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Update 13: Cast Away.png) We find ourselves in another new area, with another new god. Oh, hello! I didn't see you there. You're certainly a new face. I'm Lister. Did you know that the Faraway Enclave is... (Lister unleashes an obnoxiously loud scream-yawn in the middle of his sentence. You have absolutely no idea what he just said, but you nod understandingly anyway.) Ah, good. It's settled then! I'll see you later on, Mysterio. Thematically I like Lister a lot. It's not clear if Lister is supposed to be the god of good fortune or just fortune as a general concept of luck or fate, but either way, it makes sense that it would be conducive to laziness. I feel like they're trying a bit too hard on his dialogue though. I still don't know what a scream-yawn is. Also his face is kind of giving me the creeps. "How can I better serve you?": *yawn* Hmm? Oh, you can bring me some sea pineapples. I love sea pineapples. I also love to sleep. Bring me some sleep. *snore* "What can you tell me about this realm?": It's a peaceful place. *yawn* Perfect for taking naps. There's also lots of treasure to be found, and since I like you, I'm going to tell you exactly where to find it. *yawn* zZzZzZz .png) Brownies are new. They've got an emphasis on AOE attacks; in fact, this guy's ability is literally a more powerful version of the Splash buff. They stack, too. .png) I forget that I had equipped the sword with Final Oblation onto the arachnalisk and accidentally suicide him by provoking. Whoops. The newly minted level 1 smiths don't last very long regardless of the crystal smith's defense bonus, either. .png) We start to get into a bit of trouble as a result. Von Stauffenberg tries to play damage control with resurrection spells. .png) Getting Brimjob Jr. back up should help patch up the team's defense, and more importantly, it effectively lets us give Bone Zone double turns since Rabid Dementia gives out free attacks on demand. .png) The damage bonus from the berserk buff on the spell doesn't hurt either. I mean, it does hurt, but only for the enemies. .png) Next battle I don't accidentally suicide a key party member right off the bat and things go a lot better. It helps that the smith twins gained about 5 levels from the previous battle. .png) Other imps no good! We find and kill other imps and take their crab helmets! Collect all the crab helmets and take over the island! Faraway Enclave has imp huts just like the jungle. This time they all want the same thing, so you at least you don't have to go hunting for three different types of mushrooms. .png) You gain 50 favor with Lister, God of Fortune. What a weird looking fruit. I can't help but think it looks... familiar.  Not exactly the most topical reference, but (unlike Lister) it's understated and doesn't make itself obnoxious. The lo-fi sprite does a good job of actually looking like some kind of weird fruit while still being just recognizable enough to identify the joke. .png) It's also nice that the game is generally good about telling you what basic fetch quest objects are for instead of leaving you to wander around with them. .png) *gasp* Human has crab helmet? Give it now! (You hand the conch over to the imp. It happily runs back into its hut, shutting the door behind it. Crisis averted.) Crab helmet is definitely a funnier euphemism than feel-good. .png) There are a ton of random crystal outcroppings around here. It doesn't really fit the setting (tropical island paradise = giant purple crystals???) but it makes mechanical sense, considering crystal is probably the highest-demand basic resource. .png) A random enemy drops a chest with an okayish spell. The MP cost is obscene for a single target attack spell but it's decent enough otherwise. .png) The map generator stuck one of the imp huts in a dead end corner of the map far away from anything else and I don't have any spare shells. Some god of fortune you are, Lister  .png) Another new monster! I really dig the design of the dragon but they're annoying dicks. .png) The dragon family's powers tend to be about weakening enemies in response to their actions. The Dragon Scout drops an attack nerf any time any enemy attacks any target. This gets frustrating in a hurry when you've got a build based around lots of counterattacks--if this thing doesn't go down in a hurry, our valkyrie is going to wind up with a dumpster tier attack stat. .png) The dragon itself is incredibly flimsy, which is great if you're trying to kill things efficiently and terrible if you're trying to extract a core for future summoning and breeding potential. .png) Speaking of breeding, we find a breeding combo from a monolith. This one's... gonna be a while. .png) What's the big idea, Lister? The other gods just give us stuff for free. At any rate, I'm going to hold off on this for now. .png) Some of the chests here are Mimics. I guess this is an argument that Lister represents both good and bad luck. .png) This is Bone Zone's damage through 50% damage reduction from Protect and enough defense that most of our attackers do 0 damage, and it only takes it to a bit under half health. This thing is scary, but Bone Zone is scarier. Because he is a skeleton, you see. .png) The rewards aren't even very good by mimic standards. .png) A treasure map yields a better chest. Brain Freeze is a pretty niche spell but it can be a lifesaver if an enemy rolls a really obnoxious spell. .png) You gain 300 favor with Lister, God of Fortune. (You hear a faint whisper, and immediately recognize it as the voice of Lister, God of Fortune.) *yawn*... come and see me... or don't, and I'll just sleep. We trek back across the level to visit the isolated imp hut and finish pacifying the imps for a big reward. .png) As an added bonus, Lister throws in a juicy treasure chest for completing the imp quest. .png) Shards are a consumable resource you can use to juice your rituals. Stockpile a bunch of them and you can complete rituals without having to leave home base. .png) Axes carry a split Attack/Defense bonus, which can be decent if you want to make your attackers slightly less flimsy. This one comes with a built in trait. .png) It's nothing radical or game-changing, but it's an extremely nice perk. There are lots of annoying debuffs and a random chance to resist them (that scales up in long, difficult battles) is great. This thing's getting equipped ASAP. .png) Even the breeding combo we get is one we can use. (This is different from a breeding combo that is useful, however.) .png) But that's not all, folks! We also get an extremely juicy spell. Not only is it fairly affordable, it's also got some decent built-in autocast triggers. .png) Lister, I take back everything bad I said about your dumb ugly face, because that was a great haul. (A little Siren Oracle approaches you. It looks like it wants to join your group!) Sirens are Lister's chosen creature family. Their abilities are vaguely defined but generally about negating or nerfing enemy actions. There's a lot of annoyance potential there, but most of them are pretty tame. .png) Voice of Lister: Gee, thanks! You gained 150 favor with Lister, God of Fortune. Once you hit a favor threshold any further gains are wasted until you go talk to the god's altar and gain the reward. I didn't want to do the Moai head earlier because I knew there would be a big chunk of favor coming from the imp quest. The Wilson fruits are pretty common here too, so overall Lister tends to be pretty easy to build favor with. .png) Another Mimic. Mend can be pretty annoying due to their massive HP pools, but it's still nothing Bone Zone can't handle. Unfortunately this one just dropped a few paltry resources. .png) As it happens, the teleportation shrine is also really isolated. It's hard to tell but it does kind of feel that different realms have their own tweaks to the map generator, with the Faraway Enclave being more prone to remote "islands" like this and the one hut stuck in the corner. .png) Unfortunately there weren't quite enough fights to finish the cooking ritual. We could use the shard from Lister's quest reward to fill it up, but that would waste half the effect. .png) Back home, we can start up another ritual alongside it. This way we can continue farming energy from fights even after the cooking ritual is done. .png) Not much in the way of new creatures (there are a few spoilers as this roundup was taken at a later level.) The Brownie's ability is pretty neat but his attack is just a little bit on the light side. .png) Similarly, I accidentally got the siren a couple levels from the shared experience perk before I remembered to take a look. You can still get the idea; they're squishy spellcasters with moderate speed. Silence does exactly what you'd expect. Scorn is the equivalent for physical attacks. Inflicting one automatically removes the other, so you can't just shut something down completely. As far as debuffs to apply with physical attacks (especially uselessly weak ones) they're not bad, although the flexibility actually makes it annoyingly inconsistent; the biggest magical threats are usually utility spells, so it sucks if an annoying enemy is threatening to shut down your party and you can't silence it because it has slightly more attack than intelligence. .png) We do, however, have some new breeding combinations available. I'm showing these off just for demonstration purposes; I'm not actually going to burn the resources to summon the constitutent parts for these, let alone actually breed them. Especially this guy. He's another flavor of Wolpertinger and possibly even worse than the basic one. Death spells include a lot of double-edged swords and casting them at random can be actively detrimental. At least the dumb niche Sorcery spells are basically harmless. .png) The Brownie Trickster is somewhat interesting in that its one of the few creatures that inflicts AOE status with its attacks, but it's still an unreliable proc for an unreliable status effect. .png) The implications of having a creature family called "Demigods" don't make much sense given what little plot the game has, but you have to admit they're pretty cool. They tend to be semi-bulky support casters whose gimmick revolves around manipulating health. Generally they're more interesting than good. As for the Timeless Master in particular, note that his attack sets the target's HP to half of its maximum health and not half its current health. He's great at softening up a boss or miniboss right off the bat or weakening something to make extraction easier, and in a pinch he can bring a critically injured party member back up to half health (although this still counts as an attack, so this strategy doesn't play nicely with valkyries and other counterattack abilities.) It's also a safe way to bring an ally's health down if they have an ability that's based on missing HP (like the Final Oblation ability on the one sword.) It's kind of a nice little utility toolkit but nothing amazingly powerful.
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Aug 9, 2017 21:53
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Does the wording of Equilibrium mean that the Timeless Master can actually kill targets, but only if they have exactly one HP?
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Aug 9, 2017 23:05
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FredMSloniker posted:Does the wording of Equilibrium mean that the Timeless Master can actually kill targets, but only if they have exactly one HP? I assume it's there to make the ability play nice with other triggers, but I am curious about this as well.
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Aug 10, 2017 01:22
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I'm not even sure, to be honest. I would assume so, though--Siralim is generally pretty good about descriptions being literally accurate. Perhaps we'll find out. Another nice perk of an attack that always deals 1 damage guaranteed is that the Timeless Master can break Shell at will (assuming he can hit, anyhow.) Other support monsters with low attack are frequently going to struggle to break 0 damage, which won't affect Shell, so having a support guy that can pop shells is a nifty side effect. the holy poopacy fucked around with this message at 01:59 on Aug 10, 2017 |
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Aug 10, 2017 01:55
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Update 14: What Dreams May come Welcome to Heaven. Sort of. .png) Please feel free to take from my realm what you need. Henceforth, I will keep a close watch over you during your travels. I dig Surathli's visual design but her personality is pretty bland and generic. .png) Unlike Pokemon and most other monster training games Siralim never really gets into the relationship between humans and monsters. Considering that many of the monsters are intelligent humanoids that you send to fight and die and then smash together into eggs, it's probably for the best. .png) Our first fight has a new friend show up. Griffons are another "tribal" monster family. They're one of my favorites, but it will be a while before any of the really fun ones show up. .png) More new friends! Gargoyles are, somewhat arbitrarily, all about chaos magic. This one is kind of like the Lich Priest in that he gives the entire team access to a free attack spell. In this case it's Chaos Bolt, a single target spell that partially penetrates defense. That's kind of a big deal and makes these guys a lot more reliable for a magic offense than the lich is, but the gargoyle itself is not nearly as good at spellcasting. .png) Your creatures will start each battle with Mend in this realm. Surathli's realm has angels scattered around that will give you free buffs. .png) It also gives out free weapons! Like the gem fragments in Refuge of the Magi you need to collect a bunch of fragments just to get one, but it's still a nice freebie. .png) These silver apples are a good source of essence. Not the most useful resource, but I'll take it. .png) ...and it gazes right back at you. Mirrorballs are a unique feature of this realm. You can probably guess what they do. .png) Hey, these guys look familiar! Mirrorball fights aren't exact copies of your party; their levels, stats, artifacts, and spells are all completely normal for random monsters on the current level, only the species match. This is handy because it means you're a lot less likely to get stomped by your own strategy since the enemies won't be specced out for it. .png) Most importantly, you're free to bring artifacts with whatever overpowered creature abilities you want and never have to worry about mirrorballs turning them against you. The new axe is paying out huge dividends here. .png) The reward for beating the mirrorball is... not terribly impressive. I already have like a hundred of these things and the game just keeps shoveling them at you for random "achevements." You can even see another achievement popping up under the loot box. .png) You gained 50 favor with Surathli, Goddess of Light. In addition to the silver apples that yield essence there are also larger, golden apples for favor. .png) You cast a cleansing spell on the corrupted obelisk. The corruption manifests into a pack of hostile creatures! The main source of favor in this realm are these obelisks, though. .png) They're a bog standard fight, no unifying theme like some of the realm-specific objects have. .png) They do cough up chests afterwards in addition to the favor gain, which is pretty nice. .png) The chests aren't anything special, but there are usually several obelisks per level. .png) Case in point. .png) We find a sigil randomly lying around. We've been stockpiling these for a while, but we're still a ways off from being able to use them. .png) Random resources are available as little darker cloud puffs. .png) The monolith isn't terribly exciting. .png) We run into another dragon and finally manage to get a core for it. .png) A chest yields some more cloth. We still haven't unlocked the NPC that will let us use these, but we don't have enough yet anyhow. .png) Here's an interesting crafting material. We don't really have enough spell gems for slots to be a pressing concern (even for sorcery spells, there aren't enough good ones to make choosing difficult) but this can be really handy later on as you get more autocast spells and access to effects that care about how many spells you have. .png) Like Eternity's End, you can find portals here to supercharge your ritual progress. .png) Both the cooking and forging rituals are now done. .png) We get another buff, and it's a doozy. Unfortunately we've already cleaned out most of the level (or perhaps fortunately, since Multistrike would make it much harder to wear things down for extracting without killing them.) .png) A chest coughs up another new consumable. Keeping your Power Balance high makes the resource grind a lot smoother, but breeding and other tasks will drain your balance in a hurry, so fairies are extremely useful. .png) A shield that boosts dodge and starts with Grace could be an interesting start to a dodge tanking build. I've never been enthusiastic about dodge strategies, though. .png) I've got a start on being able to enchant my own dodge artifacts, if I do ever decide to go that route. .png) Oh, hello. There's another status effect I can stick on an artifact now, although honestly for most purposes there are going to be better things to do with slots on an artifact. .png) I finish collecting weapon fragments and get a pretty decent artifact out of it. Nothing amazing here, but it's just a nice well rounded weapon with some nifty side perks. .png) Unfortunately, Surathli is a bit stingy on favor so who knows when we'll be able to get back here anyhow. .png) Back at home we collect our two finished rituals. .png) The blacksmith now has a much wider range of artifact types available. Sword/Heavy Shield/Necklace were there from the start, and we've already seen Axes (Attack/Defense), Rings (Speed/Intelligence), and Staves (Attack/Intelligence.) That leaves 3 new artifacts we haven't seen before. Armor gives a huge chunk of HP and is extremely handy for some builds. Defense is typically better for conventional tanks since it can negate damage entirely, but some monsters have damage redirection abilities and all the defense in the world won't save you when your squishy teammates get flattened and pass the damage on to you. .png) Boots are a pure speed boost and are insanely useful for support monsters that want to get utility effects up ASAP. .png) Helmets are a mix of HP and Defense. They can be good for defense tanks that want a buffer against damage that goes through defense. .png) Over at the chef, we've got a couple new options from completing the ritual. Both meat and fonduing are new, so I waste no time in trying them out. .png) The Steak Tips & Cheese Sauce will provide you with the following bonus: You have a 100% better chance to find Breeding Recipes. The recipe recipe is technically useless since you can just look up all breeding combinations on a wiki, but I still think it's fun. Breeding recipes are relatively common drops, so you'll see a lot of impact from this meal where some types of drops are so rare that you might not get any of them even with the meal bonus. .png) Creature roundup! Dragons are fast and have quite good defense, but their HP is terribly low. These guys shouldn't really be taking attacks anyhow though; the best use for them is to pair them up with a Stronghold or other tank that can draw all the attacks while the dragon nerfs everything into uselessness. .png) Chaos Bolt is a very decent attack spell, and the defense penetration on it means that even mediocre spellcasters can get some mileage out of it. Which is good, because this guy is a very mediocre spellcaster. .png) Griffons are really fun. Broadly, their theme is sharing actions or gaining extra actions from other griffons, so they can get really crazy in a full griffon build. This guy's ability doesn't sound that exciting but it's deceptively good: the defense status is insanely good and can be used to trigger certain autocast spells and abilities. Still, there's not much you can do with it until you get some of the other griffon variations.
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Aug 10, 2017 22:06
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Update 15: Apocalypse Now The team's starting to get a little bit stale. Time to mix things up. This... guy (?) has been hanging around the stables for many levels since Friden gave it to us. .png) Mmmmmm, I could really go for a Timeless Master Egg omelette right about now. But I've got better things to do with this. .png) So far all this sword has been good for is accidentally committing suicide when I forget I have it equipped and randomly decide to provoke. Time to change that. .png) We need some new tools as well. The blacksmith coughs up a brand new pair of boots for our new demigod. .png) While I'm here, you can rename artifacts at the blacksmith too. Beats the hell out of memorizing the difference between Sword, L4 and Sword, L5. .png) Sadly, we don't have the materials to stick even more speed on our new boots. .png) That increased max health enchantment looks tempting though. The newly-christened Ragnarok doesn't have any open slots, but the enchanter can clear out some of the random modifiers it started with. Disenchanting costs a ton of essence, but we've got 20k essence in the bank. .png) There we go. .png) Fun Fact: once you get the enchanter the map gains a secret passage from the blacksmith/enchanter room to the teleportation shrine. You still have to walk about 7-8 screens to get from the summoning brazier to the hatchery. .png) We find ourselves in familiar territory. We missed out on getting the first tier favor reward from Torun the first time around, so this is a good place to revisit. Realm Quests are something new. If you've already met a god, you get a little mini-quest every time you visit their domain. Generally they're very basic collection quests, occasionally with a fight or two involved. Not terribly exciting, but the rewards are pretty nice. .png) I almost kill this group before I realize we haven't seen the purple skullface guy yet. That's an Anguish Banshee and it likes to eat MP--the banshee family in general is all about manipulating mana. .png) One of these rock piles actually turns up something useful. .png) Sort of useful, anyhow. All the Crusaders have a general theme of gaining survivability when they attack, but this one's probably not as useful as the Dusk Crusader that's available almost right from the start. .png) Annoyingly, this group rolled a spell that auto-casts a party wide shell at the start of battle. So the first hit on each enemy gets negated. .png) So it's a good thing Bone Zone has a weapon that hits twice now. .png) We picked this up a while back and haven't really had a very good use for it. Attack spells generally aren't going to do much damage unless you invest a lot in them, but all it takes is 1 damage to break Shell. .png) Unfortunately, it turns out they've got enough mana to keep putting shell back up. .png) With a third of the team badly underleveled, things get... a little hairy as a result. At this point it's just a matter of turtling until poison finishes off the minotaur. .png) It works, and we get enough favor from the totem to get our first rewards from Torun. .png) WELL, DON'T JUST STAND THERE LIKE A !@#$ING INVALID - MAKE YOURSELF USEFUL. TAKE THIS YIPPITY YAPPITY IMP OUT OF MY SIGHT. I DON'T CARE WHAT YOU DO WITH IT. DROWN IT IN A RIVER FOR ALL I CARE. JUST GET IT THE !@#$ OUT OF MY FACE. You have received an Imp Hexer creature! It has been sent to your stable. Imps are another spellcasting-oriented family, this time specializing in Nature spells. .png) This batch of enemies is a good opportunity to grab a couple more cores of some newer creatures, as well as hopefully show off the new team build. .png) The Forsaken Swampdweller's ability triples its HP pool. The Timeless Master can set it to half health. (The question came up in the thread earlier if the Timeless Master could kill a creature at exactly 1 health. It looks like it sets health to 50% first before it inflicts 1 damage, so unless you manage to manipulate something into having 2 max health, looks like you're not going to kill anything with the 1 direct damage component of the attack.) .png) The other part of the Forsaken Swampdweller's ability is that it loses some HP at the start of each turn, bringing its health down even lower. It provokes... .png) ...which triggers the Final Oblation ability on its artifact. Final Oblation deals damage equal to twice the user's missing HP--and the Forsaken is missing a lot of HP. .png) Kaboom. That's as much damage as Bone Zone getting a lucky shot on a squishy target, against all enemies, regardless of defense. The devil seems to be holding a death-resistant shield, hence the lower damage. Even so, it's not enough to save him. .png) We find another breeding formula tucked in a pile of rocks. We can make this right away, but it's a bit disappointing compared to the smiths we've already got. .png) It will be a while before I get tired of this. Final Oblation in artifact form is not something a player could reasonably expect to have access to at this point in the game, but if you've got it, flaunt it. .png) Between low levels and mediocre speed it takes a while for the Forsaken's turn to come up, which gives everyone else a chance to dick around and farm cores. Ethereal Knives turns out to do a better job of softening things up than I would have thought--it's powered by Speed instead of Intelligence and smiths have surprisingly good speed. Even so, you can start to see the limits of attack spells--this is about as good as you could expect from an uninvested caster with high natural stats, and while it's a pretty good amount of damage overall it's spread out. Pretty good for farming cores, not so much for ending fights quickly. .png) As a nice bonus, the Holy Armor spell we got from Lister's realm has an autocast on hit trigger. Typically this wouldn't be super useful since the support casters that are going to get the most mileage from the spell aren't going to be attacking very often, but the Timeless Master's special attack counts, so he occasionally gets free barriers from setting up our nuke. .png) I mean, not that it matters. .png) Huh, I didn't think mimics really showed up here. .png) They have even more HP than forsaken swampdwellers do, so being able to drop them to half health is actually pretty handy. After that Bone Zone can dispatch it without difficulty. .png) Another formula we can use! Breeding options really accelerate as you collect more monster types. I forget what these guys do but pit worms are generally pretty good. .png) These are the boxes of weapons that we've been collecting for the realm quest. This is about half again as much faith as you get from clearing out most levels, so they're a pretty good deal. .png) Realm Quests also give you a loot drop comparable to a really good chest. This one's got a couple points of interest. .png) First, yet another flavor of wolpertinger. We can make it immediately, although it would cost us our only Forsaken and we're kind of using it right now. .png) More importantly, we finally find our first rune! Runes are collectibles you can equip for passive bonuses. Typically runes are all about making buffs or debuffs more advantageous. Theoretically this would make our pit wraith marginally more useful, but nope, still don't care. .png) We also find our second rune. If we had a chaos monster to cast the Lacerate spell we found this might be kind of handy. .png) Not bad, not bad. To a conventional caster this is stupidly expensive for a mediocre attack spell, but this gives low-Intelligence creatures a way to get some magic damage in. .png) Runes are classed by magic school and you can equip 1 rune per school. Right now we really don't have any reason to not use the two that we have. .png) We find a pandemonium token in a chest. I haven't used any lately, so why not? Someone reaches down from the sky and snatches the token from your hands! .png) You gained 280 favor with Vulcanar, God of Fire. Not too shabby. In the long run that's not a super meaningful amount, but favor is a huge grind and every bit counts. .png) That about wraps it up. Back home, we've got a couple new ritual options. The Arcanist lets you dick around with sigils, which we still can't even use. There are a few ranks of improved salvaging and if you want to maximize your resources there's not much reason to salvage until you get it fully upgraded, so that can wait. .png) Finally getting some access to merchants, on the other hand, can be pretty handy. It usually won't be super useful right off the bat since we're still kind of broke but you can get some neat stuff. .png) Creature roundup! The banshee is our only new core. Like the dragon it's got remarkably good defense but doesn't really have the HP to back it up. It's a great utility caster--not only does it have a free mana denial power, it can top its own mana up at will. .png) This guy is the bane of defense-stacking strategies, which is bad news for us since we can do it better than randomly-generated monsters. Shellbust lowers the target's defense and then deals static damage equal to double the defense drop. Thankfully the scaling on stat-lowering spells is not as generous as straight damage, but it's still capable of dealing a scary chunk of damage that defense can't mitigate, while also reducing the power of defense to mitigate further damage. He's arguably more useful than the gargoyle or lich if you want to give spellcasting options to a party that's not centered around magic, since shellbust gives even more consistent damage than the gargoyle's Chaos Bolt. Even so, I'd just as soon not have to deal with him. .png) We have a few new breeding options. The Dark Brim Smith is pretty sad compared to the regular smith or crystal smith. If you really, really need a certain buff it could be useful I guess but generally by the time you create that kind of build you'll have better options. .png) This guy is not an improvement either. Most of the pit worm variants are about attrition damage, so a speed penalty is pretty mediocre in comparison--the most important property of speed is getting to act first in combat and by the time the speed drop fires it will be too late to steal the all-important first turn. He could be useful in stall-oriented strategies since he makes it easier and easier to dodge enemy attacks as the fight goes on, but generally not super impressive. .png) This is definitely a lot more useful than the other flavors of wolpertinger we've seen--Life spells are still kind of a crapshoot because heal/resurrection effects will frequently be wasted when you don't need them (and won't reliably come up when you do) but there are tons of decent buffs so at least you're reasonably likely to get something out of a random spell compared to Sorcery or Death. But even if I really wanted to bring him out we only have the one Forsaken Swampdweller and the only way to get more is to go back and talk to Friden. the holy poopacy fucked around with this message at 05:39 on Aug 12, 2017 |
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Aug 11, 2017 20:33
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I'm really enjoying this LP. This seems like the kind of game I'm really glad exists but would probably have a miserable time playing it, but I'm finding the systems incredibly interesting regardless and would never have heard of it otherwise. 
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Aug 11, 2017 21:02
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Yeah same. The team building and combat design that not only allows but encourages hilarious broken combos is really interesting and engaging, but it's stapled to such a focusless setting with 500 different currencies to grind and little but an infinite escalation of numbers to look forward to that I know I would never be able to stomach actually playing the thing. Thanks for showing it off.
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Aug 11, 2017 21:31
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Straight White Shark posted:
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Aug 11, 2017 22:11
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Quantum Toast posted:Think you got these images the wrong way round. Whoops, thanks. Mzbundifund posted:Yeah same. The team building and combat design that not only allows but encourages hilarious broken combos is really interesting and engaging, but it's stapled to such a focusless setting with 500 different currencies to grind and little but an infinite escalation of numbers to look forward to that I know I would never be able to stomach actually playing the thing. Thanks for showing it off. I think the fundamental sin of Siralim is the same as other procedurally generated/"roguelite" indie games: RNG is not a real replacement for good game design. Much of the grind can be excused under the heading of resource scarcity, and that's all well and good, but the game just kind of hopes that you'll wind up getting enough good stuff to muddle through without getting so much good stuff the game becomes trivial. I think Siralim fares better than most because of how much combo potential and breakability it has; there's so much overpowered stuff flying around that whatever random crap you get can probably be assembled into something really good, as opposed to a lot of other similar games where you're constantly hoping to grab some specific must-have thing.
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Aug 12, 2017 05:52
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Update 16: The Blob We head right in and wind up, unsurprisingly, in Zonte's tileset. The boss was described as inhabiting a wizard's tower, after all. .png) This must be its incredibly strange way of letting you know it wants to fight. To arms! Generally the game's writing is pretty charming and inoffensive but I wish it would ease up on the "Incredibly strange! So wacky!" sometimes. .png) It makes up for it elsewhere, though, because Flubris is the greatest name ever. .png) That... may be a problem. He completely no-sells shots from Bone Zone. .png) It's part of the boss's gimmick. It has 3 different forms that it randomly switches between with different damage immunities. .png) Looks like we drew the short straw--right now he's immune to both attacks and spell damage. .png) Hey. Know what's neither an attack nor a spell? .png) KABOOM Honestly, this is just massive overkill. There's a decent chance that Bone Zone would have taken it out the instant it switched to something vulnerable to physical damage. .png) With Flubris dead, you notice that a large, vibrant sphere appears to be lodged within its gelatinous body. .png) The first chest is pretty uninspiring. At least there's plenty of resources. .png) This looks promising, though. .png) The second chest is more of the same. .png) We can't use either of these yet, but I'm looking forward to this one. .png) While you were gone, Hebron and I managed to discover yet another promising location where you might find yet a Nether Orb. Have you ever been to the Frostbite Caverns? Our scouts reported that they saw what appears to be a glowing, sphere-like object, but they had little time to make certain of their findings before they were attacked by a horde of Shades. I know full well that you are strong enough to handle just about anything at this point, King Mysterio, so I suggest you make haste to the Frostbite Caverns, slay anything that stands in your way, and secure the orb! At least the exposition is relatively short this time. .png) That was a pretty short level in general, too, so we might as well keep going. First, let's shake up the team a little bit--I could probably just ride Final Oblation through the rest of the main story quest, but that would get pretty dull. So let's try out the new guy. Getting an entire extra attack every turn is pretty great, although it's a testament to Siralim's breakability that it barely even registers in the big scheme of things. .png) Since we're going for MAXIMUM SMASH, I brought our sphinx back out of retirement for that sweet supereffective damage typing. I decided to extend the theme by calling up the Asura Bonebreaker for the passive crit buff; we don't really have enough speedsters to get a ton of mileage out of it, but it's a start.  .png) Bone Zone's speed and attack aren't quite hacking it these days, so first priority is patching that up. Double attacking is nice, but he's really made for big single hits, and he'll do better with raw stat bonuses than the random grab bag from the double attack lance. The new troll, on the other hand, has some of the highest base attack in the game and would absolutely love to attack 4 times a turn. .png) While we're at it, most of our artifacts are starting to look a little shabby. I blow through the entire granite stockpile bringing stat bonuses back up to level. .png) We find ourselves back in familiar territory again, although things have changed a little since we came here as the pseudo-tutorial level. .png) For one thing, the Barrens' goddess was completely absent during the first level. Yseros is... just kind of there, but she has some awesome rewards. "What can you tell me about this realm?": I've seen the harsh conditions of this realm kill many men. Those who die of thirst and exhaustion are the lucky ones. Others are devoured whole by stray pit worms, gored to death by rampaging apises, or turned to stone by wayward gorgons. What will be your fate? She has some odd opinions on mortal perspectives, though. I'm not sure that a slow death by dehydration is "lucky" compared to being instantly killed by a monster. .png) Speaking of luck, the very first battle turns up a new monster I've been waiting to see. This odd-looking yellow fellow is a Planetary Amaranth. The amaranths are all about the defense stat and generally play together really well with crystal smiths. .png) The parts falls for the old "bandits disguised as a pond" trick and runs into another new face. Lepers are heavily focused around debuffs, which can make them infuriating at times, but this guy's relatively tame by himself. Their defenses are so bad a basic attack spell almost takes him out. .png) Remember those weird yellow rocks sticking out the sand the first time we came here? Yeah, probably not. But now that we've met Yseros, they actually do something useful. .png) It's not a huge haul, but hey, free stuff. .png) Correction: free stuff that we get rewarded for finding. Yseros is stupidly generous; I can only assume the designers felt some need to "make up" for not having access to her the first time you come here. .png) Before I get too much further, I remember that I've got a stack of Pandemonium Tokens I've been meaning to use. .png) The token glows with all sorts of alternating colors before jumping from your hands and landing on the ground before you. It slowly begins to crystallize until at last, the glowing stops. Your creatures clap excitedly for you. It seems that they think this is some sort of magic trick that you conducted for no reason other than their own amusement. You pick up the crystallized token and realize that it is actually a shard. Not bad, not bad. You hold the Pandemonium Token high in the air! Just before you start to feel a little foolish, something begins to happen... .png) Round 2. Also pretty nice! You hold the Pandemonium Token high in the air! Just before you start to feel a little foolish, something begins to happen... .png) Round 3. Less nice. You hold the Pandemonium Token high in the air! Just before you start to feel a little foolish, something begins to happen... .png) The creature attacks! Round 4. Not nice at all! .png) Oof. So we've got a big rear end boss fight against a giant demon castle and a bunch of out-of-depth monsters we haven't seen. .png) That doesn't sound good. .png) This could be a problem, considering the sphinx helpfully decided to make the whole party death-class. .png) Luckily devils are still terrible. This is after a -50% damage modifier, mind you. .png) We hit the Pandemonium King with everything we've got and he's still got over half his health left. We weather the first volley of spells... reasonably well, but he's got an artifact that's spreading Blight so we can't heal. .png) A few Rabid Dementia spells help thin out his supports. .png) I can't heal because of Blight, but I can still hand out temporary HP with barriers. Jay has high enough intelligence that his barriers are absorbing 150+ damage per cast, I need to remember to use them more. .png) Third round is the charm, at least for him. He's burned the entire party and now he's stunning our main damage dealer. In retrospect I probably should have reequipped the Quahn Harbinger axe for debuff resistance. .png) Blight + Mend is a bad combination since the regeneration turns into damage over time. That on top of the burn is just too much for our troll. On the plus side, now I can resurrect him with all his debuffs gone. Attacking 4 times for 4 damage procs from the smith makes for some decent damage. He's almost dead, so it's just a matter of chipping away that last sliver of health. .png) The Pandemonium King has been slain. He does have the decency to drop some loot, but it's nothing impressive. There's a rare drop you can get from that fight, but we're not so lucky as to get it on the first try. One more token to go. You hold the Pandemonium Token high in the air! Just before you start to feel a little foolish, something begins to happen... .png) Unfortunately, all the commotion caused several nearby enemies to take notice. This just spawns a few extra enemy groups. Not a big deal. .png) As a show of thanks, it grants you 30% Power Balance. While I'm here, my Power Balance is a bit low after breeding the troll berserker, so I top if off from our stock of fairies. .png) A relic cache yields another Pandemonium Token. One more, I guess. You hold the Pandemonium Token high in the air! Just before you start to feel a little foolish, something begins to happen... .png) Your power balance is now 200%. That was what I was waiting for. Would have been nice if I'd gotten it before using up the fairies. .png)  More good news. Not only can we use this immediately, it's a great creature to have..png) A random enemy group shows off an interesting spell. Lycanthropy is a nature spell that can't be cast manually but automatically triggers below a certain HP threshold, transforming the caster into a new Nature creature at full health. Occasionally you can get something to transform into a basic creature that you normally wouldn't have access to yet and grab something early that way, but this wolpertinger variant is locked until we breed one of our own. So, we murder it and move on. .png) Yseros: You've done well to find a source of water in such a harsh environment. You gain 150 favor with Yseros, Goddess of Illusion. Interestingly, unlike most gods Yseros gives you favor when things don't turn into a fight. This is a fairly rare outcome for the ponds, but there are a lot of them, so you'll typically get 1-2 favor bumps from these. There are a ton of relic stones, too, so you wind up gaining favor very quickly here. .png) Speaking of relic stones, another one yields a new type of artifact. Ribbons have a mix of intelligence and max health. Not terribly interesting. .png) We nab yet another new creature--this has been a really profitable run. Familiars are another tribal type race with a spellcasting slant this time, but interestingly, they power up the whole party regardless of class. Their abilities still scale with the numbers of familiars you have, so you'll generally still want a familiar heavy party, but you're free to mix in another strong caster type or two to take advantage of the stacked familiar bonuses. .png) A relic stone just dumps all this into our laps. The Barrens, despite the name, are quite lucrative once you meet Yseros. Parasites is a fun spell. Blight shuts down healing powers hard and also reverses the healing from Leech, making the enemies take damage from dealing damage. Good stuff. The axe, being a L1 artifact, doesn't really have anything interesting going on. .png) From now on, you can use an alteration spell to come back here whenever it pleases you. Simply enchant your Teleporation Shrine with this spell before traveling to a realm, and you always end up here. I believe I have somthing - or rather, someone - that can help you fight through the brutal desert environment. It is a creature called the Apis Defender, and I trust that it will serve you well. Yseros's chosen creatures are the Apises, who are somewhat vaguely oriented around protective abilities. This one is pretty badass. .png) Even more cloth scraps. One more and we can change our player icon, once we unlock the tailor. .png) Unsurprisingly, since it's ruled over by the Goddess of Illusions, mimics sometimes show up here. With Detritus smacking it 4 times for 100+ damage a pop, it doesn't last long. .png) It's hard to see, but there's a quicksand portal here. This works just like the portals in Eternity's End, meaning it's miniboss time! .png) Magma Golems are new. We can't extract from it yet, but technically we could morph an iron golem into one any time we wanted. More interestingly, that harpy up there is new and free to extract. .png) The magma golem is sort of the burn equivalent of the spitting arachnalisk--when it gets attacked, the enemies all get burned. Unfortunately (for him, anyhow), golems have really terrible intelligence so it's not going to do much damage with burn. .png) First chest isn't great, but at least I'm pulling lots of crafting materials. .png) Second chest isn't much better, but it's something. This is a really, really, really niche spell and I kind of wish it didn't have the autocast triggers, because you can't really equip it without slowing down combat with a lot of extra casts that are going to do nothing 99.9% of the time. The shield only has a few generic stat boosts, too. .png) That about wraps it up. Time to expand the castle. .png) We have a new ritual to follow it up with, but we need to collect more power first. .png) The merchant area is just south of the cook, still fairly close to the main chamber. Which is pretty handy, since merchant stocks are random each time you return to the castle and you'll want to pop in often. Right now, we just have the one. .png) This guy sells random artifacts. Mostly you're way better off building your own, but he does have one major perk: it's a great way to find artifacts with desirable traits. Traited artifacts are horrendously expensive--note that there is no designated currency, you have to pony up the price in all basic resources simultaneously. But it's very much worth it if you find something good. .png) Checking out the new recruits. These guys are great support creatures that have amazing synergy with the crystal smith--between the two of them, you can ratched up the entire team's defense to near-invincible levels. .png) The Apis Defender is an interesting alternative. Its ability is even better than Provoke, as it's always on and always succeeds, but it's also less efficient. Not only does it cost health every time it intercepts, it intercepts damage rather than attacks--so if a squishy teammate gets nailed for 4-digit damage, all that goes straight to the Apis no matter how high its own defense. Still, stack a ton of health on it and you've got a crazy damage sponge that cannot be bypassed by normal attacks. .png) This guy. Not super impressive, but stick a bunch on the team and you get a huge damage multiplier on your spells. The nerf to healing sucks but is easy to play around--you can use barrier spells, or passive healing abilities, or just plan on alpha striking everything. .png) Harpies tend to have abilities that prevent or misdirect enemy actions. They're generally unreliable and I don't like them, but all of their traits traits are just named loud bird noises and that's awesome. .png) Lepers generally have really nasty abilities, balanced out by some of the worst stats in the game. Great speed and good attack, granted, but they're up there with Apocalypses for squishiness and they don't have the mana to make use of their generally great intelligence. Still, you can't beat them for spreading debuffs. This guy is kind of lame on his own--a third of the debuffs in the game prevent him from attacking and another third will probably kill him in the process because his HP is so lovely. Which means there aren't a lot of debuffs he can effectively spread, but if you go whole hog on debuff support he can get pretty mean. .png) Moving on to breeding options, this guy is one of the game's most important supports. Final Oblation is far from the only static damage nuke in the game, and some of them are much faster and simpler to pull off. Just having a Phase Knight on the team means you don't have to worry about static damage effects, or nasty damage over time debuffs for that matter. This will nerf most defense-ignoring damage into harmlessness, so if you crank up your defense and have Endurance Aura you only really have to worry about a select few defense-ignoring spells and abilities. Crystal Smith + Planetary Amaranth + Phase Knight is a ridiculously effective defensive core that will last you a long, long time. That said, I'm not busting this guy out just yet; at this stage enemies are limited enough that we benefit more from static damage than the enemies do, so adding these guys into the mix would just randomly nerf a lot of strategies available to us without really adding any key protections for us. .png) As an added bonus (sort of), if we were to breed for the Phase Knight, we could chain breed into this guy. He's arguably better than the Deranged Gorgon, in that he can much more reliably do something with his stunning physical even if the targeting is unreliable. Plus, brownies are generally built better as attackers than gorgons. Still not a fan of either, though. the holy poopacy fucked around with this message at 18:03 on Aug 17, 2017 |
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Aug 14, 2017 18:20
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As a sidebar - this game was clearly heavily influenced by Dragon Warrior Monsters, a classic monster collection game for the Game Boy, and has a few references to it. I'm pretty sure the Addled Leper's ability, Lush Licks, is one of them - that was also a skill in DWM.
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Aug 15, 2017 10:03
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Update 17: The Hurt Locker We've still only seen about 2/3 of the dungeon settings and corresponding gods, so a new set of scenery is definitely welcome.  "How can I better serve you?": HURT, BEAT, SMASH THEM. RIP, TEAR, CUT HEARTS FROM THEM. "What can you tell me about this realm?": MANY ARE ABANDONED HERE TO BE KILLED. ME TOO, YEARS AGO. BUT I WON'T BE KILLED. NOW I DO THE KILLING. Between the mask and the bloody apron Tartarith bears more than a little resemblance to the killer from 5 Days a Stranger (the bloody simple-mindedness doesn't hurt either). I suppose they're both drawing on similar slasher/thriller horror tropes, so it's probably just coincidence.  Most creatures have multiple breeding formulas. We just got an alternate combination for this last level, but I'm happy enough to have it that I don't really care about getting a duplicate.  Nothing new just yet, but plenty of things I need to top up my core supply of.  You released the creature. It thanks you before running away, leaving behind a small cache of treasure. Weirdly, this doesn't seem to bother Tartarith.  Death magic has four themed spells that summon the Horsemen of the Apocalypse to aid you, which is pretty metal. They're nice for endurance slogs, especially since they don't particularly rely on having high Intelligence. Random sidenote  Conquest is the original name given to the horseman that's labeled Pestilence in contemporary interpretations. Traditional interpretations of Relevations saw the descriptions of the four horsemen as describing a progression of events: a call to conquest leads to widespread bloodshed, then famine, and finally death. More recent imaginings view the horsemen more as a team with defined roles, which makes Conquest and War sound a bit redundant and leaves pestilence (which is mentioned as part of the horsemen's collective function but not ascribed to any one in particular) out in the cold. Siralim likes to go old school on a lot of its inspirations, so we get Conquest instead of Pestilence. Sometimes the RNG puts together teams that work better than others. The bloodhounds will all heal each other when they attack, I can't effectively snipe them because the apis intercepts damage, and this little poo poo is spamming barriers for everybody.  I mean, thankfully they're still not remotely dangerous, but later in the game formations like this can get pretty daunting.  You can find shield fragments here, just like the weapon fragments in Azure Dream. Personally I think the weapons are vastly more useful, but in the long run most of the freebies are going to wind up getting scrapped for materials either way.  poo poo, I forgot to bring any medicinal herbs.  Fortunately, the sight of treasure takes your mind off of these horrors. The iron maidens are one of the few places in the game where you can find creature cores as loot. If you're lucky you can find creatures you haven't unlocked via extraction or breeding yet, but you're still limited to monsters in the random encounter pool and at this stage there aren't any random enemies showing up that aren't unlocked by default.  Not every iron maiden coughs up a core. There are a lot of them scattered throughout the level and typically only 2 or 3 will have anything for you.  Not the world's greatest spell, but it has its uses.  Now this one's a little more interesting. It's a big goddamn nuke (in a magic school that doesn't have many nukes) but it drains your whole team.  Let's try it ou--son of a bitch  No good deed goes unpunished, it seems. The souls of the fallen creatures swarm around you before congealing into their original forms. The creatures attack!  Finally we get a group to test Star Pact out on. Pretty disappointing--I know these guys have pretty good defense (the devil doesn't, but he's got the Protect buff up) but this isn't really noticeably any better than Ethereal Knives.  You gained 150 favor with Tartarith, God of Punishment. Again, kind of odd that the other torture devices don't have any impact on your favor, but at least there are plenty of the torture racks to farm favor on.  Scraps of paper litter the ground here, mostly with little snippets of flavor text. Kind of pointless, but given the horror theme it's appropriate that there are the equivalent of journal entries lying around.  There are also these scrolls, which are just straight up extra breeding tips.  There are a lot of different flavors of these guys, and they're almost all bred from each other in a giant incestuous orgy.  You gained 75 favor with Tartarith, God of Punishment. As with other realms, the fight for favor trigger doesn't always have a fight. It's still a decent chunk of favor either way; Regalis literally gives out a third as much.  A lot of the paper scraps are just comic relief.  Another iron maiden yields a core.  This would have been a lot more helpful if I hadn't explored most of the level already.  I finish assembling the free shield. Gain Shell on hit is a fantastic ability but other than that this is kind of a dud.  Most of the skeleton variants are bred from other skeletons, so this will help get us started along the process. Once we find a vortex creature, anyhow.  I find 2 gems of Entangle in rapid succession. It's not bad, per se; most creatures are going to have better things to do, but if you've got a support type creature without any real punch it's a decent option for them to contribute.  Urgh. This is one of the most annoying spells in the game. Sacrifice to the Light has a 100% chance to be cast when the holder dies and cannot be cast at any other time. When cast, it resurrects the user at full HP and deletes itself permanently. So it's prohibitively expensive for you to use, but enemies don't care about that, so they just get a free extra life.  Tartarith: COME. Another torture rack brings us up to the first reward threshold.  TAKE PUNISHMENT HELPER WITH YOU. You received a Chaos Guard creature! It has been sent to your stable. These guys are another defensively-slanted monster family, with more of a focus on damage reduction. They've got their uses.  More importantly, we now have enough Deity Points to unlock one of the major class perks. This spawns more miniboss portals, which means way more loot.  That's about it for the level. We actually didn't see any new creatures this time, which is kind of a letdown after last time, so the only new creature is the reward from Tartarith. Who is, uh, just a straight up Chaos Warrior. I hope Games Workshop never finds out about this game, given their litigation history. Doomguards get insane defense and not much else. Which is ok, because their abilities tend to be entirely passive. Damage reduction is a nice perk, not great on its own, but it never hurts. I'm not entirely sure why these guys come from Tartarith and not Gonfurian. "War" seems like a much better fit than "punishment", and they even bear more than a little resemblance to Gonfurian's appearance. Also there is a family of creatures we haven't seen yet called masochists who seem like they would be a much more obvious choice for Tartarith's chosen. Oh well. Ultimately most of the gods' chosen families are really arbitrary anyhow.
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Aug 15, 2017 23:03
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Maybe they're his chosen creature because they can take a lot of punishment while (probably) not enjoying it? The guy seemed big on inflicting suffering, not necessarily pain, and masochists enjoy pain.
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Aug 16, 2017 10:33
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Update 18: Strange Magic TEAM SMASH is doing well enough, but honestly the Asura isn't really contributing that much. So now that we're starting to see some decent attack spells let's mix it up a bit.  The only good Sorcery attack spell we have is powered by speed, rather than intelligence. That works out just fine for the raven, since even after his passive Intelligence boost he still has slightly better speed. Meanwhile, he'll still boost the sphinx's intelligence from okayish to very good. Still, spellcasters are always desperately hungry for extra mana.  While I'm at it, I can power up the smiths' equipment a bit more to crank up their teamwide passive bonuses.  We find ourselves, appropriately enough, back in the Refuge of the Magi.  I think this might be a new damage record for this run, and we didn't even need the asura's help.  This is also a new magical damage record. Still not really up to one-hit-kill ranges yet, but considering the sphinx is a fairly modest caster without a big intelligence-boosting artifact it's still pretty impressive.  We find our first new creature. Reapers can attack critically injured enemies to automatically finish them off and gain big bonuses on top. Pretty similar conceptually to the Carnage family, but reapers have a bit more emphasis on benefits for the whole team on their special kill. With a freshly summoned creature on the team there's a slight risk that it might get reapered, but all this one does is a big heal, which is something I can deal with easily enough.  I know I disparage Wolpertingers a lot but every now and then they get lucky. Black Ice is a huge goddamn spell that has a 50% chance to freeze every enemy and a 50% chance to turn every ally invisible. It's pretty insane and it's sheer luck that only one of my monsters gets nailed by it.  One of the many random books lying around has a useful breeding formula. I don't remember what this guy does off the top of my head but occultists are generally good.  Finally got to the favor threshold with Zonte.  I am also entrusting you with one of my personal creations: a Djinn Illusionist. I believe it will prove itself useful to your cause. The djinn are Zonte's personal favored monsters and tend to be about blowing big wads of mana. They can be pretty seriously scary.  Another random breeding formula. This one's not as immediately useful.  The random mini-quest for this level is to find knights and talk to them. Pretty boring.  Here's another new creature. Wights are all about on-death triggers, which can make them a huge pain in the rear end. This one yields up a core and goes down without trouble.  Two knights down, one to go.  Yet another new friend! Ophanim are a class of angels mentioned in the Old Testament and pretty much look exactly how they're described. Here, they're the life magic counterpart to liches/imps/gargoyles; this one, specifically, gives its entire party access to free heal spells.  We come across a miniboss portal fairly quickly, but there are buff potions available in this realm so I'm not going to tackle it until I've explored the level.  Like this.  Your creatures will start battles with Ward in this realm. And this.  Found this as a floating gem free for the taking. It's a pretty great spell, but holy hell is it expensive.  Another breeding formula, not too great.  With a few levels under his belt our raven is starting to really dish out the damage.  Dread Wights are the worst  They have a 50% chance to resurrect themselves every time you kill them. This happens about 5 more times. Eventually Detritus kills him twice in one round--which is interesting, since the way the action queue works most triggers will fire (and thus be wasted) before the wight resurrects himself. I guess being an end-of-turn trigger the berserker's extra attack gets around that. That's enough for him to finally give up the ghost.  Normally you're lucky if you get 2 breeding recipes from the books around here, this time I'm racking up tons of them. I don't even have the bonus for extra breeding recipes from the chef (I've got spell gems instead.)  I find the third knight and finish the realm quest for a decent reward.  Decent-ish, anyhow. At least it's free.   Maybe it's confirmation bias, but I do think the realms that give out buffs do tend to skew towards thematic effects. This is a huge bonus for the raven's shakedown cruise.  A random chest coughs up a basic heal spell that's been juiced up with a bunch of bonuses. I already have a spell that heals the entire party, so a spell that heals 2 creatures twice is not really great in comparison. Potency based on speed doesn't hurt, though. There are plenty of support-type life class monsters that have more speed than intelligence.  Boring.  There's literally no unambiguously positive effects that can come out of combining any of these ingredients.  I could just say no thanks, but one of the effects I can whip up summons additional monsters. At least it's a little extra resources and experience.  Now multiply this by 2. Multicast is a pretty rare buff but it can be pretty glorious if you can finagle it.  With my two spellcasters doublecasting everything to pieces, I decided to randomly try out Call Conquest. These are some pretty meaty stat bonuses, and they come up about 2 or 3 times per round.  I assemble the spell gem fragments collected throughout the level and get this. Sphinxes don't have much speed, so this isn't terribly useful right now. But again, we've got an inventory full of speedy life creatures that wouldn't mind this one bit.  The level turns out to be pretty small, so it's quick work to clean it out. Time to tackle the miniboss.  Niiiice. Was wondering when these fish guys would show up. Now I just need to figure out a way to weaken them without killing them. The yeti is still locked since we don't have any, and moreover, is the favored creature of the ice god (we've been told there's a realm called the Frostbite Caverns, so the existence of an ice god should not be a surprise.)  Whoops. This might have actually worked if I didn't have doublecast up   I'm terrified of killing off the other one now, so I just brute force extract attempts at full health and it works after 10 or 12 tries.  On to the loot. Magic Missile is an awful, awful attack spell--but it's free, and that makes it a lot more useful than many slightly more powerful spells. Fairly disappointing haul overall, but at least that's a lot of resources.  Man, the life spells are really piling up. This one is arguably less useful than a straight barrier spell, but if you've got a big HP sponge you could really do things with it.  I've kind of been neglecting construction rituals. On the plus side, that means I have enough power stockpiled to start on this and the nex(t) cooking ritual at the same time.  Creature roundup! Heal spells are kind of niche in this game, so I can't decide if this is ability is terrible because you rarely need them or awesome because it means you don't need to waste any spell slots on them. Regardless, these guys are still pretty great just for the rad graphics and spectacularly min-maxed stats. Most caster/support types are going to have a tough time doing any damage at all with physical attacks, so dumpstering the attack stat in exchange for great int/def/spd is a fabulous deal.  Cool in concept, pretty mediocre in execution. There are a few abilities that can abuse the big heals that this guy dishes out, but otherwise he's just a poorly built carnage knockoff.  Revenants (don't ask me why they are fish people for some reason) are all about HP manipulation. This guy effectively adds 40% of his current health to his attack damage, which is a pretty decent chunk that you can easily boost to very high levels. More importantly, we have like 3 breeding formulas that this guy is eligible for.  Christ, what an rear end in a top hat.  Let's head to the hatchery, and... uh  Oh yeah, there's another secret passage once you get the merchant room. It's not terribly useful, but if you're checking the merchants every time (which I've also been slacking off on) I guess it saves you a few steps.  Anyhow, breeding options! This is probably one of the worst familiars, but mana gain is so rare and precious that it still manages to be usable.  Lowering stats is a big theme for hounds. If you get a full pack of different varieties you can quickly shred a tough enemy's stats down to nothingness.  I guess they're called "Masochists" because you'd have to be a masochist to want to use them! Jesus, this thing is terrible. You can get creatures that can inflict specific debuffs (that you can plan around and exploit) and get extra bonuses, instead of debuffing yourself. There are a few abilities that can make it beneficial to gain debuffs but that's an awfully specific build and there are probably better creatures to exploit that with.   I have a ton of crappy sorcery spells and being able to turn them into stat boosts is fantastic. I've got the makings of a pretty crazy spellcasting team going here.  Including... maybe this? I dunno. I have a really hard time seeing a way to make this into a particularly useful ability. I guess maybe if you got it onto an artifact that you could put on a Forsaken Swampdweller, but even then you'd need a few other supports in place if you wanted to really make it count.  We can also chain breed the raptor occultist into this guy. Not really super impressed--having an ever-expanding library of spells could potentially be useful in very long fights, but you're still counting on the stall being something that's solvable with sorcery spells. Plus, unlike some sources of temporary spells there's no mention of getting to cast them for free, so you still need sources of mana. EDIT:  Whoops, almost forgot this guy! Djinn are seriously loving scary and this guy isn't even the worst of the bunch. With his base MP pool, he can "only" get up to a little more than triple base damage if he's casting at 0 MP (via Magic Missile, free temporary spells, or general shenanigans.) But stack a bunch of mana enchants on an artifact and his damage scales up to pretty crazy levels. Normally it's not an ability useful for alpha striking but there are plenty of ways to blow through his mana in a hurry; you can set up something similar to the Final Oblation bomb by having an Anguish Banshee poke him to steal 50% of his mana, for example. With 3-5 enchant slots you can get him up to 100 MP and he'd have more than enough left after a 50% drop to cast whatever big spells he wanted, at 4.5x normal damage. Which goes up to about 6x or so after his first big spell. the holy poopacy fucked around with this message at 18:03 on Aug 17, 2017 |
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Aug 16, 2017 23:07
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Popping in to say thanks for doing this LP, it's been a lot of fun so far.
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Aug 17, 2017 05:12
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Don't know how I had missed this LP until now. I played the first Siralim a bit, and enjoyed it, but the grind was too much for me without enough to keep me interested over a longer period. This looks equally grindy, but has way more stuff going on. Definitely will be following the LP
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Aug 17, 2017 07:31
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(You didnt go over the djinn you got  )
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Aug 17, 2017 09:14
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Does the Flood Familiar give your other creatures each 20% of the cost of the spell cast, or does it distribute 20% total? If the former, I could see some sort of gimmick build around having six of them and having them bounce around the same batch of MP for effectively free spells forever.
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Aug 17, 2017 09:20
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Rigged Death Trap posted:(You didnt go over the djinn you got Whoops! Thanks, it's added now. FredMSloniker posted:Does the Flood Familiar give your other creatures each 20% of the cost of the spell cast, or does it distribute 20% total? If the former, I could see some sort of gimmick build around having six of them and having them bounce around the same batch of MP for effectively free spells forever. It's 20% each, so you can definitely set up a perpetual casting machine. IMO it's not really that great, though. The main advantage is that it scales with MP cost, so you can load up on juiced up endgame spells costing 40+ MP and cast them continuously forever where other sources of mana often wouldn't keep up. There are a hell of a lot of drawbacks, though: -You need to use a full familiar party to make it perpetual, so you can't drop in other useful spellcasting creatures -You need to cast continuously to keep your MP up, so if you get slammed with debuffs the chain gets broken and you start to leak MP -The same goes if you have other actions you need to take or even just casting lower MP spells -You can't recoup MP lost to sources other than spells Free MP is still always really really good and if you're running full familiars you might as well stick one in (note that they operate on sliver rules, so one Flood Familiar on the team gives the power to all your Familiars) but I prefer other MP sources.
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Aug 17, 2017 18:06
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Update 19: Fifty Shades of Grey Time to tackle the next boss, but I'm going to get a few new creatures summoned beforehand so they can benefit from the spillover XP.  Gotta do some breeding while I'm at it. This eats up a big chunk of Power Balance right before a major loot drop, which sucks, but it's not too bad.  Engarde, Mysterio. On this day, I shall put an end to your tyranny. On to the boss. We haven't seen this area before but we'll be back eventually.  This guy might just be the worst boss gimmick, and there are some pretty bad ones. Remember the undead-summoning lich king?  This guy brings back the "must kill all minions to damage the boss" gimmick and throws in a new twist on top; the minions have to be killed in a specific order (randomized each time you start the battle) or else they all resurrect. Worse, you don't get to find out you're wrong until you've killed all 3. So you might have to kill 18 minions before you can do anything about the boss.  That's pretty bad, but on top of that, his minions all have invisiblity-themed powers. So there's a decent chance that while you're trying to take one of them down it will go invisible and prevent you from targeting it.  Oh, and even if you have some way to get around that with non-targeted damage, they take barely any damage while invisible. The yellow guy just gives infinite MP while invisible. Which is pretty powerful, but not as big a deal in comparison.  They're remarkably beefy too, so it's much more difficult to just brute force them.  Thankfully I get lucky on the invisibility procs and the first one goes down without too much difficulty. The other two should be much more manageable since they don't get free invisibility anymore.  Detritus gets lucky and nails the same shade with all 4 attacks, taking it down in one round.  Frustratingly the last one keeps getting Shell.  Detritus plows right through its shell and keeps going, switching targets after he's dead. And the troll's extra attacks occur after all death triggers have processed, which means...  Thank christ. By blind luck that turned out to be the right order, so we don't have to go through everything a second time.  This is a little new. The boss actually taunts you with in-battle dialogue. We have like a dozen "people" and most of them are total sycophants, so I'm not too terribly concerned about our approval.  He's got plenty of HP but turned out to have less defense than his minions, so he goes down pretty quickly.  I always appreciate JRPGs that invert the standard story formula. Forget trying to stop the bad guy from collecting all the artifacts of ultimate power, I want to be the one going out and collecting them myself. They can try to stop me.  (As expected, Shackler was guarding a Nether Orb. You pry the orb from his grasp, claiming it as your own.) (You've managed to collect 5 Nether Orbs thus far! You should report to Hebron immediately.  Hebron's dumb face can wait, it's looting time! Nothing too impressive so far. The shield is pretty generic and this combo is a hilariously difficult and inefficient way to get this creature.  This looks a bit more promising.  This, not so much.  Not the most amazing find ever, but starting with invisibility is fantastic for squishy caster types.  A neat little buff. Not something I'd cast a lot, but it's got an autocast trigger on it, so just equipping it is good enough to get some benefit.  Boring.  By the gods... King Mysterio, look at you! You've started to absorb the power of the Nether Orbs! This is a most remarkable day, indeed! You must show yourself to Damaos immediately! We've picked up some rad highlights on our robes. Partial deityhood does not, in fact, actually give us any new powers but it gives us hella style.  Oh, I almost forgot - Furness, the tavern bartender, has been looking for you. He said that he has a favor to ask of you. You should speak with him as soon as possible, but keep in mind that collecting the Nether Orbs is our top priority. We're not even a god yet and already random schmucks are begging us for favors.  (Furness's normally-jolly demeanor quickly fades into a more serious tone.) I was once a big-time fisherman, as you know, and my retirement was not without reason. One rainy, gloomy morning, my men and I were conducting business as usual; fishing, telling lies, and drinking ale. Not necessarily in that order. But suddenly, this... monstrosity of a woman emerged from the sea! She climbed aboard our ship, and we, paralyzed with fear, could do naught but stare in horror. She carefully studied each of my men from hair to toe before grabbing one of our own, and pulling him right into the sea with her! We never saw Deathwalker - that's what we called her - or my crewmate again, but even after so many years I still lay awake each night thinking about his cruel fate. That might also explain why I decided to become a bartender - the unlimited access to ale helps to ease the pain of it all. But I digress! King Mysterio, I know this is a lot to ask of you, but if you ever encounter Deathwalker where the dead ships dwell, please - make her pay for what she did to my friend!  That's actually some heady stuff compared to "hey we saw a monster but ran away." Whoops. Uh, maybe I shouldn't have just blown all my power on upgrade rituals, because this thing is pretty great and I want to get it built as soon as possible.  No new creatures obviously, but let's take a look at that breeding formula. Free barriers are nice and all, but honestly... this is kind of piddly. The Dusk Crusader can straight up break combats, getting a little bit of extra survivability is small potatoes in comparison.  The artifact vendor doesn't have much of interest, but I found this for cheap (relatively) so I decided to snag it for later. I tend to like collecting artifacts for pack/tribal creatures, it's nice to be able to double dip bonuses.  Ok, time for some more revamping. This guy gives the whole party a respectable defense boost. That adds up to a shitton of defense on top of the Crystal Smith's bonus.  We've got about 10 sorcery spells in our inventory. Most bonuses are multiplicative, so between this guy and the raven the whole party should end up with more than double their base intelligence.  Which the Coast Watcher can put to good use. We're going with a spellcasting heavy build for now but we still need someone that can dish out physical damage. With the bonus damage from Intelligence, Willie should have no problem dishing out the pain.  Especially with our newly found necklace boosting that intelligence even higher.  But, you know, immunity to burn isn't really a big deal...  And I've got all these intelligence boosting materials, see... With an extra 20 intelligence added to the necklace, this should put Willie at about 450 effective intelligence. At this level a naturally intelligent creature, with a decent intelligence-boosting artifact, might have about 200 intelligence. That's an extra 250 damage on every attack or spell Willie hits them with. A creature with mediocre intelligence and no artifact boosts is going to struggle to get much above 100. That's 350 damage to them. Oh, and all this gets a 33% or so damage boost from automatic super-effective typing thanks to the sphinx's special ability. Between that and our Star Pact spammer also getting boosted by 70% I'd say we are probably ready to go.
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Aug 17, 2017 23:05
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Update 20: Swamp Thing There are 4 realms we haven't seen yet, and this is definitely the one I was most looking forward to.  Our opening salvo might seem a bit disappointing for how many magic buffs we're stacking, but Ethereal Knives is still powered by speed so it doesn't benefit from the big boosts we've taken on.  Star Pact, on the other hand, just got a 70% or so boost from the occultist.  Four-Eyed Willie can put the huge intelligence bonuses to good use with physical attacks--not only is he putting out big numbers on par with Bone Zone, he's hitting them a lot more consistently.  Clusters of multicolored mushrooms abound, and they give a nice chunk of power. Just what we need to unlock the Altar of Blood faster.  Four-Eyed Willie doesn't even care about the dragon's attack-nerfing ability since his damage is almost entirely derived from intelligence at this point.  I've had this altar on screen since I got here but keep overlooking it because I mistook it for a wall, until I realized there weren't any stone walls here.  Meraxis is more creative than some of the game's gods, but he still isn't terribly well fleshed out. "What can you tell me about this realm?": As The Swamplands are uninhabitable by humans, they are still rife with natural resources you can't find anywhere else. Though the unfamiliar terrain may impede your efforts, it would be wise to explore this realm and seek out its treasures. Like, why does an elephant live in a swamp? How does the swamp represent bliss? Oh well. It's still a cool place.  Moving on, we find a breeding formula from the monolith next to the altar. We can use this one immediately and it's pretty handy, but pretty dangerous too. I might hold off for a while on it.  I find a random jungle shrine and blindly activate it because I haven't been here for a while and forgot they were miniboss areas. Oh well. More minibosses, more loot.  This guy is an advanced creature and I can't extract from him until I breed one myself. Doing guaranteed damage on a miss is pretty great, but turning it into enough damage to be worthwhile is probably more trouble than it's worth.  This guy is a new basic creature and is up for grabs. Mites generally revolve around manipulating debuffs; they can be handy but need a fairly specialized build since they're not so great at spreading debuffs themselves.  The new Planetary Amaranth is having some issues. It turns out that even for speedy monsters having a spell base part of its damage on speed instead of intelligence isn't a great idea when you've got teammate support that more than doubles your intelligence, who knew?  Star Pact still works just fine, though.  You gained 100 favor with Meraxis, God of Bliss. Meraxis even gives you favor for clearing minibosses. Thanks, Meraxis.  This might be worth a look, some of the storm forms can be interesting.  Our first summoning spell! If you leave some room in your party you can use these spells to conjure up new creatures. They tend to be pretty strong, but in a game about team synergy and combo building, a completely random creature that you have to spend a turn summoning isn't terribly impressive. There are some bonuses for summoned creatures that you can build around but you're really going to want to be a Death Mage if you're going that route.  Oof. This is a really strong attack spell for a school that we need more spells in, and chaos leans towards attack-heavy creatures so there's some value in having split stat dependency, but the mana cost makes it difficult to just slap this on a generic bruiser as a backup.  This has some interesting ramifications for our magic team, but we're not quite there yet.  As if giving out power-boosting mushrooms and miniboss shrines (pictured at the right) wasn't enough, Meraxis's domain just has piles of treasure equivalent to basic chests just lying around for the taking. Definitely one of the more lucrative realms.  Another pile of loot has a second copy of Holy Explosion. It's a few points more expensive than the one I'm using now, but trading off damage-based-on-speed for straight up extra damage is a huge plus.  I mean, it's still not terribly impressive, but hopefully it'll get there with a few more levels.  BOOOOOOO It goes without saying that in the long run, finding ways to deal with silence is a high priority for a magic based team.  Although you and your creatures are oddly unaffected, nearby enemies seem to be growing weaker from the dust's effects. Enemies will start battles with Blight in this realm. And on top of all the crazy loot, you can also debuff enemies. It's not as good as free buffs, and I believe there's a small chance for it to backfire, but it's still a great bonus for an already high value realm.  Another counterspell gem. This could be useful for a tank type.  We haven't seen any of these yet at all.  C'mon, creepo dwarf, step up your game a bit.  Nice! The necklace isn't anything special, but this is a great little utility spell at a very affordable cost.  Ouch. I don't want anything to do with spores that make people bleed.  Normally I wouldn't give a poo poo about this but with the occultist I want as many sorcery spells filled as I can.  This might get annoying. The enemies have mass Shell and mass Freeze spells, there's a stronghold to soak attacks, and a unicorn to revive dead enemies.  Oh yeah! Worse than that, we've got our first spectre too. Spectres are themed around lowering enemy stats and the Abyssal Spectre is brutally effective at it: when they hit something, all of its stats are set to whatever the lowest one is. That can effectively take my attackers offline one by one, and I need to get this poo poo wrapped up in a hurry. That Crusader's defense is getting bigger every round and it's going to start getting silly in a few more turns.  At some point I remember that Willie has Magic Missile equipped. It's one of the weakest attack spells in the game, but his intelligence bonus still applies so it ought to be about as good as a regular attack that can't miss. The animation, amusingly, takes "missile" literally and summons a phantom bow and arrow.   That'll do, pig. That'll do.    For a second I thought I might be screwed since no one else can break the crusader's Shell anymore, but even though I could have sworn it had Shell my watcher manages to kill it. Maybe the watcher's bonus damage counts as a separate damage instance? 364 seems like a good estimate for the difference between the watcher's intelligence and the crusader's.  Phew. That was a lot closer than I would have liked.  The obelisk has been destroyed! You gained 100 favor with Meraxis, God of Bliss. I was holding off on these because I assume they'd trigger a fight, but apparently not.  I just knock down 3 in a row without any trouble. Works for me.  This is more interesting as breeding fodder than anything else.  Found another miniboss temple.  On top of the portal from our Parallel Dimension perk that makes 6 boss chests on this level (!)  You can't fool me, Thylacine. You just took a Koffing and stuck a gas mask on it. The smog creatures all have poison-themed abilities. This guy (who, unfortunately, isn't eligible for extraction) effectively gives the whole team strong regeneration while also making them immune to poison.  Of course, there's a bit of a weakness in that the healing part goes away if the smog dies. So now all the enemies are poisoned for free.  3 obelisks + 2 minibosses is just enough favor to get us to the first threshold.  Pretty nice, but life spells have a lot of competition for spell slots right now.  I've been getting a ton of these this run, I might need to burn through some of them.  Lame.  And that's not the only peasant - erm, present - that I have for you today. I'm also going to give you a slave! It's called the Pilwiz Present - erm, Pilwiz Peasant. Enjoy! Run along now, and do what you do. Not the most impressive creature, but I recall we've got a breeding formula that calls for this guy.  The level's about done, so might as well claim our miniboss portal.  A new flavor of valkyrie. Unfortunately that means we're definitely not going to be able to extract anything.  No big loss. This is one of the weaker valkyries honestly, despite the name.  Killing it tops off both of our construction rituals.  Amusingly, because some of his favor objects act as miniboss portals Meraxis rewards us for clearing the bonus portal even though this wasn't one of his.  This is an alternate way to unlock the seven sins, instead of breeding for a specific creature and doing a trade quest. But it still requires a specific creature, so it's not a huge step up.  That's a remarkably well-rounded artifact. Not super impressive, though.  Oh hell yes. I've been wanting a second Sorcery mass damage spell for a while--Ethereal Knives is working great for our raven as a way to soften everything up right off the bat, but I could also use something to wipe the board after I've done whatever extracting I want to do.  This, on the other hand, is more interesting than good.  When it rains, it pours. The split stat dependency sucks but this is still even better for Willie than Ethereal Knives--better 50% of a spectacular stat and 50% of a mediocre stat than 100% of an awful stat. Now I can hand off the second knives spell to my Occultist and stack even more party-wide damage.  Meh.  Now that the Pandemonium Tokens are piling up again I figure I might as well blow through them. This might have been useful if we hadn't already finished all our rituals.  This is new.  I like it. Sometimes you'll run into an enemy that manages to layer ridiculous amounts of barriers and being able to break them all in one fell swoop is great.  This does literally nothing.  Again  Bingo. Bit late to benefit from it this run, but more Power Balance is always good.  We get a few new cooking options and a few new swap quests.  You must acknowledge these sins before it is too late. A sacrifice is in order. Bring me a Blood Slime - the very embodiment of gluttony - and let us relieve you of this burden once and for all. The first few citizens conveniently just hung out in the lobby chamber, you have to hunt a bit to find these ones.  Let us commemorate your temperance by creating a permanent reminder of this virtue - a Sanctus. Please bring me a Holy Crusader. It is the ideal creature to use for the transformation process. Wait, what is that uh... thing? I don't think that's one of ours.  You can only equip one rune for each of the five classes - Chaos, Death, Life, Nature, and Sorcery - at one time. Always ensure that you have the right runes equipped before you do battle! Oh, I know! Why don't you try equipping this rune so you can see how they work? You received a Lua Rune. This "guy", for lack of a better term, also shows up with the new round of citizens. His information is probably going to be obsolete by the time you unlock him, but a free rune is nice.  Correction: Two free runes.  I'm biased against random effects but it's not like we've got any other sorcery runes right now.  The first rune it gives you is another Death rune, which means we have a choice between buffing Multistrike or buffing Vulnerable. We don't use either right now, but Multistrike is a bigger deal.  The citizen recruitment also unlocked the tailor. Coincidentally, we happen to have 5 cloth scraps.  The tailor sells items that let you change your map sprite. It's not as exciting as it sounds; the options are basically limited to townspeople NPCs.  Creature roundup! The Pilwiz is a mascot of sorts and appears in the game's icon, among other things. Apparently scythes for hands just aren't cool enough anymore, they need to up the ante with scythes for feet.  I've never really been super enthusiastic about mites. You can do cool things with debuff builds but dragging battles out is not really a big part of that.  These guys are really nasty utility monsters. Their attack absolutely wrecks most creatures; the only "defense" is having balanced stats, which means you still have bad stats, just not quite as bad as if you got spectre'd with more min-maxed stats.  Breeding time! Free Multistrike/Multicast is pretty rare, but storms don't really have the stats to use them. The good storm creatures are more defensively oriented.  Most of the ghouls are pretty great but this one's kind of shabby by itself. If you have an artifact ability that scales with speed it's great and all, but otherwise... speed has limited value after the battle has begun, and there are better ways to boost speed.  These things are loving scary. Their ability is basically Splash on steroids; while normally I eschew randomness, the limitations on Splash make it really inconvenient to consistently get 2 adjacent creatures on a desirable target, so this ability is pretty much strictly superior. If there's a squishy target in the enemy ranks you can pretty easily rack up a double or triple kill--but once you unlock these things the enemies will happily do the same to you if you take anything fragile into the dungeon.  The other spectre variants are just as brutal. Lose all your defenses, do not pass Go, do not collect $200. No, I don't know why the spectres all hold babies 
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Aug 18, 2017 21:14
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Spectres are just good parents. The other monsters don't give a poo poo about their babies.
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Aug 19, 2017 05:50
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quote:The Pilwiz is a mascot of sorts and appears in the game's icon, among other things. Apparently scythes for hands just aren't cool enough anymore, they need to up the ante with scythes for feet. Oh is THAT what the icon is of.
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Aug 19, 2017 05:58
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Downloaded this last night on the back of this thread, and am really having fun with it. I'm just running with my starter mon plus a few of the monsters you are giving by hitting the first level of devotion with gods, but don't really have any synergy in the team at this stage. I started as a Chaos Mage, and an initial team comp that look like they may be possible revolves around using monsters that come with full team buff innate, so that I start every battle with buffed out monsters. Any idea if the above would work? Also, what are some other early game team strats that are effective and easy to pull off?
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Aug 22, 2017 01:51
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PotatoManJack posted:Downloaded this last night on the back of this thread, and am really having fun with it. I'm just running with my starter mon plus a few of the monsters you are giving by hitting the first level of devotion with gods, but don't really have any synergy in the team at this stage. I started as a Chaos Mage, and an initial team comp that look like they may be possible revolves around using monsters that come with full team buff innate, so that I start every battle with buffed out monsters. Early early, all you really need to do is stack a bunch of monsters with high attack and speed (you want 20+ at level 1) and pummel everything. Four heavy hitters + an Asura Bonebreaker (party-wide Critical buff) + Ebony Ent (party-wide Mend for insurance) should treat you pretty well. In the long run there aren't that many buff-granting monsters but those two are pretty good. Also, you might want to look into the dryad family if you're dead set on buff builds, although it's fairly hard to break into early (Ebony Ent x Willow Spirit is your earliest entry, everything else depends on already having a dryad.)
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Aug 22, 2017 16:44
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Update 21: Back to the Future We put the new recipe options to use at the cook.  The Beef Vegetable Soup will provide you with the following bonus: You have a 100% better chance to find Runes. We've still got tons of empty rune slots. Hopefully we can rectify that.  Back at Eternity's End. It's a pretty nice place to be, especially since I want to farm power resources for the Altar of Blood.  There we go.  The various phase warriors can be difficult to tell apart but this is a different monster than the Phase Knight we have breeding plans for.  Phase warriors have a pretty nebulous ability theme but they're generally passive, party-wide bonuses. This... isn't terribly good. Scaling off of enemy stats means it won't go obsolete against high level enemies but also makes it a lot more difficult to optimize for, and it's just not terribly strong in general. A creature with very high speed and very low HP might lose like 20% of its health.  Having buff spells that trigger on kills is great for spellcasters with big nukes. I mean, granted, if you've got a big enough nuke to drop multiple enemies the fight is probably over, but if anything actually survives there's a decent chance it may turn out to be trouble so it's nice to have the extra assurance.  Sup, Big V? Fun fact: The god of time's name translates from Dutch as "delayed" (at least one member of the dev team is from the Netherlands.)  Here we go. There's the basic entry-level version of the Smog family. I like that they basically just stock a gas mask on a Koffing.  One of the enemies opens up with a powerful endgame level spell with mass debuffs. Rude!  The Weak affliction reduces all damage regardless of type, so between that and the Chaos Guard + Crystal Smith combo Willie's first big nuke really loses a lot of the wind in its sails. The enemy's defense-piercing Chaos Bolt spam is also doing quite a number on the team due to everyone being Vulnerable.  Still, we've got enough juice to limp on to victory with our prize. The Noxious Smog's ability is basic extra damage + poison on physical attacks, not super impressive by itself.  I think this might be the first Troll Berserker sighting in the wild? He hits pretty hard for something with two attacks but the rest of the enemies are completely non-threatening.  As usual, Eternity's End is pretty generous with miniboss portals.  We see another dumb season monkey, but...  ...he immediately transforms into this other weird thing, which we can't capture yet.  This guy is fair game, though. Wyverns have anti-magic abilities; as usual I'm pretty skeptical about unreliable triggers, but most wyverns have a nice edge in that they both prevent an enemy action and redirect it for their own benefit. That's strong enough to sort-of justify having such a mediocre proc rate.  Of course, being able to reflect single-target spells isn't much help when 5/6 of the opposing team has group damage spells.  The weird guy that the miniboss transforms into is called a Tremor. They're all about disrupting or punishing enemy actions; the purple one we just killed punishes defend/provoke, which we don't care about.  Nice. Next time I breed something I can recoup the Power Balance without having to blow through a stack of pandemonium tokens and praying.  Smogs have crazy high attack and defense and little else. For a creature family built around poison it's a pretty good setup.  Here's what Spell Breath looks like completely unencumbered. Lookin a lot better.  This would be more useful if I wasn't between rituals right now.  That's 3/3 spheres for another big chunk of favor.  Combined with the reward for the realm quest that puts us exactly halfway to the next tier of favor. Vertraag is nothing if not consistent with his favor.  We've already got an alternate formula for this one.  Another miniboss fight, another valkyrie. This one has some interesting ramifications--set her next to a creature with a strong redirect ability (like the apis defender) and you can rack up the health. As an added bonus, if you have any weak attackers you can poke your own creatures for free health! Definitely an interesting piece for positional defense builds, but sadly, we're not allowed to extract from it yet.  Ooooooooooooooo. We just found our very first legendary crafting material--these let you attach traits to artifacts. Each artifact can only have one trait, and it's crazy expensive to enchant, but as you can imagine portable traits are still very much worth it. Shapeshifting skills are fun as hell but generally not amazingly useful. It can be handy for breaking a stall; if you find yourself in a fight where neither side can really do anything to the other, just shift continuously until you turn into something that can. Of course, some creatures have traits that can do more harm than good--suppose you transform into a Forsaken and pick up a trait that causes you damage every turn, for example. So you're always rolling the dice.  Interesting. The additive nature of the damage formula means this is generally a bad deal: -50% attack doesn't mean -50% damage, it usually means -100% damage because you're trying to go through the enemy's whole defense with half the attack. But if you've got a build that cares about number of attacks to maximize on-hit effects more than it cares about doing damage with attacks, go hog wild. Unfortunately, most of the damage-on-hit abilities we have access to... are powered by attack. So we're not really quite there yet. This particular gem also showcases a facet we haven't seen before: spells that cost HP instead of mana. They tend to be fairly expensive (this particular spell has a really low mana cost, so the devs definitely understand how much the trade-off hurts) but HP is vastly easier to recover.  Nice! We've got the parts for this already and it's a fairly easy route to breaking the game. We saw this thing as a miniboss fight once upon a time, and it turns the anti-type shield artifacts into full immunities--type-changing spells exist, so stack 6 shields of the same type and get a speedy support caster to set all enemies to that type and a Black Crystal Smith will render you effectively immortal. You'll still need a way to deal with damaging debuffs but that's small potatoes compared to being immune to all enemy damage.  This is kind of dumb and pointless, although it can be relevant on rare occasions for abilities that care about HP thresholds (like the autokill effects reapers have.) Of course, it's still a sorcery gem that can pump up intelligence with the Raptor Occultist but I'm already filled up on sorcery spell slots.  Miniboss #3. This guy showed up as a lackey for the undead king boss.  He's still pretty mean, but not as mean as me.  The rewards are pretty meh. We can make this right now, but I'm still not a big fan of gorgons.  Sadly we're still a little bit short on power for the Altar of Blood ritual. But our newest recruits are now over level 20, which means...  We can finally start using Sigils. Sigils are consumable items that launch you into a tougher-than-normal fight led by a specific enemy type. Not only are enemy levels scaled above your creature level, the fight has various random challenge conditions imposed. In return you get rewards more or less equivalent to a basic chest, which isn't super impressive, but right now all I care about are the extra resources--not only do sigils give you extra fights on command, you even get extra experience and resources based on how difficult the sigil is.  Enemy levels and gene strength are based on the highest of each you have in your party, and scale upwards with tougher sigils. Level 1 sigils are just barely above your party, but you can get sigils several times your level.  We start in on the Sigil of the Abomination. Right off the bat this is looking like it will shape up to be a profitable encounter: there are two new enemies to extract from right there. Efreets are, unsurprisingly, all based around the Burn debuff. Abominations are summoning-oriented creatures that give buffs to anything you summon.  The sigil finally does something, but it's a bit late. Willie one-shots the newly resurrected Forsaken Swampdweller from full HP. That's quite an achievement, considering those things get like triple HP.  That fight alone puts us up to 7500 Power for the altar of blood ritual.  The loot is pretty sad, but completing a sigil gives you a powered up version with more conditions. This one still looks pretty safe.  I blow up another one of my basic sigils. The Fire Priest here isn't eligible for extraction, so this is a pretty straightforward steamroll.  Next sigil. This guy manages to survive my initial volley by sacrificing a teammate, but he merely delays the inevitable.  This one coughs up a little more loot. This is pretty solid as far as single attack spells go.  The other Sigil of the Slime also takes a little while due to resurrection triggers. Still pretty easy.  Final sigil. I was a little worried about this one since one of its properties was extra defense for enemies and manticores are already pretty tough to crack, but it was still a non-issue.  Loot is still pretty sparse, but this could be handy.  That's all of my level 1 sigils upgraded, on to the major sigils. "Block Your Spells" makes this one a non-starter.  "Stats Randomly Swapped" is even worse. I can tackle the no-spells sigils with a party that's less spell-dependent, but building a party that doesn't really care about stats takes some serious planning.  The other two upgraded sigils also have block spells or swap stats. The abomination sigil should be doable, though. So, interesting thing about the Abomination family: I can extract from this guy too, even though most creature families require you to breed first after you acquire the initial monster. See, Abominations were released as part of a content patch late in the game's patch cycle. Because long-term players were at a point where all of them would immediately be available, and because they're not really integrated into the breeding system, instead of gating them behind breeding they're all immediately available to extract from but normally don't appear until after the main quest is finished. But sigils and minibosses bypass the normal restrictions on monster generation, so you can get them early--the downside being, since they're not really included in the breeding system, you can't use them to springboard yourself into any other new creatures. Still, it's a nice bonus.  The enemy's party-wide Ward lets them randomly negate magic damage, and our output is suffering with Matthew's passive intelligence bonus down.  The Troll Arsonist's random passive damage is really doing a number on the team, and worse, we keep whiffing on Ward checks.  Finally we manage to keep Willie up long enough to get off a big spell, and we're lucky enough that Ward doesn't trigger.  Once again, we get an even more suped up sigil and launch straight in to the next abomination fight. We're faced with yet another flavor of Abomination, plus another new creature we can grab in the cerberus. Also, note that despite outleveling us and having a sigil modifier granting two and a half times normal Speed, Matthew still goes first.  On top of the damage over time from the sigil, the enemies have an artifact that inflicts blight, blocking our healing--and random resurrections are eating up a bunch of our MP. After grabbing a core from the cerberus I decide to say gently caress it and just nuke the abomination.  There are only 3 tiers of sigils, so there's no additional sigil. Instead, defeating a primal sigil has a chance to yield a legendary crafting material with a trait taken from the sigil's creature. No such luck this time, although we wouldn't really have a use for an Abomination trait unless we went all in on summoning spells.  Taking on enemies a full 50% higher level with additional buffs is a biiit of a stretch, but I'm feeling cocky.  Basilisks are another class of expansion monsters. With such high level enemies I'm not sure I'll have any time to grab cores, though.  The enemies' defense is really visible; against things our own level Ethereal Knives would have no trouble breaking triple digits on the leper.  First casualty. Revenant Soldiers hit hard thanks to their "convert HP into damage" trait.  Even Star Pact is struggling against enemies this tough.  Good ol' Willie comes through in the end, though. Like Weak, Berserk affects all damage from the source, so Rabid Dementia is a great twofer on him: it's a free physical attack that hits decently hard due to his Int-based bonus damage, and gives a big damage boost for his future turns.  I may have gone a bit over the 7500 Power we needed.  Immune to Sorcery means this one's a no-go. The rest of the level 2 sigils also have unfavorable modifiers, and with how close an "easy" level 2 was I'm not going to touch the level 3+ sigils yet.  All of the bonus experience from the sigils unlocks a couple more rituals, so at least I can put the excess power to good use.  First I want the Altar of Blood ASAP, so I burn a couple of accumulated shards to instantly charge up the ritual to completion.  The Altar of Blood lets you enable various special modifiers on future dungeon runs. Some let you crank up the difficulty in exchange for extra rewards, some are utilities, and a few are unambiguously positive--which is why I was so eager to get it up and running. The Carelessness punishments let you turn off certain drops. That doesn't mean you get other drops instead--basically it just auto-deletes any loot of that type that shows up. They're basically there for the super-late-postgame grind when you just have too much stuff. Hypersensitivity cranks up the scaling on enemy levels. Enemy levels already scale at a very low exponential rate; with hypersensitivity enabled, the exponent gets a lot more noticeable. When you've got a really broken team that can handle enemies hundreds of times their level, it helps you catch up a lot quicker without having to clear hundreds of levels. Hypothermia and Abandonment turn off experience for stabled creatures / all creatures and are mainly used if you're trying to avoid overleveling. Certain fights (such as sigils) scale up with level, so if you're trying to tackle really high level sigil fights it's not to your advantage to let your levels get too lopsided.  Shortsighted is a relatively easy way to game the system to juice extra drops, but when you don't get to see what you're fighting you can run into some nasty surprises. You do get to see how many cores you have of an unidentified monster, so you can sometimes sort of guess what you might be fighting, but you don't get to see their breed or abilities.  Perpetual grinding. Personally I prefer making my way through the dungeon--I'd rather collect the special rewards available on each floor than just face an endless stream of generic battles that occasionally drop an additional crappy chest. If you just want to blow poo poo up mindlessly, though, this is what you want.  Here's the money shot. The extra 250 favor for completing each quest is enough on its own to make the Altar of Blood a top priority construction task, the extra loot you get is just gravy.  On to new creatures! The first abomination helps mitigate one of the biggest weaknesses of summoned creatures by giving them all an artifact trait of your choosing, but this is still much weaker than being able to hand-pick individual artifact traits for your whole team.  This also helps. That's some pretty meaty damage reduction. Interestingly, it doesn't specify that the ability doesn't stack--probably an oversight, but if I ever do an abomination build I'll have to test it out. Reducing damage to summons to 1/64 would be one hell of a trick.  This guy is an interesting take on basic "inflicts status with attack" abilities. Statwise he's pretty bad but about the best you could really do for something that relies on physical attacks and int-based burn damage.  One of the worse Phase Warrior entries, in my opinion. Could conceivably be somewhat useful if you had a team built around punishing enemy attacks.  Smogs have some ridiculous defense and their meaty attack score makes for decent damage from poison. This one is handicapped a bit since it needs to land physicals to do its thing and they really don't have the speed to hit reliably, but some of its cousins can be pretty dangerous in a poison build.  Not the worst ability as far as disruption/counter abilities go, but if you've got such a passive and unreliable ability you really need the stats to be able to contribute on your own and the wyvern just falls short on that count.  Game-breaking if you build around it.  Snore.  Interesting. This guy would make for one hell of a tank in an int-boosting party like the one I'm running right now.  Similar to the Mist Crusader we saw a while back. The Mist Crusader gets the ability to "bank" health with barriers, but the Sun Crusader gets more than twice as much recovery. I prefer this one myself, if only because there are a lot more things you can do to take advantage of heal triggers than you can with barriers.  We also have breeding access to a variant on the Stronghold. All of the Doom Fortresses have provoke-based powers. This one's quite a doozy, especially if you get something that lets you provoke out of turn.  Lastly, here's what legendary crafting materials look like. The essence cost is steep but not unmanageable--the real cost is the ritual requirement. You lose access to the chosen artifact until the ritual is complete and it's a doozy, requiring several times as much energy as your typical construction ritual.
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Aug 23, 2017 23:15
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Wanted to say I'm really enjoying this LP, especially since picking up the game. I really like how I can play this while also watching something on TV hanging out with my better half. Reading all the different builds and strategy is great, and is giving me ideas on how to go forward.
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Aug 24, 2017 03:24
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Whoops, missed one in the creature roundup again: Cerberuses (cerberi?) have an interesting conceit: they can't cast spells normally, but their spells either power up the party or get powered up themselves. It's an interesting concept, but the starter cerberus here is uniquely terrible. Compare to the Raptor Occultist: -Raptor Occultist gives a 7% boost instead of 5% -Raptor Occultist boosts the whole party for every gem any party member has, the Cerberus is limited to spells it equips itself -Raptor Occultist doesn't lose the ability to cast spells Naturally, there are analogues of the Raptor Occultist for other magic schools and other stats, so you can get the same perks if you want to boost something other than Intelligence. Moreover, the Caustic Cerberus's nominal advantage of flexibility doesn't matter most of the time because there are very few circumstances under which it's not restricted to Chaos spells. It's a cool concept, but they really dropped the ball here.
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Aug 24, 2017 15:14
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Update 22: The Abyss  Blowing things up is getting a bit passe, so let's say hello to a couple of new faces.  I'm not entirely sure how a giant living castle wears boots. Maybe they just nail them to the door? Anyhow, the Bastion's sole purpose is to mash Provoke early and often to rack up ridiculous stat boosts, so speed is really the only relevant concern.  While I'm at it, I sub Willie out for a bit more muscle. Say hello to our troll again.  Back in Azure Dream. We fell short on Surathli's favor the first time round, so this is a good chance to catch up.  Beautiful.  This is a cool guy to have, but since the pilwiz family is gated behind favor it will be a long time before we can use this.  The enemies give us a little taste of our own medicine. Under other circumstances this is a problem that could be solved by focus firing down the Bastion, but our loadout is slanted towards defense/support and a couple party members are badly underleveled to boot. Still, Detritus eventually pulls through for the win.  Hey, here's something new. We didn't manage to find any of these the first time around.  You can wish for 1 of 3 things: Strength grants a free buff for the rest of the level. On top of the buffs granted by the angels you can stack up quite a few perma-buffs, which can be handy for sigil fights. Wealth gives you an extra chest's worth of loot. It's usually not terribly impressive. Glory throws you into a battle that's worth favor for winning. Favor is way rarer and harder to get than anything else, so always pick glory.  Of course, like the star says, there's no guarantee it will work. Surathli is kind of a dick.  We've still got quite a few spellcasters in the party, so this is definitely appreciated.  Our Power Balance is in the toilet after breeding two eggs, so now that the newbies are more up to speed it's time to see if we can get another refill from pandemonium tokens. First one is a favor bump for Vulcanar.  This gives about 2k of each basic resource. We're still pretty flush after the sigil spree last level, but it does include some power which is handy.  uhhh  You gained 50 favor with Torun, God of Anger. You're not sure how or why, though. OK.  No luck on the tokens. Popping the bottled fairy brings us almost back up to full, though.  This Eye of Sauron lookin thing is one of the "wayward cores" we're supposed to collect for the realm quest (note that we get two from the "punishment" from Altar of Blood.) There are no gameplay ramifications to them, they're just... there.  Ran into a Mimic. Takes a while to go down, but I've got so much defense stacked here that it's completely harmless.  It coughs up a big attack spell for Death, an area that we've been lacking in. Death creatures feature a lot of speedy glass cannons so this is much appreciated, but it suffers from the usual problems of split stat dependencies.  Better and better.  Surathli, Goddess of Light: Come, approach my altar. A reward is in order for your unquestionable devotion. I wasn't really paying attention and wound up completing one of the realm quests. I'm only about 50 favor short of the threshold so most of the favor bump is wasted, whoops. At least we now have a 2nd quest to make up for it.  The quest loot ain't bad, either. This isn't much, but it lets us break into a family early.  In addition, I am entrusting you with one of my most powerful guardians: the Vanelin Seraph. May it serve you well. I'll send for you again soon. For now, I wish you well.  With any luck this should put us over the top for the merchant ritual by the time we're done.  So here's a fun trick. The Double Take trait on Detritus's lance doesn't just mean an extra attack, it also means spells get repeated an extra time.  With the free Multicast buff from the children of Surathli, that means he can cast his Water Enchantment buff on himself 3 times in a row, giving a meaty attack buff each time plus the Splash buff.  His berserker trait then makes him automatically attack a random enemy at the end of his turn using the full force of his new buffs.  And because he's enchanted with Splash, he dishes out extra damage to adjacent enemies too. If he hits something squishy enough that turns into a triple kill.  Surathli  None of the obelisks spawn any fights, so I'm just not making a lot of headway on favor any way you slice it.  Mirrorball. Why not? Most of the monsters in the party are relatively recent breeding attempts so I could use a chance to stock up on cores.  There's an odd quirk in the battle system: if there are repeat actions in the action queue, they will continue to fire even after the target dies. The engine won't display the extra attacks, but it still rolls damage as normal and will even trigger secondary effects like splash damage. Detritus just killed his opposite number and then beat its corpse so hard it demolished a castle nearby.  The weapon fragments combine for a wholly new type of artifact. Bows are attack/speed and are pretty nefty, although this one has a weird grab bag of enchantments that aren't particularly appealing.  Finished the other quest. Probably not going to use any of these status materials, but the favor bump is definitely welcome since Surathli is so stingy.  We hop in the miniboss portal and get a second crack at the basilisk whose sigil was too tough for me to try extracting from.  Splat. Fortunately I already nabbed its core.  As an added bonus, the Snowstorm gem we have has a chance to autocast on crits. So, in a single turn Detritus can buff his attack stat three times, attack twice with splash damage on each hit, and then if he rolled a crit he can conceivably throw three blizzards. I mean, he's not going to do any real damage--he needs the massive Int boost from the occultist to break 0 damage--but it's still a ton of freeze chances vs. every enemy.  This is technically a slight upgrade to the Star Pact we already have, but I'm assuming from the wording that the MP hit still happens when it's cast from an autocast trigger, which could be disastrous if you're saving MP for a crucial spell.  This is cheaper than the one we have, but we only really need to cast it once anyhow.  We also got a traited artifact, but "_____'s Horror" is the name of the devils' anti-class traits--this one, unsurprisingly, being an advantage over Life-class monsters. It would have been funny if it showed up on a life lance but in general it's just not super impressive.  This hits pretty decently hard and has a nice side effect, but that's a huge price tag.  Gargantuans are pretty tough family to break into, so we're probably not going to see this for a long time.  Back home, we get a new merchant.  This guy sells crafting materials. By this point you should have a decent start on the status boosting materials, but this a huge help for collecting status effect materials (as opposed to just hoping that you randomly get 3 of the same kind out of the 100ish different types there are out there.)  More importantly, it's an even better source for artifact traits than the artifact merchant is. Legendary materials are super cheap compared to fully enchanted artifacts and you get to stick them on whatever type of artifact you want instead of gambling on the RNG giving you something appropriate. The enchanting cost is pretty hefty, but compared to having to disenchant and re-enchant an artifact loaded with random crap you're probably coming out ahead in the end. This is one of the deadly sin traits and it's quite nice, if a bit generic. This will reduce most incoming damage by considerably more than 30%, and may shut down mana-based abilities entirely. Definitely a nice extra.  That was fairly short, so... what the hell, on to the boss. Our smith and bat are coming back out of retirement for this one, for reasons that will soon be apparent. Here's the shiny new Altar of Blood just sitting in the lobby.  So, uh, remember the slime boss with randomly changing immunities?  This boss is just straight up immune to all attacks and all spells, all the time. Debuffs and ability damage are the only way to kill it at all.  Well, almost. It has perma-blight, so it's vulnerable to heal spells.  Just not terribly vulnerable, since blight converts a pretty small fraction of heals into damage.  Splash damage is not an "attack", so that's one way around it. Of course, I'm going to run out of things to splash damage from pretty quickly at this rate.  Once her minions go down it's just a matter of piling on chip damage from the smith/bat abilities. At this point it doesn't really matter what I'm attacking with, since all attacks do 0 direct damage regardless of how strong they are. There's not really much the boss can hope to do against my defense, since it started at really high levels from the smith + amaranth combo and has been compounded several times over by the Bastion.  You approach the clam, which begins to emit a vibrant white light upon your approach. You instruct one of your creatures to pry open the clam, curious as to what might be hidden within.  Yeah, no surprise there.  The boss haul is pretty sad, although a second gem of Rabid Dementia is nice.  Normally I'd say "enough with the Entangle spells already", but cast on hit is a very nice trigger. I can stick this on Detritus and have up to 4 chances to trigger it per round.  I know it just by the looks of you - the deed is done. Deathwalker is no more. My king, I cannot thank you enough! I am forever in your debt. Oh, and if you haven't done so already, be sure to meet up with Zenpang in the stables soon! He said that he has something important to tell you.  It's a reclusive little place located on the far end of the Great Pandemonium. Apparently, a pair of mythical creatures guard the realm's greatest treasures there. If you defeat them, it's quite possible you'll be able to secure yet another Nether Orb! I like how laid back the stablemaster is about all this. Aw shucks, y'all never told me you was lookin for artifacts of godlike power to ascend to apotheosis, why t'ain't nothin to find 'em.  Creature roundup. This one's going to be pretty short; new enemies are becoming rarer and rarer, due to a combination of factors. We've already seen most of the game's selection of basic creatures, and the random encounter pool is getting bigger and bigger so any new ones are less and less likely to show up quickly. Plus, new creatures are gated by character level, so with us being a bit overleveled from the sigil spree last time we're not going to be gaining levels (and thereby unlocking creatures) as quickly until the enemies catch up a bit. Seraphs all have spend-mana-for-benefit abilities. Straight up triple damage on a very easy condition is pretty goddamn good, but this guy isn't really built as an alpha striker. It's a testament to the sheer power of their ability that they're moderately dangerous targets despite their mediocre attack.  The theme of basilisks is "don't leave them alone or they will gently caress you up." You can abuse statuses like invisibility/shell to make it easy to avoid damage between turns, but that's small time stuff--if you want to really break these things, you can use turn order fuckery to spam their unreasonably powerful abilities.  Not a lot in the way of new breeding combos. We do have an entry into the dryad family, but this is 1) not very good and 2) going to be available on its own in the not too distant future.  If we wanted, we could chain breed it into this, which is arguably even worse; if you have the means to apply buffs now you will probably have the means to apply them again in a few turns, whereas the naturalist lets you extend buffs that you can't replace (and also lets you renew a lot more buffs in a single action.) Either way, just extending buffs is pretty ho hum compared to some of the benefits other dryads get from buffs.
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Aug 24, 2017 23:05
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Do you have the setup to show off the Basilisk now? That might be fun to see.
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Aug 25, 2017 03:27
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Leraika posted:Do you have the setup to show off the Basilisk now? That might be fun to see. Yes and no. I've got enough defense boosts to 0-damage most incoming attacks and barrier damage does not stop the basilisk's ability, so it's not terribly difficult to arrange for it to fire. I don't have any means to manipulate turn order, though, so I can't speed up the process or activate it at will (out-of-turn attacks like that granted by Rabid Dementia do not count as a "turn" and will not trigger turn-based effects.) That does raise a question of what I'll be using, though. The next boss fight is straightforward and doesn't have much of a gimmick, so I don't really have any pressing needs to fulfill. This page is getting ridiculously long due to updates and it's been a while since I've asked for input, so I think it's time to vote on the next team comp! I'll probably still be rotating stuff in and out a bit, but for the next stretch I'll be using one of the following cores: A) Team Thousand Cuts Troll Berserker Valkyrie Scout Brim Smith Crypt Bat Same gameplan as before: launch as many attacks as possible to rack up chip damage from the smith + bat combo. But now we've got a few new tools, with access to Multistrike and multiple crowd control spell triggers. B) Team Spellfuck Raven Acolyte Raptor Occultist Coast Watcher Narklin Ophan Straightforward and efficient. The addition of the Ophan gives the team all the healing I could ever want, as well as a generally kickass Life caster. C) Team Juggernaut Bastion Crystal Smith Planetary Amaranth Rapturous Ghoul That's enough layers of defense to pretty much shut down any enemy attacks, while the ghoul provides a win condition: he gets a damage boost based on speed, which is getting continually ramped up by the Bastion, allowing the team to bust through stall-heavy enemies. D) Team A-Bomb Timeless Master Forsaken Swampdweller Chaos Guard Sphinx Justiciar Kind of a one trick, but it's a really good trick. Final Oblation with the type damage boost from the sphinx should still be more than enough to wipe most fights. E) Team Smash Caustic Cerberus Vanelin Seraph Troll Arsonist Asura Bonebreaker I know I just badmouthed the cerberus, but as bad as it is it's the best raw attack boost for the party that I've got. That directly powers the arsonist's passive damage and helps maximize the seraph's already-impressive damage, which is getting crit boosted from the asura.
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Aug 25, 2017 17:07
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A) Team Thousand Cuts I love the idea of basically nickle-and-diming poo poo to death.
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Aug 25, 2017 18:23
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Going for Team D: Team A-Bomb I love stupid ability damage teams. Also, where did the Basilisks and Abominations come from? They weren't in my build of the game.
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Aug 25, 2017 19:34
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E Team Smash This may be the only time the Cerberus is ever useful!
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Aug 25, 2017 20:11
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ChrisBTY posted:Going for Team D: Team A-Bomb I love stupid ability damage teams. Abominations and Basilisks are from a content patch that was released after the game had been out for a while.
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Aug 25, 2017 20:30
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Go Team A-Bomb!
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Aug 25, 2017 23:04
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E: SMASH
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Aug 26, 2017 01:28
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Team D: A-Bomb Let's see some crazy numbers
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Aug 26, 2017 07:01
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Looks like it's time for team A-Bomb again! The next boss isn't going to know what hit it.
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Aug 26, 2017 15:56
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