Flipz

Gods, yes please! Healers never got enough love in Heroica, and the dice roll on their healing made them less valuable than consumables in a pinch. Some love for the lovable support is definitely in order for those brave, tormented souls. True, and I suppose one disadvantage of a simple system is that it makes the system that much easier to optimize/powergame. However, and we've touched on it before, I think that the harshness of failure (i.e. fear) is a much bigger motivator for our overcautious behavior than any need for power and self-aggrandizement; it's still there, of course, I just think it's the lesser motivation. I can set aside my pride for the sake of playing along with a Quest fairly easily, but the fear that the QM could kill off a dearly beloved NPC I've come to cherish for literal years awakens a hollow dread in me that is far more difficult to ignore, particularly if that death comes because I failed to have the most optimal strategy possible. Non-optimal outcomes are far easier to stomach when the difference between "overwhelming success" and just plain normal "success" doesn't mean lives. ...or I guess in other words, y'all can blame my paranoid powergaming on Zepher (and, more recently, WBD).

What? No, no...Free Hits need to be inherently negative, they're a counter to Heroes all piling on to the same target to take it down quickly, representing enemies having a chance to sneak in a hit while the Heroes are distracted doing other things. I'm just saying it could be something along the lines of a 1/3 chance to be either regular Damage, Critical Damage, or Special Damage. Not...really? I mean, it's not zero effort, but it's exactly what stealing borrowing enemies from other QMs and the Fields is for. I mean, heck, it's a perfect use for known monsters with known stats that suddenly makes upgrading a Hero's stats worthwhile again; if odds are good that random encounters will be mostly premade enemies with premade stats, suddenly those are fixed numbers that upgrades are meaningful for dealing with. Again, it's still work, but certainly a lot less than making up new stuff wholecloth for a fight, especially if you don't really worry about making it harder so the Heroes don't plough through it. Complaints from the players actually playing, or complaints from other people not on the quest who aren't getting that experience? If it's the latter, that complaint is about as valid as people outside a quest complaining that they're not getting the specific cool loot from a particular Quest, which is to say not valid at all. (Yes, I'm aware I've complained about missing out on Expert Classes before; I fully acknowledge my complaints back then were baseless, and we've rather fully established that past-me could always be a bit of an idiot. ) Not all battles are equal, not all Quests are equal, and games don't always need to be Dark Souls/AD&D in terms of difficulty of progression. Some of us play for fun, after all. Oh, certainly, I'm just much more in favor of a logarithmic increase than a hard cap. I think the increasing Gold cost of upgrades was supposed to serve that function here, but in practice that fell apart pretty quickly due to economic factors; baking it into the stats themselves is far safer to overall balance. Honestly, my only real issue with this is my fear that QMs would just resort to enemies having 20/20 hits all the time instead of like 20000/20000 HP like we currently have; at least with the HP numbers if QMs start making things too insanely tanky, there's always ways to whittle that down faster if needs be. (Why yes, I did think the Hatchling mobs ended up with Levels too low and hit counts too high, how ever did you guess? ) But that's again a discussion about difficulty and balancing in general, as opposed to a problem specifically with a pure number-of-hits system. (That said, your complaint here perfectly illustrates my frustration with the continually moving goalposts of our current style of "balancing"; in parties without mixed level ranges, we effectively already have this number-of-hits system, and it runs into the exact problem you just pointed out.) I'm not sure I like the idea I'm about to propose, but theoretically a number-of-hits system could be balanced for mixed-level parties by having the weakest member of the party count for "1 hit", and then the number of hits dealt by the other party members are mathematically determined based on how much higher their Level and WP are compared to the baseline? IDK, I can already tell there's flaws to that, but it's at least a direction to start looking in if we wanted to go down this route.

I don't really see how it would be *that* much of a change; Free Hits would still be negated same as currently by targeting the enemy (thus giving them a chance to roll Damage or Special Damage), only in the new system an enemy that gets a Free Hit would get a roll of the dice to see if it's a regular hit for regular damage, some form of Critical (the exact rate of which could even be customized per enemy so barbarian-like enemies (for example) could get 3x instead of 2x), or their Special. That's just it--a battle against fodder doesn't have to take days/weeks, because it's not supposed to be balanced to take that long. One of the biggest problems in the game is how long and drawn-out battles have become, and they don't have to be that long because it's perfectly fine to have battles where enemies can get one-shot. QMs seem to be fine with one-shotting Heroes, but we all balk at letting the Heroes do the same to our enemies; I'm saying we should maybe fight that impulse a bit and lean into the Heroes being powerful from time to time. (Yes, that also means that AoE can end up trivializing a fight even more than intended, but so what? Why is a battle that's only 2-3 Rounds so much worse than one that takes 5-7 or 8-9? There's no inherent point to making a battle last longer than it needs to, and that's even more relevant as characters reach higher levels and the experience requirements to actually advance start to get more and more absurd and boring to have to wait for.) And I mean, for that matter, what makes a "higher stakes battle" inherently better than a lower-stakes one? If you just constantly keep raising the stakes with no relaxation or stress relief in between, burnout becomes almost impossible to avoid; for as bad a reputation as "filler" content gets, it exists for a reason, and when used wisely can majorly improve the overall pacing of an experience, whether that experience is a show or an RPG or something else entirely. Definitely agree that, as nice and simple as the current SP system is, letting players just increase damage reduction at will is not ultimately viable; there's a reason D&D makes that so hard. At the same time, setting up a system that then requires a fixed cap seems off to me; suddenly, instead of players increasing their SP as much as *they* want to for the sake of suiting their build, SP becomes a matter of simple upkeep, wherein all players end up capping their SP eventually and those that don't being mavericks/challenge-hunters neglecting a basic and universal strategy of baseline competence. (i.e. not going for Botanist in Stardew Valley, or not taking Eldritch Blast as a Warlock in D&D 5e). Whatever system we use for SP, I do feel like keeping it something that isn't capped is important, even as we try to make it a system where that infinite scaling doesn't end up creating infinite scaling on the enemy side in response.

...I actually instinctively like that concept and think it needs further investigation (even if it ends up not working out), but at the same time given current circumstances in the battle I feel compelled to mock it: So if the player's SP is greater than 100, what, they have a chance to take negative damage and get healed by the attack? ...actually, having said that, it does seem like it might end up negating even more damage than the current system, especially once players inevitably break SP:50 and deflections become more common than failures to deflect. Interesting concept, but it ultimately doesn't scale, unfortunately. This is how D&D Adventurer's League handles experience (or at least, did at the time I played several years ago), and I definitely like the concept a lot. Maybe leave the exact amount of experience gain to QM discretion (so that QMs can reward players who participate actively and/or who achieve individual goals when others didn't), but still definitely a better way than stopping a player's entire progression just because another party member rolled a 6 or two.

Honestly, upgrading weapons and shields seems kinda useless in general unless you're specifically going for the Fields, where enemy stats are set and thus can be planned around; no matter how much Gold you pump into your own stats, the QM is most likely just going to tweak the enemies to counter it in the name of "challenge". Obviously that's not true of all QMs, of course, but it does seem to match the general tone of the complaints we've all heard and made about battle balancing, and honestly at that point, what's the point in upgrades outside of posturing/bragging about how big your numbers are/insert your own punchline here? See, that's my whole problem here; the whole "just make them hit like a truck to get past the SP" solution is frankly boring, and punishes all of the players because some of them like playing tanks; what's the point in upping your SP from SP:9 to SP:10 if the QM is just going to up the enemy levels from Level 10 to Level 11 in response? Having enemies get a roll instead of a Free Hit makes the situation more dynamic and interesting, because now the QM doesn't have to inflate enemy levels to make enemies threatening, they can say "okay, so my Knight just buffed his SP and now my enemies' default Free Hit isn't enough to get past it, but that's okay because there's a chance of a Crit that will, or if I get really lucky the enemy will roll their Special just like a Hero can roll a SHIELD," and now all of a sudden there's more variety in what enemies are doing and the numbers don't necessarily have to be inflated to match the strongest player all the time. (And, as an added bonus, now there's another chance for the enemy to roll their Special, meaning once again the "hit like a truck" strategy isn't as necessary.) I mean, real talk here, if the goal is to make it so that a party of Level 1-10 characters have an equally challenging battle twelve quests on when they're Level 31-40, then why have level advancement at all? Part of the fun of making a powerful character is getting to actually be powerful, and it bothers me that so much of the conversation around high-level play tends to come down to complaining about how difficult it is to threaten powerful characters compared to threatening low-level characters. Is it important to offer powerful characters challenge from time to time? Yes. Is it important to also give those powerful characters opportunities to actually benefit from being powerful? Also yes. There's always a bigger fish, true, but that doesn't mean all the little goldfish have gone extinct, y'know? Ugh, honestly the forum update to this "modern" post editor is what finally pushed Heroica over the brink, IMO. The way this post editor handles formatting is insane and stupid and inconsistent, and makes it damn near impossible to write up and roll battles and stat blocks. If Heroica is ever revived, I honestly don't think it can be on EB proper, just because the software the site is on has made it frankly impossible to run it.

He still got Artisan through the whim of getting selected for the Quest that gave it, rather than it being something anyone could strive to achieve with enough time and dedication, and as you pointed out, he still got as powerful as he did because of uneven gold flow rather than by the much more even and controllable experience gain.

OOC: Pretzel has the Kris equipped, did it generate an Aura or not? Also, the Archdemon should be in the harbor. Oh, and I don't suppose Arthur rolled a Phalanx or Defend? (Not that the latter really matters with nearly every Harbor enemy bypassing SP... ) Unsure whether or not the party had what they needed to survive against the onslaught, Arthur melee attacks Rigger Elite A from the Back Row with his Dauntlet Index, unless otherwise ordered. Back on the Magpie, Knife-Tongue dual-strike attacks Red Hatchlings C with Cendstyr and Gold Hatchlings C with Shank from the Front Row; if his first attack succeeds he dual-strike attacks Green Hatchlings C with Cendstyr and Gold Hatchlings C with Shank from the Front Row, otherwise he repeats his first attack.

Agreed, that very much ties back in to the whole enemy responsiveness problem and the thought of "enemy turns" I mentioned before. If an enemy can't deal more damage than a Hero's SP on a Free Hit, then barring some kind of passive skill and/or immunities to damage over time (i.e. Poisoned, Bleeding, etc.), that enemy realistically doesn't pose a threat to the party because their most reliable means of dealing damage is nullified. If a QM wants to "offer a challenge" to the party, that means that their only option to reliably do that is to raise the enemy's Level, which just feeds into the cycle of constant number inflation, which also means that less tanky Heroes end up getting utterly obliterated by common mooks because the QM is constantly balancing around the party tank. While I feel that balancing everything around the tank is not a good method of QMing, enemies having a baked-in chance of a Crit lets QMs of that mindset have a chance of actually damaging the tank without having to make their enemies utterly unsurvivable for non-tank party members. Yes to all of the above. I mean, the core issue with the magical item problem is that magic items are fundamentally...well, items, which means they can be bought with gold. Gold gain is either massive or miniscule, and largely out of the player's control unless they go Rogue, meaning it's up to QM whim and RNG whether or not a character can effectively gain power and reach a state where they can participate meaningfully in endgame content with the existing high-end characters like Arthur and Hoke and Atramor and Althior (side note, why do so many top-tier Heroes stats-wise have names starting with A? ); compare characters like Vindsval and Throlar, or Pretzel and Nerwen, both cases where the newer character far, far outstripped the older one despite similar levels of activity and participation. Levels, on the other hand, are for the most part constant (barring the broken 2x and 3x experience Artifacts that I don't think should return in a future game; Endgame's Trial Brew is by far the most fair means of a character getting bonus experience from a fight I've seen, with Level-Up Mushrooms being less fair but not outright broken due to them being consumables rather than permanent Artifacts), and by the nature of the game experience is generally handed out fairly evenly, making it a much fairer way to give out new abilities and skills than Artifacts. Yeah, effects definitely need a huge rework. In theory, they're great for adding variety to combat; in practice, they're just an outright death sentence to whoever they're applied to, which in turn makes immunities run way too rampant. On the one hand, what's the point of being able to deal negative effects if all the enemies are immune to them; on the other hand, what's the point of having enemies if effects just render them useless? On both ends, effects are just too, too much at the moment. EDIT: ...pun not intended. xD

OOC: Round 5, Arthur's action seems to have been added now. My question now is, does that outnumbering requirement update dynamically per character leaving, or could we, say, have the entire party on the Magpie leave this Round without having to keep the hatchling mobs outnumbered?

OOC: Previous action doesn't seem to have been rolled for. "We've got to get off this boat, otherwise they'll block us in here for good! We need to move to the Harbor." So saying, Arthur moves from the Magpie to the Harbor, unless Pretzel can't or doesn't, in which case he melee targets Red Hatchlings C with his Gladiator Trident from the Front Row. OOC: This is, of course, assuming I didn't misunderstand how movement works. Also, would a Smoke Bomb/Flee allow the party to bypass the "must outnumber the enemies" requirement for movement?

I definitely agree that Artifacts broke the system in a big way, but I honestly lay the blame more on the arms race to make new Artifacts relevant more than on players upgrading existing Artifacts. Honestly, I'm mostly fine with the way players can get immunities, considering how devastating negative effects are--on both PCs and enemies, really. (Hashtag nerf effects, maybe?) Pala definitely has a huge point with the leveling system also working to play its part; either you win the battle without being taken out, or you get jack diddly squat, which just utterly sucks--not to mention, it's another way that strong (read: wealthy) characters get stronger (and wealthier), while newer and weaker characters have to struggle and take massive risks of getting massacred just because one or two other characters in the party are utter juggernauts. (It's one reason I really like the Skirmisher and Weather Mage classes, since they focus on supporting weaker allies with Defend and Phalanx from Skirmisher boosting allied defenses and Weather Mage increasing weaker allies' elemental spells, and in retrospect I really regret not being able to use it more--the later stages of the game might have been a lot different if we'd had a bunch of Skirmishers and Weather Mages running around instead of Dragoons and Assassins and Raiders and Marauders. Heck, the Veteran Classes got shafted too, even if they're not quite as good at supporting weaker allies as Skirmisher and Weather Mage in my opinion.) (Side note, yes, Minstrel is also an excellent support class but it's also broken as all hell in literally every incarnation it's ever had so I have mixed feelings about it, I'll rant about it at some later time. ) I do sort-of agree on the elemental immunities, though? Looking at the system, it would have made way more sense for an imbued gem in an Artifact to give the character a corresponding enemy typing (i.e. a Ruby makes the character Fiery, meaning they're immune to Fire but weak to Water and Earth). Would have been an interesting way to make elemental immunities more of a strategic choice while also encouraging more elements from enemy attacks as well. Disagree on inventory slots, though. I've played enough Earthbound to utterly hate inventory limits no matter what form they take. Again, though, the wealth inequality really did mess up a lot of things, beyond even what the rest of the base game's flaws were; in a system where wealth can upgrade equipment, any mechanic that can directly generate wealth automatically becomes one of the most powerful in the system. In retrospect, the Overkill Gloves definitely should have put the gold into the enemy's drops once they were killed instead of putting it into the individual PC's purse, and possibly the other gold-gaining rolls should have worked collectively as well. I mean, a system like that would have 100% solved the issue behind Pet Dragon logic for sure. I actually had an NPC class worked up for a planned Quest that worked along those lines for Syndicate Elites, based on a newer Syndicate member getting to pick and choose elements from the Syndicate members we'd already seen, so that kind of concept can definitely work. Thinking about it, having to actually spend levels on new rolls/traits/Artifact slots could be a good balancing mechanism as well; sure, you can pick out a really powerful trait like Pet Dragon when you hit Level 30/31, but that immediately drops you back down to Level 10 (or even Level 1 for that one in particular) when you do due to the intense and specialized training you have to undergo to be able to handle that trait. Sure, you now have a second unit in battle, but your damage output has been severely reduced, and you now have to watch out for two units rather than one. ...actually, doesn't Final Fantasy XIV have something like this? Like, you pick a class and gain a certain set of abilities to match, but then after reaching a certain number of levels within that class you can take some of the perks with you into other classes? (Forgive me if I'm wrong, I'm not terribly familiar with the game myself, just have watched a few friends play it from time to time.) Could be an interesting way to handle things.

I mean, without the conditionals, the Artificial Stupidity was even worse, taking characters who should be at least nominally competent and making them do blatantly stupid things that aren't even motivated by character reasons. Yes, competent characters can fail (i.e. roll poorly), and players can also make poor decisions, but in plenty of ways the system ends up changing actions that are competent and thought-out into actions that are completely nonsensical, through no fault of the player's own. There's a difference between taking a risk and it not panning out (i.e. taking an action that requires a die roll and rolling badly), and taking an action that engages with the system in a competent way and then having the rug pulled out from under you. I think you hit the nail on the head with the last point, though. Heroica does not scale well; everything about the system seems to have been designed around the first 10-20 levels, and then everything past that sort of just spirals wildly out of control as the numbers just continually and exponentially increase. Part of that does come from the old gold rules that put way more currency into circulation than the smithy rules were designed to handle, and part of that does come from the Artifact arms race where stacking multipliers started to become a thing, but really both of those are just particularly noticeable extensions of the base issue of the game's overall scaling; classes are built to scale at a linear pace, but wealth and equipment tend to increase in a multiplicative or even exponential fashion, and enemies ended up following the exponential curve rather than the linear one because to do otherwise would be to just get completely trampled by BS like WP:20 or x8-x16 damage multipliers or freaking SP:692. But that's me getting ahead of myself just a bit. Yeah, I do place a fair bit of outright blame on the concept that every battle is supposed to be a challenge; I completely disagree with that argument, in part because it only encourages the further exponential scaling of enemies which in turn fuels the exponential arms race between players and their opponents. (Think about it: if every battle is supposed to be a challenge, then QMs end up having to make the first-battle warm-up mooks of a new quest just as much of a challenge as the overpowered superbosses the players fought at the end of their last one; that's just not a sustainable increase.) I understand not wanting the party to just walk over everything, but I definitely think we collectively went way too far in the other direction. Honestly, I think part of the issue is how reactionary the system is. Unlike the vast majority of other RPG systems I've looked at, enemies don't get their own turns but rather can only react when PCs roll poorly, meaning the only means QMs have to alter challenge is to inflate stats and add immunities/deal negative effects/make enemies have positive effects/etc., which of course just encourages PCs to respond in kind. Instead of attempting to invoke an in-battle failure state via poor player choice, our system encourages QMs to try to invoke failure states via player HP loss, which is basically players losing because they got bad RNG rather than losing because they made a bad choice and suffered the consequences. That, I think, is the core problem here--QMs want to induce the occasional failure because that's interesting (or at the very least, they want the possibility of failure to be ever-present to keep the battles engaging), but there's not really a mechanism by which the players can fail other than "my numbers weren't big enough", so the natural player response is to make their own numbers bigger so they don't die, which in turn prompts QMs to make their numbers bigger in response, etc. etc. etc. Yes, players can make intentionally bad choices in the name of roleplaying, but that then runs the risk of drawing ire because one player screwed the situation up for everyone, which again means players getting mechanically punished for actions outside their control. ...Speaking of which, the automatic "TPKO = Quest Failed" outcome is another issue; it's such a massively harsh punishment for failure that it renders failure needlessly terrifying, and also punishes QMs just as much as players (by having their whole Quest be cut short) for something that, again, is largely the fault of RNG rather than poor decision-making. In a standard D&D or other RPG session, a party getting completely taken out doesn't necessarily mean "oh, well, I guess the campaign is over forever now, you messed up and now the world is going to get eaten by monsters from the Outer Planes in three years because this particular group of characters got shanked by a small-time mob boss at Level 4"; rather, a failure state is merely a springboard for the survivors to explore new options and encounter different narrative and mechanical challenges connected to their failures. Sure, characters can die permanently, and important things (hometowns, NPCs, artifacts, etc.) the players and characters like can be damaged or destroyed as a negative consequence for failure, but it doesn't mean the automatic failure of the entire campaign. By contrast, our particular system of failure seems unnecessarily punitive, and again encourages players to fear failure (and inflate their stats to avoid it) rather than to accept it and then turn it into something interesting. I don't know if there's a real solution that fits within the (attempted) simplicity of the core Heroica system; I've considered whether giving enemies their own player phase might level the playing field (in much the same way that plenty of enemies in Pathfinder or D&D or whatever are just other parties with similar class levels to the PCs who get their own actions and rolls just like players do), but like every other solution I've considered, it again means more work on the QM's part to control the enemies and try to make them balanced compared to the PCs and account for the enemies' roleplaying decisions and whether or not they'd realistically have good tactics or not...it's a lot easier to just add on a couple zeroes to the HP and an immunity or two and call it a day, even if that does end up meaning 6+ hours of dice-rolling per Round at the end of the game's life cycle. I'm not entirely convinced the core concept of the game can be saved from its own flaws, even with a full stats wipe and system revamp, because any revamp that really, truly addresses the underlying issues with the game would ultimately be a very different game from Heroica. Either way, it would be a lot of work on both sides, and I think that's really what drove a lot of us away from the game--when, no matter which side of the GM screen we sat on, the game ended up turning into work instead of fun. That's something that'll kill any game, no matter what system, and I truly think it was a major contributing factor here.

I have to say, the whole Torc problem this Round really highlights some of the dumber elements of the whole Battle Order system. To be clear, the whole "randomized Battle Order" system is totally fair as a mechanic (and it's really our fault for not making conditional actions for those characters), that's not my issue, it just seems really stupid to me from an in-universe perspective that a.) Torc would just take off without her passengers, and b.) the Heroes left behind wouldn't do something else with their action once Torc left. It's kind of symptomatic of the biggest flaw of the system in general, really; because everything is mechanically reactionary, characters can end up taking some completely utterly absurd actions due to what's effectively the Artificial Stupidity trope. In reality, we're not in control of our characters, we just point them in a general direction and then an AI (in this case dice-based and rules-based instead of programming-based) attempts to interpret those orders, and in retrospect that's been the source of a lot of frustration over the years.

"Front Row, everyone," Arthur orders, "cannons don't care about Row and elemental hits might do double duty that way. Two bombs on each side, please, bonus points if they're double effective on something but the point is cleaning up the smaller mobs. I'll take the one with three in it." So saying, Arthur swings Zoot's Rebel in a melee attack on Red Hatchlings A from the Front Row. EDIT: OOC: Somehow missed the QM note, will change Arthur's actions if necessary, sorry.

"Atramor, I could use some orders. I don't seem to be of as much use against these mobs as I'd hoped." After a moment's hesitation he adds, "Also, I think Pretzel could work some nightmarish miracles with the Pheles Kris, if you lent it to him." Arthur melee attacks White Hatchlings A from the Back Row with a Gladiator Trident, unless Atramor orders otherwise, in which case he follows Atramor's assignment. OOC: May be unavailable for a few days, feel free to assign me as desired until my availability improves.

Arthur nods his approval at Throlar's priorities. "Follow Throlar's lead, cannons." Arthur frowned as he realized a group of the white hatchlings had gotten off a breath. "Karie, Bellanotte, I don't think your songs will help much this Round. One of you should play a Rapid March for the Mages, but that's it; Atramor, we need to put our Rapid March Minstrel and the Mages at the bottom, start conserving our Ether more." After some hesitation, Arthur throws a Gladiator Trident at White Hatchlings C from the Back Row.

"Excellent work, everyone!" Arthur praises, glad his presence is encouraging his allies. "Knife-Tongue, switch with Lord Boomingham and fire the cannon at Shadow Drake B. Mr. Demon, you have the right track--Cannons A and B, eliminate Green Drake B, and Cannons C and D, eliminate Black Drake B. Cannon E, shoot Obsidian Wyvern B so that Pretzel can finish it with Mythril Heaven and Hell while also hitting Hunter Wyvern B." The Skirmisher surveys the skies once more. "We need to get more hits in on those smaller mobs before they overwhelm us. Taming a few would get them off our back, but eliminating them outright would be better. Atramor, would you rather I melee target Obsidian Wyvern A from the Back Row with my Clockwork Lance to try and extend my Phalanx, or would you rather I meditate more or choose a different target? Either way, I think we ought to give our Minstrels a rest, let them take on the Jinxed Hatchling mobs to try and recover some Ether naturally. I'd specifically recommend Bellanotte target Green Hatchlings A, and Karie White Hatchlings A." OOC: In case I don't get back to post before the next Round is run, assume I go with Atramor's suggestion for me unless Torald orders Arthur otherwise.

OOC: Arthur will be using the First Breath on his first turn, just so as to start building it early; since his damage output is so low anyway, better to use his attacks primarily to negate enemy Free Hits and go for Aim and Defend rather than aiming to kill, at least until he can build the Breath up a bit.

"That's assuming they don't nullify the effect with their passive Geas. Also, taking a second look at those hatchling mobs, I don't think your bomb would take out more than one of each. It'd put 'em to sleep, sure, but that still leaves the rest to deal with." "A good catch, Mr....erm..." Arthur scratches the back of his head, realizing he doesn't recognize many of the newer Heroes, and lack's the Hall's Gallery by which to identify them. "Mr. Rogue," he settles on. The Skirmisher looks to Karie and Bellanotte. "I don't think your songs would build upon each other, and with the present Battle Order the dual plays wouldn't even reduce Karie's Ether cost. I think one of you playing a Rapid March might be a better option."

Arthur shakes his head. "The Dream Drakes are too likely to negate a bomb right now, both before and after it detonates. Better to keep at the cannon until our priority targets are down." Arthur shakes his head in amusement and continues barking orders. "Knife-Tongue will rotate into your spot next Round, then." Taking a breath to steady himself (OOC: a First Breath if he is somehow hastened or given a second action, not quite clear on what songs we're singing/how they'll interact), Arthur launches a Gladiator Trident at Obsidian Wyvern A from the Back Row.

OOC: Small note, Pretzel's Defense should be 692 counting Reinforced.

Arthur scans the battlefield, his tactical mind already dropping into place. "Cannons A, B, C, and D, we need to take out Shadow Drake A, that passive ability is far too dangerous to let stand. E and F, getting Shadow Drake B down is the next most important thing for you, if someone else can finish it off once it hits the deck that would be fantastic. Benji, you and Torc are basically immune to the Hunter Wyverns, so those should be your job, alongside Knife-Tongue once one of the Hunter Wyverns is down on deck--double strike the same target for extra damage, please." Arthur pauses, looking to Atramor expectantly. "I'm afraid I've lost my touch for setting up Battle Orders tactically. Pretzel and I can handle the two Obsidian Wyverns, provided he uses his Flying Cross and I throw something else, and of course all our Mages with a Sapphire should be on Wind duty. Any other priority targets you can see?"

OOC: If I've missed any other gear loan requests, please assume I responded and handed out the relevant items. Belatedly remembering the Weather Mage's request for gems, Arthur lends Heckz his Diamond.

"True. But any of 'em we can pick off on the way in is one less we have to fight ashore."

"Hmm? Oh, yes, of course. Nice catch, Throlar." Arthur lends Euflear his Winged Sandals. Arthur swears violently, before stepping between Knife-Tongue and the rest of the party. "I didn't get off this ship last time we met, Knife-Tongue my friend, and I'm not about to this time." The Skirmisher casually fiddles with the unlucky scarf that Knife-Tongue had given him during their last meeting, raising his voice slightly for the rest of the party's benefit as well as Knife-Tongue's. "Captain Illdria is in trouble, and it's our job to rescue her and everyone else locked up in Fort Freedom. You down to help, or are we doing this on our own?"