Picky/Strategy

This page describes strategies for the Picky challenge path.

Picking Picks

Overall this plays a lot like Class Act or Class Act 2 because you can buy guild skills. You should buy lots of guild skills, especially the basic class-specific combat skills, so you can save your precious 11 picks for the best of the best. And even then, you should tailor your choices to your chosen class. There's no point taking a skill that you can buy at level 5. You should just buy it instead.

With that in mind, meat actually becomes a valuable resource. So at least one of your familiar picks should include the ability to generate some meat. (This may also serve a second purpose when you do the Nuns.)

Skills

• Transcendent Olfaction is #1. King of the skill hill.
• Smooth Movement and The Sonata of Sneakiness, together, are your #2 and #3 picks. These are too high-level to buy in run, so pick both.
• Pastamastery and Advanced Saucecrafting are vital for Hardcore. But if you are playing a Myst class, skip whichever one of these you can buy. If you're playing softcore, you may want to skip both and pull food instead.
• Amphibian Sympathy can potentially increase +items, stats from combats and +meat which makes this flexible passive one of the best possible picks for Picky. But obviously as a Tamer you'd just buy it.
• Mad Looting Skillz and Phat Loot are essential, but skip whichever one you can buy if you're playing a Moxie class, and if necessary, postpone any +item quests (like The Defiled Nook) until you've picked it up.
• The Ode to Booze adds a lot of turn generation. It's too high-level to buy in run, so pick it.

That's 9 skills (or a bit less if you can buy some of them). I consider these the core set that you absolutely want. What you add in your next 2-4 picks will vary depending on what class you are, what Items of the Month you have available, and what your day-count goal is.

• Saucemaven will add 10 turns per day to a 2-reagent-pasta diet as a Muscle or Moxie class, or 20 turns per day as a Myst class.
• Saucestorm is a brilliant all-purpose elemental damage spell. Low cost, good damage, split across two elements. Handy for non-Myst classes.
• Cannelloni Cocoon (not Cannon) is a great healing skill. Not every class will need to add a healing skill, but if you've got access to the Hot Tub to cure Beaten Up, this is all you really need.
• Tongue of the Walrus is another good choice for a healing skill, if you can't buy one. It's more expensive than Cocoon for healing lots of damage, but if you only need to heal small to medium amounts of damage at a time, or if you get Beaten Up a lot, this is the skill for you.
• Elemental Saucesphere is a reasonable choice if you have no Items of the Month. But if you have lots of IOTMs, there are a huge number of alternative ways to boost elemental resistance.
• Musk of the Moose or Carlweather's Cantata of Confrontation for +combat. This could save you a bunch of turns in Sonofa Beach, and a smaller number in other zones like the F'c'le, Black Forest, Whitey's Grove, and Barrrney's Barrr.
• Batter Up! and Ire of the Orca for Seal Clubber only. Wrath of the Wolverine can be learned at level 4, so there's no need to pick that one, but without picking Ire of the Orca, you'll have to wait till you reach level 10 before you can finally use Batter Up!, which itself is a level 11 skill. Banishing certain monsters will aid your run in a similar fashion as Transcendent Olfaction would, only that it doesn't reduce your available MP in this case.
• Advanced Cocktailcrafting only if you have no IOTMs that generate booze. Players with lots of booze IOTMs (Clan VIP Lounge key, Fist Turkey, Happy Medium, The Smith's Tome, Camp Scout backpack) should skip this.
• Leash of Linguini, while more cumbersome than Amphibian Sympathy will increase your familiars' weight in addition to Sympathy to increase their usefulness.
• Ur-Kel's Aria of Annoyance and Tao of the Terrapin for softcore non-Moxie classes. Probably not needed in Hardcore, as the increased length of quests will generate plenty of stats.
• Curse of Weaksauce synergizes with the Artistic Goth Kid for tower killing with the deleveling strategy. It's also a good combat skill for Saucerors, or Muscle classes who are having trouble hitting things (I'm thinking primarily Turtle Tamers here, as Clubbers can autohit) if they can afford the MP for it.
• Curse of Marinara synergizes with spells and/or slime stacks for tower killing with more traditional stategies. I'm not sure how feasible this is yet.
• Pulverize synergizes with the Smith's Tome to turn extra lumps of brit coal into food or booze or spleen. Without a Smith's Tome, it's not worth a pick, though.

Familiars

This depends strongly on Hardcore vs. Normal. The current authors are more familiar (no pun intended) with Hardcore, so these suggestions are biased in that direction. If you are playing Normal and you will pull a Buddy Bjorn, Crown of Thrones, etc., then consider also which familiars you want available for those items.

• Fist Turkey gives +item, stats, epic booze with +item, epic booze with +meat, and awesome booze with +weight. But wait, there's more! It can also generate meat in combat (not useful for nuns). And it does physical damage in combat.
• Gelatinous Cubeling can serve as a fairy if you don't have anything fancier. Its special drops will also save you many adventures while visiting the Daily Dungeon for keys. A top pick in hardcore since the redesign of the Lair of The Naughty Sorceress, which now requires 3 visits to the Daily Dungeon.
• Reanimated Reanimator gives the ability to copy a monster three times per day, is a volleyball but can also act as a leprechaun if prepared in advance.
• Grimstone Golem gives +item and +meat, and drops masks. The masks can be used to unlock a zone with Fish in it (synergizing with the DNA Lab for intrinsic +10 weight), and another zone where you can get an ornate dowsing rod in 5 turns, which speeds up the Desert.
• Artistic Goth Kid gives +stats, free fights which drop crayon shavings (while burning delay and giving lots of stats), and bonus PvP fights. The crayon shavings can be used to tower kill with Curse of Weaksauce.
• Happy Medium gives +stats, +initiative, booze, and more booze. Some of the booze she can give you has useful side effects, like elemental resistance, more +initiative, or bonus elemental damage, but mostly it's good for filling your Liver.
• Slimeling gives +item, and MP (when you feed it equipment). It can also give some slime stacks which may be useful for tower killing (though I haven't tried that on this path yet).
• Steam-Powered Cheerleader gives the most +item available in a familiar under the then current Standard restrictions.
• Jumpsuited Hound Dog gives a bit less +item than the Cheerleader, but also gives +combat. There are very few +combat modifiers available on this path (unless you took Musk/Carlweather), but with no Fax machine to shortcut Sonofa Beach, the hound could be a contender.
• Grim Brother, Unconscious Collective or Bloovian Groose give +stats, +meat and spleen items, as well as daily buffs (Brother) or free rests (Collective).

• If you don't have an advanced stat giving familiar, you should choose either a regular Blood-Faced Volleyball or Hovering Sombrero, depending on what you feel when you'd need additional stats the most.

Ascension Strategy
Rankings:	HC Skills - HC Familiars - HC IotMs
General:	Class selection - Familiar usage - Lucky adventures
Paths:	BHY - Fist - AoB - BI - ZS - AoJ - BIG! - KOLHS - CA2 - AoSP - SS - HR - Picky - Ed - Random - AoWoL - Source - NA - GN - LtA - L.A.R. - PF - G-Lover - DD
Additional Paths:	DG - 2CRS - KoE - PotP - LKS - GG - Y,Robot - QT - WF - GY - JM - FotD
IotMs:	Tomes - Faxing - Copying - YR - Garden - Correspondent - Workshed - Tea party - Florist