising up; rising up, rising up; London Bridge is rising up, my fair dev'less..."
http://fallenlondon.storynexus.com/Profile/heresiarch
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lady ciel
Posts: 2548
9/6/2013
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Well seeking curios and secrets in the Forgotten quarter can be reasonably profitable. It is not as reliable as you never know precisely what the result will be and you do have to deal with nightmares.
I know that a lot of the time you get a variable amount of whispered secrets (but even there you can get up to nearly 300 sometimes) and Relics of the Fourth City. So I think it probably evens out to around an echo an action. Plus you can get rare successes on some of the options - the eyeless skull, pulsating amber, and one gives a brass ring and some amanita sherry
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ciel
Sorry RL means I am not a very active player at the moment. No social actions unless you are prepared to wait and definitely no sparring or other mult-action things.
No Calling Cards or boxed cats please. Will take dupes on the affluent photographers. Other social invitations welcome. Parabolan Kittens usually available, send me an in-game social action saying you want one and I will get one to you as soon as possible.
storynexus name - reveurciel
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