Insane Difficulty: caffinator - Viewing Profile - Insane Difficulty

So it's kind of a funny thing, but it seems like if You can make a save in which You basically invested nothing by the end of the game, You can actually get a lot more mileage out of NG+ Runs. Namely the weird level stops just go away, and the entire game suddenly scales to Your party, instead of just randoms, which seems to make a lot of unexpected difference. This is especially true with Single Class challenges, which suddenly become viable in this mode. Now...Fusiliers can only be gotten at a minimum of 3, and it turns out there actually is an easy battle to farm their marks, so I'm giving that a shot on two separate saves now. Also posting findings and a sort of guide on that, but yeah, scaled battles are WAY more fun, it actually doesn't feel like cheating to make use of healing items now. I think I'll try a Dark Knight run after this.

https://www.youtube....h?v=QBrfppxJ2_0

So I've experimented a bit with Paradaigm Shift in previous runs, but had generally considered it too random or broken to really incorporate. Well, with the limits of Charm Darts and Siege Bows being seemingly not quite far enough for some of the weird bonus areas, I decided to try to go full-bore into nonsense, and bought 99 of these things.

Turns out it's basically a very expensive potential win button under dire circumstances.

Tried the Hell Dungeon, but kinda forgot how crazy fast skeletons can be to get back up, and didn't really have the shutdown potential to keep them down, or the knockbackback odds to push any off of cliffs, so with Denam 1 turn away from bleeding out....the archers just kinda went ahead and took some 50ish turns in a row.

https://youtu.be/2FOXhkWBaEk?t=37m36s

Seemingly the only balancing factors to this are just how expensive it gets, and the fact that You can only carry 99 (You can take 5-6 uses to roll the right people).

This fight is generally a lot easier with baldur items, but this worked too. (Apparently I completely spaced out and forgot about them)

Hart-Hunt, on 19 January 2017 - 08:14 AM, said:

Actually, by around part 20ish, it's all devolved into utter shenanigans, stuff like turning several bunched archers into a insta-turning turret for hitting things to Bind them, using 5 guys to turn random units against each other, ans, of all things, a racist mage that turned out to be a fairly useless unit. An AoE Quick book with a fixed 66% hit chance of hitting everyone has to be one of the most abuseable things in any game. Charm darts also make for some fun chaos. I've got a few runs planned that seemed like a interesting play on the mechanics and classes, mostly doing it for fun, but if someone finds it interesting, figured I'd pop it up there.

I love a lot of the details of the design, for sure. Especially when it comes to the scale when mixed with the weather and terrain effects. It's just kind of a shame that weapon proficiency almost erases the effects of those around mid game. It's really a fantastic game under the right circumstances, but God help You if You feel like tying a new party configuration halfway through, haha.

Augestein, on 16 January 2017 - 02:42 PM, said:

Probably a cleric for maximum suck potential. I always wondered why they took out scaling in this game, figured maybe they just wanted more attrition..or to nerf fencers. Just seems like an odd choice to have the main healer fall on their face so hard halfway into the game.