Originally Posted by
Arbitrarity
Wooo that is a LONG one. And I have to reply to Kieran over in the Grail Works discussion thread still, augh. As per usual, writing in roughly temporal order, but I'm cross-referencing with upgrades at the bottom, since I can map some of the mechanical effects to what's going on with descriptions.
So we lead with a fair amount of upgrading planning, which is quite satisfying. I think Merlin is judging me for being lazy with Mordred upgrades. I do wonder if I could have used more Fenris actions, if I thought about having someone else use an action to give him some hands. Scylla actions were very precious though, so I don't regret those choices much.
So dropping Fenris's "must kill Norse Pantheon" trait is part of the Pantheon tempering bonus? Interesting. Effects unspecified so far as well, but that will hopefully help against whatever other bizarre effects the Great Welsh Red has later. I'm feeling like the lack of Mech blood tempering choice might also be painful, given that he explicitly calls that out, but presumably that goes on the priority list for development. Also I suspect his armor is more durable than most mechs right now.
I'm not sure if I should consider that mysterious voice related to Fafnir or Ymir. Judging from Erik's response, that was a Fafnir thing, which seems... beneficial, though the anchoring problem definitely wasn't great. I suspect Uller's blood might have had some other spooky effects at that point.
Emiya seems essentially out of the fight, then. Between Rin being out of the area, and the Grail missing, he would be relying entirely on Independent Action normally, and as a non-Servant, that might be worse. Since he's semi-stably incarnated though, he'd likely be a good assist for other smithing things later. I guess that's a good reason why we couldn't use him for crafting, since he'd be gone otherwise.
I'm actually a bit shocked we ALSO got Fiore/Godafrid here. Combination of Kieran usually handling Godafrid things, and just how much there already is in this chapter. It's definitely useful getting the 6 p.m. timer for the Grail vanishing to synchronize all of these perspectives at once. Of course, no one knows that this isn't actually in Kotomine Shirou's plans at all, but presumably it's not going to hurt to be concerned. Godafrid probably knows what's going on, but it wouldn't be good operational security to reveal that to Fiore, Roche, or Gordes.
Also, I just realized Siegfried hasn't technically been killed yet. That feels strange, since we've seen Gordes around so often, but haven't seen a hint of Siegfried. I remember Astolfo explicitly going out, but Siegfried has just been quietly... there. Chiron has considerably more presence. That... hm. Considering Erik's relation with Fafnir, that's probably not coincidental.
Darn it, apparently I STILL overtapped Scylla, since we took that surprise trip. Hopefully that doesn't waste too much Legend.
Now to look at upgrade effects.
Lots of hidden synergies with Death's Reflection. I was wondering why you were pushing that one so much with your pre-builds, but they make sense in this context. Innovation does about what I was expecting, I was mostly looking for the Machinery synergy, but the rest are welcome. Nuclear had a lot of good synergies as well, and the Railgun with irradiated rounds looks quite impressive. Nuclear helping with the Radiant Wave Surger makes me think I should have gone for Shields? since the Nuclear synergy would have helped. Ah well. I also got a bit lazy with having Tamamo do the Environmental Systems, but I couldn't think of much else I could have her do effectively. I didn't really want to push that one onto Fenris, and I figured she'd be at least motivated, which... yeah, lots of lead makes sense.
I'm hoping to see some fun in-battle learning experience from the Upgraded User Manual, since he obviously has no idea what to do with Boosting etc yet. I didn't realize how tight a timeline he was on, though. He's more likely to throw himself through a few walls trying to do that right now.