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Black Robe posted:I remain unconvinced that this is a good game, because, well, you're the one LPing it. This is a game that gets most of the way to being a fantastically amazing game, with a ton of inspiration and love from classic great RPGs and modernized with really great design choices including a variety of accessibility options, but also clearly is limited by being an indie solo project labor of love. The end result is still a great game, but with plenty of flaws and rough edges, but I encourage people to overlook that and check it out if it seems even remotely up your alley. There's a demo!
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Oct 4, 2023 10:50
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 18:32 |
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Voting B, always side stuff! If I may make a suggestion - the OP is already kind of unwieldy with the classes and unlocked abilities. Consider maybe moving the individual class sections to their own posts that you link in the OP, especially if you're going to be updating them as you go along.
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Oct 9, 2023 22:21
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JustJeff88 posted:That's not bad either. I've always hated random level ups because they encourage save-scumming, and I'm glad to hear that they are deterministic even though class-based stat increases have their own... foibles. I always liked the Might & Magic system where everything was simple arithmetic, and if there was a stat increase it was fully retroactive. The class-based level up thing ranges from irrelevant to somewhat important depending on how you shuffle around classes/roles and your difficulty level, but once you get access to it, retroactively assigning your class levelups is pretty straightforward. You can also freely shuffle levelups of classes you've already "paid" for as well, so if you have 20 levels of warrior and decide you want to change it to 20 levels of warlock, you can then go back to 20 levels of warrior (or switch to 10/10) at no charge. It even gets saved in loadouts, so you can set up multiple loadouts with different assigned level-ups.
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Oct 10, 2023 20:54
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I imagine the sweet spot personally to be Hard difficulty, but with the Easier Non-Bosses flag set. The biggest annoyance to me with Hard difficulty wasn't so much the boss fights, but rather that the random enemy encounters could end up being tedious resource drains. Much like with the four job fiesta, the most interesting part to me is solving the problem of the difficult boss fights with the resources at hand, so I appreciate a mode that gives the added challenge of the Hard bosses without turning regular encounters into as much of a slog.
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Oct 19, 2023 20:19
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PurpleXVI posted:This crystal grants us the Aegis class which is a more defensively oriented Warrior. Almost all their abilities are about buffing their own defense, and they only have two (non-weapon specific) attacks which weaken the target's magic resistance and magic attack respectively, filling out a gap in the Warrior's abilities which weaken physical resistance and attack. I never found myself using Aegis much in the later game, but for now it's an obvious fit to go with Hamza, while Vanessa gets to be a Fencer. The primary perk in the Aegis skillset is the Natural Tank passive, which is a very nice convenience to ensure that your desired tank starts with a little bit of threat on EVERYONE. The Aegis also has the highest innate Vitality at 5 stars and solid Spirit at 4 stars, meaning that an Aegis is inherently good at being tanky. Aegis is key for accomplishing certain types of capital-S Shenanigans, but by and large is a conservative defensive pick with some interestingly useful passives.
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Nov 5, 2023 06:11
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Chemist is a little strange. By this point you've gotten used to not being able to use your consumables in battle, and then here's a class that lets you use consumables mid fight. It feels bad to have a class whose primary contribution is letting you spend money to heal, at a time where money is not exactly infinite, but it's notable in that it includes one of the few methods of regaining MP mid-battle.
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Dec 5, 2023 00:07
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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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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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PurpleXVI posted:I think its main use would be against single big overworld enemies. You drop the "two turns till you die"-skill on them, then hit them with a two-turn Sleep effect and take a breather until they keel over. The primary use I got out of Beastmaster was as a secondary for a different class we haven't seen yet, and that was primarily as a "delete random encounters" option using Sleep Bomb after Jugular. I never tried the extreme Variance builds, but you could probably do something silly using a Beastmaster/Scholar or something.
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Mar 17, 2024 18:26
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One thing I always appreciate about Crystal Project is how much people vary in their takes on different classes/abilities based on the synergies/playstyles they prefer. For me, I used Beastmaster (combined with a later class we haven't seen yet) as a flame clearer, and generally used Nomad extensively, paired with Warlock or Dervish. Nomad, in particular, has a fun trick with staff weapons that replace the basic attack with Aid. This functions similarly to the Healing Staff from FFV, where your basic attack becomes a free single-target heal. This is still treated as a basic attack, so it benefits from the 35% boost, and is also valid for Therapy Stance, meaning you can spam modest party-wide healing for free while also generating AP. More generally, Nomad naturally synergizes well as a secondary to Dervish to create a caster with an extremely large replenishing battery to support a more defensive endurance-based strategy. You can equip Staffs (for the Aid trick, as above) or Wands (for more damage) or even just take the native Book option from Dervish to really push the "never runs out of MP" gimmick.
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Apr 26, 2024 22:36
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PurpleXVI posted:Oh my loving God, why did it never occur to me that "gear" icon abilities are specifically neither physical or magical? Now I feel about as stupid as I did the first time someone told me the clever solution to Gran. Something else I appreciate about this game is that if you dig deep enough, there's probably a clever solution to every boss (or at least, a way to make them significantly easier). I didn't find most of them, but I figured out some. The more gimmicky a boss appears to be, the more likely there is some kind of clever solution.
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Apr 28, 2024 04:27
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Einwand posted:I remember using mimic to copy fierce stance from that one accessory, and another one we haven't seen yet without the downsides associated with the actual accessory, but mostly it's not the best gimmick. Mimic is an extreme edge case class, coming far too late to be able to justify casual use. Mimics own abilities are so niche that there's really no such thing as a "general" setup - you have a number of other, faster and easier options to fill that role for casual exploration, which puts Mimics role strictly in the realm of "weird poo poo". Understandably so - if Mimic could equip multiple sub-commands, they would almost entirely be THE superior platform for caster classes by virtue of being able to equip all gear and gain multiple passives. Instead, it becomes a solution in search of a problem and because of the flexible nature of the game, there aren't really many problems where a plan using Mimic is a more fun and/or elegant solution versus using some other more sensible and coherent plan.
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May 6, 2024 20:34
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Einander posted:Congrats on the early Conscript kill! It's pretty well-designed as part of an open-world exploration game. Even if you ignore all the spooky vibes of its environment, you're supposed to look at its skills, say "what is this nonsense," and then leave it for later. The fact that it drops nothing immediately useful is also similarly discouraging, if you're the spoiler-searching type. Nudging the player to go somewhere else without putting up a wall is an important thing to do! I always considered the Conscript to effectively be one of the "end game" bosses, for reasons that will make sense when PurpleXVI gets there. That isn't to say that you necessarily need to be at the level cap with fully kitted out gear - the speedrun of this game is kind of charming in that way. The game reaches a point after which you can't simply grind as a solution to your problems (although the accessibility options provide the ability to adjust the level cap if so desired), and the game is varied and flexible enough that you can go real far without even being close to the level cap because having a good plan makes such a big difference in successfully tackling bosses. There's even option under Assist Options to reduce the difficulty of non-boss encounters, which I really like conceptually if all you want to think about is the bigger set piece fights. As far as the fight itself is concerned, this has been mentioned before, but combining Warlock with Nomad to take advantage of Therapy Stance (turn single-target cures into multi-target) is the most efficient way to remove statuses from multiple characters in a single turn. It doesn't require Dualcast (which is prohibitively expensive to sustain) and is more or less the One Easy Trick for this fight, such as it is. Valkyrie itself is pretty helpful here as well, for Steel Heart.
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May 9, 2024 19:44
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 18:32 |
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Einander posted:
Weaver's the other part of the general wombo combo for dealing with random encounters while exploring. Using Weaver + Beastmaster with Equip Axe to throw out a multi-target Jugular at the start of combat (to stick Death Sentence on everything) then following up with Sleep Aura, will handle the majority of encounters without giving them the opportunity to take a single turn. You can use Weaver/Rogue to sleep bomb as well, if you really are averse to spending MP. It's not the only way to accomplish this sort of thing; it's just what I ended up using. G: Find some hidden loot. I'm intrigued.
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May 15, 2024 10:11
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