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I ended up doing Hikari's final chapter second last (I saved Agnea's for last as a sort of victory celebration) so yeah I basically never took him out of my party. Even though I could've for Agnea's final chapter, I figured Hikari wouldn't dare miss his friend's big show so I kept him in the party anyway  I did switch the lead character in the party order to whoever's chapter it was but otherwise Hikari tagged along the whole way. One of the other ways I tried to keep things a little bit more challenging for myself is that I didn't let myself equip Deal More Damage on my attackers until postgame, so the most anyone could do in a single hit was 9999. That's still a shitload of damage for most fights in the game but it did make sure Hikari, Osvald, Temenos, and Throne didn't absolutely delete the final boss in one turn. It does make me wish the game had a few more superboss-level fights where I could cut loose and not just win in a single turn. The one superboss the game does have was really fun to go all-out against and I wouldn't mind a few more opportunities to do that. Harrow fucked around with this message at 13:17 on Apr 27, 2023 |
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Apr 27, 2023 12:52
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dolcinea fight keeps rocking me hardcore even though im slightly over leveled and have what i assume is decent gear on the other it's fun to play and the song is awesome idk how useful song of hope is supposed to be though, since i think she can debuff you? that and it seems like breaking down shield points is usually a better use of bp
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Apr 27, 2023 13:29
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I didn't end up using Song of Hope much in my own playthrough but it can be pretty fun to pair it with Castti doing a Sealticge all-targeted Remedy. Just scattershot buffs all over your whole team and then extend them by a bunch of turns.
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Apr 27, 2023 13:42
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The big thing for song of hope is combining it with an Ochette or a multibuff assist character. Or y'know. Arcanist Oswald giving 5 buffs to the entire party.
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Apr 27, 2023 14:03
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Harrow posted:(This is assuming you don't want to just have her nuke everything, of course.) I don’t have the gear for her to nuke everything but being able to steal almost anything is great. And honestly I’m playing this for the characters and the stories and the music. If I overpower the combat, that’s not the end of the world for me.
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Apr 27, 2023 16:58
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Throne was my main and got all the best weapons and the Inventor subclass and fully wiped most encounters with BP Boost and the catapult.
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Apr 27, 2023 17:20
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I don't like the Inventor subclass cause it makes my lil' dudes look dumb as hell 
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Apr 27, 2023 18:35
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Agnea and Partitio look great as Inventors imo Now, Arcanist and Conjurer on the other hand I'm not really a fan of the looks of
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Apr 27, 2023 18:43
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Arcanist is kinda lame because it covers of the faces, but it's made up for by the fact that it just puts Osvald's and Partitio's abs on full display. Bonus points in getting to hear fake latin spells in Partitio's western slang.
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Apr 27, 2023 18:46
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Also I'd like Armsmaster's looks more without the helmet the men wear. All the women look great as Armsmasters but I think the helmet for the men is to homogenizing, they all look too similar. The only guy who looks great as an Armsmaster is Osvald because he's huge and Armsmaster makes him even more imposing.
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Apr 27, 2023 18:50
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Harrow posted:Yeah it's sort of inevitable that your main character is going to end up pretty overleveled. Besides nerfing Throne with crappy gear, you could also have her play a support role if you don't want her to just steamroll everything. Give her a subjob with good support like Dancer or Merchant and let that be her main role in combat so others have a chance to shine. Warning: Throne with dancer is really awesome for buffs, debuffs, dagger dance and surprise attack and might still steamroll things
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Apr 27, 2023 22:47
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I haven't done any
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Apr 27, 2023 23:26
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I went back and played Octopath 1 a bit and god drat, it's incredible how much better Octopath 2 looks. It's one of those things that's subtle if you haven't looked at Octopath 1 in a while but extremely noticeable if you play it now. Octopath 2's sprite animation is massively more fluid and detailed with way more frames, way more unique animations, and just tons more character. The environments look much more natural and the dungeons are more varied in their layouts and aesthetics. It's really impressive how far the HD-2D style has come in the last few years.
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Apr 27, 2023 23:40
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Does like no one have Wind damage except Dancer? This sucks so bad 
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Apr 28, 2023 05:26
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Chasiubao posted:Does like no one have Wind damage except Dancer? This sucks so bad From what I can tell there's also no group-wind spell either.
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Apr 28, 2023 06:09
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Neddy Seagoon posted:From what I can tell there's also no group-wind spell either. agnea gets one from one of the dancer shrines and that's about it.
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Apr 28, 2023 06:47
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Castti can do wind damage with her concoctions
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Apr 28, 2023 07:01
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And Ochette can capture wind monsters.
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Apr 28, 2023 07:05
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Hikari can learn a wind attack.
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Apr 28, 2023 07:56
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Sources of each elemental damage, not including soulstones or learned skills/monsters because those can be variable: Fire: Scholar, Merchant Ice: Scholar, Apothecary Lightning: Scholar, Hunter Wind: Dancer, Concoct, Agnea Dark: Thief, Arcanist, Concoct, Throne Light: Cleric, Arcanist, Concoct, Temenos ApplesandOranges fucked around with this message at 15:49 on Apr 28, 2023 |
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Apr 28, 2023 11:31
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Agnea’s group wind spell (Windy Refrain) is really good because it also makes your team go first on the next round. Even if you don’t have her set up for high elemental damage it’s worth casting just for that. If whole team has A Step Ahead and Agnea opens with Windy Refrain, you can have your whole team go twice before any enemy acts.
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Apr 28, 2023 12:35
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Harrow posted:Agnea’s group wind spell (Windy Refrain) is really good because it also makes your team go first on the next round. Even if you don’t have her set up for high elemental damage it’s worth casting just for that. I was going to say, Agnea’s divine skill that’s an aoe Wind spell is really good, she has really high elemental attack to boot. Make her a Scholar and let that poo poo fly. Blackbelt Bobman fucked around with this message at 15:57 on Apr 28, 2023 |
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Apr 28, 2023 13:07
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Bongo Bill posted:And Ochette can capture wind monsters. Some of which are insane, because monster attacks can also come with debuffs and status effects. One of my wind monsters had a wind group attack which could cause instant death. That weird bird stayed with me for a long time.
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Apr 28, 2023 13:15
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It does stand out that wind is the only element without a multi-target spell available to multiple characters, I suppose. It's also the only element without a spell that can be enhanced with Advanced Magic/Alephan's Wisdom, since Arcanist has a dark spell that can be upgraded that way. But ultimately it's not a huge issue since there are lots of sources of wind damage elsewhere.
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Apr 28, 2023 13:31
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Blackbelt Bobman posted:I was going to say, Agnes’s divine skill that’s an aoe Wind spell is really good, she has really high elemental attack to boot. Make her a Scholar and let that poo poo fly. Merchant is actually the better option for that since it lets you give her all three +wind weapons (dagger, polearm, bow).
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Apr 28, 2023 15:50
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The main downside to wind damage Agnea is that you can’t use Advanced Magic/Alephan’s Wisdom to make Windy Refrain hit multiple times. That’s not really a concern for most of the game though, you basically only really need that level of damage for the superboss and Agnea’s probably doing support in that fight anyway.
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Apr 28, 2023 15:55
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Finished everyone's stories except Agnea's and Partitio's (though I'm pretty sure I'm at the save point right before Partitio's boss now), some disparate thoughts; I went through the eastern continent's stories first, and then did everyone on the western continent; with the final chapters in the order of Ochette>Throné>Temenos>Osvald>Hikari>Castti. I noticed a little while back while thinking about some of the villains like Harvey and Trousseau that their names in the order of the travelers (with Osvald and Temenos being the first O and T) they seem to spell HTAPOTCO; OCTOPATH backwards which is incredibly cool, it's what I hoped they do in the first game and had been looking out for for a while. Osvald - Harvey Castti - Trousseau Temenos - ??? No clue someone with an A but his story had nobody that started with an A Ochette - ??? Whoever the dark hunter is probably starts with a P, I'm thinking that it's Roi from Temenos' story who got corrupted by the Darkblood Bow who decided to change his name Partitio - ??? Also no idea but Ori starts with an O, and she keeps mentioning a brother that's curiously absent from the story, and since Ori and Roi are like one letter apart it'd be very Octopath/Bravely-tier punny name to have them be some evil sibling duo orchestrating poo poo Agnea - ??? No idea but they start with a T, but honestly I cannot remember a single npc from her story aside from Dolcinaea and Vanessa Throné - Claude Hikari - Oboro, who for a long while kind of has just been a ??? nonentity, but I'm thinking he might actually be Kazan; he's the only one of Hikari's friend group we don't have a solid backstory for and Benkei apparently also changed his name when he swapped allegiance to Ku, and Oboro's journal heavily mentions some complicated plan which would be in Kazan's wheelhouse I'm a little confused on the specifics but Trousseau has to be another one of Claude's sons right? Trousseau i believe was an orphan with his sister, he has the same hair colour as Claude, and he initially lives in Winterbloom, which, seeing as Sebastian/Father stuck around there a lot and took care of things might be another location to shunt Claude's children to. Apparently Trousseau during his second phase also gains additional weaknesses which are the exact weaknesses that Claude has, which my boyfriend noticed as I was streaming the game to him on my second attempt of fighting Trousseau, which I feel is a pretty cool clue to that if it is the case. Assuming that Trousseau is Claude's son, it also makes sense that they're both weak to Dark from the start; if my assumption that Claude and the entirety of the Blacksnakes and his children exist to find a suitable vessel for Vide (which ends up being Throné), then them being weak to Dark to make it easier for Vide to possess them makes sense. The part that I'm confused on is Castti's involvement in this; one of the travel banters during Throné's final chapter says that Castti had been to Lostseed before which was a whole lot of ??? but with Trousseau straight up saying that he wished that she had listened to his words that day it makes sense that the two of them came to Lostseed together, with Trousseau being drawn there due to being one of Claude's children, and since Claude has weird vampire mind control powers when Castti rejected that simply wiped her memory of the events. I'm assuming that this implies that Castti's later memory loss is also somehow a part of this? Since her memory loss afterwards doesn't seem to be very explained beyond just being another side effect of the poison rain, but it's never really stated that that is one. I kind of wish that Castti was a bit more morally ambiguous before losing her memory honestly; it would've been cool to have fakeout double memory shenanigans and have the final chapter reveal that Castti was complicit with Trousseau, and specifically brought everyone back in time to catch their poison rain after falling for whatever the gently caress Claude told them, and that all the memories she had with Malaya are what she wished she did instead, her cognitive version of Malaya effectively being her conscious telling her what she could have done if not for Claude's mind poisoning, setting Malaya and Trousseau up as basically being the angel and devil on her shoulder, the final fight with Trousseau also rebuking that past. I know it's absolutely not what the game was going for with Castti's story but out of everyone hers really feels the most boring; she has a great first chapter and a really good last one but all of her middle chapters are so incredibly dull and predictable. In terms of difficulty the Mahamaowl (Mahina?) was definitely the hardest one by a massive margin, followed by Trousseau whose poison rain gimmick left me incredibly hosed up; by the time I finished his fight my party had maybe ~500 max hp. I died to Claude and Kaldena once when they pull out their action-blocking/instakill gimmicks but Harvey and Mugen were absolute jokes, I didn't die to either once; though in Harvey's case it's pretty fitting that he just got absolutely chumped by Osvald. I am kind of confused as to what the hell happened to Harvey in the end since he seemed to just kind of, evaporate to somewhere, it wasn't the same animation they used to denote the shadow monsters dying so that was a bit weird. I'm also pretty certain now that the Shadow, or the 7th source, or the one true magic or whatever is just some kind of interdimensional emotional energy, and how it manifests depending heavily on why it's drawn out and the user; Hikari basically confronting his shadow and turning it into the light is very similar to Osvald and Harvey both managing to access the One True Magic but somehow still manifesting in different ways. Since the Shadow and Vide seem to not be of this world as per the monsters appearing during Ochette's Scarlet Moon, it's possible that there's some weird imbalance caused by Dar'qest or whatever his name was ages ago that made the source and Vide be mostly shadow-oriented, being influenced by him. Since Vide and Hinoekagura are the only new gods and seem to be the sources of the two divine jobs this game I'm also thinking that they may be the same thing initially; if the 7th source is able to be both light and shadow, the dawn and the night, then if Hinoekagura split off to give the dawn to Solistia some time in the past, it makes sense that Vide is stuck only with the night, which is why everyone that attempts to manifest the source from that other dimension/Vide is only able to harness it in a way that manifests as Shadow, while Osvald who draws off his love for his daughter, and Hikari who would assumedly have both the blood of Vide through Clan Ku's lineage and Hinoekagura's through his mother is able to access both as well. Also is it just me or does the Conjurer class seem like garbage. Overall the advanced jobs this game haven't really seemed that worth it beyond Arcanist Osvald being able to pump out 30k per turn.
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Apr 28, 2023 15:57
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Polderjoch posted:Also is it just me or does the Conjurer class seem like garbage. Overall the advanced jobs this game haven't really seemed that worth it beyond Arcanist Osvald being able to pump out 30k per turn. Inventor, Armsmaster, and Arcanist are all great. Conjurer... eh, you can do some stuff with it but it comes so late and is so specific that I never really found much use for it. Armsmaster Osvald is even stronger than Arcanist, if you can believe it. Armsmaster lets him equip three weapons that boost the same element, and they all stack. You can do that with fire, ice, or lightning, but I think fire's the easiest and lets you use the Battle-Tested Staff for maximum elemental attack. Having three fire-boosting weapons (sword, spear, and dagger) and using Ignis Ardere can do like 150k damage if you also use his latent, it's pretty drat strong. Armsmaster is also really strong on anyone with good physical attack. Hikari is obvious and is very strong as an Armsmaster but he doesn't really need it to kick rear end since his learned skills and also Shinjumonjigiri are so strong, but Throne and Ochette can absolutely wreck poo poo with Armsmaster. Castti, too, though she often has better things to do with her turns than deal damage.
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Apr 28, 2023 16:18
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Polderjoch posted:Finished everyone's stories except Agnea's and Partitio's (though I'm pretty sure I'm at the save point right before Partitio's boss now), some disparate thoughts; I got some mileage out of inventor's "now every damage is critical damage" skill, and that dumb catapult, but I also only have one relic for arms master, and haven't found the other two super-jobs at all, so I'm basically using inventor because it's the only bonus job I actually managed to develop, 
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Apr 28, 2023 16:20
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In the endgame/postgame I mostly used Inventor for Arkhar's Coil. Using that at full boost with either Sealticge or Agnea's latent is a full HP, SP, and BP restore for the entire party, which is pretty great.
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Apr 28, 2023 16:21
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I grabbed Conjurer last since I did Hikari last, and it certainly seemed underwhelming. The last subskill that gives a chance to refund BP spent is rad when it happens. SP Saver is also nice, but you get a lot of SP items and the drain of random encounters is a non-issue because you're using one of the minimal/zero resource sweeping methods instead. The elemental chasers only proc once per attack(?) and the damage is very eh, but they do work to make everyone into additional breakers for minimal effort. The divine skill would be good except that Castti's Eternal BP Pharmacy runs 24/7 and doesn't close for holidays. If you know status effects are going to be in play then putting the resist on and spreading it could be a thing, I guess?
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Apr 28, 2023 16:24
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Harrow posted:In the endgame/postgame I mostly used Inventor for Arkhar's Coil. Using that at full boost with either Sealticge or Agnea's latent is a full HP, SP, and BP restore for the entire party, which is pretty great. Yeah I pretty much always used this tactic until I switched her to Cleric for the superboss.
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Apr 28, 2023 16:25
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There's a build that uses Armsmaster Hikari with someone else as a Conjurer where Hikari uses Thunder's Roar (Rai Mei's spear) to do two elemental follow-ups--one from the spear itself, and one from the Conjurer. (Hikari's an Armsmaster for this so he can equip as many element-boosting weapons as possible, and the build uses Hikari for Ultimate Stance.) It can do a shitload of damage if Hikari has a high elemental attack, but the thing is... he can also just do that by stacking physical attack and using Shinjumonjigiri or Limb from Limb. It's fun and flashy though so it's worth trying out, especially with Ultimate Stance making all of that hit all enemies.
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Apr 28, 2023 16:27
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Since we're talking about jobs and builds, here's the setup I used for the superboss. I'm curious what other people's setups were. Phase 1
Edit to add spoiler tags, I realized some people might consider this kind of thing spoilers. Harrow fucked around with this message at 16:48 on Apr 28, 2023 |
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Apr 28, 2023 16:45
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Harrow posted:Inventor, Armsmaster, and Arcanist are all great. Conjurer... eh, you can do some stuff with it but it comes so late and is so specific that I never really found much use for it. Ahh, I hadn't really considered to use Armsmaster to stack elemental boosts, but that does make sense. I only just put Castti on Armsmaster to try and use it more since I only just got another one of the relic weapons; I'm still missing the Bow and the Dagger but didn't really have any of its skills for a long while so didn't really have a reason to use it, same with Inventor.
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Apr 28, 2023 16:49
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Polderjoch posted:Ahh, I hadn't really considered to use Armsmaster to stack elemental boosts, but that does make sense. I only just put Castti on Armsmaster to try and use it more since I only just got another one of the relic weapons; I'm still missing the Bow and the Dagger but didn't really have any of its skills for a long while so didn't really have a reason to use it, same with Inventor. Yeah both of those can take a bit to get rolling because you have to go find items to unlock their skills, though a nice thing is that it also means their passives are unlocked for everyone automatically, and you can equip the job on anyone and they'll have all the skills right away without having to spend JP. If you have the axe for Armsmaster you have its strongest attack. Ochette or Throne can do a ton of damage with that.
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Apr 28, 2023 16:59
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Harrow posted:Yeah both of those can take a bit to get rolling because you have to go find items to unlock their skills, though a nice thing is that it also means their passives are unlocked for everyone automatically, and you can equip the job on anyone and they'll have all the skills right away without having to spend JP. Yeah, I've gotten most of their passives now, though aside from A Step Ahead which just seems obscenely broken to the point I'm debating just not using it they didn't like, seem too useful? Especially with only 4 slots it always felt like I'd want more straightforward passives like Summon Strength or something. But gotcha about the axe attack, when I wanted to go for axe attacks I'd usually just go for Drastic Measures or Cleaving Blow, Cleaving Blow in particular is incredibly funny for the amount of poo poo it can give during bosses.
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Apr 28, 2023 18:17
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Polderjoch posted:Yeah, I've gotten most of their passives now, though aside from A Step Ahead which just seems obscenely broken to the point I'm debating just not using it they didn't like, seem too useful? Especially with only 4 slots it always felt like I'd want more straightforward passives like Summon Strength or something. Yeah A Step Ahead is busted. I used it to sweep random encounters for most of the game, and it's really useful against the game's few really tough bosses to give you a head start before the bosses start to pull their bullshit. Armsmaster gives Peak Performance which is great for boosting damage for people who aren't using Alpione's Amulet for an even bigger boost. Castti's axe attacks are great (I used Hikari with Apothecary just for access to Sweeping Cleave for a while) though the nice thing about On the Hunt, the Armsmaster skill, is that it hits twice. With Deal More Damage it's pretty easy to put up some huge numbers with that. Really that kind of damage isn't truly necessary for anything short of the superboss but drat if it isn't fun to see 99999 twice in one attack. And for the superboss I used Armsmaster to boost Osvald's spells, since Throné and Hikari don't need it to do huge damage and Ochette was too busy breaking with Provoke Beasts to worry about doing big axe attacks.
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Apr 28, 2023 18:27
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Copped this little number and having a decent romp. Pokémon of old much? Level 9 Throne much?
MuadDib Atreides fucked around with this message at 19:24 on Apr 28, 2023 |
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Apr 28, 2023 19:19
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It's not Pokemon because the graphics aren't shite.
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Apr 28, 2023 19:29
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