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In Training posted:The final fight is indeed awesome but for all the praise people lay at the feet of Torna it's worth mentioning that the last 10% of the game sucks rear end and just puts a big stop sign in front of the final story cutscene until you go back and do 100% of sidequests for no clear narrative reason. Personally I didn't have such a huge issue with that part mostly because I tend to do every quest on sight as soon as they are available but I can understand the complain, since that's about like 60 sidequests you are suddenly forced to do just right about as you are to finish the game. Still only 10% suck is still a pretty good percentage. I imagine a proper remake would remove the mandatory padding barrier by expanding the story and having new areas to explore. Like one thing that dissapointed me from Torna is that in the main game you see these places like the lower levels of Tantal or the AEGIS HAMMER in Temperantia where Mythra and Malos were supposed to clash against each other yet you never explore them in Torna.
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Oct 23, 2019 22:47
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| # ? Jun 9, 2024 13:12 |
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e: ty internet for the 2x post
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Oct 23, 2019 22:47
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Playing this game for the first time and I'm about 20 hours in. So far I'm really frustrated and finding it a huge step backward from Xenoblade Chronicles which I last played like 2-3 years ago. The vertical map navigation is still a pain in the rear end and the compass loving sucks. The aggro system is somehow worse than the first game, I get slaughtered by dumb poo poo 50 levels above me that aggro'd halfway across the map. I feel like I spend half of my time in the games menus. To even get affinities to activate I have to bring them up one by one. There were so many things they could've improved upon and instead it's like they purposely made it more obtuse and frustrating. It feels like they layered on system after system without play testing or even really asking themselves what they were trying to accomplish. But what really bugs me about this game is that they developers seem to hate the player and do not respect your time at all. I grew up on JRPGs, I'm used to tedious poo poo but this game dials it up to 11. Half of the garbage fetch quests have second and sometimes even third steps followed by stupid requirements like sleeping at the inn or turning them in some weird area. There is no delineation of what is a garbage quest or not so far. I can see the rewards but how do I know if Derp Up II aux core is any good or not without tediously looking it up on the internet? How do I know if it isn't the first step in some quest to result in a rare blade or is somehow gating development poo poo? And the blade system seems pants on head idiotic for no good reason at all beyond wasting time. The combat I really want to like but I'm at chapter 3 and am only now barely able to make sense of it. I can't seem to reliably build up to level 2 or 3 combos fast enough even with attack cancelling so combat keeps stretching out. The tutorials were mediocre and I can't even seem to bring them up again. I just got finished watching a 30 minute Youtube tutorial where even the creator got mixed up with the terminology and other nonsense. The only fun part seems to be creating combos which of course I need to sit around auto-attacking, cancelling and yadda yadda just to build up for 3 minutes. Are you eventually able to get up to a level 3 combo easily? The timer finishes before I can even get there most of the time. I'm going to give this another story chapter to click and if it doesn't then I'm done with it. Really loving let down with this so far and I loved XC.
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Dec 1, 2019 20:54
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What chapter are you on? Do you have three blades on each character? At least play until you unlock all five characters. Combat mechanics do unlock rather slowly which is frustrating. I’m not sure what you’re saying about Aux Cores, it’s dumb that you have to refine them after you collect them but whether they’re good or bad is fairly straightforward. They’re very similar to gems were in the first game. And you’ll know if you’re on a quest because it shows up as an active quest in the menu.
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Dec 1, 2019 21:22
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Until late game (say chapter 5/6+) and post game, I spent large portions of the game effectively ignoring most the aux core management. I put together something at the start of each chapter and then just jammed out. Fetch quests and having to return to turn them in is probably one of the worst things in this game. Its nothing I can say to defend it. The other lovely design choice is having multiple critical paths hidden behind areas that have enemies much higher than your level. Every other JRPG convention says dont travel to areas with more powerful monsters. XBC2 encourages it.
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Dec 2, 2019 00:23
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Fetch quests are kind of a Xenoblade staple. At least they aren’t as bad as one
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Dec 2, 2019 00:25
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Blackbelt Bobman posted:What chapter are you on? Do you have three blades on each character? At least play until you unlock all five characters. Combat mechanics do unlock rather slowly which is frustrating. I’m not sure what you’re saying about Aux Cores, it’s dumb that you have to refine them after you collect them but whether they’re good or bad is fairly straightforward. They’re very similar to gems were in the first game. And you’ll know if you’re on a quest because it shows up as an active quest in the menu. I'm on Chapter 4. I'll try to slog through to the other party members. My comment about the aux core rewards was in regards to sidequests. There is a lot of bullshit tedium in the sidequests so I want to avoid grinding them all but it's hard to tell what is going to just give me some lovely cores and what is going to give me something meaningful like a blade. I googled one of the sidequests in my log, it looked like any other but no, it turns out you get a blade from it at the end. There's seemingly no way for me to differentiate those from anything else unless I'm missing something. Am I supposed to be just popping cores to get blades or should I wait until I have all of the party members? I popped a few rares from the DLC pack and got Boreas, Godfrey and Agate.
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Dec 2, 2019 05:46
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The Gunslinger posted:I'm going to give this another story chapter to click and if it doesn't then I'm done with it. Really loving let down with this so far and I loved XC. For what it's worth, I beat it and feel almost exactly the same about all your complaints, including how it compares to XC, how it doesn't respect your time at all, how the systems are just senselessly piled on top of each other, etc. I will say the combat gets pretty fun once you've got a full party. But the game's pacing is absolute trash, and yes even by JRPG standards. For the cores, pop cores on each party member until they have 3 named blades (meaning not the generic dudes). The exception is Rex, because he gets access to a few by plot alone and some other stuff. It's still worth having some legit blades on him too though. And if you don't have enough named blades, at least equip some generic dudes with weapon types that complement what you want those characters to do. Tender Bender fucked around with this message at 06:59 on Dec 2, 2019 |
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Dec 2, 2019 06:51
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Do not go insane chasing every side quest and trying to get every blade. You can almost always come back to places, with a full party and more fast travel markers and higher levels. Anytime you don't have a full party you should focus 90% of your effort on getting a full party unless you really really get the urge to explore which is always safe to do. The penalty for getting your rear end kicked is low and you can almost always fast travel, even in situations where it seems unplotlike.
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Dec 2, 2019 07:02
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I would recommend looking up the rewards for quests and prioritizing ones that give stuff you actually want. What I did was pulled cores at the beginning of each chapter. You want lots of generic blades to do mercenary missions but named blades are obviously the strongest. Rex gets a bunch of story blades but you’ll still want a couple of other named ones on him. Eventually he gets the ability to equip any Blade so don’t prioritize him.
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Dec 2, 2019 14:13
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Pretty sure the Sidequests tell you what you get. You can usually tell when you're going to get a rare Blade from a Sidequest because the quest will involve that Blade, and it says that their Core Crystal is a reward iirc.
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Dec 2, 2019 15:11
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irlZaphod posted:Pretty sure the Sidequests tell you what you get. I mean maybe it's an outlier but I'm doing the Vess quest and it gives no indication of that. Someone on gamefaqs mentioned that you can filter the quest log by blade though so I will try that. I'm at the beginning of chapter 4, how much longer until I fill out the rest of the party? quote:I would recommend looking up the rewards for quests and prioritizing ones that give stuff you actually want. Like from a spreadsheet or you just mean by checking the rewards themselves in the quest log?
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Dec 2, 2019 16:01
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The Gunslinger posted:I mean maybe it's an outlier but I'm doing the Vess quest and it gives no indication of that. Someone on gamefaqs mentioned that you can filter the quest log by blade though so I will try that. Both I guess? This spreadsheet has a ton of info (I don’t know if it’s been updated since the DLC and patches happened). There’s a link to side quests at the bottom. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FyYYaSARbKdzGAWE1WEGORYjvXMamAYPGeXwzNai9kM/htmlview#gid=2007291920
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Dec 2, 2019 16:10
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The Gunslinger posted:I mean maybe it's an outlier but I'm doing the Vess quest and it gives no indication of that. Someone on gamefaqs mentioned that you can filter the quest log by blade though so I will try that. You get all the party members by the end of chapter #5. You can only have 3 party members active though so it doesn't really change your moment to moment gameplay up that much, although I did like how one of them plays as a tank much more than the nopon. The real difference is felt by getting 3 good blades on each party member so you have a full set of moves and more combo potential. Another huge thing, that I remembered only from going through my posts in this thread, is unlocking the affinity chart nodes on each character to let them cancel arts into other arts, and the ones that let you use X, Y, and B arts at the start of battle. Those make random encounters flow so much faster and it's batshit that when the game starts your default is to start each battle and wait for your abilities to slowly charge.
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Dec 2, 2019 17:50
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Tender Bender posted:You get all the party members by the end of chapter #5. By the end of I think it’s chapter 5, when Tora gets his “second Blade” / when your 4th permanent party member joins, (and also, Rex’s story blade that isn’t The Main Plot Macguffin gets unlocked), is probably a better benchmark than the fifth party member. It’s at that point that you’ll be able to cleanly put together 3 part driver combos, as Nia can apply Break with any Claw/Ball and she should be using Claws/Balls, Rex can Topple with Pyra, Tora can Launch, and Rex can quick switch to Smash. Give Rex any and all cores that speed up his switching (and the accessory that does so as well), and the combat becomes a thousand times more engaging. Once you’re reliably doing driver combos, getting blade (elemental) combos will come more easily as well.
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Dec 2, 2019 18:08
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Thanks for the tips, I've just started this game as well and have seen some good advice. My issue is whenever I salvage I can never hit the first button. My friend I borrowed the game from just says I need to git gud and practice. I think I've managed it once in about 40 salvages. Even at the easy A A B one in the second town I can't get credit for that first A. I kind of want to get another controller to see if its the joycons, or try it in handheld mode to see if its wireless input lag, but I nail all the others unless its a fast and short one I'm not used to yet. I was fine fishing in 3 houses, even catching the goddess messenger fish multiple times, and I hit the cancelling and ultimates in combat in this game trivially, but the first salvage button at every node never works for me. bagrada fucked around with this message at 19:55 on Dec 2, 2019 |
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Dec 2, 2019 19:13
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The Gunslinger posted:I mean maybe it's an outlier but I'm doing the Vess quest and it gives no indication of that. The Gunslinger posted:Like from a spreadsheet or you just mean by checking the rewards themselves in the quest log? bagrada posted:My issue is whenever I salvage I can never hit the first button. My friend I borrowed the game from just says I need to git gud and practice. I think I've managed it once in about 40 salvages. Even at the easy A A B one in the second town I can't get credit for that first A. I kind of want to get another controller to see if its the joycons, or try it in handheld mode to see if its wireless input lag, but I nail all the others unless its a fast and short one I'm not used to yet. I was fine fishing in 3 houses, even catching the goddess messenger fish multiple times, and I hit the cancelling and ultimates in combat in this game trivially, but the first salvage button at every node never works for me.
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Dec 3, 2019 10:52
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I had much better results doing salvaging in handheld mode instead on my TV. Not sure if it's just confirmation bias or a thing.
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Dec 3, 2019 17:46
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waah posted:I had much better results doing salvaging in handheld mode instead on my TV. Not sure if it's just confirmation bias or a thing. It's definitely a thing with a modern tv that's adding visual lag. Enable a "game mode" if you have it. (It's why games with tight timing like necrodancer have a calibration phase when you first start)
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Dec 3, 2019 18:01
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irlZaphod posted:She's bonded to an old man who is very clearly going to die incredibly soon. It couldn't be more telegraphed if it tried. That was the funniest loving thing in the whole game. The sad music and touching moment as he closes his eyes and you hear Vess vanishing round the corner...then it suddenly slams back to the town’s default bright, super-cheerful jazz music as Rex swipes the core crystal and fucks off without another word, just leaving the dude’s corpse there on the porch for one of the neighbours to find once it starts making a smell. It was obviously intended to be very emotional, but the disconnect from the cut scene back to gameplay was very surreal and made the whole thing hilarious.
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Dec 5, 2019 12:18
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One thing they did right is erring on the side of fun and game over plot in several points, like in newgame+ where she's also standing there with you the whole time
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Dec 5, 2019 23:12
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I'm nearing the end of my first run. I'm in chapter 9 and poo poo is going down so of course I teleported out to help bird chefs test fish recipes and to make holiday cookies to distribute to kids. I still have 7 or so blade quests to do but mostly I'm just killing time while Ursula does her thing, closing in on the 80s so not long now. I have all the available rares except KOS-MOS, Zenobia, Newt, and the DLC blade that requires having a common giant with an ether cannon (wish I'd known that before flushing several dozen blades after bumping into the cap so much). I haven't done any active core farming yet. Should I do my farming now or wait until new game+ where I hear I can buy legendary cores with bonus xp? I'd really like KOS-MOS since I played through all 3 xenosagas when they were new, but I also have too much of a game backlog to spend the dozens of hours a friend of mine did farming and failing to get her. (He farmed pre-DLC when the game was new, mindlessly while at work).
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Jan 3, 2020 19:56
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I need to do the torna dlc one of these days
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Jan 3, 2020 20:18
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It cannot be repeated enough that Torna: The Golden Country is excellent and in some ways better than the main game.
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Jan 4, 2020 15:49
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bagrada posted:I'm nearing the end of my first run. I'm in chapter 9 and poo poo is going down so of course I teleported out to help bird chefs test fish recipes and to make holiday cookies to distribute to kids. I still have 7 or so blade quests to do but mostly I'm just killing time while Ursula does her thing, closing in on the 80s so not long now. I ended up doing a fair amount of grinding on the big legendary cow in the first town, and if you just spam smash combos on him you’ll get plenty of cores for your rare blade farming needs. (That said, if you do everything you want to do that doesn’t need NG+ other than finding those last few rares, start NG+, since you’ll need to farm up another half dozen blades there.)
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Jan 4, 2020 16:42
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I just started X. Oh boy. There's a lot of... stuff, going on in this game, huh. I have absolutely no clue what's happening in battle.
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Jan 8, 2020 04:18
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Amppelix posted:I just started X. Oh boy. There's a lot of... stuff, going on in this game, huh. I have absolutely no clue what's happening in battle. I tried to start X but immediately stopped when I couldn't figure out how to heal and decided to wait for a Switch version.
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Jan 8, 2020 04:56
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As far as I can tell, the most accessible way of healing is using Soul Voices which, by the way, is a god drat doozy of a system all on its own.
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Jan 8, 2020 05:04
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Amppelix posted:As far as I can tell, the most accessible way of healing is using Soul Voices One of the (many) upsides to playing XCX on an emulator is you can just set soul voices to auto-succeed. It's still an awful and insufficient tire fire of a system, but at least you're not having to watch for button presses while focusing on combat. OTOH with the right builds you really don't need much, if any, healing. A XCX remake needs to scrap soul voice healing, among other things, and just add actual support skills. And reserve party slots so you can bring other characters rather than spend 90% of the game with the same two people. Though at least Elma can be OP as poo poo if Cross is setup to synergize with her. Lin's just terrible and made worse by her constant interactions with Tatsu because it means you have to see Tatsu. Co-op for the main story would kick all sorts of rear end too. World Tyrant stuff was neat but it was ultimately "do multiple people know how to lock down the tyrant? Yes? Enjoy your free pile of loot."
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Jan 8, 2020 06:22
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Soul voices and soul voice healing were way cooler than dedicated support skills.
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Jan 8, 2020 06:25
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I figured I'd give this game another try before the remaster of the first one comes out. The last couple of times I tried to play it I pushed forwards too fast to try to get all the party members and got frustrated because of it - this time I'm taking my time and I feel a lot more secure in where I'm at and what I'm doing. The one thing I'm not really sure about is how to properly marshal bosses around? I was trying to take on Jugger, the guy you have to fight for Merc level 3, and he'll sometimes just turn around and wipe most of the party. I managed to get him down with a quick enough Chain Attack but I don't really know in general if there's tells I'm supposed to be watching out for or if it's just a matter of out-levelling some enemies when they hit their rage phases.
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Jan 8, 2020 06:45
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Pretty much the entire reason for Soul Voices was because in XB1 everyone ended up going for the proto version of that mechanic because it was far more effective healing than actual dedicated healers without breaking the flow of combat (again, like actual dedicated healers) so they just made it part of the mechanics.
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Jan 8, 2020 06:52
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Stelas posted:I figured I'd give this game another try before the remaster of the first one comes out. The last couple of times I tried to play it I pushed forwards too fast to try to get all the party members and got frustrated because of it - this time I'm taking my time and I feel a lot more secure in where I'm at and what I'm doing. Yeah more or less the main strategy for mid to late game is fighting enemies normally, making combo orbs appear, and when rage happens, starting a chain attack to basically blitz them down to dead immediately before they can kill you.
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Jan 8, 2020 06:56
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Enforcers/Combat Knives get the Repair ability, which heals 5% to 10% of a character's HP depending on what rank or whatever it is.
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Jan 8, 2020 06:59
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Stelas posted:The one thing I'm not really sure about is how to properly marshal bosses around? I was trying to take on Jugger, the guy you have to fight for Merc level 3, and he'll sometimes just turn around and wipe most of the party. I managed to get him down with a quick enough Chain Attack but I don't really know in general if there's tells I'm supposed to be watching out for or if it's just a matter of out-levelling some enemies when they hit their rage phases. (Jin also has this move because of course he does)
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Jan 8, 2020 07:04
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I desperately want an XCX remake for switch if only so I can use the switch pro controller instead of either the Wii U itself or that behemoth of a pro controller they made for Wii U. Makes my hands angry every time I play it.
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Jan 8, 2020 22:48
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Amppelix posted:As far as I can tell, the most accessible way of healing is using Soul Voices This is accurate. When choosing your moves for everyone, you'll want to consider not just the standard RPG stuff of "how much offense versus defense do I want" but also Soul Voice interactions. If your party has a bunch of yellow and green soul voices, don't go and load up on red melee arts. Correspondingly, don't set Soul Voices you can't trigger. You can get a sort of dedicated support class, but you're never going to have someone who can put out Sharla levels of healing throughput with arts. Like a bunch of things in Xenoblade X, it's about how much setup and planning you do ahead of time. ETA: This, by the way, is the real danger with fighting higher level enemies. Just like in Xenoblade 1 and 2, there's accuracy penalties incurred with fighting too much above level. And similar to Xenoblade 1, there's a motivation stat for everyone in combat. Missing keeps that stat from rising, and it's a huge factor in how often Soul Voices trigger when their circumstances arise. Rosalie_A fucked around with this message at 23:30 on Jan 8, 2020 |
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Jan 8, 2020 23:28
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Or you can be like me and go through the entire game start to finish and never touch Soul Voices.
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Jan 9, 2020 00:34
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Uh, what does that mean? Did you somehow intentionally avoid using them in battle or what?
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Jan 9, 2020 02:03
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Wow, love how X gives an ostensibly level 12 mission with a completely unbeatable level 15 boss at the end. Great stuff.
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Jan 9, 2020 05:40
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