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Party votes so far: Stella: 5 Dia: 4 Buront: 2 Edward: 2 Haru: 1 Ark: 1 Nila: 0  Well, that'll make things bloody for the upcoming mission if things keep going the way they are now. Not insurmountable, but bloody.Also have an unused set of lines from that last update. I sadly had to scrap these as the respective characters did not show up there, and I couldn't refit them for the current cast since everyone's personalities were too different to make use of the lines: [Screenshot of a Heated Words cast]
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Oct 28, 2020 17:53
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| # ? Jun 11, 2024 12:06 |
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Glad to see this back! My vote is for Dia, Stella, and Ark. Let's do an imperial without the huge Mage nukes.
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Oct 28, 2020 23:39
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Ark, Stella and Edward. Come forth, dragon blood!
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Oct 29, 2020 11:26
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Doesn't look like anymore votes are coming in so voting is closed! Final results: Stella: 8 Dia: 6 Edward: 4 Ark: 3 Buront: 2 Haru: 1 Nila: 0 Well um. Looks like Stella, Edward, Ark, and Dia are the ones coming along for the next mission. On the plus side, it has my favorite Imperial Dragon in the entire series, so look forward to that I guess.
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Oct 29, 2020 19:59
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This thread and the 2020 one inspired me to replay this one, without the USA patch, since I cheated my way through my first play of it (disable encounters, move fast/through objects, hack in items). Using Knight/Samurai/Dagger Rogue/Princess. Recovering 4 MN every turn for the whole fight, when most skills right now cost that much, is stupid and fun. Anyway, despite how grindy collection quests are and how easy random battles are, there is a lot of charm to this game, and I find it kind of zen, which is exactly what I needed. Looking forward to more!
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Oct 29, 2020 21:41
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WELCOME TO 7TH DRAGON!  
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Nov 21, 2020 16:23
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Araxxor posted:An encounter with some Tree Lions gave level ups to Edward and Dia. That being said, I decide to hold onto their skill points for now, as I haven’t decided on what I wanted them to do next by this time. If you don't mind the SP investment required, going for Punishment on Dia would be a riot. Turns out an attack that gets stronger at low HP is hilarious when you have a reliable way to drop the user to 1 without fighting and a support class that can take any hit that would go their way. And yeah this point of the game is where 7th Dragon really starts hitting its stride. Going from generic flame dragon in a volcano to killing a dragon in freefall and killing a goddamn mountain!
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Nov 21, 2020 18:40
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oh my god this game is awesome 
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Nov 22, 2020 12:34
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Killing a goddamn mountain is a spectacular plot. This is awesome.
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Nov 22, 2020 13:00
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It's fun to consider that the dragon is so goddamn big it's got normal-sized dragons just living on its back.
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Nov 22, 2020 18:49
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Do we ever find out how it got there? I thought dragons didn't appear until the Meteor hit in the intro. Or did they just not notice that new mountain that appeared out of nowhere?
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Nov 22, 2020 19:08
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Chuu posted:Do we ever find out how it got there? I thought dragons didn't appear until the Meteor hit in the intro. Or did they just not notice that new mountain that appeared out of nowhere? It's a very sneaky mountain. Or maybe the thing replaced an existing one?
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Nov 22, 2020 20:05
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 There's a huge mountain range surrounding the western continent. Either they didn't notice the addition of 1 more mountain in that range, or Earthshaker replaced an existing one. The closest settlement to Mt. Jomaron is the Basho District... which got completely overrun by the Bloom. So the next closest would be Zeza Port, which is a good distance away. And the Nevanplace Empire is basically on the other side of the continent.
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Nov 22, 2020 20:20
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Araxxor posted:
Sometimes I forget how recent of a thing accurate maps actually are. Especially when JRPGs handwave it away and give us the satellite view.
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Nov 23, 2020 00:53
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Slight change of plans. I intended for this dungeon to be a 2-parter, but I underestimated how long this dungeon was, and this part was getting so long it turned into a 3-parter. And I might as well start breaking up dungeons into multiparts cause some of the later dungeons in this game get looooooong. Also as it turns out completing 3 missions is what progresses the game to late-game, not all 4. So there won't be a vote right away for a party swap after Earthshaker dies, so I'll be doing a bit more sidequesting after this. quote:Coincidentally kill the last imperial dragon by lowering the dragon count to 333 by then: 1 Incidentally this might actually be possible depending on how I go about things.
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Nov 26, 2020 04:18
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Killing a mountain seems simple, none of those parts were a big deal.
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Nov 26, 2020 16:50
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Araxxor posted:
Healers that are also good at breaking faces are my favorite kind of healer by far, I am positively giddy for this.
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Nov 26, 2020 17:19
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While researching some things for the next update, I've discovered some things. Yet again. Why the gently caress are there so many hidden surprise mechanics in this game?  So Sand Kick Blind is coded as a different ailment than Blind, but it only lasts one turn. As it turns out there's an additional benefit. While normal Blind causes attacks to miss 50% of the time, Sand Kick Blind causes attacks to miss 100% of the time. If the attack is capable of missing anyways. Now onto the bigger surprises. As it turns out, this game has a bad luck mitigation mechanic when it comes to inflicting ailments. Each time you miss landing an infliction, a hidden counter increases for that ailment on the target. The higher this counter is, the easier it is to land that ailment later. Once you land that specific ailment, its counter will be set back to 0. However unlike its sister game, Etrian Odyssey 1, there's no good luck mitigation mechanic, so you don't have to worry about lucky streaks getting cut down. It's pretty simple. Each stack adds on 20% of the base infliction rate to the final infliction rate. However missed attempts only increases the counter if the infliction itself missed. If an attack that can inflict something missed damaging the target entirely, that doesn't count. And all this applies to all ailments. Base Infliction Rate + (Base Infliction Rate * 0.2 * Missed Attempts) Missed Attempts caps out at 200. Once you land the ailment, the Missed Attempts counter for said ailment goes back to 0. You cannot abuse this by landing an ailment higher in the hierarchy, and then spamming a lower tier ailment to increase the counter for that ailment, that doesn't work. The game freezes the counters for any lower tier ailments until the current ailment wears off. However it does not freeze for the same ailment, as you can reapply Poison even if the enemy is Poisoned and such. Another aspect to note is that the counter will still keep ticking up even if the enemy is outright immune to the ailment. This is because certain mechanics allow bypassing of immunites, that can actually benefit from this. Bizarrely enough, anything that inflicts an ailment increases this counter, even if the infliction is literally impossible because its rate is set to 0%, or it's like Purge, where the infliction is conditional, not RNG based. And there's a calculation glitch because of course there is. For some reason if the infliction rate reaches a multiple of 100% exactly, the game kind of goes nuts and randomly adds or subtracts 1% or 2% from the final infliction rate. I don't know why this happens. quote:Perfect Dark: Instantly kills anyone in the party that is under 60% of their maximum life. Otherwise, 0% chance of inflicting Sleep on the entire party. Has a speed modifier of 60%. As it turns out, this skill Eclipse has technically does something even if you avoid the Instant Death part. Each time it is cast, your entire party gets more susceptible to Sleep. (Remember Eclipse has access to Dream Edge.) Now what's the downside? Enemies benefit from all this too. Eventually they will land that ailment as the fight goes on, so you can't avoid ailments forever. Which is especially important to keep in mind for the most deadly ones. And now for the final surprise mechanic. As it turns out I was dead wrong about how EX worked with ailments in DS. It's stronger. Much stronger. What does it do? After all the ailment calculations are run through an enemy's ailment multipliers and all other calculations, as long as the infliction rate never reached 0% or below, using EX adds 10% to the final infliction rate. Yeah. In short when you use EX, you have a guaranteed 10% chance of landing an ailment. And yes this works with all of them. So for those of you that are familiar with deeper Etrian Odyssey 3/Etrian Odyssey 4/Persona Q mechanics, it's literally Wild Mastery/Ailment Boost/Impure Reach. On demand. And every class has access to it. Yeah. (Okay nowhere near as strong as Impure Reach, but still.) To illustrate how strong this is for those of you not familiar with that jargon I just spouted out in the previous paragraph, let me show you an example. Let's take Tidal Wave, a Fighter EX skill that has a 75% base chance to inflict Skill Seal. A lot of bosses have a 5% multiplier to that, bringing that down to only 3%, meaning it would take an average of 34 attempts to land it. Not good odds. However if you use EX, that 3% jumps up to a whopping 13% chance, meaning the average amount of attempts to inflict Skill Seal becomes a mere 8 attempts. Yeah it's really strong.  In short, this is about how I'm feeling with this game every time I dig into it.
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Nov 29, 2020 04:37
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It's like I'm playing a SaGa game all over again...
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Nov 29, 2020 05:22
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Omnicrom posted:It's like I'm playing a SaGa game all over again...
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Nov 29, 2020 05:22
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Araxxor posted:
The way instant death mechanics work in this game, do they also get that EX boost?
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Nov 29, 2020 05:33
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Oh, you remember the Misery Cord weapon from the update before last? That's probably a Misericorde. Either a translation error or wierd joke.
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Nov 29, 2020 05:41
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Chuu posted:The way instant death mechanics work in this game, do they also get that EX boost? Yes, but it doesn't bypass the dragons innate "instant death shield" that only deactivates when they fall under 10% Life, unfortunately. Ratoslov posted:Oh, you remember the Misery Cord weapon from the update before last? That's probably a Misericorde. Either a translation error or wierd joke. Definitely a translation error. The Japanese name flat out calls it that and the Japanese description mentions it's a dagger. Added to that update.
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Nov 29, 2020 06:17
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We kill a goddamn mountain! 
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Nov 29, 2020 12:41
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It feels very fitting that Stella's weapon for this quest is called the Rock Masher.
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Nov 29, 2020 14:06
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That opening was perfection
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Nov 29, 2020 18:25
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I appreciate that composite of the battle sprites, it was hard to picture it as a whole. It’s like Shadow of the Colossus in a dungeon!
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Dec 3, 2020 22:53
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 The dragons are coming from within the thread! 
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Dec 4, 2020 00:27
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Due to computer issues (my current rig decided to basically die and is nearly unusable now) and further complications in my life, preventing me from getting another computer easily, this let’s play is officially abandoned.
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Dec 25, 2020 06:01
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Okay those computer issues and complications have been dealt with. Let's get back to work. We encounter a unique foe. Welcome to 7th Dragon.   Incidentally I also took this time to really dig through and organize the data and my back end stuff for the LP. One of the big misconceptions I had was that conditional drops in this game were based off of getting the killing blow with them. They're not. Unlike in Etrian Odyssey, 7th Dragon conditionals don't care how you kill an enemy. They just track that you hit them with the correct damage type at some point. Ice resistant enemy has an Ice damage conditional? No need to time it so you kill the enemy with Ice. Just smack the enemy with Ice at some point and you qualify. On the flip side, this also makes it easy to get disqualified from certain conditional types, such as not using a specific damage type against an enemy for the entire fight. On the other other hand, conditional drops are mostly just used for meat drops. There's like 1 or 2 cases where this is used for actual rare drops. So if you don't have a Fighter, you can mostly ignore this mechanic entirely, as it's basically sort of a flavor thing really.
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May 25, 2021 08:30
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The party engaged a what I'm with Telos on this one, it scores at least a couple points higher on the weirdness scale (it's a logarithmic one) than the other ones.
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May 25, 2021 08:52
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Fight the rainbow, taste the rainbow!
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May 25, 2021 09:12
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That's loving weird, yo.
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May 25, 2021 21:05
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Fight the rainbow, die to the rainbow!
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May 25, 2021 22:58
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Enter the Painbow!
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May 26, 2021 07:21
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I am re-reading this LP now, please wait for meaningful comments. Barely related, but funny. Pixiv has some wonderful fanart. source 
NHO fucked around with this message at 20:54 on May 26, 2021 |
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May 26, 2021 20:48
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NHO posted:I am re-reading this LP now, please wait for meaningful comments. Oh uh, that's actually a traced version of some official art. Even says it's a replica in the link.  
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May 27, 2021 00:04
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I'm an idiot. But it is still perfect image. NHO fucked around with this message at 07:22 on May 27, 2021 |
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May 27, 2021 05:14
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YAY! You're back, glad to hear you recovered from the last bout of bad luck. Also, 7th dragon is literally off the rails the game, you fight a mountain and then a rainbow, both of which are Imperial Dragons. and I thought Legend of Dragoon went loose with what is defined as a dragon.
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May 28, 2021 03:32
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| # ? Jun 11, 2024 12:06 |
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Okay been doing some more research. I actually went and learned how to use a debugger (thanks Ghidra) so I can actually extract formulae and stuff like that from the game instead of guesstimating out of my rear end and trying to "reverse engineer" that way with prodding at the game's RAM or files. I was slightly wrong with critical hits. They reduce the target's DEF by 1/3, not 30%. Which makes them slightly better than I expected. More relevantly, it turns out the critical hit rate is... 5% for players, 3% for enemies. And no stats influence it either. Yeah uh, great deal. (Really more relevant for enemies than for you really.) Micro and Macroanatomy don't stack additively with this. They're separate rolls. (So a 22.1% chance for a crit with 1 at max level. In random encounters only.)Looked into a bit of the damage formula and found some nuances I missed. Not done looking into it though but here's a bit of what I found. (Assume all formulae in the game round down aggressively whenever they can.) Guarding reduces physical attack damage by 50%, or 75% if you're using an EX guard. For spells, it's reduced by 30% instead, or 65% if you're using an EX guard. Melee attacks have their damage reduced by 50% when attacking from the back row, or trying to deal damage to the back row. Damage Variance: -If damage is 20 or less, damage ranges from -2 to 2. -If damage is 100 or less, damage ranges from -5 to 5. -If damage is greater than 100, the damage will be randomized in a range from 95% to 105% of the final damage output. -If you dealt 0 damage, then you instead deal 8% to 12% of your ATK as damage instead. Also fun fact that's not really relevant unless you are overleveled or severely underleveled for an area. If your damage output is less than 10% of your ATK stat, it has a 25% chance of missing. (Same applies to enemies.) Speaking of accuracy, I finally dug out the entire thing. Almost. Spell Attack Accuracy posted:Accuracy = (100 * (Attacker Level + Attacker INT + 400)) / (Target Level + Target SPD + 400) Yeah turns out level is a part of accuracy as well. Also to those of you familiar with EO1 or at least the completed LP of it on the forums, this formula should look familiar to you. Yeah it's basically the EO1 accuracy formula only with the 500 constants replaced with 400s. So yeah, accuracy matters slightly more in 7th Dragon, but ultimately not much of a factor to worry about in most cases. Mages almost never need to worry about accuracy due to their INT providing a big boost. As for physical attacks, it's slightly more complicated. If you're a Bow Rogue. Otherwise it's pretty similar. Physical Attack Accuracy posted:Arrow accuracy = Arrows Fired * -3 + 100 Accuracy matters slightly more for physical attackers due to the lower constants. It's something to keep in mind, but not really something to worry about as everyone has 100% innate accuracy and unless there's a drastic difference in SPD, it's not too much to worry about. Unless the enemy uses a SPD buff, then it's something to worry about cause that can actually have an effect. Bow Rogues on the other hand, actually have to worry about this mechanic, as they actually lose 3% accuracy per arrow fired (Fortunately the first arrow shot doesn't suffer an accuracy penalty), but that takes place during the accuracy formula, not the end of it. This means it can actually take a while for Bow Rogues to start missing due to their high SPD stat. Though thankfully the accuracy multiplier can't go below 50%, which will be hit after 17 shots. But you really should have used Seeker before that happens. Also I was wrong about EX. It doesn't bypass the accuracy check (It does in the later games) but it doubles your accuracy instead. Granted in most cases that's enough to gain surefire accuracy, but there are a few cases where that can still miss. Blind on the other hand, reduces your accuracy by a whopping 70%! To give an example in action, take the update with the Dragonflies, those enemies with 200 SPD. It turns out that Ark, the most accurate of the bunch (before firing arrows would tank her accuracy.) had 69% chance of hitting one. With poor Stella having a 67% chance. There's no upper cap to accuracy. (Though that doesn't really matter as RNG rolls out of 100 for it.) However accuracy can't go lower than 1%. Thanks? Though I can't think of any situation where you could possibly reach that as that would require you to be severely underleveled and blind. Oh and for the record, no ailment in 7th Dragon affects accuracy or evasion. While this mechanic exists in EO, it's not something that exists in this series. Not that there's not really a lot of reason to utilize such a thing here. Unlike the EO series, everyone starts with 100% accuracy by default. Big inaccurate attacks don't exist in this game. As for the "almost", well there's actually one thing in the formula that can influence the target's SPD but I have no idea what it is. Like I just said, ailments have absolutely no effect. Buffs and debuffs already apply their effects to the stats before it even gets used in the formulas. So for now I'm chalking it up to "unused unless something surprises me later." Araxxor fucked around with this message at 07:10 on Jun 6, 2021 |
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Jun 1, 2021 15:42
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