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An RPG Analysis: Althea Edition #1
🕑 Added 2017-08-19 22:04:52 +0000 UTCAs I'm well aware, quite a few people are wondering what build Althea is using. It's seems mysterious, since she has a bunch of different stuff inherent to her. They mix together to form the cocktail that is her build. This will be a little segment to let you guys know what it is if you're curious. Also, this is effective up to chapter 46 since that is the time of my writing this. Hope you guys enjoy.
Althea's Unique Perks Outside of Schema
- Flesh of Eldritch - This is a perk that doubles her current strength and its effective bonuses. When fighting using her enhanced strength, her intelligence and willpower is halved.
- Blood of Eldritch - Gives a flat 100 bonus health regen per minute. Isn't affected by multipliers to health regen. Doubles when using strength in combat.
- Arcane Blood - The user no longer has mana. Instead, they use health in place of it.
- The Tears of Etorhma - When recieving fatal damage, health regen works for 30 seconds after death. If health is still zero after this period, true death occurs. If health isn't zero, revival occurs.
- Formless - Allows the user to repurpose body mass. Constitution slows this reformation. Dexterity speeds up reformation. When shapeshifted, armor and damage resistance are ignored including your own.
These perks create many of the limitations that she works around. She doesn't invest into intelligence or willpower since they are halved during most of combat. She doesn't invest into constitution since that slows down her transformations. She doesn't put tons of points into endurance since her health regen is already excellent given her low health pool.
Instead, she's invested primarily into strength, perception, and dexterity. Those are the three leveling perks she will choose as well. The reasoning for strength is obvious. Her perk doubles the effectiveness of the stat. She also chose her initial perk as body of iron. This further multiplies her strength, making it ridiculous.
Well what about Perception? Seems strange. The reasoning behind the other two perks are more subtle. She invested into perception for the opposite reason that Daniel did. She wanted the sensory bonuses. She wanted to be able to see long distances for aiming her harpoons, and she needed the precognition ability to avoid the bullets coming from other snipers.
The perception also allows for some intuitive understanding of the mechanical side of stuff. While she can't reproduce technology by understanding it, she goes off of feel. This works wonderfully with he formless ability, allowing her to create the crazy stuff she does. The way she understands it, people don't think about how to throw a rock. They just do. That's how she reforms.
She doesn't think about it. She just does.
Then what's dexterity for? For starters, dexterity gives her the fine tuning and control she needs to aim long distances. Even the most subtle of changes in angles can cause large changes in the landing location of longshots. Dexterity lets her hit things she otherwise couldn't. Perception let's her see the target, and dexterity lets her hit it.
Dexterity also has a much more profound impact on its less celebrated side, the flexibility bonus. While this is a throway aspect of the stat for Daniel, it plays an essential role for Althea. Her formless ability scales in speed with how flexible she is. This added flexibility also means her forms don't have to be quite so precise.
Before investing into the stat, she'd just sort of explode into writhing ball of organs. Gross, but also very painful. Dexterity elimates much of this pain, letting her focus on the minute details involved with creating another limb. In essence, she has to use the ability like a surgeon, and dexterity allows her to do that.
How does the cannon work then? It's a fusion of several factors. She uses her enhanced health regen for creating ammunition using her formless ability. These bolts can then be shot by turning her flesh into reactive chemicals that explode inside the chamber of the biotic rifle. The whole process sacrifices a reasonable amount of health, limiting her to melee combat once her health is low.
The reason the bolts can pierce even Daniel's armor is because of the infamous Formless ability. If you read closely, it mentions how Althea ignores armor when shapeshifted. That meansher bolts can peirce through any amount of damage resistance.This also explains how she ignored Daniel's armor forever ago.
How would she improve it?There's a lot of different ways, though most of them are more knowledge based rather than level based. More explosive gunpowder, harder bolts, better designed bolts, etc. would all make a notable difference for her overall ability to do damage.
Longer range, better stealth, and better scopes/sights would also help tremendously with the entire endeavour. They would let her get off more shots before being found or sighted. If her enemy's havezero awareness of the harpoon coming at them, that helps add a sort of critical strike chance as well.
How op is Althea then? What about compared with Daniel?Althea started out substantially stronger than almost anyone else when she was first created. This has faded over time, since many of her multipliers come with severe drawbacks.
Still, she has access to three things that make her very dangerous. Armor peircing, tremendous strength, and her tenacity from a 30 second delayed revival. It means you need fire or acid to kill her really. Her primary potential is in becoming a reliable glass cannon that can shred through even the most durable warriors.
Her strength has worked against her, however. She never had to struggle when leveling, even now it's relatively simple. Daniel had to train and work hard in order to get to where he is, and he never forgot how hard he had to struggle. That drives him to focus when he's training. Althea's free time equates more to piddling in comparison.
She has a case of Kessiah syndrome. She started out so strong that she never had to learn how to use it. This makes her weaker than her raw power would suggest otherwise. That being said, if she turns her act around, she'll become a force comparable with what Daniel can become. It will be dependent on if she can get her act together though.
Otherwise, Althea is just wasted potential. Hope you guys enjoyed the read!
