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Looking forward to seeing the next update with really big numbers! When looking to breed monsters, does it take into account the cores you have or do you need to summon first?
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Aug 31, 2017 02:23
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PotatoManJack posted:When looking to breed monsters, does it take into account the cores you have or do you need to summon first? You can't breed with cores alone. You have to first spend the crystal and brimstone to summon the two creatures you want to breed, and then spend power rating to mash them together into an egg.
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Aug 31, 2017 09:34
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*a skeleton with a gun pops out of an egg* The miracle of childbirth!
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Aug 31, 2017 09:58
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Update 23: Pitch Black If we're going for maximum nuke, step 1 is maximizing health. It's basically pure overkill at this point, but why not? If nothing else, it helps build a buffer if the enemy decides to try to focus down our nuke.  There are 3 realms we haven't seen yet, and one of them I'd really prefer not to see for a while. This one's okay. (Technically we did see it as the arena for the undead king boss, but this is our first trip as a regular level.)  If ever you are lost in my realm, I shall be your eyes. There is nothing to fear in the darkness - embrace it, and it will empower you. "How can I serve you?": There is not much beauty to be found here in the Path of the Damned, but one flower yet defies the decay of death and despair. It is that flower which I seek. "What can you tell me about this realm?": I once shared this realm with another. That was back when the trees were lush, the ground even greener than that of the Unsullied Meadows, and the land rife with flourishing plants and lively animals. But then he betrayed me in my darkest hour. We were attacked, and it was not my side that he took. A fierce battle ensued, and while I was victorious, itw as not without the cost of the beauty of my realm. Erebyss is a pretty close mirror of Surathli in both overall shape and personality. She doesn't have a particularly interesting character beyond that little bit of duality but she does have a top tier Pokemon-style name.  Well hello there. Here's a fellow we haven't seen before. The little brown guy is an Imling, and they're one of my favorite tribal families.  One of the problems with Final Oblation is that it's kind of all-or-nothing, but the new Necrosis spell works well enough for lightly softening up.  Yoink. Now that that's out of the way...  KABOOM Stupid shell ruins my clean wipe, though.   You gained 50 favor with Erebyss, Goddess of Darkness. That didn't take long to find.  Time to lay them to rest. These are the other main faith-gaining objects in this level. They have an annoying tendency to blend in with the walls.  The fights from them are always 100% death-class enemies. You can kind of exploit this by loading up on stuff strong vs. death, but you still have to deal with regular random encounters.  (You gained 75 favor with Erebyss, Goddess of Darkness.)  Finally found another rune. It's a chaos rune, so we have to choose between it and our burn rune. Not that it really matters since we're not actively using either status.  Scattered around are... piles of bricks? We could stand to replenish our granite stockpile, so it certainly doesn't hurt.  The mining nodes from Great Pandemonium also return to collect even more resources from. 250 of a random resource a pop isn't too shabby.  This is the downside of damage redirection abilities: if you have squishy party members transferring damage over is going to gib you, and if you don't, well, what does it matter if you have damage tanks?  Still, soaking a hit or two is usually enough to buy time for your damage dealers to work.  This happens a lot. I'm not collecting a ton of cores this way, but I've got the start of a decent stockpile on most creature types and new creatures are relatively rare at this point in the game.  Hello there! Another free legendary material.  This will go nicely with the other horde-boosting artifact I bought earlier. Once we get a good diabolic horde going, anyhow.  Graverobbing time!  The graves tend to be equivalent to a crappy treasure chest, so this is a relatively lucky find. Bleed isn't the best damage over time ailment since it's based on a percentage of current hitpoints, but mass bleed is a good way to soften things up.  Probably more trouble than it's worth but could be interesting someday.  Although you and your creatures are oddly unaffected, nearby enemies seem to be growing weaker from the spores' effects. Enemies will start battles with Bleed in this realm. One other item of interest around here. These are basically a repeat of the spore plants from the Swamplands. Overall, not a super lucrative place to visit but it's not too shabby.  More runes, and it's yet another Death rune. I wish we'd get a little more variety so that I could spread them out a bit. This one is potentially useful because it's an easy passive source of mana gain but it requires a good source of Leech status.  Clearing the skull piles spawns a chest, which apparently can also be a Mimic.  Someday mimics might be threatening again, but today is not the day.  I luck out and get just enough favor items to get me to the first threshold. At 50 and 75 a pop Erebyss is one of the more stingy deities, so this was a lucky break.  For some, the darkness is a threat. For others, it's a comfort. One such creature that thrives in the darkness is the Dungeon Shade, and now, it is yours to command. I look forward to watching you grow stronger, Mysterio. Take care. Erebyss's chosen monster family are the Shades, which as we've already seen all revolve around invisibility. They're annoying, but this one isn't too obnoxious.  Miniboss time! This thing is definitely out of our depth.  Unfortunately, it's not something we can pick up just yet. Gargantuans are sort of the opposite of basilisks: they get more powerful based on more of a certain action (attacks, spells, etc.) the enemy performs between its turns.  The fight ends predictably.  The lance isn't anything special, but that's enough craft pieces to enchant immunity to blindness, but overall blind isn't a bad enough ailment to be worth the slot.  Ehh, so-so. Cast on kill is very nice for a short-lived buff but Berserk is something of a double edged sword.  That's about it for that level. On to new creatures! Imlings are interesting in that they are part of a two-family tribal group--there's Imlings and their bigger, brutish cousins the Imlers. Imlings are fast and smart, Imlers are strong and tough. You might expect the big strong guy to be more powerful, but Imlings are really the payload behind the team; Imlers are too slow to be really effective attackers and high Attack/Defense monsters are a dime and dozen, but Imlings are some of the best casters in the game. Having two separate families working in tandem gives you a lot more flexibility in how you build Imling teams, and there are actually several entirely different ways to build them. Also, the fact that all of their special traits refer to other species means that it's very easy to mix and match in other creature types with artifact traits.  If you get them early Dungeon Shades are pretty useful--they're one of a million different variants on the "glass cannon death creature" archetype and they're not amazing at it but their ability is pretty handy for survivability. At this stage in the game you probably have better means of protecting your squishies and are going to be more interested in more specialized attackers, though.  More importantly, we've got a couple breeding formulas we can use the shade for. Some of them still need more creatures, but we could breed this guy right now. Could be a fun addition to a spellcasting party, although our spellcasting core is based around sorcery creatures so he'd probably just be boosting his own spells.  Speaking of which, all of these gods we're meeting mean we're earning a lot of Deity Points. There are still some nice sorcery perks we could hold out for but I think this is more important right now--the spell gems are really piling up and it's getting hard to fit just 3 per monster.
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Aug 31, 2017 23:13
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Update 24: Gone With the Wind Hooo boy. I said last time that there was one realm that I really, really didn't want to visit yet, and here it is. Welcome to the Dimension of Assholes.  Whenever you require my assistance, know that I will be there for you in your time of need. "How can I better serve you?": (Aeolian reveals a plume of golden feathers under his left wing.) These feathers are very special - for reasons which I cannot reveal just yet. Regardless, if you bring them to me, I will reward you. "What can you tell me about this realm?": I have kept a watchful eye over these lands for 12 milleniums. I have witnessed the cycle of mortal life and death more times than I wish to recount. I have seen many kings and queens such as yourself rise and fall. All but one, that is. Aeolian is perfectly polite, but do not be deceived. He is a right fucker and will do more to sabotage our mission than anyone else.  About the only good thing about this place is that it has spell gems lying around. Unfortunately you have to sort through a bunch of piles of decoy spell gems, and you're still not going to get as many spells as Zonte's domain so it's definitely still not worth coming here.  That was pretty easy.  Psyche! You have to run all over the goddamn level and back to find the feather.  These guys hit hard. Fortunately, the more damage they do the more Final Oblation hurts.  The Unsullied Meadows have the same wood gathering mini-quest that the Barrens do.  You gained 75 favor with Aeolian, God of Wind. These basically work the same as the obelisks in Surathli's domain.  There are scarecrows scattered around that debuff enemies, similar to the mushrooms in other realms.  Enemy creatures will start battles with Leech in this realm. Except, of course, when they don't. I think these things have a higher chance of backfiring than any other buff/debuff object.  Case in point. This one could work to your benefit in some circumstances but our main attack instakills everything without needing extra damage from Berserk.  When they work they can be pretty great, though. The vast majority of enemies aren't going to have any dangerous spells so this completely neuters the enemies' offense.  The flavor text is slightly tweaked, but it's still the same quest.  Two resources and a spell is a pretty good haul by nomad standards, even if the spell isn't spectacularly useful. Morph spells are handy to have around if you have sphinxes in your party--sphinxes want everything in your party to be the same class, which can be a problem when enemies can be immune to specific classes. Being able to switch around is vital in that case.  Things go really smoothly with the enemies largely unable to attack.  Of course, it's too good to last. Silence is usually pretty handy since annoying spells can throw a monkey wrench in your plans, but scorn is better most of the time and it gets canceled out now since you can't have both statuses at the same time.  Pretty generic artifact, starting with protect is pretty ni WAIT WHAT  Eggs are super rare loot drops, to the point that getting a single egg over the course of a couple dozen levels is fairly lucky. Unlike the cores that spawn in the Torture Chamber eggs are not at all bound to normal monster generation rules, so you can actually find new stuff--including difficult to obtain creatures from much, much later in the game. This is a loving awesome find that almost makes coming to this hellhole worth it.  Take deep breaths, think of the grimoire.  That's awfully specific. Not sure we'll see this anytime soon.  Here we go. Finally got a fight out of these.  No real theme to the totem fights, unlike some realms. Unless the theme is "suckers gonna get blown up."  That's pretty low as far as favor objects with battles go. At least it spawns a chest.  Aeolian I mean it's still not like mimics are a threat at this point, but it's a matter of principle.  I suppose in the big scheme it's really not that much worse than the imp quests, but at least there you can plan out a route in advance.  Here's our entry into the Tremor family. These guys are kind of annoying, but we're going to see worse this update.  Here we go! The Imler is the big brother to the Imling. Neither of the starters are that good, but they should be useful for breeding into better Imling/Imler pairs.  Capturing the sucker takes a lot out of the party, but we pull through.  Voice of Aeolian: Good! Continue to collect these plumes to bolster my power. You gain 300 favor with Aeolian, God of Wind. Wound up wasting a bit of favor. Frankly I'd just as soon avoid it with this guy, though.  I'm sorely, sorely tempted to bail on this jackass without collecting the reward. But in the interest of showing stuff off, I supposed I'd better.  I'm still going to put it off as long as I can, though. Maybe I'll get lucky and get wiped in a freak accident.  No such luck here.  We can already make this, but it's for a naturally occurring creature we already have.  Very nice!  We got a breeding formula for the miniboss we just killed. How convenient.  Interesting, but will be a while.  Yeah, yeah, just get to it.  You. loving. rear end in a top hat.  I will end you.  So what's the big deal? These fuckers are the big deal. Until you find some method of bestowing immunity to Silence these guys are a nightmare to deal with. If you've got a big magic nuke in your pocket it's not such a huge deal since you can end the fight with your first spell... but if you've got any spells with auto-cast triggers (especially ones that cast at the start of the battle) these guys will shut you the gently caress down. There really isn't anything worth visiting the Unsullied Meadows for, so I highly recommend just ignoring Aeolian altogether until you have ways of dealing with silence.  The Tremors are also pretty annoying, but they don't shut down spellcasters nearly as badly. I suppose you could argue they're worse in the long run since vortexes are a lot more reliable for your own use, and it's easier to get around vortexes with status immunity. But they'll never really be much more than an annoyance.  The big guy is like a mini-Apis Defender but for Imlings only. This is a bit of a problem, since Imlings are glass cannons and will take massive damage from everything. They do have massive defense, so your best bet (assuming they don't get instagibbed trying to intercept damage for Imlings) is to provoke with them and only rely on the damage redirection as a fallback for whatever gets past provoke.  The main reason I bit the bullet on the Vortex is that it does unlock a couple of breeding recipies. Like most (but not all) of the dryads, the raincaller isn't terribly good; even if you have 3-4 party wide autobuffs, you have to spend a turn to get a party-wide heal barely better than what the Royal Golem gives out for free every turn.  Most of the slimes are weird pseudo-tanks, but this one is a sort of reverse tank. Unfortunately it has gently caress all for attack or intelligence so you're shunting damage from a worthless creature to an almost certainly more useful one. It's an interesting ability and one of the more powerful ways of assuring that you get a turn, but the only way to make that turn useful is to get an artifact with this ability and stick it on something better.  More skeletons with guns! This guy is probably one of the worse variants, since his power is useless for alpha striking. Can be decent-ish for beefy boss types. You could conceivably pair him with the Timeless Master: the master sets an enemy to 50% health, triggerman pops it for 250% damage. But you need some crazy speed manipulation to make that work in the right order and you're barely getting more damage than just firing two decent physical attacks.  These guys still aren't good and we already have an artifact for his power.  Didn't forget about this guy either!  Grimoires are lategame creatures you normally need a postgame quest to unlock. We just got handed one for free. They've got some spectacular spellcasting stat spreads and they automatically get access to super-rare high end spells that cannot normally be found as spell gems (but which the encounter generator will still randomly give to enemies ) Determination: Your creatures gain a large amount of Defense, and Current and Maximum Health. Rapture: Massive damage to all enemies and inflicts them with Weak and Vulnerable. Soul Sacrifice: Your creatures give and take Health from each other until they all have the same amount. The damage and healing done by this spell is affected by traits and other effects. Rapture is the big find here--it's one of the best offensive spells in the game and comes at a very affordable 23 MP, cheaper than a lot of weaker attack spells. Determination is a great party-wide heal that also mitigates further damage. Soul Sacrifice is kind of weird and niche and not at all clear from the description: it averages out each of your creatures' HP as a percentage of their max, and then either heals or damages each creature to get their health to that percentage. So, if half your creatures are at 50% health and half are at 100%, the three at 50% will each be healed 25% of their max HP and the three at 100% will each take damage equal to 25% of their max HP. The interesting wrinkle is that this is not a "set HP to %" effect, but actual damage or healing. If you've got some form of damage reduction the monsters above average won't go all the way down, and if you have some kind of healing boost the monsters below average will get extra (and will trigger on heal effects.) Overall, it's really situational. I guess it could be handy if you go balls-out on an HP tank; if they're at 20% health and everyone else is at 100% health, averaging everyone out to 86% health could mean negligible damage on your squishies and hundreds or thousands of HP for your HP tank. Plus, spreading the damage out makes conventional healing a lot more effective--group healing is vastly, vastly more efficient than solo healing.  Woah, guess I'm a bit behind on my construction. Time to unlock the next merchant and cooking ingredients.
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Sep 5, 2017 03:21
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Haven't read the latest update, but I just wanted to share the fact that Deathwalker was a total pushover for me because one of her minions had one of those spells that changes the target into random X class creature, overwriting her trait and just turning it into a regular miniboss strength battle, really. The randomness of this game can screw you over bigtime if you get unlucky, but it can also give you gifts. Edit after reading: Like that Grimoire, holy poo poo. Getting an endgame creature this early should make things fun... especially because it's now in the encounter pool. GirlCalledBob fucked around with this message at 12:11 on Sep 6, 2017 |
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Sep 6, 2017 11:45
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GirlCalledBob posted:Haven't read the latest update, but I just wanted to share the fact that Deathwalker was a total pushover for me because one of her minions had one of those spells that changes the target into random X class creature, overwriting her trait and just turning it into a regular miniboss strength battle, really. Unlocking a Grimoire early isn't that bad; the random monster generator can already give out the grimoire spells, so you're not going to see anything you wouldn't see otherwise (there's a screenshot in an earlier update where I've been hit with a random Rapture.) And hah, that transformation would take some doing. I think there are only 2 spells that do that, and one of them is a self-only Nature spell (notably, none of the bosses are Nature type.)
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Sep 6, 2017 14:57
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Straight White Shark posted:Unlocking a Grimoire early isn't that bad; the random monster generator can already give out the grimoire spells, so you're not going to see anything you wouldn't see otherwise (there's a screenshot in an earlier update where I've been hit with a random Rapture.) It was certainly a surprise. I read the inspect text, worried that the fight was going to be a big roadblock because my team at the time was of the magical nuke kind (Mind storm with a 50% chance to proc on kill on a coast watcher. If one creature died, they were all gonna die in the domino effect), and I was trying to scramble together the few instances of damage debuffs I had on my team... and then she was nerfed by her own minion. I don't remember exactly what the spell was, but I know she went through about four forms that fight. None of which were as scary as her original one, obviously. I assumed there was a spell like that for every class, but I guess I got even luckier than I thought if there's so few ways it could have happened. Unlocking the Grimoire is going to make those spells much more common to see, but you're right that there's worse you could unleash on yourself. It's still a pretty rad find.
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Sep 6, 2017 19:09
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Update 25: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea Back in familiar territory again. There's only one realm left to discover and this isn't it.  Woah. Things are pretty crowded in here.  My attempt to farm up some extra grimoire cores gets a bit sloppy, but it works out in the end.  The next fight turns up some enemies with a mass resurrection spell. It gets annoying in a hurry.  We haven't seen this guy yet, but by process of elimination we know it's Frostbite Caverns.  Huh, this is a little different.  Good... ???  Sure, why not.  Sometimes the quest du jour just wants you to examine certain junk objects (shipwrecks, in this case.)  This one's a nice find. These candles appear somewhat rarely in any realm (although a few of them have deceptively similar generic candle obstacles that do nothing special.) I'm kind of intrigued by this "simple fire spell" that can light a candle underwater, though.  They're more useful for gods that are stingier with their favor, but any favor is good favor.  Especially when you have a quest awarding you even more favor for it.  Friden doesn't have the most lucrative realm, but this is always pretty good.  A slight upgrade to the one we already have. The extra 1 MP cost isn't going to make or break it.  Most of these have fizzled out so far, this is the first ghost fight of the run.  It's kind of an odd bunch, but thematic.  (They're even more thematic after I kill them all.)  Close, but we still haven't seen any phoenixes yet.  This one, on the other hand, we can already put to use.  Ka-ching! Legendary material just lying around is always a nice find.  This is from another sort of basilisk and it's a right bastard. If it ever fires there's a very high likelihood that it will wind up stunlocking the opponents forever unless it hits stun resistance or a passive attack/spell trigger that can break the cycle.  That just leaves the portal miniboss.  The gloves aren't anything special, but Arcane is a sweet buff to have.  Extremely useful, but we need to acquire a sin first.  I stopped burning through all our sigils because they were very unfriendly to spellcasting parties. But seeing as we're not running a spellcasting party right now...  KABOOM!  Yowza. That's quite a stack of penalties on the next step sigil. I think I'm going to hold off on this one.  Even with the Piety Candle and double quests I'm still a decent bit short of the next level. Oh well.  Not much new this time in terms of new creatures. This guy has an interesting passive defense mechanism, although it works best if you already have a source of Shell--Shell cancels out the hit and is lost, then the paladin has a 50% chance to replenish Shell. Not super reliable (and it won't stop the enemies from breaking shells with magic/passive damage) but with enough support you can get some pretty ludicrous shell chains.
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Sep 6, 2017 22:22
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Update 26: A Rock and a Hard Place We head in to face the next boss.  But first, an interesting wrinkle: the Pandemonium zone's boss arena actually contains resource objects scattered among the decorations.  (The duo lunges forth to attack!)  Meet Scylla and Charybdis. Charybdis is supposed to be a sentient whirlpool to Scylla's multi-headed monster; I guess fish monster is close enough, except the game gets them switched around.   Their abilities are on point, though. Metaphorically Scylla and Charybdis are the classical representation of being between a rock and a hard place. Whichever one you go for, you'll have to face the other one with massive buffs.  Of course, killing them simultaneously along with their entire entourage completely sidesteps their gimmick.  It would help if some of them would stay dead, though.  Oof. This may be a problem; normally I'd have no problem killing this guy as many times as I needed to, but this sort of puts the battle on a timer.  Stay. Down.  Bone Zone starting to look a bit shabby these days, even his crit headshot isn't enough to bring the wight down and it's not particularly tanky.  Eventually Final Oblation does the trick. It's a good thing we've got multiple resurrects or we'd have been pretty well hosed.   (Upon defeating Scylla and Charybdis, you notice one of Charybdis' mouths rests ajar, and within it is a glistening Nether Orb!)  Useless, we've had these guys for like ten levels now.  This has some potential. Normally I'm not a big fan of conditional buffs on artifacts but shell is good enough to be worth considering.  This is a repeat, and relies on two specific monsters we won't have for a while.  Here's one we can try.  I like spectres and feel bad that I haven't been using them more, so here's hoping I can show this one off by and by.  The resource nodes respawn after killing the boss, which suggests the before and after arenas are separate areas. Makes sense; it would probably be easier and more foolproof to just make a copy than it would be to code an event trigger to unlock the chests.  (Just like before, your vision blurs and your mind is flooded with a barrage of incoherent whispers. Eventually, you can barely start to make out the voice of Vertraag, who seems to be excitedly rambling about something related to the Nether Orbs.)  (Vertraag's words slip back into whispers for a time before returning to a coherent volume, causing you to miss a few words.)  (And yet again, Vertraag's voice is swallowed by the competing commotion. After a few more moments, your vision returns to normal and the whispers are no more.)  ...WHAT?! You say you spoke to a god? King Mysterio, pray tell, what did he say to you? Oh, so now you know the locations of not one, but two Nether Orbs! That's excellent news! If you're unsure of how to reach the places you mentioned, you should ask Hebron for help. You might think that getting told of two boss orbs at once means we'd get a branching path type option, but...  But alas, I digress. You mentioned that one of the orbs is in the Faraway Enclave, correct? I believe that should be where your journey next takes you, then. Good luck, King Mysterio! ...the plot (such as it is) immediately gets back on the rails. It's for the best. If you knew what was coming with the second boss pair you'd save them for last anyhow.  Dryads are starting to get a little more interesting. You can rack up some ridiculous buff piles with this (consider, for example, Rapture: two debuffs against every enemy at once = 12 random buffs for your side.) Not terribly reliable, but it can be fun just to watch the buffs stack up.  Level 35 unlocks a shitload of new punishments for the Altar of Blood. You have to build them separately and they cost a whopping 5000 power each, so enjoy having your building ritual menu clogged for the foreseeable future. Agnosticism: Spell Gems' automatic casting properties, such as 'Cast When Hit', are ignored. Autocasting spells is a huge part of high level optimization and losing access to them hurts--but this one cuts both ways, and if your setup doesn't rely on built in triggers this can save you a lot of trouble. Amnesia: At the start of every battle, creatures are placed on the Action Queue randomly in alternating order of enemy, ally, enemy, ally, and so on. This punishment does not override traits and other effects that manipulate the Action Queue. This punishment is ignored in story battles. This lets you sort of cheat if you don't have any expectation of outspeeding enemies (either because you're not investing in speed or because you're late in the postgame and everything way outlevels you)--instead of 4-6 enemies going first, you only have to deal with 1 at a time. It fucks with combos that rely on taking specific actions in order but if you're not super dependent on that this can be a nice bonus. Arrogance: Artifacts' traits are ignored. Enemies don't roll artifact traits, so this is pretty much 100% self-handicapping. If you have an artifact with a double-edged trait this lets you get around the penalty, but at this stage in the game you can just... use something else??? Drought: Your creatures' Mana does not regenerate between battles, and only when you warp to a new realm. Boosts experience and resource gain. There are plenty of builds that don't really care about not having mana, and even some that actively reward being out of mana all the time, so for the right party this is just free stuff. Nostalgia: You cannot have more than 3 creatures in your party outside of Siralim, nor can your enemies. This punishment is ignored in story battles. Mostly a handicap--cutting your party size in half drastically reduces your combo potential, and generally hurts you more than it does the enemies. It completely guts most tribal monster families, so if those give you trouble and you've got a very compact combo maybe it could theoretically be useful for that? Poverty: The effects of your Cards are ignored. Cards are rare passive buff items that we haven't gotten to yet. Purely for handicapping/testing purposes. Stricken: Your creatures take 100% more damage. Increases treasure chest yields. Pretty nice; a strong build probably won't blink at the double damage. Stubbornness: Most dialog will no longer be displayed in realms. Just there to speed up grinding. Suffocation: Your creatures' Health does not regenerate between battles, and only when you warp to a new realm. Increases experience/resource rewards. A bit more dangerous than the corresponding mana-based punishment; generally only useful for the most utterly broken builds, by which point you're probably beyond caring about the rewards. Short update today, but things should be getting more interesting soon.
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Sep 7, 2017 21:25
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Update 27: Flight of the Phoenix Blowing stuff up is getting a bit stale. Time for some good ol' fashioned smashing.  I scrounge up some random artifact from our stockpile with extra spell slots in order to maximize the bonuses from the cerberus. This is every chaos spell gem we own, for +25% attack to the entire team.  Looks like we're back in Tartarith's domain.  Tartarith's stuff is mostly more amusing than it is lucrative.  Ah! Finally, our first phoenix sighting. These guys are about the last naturally occurring creature unlocks--from this point on it's pretty much all breeding and quest rewards.  That's taken care of, at least.  Aeolian  Can't make this yet, but should be any day now.  Feels good to be back and smashing again.  Detritus's new cast-on-hit Entangle is putting in some work.  Being able to find cores here is unique but still not especially useful.  Still don't have any Life or Nature runes, but this is a pretty neat choice for Sorcery. Multicast is pretty rare, but when it does come up it can get hilarious in a hurry.  Not only does this guy start out unlocked, he's not even good.  The seraph doesn't have the sheer SMASH of Detritus, but triple damage is still pretty good--this just took out a Stronghold.  I got most of the way through the level before I remembered Detritus's splash enchantment trick.  Assembled the freebie shield from the fragments in Tartarith's realm. Not a big fan of the class shields, but it's got a trait on it.  This is from the Mountain Priest, one of the Forest Priest's cousins. It's pretty badass--a bit slow to set up with, but it's a great way to ramp up stats and defense is one of the best stats to ramp up with.  This one's going to take some doing.  That was easy.  Still only gets us about halfway. Oh well.  Miniboss time! I'm not sure if this is generic flavor text or if the game's aware enough to realize that we're fighting one of Tartarith's own chosen.  He's like a more concentrated version of the Chaos Guard. With Protect on top he's taking 1/4 damage from all sources.  Coupled with poison from his arachnalisk buddy this turns out to be a bit of a problem, but we make it through.  The loot is mostly uninteresting, but we did turn up this.  We cash in our completed rituals.  The new merchant mostly sells consumables. They're handy for busting out rituals quickly or topping off your power balance, but they're crazy expensive.  Runes also occasionally show up in their inventory. They're even more expensive, and we already have this one anyhow.  Missed a screenshot, but the new level of cooking adds Fish as an ingredient and gives you Fry as a method. We don't care about frying just yet, because we can bake fish with vegetables...  ...and get a tasty, tasty favor boost. Every god has a favorite food you can cook to generate additional favor. Until we get some more cooking upgrades the only recipes we can make are for Surathli and Erebyss. Neither of them is a super high priority, but some of the seraphs can be pretty badass, so for now that's what I'm going to work on.  Phoenixes are all based on resurrection triggers. This one can be pretty useful if you have a party build that can spam resurrections.  We've got a new flavor of priest. Weirdly, priests have way more attack than speed (and attack boosts are generally more useful than speed) so these guys are a big improvement over Forest Priests. Normally I still wouldn't use them, but interestingly, we can stick the shield we just found on one of these guys and he'll simultaneously add his Attack and Defense to make him a crazy buffmonster.  Having access to phoenixes springboards us into another new monster family. Clutchers are pretty much breed-only. I'm not sure why; their gimmick of punishing dodges generally isn't terribly good. This is one of the less bad ones. Clutchers lean Intelligence-heavy for some reason, so their burns can do pretty decent damage.  Nice! This is one of the more important breeds of familiar in my book. MP regen is so, so good.  Another dumb monkey. This one isn't so bad--even disregarding how unreliable the dodge mechanics are, having an automatic 3 in 10 chance to negate an attack and freeze the attacker is not too shabby as far as random defenses go. But there's no getting around their awful, awful stats.
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Sep 8, 2017 21:20
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Straight White Shark posted:
Out of interest, do the monsters in your party with a trait need to be alive for the trait to be active, or can a dead monster still provide passive buffs? If the latter, could you make a party based on phoenixes, dread wights and stuff like the final oblation skill you were using up until now to create a party that won't stay down and hurts the enemy when they try?
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Sep 10, 2017 16:17
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Generally it only counts if they're alive, there are only a few that give out lingering benefits (anything that auto-buffs will leave the buffs up when they die, for example.) Resurrection parties are still 100% viable, though. Between the entire wight and phoenix families being based on death/resurrection triggers and all of the random one-offs from other creature families, there's a whole lot of raw material to work with.
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Sep 10, 2017 16:29
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Straight White Shark posted:Generally it only counts if they're alive, there are only a few that give out lingering benefits (anything that auto-buffs will leave the buffs up when they die, for example.) That might be interesting to see when you get more of the pieces together.
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Sep 10, 2017 16:40
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Post 28: Polar Express I didn't hatch a sentient book of forbidden ancient magic to not use it. Time to bring out the magic crew.  There are a couple useful Altar of Blood punishments, but they can wait. For now it's more sidequest givers, and, what the hell, extra forging options at the blacksmith.  Here we go. This is the 15th and final dungeon setting. Since you're entirely dependent on RNG to discover new realms it's fairly lucky to get all of them this early.  Your creatures will start each battle with Taunt in this realm. These campfires hand out buffs, and they don't backfire unlike some buff objects.  The damage on Rapture isn't that amazing (although considering how underleveled the grimoire is, this is still pretty drat good), but mass Weak + Vulnerable is fantastic. Taking 50% less damage and dealing 50% more damage is equivalent to a really good support monster ability.  Willie is, of course, still the star of the show when it comes to magic.  You guessed it, the wood collection miniquest shows up here too.  Ethereal Knives is speed-based and does not benefit from all of the crazy intelligence boosts this party is rocking and it's still doing really good damage thanks to Vulnerable. Getting mass Vulnerable as a rider on an already good attack spell is so, so good.  If their greeting is so warm, why do they need more firewood   Woah. That's a really, really good haul for a nomad trade.  This does nothing... for now.  I look forward to the next time we meet. "How can I better serve you?": This realm is home to powerful jewels that I use to empower my maul. Collect them for me and I will reward you. "What can you tell me about this realm?": There are no springs, summers, or autumns to be found here - only winter. Though the climate prohibits most from inhabiting these lands, others realize the opportunities that can be found here. Azural is the most boring god with the most boring realm. Don't listen to him, there aren't any worthwhile opportunities here unless you're trying to grind favor with Azural.  Gargantuans are effectively breed-only and most of them require other Gargantuans, so expect this to take a while.  Like Erebyss's realm, there are graves here you can loot. They're not particularly valuable, often just being a single handful of resources.  Frostbite Caverns are a pretty good place to collect crystal, so I suppose there's that.  Now that we've met Azural we can collect these for a favor boost. It's a pretty big boost, at that.  This guy heralds the end of an era. We've reached the end of being able to naturally unlock new monsters via leveling. Now the game just adds locked monsters to the encounter pool at random.  From here on out, the only way to get new monsters is quest rewards and breeding (and, in insanely rare cases, eggs.)  C'mon, give me something good already!  This is new--a Charitas Sanctus, the virtue of charity. These guys are one of the trade quest rewards, which... I don't think we've unlocked yet. The sins and virtues don't really have a very unified mechanical theme, beyond the sins mostly benefiting themselves and the virtues mostly benefiting their team. This one is pretty cool--single target healing is generally pretty weak so turning a single heal into a group heal isn't that impressive, but it effectively doubles the strength of group heals for teammates and that's not bad. It's got some potential, but by the time you get your hands on one raw healing is not going to be super valuable; you really want to pair it up with something that can turn heals into additional benefits. (As an aside, this would be one example of a way to make the grimoire's Soul Sacrifice spell useful: if the charitas sanctus is low on HP, it will get healed up to the average level of the team's HP, and then give everything else a big healing boost.) Naturally, like with the new gargoyle we can't extract from it until we unlock it ourselves.  The diamonds are literally the only favor-granting object in Azural's realm, because Azural is the god of  . It does frequently spawn 5 of them per level, so you can reliably get a reward from Azural on your first trip. I'd like to teach you a spell called Alteration: Frostbite Caverns. As its name suggests, it will allow you to visit this realm whenever you prefer. I'd also like to send a creature known as the Frostbite Yeti to your stables. Yetis are durable creatures that can hold their own against multiple foes thanks to their ability to freeze enemies. There is much more to come, Mysterio, but I must take leave for now. Farewell. Yetis are all about freeze, which here as in Pokemon is The Best Status. The most important part of this reward is that we now have status with every single deity and can visit whatever realm we want at any time without having to rely on RNG. Getting to this point so early is extremely lucky considering several gods require multiple RNG-based visits to get enough favor, and it required almost no savescumming on my part (the return trip to Torun's jungle would have been another, less useful repeat so I reloaded to get something more interesting.)  Miniboss time! For some reason the boss arena has a different tileset than the main level.  These guys are all old hat, nothing interesting or dangerous here.  Well, 1 for 2 isn't bad.  Kind of niche, but can be useful. Getting party-wide Shell or Protect or Barrier is not a bad use of a turn, and if an enemy has multiple buffs layered you can get even more than that.  Score.  That sure is a lot of gibberish names.  So-so. A real spellcaster is better off blowing poo poo up, but this can be a decent utility move for a support type.  We head back and upgrade the blacksmith. Now we have access to all the basic stat-boosting artifacts: one each for HP/Att/Def/Int/Spd and one for each combination between them all.  Our new yeti is a status tank of sorts. His freeze is more reliable than the Winter Aspect, with the downside that he actually needs to take the hit instead of getting to dodge it. The difference is that the yeti is actually built for his role while none of the seasonal aspects are really built for anything let alone dodge tanking.  Better still, having the yeti opens up some new breeding options. Most of the angels are variations on the "do extra damage + status on attack" formula, and freeze is one of the best statuses in the game, so this guy is about as good as it gets. Having a reliable way to inflict freeze is very, very nice; they've got pretty mediocre speed which is bad for initiative and accuracy, but their #1 job is status so you're not missing much if you dedicate their artifact to pumping speed over other stats.  The rest of the manticores tend to be about the attack stat just like the starter manticore was. This one is... ehhh. It can potentially dish out some decent passive damage, but its defense is just sort of "pretty good" which is not really what you look for in something that you want to draw as many attacks as possible. If you can get it a better defensive ability or get this one onto something else, though, then you're onto something pretty sweet.
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Sep 10, 2017 18:52
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I'd suggest changing the Grimoire's name to Weiss. Mostly because I just finished playing Nier again.
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Sep 10, 2017 20:05
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Straight White Shark posted:Generally it only counts if they're alive, there are only a few that give out lingering benefits (anything that auto-buffs will leave the buffs up when they die, for example.) Yeah Wights were my favourite dudes. My best team had two of the wights that absorbed 50% of the stats of your teammates if they died, and swords that resurrected teammates on hit. Battles would usually end with two hulked out wights atop the corpses of everyone else, friend and foe.
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Sep 11, 2017 00:59
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Update 29: On the Beach You know, it just occurred to me that I've had access to one of the better familiars but didn't think to bring any out for a spellcasting party.  Breeding two familiars eats up a massive amount of power balance, but the new consumables merchant has our back. It's expensive, but we've still got a ton of resources stockpiled from the sigil spree.  Now that we can go to any realm any time we want there's nothing to worry about missing by beelining for whatever realm we want to grind in. You can aim for different realms depending on what kind of resources you most desperately need, but in the long run favor is always going to be the biggest limiting factor, so that's probably going to be your main consideration. We're going to focus on Lister first, for reasons that will become apparent in a couple levels.  Using the Alteration spells does cost extra Power Balance; you should still be able to keep it pretty high as you clear levels, but you can also top it off yourself.  He's no Four-Eyed Willie, but he'll do. (Granted, Vulnerable helps.)  The familiars don't really have the stats to do much good, which is fine because I don't have the spell gems to give them good attack spells. But their spells spread mana around so they can cast whatever useless high cost spells they have and help replenish everyone else.  That's done.  Here's another new face. We've actually seen this guy's ability on an artifact but now they're out in the wild too. Shapeshifters are goofy fun but generally not terribly threatening.  One of the nice things about focusing on Lister to grind favor is that he gives out ridiculous amounts of it. Between the Wilson-fruits, the imp huts, and the Moai you can clear 700+ favor before quest rewards.  Also, one of the realm-specific quests generates an extra Moai and then gives you a reward for activating both of them. So by the time all is said and done I should be getting about 1300 favor on this run.  The quest reward even gives us a new breeding option (the lance does nothing interesting.)  Another one comes up on a random monolith.  Finding a bunch of knights finishes the other sidequest.  The rewards are less interesting, but it's still free stuff.  This is a little weird.  We're in for an endurance slog here. These guys get 3 turns in a row and each one heals all of them for 25% of their maximum health. Even with the bonus damage from Rapture, their defense is high enough that we're having a hard time keeping ahead of their healing.  Eventually I remember I can do this.  It sucks that we can't just capture new monsters anymore, but on the plus side our stable is big enough that we can fill out breeding formulas a lot faster and more reliably.  After cleaning up the level it's on to the miniboss. I swear we've run into this guy before.  Between the Carnage racking up extra attacks off our squishy newbies and the Tremor randomly interrupting spells we're in for a lot of pain.  A whoooole lot of pain.  In the end I didn't actually lose anything but this stuff is still debatably not worth it.  Oh hey, one of these. I should do another sigil run sometime soon.  So close. We'll be back soon enough though.  This will make a couple new quest-givers appear.  Oof, just a little bit short. I really want this, too.  I speak, of course, of charity, and it is arguably the most overlooked virtue of the seven. Let us commemorate charity by creating a permanent reminder of this virtue - a Sanctus. Please bring me a Unicorn Holycaster. It is the ideal creature to use for the transformation process. I'd have thought Humility was the most overlooked virtue. That's sort of its thing.  Surely you know much about such diligence or you would not have made it this far. Let us commemorate your diligence by creating a permanent reminder of this virtue - a Sanctus. Please bring me a Diabolic Insurgent. It is the ideal creature for the transformation process. Nothing says "diligence" like "horde of rebellious devils", I guess.  Is your mind polluted by greed? Surely, at some point, you've fallen victim to its call. A sacrifice is in order. Bring to me a Diamond Imling - a creature that thrives on greed - and let us ensure that your mind is always that of your own. I'd rather just have the Diamond Imling. I guess in that sense it really is the embodiment of greed. (Actually I lied. Greed is one of the best sins.)  Breeding time! The Bone Reaper is interesting--this is a ridiculous stat boost and well worth killing a teammate for, but the trigger is pretty finicky and it's hard to set up quickly and reliably. Still, considering how much support there is for benefit-on-death creatures you can build some crazy teams based on continually harvesting and resurrecting creatures.  This guy sounds like he'd be the perfect companion to the Bone Reaper, but the reaper's ability does not technically trigger on death, it causes death. So you can't use them both to get double stat boosts or anything. Still, the ideal scenario for the reaper is that you have a creature with great trigger-on-death abilities and the rift dancer will definitely make that part even better.  Oh daaaamn. Willie might have some competition for the biggest baddest magic nuke. Willie might be able to edge him out on damage but he can't possibly compete on speed.
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Sep 11, 2017 23:04
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Oh my god it's cute as heck.  It'll be around as long as we use the magic team, right? Because I need more book birb.
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Sep 11, 2017 23:26
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Kyrosiris posted:Oh my god it's cute as heck. Weellllll, yes and no. The current iteration of the magic team isn't really sustainable long term; having MP batteries is nice but dedicating 2 team slots to it means there just isn't quite enough oomph to power through higher-leveled enemies. But I didn't just randomly blow a huge chunk of power breeding them just to bench them again; familiars grow in power exponentially the more of them are on your team, so there will definitely be a birb team in the future once we get a few more key familiars. I just wanted a head start so I didn't have to grind up a whole team from scratch when we get there.
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Sep 12, 2017 02:06
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Straight White Shark posted:there will definitely be a birb team in the future once we get a few more key familiars GOTY. 
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Sep 12, 2017 02:11
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Hooray, birb team! It's really interesting to see how many different team structures you can make in this game.
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Sep 12, 2017 03:25
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Update 30: Wizards Doing a little bit of breeding to get some stuff out of the way. As an added bonus, these are generally fairly bad on their own so this helps dilute the encounter pool.  I'm doing this mainly to get a head start on leveling things for later, because...  ...we're getting to the point where the enemy level curve starts getting pretty steep. It's getting harder and harder to just stick a newly hatched monster on the team without getting brutally punished for it.  On to the boss fight. I'm a little sad that Siralim doesn't have more of a story to it. It repeatedly flirts with the idea that you might actually be the bad guy but it never really goes anywhere with it. It's interesting trash talk, at any rate.  First thing to notice: everybody has Scorn. No attacks allowed here.  The boss kicks off the fight by dropping approximately a million autocast spells, and it has Doublecast to boot.  Many of them are largely pointless, although this probably just ruined my familiars since there are now a total of 0 familiars to power their abilities.  Ugh. So much for being able to alpha strike.  Even with Scorn you can still trigger attacks from spells and abilities. This is a little bit different than Silence, which will shut down spell triggers (but won't remove spells that were already triggered and are "on the stack.")  About 2 minutes later the spell barrage finally stops. We got off fairly light, all things considered.  The good news is, the familiars I brought are irrelevant anyways because everybody has infinite MP in this fight. It's a magic battle through and through.  It's nice that the enemies can't attack, but the downside is that they spend a lot of time defending. This is a problem, because between the defense boost from the amaranth and the boost from defending it's going to be tough to break through these guys.  Big randomized stat boost. This could be a problem if he starts rolling lots of defense.  That's handy--there go all the enemy's barriers. Of course, scorn immediately gets re-applied; you can't break this fight that easily.  Just kidding! You totally can. Brain Freeze is irrelevant most of the time but it can completely trivialize this fight if you survive the opening barrage.  As far as I am aware, there is absolutely zero defense against sealing spells, even for bosses. All those spells that got autocast to start? They're gone.  Oh, great. They have the one good dryad, too. So that's another 7% or so defense for the enemies--not a lot, but that's the difference between "some damage" and "no damage."  A couple nasty spells got through the first Brain Freeze. After several attempts I eventually manage to get Hedwig up long enough to take care of that.  At this point the enemies can literally do nothing, so I can revive my fallen party members and get to work.  We're still in for a long, agonizing slog even after I get Vulnerable up.  The amaranth finally goes down. That should speed things up.  The good news is that my damage output is back up into low-mid triple digits. The bad news is that my damage output is back up into low-mid triple digits and things still aren't dying. Our level deficit is becoming really apparent.  That's that.  I missed one somehow  It still can't hope to keep up with our pace of damage.  The Unguided: You know not what you seek. Tkae the orb, but heed my warning: it will ultimately lead to your demise. Yeah yeah yeah, quest item, whatever. Gimme the real loot!  Disappointing.  Interesting.  Starting to really rack up a backlog of sin-based breeding formulas.  Look at the level multiplier on this thing. That one's going to be on the shelf a while.  ...What? You say The Unguided threatened you? It claimed that your people - the people of Siralim - would one day overthrow your rule? That is complete and utter nonsense, King Mysterio. Rest assured that under the supervision of Damaos and myself, the people of Siralim will always remain loyal to your banner. Official census of the people of Siralim: 2 sycophants 5 creepy dwarves 7 mysterious magi who hang around babbling about sins and virtues 4 drunks who hang out in the bar 24/7 4 bar staff 4 merchants 3 castle servants 2 library ladies 3 cats Not sure who these oppressed masses that are going to rise up against us are.  Be warned: the orb seems to be guarded by the archangels Judgment and Mercy. Though the pair were formally fair-natured guardians of humanity, there's no telling what they might do if you try to take the treasure they so desperately protect. Everyone issues dire warnings about every boss we've faced, but they're actually not kidding this time; this fight's going to be a real bear.  Whoops, add one to the census. This guy shows up with one of the citizen recruitment waves to let you know about the secret passages if you didn't find them yet.  Only one new breeding option this time. It sounds fairly bad (what debuff is worth a measly 30% extra damage?) but there is plenty of support to make a debuff-collecting party viable.
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Sep 12, 2017 22:56
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Straight White Shark posted:Only one new breeding option this time. It sounds fairly bad (what debuff is worth a measly 30% extra damage?) but there is plenty of support to make a debuff-collecting party viable. That actually sounds fascinating. How would something like this work?
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Sep 13, 2017 05:46
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There are several monsters that let you ignore certain debuffs or even turn them beneficial, and there are other monsters that can gain benefits based on how many debuffs they have, so you can build a party to rack up a bunch of "safe" debuffs. The only downside is that some effects will get much worse based on the debuffs you have.
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Sep 13, 2017 06:07
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And would you debuff yourself? Or just hope that you run into something that can turn your team on, in a sense?
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Sep 13, 2017 06:11
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Update 31: Trouble in Paradise We're starting to feel the crunch from exponential enemy level growth, so I'm trying a more balanced approach here with a mix of spellcasting and SMASH.  I believe there was some call for birb party   Our new Priest of Fire sports a sweet Attack + Defense combo buff for maximum SMASH.  I'm still not sure if I'll ever get around to using this guy but eh, at least I have something new to stock up on.  My business is SMASH, and business... is good.  Our power balance is still in the shitter from the last breeding spree, so let's see if we can remedy that.  Your creatures will start each battle with Leech in this realm. No dice. Let's see what else we got.  Your rituals gained 425 energy. We're not working on any rituals right now. Oh well.  Are you kidding me?  Still just more of the same.  Guess what happens two more times. And then finally...  Finally, your Detritus stops and turns to you with a smug grin on its face. It holds what was once a Pandemonium Token in front of you. I guess it's something different, at least.  I still have hundreds of these and hardly anything to spend them on.  This could be interesting.  These matching groups start showing up around level 30. Usually they're based around families that gain benefits from having more of the same creature but for some reason that doesn't seem to be happening. Not that I'm complaining.  The defense on these things is pretty annoying, but they're not much threat.  It helps that this is exactly the scenario that the priest excels in.  Hit the second favor threshold with Lister!  Oh, hello, King Mysterio! Have you seen my friend? His name is Mister Siren Oracle. No? That's too bad. Oh well, I'm sure he'll turn up soon... *snooze* I appreciate that Lister is so slow on the uptake he's just now noticing the siren we got from the last favor threshold is gone.  We don't get the new rewards for this tier for free--we have to cough up emblems if we want them.  For rank 2, we not only get an additional tier of siren, we also get a free spell. Having a guaranteed source for spells is nice, but most of the low rank spells from gods aren't terribly good. This might be decent for a dryad party, but neither of the buffs is amazing by itself.  It's something, I guess?? Again, a 50% chance to sleep translates into a 25% chance to actually skip an enemy turn, even assuming that they don't get woken up by some random damage.  Most of the time the sidequests for a level just involve collecting pointless bullshit or activating objects that are already on the map, but occasionally they'll spawn more of something than normal. Getting 4 breeding inscriptions for a single level is pretty nice.  Of course, they're not all going to be winners.  This is the first "clean" copy of this spell we've found. I think I'll stick with the damage boosted one even if it's more expensive.  Nice! Ghouls are generally good.  That, of course, completed the quest to collect breeding inscriptions and gave us another breeding formula. Not going to be able to use this one for a while on account of needing to grind our way up the ladder with Surathli.  Finally a spell that's not Sorcery/Life. This one's got some potential; cast it on one of those same-family groups, or after using a class changing spell to set the enemy party to a single class, and you wind up doing over 5x normal damage thanks to the extra cast.  Piety Candles are kind of overkill when we're dealing with one of the most generous gods but I'm not going to complain.  This is kind of getting out of hand.  But not as out of hand as I am.  These guys have pretty good defense and shittons of healing, but that just means more time for the priest to work on Detritus. Finally it's on to the miniboss.  This could get annoying. Definitely a focus priority.  Hello new bat friend! This sounds scarier than it actually is; building up a ton of speed is not super useful without a way to translate that into damage.  Speaking of bat friends, here's something we can use.  Also this, for a certain definition of "can use."  No luck here.  Starting to really hate rolling traits on class shields, I much prefer stat boosting artifacts. But this is a pretty good one: straight up full power counterattack any time the user is attacked. If you've got a tank that can take the heat it's a great way to spread attacks around.  Back home, we've finally got enough power to start up the new merchant ritual. We'll have to wait another level or so to see it finished, though.  Actually, no, screw that I want it now now now now now  Ding!  That giant chest full of multicolored stones means exactly what you think it might:  We can buy spells now! :clap: They're ridiculously affordable compared to the other merchants, too. You'll want to keep a close eye on the spell vendor from now on; buff and debuff spells are hugely important for the big showdown at the end of the main storyline.  Our last meal bonus has run out, so it's time for something new. Baking Fish + Meat gets you this. We're close enough on favor with Surathli that our next trip to her realm should get us a reward, so I figure we might as well work on someone else.  New monster time! Wow, this guy is pretty bad. I forgot how awful most of the Efreets were.  Not great, but not terrible. If your monsters have around the same speed this is effectively a 25% speed boost, but it gets better if you have a way to rack up speed bonuses (I wish we could have captured the new bat from the miniboss fight, but we'll have to find a way to breed it now.)  Here we go. This is guy is one of the lynchpins of a familiar team; additive defense calculations means that 50% defense penetration is usually going to be way more than double damage. It'll be some time to get birb team going but the pieces are in place now.  This guy doesn't do much for a traditional spellcasting team but he's great for turning speedsters into damage powerhouses. Between this guy and the new ghoul we've got the makings of a pretty good speed demon team, although I think the only group damage spell we have for Death is already based on speed.  One of the better mummies for sure, since his awful speed does not get in the way of him spreading Curse around. With how common spell triggers are this can pretty reliably get most of the enemy team cursed after a round or two. Still not terribly fast or reliable, but not useless. the holy poopacy fucked around with this message at 23:08 on Sep 14, 2017 |
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Sep 14, 2017 22:28
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Straight White Shark posted:
 ??? Straight White Shark posted:
...Oh.
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Sep 14, 2017 22:45
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Raven Batmaster has one of the "Good Stuff" staple traits in this game. Doubling up on the effectiveness of a single stat is overpowered in ways that don't require any other traits to abuse. Just load up Speed into every single one of your artifacts to Go First and Cast Big. If you couple that with any method of adding speed to attack damage (there are a few), then you have a stat that does everything in a game that rewards alpha strikes.
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Sep 14, 2017 22:53
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jon joe posted:Raven Batmaster has one of the "Good Stuff" staple traits in this game. Doubling up on the effectiveness of a single stat is overpowered in ways that don't require any other traits to abuse. Just load up Speed into every single one of your artifacts to Go First and Cast Big. If you couple that with any method of adding speed to attack damage (there are a few), then you have a stat that does everything in a game that rewards alpha strikes. The limitation of the batmaster is that it doesn't actually do anything to accelerate you along the power curve; by himself, all he can do is make your monsters more well-rounded. Sure, you can take a speedy monster and load up on as much speed as possible and have a fast, powerful caster... but a lot of the fastest monsters in the game are already caster types, and in some cases you can get even more power just by maxing speed and then replacing the batmaster with some other form of magic support (e.g. Raptor Occultist.) The big advantage is that the batmaster is a force multiplier for anything else that boosts speed (such as the speed-based equivalent of the Raptor Occultist.) Being able to treat multiple stats as being equal to a high natural stat is really nice but is going to eventually fall behind the leveling curve. Being able to treat multiple stats as being equal to several times a high natural stat--and eventually, treating multiple stats as equal to arbitrarily high numbers (!)--will let you break the game. There's a good chance that the first postgame party may wind up being three ghouls and a batmaster.
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Sep 15, 2017 05:05
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Straight White Shark posted:three ghouls and a batmaster. Sounds about right.
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Sep 15, 2017 08:36
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Update 32: Beach Party Retooling the party a bit further. Throwing our Bastion back in for maximum stat gain and a Bone Reaper to help spread it around and turn around tight situations.  Beautiful.  It just occurred to me that I've got a spell that buffs Attack and Defense simultaneously. Which our priest can turn around and give to other party members.  The results are satisfactory.  This could be bad.  So... let's try this out.  That is a lot of stats.  Detritus missed out on the big stat bonanza, but thankfully we can share.  Cool, but we still need a Silver Imler.  Here's something new. These guys are one of the annoying golems I mentioned I didn't want to unlock too early, but looks like the game decided to take it out of our hands. Thankfully they don't seem to default to defend as often as other creatures with defend/provoke effects.  Such as this shapeshifter here, who has just metamorphosized into some kind of weird elf thing. Elves disable triggers, which is super handy but more than a little situational--they're better at loving up your combos than they are at setting up their own combos. They're also postgame patch content, which means...  Yoink! We don't get to do this with new monsters that often.  Overall a very straightforward and same-y level, so we're already moving on to the miniboss.  Ouch. This isn't super reliable but it's got a lot of potential for pain. Luckily the berserker fiend is the only real danger here.  That doesn't stop the wolpertinger from dragging things out with random barrier spells, but the enemy is rapidly running out of threats.  A little on the expensive side, but freeze is super handy.  This is an alternate for a creature we've already got a formula for. Considering how specific they are, it's probably a good thing we have multiple routes.  Free artifact trait! This is the Timeless Master's ability, though, so not super useful--I suppose you could give it to something naturally faster, but it's stuck on an artifact with no built in speed stat (and the attack bonus is just straight up wasted.)  Quite a boring haul overall. Back at home, the spell merchant does have a nice little find for us.  That was pretty brief, so heading back in for another run.  At this point we're so far behind on the stats/level curve that even stacking multiple defense boost monsters isn't cutting it for the team's squishies, but the crystal smith is so loaded with defense that even with the penalty from provoke he's in no real danger. It's not fancy, but it works.  I know the fight's already over but man I love seeing those numbers.  Couple new faces here. The purple hunter works the same as every other hunter: it procs 1 extra mini-attack for every hunter in the party. The harpy torturer here is basically a better version of the basic wyvern, with the added potential to mess up friendly spells. Still not terribly interesting or dangerous.  I've been meaning to get more of these since I bred the first one but keep forgetting/exploding them too quickly.  Man, I really want to start playing with some more Imlings/Imlers but even if I had the formulas we're a bit strapped for resources right now.  BIRB PARTY  This was only a matter of time once same-family groups started appearing. It's actually a good thing we hatched the extra ones; the Elemental Familiars have an ability that increases with power based on the number of familiars and stacks, so a party of Elemental Familiars and nothing else hurts.  Rude!  Thankfully we've got stat buffs that don't depend on MP. They don't have a lot of defense-piercing damage, so we're pretty safe.  A quest reward yields this, our 4th copy of Entangle.  Also this little guy! Not as rare or unique as the grimoire egg but finding a new monster egg is always nice.  Finally a moai head pushes us up to the favor level we've been waiting for.  Let's make a deal. I'll teach you how to cook with some new ingredients, and you can cook my meals for me... *yawn* Do we have a deal? Good then. Back to sleep I go... *snore* In addition to the various cores and spells and runes that you can purchase from gods, each god has some sort of wholly unique bonus they unlock at a certain favor threshold. Lister's is cooking.  Every god has a specific recipe that raises favor with them, and about 2/3 of the gods have a recipe that requires Lister's cooking expertise. So tackling a few levels of favor with him first helps speed up whatever other gods you're trying to grind favor with.  Did I say runes? Oh yeah, each god has a unique rune you can get from them at rank 3 favor. This is a drat handy one--if you've got a source of Mend you basically get the Willow Spirit's ability for free.  The new level of siren is less impressive. It's no more reliable than the one that spreads Sleep, but Confuse is even less likely to actually do anything beneficial.  New summoning spell. It's still going to be a long time before we have a use for this; taking less than a full party is a pretty big gamble.  Miniboss time! This guy isn't very impressive. There are much nastier MP draining abilities out there, and this guy can't do anything against anyone until they've already cast at least one spell.  The treasure is similarly mediocre, although extra Power Balance is always appreciated.  Not much in the way of new creatures this time, although we did get Dobby here. Like harpies, I think the best part of elves is the ability names because honestly they're not terribly useful otherwise. Maaaaaybe worth taking if you've got a really amazing combo that can get derailed by one specific creature's triggered ability but that's about it.  Also went ahead and hatched this little fella. His ability is a bit off-brand for trolls since it's not any kind of attack at all, but it's not bad. It's pretty unreliable since there's no guarantee that it won't hit something that's already near the end of the turn order, but it's a great way to ensure that the turn order gets shuffled around and that can be a lifesaver if there's a particular sequence of enemies that's problematic.
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Sep 18, 2017 22:52
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Straight White Shark posted:
They're all so cute! So what does an endgame birb party look like, anyways?
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Sep 18, 2017 23:15
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Kyrosiris posted:They're all so cute! Hahahaha, that's a funny joke. An endgame party will never have any of those birbs.
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Sep 18, 2017 23:38
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jon joe posted:Hahahaha, that's a funny joke. You need to believe in the heart of the birbs!
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Sep 19, 2017 00:35
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The game just stretches on forever, so the true endgame consists of fighting infinitely higher level creatures which really limits your options. Birbs can make a pretty decent push thanks to the Judge Familiar since defense penetration is just that good. It helps that birbs share almost all their powers with non-birbs, so if you want to maximize your potential you're probably looking at something like 4 birbs + 2 support monsters. You'll want to be alpha striking the hell out of things so your support would probably either be speed boosts or things that boost autocasts so that you can decide battles with your opening volley. There are 6 different familiars so you can make a party of just 6 different colored birb and it would do fine up to a point, but not all of them are amazingly useful.
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Sep 19, 2017 00:47
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Update 33: Judgment Day It is time.  Mercy: Indeed - this situation is far worse than I had ever thought possible. Mysterio, turn back now. There is no need for blood to be shed here on this day.  Mercy: Mysterio, I shall give you one final chance to turn back. Return to your kingdom where you belong, or we shall take matters into our own hands.  Again, in a lot of ways the PC's actions seem to fit the traditional RPG villain role more than the hero. We're collecting artifacts of ancient power to become a god and now the angels are uniting in a last ditch effort to stop us. I mean, granted, they're namedropping a guy who goes by the name Misery so it's not entirely cut and dry, but it still feels unusual.  So here's Mercy and Judgment. You can coast through the first 30 levels of the game easily, the Unguided boss and the levels after it are a bit more challenging because the level scaling ramps up so much, but this right here is the first big wall for a lot of players.  WHAM! Right off the bat you lose 85% of your health. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200. (Ignore the ability text up top, this has nothing to do with the random autocast spell the ent is using.)  Judgment is straight up guaranteed to go first regardless of speed. So you'll have to eat at least one attack at 15% health, which has a decent chance to kill something because Judgment has boss stats. And unless you've got a one-round KO up your sleeve, you'll probably have to eat more, because the health reduction happens every round.  Mercy is guaranteed to go last instead. Which is good, because she automatically kills everyone at low HP. Which, after Judgment goes, is going to be everybody.  Big Black Wood came out of retirement for this fight because he provides auto-Mend to everybody. Mend heals 15% every turn, but the Fau rune that we just got from Lister doubles all healing while Mend is in effect. So after one tick everyone is up to 45% health, just out of range for Mercy's autokill.  Meanwhile our Bastion spreads defense buffs around to keep squishies alive and tank hits like a champ. We still have to worry about passive damage but we have some decent heal spells as a last resort.  Like so.  One of our other runes gives pseudo-Leech effect when attacking bleeding enemies, so this both softens up enemies and provides some backup healing just in case.  Bleed deals 40% of current health. That's about 1600 max HP on Judgment.  Sweet, sweet life drain.  Unfortunately I run into a bit of a conundrum. See, the Bone Reaper's stat-harvesting ability requires an ally under 25% health. The only creature in the party slower than the reaper is the ent... who died and got his spot in the turn order reset to go ahead of the reaper, meaning that by the time the reaper's turn comes up everyone has had a regen tick and can no longer be harvested for stats. This fight is literally the only reason I bothered breeding this rear end in a top hat and putting up with him for several levels. It appears the only taint that has been reaped... is my own.   Luckily I have Detritus to work out my frustrations. He just instagibbed the entire bottom row, boss or no boss.  Mercy's got a bit more defense but she can't do much without Judgment to set up for her.  (With Judgment and Mercy defeated, you hurriedly pluck the Nether Orb from a gilded cloud that rests where your adversaries once stood.)  The loot is a bit disappointing.  This is the most interesting part and it's going to be a ways off and probably not that good in general.  This battle shall decide the fate of our entire kingdom, and potentially that of the entire world, King Mysterio. With the help of your Nether Orbs, you are our only chance to defeat Misery. Come back safely, victory in hand, and we shall sup and drink to our hearts' content knowing full well that Siralim served as the last bastion against the carnage Misery has wrought against our world. Good luck, King Mysterio. May the gods be always at your side. At least we don't have to run around talking to everyone to get our next boss target, because we're going after the big man himself.  The vendors don't have anything great for us but there is this. It's not quite as impressive as it sounds since autocast spells have a fraction of their normal strength, but it's still a way to spread some free damage around. Short update today. Next time, the final (...?) stretch begins.
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Sep 19, 2017 23:02
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Fun fact: before a balance update, judgement used to send you to 1 health on its turn.
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Sep 20, 2017 00:54
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Aren't most of the gods friendly to us? I mean I know the game's plot is threadbare at best, and thinking about it is probably a waste of time, but so far it really only seems like we're hurting this Misery guy and his cronies. (and I guess randomly wandering packs of birds / trolls / castles / apes / flaming eyeball wheels)
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Sep 20, 2017 21:19
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| # ? Jun 7, 2024 09:08 |
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It almost seems like the collective of gods as a whole do not approve of Misery's end goal of becoming a god and joining their "pantheon", empowering you through divine favor and access to Emblem-bought items as an agent to prevent Misery's divine ascension. They may see you attaining godhood in the process as an acceptable cost of business (which benefits them in the end, as your rise in power includes supplying them with Exalted Emblems, which in turns increases the gods' power as well, and so on).
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Sep 20, 2017 21:39
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