Leal posted:

I was surprised that VAMPS is not only a real band but existed before this game was created, and not created for this game. Which made it double surprising when I got hit with a claim.

Solitair posted:

I think I've seen enough to say that my involvement with this LP is cursed.

Leal posted:

Also it seems Solitair's commentary bugged cause it goes completely silent midway through the video. If I suddenly laugh at nothing, that's why

Psycho Knight posted:

I just assumed you had gone crazy and you were imagining a co-commentator.

Xun posted:

Damnit, I wanted to see whats at the end of this ludicrously long zone

Leal posted:

RIP Louis, forever condemned to the broom closet with the nameless human who is still hanging around home base.

NGDBSS posted:

Leal posted:

I love that even though this is an action rpg, they still have a bunch of complicated formula stuff like its a JRPG from the 90s

NGDBSS posted:

I should also clarify what in the world I was talking about several videos ago regarding damage reduction, elemental damage, and so on. It's separate from music chat so I'm putting this in its own post.

Nearly all damage in the game is typed in some way. Physical attacks can take the Slash, Crush, or Pierce types. Elemental attacks also have an elemental type at the same time - Blood, Fire, Ice, or Lightning. Nothing explicitly prohibits an attack from gaining more than one physical or elemental type, but in practice you have to work to do it. (There is a single instance of damage that only has an elemental type, but we haven't seen it yet.) Types don't do anything by themselves, but are instead present to interact with an enemy's defenses. Hostile NPCs have hidden innate defenses, but for players all that stuff is spelled out on your blood veil. Take for example the Queenslayer Claw:

• 44 Slash
  
• 34 Crush
  
• 48 Pierce
  
• 41 Blood
  
• 40 Fire
  
• 33 Ice
  
• 38 Lightning

The way these actually work is that they're expressed as a percentage of damage from that type that you avoid. So if you got hit by an attack with the Slash type, you'd take 56% (100% - 44%) of the normal damage value. If it was also a Lightning attack, you'd take ~35% ((100% - 44%) * (100% - 38%)) of the normal damage value.

So how do we get a "normal damage value", anyway? That comes down to sheet stats and the kind of attack you're using. Take the sheet stat (weapon damage, Light Gifts, Dark Gifts, Drain), multiply it by an appropriate hidden percentage, and you're done. For example, most one-handed swords with a 4-hit combo deal 90%/95%/100%/105% damage as you go along. So if your weapon had 500 attack on your sheet, that'd be 450/475/500/525 before defenses. Physical gifts work much the same way, dealing one or more hits each with its own multiplier. Circulating Pulse, for instance, deals 100%/70%/70%/70%/120% damage. With our hypothetical 500 attack sword that's 500/350/350/350/600 base damage. Light or Dark gifts tend to get bigger multipliers (all the Roar gifts get 400% of Dark Gifts), but in return they do have to check against two resistances at once.

I should briefly mention gift triggers here because they're weird. The basic idea is that if you use an appropriate heavy attack with an appropriate weapon (eg, all bayonets on gunfire mode), you can get extra damage somehow. The exact formulae are not well understood, but generally this is where Mind and Willpower scaling matter. Sometimes the gift trigger also gains an elemental damage type! Bottom line, Mind and Willpower scaling only matter for gift triggers and more is better.

What about elemental buffs, then? If elemental damage is just a type so the game can check which defenses matter, what does "50 Fire" do on a transformed weapon? What that actually does is that it adds an elemental type to your weapon's attacks, and it also pushes the above defense calculation around. Innate elemental values apparently reduce an appropriate enemy elemental defense by (sheet - 30)%, and temporary buffs like cartridges or gifts reduce the same by their listed value. This can go negative, and in fact damage weaknesses are just negative defense values. So a Fire weapon with a fire gift buff - 50 innate, +20 from a buff - adds the fire tag to its attacks and reduces enemy fire defense against those attacks by an additive 40%.

This is adequate for most damage calculations, but there are a handful of effects that further modify damage. Like before, these are just multipliers - Final Journey grants 1.5x to all damage, Flashing Fang grants 2x to your next melee attack, and Ranged Impact grants 1.5x to all gift triggers (apparently not just gunshots). They all have limitations, but if you can combine a few they do stack multiplicatively...