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Cattail Prophet posted:The ibek is my mount of choice for precision platforming. In addition to the extra height, it locks you in place while charging its jump, which makes it a lot easier to inch towards the edge of blocks without falling off. I was going to say the same thing. I don't know if the charge is supposed to be a downside but I find it a big help with precision jumps.
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Jan 3, 2024 07:53
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Cute goats and killing goat murderers and goat mounts and numbers going up and killing people for lunch (money)? Best dungeon ever!
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Jan 3, 2024 23:35
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I don't get your hate for ninja. They have amazing crit related stats and knives are the best weapons in the game for raw damage via crits. Giving a ninja rogue abilities and equipping high level knives are what I typically used for high damage single target physical damage in this game. Some of the scroll abilities are very useful in some specific fights too imo
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Jan 4, 2024 00:18
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How Rude posted:I don't get your hate for ninja. They have amazing crit related stats and knives are the best weapons in the game for raw damage via crits. Giving a ninja rogue abilities and equipping high level knives are what I typically used for high damage single target physical damage in this game. Some of the scroll abilities are very useful in some specific fights too imo The Ninja ability set is okay for specific fights but in general the primary reason you're using the ninja job is for the innate passive dual wield. Scrolls being a consumable makes relying on the job abilities a poor choice for exploration, and also kneecaps strategies that rely on running multiple ninjas for their abilities, since they're pulling from the same pool of resources. The fact that Ninja is 99% of a time a vehicle for the dual wield passive is effective, but it makes the class boring.
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Jan 4, 2024 00:43
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Re: Dervish, the one wrinkle with its passive is that you need to be able to actually gain the AP; if you're already at full it doesn't do anything. Not a big deal for throughput in normal encounters, but for longer fights it's best to pair it with a class that uses AP so the battery can keep running. I've never tried it, but I imagine Monk works well. Chi burst lets you dump all your AP at once and scales off of a caster stat, and there's just enough utility in the rest of the skillset that you don't need to feel compelled to build toward mixed offenses to get your money's worth. Focus energy into a wind spell might be fun, too.
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Jan 4, 2024 04:45
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Cattail Prophet posted:Re: Dervish, the one wrinkle with its passive is that you need to be able to actually gain the AP; if you're already at full it doesn't do anything. Not a big deal for throughput in normal encounters, but for longer fights it's best to pair it with a class that uses AP so the battery can keep running. I've never tried it, but I imagine Monk works well. Chi burst lets you dump all your AP at once and scales off of a caster stat, and there's just enough utility in the rest of the skillset that you don't need to feel compelled to build toward mixed offenses to get your money's worth. Focus energy into a wind spell might be fun, too. I think the ideal combo would be with another class we don't have yet, the Nomad, since they're a spellcaster that uses AP for their spells, if you're focusing on the AP-MP dimension. I don't think their skills would be a great combo, but it would definitely provide considerable endurance for long fights or expeditions.
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Jan 4, 2024 11:59
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That sure would be an ideal combo for that item and passive. How unfortunate that you don't yet have the Nomad. 
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Jan 4, 2024 18:09
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Meat, Meat, Meat, Meat. Surely a meat tunnel has something of value or interest to it. Or maybe it'll just traumatize our heroes. 'ts a win-win, I think. Glad I caught up with this one. My favourite Final Fantasy games are 5 and Tactics A2, so anything willing to dispense with the plot in favour of giving the player twenty different ways to mash up character traits to potentially break open the game is bound to be all kinds of fun. Here's hoping the
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Jan 5, 2024 20:38
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Update 13: The Beach Episode     Welcome back, this time we're going to the beach... among other things.      Getting here starts off with a little bit of Quintar-requiring jumping, but if we didn't have an Ibek, our exploration in this direction would be pretty short.     Charity: A beach where the wildlife isn't trying to murder us, this is nice! Hamza: I always get bored at the beach.     Charity: How can you be bored at the beach? The point of the beach is to not do anything. Sand! Sun! Lying down! Maybe a soda! Hamza: Yeah but... like five minutes of that and I need to do something. I usually bring a shovel.      Charity: Oh my God, you're one of those assholes. Hamza: Sometimes you just need to dig a hole! It's relaxing! Or, you know, dig a tunnel... or dam a small stream... Charity: I'm adventuring with psychopaths.     Charity: You know, it's almost eerie nothing's tried to kill us so far. Vanessa: Not much loot either, just some of these minerals for gear upgrades. Tau: No enemies, no loot, perhaps a hint that we're off the path? That we should go somewhere else? Charity: You're not getting me with that one.     There's one enemy you can encounter before you need an Ibek.      The Snapper is identical to the Shelldin from the Salmon River, but with notably higher numbers. He actually loving murdered my party the first time. This guy is monstrous.         Moving on, there's a non-beachy interlude.      This features one new enemy, the Seafeeder, which isn't too threatening. It can hit decently hard and has a self-heal, but if you can get past the Snapper earlier, I can't imagine the Seafeeder being a threat to you.         It can be hard to tell, but that tree's branches are just one block higher than the lowest ledge, so getting on that lets you Ibek jump to the higher ledge.   You can, of course, also just jump from the other tree to the little ledge on the right side of the pond and off that to solid ground, but this feels like more of a flex.              Tau: Where are we even going? All we're doing is... jumping up and down cliffs. Hamza: I know, it rules.             There's this odd little section that lets you get to a high part of the Poko Poko Desert. It doesn't have any loot, any enemies or function as a shortcut to anywhere you'd otherwise have a hard time reaching.         Charity: At least we're back on the beach again. I'm almost starting to agree with Tau, though, this is starting to feel a bit pointless...            The main challenge, if you can call it that, here, is identifying the right jumps necessary to get some height again and cross the next obstacle.    Hamza: How about we go beat up whatever that is? That should cheer you up. Charity: ...not really. Vanessa: Only if it has good loot. Tau: Whatever I say, you're going to rush down there anyway, right? Hamza: Well, yeah, because it's gonna cheer me up.    I have no comment on this name. Gross.   Scentaurs can be bad news if you're not equipped to tank their attacks or kill them quickly. Harvester will hit everyone, Adrenaline will let them generate AP at an accelerated pace and Executioner is a skill that just loving murders whatever it hits. It does the big numbers in a painful way.  They're one of the enemies who, like Snappers, are still very scary even when they're just on their own. Look at what this rear end in a top hat did to my poor party.       It's not just Charity who likes this area, I love beaches in RPG's. They're always some of the coolest areas, with some great visual design. The closer you are to the sea, the better all the design is. This is fact. I will brook no dissent.     Climbing this tower is a bit annoying because, as you can tell, the next step each time is just high enough that it isn't entirely drawn in. It's not a huge problem, but a bit annoying.       Like all this game's other towers, it hosts a class master.  Charity: ...is that a building over there? Vanessa: I don't see any doors or windows, looks more like a wall.      Charity: Walls can be part of buildings. Having walls is basically what defines a building. Vanessa: What about a gazebo? Hamza: Hmmm, I see ledges...       Charity: What about a gazebo? Vanessa: It's a building but it doesn't have any walls. Hamza: ...lots of ledges, but no way to reach them.  Hamza: I think this is a dead end. Charity: What? Oh. You climbed it. Tau: Maybe they walled something off because it isn't done yet, you know, like a placeholder, and they're going to put down something cool later, like a dragon or a huge wizard or a huge dragon wizard. Hamza: I don't know... these ledges feel... deliberate. Navigable. We're just missing something to navigate with. Vanessa: ...this isn't just a wall, this is a vault. We're so breaking in here when we find the key.       We can't really do anything with the Big Wall for quite a few more hours of gameplay yet, but we'll eventually want to visit it for bragging rights, considerable amounts of annoyance and little else. But we're going to loot the Big Wall's neighbour, this cave.         The reason we're doing this is because the Blank Pages is a powerful contender for one of the most insanely useful things a caster can hold, even when staves, wands and other books have bigger numbers. That's because it GUARANTEES that the holder goes first and, though it doesn't say so, negates the CT cost on what you're casting. So you're GUARANTEED to be able to get in buffs, debuffs, nukes, whatever you like before anyone else, as long as it's something you can do while holding a book rather than, say, an axe.           Tau: Well, I think we've walked on every inch of sand and looted every shiny rock around here. Are we done? Can we proceed? Hamza: Not quite.    The beach has a borderline secret path. Take note of those huge pillars in the foreground of the screenshot. We can get up on those, but the trick is figuring out where to start, as is the case of much Crystal Project platforming.      Once you've gotten up here, there's really only one way to go. So start jumping.              Tau: Where is this even going? Is this even a path? Hamza: It is now.            Tau: Congratulations, you brought us back to the desert we've already been in. You'd be tempted to think this is a pointless shortcut like the last one that lead to the Poko Poko Desert's higher sections, but!       Hamza: Pretty sure we didn't see this before. Vanessa: ...weird, it looks like it's made of the same materials as the Vault.   Vanessa: Doesn't seem to do anything, though.       The interesting part here is this oasis and camp.     It's got a map for somewhere we haven't been yet, but the existence of a Salmon River should provide a clue towards where it is.    Tau: ...you think? Charity: ...oh, definitely. Hamza: ...so that isn't a vault. Vanessa: It's a Labyrinth. Must've been built to house some greedy king's treasure. That's the only reason anyone ever builds labyrinths. Charity: What about hedge mazes?        Vanessa: I mean, if it's a proper one you'd hide something neat at the center, also I don't think it really counts as a labyrinth unless it has monsters in it. Charity: Nothing's stopping you from putting monsters in your hedge maze!       Hamza: Man this labyrinth is massive. Check this out. Tau: Whoah, okay. I'll admit Charity's right, sometimes it's worth going places just to see weird poo poo. Hamza: You'll probably have to tell her later once she's done arguing about gardening. I don't think she's hearing anything right now. Tau: Hm, sounds like they'll be at it for a while. I guess... Meat Tunnel? Hamza: Meat Tunnel.        We've seen the start of the Meat World before, but now we can finally get over those accursed boxes.       The monsters here would likely still vaporize us turn one, but thankfully they're designed with a very low aggro radius. You can either just walk past them if you time it, or they'll aggro "late" enough that you can just run past.        Hamza: Left or right? Vanessa: Always go left first.    Vanessa: I said left. Hamza: Look at the screen! This is left! Vanessa: But not our l- oh never mind.        Charity: ...continental tram? This is a subway? Not just a meat tunnel, but a meat subway?      Vanessa: But why? Who wants to ride the Tendon Train? Tau: It doesn't look... intentional. Look at the way it's sort of spattered around?     Vanessa: So you're saying a shipment of beef overturned in the tunnel? Maybe here? Tau: ...I'm saying it invaded. I don't think we're ready for this. Ignore it and keep going. We'll want to go here eventually, but probably after the monsters here stop being red flames.          Charity: Meat aside, this is a nice station. Nicer than most of the ones around my part of the world.         Charity: But I wonder what's up here... where are we? Maybe somewhere new and exotic!       One easier entry here that doesn't involve dodging anything nasty is if you get the watergoing mobility option before coming here.    Also since no one's here let's mess around in the ticket office.     Tram Key... where have we seen that before...           Yeah, we're just back at Sara Sara. But what if we'd gone the other way?      The tram speeds things up.          Vanessa: Train vs Meat. Meat Wins. It obviously can't get past the blockage but it's way faster than a Quintar for this first stretch.         Tau: Looks like someone tried to wall off the meat infection here and succeeded.       Tau: ...I hope it doesn't get into the sea. Meat Tunnel is bad enough, Meat Ocean would be worse.       Two locked doors, a save point, a button.  Button unlocks the doors. Let's try one of them at random.      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqM6Huu7xs4 Tau: ...man I really don't feel like we're meant to be here. Vanessa: You say that about every place we go.       Now, we could explore around here a bit, maybe even snag some truly out-levelled loot if we were clever and speedy. It might even be some form of pro strat for a speedrun! But...    We'd have to be real loving careful, because everything here super outlevels us. It's probably the most out-of-our-depth place we've poked our noses into so far. We'll be able to take on the Crag Demon and Enami sooner than we can make headway here. But what about the other door?      Like most of the other Jay Man tracks used in this game, I couldn't find this by itself. It sounds vaguely mystical and eastern, like a slightly more electronic version of something you'd find playing in a movie in a bazaar or as the clueless western protagonist steps into an incense-filled temple, baffled by the mystics sights and unfamiliar rituals.  Vanessa: Diamond?! Oh baby yes, this is mine, all mine... Diamond is the third upgrade material. We still haven't met any Diamond upgrading vendors, though.     Hamza: Otherwise this is just a... glass box so we can look at... some water and four huge fish? Charity? Charity: Yeah, I've got nothing, this isn't cool, cute or dramatic, it's just weird. With our odd explorations done, let's hop back to the Capital since there have been a few changes there, including one that I missed on the last visit.       The Grand Master is tightening the screws...      And most of the wandering "player" NPC's have something to say about it.           Everything from panic, to fatalistic acceptance, to grumbly complaining about the people who precipitated the situation.       What I missed was that the Luxury Shop is now accessible, and was in fact accessible several crystals ago. Whoops.         They sell something for every slot except for accessories, which I'd largely rate as being somewhere between silver and gold gear in terms of quality. A few pieces are still slightly better than what we already have, but most of it's irrelevant until we get access to their super assortment in several more crystals' time.   Vanessa: Also we gotta find this key and rob their storeroom. Videogame shops exist to be robbed. Anyway, that's it for Capital content, so all that's left is to find a new place to go...      ...which is going to be seeing what's in that blighted-looking area east of the Sara Sara Bazaar. It gets its own update since it's a dungeon, and I'm picking it since it's clear that everyone's mood is for side content rather than progress, and also doing it a bit earlier than I did in my first playthrough would definitely make it more of a fun challenge.
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Jan 12, 2024 02:17
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...It'd be pretty funny if you actually got hit with a nonstandard game over for reaching too high a level without enough crystals.
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Jan 12, 2024 05:51
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Hooray for distractions! The Meat Tunnel led to even more interesting things we definitely aren't supposed to be doing yet. I really dig how the game just lets you bumble off in a direction and find so much without prompting. The flame colours even do a solid job of letting you know that you're in over your head.
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Jan 12, 2024 06:58
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I think I completely missed the meat tunnel in my play though
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Jan 12, 2024 08:55
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I found the meat tunnel but it wasn't until much later in the game, I had no idea it was possible to get in there this early.
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Jan 12, 2024 21:21
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Blank Pages is one of the combo options that enables the Scholar's Sleep Aura and makes it great for random battles, and it comes much much sooner than the other combo. Only problem with it is the MP cost when you're using that spell so often. The meat tunnel is legitimately good visual storytelling and I'm very fond of it. You can look at that and know basically what's going on and that it's bad news, mostly just through good map tile placement and some supporting lighting. One more big thing is available in the capital city, for a certain value of "big thing." You need the goat for it.
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Jan 12, 2024 23:39
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Einander posted:One more big thing is available in the capital city, for a certain value of "big thing." You need the goat for it. Oh, poo poo, I completely forgot that thing. I think based on that, you can tell how often I used it in my first playthrough(zero, zero times).
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Jan 13, 2024 09:52
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Update 14: Beauroir Volcano Late update this time because a friend gifted me FF9 for Christmas and I wanted to finish it. I would rate it as one of the better Final Fantasies, but 5 remains my favourite main-line FF.  Before we head off to the volcano, though, as Einander helpfully pointed out, I missed something back in the Capital. The first time I played actually missed this all the way until the endgame when I wondered why people were talking about a thing I hadn't seen at all, so...  This chimney cannot be reached without either the goat or a much later mount, but I believe it's the only thing in the Capital that can't be reached with just the Quintar, so it's easy to forget, or to miss it and assume you already have everything here.   Vanessa: What the hell is this? Charity: Easter egg?   The crystal is real enough and provides the Beatsmith class, they are... technically useful and I know some people have made great strats with them, but I don't like them. Their gimmick is that despite having quite useful skills(including an MP recovery skill that recovers more than it costs, and for the entire party...), all of their skills lock them in to using the same skill three actions in a row, whether that's an attack, a buff, etc.. I don't like that it yoinks some of my control away from me, though, and I feel like I rarely have a fight where a given character is doing the same thing round after round. I'd also say that they're Crystal Project's most original class, though, without any kind of Final Fantasy analogue, unless you want to compare them to a Berserker type of character, which they're not quite, because you still get to choose what they do, but then they just keep doing it. Anyway, back to going the places we were going to go.       Tau: Are we sure we're ready for this? Hamza: We've been ready for everything so far! Tau: Except for Gran, and the troll, and Enami, and the Crag Demon, and those Quintars out in the wild, and the mushrooms underground, and the Jidamba place... Hamza: Well almost everything.         Beauroir Volcano has no music, just a windy ambience.         Charity: Well, this place is bleak, I guess it'll be too much to hope that it leads somewhere a bit more interesting to look at.    There are two enemies on the way to the next area, one is the "Mettal Beak," which are forgettable single target attackers. If you somehow got here too early, they could absolutely hack your party members in half, but they don't really present a threat to me.       The others are "Hot Shells," fiery snails that do fire things to you. The main danger is if they manage to set Burning on a character and then finish up with Spit Fire which does double damage to Burning characters. Their high physical resistance makes this a real threat if you're running with a party of purely physical combatants, but I've got a lot of magic so they don't manage to scare me much.        The broody, lamplit path of precarious volcanic ledges and constantly falling flakes of ash actually made me think of this place when I played Elden Ring and got to Mount Gelmir.       Charity: Is that a door? Tau: Certainly looks like one. Charity: Into the side of a volcano? Hamza: Can't argue with that. Charity: ...well that's delightfully whimsical, I can't wait to see what's inside!      Quiet, spooky ambience as we step in. The same sort of "brooding horror" ambience as we got in places like Gran's basement.   If you notice a slight distortion on the screenshots from here on out, it's because the game overlays a "heat shimmer" effect on your screen any time you're inside Beauroir Rock.  Hamza: Three doors, hmmmm... Vanessa: I always go with the left path first. Charity: I like to go right, helps to have a pattern. Hamza: Center it is!   Behind the center door is a spike pit and a locked door, so clearly not where we're meant to go first.        Left door leads to a chest containing a key. The right door also leads there, completely identical choice.     To progress the dungeon we need to find these single-use keys and unlock the way onwards from time to time, but it's not really much of a puzzle, relatively trivial, all in all.   Our reward for finding the first key and going down is also that now we have some surprisingly chill music for the dungeon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCQyy6DoMh8 A bit of an unusual pick for a fiery volcano dungeon, but somehow it helps bring a unique mood to the dungeon even so. I dig it.    Hamza: Hey, they're not moving towards us, you think they're gonna run away like some of the others?   Vanessa: I think the ruling on that is "no." All battles inside Beauroir Volcano immediately sets permanent Burning on all your characters. This means that they'll be taking 15% of their max health in damage every turn, and means you need to be quick about fights to avoid getting melted.   Devil Bombs, predictably, have Explode! So that's another good reason to finish the battle quickly, as well as Spit Fire, which does double damage when we're on fire and... we're always gonna be on fire. Bottom line is: They hurt.  This is a good example of how fights usually turn out in this dungeon even when I manage to avoid the Devil Bombs exploding.     It can be hard to tell, but once you're a few steps into this room, the doors lock and will only open if the flame in the room is killed. Hamza: A battle challenge! Excellent! Vanessa: Well, poo poo, I guess you're right, we do have to pick this fight. Hamza: Check it out, I'm going to rush at them mindlessly. Rargh!    Hamza: ... Vanessa: ... Hamza: ...I'm going to count that as a glorious victory. So my experience is that ninety-nine times out of a hundred, when you rush at this enemy, they'll yeet themselves into the magma and destroy themselves, which also counts for the purpose of unlocking the doors. I can't tell if this is intentional or not, but it is somewhat funny.          Vanessa: Loot but... loot we can't get to... Tau: Maybe it's just there to taunt you, forever unreachable.  The thing to remember here is that while everything is split into cubes, your movement is not strictly limited to only one part of a cube. If a cube is only partially occupied, you can still walk on the unoccupied part, like the outside of these grates.    The Guard Crown is a decent hat, but our only current Light Armor wearer is a spellcaster who would prefer more blasting to less dying.      This little bit of gold is actually kind of sneakily hidden since you won't notice there's anything to jump to unless you go to the bottom of the starter platform.    The door to the right of the warp pipe leads to another Small Key, necessary for progressing.       Beauroir Volcano delights in having a non-obvious layout, with every second door being an elevator rather than a horizontal entrance, so nine times out of ten if you see something you can't reach yet, you just need to wait until you loop around.      Another room where the doors lock when we enter. Since this one is also necessary to pass through to get to the rest of the dungeon, if you die, you WILL be redoing this fight every time.     Salamanders are chonky and interesting. Firebreath is a really good, but expensive, Scholar skill to learn. With no CT time it's easy to barf up and with its partial resistance ignoring, that's also handy. Cauterizer is another all-target physical and Spotlight is a Cleric spell that gives a single target a temporary weakness to Fire damage. It has some useful synergies in our hands, in enemy hands it really adds to how much hurting they can put on us.     That ledge over there is a mean trap, it's EXACTLY out of reach of a quintar jump from the same level, so you can waste a lot of time trying to make it and circling around, I learned that the hard way.    Hamza: Okay, we need to be careful here. Vanessa: So we can avoid a pointless fight, right? Hamza: ... Vanessa: ...so we can avoid a pointless fight, right?   Hamza: It would've been just awful if they landed in the magma again and we missed this fight. Vanessa: You suck.   Rock Lizards are probably the least scary enemy in Beauroir Volcano, their only interesting skill is En-Fire, an ability that enemies occasionally have which makes all their physical attacks count as fire damage.       Another warp pipe leads into the fire basement again.        A small key, but... Vanessa: ...maybe we should try the same thing again. Charity: What thing? Vanessa: I bet we can walk on that narrow ledge by the grating.    This is the first of the game's bosses that I would call a hidden boss, but not the last one. Gran and the Troll sort of count, but they were on the path to somewhere or hard to miss otherwise. This one, though? I imagine a lot of players missed it. Now, in the real timeline I skip this guy, get to the next save point, and then come back for him with Tau as a Cleric and a nearer place to restore at, but we're going to gently caress with the chronological order of things a bit because it fits better to put the fight here. Hamza: Oh my God! An extra boss fight, this rules! Charity: I don't really get the hype about fights but... I love secrets. They always bring a cool vibe to places.     The Ancient Sword has all skills we've seen before: a basic attack, Wind-Up(very strong attack with a charge time, rare for physicals), Blood Spiller(all-attack that causes Bleeding, another -15% health per turn) and En-Fire, which makes all its physicals do fire damage.  Blood Spiller hurts like hell, but after starting with that, it always uses En-Fire as its second ability, which means...   ...that Blackout makes us completely immune to everything the Ancient Sword does for three actions. With one exception: Since Blood Spiller technically still hits, it technically still sets the Bleed status, which means everyone's losing 30% of their max health in current health while affected by both it and Burning.    It takes me a couple of tries, because of bullshit like Typhoon missing on a 90% chance to hit, and at the end Tau is down to literally zero MP, since they're simultaneously on healing duty, revive duty(Vanessa gets melted by fire and bleeding a couple of times) and Blackout duty.    The reward is... mediocre, but it's about the principle of it, the principle that says every boss needs a good dunking on just for existing.     Anyway, back on the main route, it quickly becomes obvious that we're actually circling the volcanic caldera itself, occasionally crossing it, as we work our way upwards.       More sinking and rising platforms, the trick is the same as when they were in water: jump just as they disappear, not when they appear, though the timing can be a bit trickier since the lava is opaque and you can't gauge the movement of the platforms as easily as a result.       Charity: For a volcano lair this place is really surprising. Tau: You think so? I thought the fiery enemies and heat shimmer were kind of predictable. Charity: I mean more the... colours, all I'd expect to see in a volcano would be reds and blacks. It's a nice change.      When the game tells you if a piece of gear is better or worse, note that it doesn't take special attributes into account, only stats. With the buff effect, for the first couple of turns you're definitely better protected than by a lot of other armors, but the limited duration of the effect also means it's largely relevant in fights you can also finish fast.   Charity: See? Who'd ever expect deep purple in a volcano? Tau: I think I get your point.       Some parts of the volcano are kind of surreal in their presentation. Actually, scratch that, a lot of it is. It doesn't really pretend to be a "real" place like some do.         Doing the full loop around gets you another Ether Pouch. It's one of the less important Pouch types since MP refill items are comparatively pretty expensive for most of the game unless you do some grinding or tactical stealing(some enemies have some relatively expensive steals, or can have Ethers stolen from them), so out of the endgame you're probably not going to be filling up even your starting max of Ethers.   This is probably the nastiest "disappearing platforms"-puzzle in the game, since BOTH the center AND lower right platforms disappear, so you have to be VERY on the ball when making the jump. I generally find the only easy way is to be on a Quintar, which gets you just that bit more speed for getting on and off the platforms.        The "Cold Touch" is another dubious weapon since its main special ability more or less requires picking a caster class as a primary or secondary, and then not wielding a wand/staff/book that buffs the class, and instead picking this up. I'm somewhat dubious of the utility.       Just to gently caress with you, the boss room actually isn't on the top level, instead if you jump off the top bridge, to the platform you couldn't reach from the middle bridge, you'll get there.     The one on the top floor instead contains this strange room full of flames that run from you. If you manage to catch one...       And then DON'T attack it, it'll cast Curena on the party and then run away. They also have a unique steal.   If it works with lifesteal effects, then it makes sense, but if it only works with direct healing effects, then it's once again one of those "you have to make a weird janky hybrid setup"-gear pieces when by and large you want to specialize.    Anyway, it's BOSS TIME.   One of the important parts of this boss fight is identifying who the dangerous one is.   Iguanadon isn't too scary, being a single-target attacker who doesn't hand out unmanageable amounts of murder per turn.  Iguanadin, on the other hand, is a priority target for killing or lockdowns. Harvester is a multi-target physical, which is bad news, and Spit Fire was bad enough on normal enemies, on a boss with higher stats, it can one-shot even Hamza. Hamza: What the hell's the point of being a tank if a single hit can take me down?! These two are notably more difficult than the first time I fought them as a consequence of knowing the game well, which may seem paradoxical, but easily explained: knowing where to go, when and in what order involves me bumping into a lot less rando fights and thus I've been consistently slightly underlevelled for everything I hit.  Vanessa: First things first, how about the dangerous one doesn't get any turns. Sleeping Iguanadin both prevents it from taking a couple of actions and also gives Hamza the breathing space to Taunt both of them, making sure he draws every single-target attack they've got. My first attempt got the party clowned on because Hamza could only draw one's fire and the other would hack Charity in half or something.  Tau: Ha ha, no, no, you don't get to do that. Blackout remains useful for preventing Sear and Spit Fire from killing anyone.  And Harvester is negated by blinding the Iguanadin.    Meanwhile Charity and Hamza are on damage pressure duty, keeping the pain flowing. Everyone being on fire and Tau's non-infinite mana pool still presents a limitation in terms of how long I can allow this fight to go on, I can only do so much healing.  This is what it looks like when a Harvester lands  Tau only BARELY survives to heal the party up, and that about does it for the last of their MP.   Thankfully I can always rely on Vanessa for having stacked up enough AP for some spike damage once enemies' names are in their "very badly injured"-red colour. Hamza: By the skin of our teeth! I love those kinds of fights. Vanessa: Ugh, I don't. They'd better drop some good stuff. Charity: I'm just curious what's behind that door, we've been going up for a while now, we must be almost at the top of the volcano... Tau: I just can't wait until we're done with this boondoggle side journey and can get back to the actual place we're meant to go. We could've gone there days ago! Literal days! It's right there, the boat! Charity: Raft. Tau: Raftboat!  The Bone Mail is an okay piece of armor but a bit outdated already.  And I have no idea how you're meant to swing the Bone Trophy. The stance itself is just an exaggerated version of Berserker Stance, but -50% health!? Maybe you could stash it on a Ninja and rely on being able to dodge? Or a Rogue and really good aggro management?     Tau: Fresh air, hallelujah. Charity: I guess it is nice to see the sun again. Are we really at the top?       Vanessa: We're on the stairs leading to the top, if that counts.       This is the caldera itself, the pit we've been circling all along. If we dropped down here and missed the magma we'd be right back in the dungeon.     I loving LOVE the Valkyrie class, they're amazing. They've got a Taunt skill like the Warrior, but it affects ALL enemies, which means you'll never have one or two attacking squishies on their first action. They've also got party-wide heals, inherent Re-Raise and Re-Raise on allies, a good selection of gear, some okay attack skills, etc. stack them with a Warrior secondary for the various attack and defense-weakening bonks and you're golden. Now, let's get the hell out of this volcano.  Tau: Did you have to keep the beard? Hamza: Yes, I like the beard.   Charity: I think the viking warrior look suits you. Hamza: See? Charity likes it. Charity gets me.    Tau: Fine, whatever. At least now we can go to Shoudu Province and nothing weird is going to happen. No strange distractions. No odd occurrences. We're just going to have a nice trip across the water. Next Time: Nothing weird happens, they have a nice trip.
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Jan 30, 2024 17:43
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Beatsmith has two incredibly specific use cases. One: there's an endgame area where Beatsmith/Scholar is a relatively painless way to switch your physical characters over to support for the dungeon. Two: they're amazing early in a randomizer, since high attack staves are offered up at regular intervals throughout the game, and all of their abilities have uses early on. In particular, enemy offense debuffs! Auto-Haste is also a fantastic passive to get very early, even if it wears off. Other than that, not great. The volcano is going for sort of a Zelda thing with the camera perspective and the keys, so I'm surprised they didn't at least have block pushing puzzles or something. But, hey, that at least means they didn't feel tempted to reuse block pushing mechanics in other places outside the volcano, so I'll count that as a win. Unless they changed it in a patch, the Burn in the volcano is infinite duration but one-time on battle entry/revival and removable through standard status removal. So if you have a Warlock, you can doublecast Remedy and have it off of everyone in two turns. Valkyrie is funny in that it's a tank class that you might want to teach your healer. The spell side is about as good as support gets in Crystal Project. Sure, the Vit scaling on the healing hurts a little, but their Spirit is going to be so much higher than a proper Valk that it barely matters. In particular, party Armor Up makes physicals notably less scary going forward.
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Jan 30, 2024 18:32
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The screenshots all say Beaurior but your text commentary all says Beauroir (with the “o” and “i” switched).
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Jan 30, 2024 19:32
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AweStriker posted:The screenshots all say Beaurior but your text commentary all says Beauroir (with the “o” and “i” switched). Ah you see that's a clever hint to the reader that lets them know I'm incompetent if they're paying attention.
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Jan 30, 2024 19:36
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PurpleXVI posted:And I have no idea how you're meant to swing the Bone Trophy. The stance itself is just an exaggerated version of Berserker Stance, but -50% health!? Maybe you could stash it on a Ninja and rely on being able to dodge? Or a Rogue and really good aggro management? I think you didn't look closely enough at it - Berserker Stance is deal 25% more physical damage / take 25% more physical damage. Bone Trophy has you deal 35% more (so 10% stronger), but has you take 35% less physical damage, offsetting a large chunk of the health reduction (but only against physical damage, so watch out for magic!). You can think about it as a stronger berserker stance that makes you take double damage from magic but also receive double healing from spells and lifesteal, so a higher risk/higher reward option. It's also an excellent option for a hunter or rogue who isn't going to be tanking the majority of incoming damage, and then there are... sillier things you can do. The accessory itself is what carries the -50% HP property - the stance, on its own, is quite strong with no downsides, so imagine figuring out a way to apply the stance to the tank without needing them to take a -50% hp hit in the process.
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Jan 30, 2024 22:16
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Also re: the bone trophy, reapers don't particularly care how much HP they start a fight with as long as they're consistently doing damage, especially since the stance buff means they're accumulating even more temporary HP than they would be normally. E: imo you're selling the axe of light short; it's got perfectly reasonable caster stats for this point in the game, and I know shamans at least have axe access natively. You really don't need a hybrid setup to make it work. (It's probably also one of the best weapons around for a variance scholar build, but that's getting into much more niche territory.) Cattail Prophet fucked around with this message at 23:08 on Jan 30, 2024 |
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Jan 30, 2024 22:58
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Olesh posted:I think you didn't look closely enough at it - Berserker Stance is deal 25% more physical damage / take 25% more physical damage. lmao oh my God I've played through this game like five times and every single loving time I've misread that item because of what I expected it to say.
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Jan 30, 2024 23:27
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Let's Play Crystal Project: It's a Learning Experience
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Jan 31, 2024 02:38
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In my playthrough I found Beatsmith to hit hard enough that it was worth giving up control of the character. I wound up planning most of my party comps around one as my main source of damage
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Jan 31, 2024 03:02
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I spent a lot of my run with a Reaper/Warrior using the bone trophy. It got pretty effective later in the run when you get some more weird poo poo.
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Jan 31, 2024 03:24
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PurpleXVI posted:
I've used it several times in the Sky Arena, especially during randomizer runs. That +35% outgoing phys damage, coupled with a bunch of other silly effects, is part of a hard alpha strike strategy, ensuring I only need one turn to kill things and I get that turn first. The rest of its stats don't matter if you can fulfill those two conditions!
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Jan 31, 2024 05:30
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I totally missed Beatsmith in my completed run for basically the same reason: I “cleared” the capital in one go except I didn’t go back when I got the goat.
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Jan 31, 2024 09:49
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Update 15: Shoudu Province https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cl9Q_aJ0raI  Hamza: Are we there yet? Tau: No.  Vanessa: Are we there yet? Tau: No.  Charity: Are- Tau: No! Charity: ...I just wanted to ask if you're all enjoying this ride as much as I am. Once you jump on the raft and talk to the raft captain, it sets off across the sea on its own, gliding across first the shallows, and then the deep undersea.    Once we start getting close to Shoudu, the air darkens and the water turns practically purple from the new palette.    Charity: Shoudu doesn't feel as... active as I would've expected if everyone had run off here. Hamza: I guess most folks got banned before they managed it.      Tau: See? Those guys already beat us here, because we were wasting our time going on "side quests" and "exploring dungeons" instead of getting on with the main quest! Vanessa: ...what is the main quest? Tau: ...okay I may not know exactly what it is, but it's definitely this way.               Vanessa: Fishing for birds... Charity: You'd need some unusual lures for that. Tau: I mean, depends on what you're fishing for. Just tie a french fry to a string and you'll get all the seagulls you want.        Shoudu has a generally melancholy run-down feel to it, between the music, the dim lighting and the empty streets.        Hamza: ...fighting a Grand Master. That would be one hell of a scrum. Vanessa: They'd just banish you the moment you started looking at them funny. Hamza: ...yeah. It'd take some plan to pull off. Vanessa: Alright, if we see the Grand Master, everyone pile on Hamza and kick his rear end before he gets us all banished. Tau: Got it. Charity: In an instant.    Shoudu Stew is a great healing item, cheap for the power, though you can't carry many, and one guy back in Sara Sara Bazaar will give you the map of the Poko Poko Desert if you bring back one of them, so coming here can help you find all the lookouts in the desert by letting you actually map it out and see where you've been before.      One thing that's nice about Crystal Project is that, universally, when you find a better equipment or item shop, the shops back in the capital will stock the same stuff from then on. So there's no remembering where you found Crazy Joe's Sword Shack and trekking back there past fifty assloads of Murderbones and Spectral Frost Phoenixes just to check if the Z Sword beats the X Sword you've got.    Shoudu also has a couple of homeless people that you can give one copper, one silver or one gold. I always give them one gold because I know what happens if you do, and it's quite good, and you do not get any kind of do-over if you pick a choice, so I never really wanted to make a run more annoying just to test it out. We will see the consequences of this later.     Vanessa: What the hell? That's like 20% of our money! And he just ran off with it! Tau: Well he looked like he was hard up, I wanted to be nice to him, not like we can't get more money. Vanessa: But it's the principle of it... money can be exchanged for goods and services, I want goods and I want services.          There are, of course, also enemies in Shoudu Province. Let's try fighting one of them.  Hamza: Rargh! Fight!    Hamza: ...fight? One of the more common ones WILL run away from you and it WILL get away 90% of the time, if you manage to catch it, though, you see the following.      Dry Kids have a metric assload of Scholar skills, so handy for patching up holes in those, and will often start the battle by hitting everyone with Sleep Aura and then running away. If you kill one, though, it's a rare source of extra Learners' Pins(in case you've got some Scholar-heavy strat planned) and provides quite a bit of job XP. In another, worse game, they'd be some sort of ultra-efficient way of grinding requiring specialized stats, but Crystal Project will never require you to grind.      The Shoudu docks also have the gold weapons upgrade guy. I take the chance to upgrade Vanessa's silver dagger. It's unexciting but makes number bigger.     And get some upgraded gear out of the guy's rafters.      Charity: I can see why everyone moved away. Half this house is just spikes! Tau: Hey, maybe the rent is low and it's easy on the commute.      You gotta buy this guy's cod bag to get the Shoudu Province map, and they're the only two things he'll sell. Good luck navigating this loving place without a map. Good luck navigating it WITH a map.     Charity: Ooooh, there's that goat. Hi goat! While Shoudu Province might feel halfway around the world, it's really just a bit away from Capital Sequoia.        Fathom is right, there is, but it requires the Ibek. Without it, you'll never get past the docks, but since you can get here without the Ibek, I spent an awfully long time trying to figure out what the gently caress I was trying to do before I eventually decided to go back and hunt around the desert for those lookouts Reid wanted me to find.      Over on the east side, you can make your way up by jumping up on to the rooftops if you have the Ibek.      The inn is nice, and you'll want the save point since it's real easy to gently caress up a jump and end up dropping down to a lower level.     In the adjacent structure is this easily missed(since the entrance is on the "blind" angle of the building) item which is very, very nice. I think it was also partially luck, but I was absolutely drowning in drops after I put this on Vanessa.      And behind the inn is one of the first chances to fight some actual Shoudu enemies. Dark Vagrants are pretty chunky and hit pretty hard, but their biggest danger is Countering on physical hits which means they can put out a lot of hurt if you just start swinging without checking their stats. Thankfully, with the Blank Pages on Charity, she can start off every fight with a cast of Typhoon which puts most enemies at the current level one hit from dead(unless it misses...) and being a primary Dervish means she recovers a good bit of the MP she spends on it.  They also keep dropping these Blood Shields that I end up absolutely drowning in. They're useful for some sort of high lifedrain build.     I think you might be intended to use the entrance on the left side of the previous screenshots, just prior to the fight, but I use the save point(or the head of the "youthful lady") for enough height to leap up on top of the inn and make progress that way.    Hamza: Oh hell yeah! A samurai class! I can't wait to be an honourable bushido warrior who yells some bullshit and then cuts a guy in half faster than light. Vanessa: You've got the yelling some bullshit part down already.   Charity: Elevator parts? What are we, the maintenance team? Tau: Well, we might be, I can't pry this thing out of the inventory bag.          It's easy to avoid fights in Shoudu because you can easily lure enemies into throwing themselves off buildings so they can't reach you, so I intentionally pick a few more than usual for the purpose of showing them off.     Dark Archers sometimes accompany Dark Vagrants, they're trouble because if they get off a Quickshot and a Barrage it can quickly add in a good bit of pain for the team, but more fragile.    Tau: Doesn't look like anyone else has made it up here so far... Charity: No wonder, remember the crap we had to go through just to get an Ibek? Tau: The desert... the more desert... the desert again... and then the mysterious river dungeon under the desert.          The Shoudu Province "marketplace" is quite a ways above sea level. It has a lot of straight numerical upgrades if you can afford them, and also some interesting options.  This is an interesting weapon, for instance, but neither of the classes that can use an axe for their skills AND are very AP hungry are in our reach quite yet.          There's also an accessary shop on the higher tier of the market area.       Tau: This place is a labyrinth. Charity: I know! It rules.     Dark Mages are the last part of the Dark [profession] squads that show up. They are a high priority target because if they get off a Shadow Wall cast or drop Barrier on a Dark Vagrant, the whole assemblage gets way longer to hit the team, which is bad.  They also drop these staves which are quite nice. Percentage+ equipment stays fresh for long.    I don't think I've ever fought this flame, they always drop off while trying to get to me.         This section isn't labyrinthine in the "hard to get through"-sense but instead in the "you see a chest and then you spend half an hour trying to figure out how to path to it"-sense. Just getting through is easy, but if you want all the chests... you will suffer a bit.       Charity: I think after the milk, and the claws, and the skulls, I'm... numb? Go on, pick up the used underwear. Vanessa: ...well now I'm weirded out, because it's techncially a piece of equipment for me.     Tau: Multiple elevator parts... Charity: Maybe there's a minigame where we have to assemble our own elevator! Tau: I see someone's missing the Satisfactory server. Charity: ...I miss my conveyor belts.         Hamza: Man, imagine sleepwalking here. Vanessa: Miss the left turn at the nightstand and whoosh splat. Hamza: I mean, no falling damage, so not splat, but either you're napping on the docks or you're back in your bed by noon after climbing a small mountain.           All in all we're going to need ten Elevator Parts. They're technically optional but they make a few things easier. Finding them never really requires seeking them out, as long as you're even marginally curious you're almost guaranteed to find them.      It took me a while to realize the door to that chest on the left was literally just to my left. Sometimes this game requires you to be a bit perceptive.    Vanessa: Oh thank God, I thought I was going to have to equip that... other thing, if we were doing stealing. Hamza: Hey, you've got two accessory slots and they stack! Vanessa: Go to hell.     So that's the Samurai and Assassin lounges in Shoudu Province. If you can believe it, the crystals for both these classes are in Shoudu, too!        Hamza: drat, check out how high up we are! Charity: It looks so orderly from up here. You can hardly tell what a mess of nooks and crannies it is.            Charity: ...almost feels weird being out in the open like this again. Vanessa: Like something's gonna swoop down on us. Hamza: It'd be cool if something did, I wanna fight more giant birds.     Even in this "cleaner" upper section, Shoudu still feels run-down. Watch your step or you're gonna go for a deep plunge.     Hamza: Oh poo poo there are people up here, too. Tau: Oh thank God.     Hamza: ...Sky Arena... Tau: Oh no. Hamza: We're going to have to jump... to get up... to FIGHT. HELL YEAH. Vanessa: Well, at least there might be some good prizes. Charity: And a nice view! Tau: No... we were just back on track... please...         I wonder what this place was for. For some reason it reminds me a bit of a slaughterhouse.            There's not a lot to talk about in most of "upper" Shoudu Province. Mostly just mashing more bandits(are they bandits? whatever, I'm calling the Dark Dork teams bandits) and jumping upwards.   Their formations also start becoming more complex. I cannot understate how much easier having the Blank Pages makes handling them, without that you'll often have Vagrants and Mages getting off their buffs, or Archers their attacks, before you can wipe them out.     This little structure has no purpose for now, we need more mobility options, so it's worth keeping in mind, but easy to forget.          The fields overlooking upper Shoudu also have a new enemy, the Pangolion. Their main noteworthy skill is Rabies. If they land it, that's 30% max health in damage per turn, that's actually pretty brutal! Combined with the attack from the swipe, that's one or two actions and boom, dead.  And they drop a new seed for the capital garden. We'll be back there to make mistakes sooner or later.                Tau: Okay, I think we're a bit off route, we're not even in Shoudu any longer!      But we wanna go up here for another shrine!    Another stone that gives us a permanent way back to the upper levels, even if we don't have a home point there.        You can also get a refund on your purchase if you poke through the "attic" of the shrine after the warping there.    Tau: I wonder where this path leads. Charity: Do paths have to lead places? Tau: That's what make them paths.               Charity: Well, guess you were right, it lead to a nice view! The owl just flies off, heading for some other, distant perch. It's hard to explain how it feels... fitting, for the Overpass' bleak and abandoned feeling, with the constant howling wind.        Anyway, having reached Ganymede Shrine, we now have a relatively quick way to get to these narrow walkways suspended above upper Shoudu.       Vanessa: An appropriate reward for walking the high wire to get them. Cheeky.       These pillars are my goddamn bane. The way you have to sort of "hook" your jump around the side fucks me up so often, and with there not being water below, you have to reset all the way back to the nearest home point or teleport stone location if you gently caress it up.       Charity: Wow, we're so high up we can hardly see the ground any longer. Tau: At least if there really is a "Sky Arena" we're at an appropriate height for it.            The Sky Arena is real, and strong, and it can hurt you.  It's a solo arena, you get to send in one character at once. I send in Vanessa classed back to a Fencer because it's my best option for spike damage at the moment and they have Snowfang for lifesteal.     We start off easily enough.   The second has both a self-heal skill and enough hit points to get in an attack before it goes down.  You don't heal or recover MP between fights, though! Which is also why MP-using classes are not a great idea for the Sky Arena.   The Rogue Knight has a funny gimmick where all he has is a simple attack, but if you don't kill him before he starts attacking, you need to somehow survive 12 attacks in a row.  Trivial, though.     The Mountain Knight is a bigger, nastier version of the giants we've fought previously and dings up Vanessa pretty bad, she comes out of it missing a lot of health.     The Mage Knight has no special gimmicks but flattens Vanessa because it hits pretty hard.  Hamza: I wanted to do the fight! Tau: You can do the fight next time. Charity: Yes, we made Vanessa do the fight this time because if we let you start fighting, you won't stop.       Anyway, time to drop back to the arena counter.          Every two or three fights you beat, there will be either a new Treasury or a new prize from the front counter.           I love unlocking doors that hide treasure, it's always so exciting.     Especially when the treasure is a new class. Samurai are... interesting? They have a passive that makes them not proc counters, which is nice, otherwise their gimmick is that almost all their skills do not trigger a turn end and they have an increased AP cap, meaning they can do a lot of spike damage under the right circumstances. Each hit they land with their "instant" skills also builds up "combo tokens" on the target. The combo tokens evaporate at the end of the turn, but the samurai also have normal skills which do extra damage for every combo token on the target they hit. All their skills also only work with katanas. I think the "best" samurai would have a Scholar or Monk secondary for bonus AP, but that still means wasting turns not attacking. Not wholly sold on them as useful.           The other treasury has somewhat more conventional treasure.           There are three more treasuries, and we'll need to fight our way through the entire rest of the Sky Arena to crack them all open. That's not gonna happen for quite some levels yet, so that's getting backburnered for a while.      Hamza: ...well, what now? Charity: I guess we look around some more while you mull over whether you want to be a valkyrie or a samurai. Hamza: But they're both so cool!        Tau: What was this ever for? Did it fall apart? Was it never built? Vanessa: My guess it's for us to platform on until we reach something to steal.  There's another elevator part in the purple chest down there. Almost all purple chests in Shoudu have elevator parts.                     Charity: ...it feels like those folks have something going on that really weighs on their mind. Tau: Some people just like to carry their drama into games instead of simply enjoying them.   Charity: Kind of hard to understand, you could just sit here, listening to the music and watching the view, watching the birds. Tau: ...it's pretty soothing. Hamza: ... Vanessa: You're about to spoil the bonding moment, aren't you? Hamza: ...I can't help it, I wonder what it would like to fight those birds.         Vanessa: Hm, how many do we have by now...  Eleven, without even particularly hunting them down or being exceptionally completist about picking up every chest in town.   Under the platform is this technical room.    Every time you touch a ? you can replace it iwth an elevator part, visualized as a little pillar.  The one on the right there is the only one that's really hard to reach. You'll be used to making every jump with the Ibek so far, but you need to swap to the Quintar to make it happen.        Vanessa: Is this slab the elevator? It's just a big rock.   Hamza: A big rock that can take us places. Charity: Please not the "Quintar Reserve," it's enough that we ride one of those things. I don't want to see more of them. Tau: And we've already been to the Sky Arena. We're not going back just yet. Vanessa: Good thing there's another part of Shoudu we haven't been to yet. Tau: There is? Vanessa: Oh, definitely. I'll show you tomorrow. As usual, I've got it all figured out. [END SESSION]
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Feb 14, 2024 20:58
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I'm sure you'll show it in your next Shoudu update but there is a house in the bottom west of the zone that I never loving figured out how to get into it and the chest inside and it haunts me.
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Feb 15, 2024 03:38
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Chillgamesh posted:I'm sure you'll show it in your next Shoudu update but there is a house in the bottom west of the zone that I never loving figured out how to get into it and the chest inside and it haunts me. The one right next to the Goat Ledge? If you get up on the ledge above it, there's a small hole knocked in the ledge that you can drop into and use to enter the house from "behind."
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Feb 15, 2024 03:43
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I think they're talking about the other chest in that house? Which yeah, that one took me loving forever to figure out. Here's a hint: Talk to the goat again, and watch him carefully. IIRC it didn't even have anything that exciting inside.
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Feb 15, 2024 06:08
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Shoudu is cool so long as you know to beeline for the Shrine. Being able to just instantly pop back up to the top makes the place so much more tolerable. Aside from that, I appreciate the enemies being easy to bait, because it lets you focus on the platforming. There's a Steam Workshop mod that adds Etrian Odyssey 4 classes to the game, and that provides the one good use of Samurai that I've seen. The Bushi class has Dual Wield, katana access, and a secondary passive that turns its normal attacks into an HP drain, and IIRC each hit of Dual Wield gives you a separate +6 AP from a normal attack. So a Bushi/Samurai draws in aggro, tanks with lifesteal normal attacks, and then blows their entire stock of AP on Samurai moves to keep aggro. It's a cute use of the Samurai class and the general Sky Arena strategy is lifesteal and counter-attacks, so it's a good fit for that.
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Feb 15, 2024 09:06
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Einander posted:There's a Steam Workshop mod that adds Etrian Odyssey 4 classes to the game, and that provides the one good use of Samurai that I've seen. The Bushi class has Dual Wield, katana access, and a secondary passive that turns its normal attacks into an HP drain, and IIRC each hit of Dual Wield gives you a separate +6 AP from a normal attack. So a Bushi/Samurai draws in aggro, tanks with lifesteal normal attacks, and then blows their entire stock of AP on Samurai moves to keep aggro. It's a cute use of the Samurai class and the general Sky Arena strategy is lifesteal and counter-attacks, so it's a good fit for that. I don't think you really need to mod Samurai to make them powerful. For instance, a Samurai with a Scholar secondary who pops Adrenaline on their first turn and have some of the passives for extra AP will rapidly do a lot of damage, a friendly Valkyrie can drop "spare" AP on them from time to time, etc. They just, more than many other classes, require the right secondary and the right backup classes to reach their potential. The problem is that these backup classes deny them other stuff you'll probably want on your primarily physical "tank" attacker, like being able to draw aggro. So in our case, Samurai would probably be more appropriate for Vanessa than Hamza, but then I'd be down a Rogue doing rogue-y stuff. So either you'd be clearing out one of your magic users(Mind/offensive caster or Spirit/defensive caster), your tank(Warrior, Aegis, Valkyrie) or your Rogue(Rogue. Rogue Rogue Rogue), all of which I consider somewhat indispensable. Samurai do have access to a lot of Wind and Fire damage, though, so I'd say their ideal use would be as a sometimes food in areas where giving up your threat management and such is worth it for a lot of spiking damage of the right element.
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Feb 15, 2024 12:17
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Yeah, the last sentence of your third paragraph is really the crux of it. You have a lot of flexibility with mages even if there's a Mind/Spirit divide, because a fair number of classes do both and give you both stats. Plus, you can mostly do whatever you want with mages so long as you have /Warlock on them, because that skill set always provides them something useful to do. But the tyranny of weapon restrictions on top of differing stat growths means that your Tanks and your Rogues tend to have more rigid roles in comparison, and Samurai is on the tank side of the class divide... But the class can't really tank in any way other than pulling threat by doing damage, and if you're putting away the tools of a character's role in exchange for them doing more damage, it's usually the Rogue who does that. But that trade stresses your other characters more and makes it more important that they do their roles well, and Rogues and Mages are all dependent on good, reliable threat management to work properly. That said, basically any Tank-side can salvage a half-decent tank role out of /Scholar thanks to Insult and aggro-boosting armor (even if it's not scaling on their stats), and Adrenaline is a decent use of free turns. It's also not eating into the AP a Samurai needs, so that's probably their best class combo. It's just hard to ever call Samurai/Scholar a good idea, as opposed to one you can get away with.
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Feb 16, 2024 09:05
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Update 16: The Undercity Before the meat of the update, we're going to look at the house that Chillgamesh asked about.  It's the westernmost structure in "lower" Shoudu Province, the one you can see from the ledge below where you see your first Ibek. There are three entrances. The most obvious one is the "barred" door down in front which is perfectly openable.   Then there's the back entrance to the little section up top. But neither gives us access to the west part of the house. How do we get in there?    There's a small crevice, reachable only with an Ibek jump, hidden under the overhanging roof. And what does it give us access to?  Just an Ether Pouch. The dev would not be as cruel as to hide anything truly vital in there. Anyway, back to the show. Charity: Where are we heading this time? Vanessa: Down.      Hamza: Son of a bitch, is this a sewer level? Vanessa: More of a sewer area, but yes. Hamza: No one's ever enjoyed a sewer, whether level or area. Charity: You can't speak for everyone- Hamza: If someone enjoys a sewer level then they're not people.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvqGwLQM2pY The start of this track reminds me a bit of some of Chrono Trigger's music, like in Magus' castle, but it soon becomes much more melancholic than sinister. This could play while you're in orbit around a peaceful planet or something. I love it.   Tau: ...is Shoudu Province's sewer just the ocean? Vanessa: I'm sure the fish don't mind.      The gimmick for the Undercity is that enemies will only track you if you move near them and will quickly reset afterwards, and that they're relatively tough and if you're not well-prepared can easily drain your resources if you fight all of them. I'm well-prepared, though.    Hamza: ...why are we standing still again? Tau: So we don't get into a fight. Hamza: ...why are we not getting into fights?     I make some effort to be stealthy but also want to aggro a few enemies so I can show them off.     Once again, if you come here as soon as possible, for instance if I had not hit up Beauroir Volcano or the upper Shoudu City first, Koh-Mohri can be threatening, because they're REALLY good at dodging. If you're full on physical attackers you're gonna be missing a lot while they whittle you down.      You get a few chances to understand the local gimmick if you don't get it the first time.        Ratatasks by themselves aren't terribly threatening, kind of like the Dark Vagrants up above, but when they're travelling with the other goons they get scary, like Plague Bows have shooty bullshit, blinding counters, status effects, etc. and if Ratatasks get the chance they can pop a Cover effect that makes them take hits for their buddies.   Oh and they hit like loving trucks if you take them lightly.       The Undercity is also a bit tricky with some hidden paths that you have to intuit and can't see because the camera never really gives you a view of them.  Nothing in here you desperately need except for some Gold crafting materials, but still. Never pass up loot.    Vanessa: You know, I'm still upset. Tau: Why? Vanessa: Giving away all that gold to that homeless guy. Tau: What goes around comes around! Vanessa: That's bullshit and you kn-    Vanessa: What the gently caress?  Vanessa: What the gently caress?      So, if you donate to the homeless person generously, this trio of weirdos will bounce down a few places in the Undercity dropping a full heal/revive on you and a full MP recovery, too. I get a single chance to act before they do because of Charity's "Blank Pages" book. Theoretically with some sort of wild overlevelling(perhaps by removing the level limit or upping it greatly) you could come here early and maybe nuke these guys or something. But I have no idea what they drop if anything, I would assume nothing at all. I have no idea what worse generosity does, I presume just "no heals," but who can say. Maybe they blow your rear end up if you're stingy.    Tau:  Vanessa: You're not going to make me admit it was a good decision. Give it up.   It's somewhat interesting to me that the dev didn't "cheat" with lighting the Undercity. There's some ambient lighting, of course, but all those grates and stuff from above still cast their shadows down here from the omnipresent "sun" light source above the world.       If you get the aquatic mount early you can skip the entire Undercity. Just as a fun note.          It may seem expansive, but until you get this far you don't really have a choice of direction, so just follow the obvious path.    Tau: I can't believe there are people down here. Charity: People, down here? You mean they have their own little- Tau: Don't do it. Charity: Sewerlization? Tau: It burns.   You can probably already guess what class crystal they keep caged down here.    Hamza: Beat three bosses, get crystal. Got it.    This guy sells an Undercity map which is... not really all that useful because of how the area is laid out? You can't really get lost, in my opinion. But hey, completionism demands I get it.  Anyway, let's get to the first master of the Undercity.       You can technically get into those little canals on the north side of this bigger canal, but all you get for it is a single unit of gold crafting resource, so you may as well wait until you have a mount that makes it easier.    We also have new rats here.  Squealitts are single target attackers that hit real hard.  And Charity's alpha strikes leave them with just enough health to get an instant turn and turn her into chunky salsa when I try to solve the fight that way.       Vanessa: They're stalking us now! Tau: Stalking us with kindness. Vanessa: They're just fattening us up for the kill...      The Master of Shadows is, predictably, hiding in the shadows.   https://soundcloud.com/schematist/born-soldier     The Master of Shadows, Shadow Master, whichever, has a number of mean skills that will debuff you and whonk the entire party for a good bit of damage. The mix of magical and physical attacks means you can't rely on ONLY blinding or disrupting him, you have to do both.    Since you can only apply Sleep to a given enemy(or character) once per fight, it's good to save it for big casts where your Rogue's interrupts don't line up well enough with the charge time. You can't use it as an actual interrupt since they'll tend to pick up where they left off the moment you wake them up.   Ultimately he's not that much trouble as long as you bring a Rogue and understand the game's mechanics.  He drops a bow in case I ever want to do some sort of niche Hunter build.   Crystal Project, because it is good, also keeps you pretty well updated on the progress of this subquest.  Hamza: God, yes, a boss fight! What's next? Are there more? Charity: Should be two more. But I'm not seeing a way onwards- Hamza: I do. ONWARDS AND UPWARDS.    Charity: ...I feel like using that man's head as a platform was a bit rude.       The "girders" up here can be used to access a few pouches and consumables farther south, nothing worth chronicling, but worth noting that they exist.     Just look how many loving elevator parts there are, it's silly.       You can also cross that bridge and bounce across the lanterns to get up here to this big cistern space.         The rat man squads up here add Vermages, who have a LOT of nasty spells if you don't kill them fast, and who counter magic with an MP drain effect that cuts 15% of your max MP every turn.         And as soon as we reach the other side of the cistern...    Vanessa: Again?! Who just helps people like this?       It's a bit odd that the generosity squad shows up to heal us right next to a place where we can pay a symbolic amount for a full heal as well, but so it goes.      If you go out the back and jump on the roofs of the northern shacks, you can get into the southern one and collect a bit more gold.    While moving out across the cistern again, there's a little sneaky secret on the bottom.      If you got into one of those tricky passages on the way to the Shadow Master, you'd end up on the other side of those bars, which would indicate that this existed, but probably also leave you sad simply because of how much effort it was for such non-existent reward.  The Brigandine certainly has some kind of use, but it's rare that you need access to any kinds of weapons that your primary class doesn't already let you use. Still, we're picking it up because A) we don't get to back out of picking it up and B) completionism.          The jumps leading up to the cistern roof are pretty easy and also since a failed jump drops you into the drink, you just reset if that happens.      Hamza: If I kill him, do I get to call myself the new Blade Master? The Blade Masterer? The Blade Masterest? I want to be the Blade Masterest.    Holy poo poo the Blade Master can gently caress you up if you fumble the fight. He can drop 45%-per-turn health drain on someone with a single skill and then follow up with a "gently caress you, die"-skill powered by those status effects.    ...but the trick is, as usual, to bring a Rogue. If you blind him, he can't do jack poo poo other than whiff his attacks, and I can taunt him so all his attacks that DO happen hit Hamza's big spongy head.  Even so, he almost manages to take Hamza out.  The Gouger is kind of a gimmicky weapon. If you stack +crit stuff and equip the Fencer's stance that increases crit chance, you can possibly guarantee enough crits for the bonus crit damage to matter more than the lost standard damage.   Anyway, one Master left.        Back to the bridge where we turned west into the cistern before. Note that one of the flames here is a GRAY flame, the lowest tier. Gray flames won't chase you and are extremely trivial combats.    It's a Zoo Bat, one of the enemies way back from the Soiled Den minidungeon in Delende. I'm not sure if it's placed here because somewhere underground should have bats, or if the dev fat-fingered an intent to place another Koh-Mori.         Small detour for a Knight's Plate. It's an unexciting but solid upgrade on most armors available at this point.     Now, we need to go up, but first we need to go down and across.        Bring out the Quintar, get healed by the local weirdos.              Navigate around the edge of the big room in a surprisingly combat-free bit.         And then loop back to where you started but a bit higher up to face the third and final Master of the Undercity.      The Duel Master honestly feels like something went wrong when designing him. He's got an attack that makes his debuffs last longer, but he doesn't cause any debuffs with any of his attacks. He can hit real hard, but he can only hit one character, doesn't apply any conditions, it's all physical, so keeping him blinded is relatively trivial.     Predictably, Vanessa blinds him and hits him with a 9-turn bleed effect while he keeps attempting and failing to kill Hamza.   He drops an alright sword.       Hamza: Thank you for rewarding us for fighting things. You made my day.        Assassin is one of my favourite classes in the game. Their passive is that any physical attack that would kill an enemy if it did double damage, does double damage. Their skills are clearly designed for daggers, making them a great combo with a Rogue, but they also have some weapon-agnostic skills and a few skills that also work with axes and swords, even one that's bow-only. They can fit into some odd and unexpected synergies besides the obvious Assassin/Rogue.    Tau: ...so wait, is Shoudu Province just a dead end? Are we meant to go to the Quintar Reserve? Worse news for Tau: Shoudu Province is actually a completely optional area on the route to the endgame. It's not obviously so since the game leads you this way, but once you finish off Shoudu, you might be very baffled about where you're meant to head if you took the path we did. Charity: Look on the bright side, Tau, now it's a journey of discovery! Everywhere we go could technically be the right way! Tau: Auargh!    My first time around it took me a while to get on the right course, but now that I know what the intended next place to go is, I will share my wisdom.       Tau: Where are we going? We've been here before already! It was a weird bear boondoggle then, too!       Anyway, there's a part of Salmon Pass that you can't make use of until you have an Ibek.         This little niche in the northeast of the cavern.                   Spiral around a bit and you get up to an upper section of Greenshire Reprise. What fooled me the first time around was that I had somehow made my way up here earlier and got INTO Salmon Pass from this entrance, so I thought that was intended and never thought to come back this way with more mobility for quite a while.       Charity: Ooooh! A snow zone! Tau: No roads, no NPC's, no quests... you're just making it up as we go along. I bet we're not meant to be here. Vanessa: Good, then the loot will be outscaled and will make everything easier. Hamza: Great! Then the fights will finally be challenging!   https://soundcloud.com/vindsvept/over-the-mountain I love the Tall Tall Heights theme, I could listen to it forever.     Snowflakes constantly fall in the Heights, and everything has a dim, twilight look, like a winter's evening when the sun is long below the horizon and the lighting is primarily artificial, moonlight and starlight reflecting off of snow, somehow almost as bright as day.    The Heights also do not have ice physics, but they do have ice PUZZLES.    If you bump into these ice cubes from an "open" side, they slide until they collide with something in the cardinal direction you bumped them towards. If they get "stuck" in a corner or similar, there's always a nearby button you can hop on to reset them.     Bar one, these Tall Tall puzzles are always about shuffling the ice block along so you can use it as a platform to reach a ledge.           Another thing you need to spot to make any progress in Tall Tall Heights is the trees, because the pines are universally arranged so that an Ibek can just exactly get on the lower branches.        Hamza: ...drat. Tau: Finally realizing the enormity of a quest without guidelines or paths to follow? Hamza: ...actually just realizing this game doesn't have warm socks. This place is gonna suck. Next time: Puzzles, snow, horrible surprises, weird things.
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Mar 2, 2024 01:00
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Can confirm that the three weirdos will gently caress you up if you're stingy or poor yourself. They all launch an attack before running. I was broke my first time though and had a bad time in the undercity.
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Mar 2, 2024 01:29
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I have an enormous grudge against Tall Tall Heights for being a huge, sprawling area that's a pain in the rear end to navigate without a map. A map that iirc I literally did not stumble into until after beating the final boss. Assassin is weird. It's literally the only class that has mutually exclusive weapon skills, and that's an interesting concept! ...But in practice you can just stick to a dagger, have access to everything except harm memory (which is bad anyway), and call it a day. Axes do at least get you most of the important stuff, if that works better with your secondary.
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Mar 2, 2024 05:54
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IIRC the Assassin skills don't work with swords, they work with rapiers. If you've been running a crit-heavy Fencer build, Fencer is a fantastic subclass for them during dungeon exploration, because the double-damage passive is calculated off the attack's final damage, and that includes the bonus from a critical if you land one. It's not difficult to raise a rapier-wielder's critical rate to 100%, so you can use them to pretty much delete any random encounter monster on turn 1. Admittedly they're not the hottest choice for boss fights, but eh, I like that some of the classes have a niche like that.
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Mar 2, 2024 06:14
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Now that we've seen all the pieces, Assassin/Hunter is what I used to trivialize the Sky Arena. The highest attack gear I had, Initial Oomph, Perfect Vision, and Quickshot/Snipe took everything out in one round or drat close to it.
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Mar 2, 2024 09:38
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If you're cheap then navigating the Undercity is really, really annoying. Having to pick dead dudes up off the floor four separate times is a pain in the rear end. Assassin is funny in that it's the end point of every Rogue-branch class. Running a Rogue? Assassin/Rogue. Fencer? Assassin/Fencer. Hunter? Assassin/Hunter. Ninja? No you're not, stop lying. (Okay, maybe not Ninja.) There's even another later axe/dagger class, in case you're wondering why the axe access on the skills. Assassin is just a really, really good class! As a side note, the two debuffs on that middle branch to Harm Memory, Harm Power/Harm Magic, used to be bow-only. In practice you still have other characters do the debuffing unless you're using bows, but it's nice to have them available on the rogue-branch character.
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Mar 2, 2024 10:05
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