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Nov. 5th, 2010 08:24 pmYou know, I used to be annoyed at the way the solo sea quests force you to have NPC party members taking up valuable slots, thus only leaving room for you to send about 2-3 of your own guys. If you're OCD about keeping your entire team at the same level, it means you have to do every quest 2-3 times just so everyone on your team gets a turn, and it will be a lot harder on certain runs if your party's power is at all lopsided. (That is, the missions tend to suck when it's the Farmer's turn to take them....) Even then, even if you do that, it's still not going to keep the experience levels 100% precisely even, due to variations in whether the enemies kill any of the NPCs before you win, or this one particular boss that has a habit of randomly calling for allies.... I honestly wish the sea quest battles just didn't give you experience at all (or I wasn't so weird about keeping my team level like that.) That's still something I have to work around.
However, as obnoxious as that remains, I have come to appreciate the way the NPCs expose you to alternate party builds you probably hadn't considered. As someone who is currently running a Prince/Hoplite/Monk/Arbalist/Farmer, the mission with the Buccaneer/Zodiac/Arbalist trio really opened my eyes to something of which I had been completely unaware, which is just how much of a holy terror against groups Buccaneer Chase Element skills are when you have multiple sources of group-wide elemental damage. Even with just those three by themselves, Chase Fire + Binary Fire + Fire Barrage = hitting every enemy on the field a lot. When it was Simone's turn to take that quest and I therefore added my own Arbalist with another chasable Fire Barrage to the mix, we basically slaughtered everything that moved in one round (except the big boss at the end because the NPCs were dumb and only did the element chase combo when there were multiple enemies on the field, and just attacked otherwise.) It was awesome.
I have yet to see any characters on any of these quests that are godly enough to make me reconsider my own party build (though I will admit that the chasing was a lot better than I expected it to be,) but I just like how reassuring it is that apparently everything is viable, even the stuff I didn't pick. We've come a long way from EO1 where the game is impossible without a Medic and you're dumb for trying, it would seem.
However, as obnoxious as that remains, I have come to appreciate the way the NPCs expose you to alternate party builds you probably hadn't considered. As someone who is currently running a Prince/Hoplite/Monk/Arbalist/Farmer, the mission with the Buccaneer/Zodiac/Arbalist trio really opened my eyes to something of which I had been completely unaware, which is just how much of a holy terror against groups Buccaneer Chase Element skills are when you have multiple sources of group-wide elemental damage. Even with just those three by themselves, Chase Fire + Binary Fire + Fire Barrage = hitting every enemy on the field a lot. When it was Simone's turn to take that quest and I therefore added my own Arbalist with another chasable Fire Barrage to the mix, we basically slaughtered everything that moved in one round (except the big boss at the end because the NPCs were dumb and only did the element chase combo when there were multiple enemies on the field, and just attacked otherwise.) It was awesome.
I have yet to see any characters on any of these quests that are godly enough to make me reconsider my own party build (though I will admit that the chasing was a lot better than I expected it to be,) but I just like how reassuring it is that apparently everything is viable, even the stuff I didn't pick. We've come a long way from EO1 where the game is impossible without a Medic and you're dumb for trying, it would seem.