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Oh hey, this is finally up. I helped Kinu and Rea out slightly on the technical back end for this project. (Mostly with data and game mechanics as best I could.) Fun fact, while most enemies have it so that D-Depth can only have a 45% or 50% chance to land on them, D1 and D2 have their stats fudged so that D-Depth always lands on them. This is so you can witness how a Destroyer works if you have one in the party and actually get to use their full kit in the battles that matter in the prologue. It's a neat little design trick. None of the other classes have such fudging, but they don't need it at this point in the game.
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Oct 14, 2020 07:55
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Pokeytax handled the fan translations of pretty much every game that wasn't VFD, so he also worked on this game. Dude did a lot for this series for us international speakers. While he did do a decent job on the DS game, the translations for the PSP games are considerably more polished I'd say. For anyone who's interested in playing any of the 7th Dragon games that isn't VFD, you can find the fan translations here.
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Oct 16, 2020 11:46
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There's a lot of huge gameplay changes from DS (though also quite a few callbacks, such as putting Hammerheads in the occupied area dungeon.) A lot of ailments got reworked to have their numbers tuned going off of the skill data now instead of being a hardcoded mechanical interaction. Which leads to stuff like Paralysis having a much lower incapacitation rate compared to the likes of DS and EO. Though you can stack every single ailment on a single enemy now, so that's probably meant to balance it out. That being said, enemy ailments basically have similar incapacitation rates to DS and Etrian Odyssey style ailments, so it's safe to assume enemy ailments are far more deadly. (Paralysis chances are like 33% to 55%ish on not being able to act to give an example.) Decoy Mirror is also ridiculously strong in this game. It was a strong defensive skill in 7th Dragon DS, but it got mega buffed here. Lack of shield bleeding and actually making it negate attacks instead of making it essentially a Life extension makes it a fantastic defensive for quite a lot of situations. (And then 2020-II buffed it further.  )quote:If you're coming from Etrian Odyssey: Dragons are not on the same level of power as FOEs. You're meant to kill them as soon as you see them. In fact, if you don't do that, you will regret it very much down the road. I think this is why the game forces you to fight 5 dragons at the beginning of the game. It serves as reconditioning if players are more familiar with EO, and lets players know it's okay to fight dragons right away. Smart design. Fun fan translation fact, in the Japanese version, all the junk items had the same description "Sell this to a shop." The fan translation gave all the items unique descriptions.
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Oct 24, 2020 05:25
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Clarste posted:I would just like to note how humongously important it is for counterattack builds that all dragons attack twice per turn. Yeah, the counters were pretty situational skills in DS. While they could be strong in that game, using them for offense pretty much limited to you to either running a solo or small party or having a Princess or a Knight to redirect attacks towards themselves to get the most out of them, or fighting bosses that have multihit skills (And there weren't that many such bosses in DS.) Or you were trying to bypass the Mage's damage soft caps. Dragons now being able to attack twice per turn pretty much makes reflecting damage back to them an incredibly strong tactic, if not one of the strongest ones. I'm pretty sure the class writeups'll reveal just how much damage you can smack back per turn just by stacking all counters possible. Oh and before anyone gets any ideas, they changed counter skills to be once per action and not per hit from 2020 onwards, ala EO style counters, so multihits aren't necessarily the best kind of enemies to try to counter. Granted by VFD, this stopped being one the strongest tactics if only because VFD introduced a ton of better options you could use for massive damage. Junpei posted:The Trails Series? They do that. Commander Keene posted:I don't remember which game it was, but I'd absolutely believe that XSEED would do that kinda thing. It was indeed the Trails series where these exact circumstances happened.
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Oct 24, 2020 11:17
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Full tables for Redfire Breath and Darksteel Breath for those that are curious. Redfire:  Darksteel:  At least they're not loving 30 turns in this game?? Not sure why DS think they needed to scale up for that long. Healing is also really simple. Base Heal + (MAT / 10), that's it. Only use MAT has for physical attackers. (Meanwhile Psychic is basically free to ignore ATK all they want.) Priority is similar to how Pokemon handles priority brackets, except in 7th Dragon's case, the lower the priority number, the better it is.
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Oct 25, 2020 02:26
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Yeah, gonna have to agree with Clarste. There's only one set of situations where I can think of where you might consider switching back to Battou Stance, but that's locked to lategame. Otherwise flipping back and forth between stances is a huge waste of turns. Also an important note about buffs, unlike Etrian Odyssey's in-game skill descriptions, 7th Dragon's in-game skill descriptions count the casting turn in their duration count as well. Junpei posted:I'm not experienced with this game, but if Battou has the AOE skills, it could be worthwhile to switch back to Battou if you have a boss that doesn't start off with adds/mooks/minions, but summons them later in the fight at a specific HP threshold or after a certain amount of turns or something. Surprisingly that's actually something bosses or dragons don't really do in this game, or this series compared to EO bosses. Probably cause from 2020 onwards, the shift to giving dragons and bosses 2 actions per turn would make the action economy spiral out of control in the dragons' favor if they had minions. Araxxor fucked around with this message at 06:52 on Oct 25, 2020 |
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Oct 25, 2020 06:49
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We all did dumb things as teens, don't worry too much about it. Incidentally, pretty much the only way to get the most out of Redfire Breath is to trigger react turns. Without any react turns, it's barely much of an increase in damage. About 105.5% overall, if the battle even lasts for that long. Araxxor fucked around with this message at 07:22 on Oct 25, 2020 |
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Oct 25, 2020 07:17
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Yeah, it's a good tense track since fights against Imperials can get pretty rough. Warcry can be a bit of a nasty boss, but this section of the game really fudges things in your favor as you're getting used to things. All the dragons here, Warcry included, barely resist ailments so a Dagger Trickster can end up being a huge help. A lot of things in this game get far more manageable if you double stack resistance accessories, so being able to avoid stuff like Paralysis can help a ton. quote:A lot of ailments got reworked to have their numbers tuned going off of the skill data now instead of being a hardcoded mechanical interaction. Which leads to stuff like Paralysis having a much lower incapacitation rate compared to the likes of DS and EO. Though you can stack every single ailment on a single enemy now, so that's probably meant to balance it out. quote:Typhoon Howl: Non-elemental Ranged attack to all party members. MAT-based. 1.25x damage. 0.75x speed. Cannot miss. 65% chance to inflict Paralysis for 3 turns. Paralyzed targets have a 35% chance to not act. Case in point on enemy ailments being far nastier than player ones... yeah you really don't want to go in without Paras Guards. An interesting thing to note is that Warcry actually has 2 different regular attack animations. Him clawing you, and then he starts adding in biting you to the mix when he's below half HP. That's not actually for show, though both attacks deal the same damage. There's something alternate basic attack animations does affect a little later, though I think that'll be talked about fairly soon. Another fun fact. Gather Power does absolutely nothing. It's just there to warn you about Typhoon Howl, which is Warcry's strongest skill. In fact several enemy telegraph skills don't actually boost up the enemy. Their next attack is just naturally that strong. It's just like Etrian Odyssey 1 charge skills!
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Nov 3, 2020 15:24
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Junpei posted:Hmmmm. How does boss AI work in this game? Is it a set pattern of "use Flame Breath, then normal attack, then Claw Swipe, then go back to step 1"? Is it random what skills they use? We have no idea on the specifics. We couldn't even find that info. That being said, it's mostly set for dragons. All dragons have a set pattern of attacks they'll follow for the first few turns before doing random stuff. Though they actually have like 3 different AI sets depending on how the battle started out. Preemptive attack, surprise attack, and even footing. Not only that, they'll also change their behavior immediately upon reaching a certain LIFE threshold, so it's also phase based as well. This does make hunting down dragons easier since you'll have to kill multiple of the same species and makes things more efficient if you can capitalize on your knowledge from when you first fought a new dragon.
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Nov 3, 2020 15:57
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BrightWing posted:Is Seven Deadly Struggles used in any other game? It sounds vaguely familiar It's not used in 7th Dragon DS or VFD. Fun fact, this game actually has difficulty modes, Standard and Casual. They're both what you'd expect, though Casual is blatantly tacked on. As for why I say this. What Casual does is reduce damage by 15%, and reduces enemies; life by 15%. As well as giving a 5% boost to SP and EXP payouts. Sounds good, but there's one big problem. The damage reduction applies to everyone's damage! From what I can tell, they just slapped on a check at the end of the damage formula that goes "Is the player playing on Casual mode? Multiply damage by 0.85 if so." Without any regard for who is dealing the damage. So the 15% HP reduction is entirely negated by that mistake, meaning the only thing it really does for you is reduce damage and put you ahead on the level curve ever so slightly. Later games just straight up have an entirely different stat table that's used for enemies on Casual mode, avoiding this mistake entirely.
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Nov 8, 2020 10:59
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I finished tearing through 2020 data (though not II) for Kinu to the point where 2020 is now basically an open book, so she and Rea should have a lot more info on the back end now. Speaking of which guess what, the Samurai buff over time skills are bugged! The data table is misaligned. Normally the turn 1 values (which are stuck at 1x) are there as dummy values as casting it on the first turn doesn't do anything. Unfortunately, the turn 2 effect starts off at the turn 1 column instead! Meaning that on the turn after you cast the buffs... you get no benefit. And have to wait for the turn after that for them to start kicking in. And because 1 of the turns is accidentally wasted, the effect cuts off at the turn 9 column instead of the turn 10 column, making these skills worse than intended. This bug was not fixed in II.
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Nov 12, 2020 08:20
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Junpei posted:I do remember that on Gamefaqs, our old pal Dr. Fetus had did some datamining for the VFD classes and their skills, and the Samurai long-term slow self-buffs weren't bugged there, at least. Yes, that is me.  Also I'd probably take some of that with a grain of salt. Back then I didn't have the ability to dig as deep into the games as I do now. Been meaning to do a 2nd pass on those writeups. In fact until a few days ago, the reference material I mined out months ago for Kinu and Rea for 2020 were woefully inaccurate and out of date. Spent the past few weeks data drilling into the game (and getting a game complete save file I could having a testing environment with) and correcting a bunch of faulty assumptions on my part. (And discovering some more hilarious bugs with a few skills as a result.) Junpei posted:Also, let me just quickly put on my 'Mythology Nerd' hat for a second and explain where the name "Murakumo" comes from. Ah, that'd explain the sword logo for the organization, I see.
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Nov 12, 2020 11:06
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That remix of Jungle Navigation is nice, maybe give that a listen.
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Nov 20, 2020 05:52
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In fact, that portrait's official name is Jet. Like with DS, the portraits in the rest of the series have "canon names" as well. Unlike with DS, you get no bonus SP for doing so nor are there passwords to give them said names.
Araxxor fucked around with this message at 05:39 on Nov 27, 2020 |
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Nov 27, 2020 05:27
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That is in the game, though it's only the fan translation saying that and not the original JP version. VFD would go on to be a lot more inclusive about things though, but the rest of the series doesn't really say much unfortunately. (At the very least it's not offensive, though there are some side-eye worthy moments here and there.) Again, VFD is much better about this.
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Dec 1, 2020 00:20
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Rival Arrival is one of the best tracks in the game. Definitely give that one a listen! Also yeah counter parties are just nuts and tear through dragons since they activate twice if the dragon opts to attack your party twice.
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Dec 18, 2020 21:57
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Unfortunately in 7th Dragon DS, Curse is still poop due to being basically a direct sister of EO. (Also for some reason Curse got nerfed there???) In the later games, it's an actual DPS ailment. Feedback is absurd. Most dragons and bosses just have a 0.8x multiplier against Curse, which basically amounts to a 76% chance on average to land it. Which is absolutely ridiculous when it basically takes 1 to 2 turns on average to land Feedback (averaging close to 1 turn), meaning you can save EX for Hacking attempts instead so you can set up luvshock.exe easily. Combo that with luvshock.exe and enemies essentially shred themselves for 1575% damage! On top of denying a turn to them which can be huge in dragon and boss fights. Unfortunately luvshock's damage does take into account the target's defense stat, so if it's particularly high, the self attacks won't do much, but fortunately there's not too many cases where you have to worry about that. Hackers can be a ridiculously strong support if you use them right. Incidentally Thunder Breath here is a mistranslation. It's actually supposed to be Sand Breath, which is why it blinds instead of doing something like paralyzing, and not the first time this error is made either. Which is funny cause there are actual Thunder Breaths in this game. This version of Thunder Breath has a 35% chance to blind for 3 turns and multiplies accuracy by 0.85x. Enemy blind for the most part can be face tanked through, namely cause a ton of player skills in this game have super high accuracy. Araxxor fucked around with this message at 23:50 on Jan 17, 2021 |
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Jan 17, 2021 22:45
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Oh yeah, building up EX with a Hacker is basically awful, which is a shame cause they really get a lot of benefits from EX. Only 2 skills grant EX, so they have to smack things with their Chakrams to even build it up, or facetank a bunch of hits. There are thankfully ways around that, but you're basically not gonna see Hackers reach 100% EX more than once or twice in a dungeon run.
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Jan 18, 2021 00:52
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Blind is basically not a real ailment in 2020. In fact accuracy is a really underutilized mechanic overall in 2020 outside of very specific circumstances. The accuracy formula is really simple: Accuracy = (Unit Accuracy * Skill Accuracy * Blind Factor) - Evasion. Most of the time everyone has 100% innate accuracy. The blind accuracy multipliers are rather ineffective. Most of the time enemy blind just applies a 0.75x multiplier to accuracy. The thing is, on the player side, most attacking skills in the game have at least 1.5x accuracy. Just look at the Samurai and Trickster writeups. So your party can easily bypass the blind by either not giving a drat if they're a Hacker, or just using an attacking skill since that still has over 100% accuracy. And against enemies and dragons? Well it can work but a 15% reduction isn't really something notable, though you can stack ailments. But against bosses, don't even bother. Nearly every single attacking skill from a boss has the "Cannot Miss" flag. Meaning most of the time it'll only have an effect on their regular attacks (which they do use periodically so it's not entirely nothing.) Venom Boost got nerf hammered hard from 7th Dragon DS, because in DS it can be stacked infinitely, and always multiplied poison damage by 1.3x no matter how many Healers were in the party, which is rather ridiculous when you have 4 Healers in the party. (Yes they handed the lethal poison to the medic class.) It's still really drat good in 2020, which kind of speaks to how game shattering it could be in DS. Surprise Hunt nullifying only dragons walking into your back seems like a rather small bonus, doesn't it? Guess what, it's bugged. It was supposed to work on all surprise attacks period, but doesn't work on random encounters in 2020. This was fixed in 2020-II. Sadly the preemptive aspect doesn't work on dragon battles or boss fights, but you can already walk into dragons' backs anyways for the former. There may be several of you wondering why Sacrifice even exists. That skill originated from DS. For those of you familiar with that game, that is probably all the explanation you need. To go more into depth, it was one of the Rogue's skills. What's worse was that it was an EX skill and easily the worst one in the game because it permanently killed the Rogue there too! Also it deleted whatever equipment the Rogue had as insult to injury. At least 2020's version returns them to you because there is plenty of one time equipment in the game. It had slightly different effects there. If no one in the enemy party was 10 or more levels above the Rogue, they would either have a 100% base chance to instantly die, or take 70% of their max LIFE as damage if the former effect didn't activate, as well as the full heal. Otherwise if even a single enemy was that much stronger, everyone just got smacked for 100% typeless damage. This still kills the Rogue. I can only assume the thought was "what if we let players have their characters commit heroic sacrifices through gameplay instead of cutscenes?" I'm not sure why it made it into 2020 though. Incidentally, quite a few players ended up permanently killing the Trickster by accident and were understandably pissed afterwards. How did this happen? Well the Japanese description is kind of vague... quote:Large damage to all enemies + Party fully recovers + User disappears (LOST) quote:Lose one's life forever to turn the tables.
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Jan 28, 2021 04:29
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According to a developer interview, that was intended to be Gigawatt, not Jigowatt (It's a Back to the Future reference, yes.) But one of the writers misspelled it and they just ended up rolling with it.
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Mar 2, 2021 05:33
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It's Phantasy Moon in the original Japanese as well.
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Mar 3, 2021 15:16
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Yeah this game does not gently caress around in its tone, which can be a real stark contrast if you're coming off of VFD which is very oddly really lighthearted in comparison to the rest of the series. (DS while being more along the lines of a traditional fantasy JRPG in terms of tone, did have its share of some hosed up poo poo.) Chapter 1 was sure something but chapter 2 is where the game really got my attention and drew me into the setting. A cage made out of railroad tracks and trains and train stations is a pretty memorable setting. Koron should be very glad the game being played is not 7th Dragon DS. There are far more out there dragon designs in that game. (I don't even know how something like Eclipse would have worked as a 3D model for one.)Ah Tower Dragons. They... certainly existed in DS. Then 2020 turned them into something the entire playerbase despises because they're so annoying to fight. There's absolutely no way to pierce that Jump, as every attack, even the ones flagged as "can't miss" are instead flagged as "auto-miss" so don't even try. (VFD added in the power of friendship to knock them out of that state at least.) That Railgun is a scripted miniboss. By which I mean it's innate accuracy stat and the accuracy of its skills are set to 0% so it's nearly impossible to lose. (There's a lower bound of a 1% chance of being hit so you could theoretically lose the battle if you really tried for some reason.) Araxxor fucked around with this message at 00:28 on Mar 15, 2021 |
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Mar 13, 2021 12:40
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VFD is alright but yeah, going from VFD to any of the earlier games, especially the 2020s, can be a huge bit of culture shock as someone described to me. As someone whose first introduction to this franchise was VFD, that game didn't click a ton with me, but I got hooked hard into the rest of the 3 games when I went back to those. (Though DS took a while to really hook me but once it did, hoo boy!) And 2020 snagged me by this point in the game. I do have a lot of words to say about VFD, but they'd probably be better suited for someone's hypothetical VFD LP instead of derailing this particular LP to 80 years in the future. (That and such discussions would spoil the rest of the games like rotten milk.) I will say this though, it's a drat shame the other 3 games got left behind in Japan. Many thanks to Pokeytax for letting those titles live on in fan translations at the very least. 2020 as you've all seen in this update is not afraid to get personal and visceral in what happens in this twisted and distorted world and it's great.  The sheer wrongness of the setting, and the sea of senseless deaths is just really gruesome. A lot of what the 2020s did has a bunch of roots in what DS pulled off and they really decided to go all in on some of those roots as they took the games in a different direction, like the sheer batshit insane moments and just really getting drat metal with the plot beats and setting.quote:It's great and really sells the Imperial Dragons as forces of nature and beings from not here rather than just "the next boss". This one inverted a tower and created a mess of floating debris orbiting a singularity just by deciding to live here. Looking forward to seeing if they keep up the trend or just kind of drop it like a hot potato in the future. To the person who said this, boy did you get your wish! Araxxor fucked around with this message at 04:11 on Mar 14, 2021 |
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Mar 14, 2021 04:08
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Even though Imageepoch was the main company for developing the games, 7th Dragon was always a SEGA IP. Rieko Kodama and Kayzua Niinou were the main heads of the series for DS and 2020, however Niinou left after 2020, so it was namely Kodama in charge for 2020-II and VFD. However she was hospitalized for most of VFD's development.
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Mar 14, 2021 06:13
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Trash Pickup is truly and utterly absurd and is easily one of the biggest selling points of a Hacker. The other selling point is luvshock + Feedback which turns your Hacker from a support class into an outright carry. Fun fact it was supposed to be called Garbage Collection in the fan translation but, Pokeytax ran into character limitations. Unlike Etrian Odyssey titles past 2 or 7th Dragon DS, ailment duration isn't RNG based. Each individual skill defines how long an ailment lasts if it lands on your party. And Trash Pickup dumpsters on most of it. The other big selling point of Trash Pickup is that it means that as long as your party is fast enough, several ailments will do literally nothing if your party moves before they get inflicted. This also means that ailment defensive accessories are a complete and utter waste with proper usage of TP, and that means you can use stat accessories instead to finish fights considerably faster due to the DPS increase they give. Or to hugely neutralize big attacks with defense accessories. Trash Pickup is completely and utterly broken. Jigowatt can be a bit of a toughie, and it's something of an infamous boss in the playerbase. While no means impossible, it's kind of a notable difficulty spike where it's placed at and demands you know what you're doing to get past it. It can take a few tries or you might have to grind up a a bit to get past it. Though the artbook and game data might provide some insight onto why this was the case. According to how the artbook organized the area and enemy art, it's likely that Jigowatt was intended to be fought later instead of in Chapter 2. Jigowatt's stats are also kind of a little odd. War Cry's ailment resistances are set at 0.9 (meaning ailments are only 90% as effective relative to their base infliction chance), and for bosses, this gradually lowers to 0.5 with each boss fight as the game goes on in order to provide a bit of a difficulty curve regarding ailment usage. The chapter 3 boss has their multipliers set to 0.65. Jigowatt on the other hand? Its ailment resistances are set to 0.5 instead, while all the other bosses drag the number down gradually, meaning that only Jigowatt breaks that pattern. This suggests that it was dragged from elsewhere in the game, and they just didn't finish rebalancing the boss fight in time for the final release which could explain the rather large difficulty spike for most players. Also another bit of an oddity. Bosses are unique in that they have 2 different basic attack animations for the purposes of the tier 2 Destroyer counters, and well to also add some more flair to them as only bosses and very few dragons have this unique privilege. As counters don't check for the damage type, but rather the animation flag (Melee, Ranged, Claw, Fang, and Breath), which are only used to activate counter skills. (This was sadly dropped in VFD since the tier 2 Destroyer counters were thrown out in that game, and the only animation flags used are now Melee and Ranged.) However Jigowatt is a bit weird in that both of its attacking animations, where it shoots at you, and where it headbutts you with an electro ball, are flagged as Ranged, despite it visibly making contact with the party member. There are a few other cases where the animation flags got screwed up and the counter move you're supposed to use doesn't match up with the enemy's attacking animation though fortunately not too many enemies and skills have mismatched animations and flags.
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Mar 21, 2021 07:52
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Junpei posted:Does Trash Pickup render actual ailment-curing skills and items pointless? Sort of, though there are a few things to keep in mind. Inventory space isn't at a premium like in EO and 7th Dragon DS, so you might as well bring them along anyways. The other thing is that DOT ailments such as Poison, Burn, and Freeze will still take effect before Trash Pickup does, so it can be worth it to try to purge those off immediately in some scenarios. The other potential issue is that Hacker just has too much to do depending on how you skilled them, so they might not have had an opportunity to use it, so it doesn't hurt to have alternatives. Another thing that's tied to this is that ailment dispels in 2020 are undermined by a rough balancing issue. Annoyingly enough, the ailment balance in 2020 is... wacky. And kind of non-existent. The enemy side of this aspect is pretty lopsided in their favor, as the infliction rates of enemy skills in important fights and a few randoms are sky high. Most of the time they're set at 75%, 99%, or 100%. This basically means that if you don't run Trash Pickup, you have to use ailment defense accessories which basically means stat accessories are extremely niche as you can only really use them in a select few cases. Like if you stack up on MDF accessories, you can cut Railgun's damage hard and could straight up facetank it in some parties without having to use the defend command. And for that matter, the rest of Jigowatt's offenses. Unfortunately that leaves you open to Discharge's Paralysis which can send the fight south fast. Sure you're taking less damage but that won't mean a drat thing if your party can't even act because the Paralysis kept proccing. Trash Pickup lets you benefit from the best of both worlds, which is one of the biggest selling points of a Hacker. But if you don't have that, it's basically run ailment accessories or die. Later games would fix this issue by... just actually rebalancing the numbers to be more sensible. And actually rebalancing the rest of the mechanics to give you an actual reason to use different equipment options. (Evasion increases are basically a dump stat in 2020 because everyone's eyesight is too drat good.) But due to the ailment balance in 2020, a ton of weight is placed on preventing them from landing in the first place, with not a lot of room to just tough it out for a few turns.
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Mar 22, 2021 04:04
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Oh god Hacker. This class is just so completely and utter absurd. They do have a considerable knowledge floor though, so it can be extremely easy to write them off as "worst class in the game" (in fact they are considered that by the playerbase overall.) due to the fact that they are a support class in a game with a 3 man party, so losing one DPS class is a huge setback in offensive power. Then you look at the internals and the hidden mechanics and the way they interact with each other and realize "this class is loving broken holy poo poo." The stat boosting buffs essentially upgrade your equipment by 1 tier on top of amplifying their effects, so they're super good and make up a bit for the lack of damage Hacker brings to a party. And the flat stat buff stops them from being worthless at the beginning of the game. Oh sorry did I say lack of damage, cause as you all have seen, luvshock + Feedback is completely ridiculous! And basically turns the Hacker into a DPS class on top of just stopping the enemy from doing anything. That combo is what truly makes Hacker completely absurd, and separates the bad Hackers from the good ones. Regenerator is also a fantastic defensive buff to lay on top of that, and an A-Skill Caller boosted Airsoft Training also stacks with that, forcing your opposition to basically one shot you to truly take you down, and means you have to heal way less often, which means more opportunities to deal damage. You all already know how amazing Trash Pickup is. Feedback is legitimately nuts and seeing Curse actually be an unironically good ailment instead of something purely reserved for cheese strats was quite a bit of culture shock. (Except in 7th Dragon DS. Curse still sucks rear end there.) Discounting immunities, the multipliers against Curse in the big fights are either 0.75 or 0.8. Which means you have a 71.25% or a 76% chance of landing it without any boosts! Which is really loving absurd, and generally means you're good at fishing for Feedback procs without having to use it on a Hacked target first. Course if Quick Hack procced on an important fight that just guarantees Feedback will land and is one less thing you have to worry about. Poisnjam probably won't see much use, but if you're using a a triple Hacker team (Yes it's possible to beat the game with one, I managed to 100% the game with it. It was a loving absurd trip as Kinu can verify.) it's pretty much the main way for such a team to deal damage, as multiple luvshocks sadly do not stack due to it just being an AI overwrite. Yes Buffer Overrun works on Hacking too, and its effects are dynamic, so you don't have to time it to only land on a Hacked enemy. Oh god Shutdown. There's a reason this skill is locked behind tier 4 and it's because it enables the Hacker to straight up stunlock the enemy! Hack > Shutdown > Hack > Shutdown, rinse and repeat as needed. This combo gets even more absurd with multiple Hackers because as it turns out if a luvshocked target is asleep, they will attack themselves without waking themselves up! Not only that, enemies resist sleep far less than they resist hacking! So if you just need to buy yourself time to work that hacking magic, you can use Shutdown as an opportunity to fish for Hacks. It's nuts. gg.bat is yet another bit of absurdity, only real weakesses are the Hackers can't build up EX for poo poo in 2020, and that it doesn't dispel existing ailments on cast, meaning stuff like Poison and such will still deal damage to you. That being said, even though Hacker is the 2nd most broken class in the game, they do have their weaknesses. Their core hacking mechanics are pretty heavily RNG based, so if Hack fails to land, that does reduce what they can do. They're also incredibly terrible at building up EX and that would help a lot since it doubles infliction rates to give them more reliable Hacks. They have a lot of fantastic skills that they can be using, but they are ultimately only 1 party member, so they can oftne be choice locked in what they can be doing. Not only that, but they are easily the most SP hungry class in the game. With the way the skill system works from 2020 onwards, generalizing your skillset is encouraged more over min max specializing. And most skills are good from level 1 anyways, with further levels just being further optimizations. Not for the Hacker, due to the way their mechanics work and their skills scale, they heavily benefit from max level skills far more than most other classes, so they'll flounder quite a bit early on. Should probably let them guzzle down all the SP boosts you can find to alleviate that problem.
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Apr 12, 2021 03:06
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Some of the Hacker's skills are mentioned as being able to trigger contact counters. That's because said skills were accidentally flagged as having melee animations instead of ranged, which enabled them to trigger those. Whoops! Fortunately it doesn't matter too much as only a few enemies can make that an issue. Fixed in later games thankfully.Omobono posted:There's people that think this class is bad? Clarste basically had the gist of it. In Etrian, having 20% of your party eaten up by a support isn't a big deal, but 33% in the 2020s can be due to the lower action economy. Basically the luvshock + Feedback combo is what turns the Hacker from a support into a MASSIVE DPS. But remember, like Etrian Odyssey, most of the internals are rather obscured from the player and "self-damage" on enemies in RPGs usually isn't incredibly high. Pretty much the agreed upon selling point of the class was Trash Pickup, that much at least became obvious, but the class was seen as "less efficient" than the 4 other candidates when that was far from the truth. Now they weren't seen as outright bad, just worst comparatively. Even a party with a poorly used Hacker could get through the game. Just with a lot of needless pain that could have been avoided by just using the class better. It also does not help that from what I can tell, the Japanese descriptions of some of these skills are rather vague and kind of bury a lot of lede. Like it's not stated inflicting Curse or Sleep is guaranteed on Hacked targets. (Though it is stated in the fan translations, and Pokeytax tried to deal with the vague skill descriptions in general, so if you already had a better idea of how some skills functioned, thank him.) And well like Clarste said, that quite a few people still have the mentality "status effects are bad" to this very day even though quite a few RPG series already grew out of that bit of restrictive design long ago. Like I said, there's unfortunately a knowledge floor to really use Hacker effectively, but they are just absolutely ridiculous in the right hands. A badly used Hacker can still contribute quite a bit to battles, but they'll be far less effective than any of the 4 other classes since they're all offensive classes. Like you have to be aware that using EX doubles your infliction rates, which helps put the dice in their favor, so learning how to use that effectively makes the Hacker significantly less dead weight. And knowing that Hack Weakness is incredibly strong, both of those which are not explained to the player, also helps and stacking all the boosts you can for the nearly guaranteed Hack is basically another thing that separates good Hackers from the bad ones. Also knowing when to use their buffs and when you should be fishing for hacks is important as well, as Hacker has way too much to be juggling at any given time so they heavily reward good decision making while punishing bad ones. Using one well basically means you have the entire battle under control, which isn't something the other classes exactly offer. Lord Zedd-Repulsa posted:If they're the second most broken class in the game, what's the first? Destroyer. Incidentally, they were also recommended by the dev team themselves as the best candidate for a solo run. (Funnily enough they also said that triple Hacker is probably impossible to complete the game with. I can personally verify that part is not true.  )Funnily enough for all the absurd bullshit you can pull off in this game and its sequel, it has nothing on the VFD classes. All this would be peanuts in comparison to those Super Saiyans. Junpei posted:I do like the fact that no matter the class combo (assuming you keep a 3-man party the whole game instead of rotating around like LPers do) you have at least one person who can heal, either actively (Psychic), passively (Hacker) or through items (Trickster) Regenerator is more of a "use this if your Hacker has spare turns" skill, which can happen but isn't to be super relied upon. If anything, the better heal is an A-Skill Caller boosted Airsoft Training as that has a 65% chance of proccing end of turn AUTO skills, and benefits your other classes too since it can boost their AUTO skill rates. And even then you'll still want heals from items or skills for emergencies. Inventory space is not at a premium in this game. Incidentally it was mentioned in the tables of these class overviews, but there is a priority system in these games. If you're familiar with Pokemon's priority system, it works just like that. There's a set of priority brackets which has a number assigned to them (and that's how the skills are flagged with priority in the data), with the higher brackets moving before the lower brackets. Though unlike in Pokemon the numbers aren't completely indicative of how much priority a skill has, so here are the brackets so you know what the numbers in the tables mean: 6 1 2 3 4 (Completely unused in 2020.) No Priority 5 (Completely unused in 2020.) Funnily enough 2 priority values are completely unused by both players and enemies in 2020. But uh, don't use this as a reference for later games, as they shuffled some of the brackets around. Araxxor fucked around with this message at 12:22 on Apr 12, 2021 |
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Apr 12, 2021 12:15
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Hacker is pretty much the equivalent of the Princess class from 7th Dragon DS. Which pretty much is Troubadour + Hexer yeah. Hack is basically a reskinned Fear, and the commands are akin to the Fear commands from EO1 and 7DS. Though luvshock got a huge buff as the self damage is only 1x in EO1 and 7DS and ailments could not stack in those games. Feedback not only stacks with Hack, it basically takes the high damage modifier into even more absurd territory for a total of 31.5x damage at max level against dragons and bosses! Yeah it's that absurd! Do be warned it does take the enemy's stats into calculations, so against enemies whose DEF stat is close or eclipses their ATK stat, it will do no damage due to the Paper Mario math. Not too many enemies like that thankfully. but they do exist. To put things into perspective, Jigowatt has 75 ATK and 43 DEF for a base damage of 32. If you had both max level Feedback and luvshock.exe active, you would have dealt a total of 990 to 1020 damage to it! It has 3650 LIFE by the way. Far more than any other class could deal at this point! Granted having both of them at max level is incredibly unlikely this early, but you can level them up enough to still outdps the other classes at this boss. (Incidentally in one of my playthroughs I actually managed to break Jigowatt's AI and stopped it from casting Railgun at all because of the stun + massive damage confusing its AI.  )Incidentally, Samurai is basically the Fighter analogue while taking elements from Samurai as well, as 7DS Samurai was a lot like Ronin, and that's not exactly an ideal design for a simple offensive class. Trickster is basically the Rogue analogue. Psychics are a mish mash of Mage and Healer, while Destroyer... doesn't really have a direct analogue, they're pretty original. Though they do expand a lot upon the Samurai's Unarmed skill tree from DS. There's no analogue to the Knight though, as a defensive support like that was likely not ideal for a 3 man party, especially in a game that took out the row mechanics. Araxxor fucked around with this message at 13:07 on Apr 13, 2021 |
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Apr 13, 2021 12:35
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darealkooky posted:I'm still reading through the LP so maybe this is explained later, but given the in-depth mechanics knowledge on display in regards to exactly how much damage skills and stuff do - do you know if the position of your characters matter at all in regards to how often they get attacked by enemies? Is putting a psychic or a hacker up front a stupid idea or does it not matter? Positioning doesn't matter when it comes to aggro. We don't quite know all the specifics but it works like this and like in Etrian Odyssey 3 and beyond, aggro checks are done for each hit in a multihit attack. (You can see this in action in the Jigowatt fight where each hit of Clean Sweep was evenly distributed among the party instead of overly focusing on one party member.) If targeting a specific party member, target that party member and end routine. Meaning that no matter what happens, if that enemy really wants to go after that Psychic, they're going after that Psychic. And there's some stuff like "don't target the party member with the lowest life period" (Little Dragons follow that routine when choosing to gnaw on someone to avoid having a low LIFE party member get instagibbed.) Otherwise: -Check to see if Provoking skills are active. If the chance succeeds, target that party member. Otherwise move onto the next step. If multiple Provoking skills are active, randomly choose between the ones that succeeded at the aggro roll. -Normal aggro mechanics. Party members with higher current LIFE are prioritized more often. -Redirection phase: Check to see if the party member has an anti Provoke skill. If the chance fails or that party member is the only living one, target that party member. Otherwise if the chance succeeds, randomly target the other party members instead. Redirection cannot happen more than once per hit. This means that if multiple party members have say, Hide active, only the first instance of Hide can redirect a hit towards another party member. If that redirected hit happens to go after another party member in hiding, tough luck for them. (This is obviously to prevent infinite aggro loops.) Incidentally it works like this in the DS game as well, but that game actually had rows so that's factored into normal aggro mechanics where all the games that came after 7th Dragon DS no longer use rows. Positioning matters in a few rare cases, but that's more because certain game mechanics simply check from left to right, but that's not actually employed very often. More often than not, the game just picks randomly if multiple RNG rolls succeed at some game mechanic. Like AUTO skills. No matter what, only 1 AUTO skill can activate per turn phase, but if multiple AUTO skills succeed at proccing, the game just randomly chooses one and doesn't even take the party member's position into consideration in such cases. In short positioning doesn't matter outside of a few extreme edge cases that I'm not even sure exist in 2020. I know for sure they exist in the later games. So place the party members wherever in 2020 at least. Araxxor fucked around with this message at 01:40 on May 24, 2021 |
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May 24, 2021 01:21
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Yeah I ultimately prefer the normal soundtrack more, though the DIVA version has a few really good ones. (Generally I tend to find the ones with actual lyrics instead of Miku just singing the notes out loud to be the really good ones.)
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May 25, 2021 09:09
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Omobono posted:Miku? Miku. It's one of the things I knew about this game. She's probably a human given how she's in danger of being nommed by a dragon. Though it's a fairly moot point since as you can tell from this update alone, she doesn't really talk all that much. Kinu added like 2x more dialogue alone to her with only a few words compared to what you would normally hear from her from this quest. Incidentally from what I can tell, her presence in the game was advertised quite a lot. But uh, her actual role turned out to be a lot smaller than the marketing would have had you believe, and she's just an alternate soundtrack and the person who has a presence in the opening video. This version of Miku does have a separate name like a lot of other alternate Miku designs. Her design by Shirow Miwa in this game is known as Hatsune Miku TYPE 2020. Araxxor fucked around with this message at 11:14 on May 28, 2021 |
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May 28, 2021 11:11
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The song for this area is pretty sick, give it a lesson. Sets the mood pretty well! Oh and don't bother in trying to "pre-fill" the minimap while it's disabled, it annoyingly doesn't log that info for when it gets re-enabled. That Destroyer Dragon is kind of a notable motherfucker. Muscle Eye can't miss and has a 35% chance of inflicting Stop. And just hits pretty hard too.
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Jun 26, 2021 04:39
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quote:From a boss fight for a quest of fetching food for a gourmet to a random encounter. What a downgrade. Then again the series kind of stopped having non-dragon boss fights after the DS game.Enemies do have a natural evasion stat as SPD no longer affects accuracy or evasion whatsoever unlike in the first game, but it's set to 0% for most of them. Wraiths have it set to 25% so it doubles to a coin flip after their buff skill. All Bloom Seeds incidentally have 20% evasion on top of 999 defenses.
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Jun 29, 2021 01:11
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Clarste posted:Take out all non-dragons, imo. Both in gameplay and the plot. I am honestly unsure why non-dragon monsters even exist in this setting. The first game sort of had this theme of the Bloom turning all the normal wildlife rabid, (And it's mentioned by some NPCs in passing) and eventually you start seeing random encounters that are completely infected by the Bloom and are hosts to it. That being said, the DS game doesn't really do much with that plot point nor does it affect gameplay, and it's basically sort of a background detail at best. The randoms did at least put up a fight in the prologue... then basically ceased to matter after the first boss, unless you went "out of order" during the rather open mid-game segment. I blame the Bloom mechanics in the first game for that gameplay aspect, especially with how oppressive Bloom tiles were overall as a mechanic. Plot wise there's at least lots of other non-dragon troubles that have to be dealt with in the first game since it's a fantasy RPG setting. Later games I think non-dragons are just there due to inertia from the first game and RPGs in general, and another source of EXP and SP to prevent getting stuck due to severe underleveling. (And no more Bloom Seed items to respawn dragons in a dungeon, nor automatic dragon respawn in Bloom infested dungeons.) Plotwise It's not even a fantasy RPG setting anymore to host those, so their presence does stick out if you think about it too hard. Monsters are just mentioned infesting an area or two in passing and that's about it. Gameplay wise uh yeah, the randoms are just limp from the get-go, not even putting up a fight in the prologue like in the first game. Incidentally randoms in this game are pretty weak. Where in 7th Dragon DS, all randoms had 100% multipliers against every single ailment, in 2020, every last one of them are actually 2.5x susceptible to Hacking, 0.5x susceptible to D-Depth, and 1.5x susceptible to every other disable. Yeah a level 1 Hack is guaranteed to work on any random encounter. Aside from Bloom Seeds which are immune to everything aside from D-Depth. (Don't take this to be the case for II and VFD, they actually started putting actual design in the multipliers for randoms.)
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Jul 3, 2021 12:05
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quote:A very nice change with these from EO and 7th Dragon DS is that weapon effects can proc on ATK-based skills! Granted Richter doesn't have any, but a pretty welcome change from seeing small attack weapons with a bad effect. 7th Dragon DS at least had the courtesy to stick those effects on pure upgrades at least instead of horrible stat sticks. quote:I can't really explain this—there must be some condition in the Destroyer Dragon's AI that causes it to use Muscle Eye on Turn 2 if something happens, because it doesn't usually. Maybe it's because I damaged it too much. HP thresholds are like the one thing I know DS's AI checked for (and from what I can tell it's pretty basic in that game. I think 2020 gave upgrades to the AI though.) So that probably makes the AI get all weird since dealing too much damage causes them to swap over to different behavior. quote:Yo, I've got some people who haven't played 7th Dragon DS or aren't reading Araxxor's LP—you know in that game the Bloom was all damage tiles that you had to manually cut down in order to keep the dragons less powerful? All of it! It's hosed up! Right, so, for those that don't know the Bloom in this game, and the rest of this series, is just purely decoration for scenery. You see some red flowers here and there, but touching them does nothing and aside from plot, the Bloom itself doesn't do anything. (That I'm aware of.) This was a very big change from how the Bloom functioned in the first game. In the first game, they were damage tiles. Walking over them made them disappear at least, but they dealt 2% of your maximum HP as damage for each one you walked over. How many of them were there?  A lot. All of the red squares you see on the bottom screen are Bloom tiles. There are 16,172 of these things. This unsurprisingly made the field skill that negates damage tiles completely and utterly meta defining, and Knights basically skyrocketed in usage because they were the only class who could deal with the Bloom. Not having a Knight meant having to menu every few seconds to heal up. (The fan translation has a version of the patch that lowers it to 0.8% max HP as damage which makes Knights nowhere near as mandatory as in the base game.) Also these tiles could regrow on the overworld every few days. They also had a bunch of other secondary effects. They made it more likely to be blindsided, and if a town was surrounded by too much Bloom they would skyrocket their shop prices so that you were paying a premium for their gods and equipment until you lawnmowed enough of the area the town was surrounded by. The effect Kinu was talking about was a hidden effect that pretty much nothing aside from a very vague hint from an NPC told you about. Lawnmowing the Bloom around dungeons in the overworld also weakened the dragons in said dungeons, making them take up to 30% more damage from all attacks, and made it up to 30% easier to inflict ailments on them. I know for sure this mechanic does not exist in the rest of the series. The stats the dragons and bosses have, are actually the stats you will always be fighting them with.
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Jul 18, 2021 08:10
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Pretty intense update. Lore-A-Lua is one of the spots I had in mind with 7th Dragon 2020 being wonky with ailment balance, and essentially forces the usage of ailment accessories or Trash Pickup or you're going to have a very tough time. Her bleeds have a 75% chance to land, Downer has a 99% chance to land, and Second Harvest has a 100% hit rate. Only mercy is that Blindness Whisper hits 55% of the time, which is a very small comfort as its version of blind multiplies your hit chance by 0. Never try to "face tank" the blind, you'll just grant her extra turns. Instead, either cure it ASAP, or come in with Blind protection, which is probably the best course of action to take, really. The Downer and Bleed suck to be hit by, but it's way better than granting her extra momentum and opportunities to destroy your party. Don't be afraid to use EX to double the healing from Heal Aerosols and whatnot if you have to. Doing this heavily defangs her and makes the fight much easier to deal with. (Come in with Downer protection on supports if you're not having them attack.) Also do not try to bank on outspeeding her before she comes in with Blindness Whisper, as she has a SPD stat of 45, and you'd need at least a SPD stat of 61 to outspeed her guaranteed. Which is not really happening at this point in the game. Evasion Reacts fortunately only checks for attacks missing. It doesn't care about ailments missing and such, so feel free to fling those out. Also fun fact, luvshock carries over into extra turns. You can set that up, deliberately trigger the react, and watch as Lore-A-Lua wastes her extra turn and speeds up the entire fight by smacking herself for big damage. Crimson Scythe is also another one of the few places in the game where the animation flag doesn't match the actual animation, as it's flagged as a melee attack, but is clearly a claw swipe attack visually. Bleed got massively reworked from the first game. There it lasted forever instead of a set amount of turns, and took off 3% of the victim's max HP at the end of each turn. This made it an incredibly strong ailment to use from the player's end, but laughably worthless from the enemy's end, since you'd lose like 9 HP per turn. At 300 HP. Yeah. Here it deals a set amount, but increases in intensity by 20% per turn. Sort of. The difference between the current damage and the last turn's damage is increased by 20%. So going off of a damage of 100, it'd go to 120, then 124 and uh, taper off after that. Yeah in practice the "intensifying damage" doesn't really come into play much, since you'd see a slight increase from turn 1 to turn 2, and maybe like 1 point of damage after that eventually. In practice it's really a palette swap of Poison. Can still be dangerous to deal with, but not all that much different from it. Kinu mentioned that this was the only fight that Blind was truly relevant as an ailment. This also functions for Death, and you get Death protection accessories just a bit earlier. Lore-A-Lua is literally the only enemy in the entire game that can use the Death ailment, and that's only if you ever trigger Swaying React, as she will never use Second Harvest during the normal turn phase. This functionally means that Blind protection does the exact same thing as Death protection, and that Death protection accessories are completely obsoleted by those.
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Jul 24, 2021 21:53
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Destroyer is pretty much the most broken class in 2020. It just deals out shitloads of damage, more than any other class in the game. In fact it was the class the developers recommended for solo runs. Counters are absolutely ridiculous and a big difference between DS and the later 7th Dragon games was that in DS, every enemy (except for 1 boss that was not even a dragon) could only act once per turn. Since all dragons now attack twice per turn, Hard Target essentially deals octuple damage, on top of protecting the rest of your party, and is a free 2-Depth. Even if you have a luvshock Hacker in the party denying the enemy turns, that's not even a detriment as Destroyers can just swap to spamming Quintets instead. And the way SP works in the later 7th Dragon games makes it far easier to spread out your skill build instead of having to treat every last bit of SP as a precious resource. The base infliction rate for a Destroyer inflicting D-Depth is 100%, though in practice it'll either be 50% or 45%. Random encounters multiply the infliction rate by 0.5, while dragons and bosses multiply it by 0.45. I don't even know why that 0.05 distinction is there. Only 3 enemies break this rule. D1 and D2 have a multiplier of 1, so they're guaranteed to be smacked with D-Depth after a punch. (Most likely so you can actually use Forward Punch and see what they can do.) The hopeless boss fight version of War Cry is literally the only enemy in the entire game that's immune to D-Depth. And every other ailment, frankly. Even Bloom Seeds can get hit with D-Depth despite being immune to all other ailments. All of the guaranteed D-Depth skills just bypass infliction calculations. So not even immunities (if they existed) save enemies from being inflicted with it. Funnily enough, God Hands in VFD work a bit differently for some reason. Jab and other "guaranteed" infliction skills just have their rates set to 200%. In practice this doesn't really do much, as the actual main change was that they removed their innate ability to inflict Fun fact, Destroy React is the only react skill in the entire game that's RNG based. All other reacts just have the chance set to 100%. This was likely because the condition that sets it off is far more reliable than any other react condition. (Score a crit with the Trickster. Hack into an enemy. Or make sure an enemy takes off enough of your Samurai's life.) And you can get extra turns within extra turns, (capped to 3 after certain setups in DS could generate infinite extra turns.) so you can easily rack up 3 free extra turns to deal damage with, and can start slamming down Quintets right off the bat. Araxxor fucked around with this message at 08:54 on Jul 31, 2021 |
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Jul 31, 2021 04:05
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quote:You see, Captain Inomiko, from the readings we've taken, it appears you're unaffected due to antibodies you generated during your month-long coma. This is pretty much the in-universe reason why 2% max life as Bloom damage is no longer a mechanic and the Bloom is just decoration in dungeons. Evidently the world of Eden had weaker immune systems. Imagine if you had to deal with that mechanic in the post-DS games. 
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Sep 12, 2021 01:27
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 There were times during my playthrough of 2020 and II where I was just stunned and had to recheck the release dates of the games just to make sure they weren't recent releases. I have to wonder what the developers think of these games now. I know some of the localizers for VFD were quite horrified when lines about 2020 in that game were pointed out to them in that year. Snapdragons are using Sand Breath, not Thunder Breath, hence why it blinds you. Machine Dragons are utterly pathetic. Only has like 1100 HP when several other dragons around this point had 2000 or so.
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Oct 1, 2021 08:49
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