i tried this a little earlier, and it’s surprisingly effective, so i’m going to share it in case other people are interested.
thorns of agony is a bad charm and you will not sway me. it is a good set of training wheels for early game, but by end game there are better charms to swap it out for.
however.
the one merit it has is that the damage output of thorns is equal to your nail damage. in the overworld, this is piecemeal and frankly useless; almost everything dies in one to three hits, especially by the time you have the pure nail. but in boss fights, that extra 13/17/21 damage when you’re close enough to the boss can stack. trading a nail hit’s worth of damage with the boss when you get hit is decent, but the soul requirement for healing is still kind of awful.
but not if you have this build:
[image description: a screenshot of my charms menu. I have on Thorns of Agony, Dream Wielder, Grubsong, Grubberfly's Elegy, Quick Focus, and Shape of Unn. end image description]
behold the tank build. this is... scarily effective. i scampered around in godhome for an hour earlier testing most bosses with this build, and i pretty consistently ended fights with 5+ masks. dream wielder gives you two casts of soul/two heals and a much shorter dream nail wind up, grubsong and elegy in conjunction give you almost a full heal when you take damage, quick focus and shape of unn let you slug away from danger at the speed of light. and all of that in conjunction will net you way more soul than you need to replenish the damage you take from running into bosses face first. i beat like 50% of godhome with thorns damage only, i kid you not. this is extremely effective.
another thing about this build is that sometimes, if you’re close enough, your thorns can double hit. so you’re dealing two nail swings worth of damage and getting almost a full heal from doing so. i also deliberately restricted myself to thorns damage only; if you’re also doing regular nail hits, this build will probably render you near unkillable.
there are some drawbacks to this build. it doesn’t work on bosses that deal double damage by default, so don’t go bringing this into pantheon five or any ascended arenas. grubsong and elegy give soul based on the number of hits, not the amount of damage taken, so you’re trading two masks for one heal. it also doesn’t fully work on bosses that can’t be dream nailed (ie the dream warriors, lost kin, and broken vessel). for those i traded shape of unn for weaversong, and it works about the same. you also have to be fairly strategic about when and how you get hit; you still get soul from getting hit by projectiles or whatnot, but the thorns damage will get wasted. not a concern if you’re just playing casually, but if you’re doing a thorns damage only run (which is very fun, i will say, and not as difficult as you may think) then you have to try to make every hit count.
i didn’t test this out on uumuu because i’ve done minions only runs and they make the oomas Extremely unpredictable, and also shape of unn doesn’t really work in its arena, so that might be an exception to this. not sure, someone else can try it. i also didn’t test it on oblobbles because they’re mostly an aerial boss, but i imagine weaversong might make it work. but besides them and the double damage bosses this works for Everyone. and i mean Everyone. it works for GPZ, it works for sly, it wrecked collector, it works for watcher knights, it would probably work for soul tyrant but it was pretty decent against soul master. i’m simultaneously delighted and flabbergasted by this discovery.
anyway, happy tanking.
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I'm also still laughing that he really showed up, introduced himself as an Archivist of the Cobalt Soul, and then insinuated that they were going to go extrajudicially hunt down, capture, and "interrogate" a Cerberus Assembly Archmage. Sir, archivists do not do that kind of thing, least of all on their own, LEAST OF ALL with a bunch of random hooligans they were just sent to collect for an unrelated excursion. Quite honestly, that was the thing I kept going back to in evidence of, there is absolutely no way this is a legit archivist.
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I think people sleep on this moment in the Odyssey...
If I'm wrong, not getting full context, or see something that isn't there, feel free to give evidence to explain why.
Here he crept under a pair of bushes, one an olive, the other a wild olive, which grew from the same stem with their branches so closely intertwined that when the winds blew moist not a breath could get inside, nor could the rain soak right through to the earth.
(Book 5, Rieu)
I think this is about Penelope and him.
Obviously, their marriage bed is made from an Olive tree. If it's just about Athena then why are there two mentioned? Why did Homer mention two when he could've just said he took refuge under one? Or a completely different type of tree? Why mention them being intertwined?
One an olive: Penelope, who has been with society and "safe" in Ithaca ("Safe" because of the suitors)
One wild: Odysseus, who has dealt with literal monsters and immortals and has just escaped from Calypso. Literally naked and filthy, a "wild man".
"which grew from the same stem with their branches": Them both being together at first, before being separated.
"so closely intertwined that when the winds blew moist not a breath could get inside, nor could the rain soak right through to the earth.": Despite being separated, they are still "intertwined". Whether you want to think of it as them being likeminded or simply connected, even though they are apart, nothing could get in between them. 🥺
I don't know what else Homer could be referring to other than them.
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Ideal Peter Parker getting to full on mentor Miles Morales for me is Peter, who has been keeping his identity a secret from everyone for years, giving Miles absolutely wild advice on how to hide his identity and sounding like he’s super overthinking everything
And then Miles meets like,, Nick Fury, or someone else who really wants to know Spidey’s identity, and it turns out to all be really rational advice because there are people out there going to great lengths to find out his identity
(So yeah, sorry Miles, but you are gonna have to figure out how to manufacture your own spray paint if you wanna use any as Spidey because they will try to use that to figure out who you are)
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