(no subject)

[kjorteo]

You know those plots of superhero stories or whatever that are basically there specifically to give a certain character a large pile of badass moments? TV Tropes has this and this to say on the subject.

Anyway, I don't know how the fight went or will go down for anyone else (feel free to tell me, I'm actually very curious!) but for me, the boss of the second stratum was one giant advertisement for the glory and awesomeness of having a Prince.

The boss had a super smokescreen-type massive evasion buff--that alone would have been Game Over for the rest of my team, since the only person who can actually damage a boss like she means it (Simone the Arbalist) is... already somewhat less than 100% accurate with Armor Piercer, even with two +Hit elements forged onto her crossbow. If only I could do something about enemies buffing themselves... oh, right, Julian has Ad Nihilo.

The boss had a party-wide sleep, which admittedly Rachael can clean up after easily enough (she has an equally-party-wide Refresh) but the 1-2 turns lost when you were put to sleep before you could act and are asleep at the start of the next round can really wreck everyone's momentum and basically screw up everything, especially when there are a lot of buffs that need to be kept on top of and not allowed to expire. (And woe unto me if Rachael herself falls asleep!) If only I could just make sure the sleep doesn't wreck my day in the first place... oh, right, Julian has Prevent Order.

I decided to use Formaldehyde because the boss' conditional drop is bullshit. (I've gone through two EO games now and have gotten extremely difficult-to-get conditionals before, including the one in EO2 where you have to kill the ice-aligned Super Rape Dragon with an ice element even though it's practically immune to ice and the only ice move I even have is an extremely crappy level 1 move the Gunner knows just to get ice conditionals out of random encounters or something... but this, this is the first time in the series I have truly believed that a drop would be literally impossible for my team such as it is to ever get, even coming back later, even at max level.) Formaldehyde makes it so that any enemy slain on the same turn that it's used is 100% guaranteed to cough up every single drop it is capable of coughing up, including super rare ones and conditionals, even conditionals that you didn't actually fulfill the condition to legitimately earn. The only catch is... well, first you have to use it, and then it only works on enemies killed that round. Someone has to go before the rest of your party and use Formaldehyde, then the rest of your party has to finish the target off. Making sure I strike the killing blow on the right turn is hard, but nothing I haven't done before, but if only there was a way to make absolutely certain beyond the shadow of a doubt that the person tasked with using the Formaldehyde will actually do so first that round, before everyone else takes their turn kills the damned thing... oh, right, Julian has Knighthood.

And all that that's on top of Julian's Attack Order helping Simone do her thing.

Oh yeah, so that conditional drop I "got" (successfully using Formaldehyde on the right round does too count as enough work to have earned it, fuck you) unlocked the Buccaneer's class-specific elite endgame armor. Compared to the rest of the armor at this point having defense in the high 30s/low 40s and selling for around 2,000en, this thing has defense of 122 with one each +Agility, +Luck, and +Critical Hit elements, and sells for 243,000(!!!). I'm actually kind of grateful that I don't have a Buccaneer, because the paradox of "I WANT THAT ARMOR" versus "that... that's even more than what my Guild Card claims is the total en I have ever earned in the history of the game to this point D:" probably would have killed me. (Things like this are precisely why you hoard those Coupons, though.)

I can now multiclass! Expect all actual progress in this game to halt for a while as I do a bunch of last-minute "while everyone is still pre-retired and high level" errands (sea quests, maybe try for the first stratum boss' conditional,) and then do a lot of "save before retiring/subclassing, then throw some points into this or that just to see if the combos that seem so awesome in my head actually work in practice" experimentation.

Comments

[sethimothy.livejournal.com]

I need to either start on the end-game stuff, or play again and unlock Yggdroid and maybe the best ending. :c

A lot of people really swear by Prince but I found a lot of their buffs to be so temperamental, regardless of how awesome they were, that I stuck with my Monk/prince instead.

I should also farm up some more ingredients for Formaldehyde to that I can get that damn armor, since I never did, and I have a Buccaneer that's not part of my standard party but is fully leveled just should I need it.

Keep me up to date, I'm curious what sort of party you're working with. :D

[kjorteo]

I choose to interpret the fact that you're in the post-game content and yet even you phrased your intentions for getting this armor in the form of "I should also farm up some more ingredients for Formaldehyde" as proof that I'm right about his drop being bullshit.

From what I've seen just so far after clearing B8F, it appears that the endings and possibly even the Shogun/Yggdroid choice are tied to moral decisions. Since I don't really want or need either extra class just yet, I think I'm going to just follow my heart and see what happens on the first runthrough rather than deliberately work toward whatever class/ending. And based on how I handled the events right after B8F, I have apparently already locked myself out of the True Ending anyway, so whatever. That's what New Game Pluses are for! (Also, just because I looked up what the repercussions of the B8F decisions were, don't assume I know anything about anything else and don't say anything. SHH)

And Princes are hardcore, though I'll probably end up with a Prince (well, a Ninja/Prince who's a Ninja literally just for Keburi no Sue, but shh) and a Monk/Prince anyway... we'll see. I'll post party builds after I experiment with them.

[sethimothy.livejournal.com]

Well I can't meet the requirements with characters that are well (but not perfectly) equipped, level 70 reincarnated. So... yeah. Pretty much.

[kjorteo]

I KNEW IT. Yeah, there's definitely no way my party ever will, then. I mean, I just got GameFAQs board feedback to the effect of "um, okay, I actually really like parties that are more defensive than offensive but holy shit," so I doubt they'll ever stand a chance of earning that one. (Then it quickly devolved into a Monk vs. Prince debate which I plan to get around by having both, but hey.)

[sethimothy.livejournal.com]

Personally in the world of Monk vs Prince, I had to choose, because I was already too defensive with my Hoplite. Although my Hoplite once reincarnated became moderately powerful in his own right... follow up every attack with an attack, and couple it with my Ballistar who is focused on multi-hit elemental strikes? :D

[kjorteo]

Oooh, nice. :D My Hoplite is... extremely happy with being a Hoplite and pretty much doesn't need to subclass; I think I'm going to give him a Wildling sub literally just so I can dump a quick 5 skill points in to pick up Alertness. I'm probably where you were in that I maybe could have said I'm already too defensive with him and therefore maybe shouldn't have a Monk and a Prince on top of that, because good God is my defense/offense balance in my overall team skewed, but... man, I really love my team, ability to actually hurt anything be damned.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

Do you think that a game with this much customization, but without the grinding/mapping, would still be fun? Because I love reading these posts, but the thought of investing the time that it would take to earn the points that it would take to unlock all of these abilities just gives me chills... but, I also know perfectly well from experience that getting new abilities feels so much better when you earn it. But in a case like this, with so many abilities, and so much shuffling of them around, I wonder if that isn't worn smooth and replaced with the satisfaction of experimentation instead...

(This is entirely hypothetical, I'm not planning on making anything like this any time soon, but I'm always curious about picking apart game ideas..)

[kjorteo]

Well, you can always go play with the online skill simulator if that's your only goal, I guess. Beyond that, I think you'd have to play the game. :P

I know I for one love it, though! The entire point of an RPG is to become strong enough to overcome things, and the customization and skill options really amplify that when you get past a tough battle thanks to clever selections of skills you picked. The second stratum boss kicked my ass the first time I fought it, then, once I knew what I was up against, I gained just one more level (it helped that I was actually really close to it anyway) and used that one skill point to pick up Prevent Order, which made all the difference. :D It's an awesome feeling to have a plan and have it actually work like that.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

Well, there's no bosses to fight in the Online Skill Simulator, is the problem ;) But I mean, if the game were nothing but boss fights, and you're given a predetermined number of skill points, and can build a party from scratch using those points, to try and get past it.

[kjorteo]

No, because the labyrinth itself is the other major thing your party needs to overcome. Some sort of on-rails boss rush mode would completely defeat the point of the Princes' Monarch March skill, all out-of-combat spells and gathering-type stuff, basically the entire Farmer class....

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

... I'm not talking about applying this to Etrian Odyssey with a romhack or something! I mean, say once you've finished Etrian 3, and Etrian 4 isn't out yet, and some dude releases a flash game that's a gauntlet of RPG-style boss fights, for which you have to spec a party with a predetermined number of skill points. Anyway, I was just thinking out loud, sorry. X3

[kjorteo]

Well, I think exploration rather than playing it as though it were some sort of boss rush mode is a good part of the fun of any decent RPG, which is one of the many reasons I'm so against the very idea of Final Fantasy XIII, but that could just be me. :P

[davidn]

This is going to be amazing, isn't it - even given those boss abilities as a preview, I've no idea how my party is going to cope with those.

[kjorteo]

Just hit the thing a lot, presumably! (Well, until it throws the evasion buff, anyway....) As always, anything particularly awesome that my Prince or Hoplite does comes with the understanding that, as a tradeoff, there is exactly one person on my team capable of seriously damaging a boss.

And buy Sleep Charms, I guess?

[davidn]

I'd actually completely forgotten about the possibility of using items... until now, I've treated them so much as something that I pick up occasionally and that just take up space in my inventory that could have been used for more Abyssal Twigs and Sepulchral Dessert Spoons. Maybe that's a route to go down.

I am still tempted to either get Steve the Hoplite or Prince Siegfried out of the guild and start actually using them to see if they improve the dynamics of my party... I have the complete opposite problem to you, as you know, of most everyone being very competent at dealing damage but with a bit of a gap when it comes to status ailments or stopping damage to themselves.

[kjorteo]

The EO series as a whole is surprisingly good at averting/subverting the Antidote Effect. I'm very much used to the standard RPG tactic of keeping some status-fixing stuff, HP/MP restoring stuff, and the local Phoenix Down equivalent in my inventory "just in case" and then completely ignoring them for the entire duration of the game, but in EO... it is almost completely impossible to make a party that can do everything you need it to do without items, so you actually do use them for whatever holes remain. Nectars, for example--I didn't have a class that had any sort of Resurrect/Revive spell in EO2, and even though I have one that could learn it this time, there's a very good chance I could end up passing on it anyway, if only because actually using those Nectars in your inventory (which you're allowed to do!) in the somewhat uncommon situation in which someone is down and I need to revive them (not that the game isn't brutally hard; it's just, for me, either everyone is up or it's a total party wipe, with surprisingly few instances in-between of needing to revive one specific person in the middle of a fight) does a passable job emulating it and would save me the absolutely precious skill points. And don't get me started on Simone's Amrita habit (the other party members are starting to get worried about her but she can quit any time she wants to, God damn it) after having pretty much never used MP-restoring items in other games.

In fact, here's a confession for you... I have party-wide Refresh and Prevent Order, and even I actually bought two Sleep Charms for this fight anyway, just because it was really, really, really critical that absolutely no one fell asleep on the turn I used the Formaldehyde, Prevent Order only covers one row at a time, and even though I could have just cast it on one row and then the other (it lasts for three turns or until it actually blocks something, at which point it disappears with whatever status attack it negated,) that would have required predicting when the boss was at its last sliver of health even farther in advance, and the dynamics of the battle just kept changing too rapidly for me to be sure that Julian would actually be free to cast it two turns in a row without suddenly having to do something else--re-cast Attack Order since that needed to be kept up as well, Ad Nihilo if the boss threw the evasion buff, etc.

[rakarr.livejournal.com]

"Amrita" - that's in Persona 3 and 4 as well (and maybe other Shin Megami Tensei games), but in those it's primarily a spell and it provides your standard "Esuna"/Dispel sort of effect. Still, with Atlus being involved in both series, I have to wonder if it's some kind of deliberate reference. Maybe not, though, given the word has an actual meaning (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amrita).