"I've already got a minor passive resistance, but it might be smart to upgrade it. I don't know what it means to have a "minor" resistance, whether that means I'm already proof to mundane flames or not. It might be smart for us to do a test with a candle or something."

She nods. "Good plan. Resistances usually scale by being immunity below a certain intensity, then decreasing percentage of reduction above that. So I think you'll have candles covered, maybe as far as torches? Not sure. There'll be a candle in the room."

She tears a piece off her roll to sop up some of the remaining stew.

Oh yeah, food!

She takes some time to eat more of her stew as she mulls.

"It'll be really interesting to test. I think torch intensity would be better to have, given that I expect to be tossing around a good amount of flame."

<Interesting, yes, that's one thing to call it,> Hailey snarks. <Also hot.>

<Adorable sadist,> Sable teases back fondly.

"Definitely! Hmmm." She eyes the fireplace. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

She looks over at the fireplace. 

"You're on," she says. "I bet I've got spare mana by now, I can heal it even if it hurts like a bitch." 

She leaves the remnants of her stew behind and walks over next to the fireplace, where she crouches and holds out a hand to feel the warmth of the flames on the back of her hand.

The flames feel gently cozy from that far away.

Let's see how far she can stick her hand in before it feels like a bad idea.

Brushing the edges feels distinctly hot. Holding her hand directly in the upper reaches of the flames stings a little but doesn't really get worse. When she starts to lower her hand closer to the logs, about midway down it starts to noticeably hurt, though even there it would take a while to actually do more than redden her skin.

She reaches a little lower and then pulls back her hand with a hiss. Yeah, her resistance is definitely failing there.

Then she laughs and shakes out her lightly-scorched hand. "Cool!" 

She runs her thumb across her palm a little and grins. "Honestly, if I took another fire resistance node I could maybe hang out in the splash of my own flames, which would be one heck of a deterrent for anything that wanted to attack me."

She picks up the poker, which has been lying in the fireplace for a bit, and slides her hand slowly down it until she feels her resistance start to fail again. Does it extend to generally hot objects?

Yes, it definitely does. It's hard to burn a fire witch, harder still the higher she levels.

When Sin looks back at Sable, she finds her blushing a bit and biting her lip. She shakes her head. "Very cool. I can probably do similar with lightning or shadow, but there's something viscerally impressive about seeing you do that with fire."

"It's a really interesting sensation. It still feels hot, like, intensely hot, but something in me likes it rather than flinching. It doesn't burn, even when it gets to be too much I have space to play with. I wouldn't want to put my hand on that log down there, but this much is easy." 

"Fire resistance is awesome." 

She smiles brightly and rubs her scorched palm a little more. "This is just about convincing me to buy another point of resistance. There's so many options!"

She raises an eyebrow at the mention of liking it. "Goodness. Well, far be it from me to stop you. Hopefully the herd of goats tomorrow is easy but numerous enough to get you plenty more points, because I'm quite eager to see what you do with them."

"Right now I think I want Splash Spell, Extinguish, Held Spell, another passive node of Fire Resistance, and either something from Persistent or an Anamnesis passive."

She hums a bit. "Passives occupy a slot themselves, is the thing, so it would take one hell of an ability build to make an Anamnesis passive that was slot-positive. With the fire resistance, you're just making a new version to go in the already-occupied slot using your improved intricacy and any better nodes you've bought."

"Oh, I see, that makes sense. Is it possible to stack multiple fire resistance nodes on each other with high intricacy, or is it a best-wins situation?"

"I think there are ways to combine them, but they're a little tricky to get locked properly in the ability builder. High intricacy definitely helps with that, though."

"So it'd be more like just buying a second level of a passive than being able to do something more fancy, at least at this level. Eventually it could produce some interesting results though..."

"If passives take slots, then the Meditation and Passive Mana Regeneration out of combat recovery build is a bit more fragile because I would have to unslot two of my four things out of combat, which means that if we're ambushed I'm really in a bad situation. On the other hand, being able to meditate to become even more proof against flames is really cool. But probably not actually that useful."

"I'm definitely putting my ability points into Anamnesis now, if it's that hard to buff."

She nods. "I'm not even totally a caster and I have to keep my Anamnesis up. It's very useful. You've got a good plan at this point, I think."

Sin gets up from the side of the fire. "So then it seems I need to pick a fourth node, probably as a mix in... I could take Redirecting Spell from the Ranged tree, and then with Held I'd have a lot of control... But I want to work on the Persistent tree to get to Lingering..."