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How the charm recommendation is decided

Charm points are slow to earn and awkward to move, so the plan is solved for the whole hunt at once rather than creature by creature.

This is the most opinionated advice on the site, and the advice with the highest cost to get wrong — charm points take a long time to earn and moving one later is a real expense. So it is worth knowing how the plan is reached, and just as importantly what it does not know about you.

One plan, not one answer per creature

The obvious approach is to ask "what is the best charm for each creature here" and read off the answers. It gives bad advice, because the answers overlap: three creatures can each be best served by a different charm that solves the same third of the spawn, and following all three spends points three times on one problem.

So the hunt is solved as a whole. The plan is the set of charms that together cover the most of what you will actually fight — which sometimes means the recommendation for a single creature in the hunt is *not* the charm that creature would pick alone.

Major charms follow what the hunt is made of

A major charm does elemental damage, so its worth is the creature's sensitivity to that element, weighted by how much of the hunt that creature is. A charm that hits hard on something you meet six times an hour loses to a charm that hits adequately on the four hundred you actually kill.

This is why the plan can change completely between two hunts that share creatures. The mixture is the input, not the creature list.

Minor charms answer a different question

The four minor charms are not small majors — they respond to what the hunt does *to you* rather than what you do to it. So they are planned alongside the majors rather than after them, on their own reasoning, because ranking them on damage would always lose.

A mana drain is judged by how long the hunt leaves you standing in it, not by whether it happens. A creature that drains a little across most of the spawn's health is a worse problem than one that drains a lot and dies immediately — and the second is the one that looks worse in a list of abilities.

The same logic decides a charm that punishes fleeing, or one that leeches back: what matters is the share of the hunt where the condition is actually true, which is a fact about the mixture rather than about any one creature.

What the plan does not know

It does not know which charms you have unlocked, how many points you have, or what you have already spent them on. It assumes the choice is open, which makes it a target rather than an instruction.

It also does not know that you hunt somewhere else on Tuesdays. A charm is a lasting commitment and this page is about one hunt — if you split your time, the honest reading is to compare the plans for the two places and take what they agree on.

Where these numbers come from

Which creatures a hunt contains and in what proportion is read from real recorded sessions. Sensitivities and hit points are the wikis'. How a charm behaves is what CipSoft has published. What a drain is worth once you account for the time you spend in it is the part that came out of hunting, and it is the reason the minor plan looks different from a straight damage ranking.

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