Christmas Strategies

(to be cleaned up)

Most Christmas encounter on The Quad are Choice Encounters, so Chance of Choice Encounters can increase your chance of encountering them. Additionally, removing/minimizing other encounters in the area can increase your chance of encountering them:

• Horrible Poet (Choice Encounter) - can be dismissed by:
  • Effect: Etheric
  • Offhand equipped: Survey of Modern Poetry
  • Daily: remove for day with Psychoanalyze him: (needs investigation)
  • Kill him: removes encounter permanently; but adds Migard Security Encounter.

• Midgard Security (Combat Encounter):
  • Only if you have killed the Horrible Poet

• The Blind Legion (Non-Combat Encounter):
  • Offhand: evaded with Walk With the Blind equipped (compare with Survey of Modern Poetry)
  • Strategy: Most Christmas encounter

• Third Eye Ganger (Combat Encounter):
  • Only if you not joined the Third Eye

• Insulting Punk (Choice Encounter)
  • Daily: if you Match him, remove for day

• The Bum (Combat Encounter)
  • Only when Etheric
  • Has zero reflexes, so can be run away from for zero energy, for a number of times equal to the Square Root of your Reflexes per day

General strategies

Good stats, HP, etc. are useful as many of the Christmas snowman hit pretty hard.

List here any useful techniques, items etc to prep.

Techniques

• Chemical Mixture- deals hefty end-of-round damage in addition to its decent main damage. With decent Fire Power, it's two decent attacks may be better than the harder-hittingincendiary grenade (technique) or blazing torch. Snowmen almost never use Evasion techniques, so don't worry about it being dodged. Chemical Mixture is, however, less useful against the swarm of tiny snowmen, who are immune to its end-of-round damage.
• Dancing Blade (technique) with a dancing blade equipped- also tacks on a bonus attack in addition to your main attack. Useful for swarm of tiny snowmen, who are *not* immune to it.
• Steel Rocket- snowmen almost never use evasion techniques and usually have little to no fire defense, so this will do a ton of damage to them.
• Whiteout, Defensive Burn if you don't mind spending Etheric, these techniques will utterly bypass most of the Snowman defenses, especially reactive defense. Particularly useful against swarm of tiny snowmen.
• nitrox, frag grenade (technique)- area of effect attacks. Particularly useful against Manyheaded snowman and when choosing "rampage among the big ones"
• shape flames- difficult to obtain but the clear winner for slot 4 if you don't mind spending Etheric.

• A very solid deck for most snowmen would be 3x nitro, 4x chemical mixture, 4x nitrox and 4x steel rocket
  • Replacing nitro with clashing blow or another melee technique might be helpful to avoid the stun effect from horned snowman's jacob's ladder attack

Against swarm of tiny snowmen, they ignore all damage over 5, so only quantity of attacks count. Thus, dancing blade (technique) and your favorite melee deck would be slightly better than a straight fire deck.

Equipment

• Don't forget to put on a containment suit against the swarm of tiny snowmen!
• staring blade program is a good way to boost your Fire Power. Pair it with an ad spider, hologame tome or white noise producer
• charged sludge heart is good for avoiding the stun from horned snowman

Cyberware

• sludge cyberheart- useful for both resisting snowman Etheric attacks and really putting on the hurt with Fire techniques.

Items

If you have the recipe, you might want to stock up on unmelting ice bricks.

Daily Activities

• Get one peppermint schnapps by pickpocketing in the The Happy Hour with festive music playing
• Use your fake Christmas tree to get a tiny gift

Opponents

In addition to the drops called out below, most snowmen will drop some number of gnarled branches, lumps of coal, and unmelting snowflakes with a Myers sampling kit equipped.

Also see Snowman opponents for some generally applicable notes.

Opponent	Strategy/Notes	Notable Drops	Unlock Condition
EVIL SNOWMAN	40 HP. Mostly Melee focused, though it does know Frost Breath and Evil Eye. Weak to Fire.	silk top hat (restores the one used to unlock it) frigid scarf carrot nose third hand pipe	Use a silk top hat and then adventure on the Quad while Etheric.
FRESH SNOWMAN	20 HP. Not particularly strong, weak against Fire. Mostly uses Melee, but does know Frost Breath and has a weak Ranged technique.		Immediately available from Snow Goons encounter.
FANGED SNOWMAN	40 HP. This is where snowmen start to get a bit trickier, and attack power starts getting high enough to need to think about defenses. Has Stealth, Melee and Etheric attacks, as well as the Maw Counterattack which can return your own attack type back at you. It's weak to Fire, which can also block its Viper Lunge stealth attack, but be wary of fire techniques getting absorbed and shot back at you, as some sources of Fire Power may also weaken your Fire Defense.	icicle fang	Available from Snow Goons encounter when max scariness hits 50.
STARING SNOWMAN	50 HP. If your Etheric Defense and Fire Defense are equal, you should get the "conflicting forces" result from its Spin Eyes Wildly attack, which is otherwise devastating. It can debuff your ED and throw this out of balance by inflicting Entrapping Gaze with its Focused Gaze attack, but if you own an anniversary pocket mirror, you can prevent this from happening and reflect its gaze to boot.	red glass ornament, green glass ornament	Available from Snow Goons encounter when max scariness hits ??