A commonly glossed over advantage of chains is that characters who have their arms (or legs) locked have a weaker struggle, which means that you're more likely to finish an opponent you manage to pounce on before they get freed. It has lower precision, sure, but it has good synergy with common magic builds that rely on Freeze Feet for reliable control damage.
Anyone have a strict reason to pick Ethereal chains btw?
Another interesting benefit is that if willpower is 0, the Aethereal Chains CA during has a
significant overflow to lust damage during sex scenes, which means more orgasms, which means more relationship gain. In particular, if you want to build submission, you get more opportunities for denied orgasms.
The best way I found to build submission (a couple hundred in an evening is not impossible) is to repeatedly have sex with someone in a submissive relationship and deny as many orgasms as possible. Costs nothing in terms of
social drive or infamy to ask, a submissive can't deny your requests for sex, and sex scenes don't take that much time, so you can do it quite a lot in one evening (better yet, have sex with different characters to build tons of submission with different characters). Just mount from behind, penetrate and whatever other CA's you can stack to give tons of denied orgasms (takes a bit of effort to manage without chastity but should be fine once you get the hang of it).
Chained arms adds a lot to this approach. Here is an example from a recent scene with Nash, using my charisma/will/int character:
(The first overflow is will, the second is energy).
That's 18.6 lust damage per turn, or an orgasm every 6 turns, or 3-4 orgasms a scene, or 60 submission from ruined orgasms if you manage it well, in addition to submission gained from will/energy damage, all from a CA. Hypnotic Glance does have a lot of willpower damage which builds submission, but it is not a CA so it competes with other actions like thrusting or spanking. And neither Glance nor Kiss have any lust damage overflow.
A bit later in the scene, I was able to get 36 lust in a single turn from Aethereal Chains with me having +bonus to dominant and Nash +bonus to submissive actions.
I wonder if this is somewhat bugged though, looking at the code it doesn't immediately seem like there should be any reason for the willpower overflow to be that much more significant than the energy overflow (or that significant at all, really). Perhaps the applyBarDamage function is picking up ALL willpower damage being done in that round rather than just the damage from Aethereal Chains?
... in fact, looking at the numbers from a few different scenes that seems to be exactly it, for both will and energy overflow. Possibly a bug
DeepInteractivity? Or working as intended?
