Talk:Mother Feelbright's Busy Bees

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I've added in a whole lot of data to this article, however, there are still several bits of research missing:

  • Damage per bee - this needs a PK witch to test, and should hopefully be pretty straightforward.
  • The relationship between total bees and number of dollops thrown - this is difficult to determine due to the 'many bees' problem ('many' is 'any number above 19', which makes analysis difficult), which hits me at 2 dollops :(. A witch with lower charming would probably have more luck here.
  • Likewise, the effect of stacking bees (I'm guessing that this just adds to total_bees, but again the 'many bees' problem makes this difficult for me to test).
  • How the wetness of the target affects the damage they take.

The lists of honey/beehive locations are also pretty incomplete; all additions welcome! :)

Chat 18:30, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Damage per Bee

Honey Bees seem to to a consistent 16 damage each. --Vee (talk) 04:43, 31 December 2018 (EST)

Stacking

The statement 'Bees will only stack with other bees of the same type. If a different type is summoned to the ones already attacking the target, then the existing ones will fly off and the new ones will attack the caster.' doesn't appear to be true any more. From logs:

The swarm of honey bees joins the bumblebees surrounding Charisse of Gapp, causing their buzzing to increase in volume.
...
Many of the bumblebees and honey bees swarming around Charisse of Gapp sting her.

Quotid (talk) 15:52, 18 January 2016 (EST)

This has been confirmed by another witch with honey bees and killer bees. Updating article. Quotid (talk) 09:24, 7 June 2016 (EDT)

Oops - thanks Sorae, Circe and pommes for testing this! Quotid (talk) 09:31, 7 June 2016 (EDT)

How much honey can I use without failing?

Failing to cast Beesargh hurts. A lot. And I have found that I can successfully cast with 3 drops of honey seeminly 100% of the time. But I nearly always fail with 4 drops. Learning this was painful.

I would really like to know if it is only ma.sp.offensive that determines how many drops of honey I can use. Or if *all* relevant skills matter. The targets skills and defenses don't seem to matter. I would love to have some sort of math to tell me what a safe amount of honey is.

The best way to research this would seem to be crowd-sourcing data from all the witches about how many drops they can do. The data already exists, after all. Most witches have done this research the hard way already. Though they may not have pushed their numbers to the limit.

My Data: 3 drops is easy, but 4 drops is usually bad. My bonuses are:

  • ma.sp.offensive - 202
  • ma.me.me.channeling - 279
  • ma.me.me.charming - 338
  • ma.me.me.cursing - 338
  • ma.me.sp.summoning - 280

Velmah (talk) 14:39, 1 December 2018 (EST)

Before testing you should make sure you are very wet. This can be accomplished by many means, for example by going in some water room, or washing in the creek need Granny's or having someone use a fake flower on you, or use a fake flower on someone (e.g. giant fruitbat), dry them off with a towel and cast Mama Blackwing's Potent Preserver on the wet towel.
Being very wet will greatly decrease the damage taken by the bees. The bees will dry you off as they leave because of the wetness, so you need to keep the water coming if you keep on testing. Casting while swimming could be great, but you can't cast bees if you are swimming.
There's a range inside which you'll fail some of the time, but not always.
I picked 80 drops a while because it does not fail for me.
There seems to be a problem with testing bees, the more you test, the more it seems to fail, like as if you have more chances to fail if you failed recently. I tested again with 80 drops and it failed, but it does not fail normally.
I seem to succeed with 100 drops, but not when casting a lot in a short period of time.
Bonuses
  • ma.sp.offensive 337
  • ma.me.me.channeling 337
  • ma.me.me.charming 343
  • ma.me.me.cursing 345
  • ma.me.sp.summoning 277
--Frazyl (talk) 01:41, 2 December 2018 (EST)
Casting in a swamp seems to work well, moving between rooms puts you back into maximum wetness. Water buffaloes make good targets for me since I can dispatch them easily in a little while without magic.
This time I got to 250 drops / 25 dollops of honey before I got into a bad streak of failures. It seems to fail sometimes, but this might be because of the recent failures.
--Frazyl (talk) 04:28, 3 December 2018 (EST)


Thanks for the data! Also, if being wet really helps, I'll try that! My current plan is to walk around hunting while carrying a bucket of Healing Tea.
I'm not sure what to think about streaks of failures when you cast on too many targets in a row. That's a complicating factor, for sure. I guess I'll try and test that and see if that's something I see as well. *fingers crossed*.
Thanks!
--Velmah (talk) 08:45, 4 December 2018 (EST)
Yes being wet seems to makes each bee go away after they attack once weakly or not even that. It might be that bug shield and CCC is absorbing damage for me also, not sure.
Someone suggested on the witchesguild board that there are diminishing returns past 10 dollops (100 drops) of honey. It does seem to behave similarly between 100 and 200 drops on a water buffalo (though above 19 bees it says many so it's hard to know). Testing on a bull water buffalo did not seem very different either, but I did not test enough to be confident.
Chat suggests that it looks like (I had to divide X by 10 otherwise it doesn't fit) :
'Bees = 10 + (X/10) * ln(drops)'. Where X could be either the bonus average of summoning and cursing, or the average of summoning and channeling. Or maybe all the methods with or without offensive.
ln(drops=100)=4.61, ln(drops=200)=5.30, ln(drops=250)=5.52 if we suppose X = 344 (the likely X for me) we get bees(drops=100)=168 bees(drops=200)=192 bees(drops=250)=200.
Unfortunately 250 drops fails more often than I like, but it seems worth it if this pans out (maybe there's a maximum cap of bees somewhere in there).
It might overall be simpler to cast on yourself/someone else in ctf to figure this all out.
--Frazyl (talk) 17:38, 4 December 2018 (EST)
Oups forgot the bit about varying gp costs being removed. Edited my reply above to remove the part about variable gp cost. --Frazyl (talk) 03:59, 9 December 2018 (EST)

Suggestion: do research against another player in the PK arena, which is what Quow did for much of his research. (See his books in the AM Assassins library.) If your skills are > 300 levels, you can lower them using skillcap which should help greatly with research. Juliette (talk) 21:58, 4 December 2018 (EST)


Syntax for casting with honey in containers

While I can cast using honey that is in an open container like a backpack I can't seem to specify honey that is inside an open bottle. Am I missing the syntax to make this possible or should the line about containers be expanded to explain honey cannot be in a liquid container during casting? It seems like people are bound to get tripped up on this since when you gather honey from hives it will end up in a bottle. --Spookee (talk) 05:13, 20 September 2022 (EDT)

Possibly if you identify your bottle as component pouch it should work if you keep the bottle in your inventory. I don't think I tested nested component pouch (in another component pouch). In any event handling honey outside a liquid container is simpler, so yes this could be suggested. --Frazyl (talk) 02:43, 22 September 2022 (EDT)