Battle tips & tricks thread

[jack1974]

Thanks for retesting. I'm not sure if to tweak the speed bonus or not at this point. I mean, not enemies speed (since changing them would mean retest all battles!) but perhaps lower the bonus the characters gets for Speed? what you think? If you have a savegame of your party just before the final battle and you could send it to me, would be cool

edit: Even if a 6 minutes battle against a single target it's not an easy battle anyway I think! So maybe I should leave the game as it is...

[FireSeraph]

To be perfectly fair, Fost only used two attacks the entire fight: Syphon Life and a normal basic attack. I'd suggest varying his moves and giving 'cheat' moves: Tier 3 skills but with drastically reduced wait time. Give him minions so that the party isn't focusing fire on him. Having only one enemy makes that one enemy vulnerable to focus firing so having a few minions around will spread the love.

Out of curiousity, how does the game calculate when your turn is up? Is it speed divided by the wait of the action and how many times of the result is added together to reach 100 or something like that? Or is it totally different?

[jack1974]

Yes I agree that a party vs 1 single character is an unfair battle
The problem is that normally he would use different skills - but because you move fast, you always make him go "overdrive" (his overdrive attack is the Syphon Life indeed). About the speed... ahem, Anima (the coder) can answer you better but I know that beside the character speed, the skill used has a big weight (as you probably know each skill has a Wait value, and the same works for the enemies).

[Anima_]

It's max(baseWait - ((speed-100)/waitModifier),minWait)
The waitModifier is globally set to 10, but can be set for each skill individually. The same goes for the minimum wait, it's set to 1 by default.

[jack1974]

Ok got your saves FireSeraph, now will try and see what I can do about it. While I don't want to change too much of the game right now, I think I could balance better the Skill attribute. I think because it changes both Speed and Defense, it has too much "power" vs the other ones. So probably lowering slightly the speed bonus might be enough.
Also, did you find all the other boss battles easy, or just Fost's one because he fights alone?

[FireSeraph]

The hardest boss fight I had was with the Lizard King at the end of Chapter 1. He had a full force backing him up, has ways to screw with the party's speed, everyone in his team had area attacks and he hits very hard, something like 50-60 damage when the highest hp in the group was slightly over 200. I'd say that was the best fight in the game imho since it forced me to figure out how to deal with his squad as well as taking down the Lizard King before he pummels Loren and Ramas into the ground. So I'd say use that fight as the template for a challenging fight.

Edit: I don't think changing the way the attributes function will help. Just toss in enemies with the right skills to mess with how a party functions, make Fost a heavy hitter with mighty blow instead of syphon life. Give him a minion that heals, another minion that inflicts status debuffs. Put them in the back row. Have two more minions in the front row that functions as spinning strike warriors. I think that might work better rather than messing with the way the game functions.

[jack1974]

Thanks. I wonder though if that fight was hard because happened early in the game, so maybe the problem is on the Skill impact "progression", so that at later level it overpower the players too much?
But yes I agree that the best difficulty is having an opponent with your same skills: hard hitter, healer and a debuffer/AOE damage. I tried building Fost so that he would function like that with the Syphon Life that heals him. Will try and see, since for the story it would be better if he fights against the party alone. I might change some of his skills to work as speed debuffer (Slow effect) maybe that will be enough to balance it.

[jack1974]

I tried changing the Syphon Life to cause Slow condition instead of Weakness. It was much harder to beat now. I also tried loading one of my saves at Normal level and it was harder but still managed to beat him. So for now I think will keep that change but don't mess with players' parameters.

[Jim1958]

I replayed the entire game, using the Skill trick and no training. Party level was around level 13-15. Fost was demolished in six minutes instead of five. Yup, I'd say it's official. The best way to beat the game to pump up your Speed so that you can get more moves than the enemy.

Edit: Forgot to mention. This is still on Hard mode.

I've been playing for a couple of days now on my latest play in hard mode and hit on the same idea of increasing speed as that is what wiped me out in the previous versions on hard. I now have the characters at level 12 and am just starting chapter 3, but it is a lot of grinding. I haven't been using the +2 skills but have been using +1 on everyone and using every speed enhancing necklace and ring available as well as keeping the characters equipped as light as possible. Dora and Karen are awesome together as I've been adding 2 to skill and 1 to strength.

Hopefully the game designers won't screw this up by slowing things down - I played the three chapters at least six times and the complete game once before I figured out the speed idea, others figured it out faster obviously but it would not be apparent to a first time player.

Best Regards
Jim

[jack1974]

No I only changed Fost's battle, and that's the only change I'm thinking to do, since he is the final boss! I won't slow down the party members reducing the speed impact.