Lini exploration macanics

[kokatrix]

Lini became a great support but, i just didn't understand about Lini's new exploration mechanics.

Compared to Sajan, who has 7 blessings and 3 allies, knowing that he should bless practically everything he does with two or 3 blessings due to his low skill values, Lini has only 5 allies and 2 blessings.

as I understand it, Lini can no longer recharge animals after using them to explore (with the exception of Droogami).

if she tries to explore, she will be without her animals. So, like Sajan, she drifts to a more selfish side, or uses the power of her allies to help her group, without being able to explore multiple times in one turn.

this mechanics was well explored in the article about Sajan, but was not mentioned in the article about Lini.

Am I correct?

[Yewstance]

kokatrix wrote:

Lini became a great support but, i just didn't understand about Lini's new exploration mechanics.

Compared to Sajan, who has 7 blessings and 3 allies, knowing that he should bless practically everything he does with two or 3 blessings due to his low skill values, Lini has only 5 allies and 2 blessings.

as I understand it, Lini can no longer recharge animals after using them to explore (with the exception of Droogami).

if she tries to explore, she will be without her animals. So, like Sajan, she drifts to a more selfish side, or uses the power of her allies to help her group, without being able to explore multiple times in one turn.

this mechanics was well explored in the article about Sajan, but was not mentioned in the article about Lini.

Am I correct?

I think there's a lot of unspoken assumptions being made here, and it's kind of hard to tackle this. I'll just try to give my interpretation about "Exploration Mechanics" as a whole, since that's the crux of this thread.

Firstly, unless you're in a 5-6 person party, a character being able to explore 3+ times a turn isn't even that helpful (let alone desirable).

Secondly, there's not really any Core or Curse character who has some kind of unique way of exploring faster (Pre-Role), with the possible exception of Ezren (after he spends a power feat, he can recharge a spell and another card to explore). There's a lot of circumstantial reasons why some characters would explore faster or slower than others, including hand size, ally/blessing counts, capability to take on multiple checks with minimum card expenditures, self-healing abilities (or ability to recharge cards to explore) and even the Diplomacy & Divine skills (which are consistently helpful for acquiring allies and blessings).

With that said, if you're trying to compare just Lini (Core) to just Sajan (Core) in a vacuum, which seems to be the case...

Lini has the Divine skill and thus can heal herself with Cure spells which are multiple times more powerful than most non-Spell methods of healing. That means if Lini heavily discards allies and blessings to explore, and Sajan heavily discards allies and blessings to explore, only Lini will be able to sustain such actions without running out of cards sooner or later.

Additionally, Lini can shuffle her deck easier than almost any other character (since all Core Animal allies have a 'recharge' power, she can use her power with them to shuffle them into her deck) therefore is able to redraw recharged cards (such as a recharged spells like Cure) faster than almost any other character.

Lini has 5 allies in her deck by default; you only need one in hand to have a combat option. Because of her ability to shuffle her own deck, every time you end your turn and reset your hand you will very likely draw at least one more ally. That's a lot of exploration power even if you refuse to spend your last one to explore... and even then, you have attack spells which are better than using animals in combat. Even then, PACG doesn't usually require everyone to spend all of their cards exploring every single turn. (If it did, Hand Size 4 characters would be disastrously bad.)

If you're concerned about running out of animal allies when you're both discarding them to explore and also recharging them to attack, then take more Ally Card Feats. 5 is already a huge number of a single card type to start with; it's 33% of your deck.

Whether she's 'selfish' with her cards or not depends on how you build her (and exploring many times a turn isn't even selfish, anyway), but the fact that she's a spellcaster who can redraw recharged spells quickly, and leverage her Divine skill for both healing and combat, makes her completely distinct from Sajan in almost every way. Additionally, she benefits from every facet of her character being enhanced under a single type of Skill Feat, as she can leverage Wisdom to fight with Animals, with Spells, to recharge Spells as well as enhance the power of Survival-specific Armors and (In Curse of the Crimson Throne) Weapons, which she is the single best post-Core character to use on account of having the highest survival skill of any Core or Curse character.

Additionally, Sajan couldn't bless most of his checks with more than one blessing - he can only do that on Combat and Acrobatics checks.

(If you're trying to compare Lini to an earlier printing of Lini, that's a completely different story to tell. But since there's 3 previous printings of her, you'd need to be more specific. I will agree that this is one of the weaker printings of Lini, but that's true of several Core/Curse characters, which are consistently better balanced than previous examples of their classes.)

[zeroth_hour2]

Yewstance wrote:

Firstly, unless you're in a 5-6 person party, a character being able to explore 3+ times a turn isn't even that helpful (let alone desirable).

I would say that as the number of cards in your hand decreases, the more dangerous it is to explore (especially in Core where YOLO exploring has lots of nasty consequences, mainly from the scourges). So it's not useful in that manner. Since "bad" explores often lead to others having to dump cards to help you, a bad explore is worse than not exploring at all.

An exploration velocity (my term; number of explores on average per turn) of 3 is unsustainable. For one, damage and checks are things. The game's checks are designed to take resources out of your hand. If they didn't, they're not doing their job.

So I don't think it's not helpful, it's that most characters would not be able to explore 3+ times a turn continually without sucking the rest of the team's resources completely dry, and that's not helpful.

[Yewstance]

Agreed, especially in Core.

Caveat:

Though an exploration velocity of 3+ is sustainable with various characters, including some post-Core ones. I've played more than a half dozen characters who average 3+ explorations a turn over a scenario, including with post-Core, post-Role Fumbus, and I believe Varian probably can too (especially in CotCT with the added Harrow blessing).

Though you'd only even consider such a velocity if the party size encouraged it, and in a full 6 player party you pretty much never need to worry about running out of cards in your deck.

Also, the mechanics of the Base in CotCT greatly adjust traditional exploration metrics if you assign someone to largely empty it rapidly. Class Deck boons can also make it much easier; it helps that healing is so powerful and easily reuable in PACG.

[kokatrix]

Yewstance wrote:

With that said, if you're trying to compare just Lini (Core) to just Sajan (Core) in a vacuum, which seems to be the case...

Yes, that was the comparison I wanted to make. I am really delighted with the community and the issues raised here. thanks to yewstance and zeroth.