Astrology is one of those skills in Melvor Idle early on I just did not see the point of investing time into it. For the early game, I don’t feel I was wrong in my views towards it. At the later stages of the game, however, my opinion has shifted quite a lot.
One of the more interesting aspects of astrology is once you unlock a bonus it’s passive. It’s also not like agility skills where you have to switch and choose which skills you want to be your passive. You unlock something in astrology, and you are done.
The biggest downside is it can be quite time-consuming. Early on why would I spend half a week or longer investing in something. When instead I could have put that time into getting some other skill higher or even in some cases to level 99.
In astrology, you have different constellations that you can devote to studying. Each one has two pair skills. Many of them go hand in hand. Such as Deadree being a tree and plant. While Iridan is melee combat and smiting.
Within each constellation, you have minor and major passive bonuses. Minor ones are unlocked at lower constellation mastery for that individual one. They are the ones in the blue and they cost stardust to unlock. Each level invested into each passive bonus costing an increased amount of dust.
Then you have the higher major bonuses in the gold. They cost golden stardust to unlock with the last one requiring level 99 mastery in that constellation just to unlock it.
Stardust and golden stardust drop at random. Early on when you have a low skill mastery you have quite a low drop rate. As that mastery increases so does your chance of getting it. You can even at level 99 get the astrology mastery cape that doubles drop rates for the dusts.
One nice thing about the mastery cape for this skill is unlike others where the bonus the cape grants might no longer be worth using. You tend to have gathered all the resources you would need for that skill and have moved on to something else in many cases.
In astrology, you are just not getting a lot of dust overall. It can also cost a few hundred to upgrade something. So even after you have reached 99 you are far from acquiring all the dust you might need at some point or another.
Like most skills level also plays a huge impact on which consolations you can even study in. Which for me early on made this skill feel a bit frustrating. Anytime I’d look into this skill to see if there was a bonus, I could benefit from it would require a decent level astrology level just to then start grinding to unlock those passive bonuses.
For most things, I also just did not see the investment of time overall worthwhile unless you were going to grind something for weeks on end. You could have just invested that time in what you were grinding out; instead of working on astrology to get that bonus to then slightly boost the skill in question.
A good example of this would be getting the passive to reduce the interval time of firemaking by 5%. While fire making is a skill I’ve maxed out. It would not have been worth the time to have gotten such a tiny speed boost to level up that skill unless I had over farmed the dust needed to buy that passive out of astrology already and had it unlocked.
Many of these bonuses I see as having if you want to be a 1% at something. Such as having a 5% reduced fishing interval. If fishing is your main source of income, then that 5% reduction in time is quite massive and well worth investing days to get.
There is however a much larger picture to look at for something like combat. Each combat type has its constellation with its bonuses. I noticed at the lower levels they all had a bonus you could get for an accuracy rating. It was also not capped at 8% either. Meaning acquiring that accuracy passive bonus from multiple constellations was worthwhile.
Combat in general as it turns out is one of those skills that highly benefits from astrology and is worth investing quite some time into unlocking everything you can. I started to invest weeks (thankfully this is a mostly idle game) into getting combat bonuses ahead of my major skill push I do for magic, melee, defense, health, or ranged combat.
Final Thoughts
As a result, you can start to see how my new strategy to take advantage of astrology will start to pay off. All combat will benefit from the investment I’ve made in accuracy rating. All damage types as far as I’m aware will benefit from the 5% life steal, I’ve picked up.
Then you have the more basic stuff that I don’t tend to put much effort into acquiring. Like an increase in experience rate. Expect when it came to astrology. All those passives were minor ones requiring only stardust which I started having quite an ample supply of after a while. With gold stardust being my bottleneck along with mastery of each constellation.
Hopefully, once I start to get back into combat things will go a lot better than the last time, I attempted things. I could tell there was something I was missing to be able to progress along with different combat-related things.
While these passives on an individual level are not that massive. Once they start compounding to the point I have so many of them now. It should have quite a huge impact on the content I’ll be able to do in combat at some point. If nothing else it will make leveling up my lower combat skills so much easier which is another thing I need to invest in for my overall numbers.
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Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Melvor Idle. If you wish to further support my content you can use enjargames at checkout or this referral link for Melvor Idle on the Epic Game Store.
Disclosure: The game was received for free.
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