Roman Candelabra: Overview
2024-07-03 // IOTM Overview
Now that I have you here, it's time to discuss how to pluralize the IOTM. No! Wait! Don't boo! It's funny! Candelabra is considered a plural form of candelabrum, but can also represent a singular form. There are alternate plurals of "candelabras" and "candelabrums", but all the dictionaries I checked (Webster, AHD, Oxford, Webster's) work one-way, where candelabra is a plural of candelabrum and candelabrum is not a plural of candelabra. The plural in-game is "Roman Candelabras". TPTB missed a chance to correct the grave ill of candelabrum never being allowed to be a plural by itself. Could've done "Romans Candelabrum", or "Romen Candelabrum", or "Roman Candelabra" just to confuse people who don't realize Candelabra is already a plural. So many fun options! Come on, let's go! Sign my change.org petition!
... OK, I lied, it wasn't funny. Go ahead and boo. Egg on my face. Real candelabruh moment for me. Ow! Ow! Stop throwing candles!
General Summary
The Roman Candelabra (or the Randle, as I'll be calling it) is an off-hand equipment item. It has a variety of enchantments, which (funnily) have their values portrayed in Roman numerals. (And Times New Roman! Love silly font gags.) The base enchantments are:
- HP/MP +XX
- Muscle, Myst, Moxie +X
- +X to Spooky/Cold/Hot/Stench/Sleaze damage
Assuming you were a fan of the USA's National Football League back in 1976, surely you will know that "X" means 10, and XX means 20. (Yes, Americans love Roman numerals for that one extremely specific thing and absolutely nothing else. Very normal country we have here!) The Muscle/Myst/Mox go up by "V" (5) every time you use their corresponding skill, and the MP/HP go up by "X".
"But, Scotch, you haven't told us about the skills yet! I don't know they exist! Why didn't you add a spoiler warning???"
Great question! Because, dear reader, I am a jerk.
When equipped, the Roman Candelabra gives access to the following skills:
- Blow the Red Candle! -- deals a large, unspecified amount of hot damage and gives a tiny amount of stats; increases HP enchantment by X, then gives 30 turns of Everything Looks Red
- Blow the Blue Candle! -- stuns a monster for 3 turns, along with a large amount of MP; increases Muscle enchantment by V, then gives 20 turns of Everything Looks Blue
- Blow the Yellow Candle! -- yellow rays the monster (a turn-taking YR, like all YRs except Fondeluge & Jurassic Acid); increases MP enchantment by X, then gives 75 turns of Everything Looks Yellow
- Blow the Green Candle! -- runs away from the associated monster without spending a turn; increases Mysticality enchantment by V, then gives 30 turns of Everything Looks Green
- Blow the Purple Candle! -- copies the current monster in a chain-to-fight extra combat (much like the Pocket Professor); increases Moxie enchantment by V, then gives 50 turns of Everything Looks Purple
Whenever you have the corresponding Everything Looks effect active, the corresponding +10 elemental damage drops off the randle, and you cannot use the associated skill.
Speedrun Applicability
Before we start, for reference purposes, I wanted to share one useful heuristic to measure the individual skills. As you can only cast them without the corresponding Everything Looks X effect, there is an inherent limit of the number of times you can cast a specific skill in a day. To that end, here's a table with a few common end-of-day turncounts, and how many times you'd get to blow each color of candle in that duration.
| # of turns | Red Count | Blue Count | Yellow Count | Green Count | Purple Count |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 101 | 4 | 6 | 2 | 4 | 3 |
| 126 | 5 | 7 | 2 | 5 | 3 |
| 151 | 6 | 8 | 3 | 6 | 4 |
| 176 | 6 | 9 | 3 | 6 | 4 |
| 201 | 7 | 11 | 3 | 7 | 5 |
| 226 | 8 | 12 | 4 | 8 | 5 |
This is a decent little reference for your planning, if you don't want to keep redoing the math every time you make a spreadsheet. Hooray! As usual, let's get the minor junk out of the way first.
- If you own the Everfull Dart Holster, you will never use Blow the Red Candle. Ever. A free kill is quite a bit better than the meager stats you gain, and the gob of hot damage isn't better at killing a monster than, again, simply killing the monster for free. If you don't have it, you'll get an extra few hundred stats sprinkled throughout your run, for very tiny leveling applicability.
- Conversely, if you're in standard, you are (probably) going to get some minor benefit from the blue candle. We aren't really hurting for MP, but it's always nice to have an easy way to boost your MP and buff up. More useful, in my view, is the 3 turn stun -- there are a lot of weird things you want to do in combats at times, and getting 3 extra turns with zero damage is a nice quality-of-life boon in those annoying combats where you have 2 items to throw, a dart to launch, and a few skills to use. You probably don't care much about routing around it, which means you likely make a target to use the skill in a 30-40 turn range.
Those two are pretty minor, in the grand scheme of things. The next three are not!
First, blowing your yellow candle, for a traditional Yellow Ray (YR). Forcing items to drop is pretty great! It's a power that often can get slept on by most modern ascenders, since our item drop gets -silly- high in modern ascension. There were metas way back in the day where 234% wasn't easily doable, and in those, YR choices in any given ascension could represent a 4-10 turn swing. We are also a bit spoiled; the fact that the Jurassic Acid YR is an inherently freekill makes people feel like something like the Candelabra that's "just" a yellow ray is a bit of a disappointment.
I'm here to say: bollocks to that! Yes, while Parka is in standard, you will -almost- entirely export your YRs to Parka to get that spicy free kill. But for two years post-Parka, the Randle is going to provide us 3-4 rays a day. That's great! Even with our high inherent item drop, each yellow ray is worth a turn or so, especially in concert with the glut of summoning resources we currently have. While faxes and summons help avoid the extra turns spent finding a monster, yellow rays help avoid extra fights to generate the item you want. Always easier to get things done in 1 fight instead of 2-3, even if you -can- summon up the monster itself. The 75 turn window helps too, increasing the number you get in a given day. Getting 3-4 rays a day is a huge boon!
After the YR, you have a brand spanking new mechanic -- blowing your purple candle, for a Purple Ray! This is my favorite of the additions in this IOTM. It creates a chain-to-fight copy of the monster you're currently fighting. In its simplest use, you can look at it as a force multiplier on one of the many summon sources we currently have in the game -- any time you summon a monster while you don't have Everything Looks Purple, you can use a charge to fight two of the summoned monster instead of one, avoiding having to generate a mimic egg for the second fight. This is a solid use, and likely saves a fractional turn. It's easy to execute, straightforward, and sensible. But I know you, reader. You aren't here for "sensible". You want that cask-strength speedrunner facestabbing. You want to know what the Gold Star runners are going to try to do as they drive themselves to insanity to try and shave an extra turn or two.
And that, my friends, is to put your copies into delay. If you use a purple ray on a monster you want to fight multiple times in a delay zone, you are in effect solving two problems with one resource. The trick is actually getting your monster into the zone you want. Luckily, the Randle overlaps with the Book of Facts, which means you can use free fights you've habituated as purple ray targets. There are also a handful of solid targets that exist within the normal ascension loop:
- Ninja Snowman Assassins are awesome; if you do your Shen Snakes on D1, copying a natural assassin saves both a summon and a turn of delay, which is excellent value.
- Pygmy Accountants are great as well; you need to burn 10 turns of delay in the office and 9 turns in the apartment. While you can use sneaks and sneak-likes to force the NCs, delay-burning your way to one of the NCs can save a few resources later on and reserve an NC force for other purposes.
- If you are already seeking them out in the Cyrpt, using a purple ray to snag an extra swarm of ghuol whelps isn't a bad shout. You generally will need 2-3 of them, and it's easier to just fight it in-zone if you're already dipping in.
- Red Butlers are nice too; if you get an early butler, using a purple ray to (hopefully) avoid having to banish the Red Snapper or the Red Herring (the two monsters that do not give you progress in the zeppelin) is a decent use.
- If you want to save your pro skateboard duplicator, or simply don't own the 2001 catalog, using a purple ray on a skinflute or a camel's toe for all your stars and lines is a great usage.
Somewhat helpfully, in a 150-190 turn day, you'll get 4 purple rays -- one more than the number of casts of Recall Habitats from the Book of Facts. So you can (if you're creative) probably wrangle it such that you use at least 2 or 3 of your purple rays per day on burning actual delay turns with habituated free fights, then use the other 1 or 2 on either an egg copy or one of the natural ones noted above. You also can use the weird trick noted in the upcoming synergies section to try and make it 4-5 freefights in delay... just be careful with it!
Purple Rays are great. For me, PRs are quite welcome. [dodges a tomato from Gausie]
Finally, you have the ability to blow a green candle, which is just a free runaway on the same Everything Looks Green counter as Green Smoke Bombs, Spring Shoes, and other runaways. It's a 30 turn timer, the same as the Shoes. Which begs the question...
Which is better: the Spring Shoes, or the Randle?
Yes, yes. I will have a separate synergies section in a second, but it's impossible to talk about the value of the Randle's green candle without talking about the Spring Shoes. There is a wild amount of synergistic connective tissue between the core ascension value of the Spring Shoes and the Randle. When it comes to freeruns, they're virtually completely equivalent. Both are skills that give 30 turns of Everything Looks Green, and can only be cast when you don't have ELG active. If you have both, here is a quick table with the benefits of using one source for your ELG runs versus the other.
| The Randle! | The Spring Shoes! |
|---|---|
| Every free-run will add +5 to the Randle's myst enchantment, helping scale up MP and push stats higher for tower tests | The shoes are an accessory, which is a less contested slot |
That's it. Both of those are immensely minor benefits. As they were released in the same year, they'll leave standard at the exact same time. My guess would be in unrestricted you slightly prefer the spring shoes for your ELG free runs due to the massive crunch of good unrestricted offhands, most of which require charging. But in standard you probably slightly prefer the Randle, as there are fewer useful offhands to deal with and it nets out to an additional 40+ myst by the end of your run.
Regardless, the point of the matter is that these two IOTMs are exactly the same in this specific mechanic, with fully shared timers, so it really is a matter of "you only strictly need one." This is the clearest example in years of a situation where a lower-shiny speedrunner is able to pick one out of two IOTMs whose value is largely wrapped up in the same thing. That said, as I noted in the Spring Shoes article, there are other benefits to the shoes; the shoes offer fruit (0.5 turns), initiative (0.5 turns), +/- combat potions (1 turn), and the Spring Kick all-day toggling banish (2-3 turns). So you have 4-5 turns per day of non-freerun value from the shoes. Similarly, you have non-freerun value from the Randle; purple rays are 2-3 turns (smaller if you don't execute it painfully, larger if you execute them perfectly), yellow rays are 2-3 turns (though won't be used until next year once the Parka rotates), and the comfort of the blue ray is probably worth a fractional turn. So you net out to 4-5 turns of non-run value in the shoes and 5-7 turns of value from non-run value in the Randle, but for (obviously) different stuff.
So, the big question. If you're a low shiny ascender, which should you buy? It's tough, but I would personally lean towards the Randle. While Spring Kick is amazing, the benefits of the Randle are slightly more flexible and involve a tiny bit more strategy, which is what often makes KOL fun. And the purple ray mechanic is very cool. If you already have the Spring Shoes, and are saving up for some key Standard set IOTMs, you might get a little more juice out of something else. (But not the Kiwi. The 4-5 turns of value is still way the hell over the Kiwi.)
2024 In-Standard Synergies
Quite a few, actually!
- There's a pretty spicy synergy available with the Book of Facts (2023), the Randle, and the Spring Shoes. You start by habituating a free monster (like trick or treaters, from 2023's Jill, or a free black crayon monster you've summoned from a Chest Mimic) so that you can encounter free monsters in delay zones anywhere. You then fight one and purple ray it. You then use the Spring Kick banish from the Spring Shoes to banish a habituated copy you've made from the Recall Habitat skill from BoFa. Because it's a toggling banish, you can then cast Spring Kick again in 50 turns, encountering your leftover habituated copies and letting you get multiple free fights into delay with Purple Rays off of one cast of Recall Habitats. It's a spicy, fun trick! The key to it is that you want to make sure that you have 50 turns of things to do where having the Spring Kick banish active wouldn't be helpful; if so, you're golden. If not, you probably need to avoid this, as it does lock your spring kick up on whatever you've habituated until your purple ray comes back up.
- The Patriotic Eagle (2023) is one of the few familiars that recharges its primary familiar benefit -- the Patriotic Screech phylum banish -- on freeruns. That means that you can use the Randle's free runs to help charge up your next Eagle banish, unlike most familiars (who do not derive real value from freeruns).
- The purple ray synergizes with the Eagle as well; if you are doing a Red, White, and Blue blast to get an extra gob of the current monster, if you only need one or two more beyond the RWB blast, you can purple ray an extra copy into the chain if you time RWB with your purples.
- The purple ray synergizes nicely with the Chest Mimic. Every mimic egg costs 50 familiar XP, a daunting number for those who don't have all the shinies available. Purple rays can be used to save 50 XP on a mimic summon by copying an existing summon one more time, if you don't have the means or patience to get the XP in order.
- The blue ray synergizes a bit with allowing you to use things that take combat rounds and are commonly done over-and-over again in a run, like the Everfull Darts, as it helps lengthen difficult combats where you may want to throw multiple darts or do a lot of other random nonsense. Like flyering for the war, plinking for familiar actions, etc. Not a massive benefit, but a legitimate synergy.
Overall Rating
We'd rate the Roman Candelabra a Tier 1 IOTM. As with the Spring Shoes, it's extremely close to Tier 0, and you wouldn't really have much argument from me against it. I'm benchmarking at saving 6-7 turns a day through free runs, 3-4 turns a day through purple rays, and 2-3 turns a day through yellow rays. It won't manifest as an immediate power player in modern standard for those who have everything, due to the fact that the yellow rays are being handled by the Jurassic Parka until 2025 and the freeruns are interchangable between this and the spring shoes. But it's a truly awesome IOTM for low-shiny accounts, and will be a staple of standard planning for years to come.
NOTE: Thank you to the ASS discord (specifically Vulcan9009, Purple Shrimp, and The Erosionseeker) for giving me ideas for alternate plurals to pad the intro to this post. They will be compensated in fond glances, and a few of the unbruised tomatoes from the disapproving crowd. Appreciate you, fellas.