Part 141: Abnormality Roundup 4

Abnormality Roundup 4

Safety's all wrapped up, so it's time for the usual checkup. Honestly, things are going really well, and as soon as I find some way to mitigate the Queen Bee's brand of rudeness (which should come on day 23) we'll have a very strong facility put together. This is about the point where I like to have an overall plan for how to polish my Agents, and between Scarecrow/Rudolta, Laetitia, Queen Bee, and Blue Star we have a useful trainer for every type of work. The most important thing to keep in mind now is to keep Agents cycling through the various trainings. One mistake that every new player makes is favoriting an 'A-team' of Agents with maxed out stats, and allowing them to do all of the work. This makes the rest of the facility stagnate, and winds up forcing the player into situations where most of their employees are little better than fancy Clerks. More numbers are always better, so we will be making the numbers go up. I wouldn't mind an Instinct trainer that was less… Queen Bee, but there's nothing that I really want for at the moment either so I'll just say "Birdzodia pieces, please!"

You Must Be Happy


One of the universal rules of tool Abnormalities is that I don't really pay much attention to tool Abnormalities. They're finicky, rude, and more often than not the penalty for using them wrong is 'your Agent dies.' However, it turns out YMBH is really useful if we can work around its particular quirks. In addition to trivializing a mission later on down the line, it can help our Agents cheat their way into working stat requirements by either cutting off unneeded stat points with a NO, or adding on additional points with a YES, like we've been doing to work Blue Star. Solid tool overall, especially since it's easy to work with as long as we remember to just leave immediately.


Queen Bee



Ahh, Queen Bee. Nobody really likes Queen Bee, because she'll turn every Clerk (and Sephiroth) in the entire facility into a worker bee given half the chance. This makes Clerk's Rights Abnormalities break out, and it can cause a lot of problems for your facility-particularly in a place that overlaps like Safety does with Information and Control. We've got her in the worst place in the entire facility, and yet we're still using her. Why? Because she's an incredibly efficient Instinct trainer. Let's say we use a 50 Temperance agent with 50 HP and 0.8 HE armor vs Red on her. That'll give us a base success rate of 62% after observation bonus. That'll give us 13-14 of her 22 boxes on average. The remaining 8-9 boxes will deal an average of 4 damage each, so we'll take 32-36 damage, hitting that 1.0x damage multiplier. That means that with our level 3 Fortitude each box is worth 0.75 points of Fortitude, and we gained either 13 or 14-which works out to an average result giving us right around 9-10 Fortitude. In one work, that's amazing-and absolutely worth the risk of keeping her around.

Plus she has a really cool hat.


Blue Star



Blue Star is the friendliest, easiest ALEPH we could possibly start with. So long as we keep its rules in mind we won't lose anyone to it outside of something truly crazy happening-its QC of 2 protects it to some extent from Crimson Dawns, and we want meltdowns on it for the overload-free works anyways. If it escapes it'll definitely kill a substantial portion of our employees, but that's just ALEPHs in a nutshell: "don't screw up or you'll probably die." It's an excellent finishing Abnormality for Prudence, only needing 1-2 works to max out any Agent that's at level 5 (and since we have YMBH, we can cheat and make it work for Agents with lower levels of Prudence as well). In addition to that, its requirement of decent to high Temperance to avoid working on it too long makes it a very good Repression trainer as well-40% isn't the best, but it's far from terrible-especially given an ALEPH Abnormality's number of boxes and risk multiplier. It's stable across the board, as well, meaning that a hypothetical 5/5/3 Prudence/Temperance/Justice Agent would be able to quickly farm its way up the chain.

That's right: we finally have a decent Justice trainer, you guys.

Its gear is a little weak for ALEPH gear, but that translates to 'It's only better than everything else in the game by a substantial amount,' and both Blue Star and its weapon can cheese a few missions later in the game if we get the right combination of supporting Abnormalities. I'll be keeping an eye out. Overall Blue Star is a super-great first ALEPH, and I'm glad to pick it up.


Old Faith and Promise



The above chart shows the odds for Old Faith succeeding at each level of boost. One thing to note: Trying for more than 4 boosts is a trap! We'll probably break our weapon, it takes a lot more energy than the others, and even if it works the weapon gains nothing. Since its destruction saves even through a Retry, any time we use this thing we're playing for keeps-meaning we're not putting any ALEPH toys through it. Additionally, the boosts are too small to make up the gap on lower level weapons.

As for the overall odds: One boost is 85%, two boosts is ~64%, 3 is ~35%, and landing that fourth boost takes us to a 14.025% overall chance. It's just not worth it for the minimal boost to our damage output. Generally speaking, any time we might want to use this, we could just pile another Agent onto the deathball and get more bang for our buck. Unless we have to, we won't be using this. Unfortunately, due to how meltdowns work we may have to-because it's not immune to meltdowns.