Part 127: Abnormality Roundup 1

Abnormality Roundup 1

Every time one of our departments gets up to four Abnormalities, I'll be going through and doing a bonus update like this where I give my thoughts on each of them, alongside detailed base work chances and 1-2 images that have been shrunk to 180x180 or less. The base work chance charts are being grabbed as needed from a document I compiled nearly a year ago, so the formatting is a bit different from the other charts I've been using. More than anything, think of this as a sort of a strategic ramble where I talk about what each Abnormality brings to the facility.


One Sin and Hundreds of Good Deeds



One Sin is easy to work with for new agents by design, with 50% or higher success rates in all of its work types for newbies, and no ability to kill agents permanently. Honestly, every time I look at it I notice something else that makes clear that it was meant to be something new players were meant to have to help them. It gives 5 slots for weapons that deal White damage (important for dealing with panicking agents, and a weakness of many early game threats). Its suit is well-balanced and capable of getting agents through a work with almost any TETH Abnormality. Even its gift is well-placed, making sure that you always have something available to overwrite any gift you get in the hat slot-the one slot that it is vitally important to be able to overwrite. It's useless past the early game, but for getting a good footing on days 1-5 it's hard to think of any better Abnormalities.


1.76 MHz



The main reason to take 1.76 MHz is its 1.2x base success chance buff on Fortitude 1 characters and its base work rates make it the best early-game Justice trainer. In a pinch, it can serve as a good way to train the Prudence of Agents with a rank 1 or 2 in the stat, but it's not the best use of the Abnormality. One of the hardest things to do in the early game is raising Justice, as One Sin gives very little EXP and there are very few other high-Repression success Abnormalities before HE level, and zero other ones that don't have instant kill/panic rules to keep in mind. This is important because most of the best Justice trainers from HE and up require a base Justice of 3+ to properly work, which can make Justice a feast-or-famine stat. 1.76 MHz is perfect for getting an agent's Justice up to the levels necessary to trade off to a higher class Abnormality, and it's a calm Abnormality to work with.

Its gear is its one downside, but it's a large downside. In Lobotomy Corporation, gear is the #1 factor in determining what we can accomplish as far as working with Abnormalities goes, and only getting a single TETH level suit with poor resistances for earlygame enemies is the worst in the entire risk level in terms of equipment. Taking 1.76 MHz is effectively stating that you're willing to trade good earlygame gear for guaranteed Justice growth, and that's not a trade to make lightly.


Forsaken Murderer



Forsaken Murderer is such a textbook early game Abnormality that it makes a good baseline for what's normal in a TETH. Its Red damage/Instinct preference make it ideal for early game Fortitude training, and while its QC is lower than normal it only lowers on a Bad work result, meaning it's very rare to see it break out if handled properly. It has a decent amount of gear for a TETH, and its 0.7 Red resist is very strong in the early game. Good basic Instinct trainers like this are fairly common among TETHs, so the most important part of this Abnormality in a first run is that it can breach when upset. There are missions later in the game that require a certain number of different Abnormalities who can break out in order to complete them, and picking up 3-4 low-powered ones in the first couple branches is a good idea. It also has a nearly-unique gift slot, but its competition is a very useful Abnormality whose gift is strong enough that it completely eclipses our poor murderfriend.


Mirror of Adjustment


What can I say that I didn't say in the thread already? Lobotomy Corporation has 3 main considerations when it comes to Abnormality selection: Gear, training potential, and how much of a pain it is to deal with. The thing which makes Mirror so powerful is that it allows us to ignore one of these 3 considerations for most of the game. Between it boosting our training sessions by shuffling stats around to allow us to train more at the faster-growing lower levels, and its rules allowing us to never actually see its downside, Mirror is amazing. It's as simple as that.

Ah, here's a new tidbit: Mirror of Adjustment is so powerful for training Agents that in speedruns, not getting it on day 4 is an instant reset. It adds that much efficiency.