Tearaway Pants: Overview
2024-08-21 // IOTM Overview
These ain't no ripoff pants! Okay, well. Depending on how you evaluate its use, they might be ripoff pants. But one thing's for sure: they're tearaway pants!
General Summary
Tearaway Pants are, well, pants. They're pants, folks. The pants are enchanted as follows:
-
- X Sleaze Damage (
X = level * 5)
- X Sleaze Damage (
- Damage Reduction: 10
- So-So Resistance to All Elements (+2)
- Combat Initiative +50%
- Maximum HP +50
- "Tear them away in combat!"
The final bit of bluetext refers to a new combat skill, "Tear Away your Pants!" accessible whenever you happen to be wearing your tearaway pants. It is usable once per combat, staggering your foe and offering an additional effect depending on the phylum of the active monster:
| Phylum | "Tear Away your Pants!" result |
|---|---|
| Beasts, Bugs, and Penguins | 3-round stun |
| Constellations, Elementals | Delevels the enemy |
| Constructs, Slimes | Absolutely nothing |
| Demons, Horrors, Undead, Weird | Physical damage to the enemy |
| Dudes, Elves, Goblins, Hippies, Hobos, Humanoids, Orcs, Pirates | If the monster drops pickpocketable pants, you acquire them! Otherwise, it's a +15% bonus to item drop for the combat. |
| Fish, Mer-Kin | Very tiny substat gains |
| Plants | Gain 1 adventure, or no effect |
In addition to the enchantments and the skill, the tearaway pants provide instant access to the Department of Shadowy Arts and Crafts for moxie classes. After all, Shifty's whole ask for guild membership was to steal your own pants, and it's very easy to steal your own tearaway pants!
Speedrun Applicability
Let's start with the good news. This IOTM does two things that are really quite novel. First, it provides guild access to moxie classes without having to go off an ascension's critical path. Many people have been wondering if there will ever be a change where the mysticality and moxie guilds are placed on-path in the same way the muscle guild is; the fact that two classes get free access and it takes 5 annoying turns in a terrible zone for the other four classes has always felt a bit weird. This is better than we could've anticipated on that front, as it's actually more free than the muscle guild, since you'll get guild access without spending a single turn. That's neat! It should be helpful for newer players who still need to occasionally buy perms in-run. Beyond that, it doesn't really do much, but at least it does that.
Second, this item technically enables nigh-infinite pickpocketing, albeit on low-value targets -- because you can cast "Tear Away your Pants!" on every single fight, if you were to somehow make a zone into a one pants-wearing monster zone, and that monster was in the phylum list, you could get a pair of pants on every turn, rain or shine. This isn't likely to become majorly relevant any time soon, but with elves in the phylum list, there is certainly a chance that some world event will feature some kind of advantageous relationship where getting a bonkers amount of free pants will be valuable. It also is nice for any collectors of a droppable pants item.
You may notice that the good news is centralized in "novel mechanics", not centralized in "things that are good for speed ascension." And largely, you'd be right. If I had to list this item's powers at speeding up your ascensions, I'd order this roughly as follows:
- The sleaze damage is pretty good! We're spoiled for choice with Zeppelin speedups in the modern game, but this will end up at 55+ sleaze damage by the time you enter the Zeppelin. It's worse than the designer sweatpants, but next year those rotate out, and this will probably save folks a wish or some resource usage.
- The initiative is fine. 50% is a nice chunk; it will help defray a few init losses going into next year, and there are multiple init tests in a run (modern zombies at 850%, 8-bit at 600%, and the tower at 400%) where it's nice to have big chunks of init that we can just throw on for the tests.
- The "gain adventures as you fight plants" thing is cute. There aren't a TON of plants in an average run, but there are enough that this is 3-5 turns pretty dependably in a run, and can be a decent bit more if you really lean into it (by, say, wishing and casting Recall Habitat on black crayon plants!) For turnbloat paths, a relatively slotless 3-5 turns can be the difference between making daycount and being just short.
- I love the pants pickpocketing. Love it. It's fun and new. However, there really aren't a ton of great uses for it in-run, which is a shame. The best one I've thought of so far is using tearaway to get the knob goblin harem pants and the 2002 Mr. Store Catalog's FLUDA to pickpocket the veil, to save a yellow ray. It's minor, but there may be a time where that's helpful. In addition, you do encounter a few pants throughout the run that you can yoink and autosell for meat. With trainset leaving us in 2025, there may be some paths where there's enough of a meat crunch that easy autosellables would be helpful. The +15% item drop on no-pants match monsters is helpful, too, though it's small.
Nothing else really shines. These are pretty low impact benefits. At -best-, you save a turn on the Zeppelin (next year), gain some fractional turns from additional initiative, get a handful of extra turns, and (maybe) save a yellow ray if everything works out. And you get a 15% +item buff on something like a fourth of your turns in an ascension. It's just not a lot, compared to most IOTMs, despite my genuine delight at the mechanics of it all.
2024 In-Standard Synergies
There isn't much, but there's a few.
- As mentioned earlier, the idea of synergizing with the 2002 Mr. Store Catalog (2023) to try and avoid a yellow ray but stealing two items in one combat is pretty cute.
- The "gain adventures as you fight plants" thing synergizes with summon and copier sources, like the Chest Mimic (2024) and the Recall Habitats skill from the Book of Facts (2023). Using this skill to smuggle more plants into your run can definitely increase the volume of plants you encounter in any given run. It also synergizes with the Guide to Burning Leaves (2023) very well.
Overall Rating
We'd rate the tearaway pants a tier 5 IotM, meaning 0-1 turns saved each day, on average. It simply is not essential for ascension... at least, not yet. There is always a possibility that the novel benefits will increase its value later in its standard lifespan. There are a bunch of decent examples of that -- for one, the Industrial Fire Extinguisher went from its charges being worth about half a turn to a full turn immediately once the Shadow Rifts were introduced. When the Smut Orc Logging Camp was remodeled in February of 2019, it increased the value of every source of sleaze resistance, which included +5 from the KGB, +3 from the Latte Lovers Member's Mug, and +2 from the pantogram. When pirates were removed as an alternate route to the talisman of namsilat, macrometeorites were boosted, because ascenders no longer could waste all their macros failing to get pirate insults. (OK, that one was a joke, but people finally got better at using macros after that happened, which was huge!) You never know what kind of mix-ups TPTB could have in store for us.
Then again, maybe nothing changes, and this IOTM remains what it is: a beautiful little mechanical marvel that is basically useless to modern speedruns. C'est la vie, tearaway pants!