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Deified Data posted:Does having a unit directly in front of another unit in the front row have any effect other than making them susceptible to piercing attacks? Is it generally better to stagger units in formation if you can? The column matters for piercing attacks, and if there are no more specific targeting rules, characters will prefer to attack enemies in their own column. Other than that, it's got no effect, so staggering is better to defend against full column attacks.
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Apr 20, 2024 18:59
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Deified Data posted:Does having a unit directly in front of another unit in the front row have any effect other than making them susceptible to piercing attacks? Is it generally better to stagger units in formation if you can? Multitarget attacks like Magic Missile or Dual Shot prefer to hit targets in different columns, so placing units in the same column makes the back unit much more likely to get targeted by a column attack and much less likely to get hit by a split attack. Because of the way targeting works the safest slot against a two target attack is usually the back row slot 'nearest the camera'.
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Apr 20, 2024 20:10
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Im trucking through my 5th continent of content slowly every night before bed almost done with the game but man i'm kinda let down by the lack of oomph in this story/narrative delivery after 13 sentinels let you play the story via adventure gameplay instead of interminable cutscenes with a long hold to skip
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Apr 21, 2024 01:57
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The freedom to let you go anywhere you want in any order has definitely come at the cost of making all those places boring and interchangeable.
Clarste fucked around with this message at 04:00 on Apr 21, 2024 |
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Apr 21, 2024 01:59
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You could do the 13 sentinels story in any order tho!
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Apr 21, 2024 02:02
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yeah but the story took place in a fixed order, UO doesn't have the luxury of loving with chronology
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Apr 21, 2024 02:03
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Okay I give up how do you do damage to the last boss, also how are you supposed to know to prepare whatever the team is that can actually do damage given he is only revealed after what is already the longest mission in the game, and also did someone forget to add the code to make these rings do anything or what? I did all the plot. I was eviscerating units left and right on the way in but like. What is going on here. Come on man, even the two designated final battle recruits aren't doing more than a digit and that's before the healing. This is enough of a wall that I feel like something has actually broken.
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Apr 21, 2024 02:59
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A Swordmaster with Meteor Slash is basically mandatory
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Apr 21, 2024 03:02
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Fedule posted:... and also did someone forget to add the code to make these rings do anything or what? Did you do the ceremony?
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Apr 21, 2024 03:20
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The rings are used after that fight. The “negate the first six hits” barrier combined with the autoheal after fights can be an extremely rude combo depending on your squad setups. Meteor slash is the easiest way to pop it quickly, but any multihit helps. If you have something that can stun him at the start of battle (one of the elf sisters and a skill from one of the bow weapons can both do it) you can prevent him from putting up the barrier in the first place too, I believe.
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Apr 21, 2024 03:28
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Fedule posted:and also did someone forget to add the code to make these rings do anything or what? If you're talking about the special abilities from the fully upgraded rings: You don't use them yet, they can activate against the actual final boss (though they do have a AP or PP cost, so if you don't have enough PP when you want it to activate it won't do anything)
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Apr 21, 2024 03:31
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Fedule posted:Okay I give up how do you do damage to the last boss, also how are you supposed to know to prepare whatever the team is that can actually do damage given he is only revealed after what is already the longest mission in the game, and also did someone forget to add the code to make these rings do anything or what? I did all the plot. I was eviscerating units left and right on the way in but like. What is going on here. Come on man, even the two designated final battle recruits aren't doing more than a digit and that's before the healing. This is enough of a wall that I feel like something has actually broken. You can switch characters around in undeployed units; you can make the team to kill him in the middle of the battle if necessary.
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Apr 21, 2024 04:01
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Arist posted:A Swordmaster with Meteor Slash is basically mandatory You can also use Rosalinde's start-of-battle stun to just prevent it
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Apr 21, 2024 04:10
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Finished this game today. I know vanillaware doesn't do sequels but this good gameplay would be outstanding if it had an actual story to go with it. I never used mercs which made me have to get Weird with my groups which was fun. anyway my first act as king will be banishing all feathershields Yinlock fucked around with this message at 05:27 on Apr 21, 2024 |
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Apr 21, 2024 05:25
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Okay fine they got me. They Dark Souls'd me. The last thing I expected at this point was a third phase. Christ. So yeah I have reached the conclusion that this game's approach to Big Boss Design is Bad. Fortunately you spend 99.99% of the game dealing with regular encounters which are Good. (I had a somewhat neglected unit, not exactly bad but had fallen behind a lot in levels especially during the course of the EXP-laden final mission in which everyone just seemed to always be a better option, formed of Amalia, Ochlys, Virginia, Sharon and Berenice, who I had completely forgotten about and only out of habit-driven curiosity bothered to check their forecast and found they were able, with a little Elixir injection, go a few rounds of dealing 400 odd damage to the mfer because I had specifically Ochlys and Amalia set to plans to build up big second or third action hits. Shoutout though to some random generic swordmaster who I couldn't stop barreling into the murder zone and triggering a free heal, almost throwing the whole plan. I never did find out what those rings do, though, despite having tactics for them at the top priority listing, because literally every single unit I fielded would apparently have taken four digit damage against the actual final boss except the Trinity Rain team, which won in one round, so unless whatever it was would have averted the forecast and I was just supposed to know that, it can't have been much.) It's like. This is not in proportion. It is an insane spike both in general difficulty terms of how much the game is throwing at you and in how specific the things you have to do in response are, to say nothing of the fact that there are two of them in a row and neither of them has any warning. Up to this point I have been murdering my way through the hardest non NG+ difficulty, which I turned to because it was the only one that was providing literally any pushback, with teams formed by starting with some loose plot connection stuff (generally keeping obvious pairs together, teams formed around guys from each nation, etc) with tactical gaps filled in, I had a whole roster of units who could destroy most things on a map but got firm countered by a few. You expect literally the final boss to put up more of a fight, of course, but not to have to hard swerve your entire game plan based on surprise encounters, not to find out that basically all the units are useless because you didn't know in advance to build around one of a few specific approaches (frontload hit quantity, backload big damage, while also not dying to a wide array of bullshit, including random debuffs are you kidding me) in a game that until now has been bountiful in terms of the freedom you have to pick more or less any approach and lean into it hard enough to win. The whole rest of the game works because it doesn't do what this last mission does. (and for gently caress's sake if you're going to give me last minute recruits specifically for the final mission they should be able to be somewhat effective against the boss! I thought that was what these guys were for, because they certainly don't arrive in time to help you with the actual meat of the mission up to that point!) It's a good thing you can reform units in the middle of missions but holy poo poo this game is not designed to accommodate that. Sure I could do it but if I want to roll a custom unit I have to break every unit I'm taking people from and probably mess with their equipment and tactics too, for the purposes of this tiny handful of fights which are characteristically unlike anything else in the game and then put everything back together afterwards. I'm glad I was able to get away with not doing that because it would have felt very bad. All in all I have been up until this point basically coasting and vibing with this game, sure it's sad to see this phoned in plot after 13 Sentinels left me needing to sit in 20 full minutes of silence having ploughed and harrowed my soul and rendering it capable of turning to good, and sure it was dragging quite a bit but it was a lovely fun tactics game which made it responsive and rewarding to throw together units and find ways to make them work. But that sure went out the window at the end though, and then there was a complete snoozefest of an ending, and then the game had the gall to assume that after that I would be in any mood to be thrown into a pile of literally a hundred dialogues. Oh my god I do not care about any of these people. Some of them were kinda vibes but ultimately they were barely one note. Maybe some of them would've had really good supports but I guess I didn't get those pairs. Or maybe I did but just never found the conversations while out and about (and I only remembered afterwards that there's a menu more or less specifically for teleporting to those spots. Weird system.). About the only character banter I remember is Alain having a nightmare about eating Lex's cooking. Awful note to go out on. Hey there's a postgame mission! (I have a spicy take brewing that this game should have dispensed with about 75% of the cast and leaned heavily into the generic mercenaries for squad depth instead (thus forcing the issue and giving you a big push towards min-maxing your squad comps even further) and then focused on developing the remaining characters. I've suddenly remembered Supergiant Games' Pyre, which also had a giant epilogue dump where all the character threads in a cast of 20 all resolved at once, and every single one was a joy. Now I'm imagining a Supergiant/Vanillaware collab, but I can't complete the thought because it would be apocalyptically horny.) I really did love most of this game.
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Apr 21, 2024 05:51
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for the rings alain makes a lightsaber and murders a column while whoever is the maiden blocks a super damage zombie unicorn aoe, it's basically a victory lap if they're both in the same unit Yinlock fucked around with this message at 07:04 on Apr 21, 2024 |
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Apr 21, 2024 07:02
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Probably one of the reasons the game pushes Scarlett so hard is how well she uses the ring with her default tactics setup. Against the final team she's always gonna have PP left for it
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Apr 21, 2024 07:12
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Zwingley posted:Probably one of the reasons the game pushes Scarlett so hard is how well she uses the ring with her default tactics setup. Against the final team she's always gonna have PP left for it Alain and Scarlett are basically made to work together yeah(keep the bow on her though), I gave it to her since she was in his unit all the time anyway. Even with Fancy Tactics it takes a good while for her to run out of anything, only real drawback is the lack of a reaction status heal so sometimes an angel will sparkle on you and make you sad
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Apr 21, 2024 07:19
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I did have Alain and Scarlet together with the rings and apparently it did not help at all. That said I also had Scarlet set up with Flame Conferral and them doing the thing where Alain covers her and she refunds the PP (the plan was very much critical truestrike flaming spinning edge) and now I scrutinise what's going on in that enemy unit I guess the one giant AoE comes out quite late so maybe she just didn't have anything left to counter it with. In retrospect it's funny in a way that they have this gimmick in the final battle of a tactics game that hinges on having to integrate mechanics you know nothing about into your step by step battle logic. Three battles in advance. Time to find out how the postgame mission does something even worse right at the end, maybe!
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Apr 21, 2024 15:00
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I can't remember the exact details, but I seem to recall looking at the boss stats prior to the battle and figuring out ahead of time exactly which move would be countered because it was super obvious. Like, I always look at boss attack patterns before fighting them,. Clarste fucked around with this message at 15:05 on Apr 21, 2024 |
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Apr 21, 2024 15:02
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I also looked at the boss pattern. There was indeed a giant glowing significance sign on it. I, apparently correctly, inferred that it could be countered somehow by the rings. Unfortunately, I still didn't get to know how, because Alain's unit would die finding out, as would every other unit who fought him, except the Trinity team, because there was something in my tactics that precluded it but I wasn't allowed to know what (it's only later that I guess (and it is, I must stress, a guess) that it's Scarlet running out of PP.
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Apr 21, 2024 15:16
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I just added a flag to my ring bearer that stopped her using PP moves unless she had 2 or more PP.
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Apr 21, 2024 16:34
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Fedule posted:I also looked at the boss pattern. There was indeed a giant glowing significance sign on it. I, apparently correctly, inferred that it could be countered somehow by the rings. Unfortunately, I still didn't get to know how, because Alain's unit would die finding out, as would every other unit who fought him, except the Trinity team, because there was something in my tactics that precluded it but I wasn't allowed to know what (it's only later that I guess (and it is, I must stress, a guess) that it's Scarlet running out of PP. Who was on your Alain team and what was their composition? I did not have to change up a single thing on Team Alain for the final boss fight (let alone all of the battles in the game after getting the unique archer). In fact, all of my standard teams (Team Berengaria, who had my other ring, Team Clive, who was mostly calvary units, and Team Virginia) could survive an encounter with the final boss (I think Team Clive may have had "loss" but the unit survived). I actually tried to let my underleveled Virginia team get the kill but saw the 1HP remaining bit and had to send in Alain. By that point in the game, most of your teams should have enough PP and PP recovery to tear through multi-hit barriers even without the specialized multi-hit moves like the sword masters have. Edit: and many units have multi-hit attacks by level 35 anyway, including the unique classes (except Gilbert). Unrelated, but sainted knights become amazing hybrid units and have a lot of flexibility in their later levels. I had a Monica(?) on Berengaria's team and the vast majority of the time that team was at 100% health.
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Apr 21, 2024 18:05
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If you are in doubt, add shaman or elf twins
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Apr 21, 2024 18:34
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the most annoying thing were the green NPC squads that try to help and just feed into him regaining his HP back, had to wait for them to suicide themselves before I started my attack on him otherwise. Then I fed Alain's squad with gold clocks and pills to keep chain attacking without waiting
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Apr 21, 2024 18:54
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Prowler posted:Who was on your Alain team and what was their composition? Most of my teams got smoked by him except Alain's who took barely any damage and took out like 90% of his unit's health in one round which was a handy hint as to who should try to fight that guy. Mr Shield was the way bigger problem for me since both Rosalinde and 1/2 of my active swordmasters were in the magical assist/anti-armor unit 
Yinlock fucked around with this message at 19:23 on Apr 21, 2024 |
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Apr 21, 2024 19:19
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Couple more questions: Does the day/night cycle ever become relevant? Will the # of days that pass ever be relevant? Also if I have an archer and want them to prioritize both flyers and back row units, do I set those both as condition 1 and 2 and the archer will look for both, or does setting a condition 2 in this instance mean the archer is looking only for flyers in the back row? Also was there a right answer to those thieves in the beginning? I jailed the first one and executed the other because their stories were obviously fake.
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Apr 21, 2024 19:31
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some classes you get later will be stronger during the day or night, that's it The conditions are 'and', not 'or'. If you set 'back row' 'flyer', it will only hit flyers in the back row. To get 'or', you usually want to have multiple copies of the same move in your tactics list Sparing them lets you recruit them later on. You need to spare both to get either, apparently
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Apr 21, 2024 19:34
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There are a bunch of pendants to give your units extra PP/AP, Swordmaster trivializes the boss-shield thing but even without it unless you did nothing to use your items that grant pursuits or have any multi hits (like Alain's spin move) or anything you should make steady progress on the boss. And on top of that every temple gives you an item to deal with the status effects and the items heal your team when they act.
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Apr 21, 2024 19:47
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bhangraton posted:There are a bunch of pendants to give your units extra PP/AP, Swordmaster trivializes the boss-shield thing but even without it unless you did nothing to use your items that grant pursuits or have any multi hits (like Alain's spin move) or anything you should make steady progress on the boss. And on top of that every temple gives you an item to deal with the status effects and the items heal your team when they act. Without it his regen makes inflicting lasting damage a bitch since multi-hit attacks are usually pretty AP-heavy and most teams aren't gonna be specced for attack count. Best strategy is probably to withdraw some units and make a janky new one(s) specifically to deal with him. Deified Data posted:Couple more questions: They were telling the truth, sparing them both gets you both of them later on and they join promoted. # of days means nothing, Night is important for some units and angels get some buffs during the day but nothing that big Yinlock fucked around with this message at 20:15 on Apr 21, 2024 |
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Apr 21, 2024 20:12
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Guess I'll remember that for a future playthrough lol. Is there ever a situation where you don't want to respond as charitably as possible?
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Apr 21, 2024 21:04
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You do get items for rejecting people. The exact stuff varies by person but they can be useful if you're doing weird challenge runs or just want to achieve some benchmark early. The most notable one iirc is that rejecting Monica gives you 30 divine shards.
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Apr 21, 2024 21:07
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Deified Data posted:Guess I'll remember that for a future playthrough lol. Is there ever a situation where you don't want to respond as charitably as possible? No, not really. Most of the benefits from executing or not recruiting someone are really minor and you need a lot of bodies if you want to staff all the towns anyways .Plus as uniques they get conversations which can be fun.
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Apr 21, 2024 21:08
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Hmm, so why would archers who I told to prioritize the back row go after the front row first? Seems to happen in every mock battle I do trying to figure this out. Archers can hit the back row, right?
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Apr 21, 2024 21:47
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I guess I forgot to mention that Team Alain had 3/5 members who were immune to all status ailments, and the front row of my other teams were similarly well-equipped. All had at least +2 PP (+4 for Alain). My Berengaria team was set up for PP donation and farming. She would start with 4 and recover 2 on her own, and get an active heal and other PP donation from the back row. She, alone, could tear through barriers, evades, and etc. simply with her follow ups and normal attacks. She'd have 4 active PP ready to go while the rest of the field have already exhausted them. ---- The recruitment stuff was a little disappointing. I intentionally executed someone because I thought Ochlys' recruitment was contingent on it (either you execute him and get to recruit her, or vice versa). Deified Data posted:Hmm, so why would archers who I told to prioritize the back row go after the front row first? Seems to happen in every mock battle I do trying to figure this out. Archers can hit the back row, right? Can you be more specific? What moves do you have set to "prioritize back row" and what other conditions do you have? And, when you switch it to "back row" only, does it target the back row no matter what? Prowler fucked around with this message at 21:52 on Apr 21, 2024 |
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Apr 21, 2024 21:49
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Deified Data posted:Hmm, so why would archers who I told to prioritize the back row go after the front row first? Seems to happen in every mock battle I do trying to figure this out. Archers can hit the back row, right? What exactly are the full tactics that you gave them, what is the behavior that you observe, and what are they doing instead? And also, what is the layout of the enemy unit?
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Apr 21, 2024 21:50
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Priority 1: Single shot Condition 1: prioritize flying Priority 2: Single shot Condition 1: prioritize back row Archer will prioritize front row 100% of the time (flying or not)
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Apr 21, 2024 22:02
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Prowler posted:Who was on your Alain team and what was their composition? Alain team was the OG Crew, Alain and Scarlett in the front and Lex, Chloe and Josef in the back. Setup is Alain covers Scarlett with Luminous Guard and Scarlett refunds the PP with Passive Miracle, meanwhile Alain uses Spinning Edge and either gets Flame Conferral from Scarlett and Eagle Eyes it himself or gets Keen Call from Chloe. Lex has the Flamberge to hit survivors. It folds against the second to last boss because nobody other than Alain is going in on attacks and his are all mega frontloaded. I've finished the game and moved on so I'm not going back to check again but I think this would have been fine to use against the last boss if I'd specifically set all of Scarlett's passive tactics to hold back 1PP. Possibly if I'd redone their defences the Knight Squad with their endless assaulting lance and cavalier call might have been able to get some damage going but as it was they all died too quickly, since I had them up front using Aurora Veil to give them regen on their unceasing turns. They just. Do need to live long enough.
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Apr 21, 2024 22:03
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Deified Data posted:Priority 1: Single shot "Prioritize flying" in a single row means it will target a flying enemy if present or the default target if there is no flying enemy. It never evaluates the second row because the first row can't fail. You want "Flying," so that it falls through to the second line if there is no flying enemy.
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Apr 21, 2024 22:04
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Deified Data posted:Guess I'll remember that for a future playthrough lol. Is there ever a situation where you don't want to respond as charitably as possible? Nope, there's no reason to murder anyone when given the option unless you just feel like bein' a jerk. tbf those two are probably the most suspicious of the bunch.
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Apr 21, 2024 22:04
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