Sauce-slinging

[tanithryudo]

Reading the articles and forum posts on sauce-slinging made my head hurt. After I got out of ronin on my softcore account, I abused the buffbot for free saucespheres so I could try out the skills earlier and it hadn't been working for me. I was ready to give it up and just go moxie the entire way, but this morning while waiting for stuff to happen, I played around a little with different combos of EQ and skills and I think I got it.

First wanted to make a note about generic EQ for saucerors:

- black kettle chefstaff + offhand book (hot or cold) + sauce gloves
- 17-alarm pan + offhand book (hot/cold) + blackberry slippers
- 17-alarm pan + offhand book (hot/cold) + enchanted toothpick
(Remaining item slots were bonerdragon necklace for initiative and woven baling wire for +15 spell dmg mainly)

It was very obvious that the chefstave combo did the most damage by a long shot. Some folks have said they don't use the cheffstaves because you have to lose an accessory slot for the gloves (which provide no bonus), but you have to consider the opportunity cost... cheffstave + wasted accessory slot is *better* than 17-alarm pan + any damage buff accessory combo. True, chefstaves are a pain to make/upgrade, but I think it's worth it. Also, remember that chefstave has MP regen on it for those non-combats, and saucerors do not have any intrinsic +MP regen gear unlike pastamancers.

As for the attacks, I have so far:
lvl 1 stream of sauce (3 MP)
lvl 6 saucestorm (10 MP)
lvl 8 wave of sauce (16 MP)
And the one I don't have yet is saucegeyser (lvl 11, 28 MP)

The first one is only for lowbie areas... where you should be going moxie anyway. So I don't think it needs to be bought, really.

The key is to have enough +dmg to trigger the bonus on the skills (will pretty much always happen with utensil+book), and determine how many rounds combat will last on the mobs of an area.

If you're one-shot killing, then just use the saucestorm skill (equivalent of cannollini cannon). The staff alone with recoup 6-7 of the 10 MP used. Saucesphere will pick up the rest if cast, but you'll have some stamina to do well even without it.

If you're doing more than one-shot, always start off with wave of sauce. Your next skill will recoup more than enough mana. So either wave > saucestorm or wave > wave to kill things in two rounds, and recoup all your mana and most of your hp from jalapeno. You don't need jalabeno to recoup all your MP this way! I've dropped my jalabeno saucesphere while testing all the way through castle in the sky and hole in the sky (at 84 moxie).

The bad place to be is if you're one-shot killing with wave but not able to kill with one shot using saucestorm. I guess at that point either adjust +dmg gear until it you're doing higher or lower damage, or use 2x saucestorms and spend some money/potions to maintain HP/MP.


Edit (3/15):

Killed the NS today (right before Muscle day for my next TT ascension)...
- Suicided 4 times, died 2 more times after that before I got her.
- EQ was the fully legendary sauceror regalia set, battered hubcap offhand, blackberry slippers and baling wire bracelets. About 228/313 HP/MP with that set.
- Saucemageddon (the weapon skill) costed too much and ran out of mana quickly
- Wave of sauce did too little damage to get anywhere before being killed
- Used saucegeyser as the attack to kill her; maybe got 2/3 of shots in.
- Ran out of red pixel potions and had to use gauze garters bought from mall. Should've also tried boomboxes/macrame nets but forgot...