Wardrobe-o-Matic: Overview
2023-11-29 // IOTM Overview
Whoa! This one came out of nowhere. With the Time Twitching Tower back, TPTB released a brand new item in the KOL Con Merch Table, at the price of one Mr. Accessory. It's the Wardrobe-o-Matic, generating three equipment items when you use it. But is it good? Is it bad? Is it worth a Mr. A, or does it make you sad? Who could say? Well. I could. But we'll do the whole article first, I guess.
General Summary
Unlike many modern IOTMs, the Wardrobe-o-Matic is a pretty simple automatically pulled box. You click a button and you get some stuff! Specifically, you get a hat, a shirt, and a piece of familiar equipment. The stuff you get is based on your level; at its core, the higher level you are, the better the enchantments will be. There are five tiers of items:
- If you open the wardrobe from level 1-4, you will get first tier items, with just one enchantment
- If you open the wardrobe from level 5-9, you will get a second tier item, with two enchantments
- If you open the wardrobe from level 10-14, you will get a third tier item, with three enchantments
- If you open the wardrobe from level 15-19, you will get a fourth tier item, with four enchantments... and the possibility of a familiar XP, meat, and item boost from the items
- If you open the wardrobe at level 20 or any higher, you will get a "final" tier item, with five different enchantments and the inclusion of meat/item/famXP in the pool
Then you wear the stuff, or you don't. There's no big fancy tricks with it; your biggest in-run "choice" really is just deciding when to click the button. The way the wardrobe seems to work, per our spading, is that the wardrobe itself is a universal daily random draw based on the level of the owner. If you're a level 12 sauceror, you're going to have the same hat/shirt/famequip as any other level 12 character in the game. Due to the new effects introduced at level 15+, the items will have (generally) different enchantments if you compare sub-15 to post-15 characters, as the extra options impact the random roll. In terms of eligibility, we don't know -exactly- what's available in the enchantment bucket for each piece yet, but our spading has indicated the following enchantments are available on each piece of equipment:
- For your shirt, you can have: Hot/Cold/Spooky/Sleaze/Stench resistance, at anywhere from 1 to 7 points depending on your tier. You can get flat additional Mus/Myst/Mox, at anywhere from 10 to 60 points. You can get anywhere from 10 to 110 extra HP/MP. You can get some amount of HP/MP regeneration, and some amount of DA. If you are at a fourth or final tier item (IE, level 15+ at opening), you can also get item drop, meat drop, or ML (though we have yet to determine ranges on those)
- For your hat, you can have: Hot/Cold/Spooky/Sleaze/Stench damage, at anywhere from 4 to 30 points depending on your tier. You can have spell damage of any element as well, also at a 4 to 30 range. You can get anywhere from 10 to 110 extra HP/MP. You can get some amount of HP/MP regeneration. If you are at a fourth or final tier item (IE, level 15+ at opening), you can also get item drop, meat drop, or ML (though we have yet to determine ranges on those)
- For your familiar equipment, you can have: familiar weight, at anywhere from +6 to +15 familiar weight. You can get what appears to be 15 to 75 +damage on your familiar as well. If you are over level 15, you can get familiar experience, at a range we are unsure of (but have seen 4-5 so far in the first few days of items)
The items are tied to the tier they are generated at -- that means that if you open the wardrobe at level 1, even if you hit 20+ later in the day, you will still have your tier one item with just one low enchantment. So, uh. Open at a high level, probably?
Speedrun Applicability
Not all of these possible enchantments are particularly valuable for a speedster, and some can in fact be actively harmful. Familiar damage, for instance, could make your familiars too good at killing monsters, and have your familiars off a monster before you've completed whatever spells or skills you need to cast in the combat. Largely, though, these are benign or not-super-valuable. For instance, HP regeneration is cute, but it isn't really necessary given the strength of Cannelloni Cocoon. All in all, I'd tier the effects as follows (demarcating the 15+ effects specifically):
- QUITE HELPFUL TO SPEED: Item (15+), Meat (15+), Sleaze Damage (Spell or Flat, for the Zeppelin), familiar weight (in unrestricted; extra runs with bander/boots), Monster Level (15+), Familiar XP (if you have grey goose; 15+)
- QUESTIONABLY HELPFUL TO SPEED: Sleaze Resistance (for Blech House), flat mainstat (for better scaling monsters), familiar weight (in standard; slight boosts to item%/meat%/ML), non-sleaze flat elemental damage (for damage capping the tavern, post-Cleaver), DA (for capping the 8-bit DA realm in avatar paths), flat MP, Cold/Spooky resistance (in low-skill avatar paths)
- NOT REALLY HELPFUL AT ALL: Non-sleaze spell damage boosts, HP regeneration, familiar damage (yes, there's probably a Vampire Vintner shitpost here, but I am the no-fun man), flat HP, other resistance buffs
This means that the pools for each item split as:
- SHIRT: 3 quite helpful (all L15+), 5 questionably helpful, and 8 unhelpful enchantments
- HAT: 5 quite helpful (3 L15+), 4 questionably helpful, and 8 unhelpful enchantments
- FAMEQUIP: 1 quite helpful (L15+), 1 quite/questionably helpful pending unrestricted/standard status, and 1 unhelpful enchantment
Now, all that noted, I think there are two ways to look at this. The glass half full interpretation is that if you do happen to hit level 15+ in a run, this item has the potential to be pretty darn lit. It would happen late in the run, surely, but you'd get a nice late-run boost with some possible item or meat drop, or a late-run goose sprint with an additional 4-5 familiar XP to help generate degenerate amounts of drones. That's pretty strong stuff. And since the model trainset is overlapping with half of the wardrobe's standard period (2023/2024), level 15 isn't as unattainable as it sounds -- especially next year, without the Cold Medicine Cabinet taking up at minimum 91 turns in a 1 day run or 160 turns in a 2-day run, a stat-tuned trainset could have you sniffing absurdly high levels without any real effort.
The glass half empty interpretation is that this is a bit of a silly thought exercise to begin with. Because it's seeded random, once we have collected a sufficient amount of data and reversed the seeding equation, we'll eventually know exactly which days have good rolls for each item (and will probably have some online sheet speedsters can reference to examine them), but the chances of getting a roll that's good on both D1 and D2 isn't great. All in all, probabilities any individual enchantment is good works out as follows, with parenthesis showing the value if you are below level 15:
| Equipment | % quite helpful | % helpful at all |
|---|---|---|
| Shirt | 18% (0%) | 50% (13%) |
| Hat | 29% (11%) | 52% (35%) |
| Fam Equip | 33% (50%) | 66% (50%) |
Assuming that you are able to pick your spots and run on days when the wardrobe-o-matic is seeded well, you'll be in a good spot. But that won't happen -super- often. And on some level, you sort of have to hit level 15 to roll well -- the shirt enchantments literally never hits "quite helpful" status below level 15, owing to the fact that it's the resistance item rather than the damage item. And realistically, real-life constraints on speedrunning (days off work, end-of-path sprint times) will almost certainly override the "pick a day with a good wardrobe bonus" strategy, and many of the enchantments I noted are solved with various tools we already have in standard. For instance, in a post CMC meta, I can't really imagine a trainset owner ever needing to run Blech House, so sleaze resistance becomes broadly unhelpful. Flat mainstat doesn't matter if trainset is solving your leveling anyway. It may be a slight help in some routes, but it's hard to bank on. And the level 15 issue is a big one -- you need to accumulate 40,000 total substats to hit level 15, which isn't THAT many in the age of trainset, but it's enough that you really won't be hitting it on day 1 in a 2-day run, and probably won't hit it until well after midday in the 2nd day. Which means this stuff is (likely) of middling use on D1 and difficult to route on D2.
So. Horrible, right? Eh. Not sure about that either. I think the truth is somewhere between the optimist and the pessimist poles here. There are going to be some paths where the wardrobe happens to drop some obscene +40 sleaze damage hat on the level 10 item -- in fact, it dropped a +35 aggregate sleaze hat for level 10-14 users on the third day it was released. Wild! It's also worth noting that the enchantments here are quite generous -- a maximum 60 damage sleaze hat is best in slot, and not just by a little bit; the current top speedster option in unrestricted is the Ratty Knitted Cap for +30, and in standard it's the Grungy Bandana via Arr, M80s for +10. That's a -huge- boost, likely enough to considerably impact your routing and the ease to which you hit your target sleaze for the Zeppelin mob. The meat boost on the shirt is likely unhelpful to the speedster who has everything (as we have yet to see a shirt you could feasibly get in-run that's better than your trusty Jurassic Parka), but if you don't have a parka, that's just flat value. And the item boost is best in slot in-run for both slots by an enviable margin, likely helping a lot on tomb rat capping later in run.
On net, you can't guarantee you -always- get all of the boosts these items could feasibly give you. But there are enough helpful things that a high-level character opening their wardrobe is likely to find one or two useful things to poke at. And, as noted, these are pretty generous enchantments, so much so that even the useless stuff has some (tiny) comfort value. -- For instance, the flat stat offstat boosts are high enough that they add some level of comfort to your run, allowing you to outmuscle or outmoxie random foes that would otherwise give you potential combat trouble. The regeneration makes your run much more cozy. Et cetera, et cetera. I don't necessarily think these are items you'll HAVE to wear all day, but unlike the coat of paint, I'm not sure that they will be strictly outclassed by literally everything else that occupies the slots they inhabit. And that is worth something, even though I am not usually a proponent of valuing items simply because they "fill slots" so to speak.
2023 In-Standard Synergies
- Well, this one's simple. The familiar XP has massive synergy with 2022's Grey Goose. It doesn't necessarily get you to a new "threshold" during your goose sprint, but if you can wrangle a +4 or +5 familiar XP boost, that +3 versus the stillsuit is a very tasty addition to your drone accumulation process. There really isn't any other major synergy -- if you have goose, the fam XP will be valuable. If you don't, it probably won't.
- Actually, OK, one last one -- there's a (very slight) anti-synergy in the familiar equipment from the wardrobe-o-matic and the Jill-of-all-Trades. This is because if you happen to be using Jill, you almost 100% will want to be using the LED candle, as 1.5x familiar weight is (at any weight above 20) superior to +10 familiar weight. So, if your only IOTM familiar happens to be the Jill, you probably won't be using the generated familiar equipment. Sorry, dude! (To be fair, with Tiny Stillsuit (2022) still in standard, you also probably won't be using the fam equip that often either, as stillsuit is a slightly better value for your time. But that's a whole other topic.)
Overall Rating
We'd rate the Wardrobe-o-Matic as a tier 5 IOTM, with less than 1 turn saved daily in your average run. Yes, yes. There are cases where it'll save a bit more if you overlap with an incredible seed and use it to shave a turn off, say, Zeppelin + Spookyraven Basement. But I'd deem that a bit of an outside-the-average outcome; in most runs, you'll find that the wardrobe's items are comfy and cute but not necessarily changing your life speed-wise. It certainly isn't as bad as a hobo sheep, but don't buy this one expecting the world from your wardrobe-of-the-future.