praetarius5018

Seiken Densetsu 3 Sin of Mana - Discussion

971 posts in this topic

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Dare I ask what your Lv/VIT is at?
This actually sounds like it is a bit low.
She shouldn't hit nearly that hard.
I remember I had to tweak her a lot so she doesn't 1 shot characters with her double hitting tech on hard.

 

9 hours ago, Kei said:

Tinkle rain only protects against status from basic attacks; spells are always 100% chance

thanks for doing my job :$

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Lise LV88 Vit 30 (Max for Star Lancer) and 18 LUCK
Hawk LV88 Vit 24 (6 point away from max with Ninja Master) and 32 LUCK (Max)
Carlie LV88 Vit 28 (Max for Bishop) and 21 LUCK 

So encounter that Black Rabbit (from what I understand he is optionnal in Vanilla here he is mandatory) :

Spoiler

Just an easier version of Bigieu (hit like a truck, some buff and AoE sleep spell yep totally Biguieu), his physical almost one-shot regardless of buffs and debuff, so again Spike Armor is what allow me to win this one as just like Biguieu he take 999 everytime he hits me, eventually he just do that big set up where he summons a Great Demon cast who know how many spell, whatever I just throw a Specter's Eye when he is done casting and he died shortly after hitting himself.

And now stuck on the final boss :

Spoiler

For now I don't see how to win, his spells hits like a truck for easily 700-900 (999 when single target), I assume that his Anti-Magic is a ubber version that remove all buffs and debuff on everyone (both him and me) and I suppose Dragon's Eye gives him all buffs as when I throw a Specter's Eye and did a Fire Jutsu his Damage output was severely reduce, but I only have 2 or 3 Specter's Eye left and off course he does that multiple time, and sadly he just have to cast 2 AoE in a row (as he loves to chain spells) before I get to debuff him and buff myself and this is a confirm game over. My other problem is that I barely does any damage to him the best was around 250 with LV3 tech Power Up and Def Down, and of course he has Heal Light and Heals for 720 to 999.

 

Edited by Nesouk

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I've beat Archdemon on Hard before, and I really wonder what you are doing wrong, since I was never taking 999 damage. The normal spells were probably below 500 damage, and Jutsu-style spells were usually something that will kill you unless you're on full HP, since they did 700-800 damage or more. What is your SPR stat? Some tips for the fight:

  • Use the armor that removes weaknesses. Otherwise Archdemon's Anti-Magic II makes you weak to all elements, and his spells will be even stronger.
  • Note that you won't need Specter's Eyes to cancel his buffs. Casting Fire Jutsu twice will remove his magic buff and debuff him. You should only need one Specter's Eye in the battle, to remove his elemental absorption, so that you can successfully use Fire Jutsu against him (it does only half damage after removing the absorption, though).
  • Use Red Moon Horn or two to lower his level.
  • Archdemon has a ridiculous physical defence. Spam magic against him. Bishop's Holy Ball/Saint Beam works wonders, especially since Bishop can power it up with a Saint Saber (and Lise's Mind Up). Have Hawk spam Water Jutsu, since Archmage doesn't absorb/resist it, and Lise can use either Marduke or level 3 techs.

 

Edited by Serafie1999AD

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The problem is I don't have the time to cast 2 Fire Jutsu and Mind Up most of my Game Over so far are due to him casting 2 AoE spell in a row right after he buffs without leaving me enough time to debuff him or buff myself resulting in an unavoidable death.

My PIE are :

-30 with Star Lancer Lise (Max)
-25 with Ninja Master Hawk (3 Point away from the max).
-32 with Bishop Carlie (Max)

So there's really nothing more I can do regarding PIE for Lise and Carlie, I'm gonna try Saint Beam see how it goes regarding damage but the problem is really my defense.

 

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Took him down jesus I thought he would never die :

Spoiler

So basically I semi-follow Serafie's tip so he was indeed weak against magic, however instead of Saint Beam I use Holy Ball reason is :

-Holy Ball castime is instant thank to max agility and equipment
-Holy Ball cost 4MP for 263 damage, Saint Beam cost 6MP for 320 Carlie's max MP are 20 so by just spamming I can cast 5 Holy Ball for a total of 1315 damage VS 3 Saint Beam for a total of 960 damage which mean Carlie will do more damage between each Magic Walnut with Holy Ball.

So the strat is simple :

-Specter's Eye on him, then Fire Jutsu, Mind Up on everyone and Saint Saber on Carlie
-Spam Holy Ball while keep attacking with Hawk
-Once Carlie doesn't have MP throw a Magic Walnut and then continue the spam
-After the first Anti-Magic 2 Mind Up on everyone, Fire Jutsu 2 time, Saint Saber on Carlie
-Continue the Holy Ball spam

If everything goes well I should be able to kill the first phase before a second Anti-Magic 2 (which retaliating from is the hardest part).

Now for the second phase same strat until I have no more Magic Walnut, then this is the hardest part of the fight as this become a war of attrition, to give you an idea I win this fight I had no more Magic Walnut, no more Healing Item beside Round Drop, 2 Angel's Grail left and 1 character dead (I finish the fight with Carlie and Hawk reason being if Carlie die and get resurected she recover all of her MP for Holy Ball spam so Iwas saving Angel's Grail for her (at this point I did'n bother with Saint Saber and Mind Up)).

His second phase doesn't hit as hard as the first one due to no more anti-magic 2, Demon Scream is a very nasty move tough reduce HP to 1 give a sap effect, make so that the character only have 1HP instead of full hp when resurected AND it persist through death, Catastrophe hurt a lot but his only attack able to kill my character are Great Demon and his sword thing which are only ST. Long story short the last minutes where intense.

Also the High damage of the first phase may come for me being a little underlevel I was LV93 but the ennemies in the area just before him were LV97.

I will write my conclusion for this mod later.

Edited by Nesouk

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-his anti-magic is even better! if you have any weakness, you become weak to everything; otherwise it only negates resistances
-dragon's eye is a simple all stat buff, yes
-archdemon has a bit above average phys. defense but low evade, the other 2 final bosses have both medium and low def but higher evade; I didn't want all 3 final bosses to be just copy pastas of each other; they have each different stats and battle tactics
-final bosses are Lv99 btw but stat scaling after Lv90 is much flatter than before

I've still no idea why you took so much damage...
I've a Lv90 Duran with starter gear (so he gets weakness damage), the mixed def helm and 13 PIE (204 m.def) who only took 905 damage from Archie's tidal wave without any additional buffs...
17 VIT, same gear (271 p.def), 547 damage from bigieu non-crit

 

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The damage from Archdemon's First Phase were that high only after Anti-Magic and his Buffs, during that time where I have to rebuff myself and debuff him this is where is damage output was extremely high, once I succefully Debuff him and rebuff myself his damage are nowhere close from that (around 400-500 for Tidal Wave).

For Bigieu I don't have any ideas.

 

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Change of topic, but I just wanted to mention how much I love the first Bill & Ben fight in this remake. After the first class change, the stat bump and MT magic upgrades make it seem like the game just got a lot easier. Genova is a pushover if you have MT Holy Ball, but then come Bill & Ben with their incessant physical attacks, Thunder Jutsus, and powerful tech chaining. If you are attempting a deathless run, this fight becomes much more difficult as you basically need to keep your HP above 75% or so to avoid any surprises.

I like the new dynamic for this fight in this remake. Previously, the ninjas could outrun and corner you, but now, you can run circles around them, which is a bit ironic in a fight against ninja bosses. I suppose this is the trick to keeping their physical attacks focused on just one teammate at a time. I've found the other most consistent way to mitigate their damage in a deathless run is physical defense armor to protect against their techs, their most powerful attacks, plus a ton of Stardust Herbs to cancel their Thunder Jutsu effects. Again ironically, Angela is my rock in this fight, as she can blast off consistent damage and keep the fight advancing at a regular pace. She is rather vulnerable during casting, but you can keep your other fighters on the other side of them and again avoid being crowded by their physical attacks, or lead or push them away if necessary.

This is one of the fights that I believe would benefit most from having two or three human players to enhance your mobility and better control the space.

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For that fight I mostly wanted it to be a "mirror boss" fight for dark Hawk.
In vanilla he'll be just a thief (no class change) up against ninja masters (2 class changes up).
Here it can be fresh ninja against 2 experienced ninjas.

You may notice that Bill/Ben can no longer use fire or water jutsu at that point, which you can't have here either.
The only thing Hawk shouldn't be able to do what they can is shadow dive - and that is just a technical limitation; there's no other lv2/3 tech that works for that enemy type.
Apart from that, the options are identical:
single target thunder/earth jutsu, shuriken
double attack
triple attack ~ Hawk's L1 tech
running and cornering

Honestly, you always profit from having a human partner, the AI is just bad, especially against "small" enemies (anything player sized).

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So here’s time to sum up my conclusion.

So for a bit of context I want to remind this was my first time playing through the game at all, so I didn’t have any knowledge of the vanilla version, I jump into this mod after watching an LP of french player who was playing this mod on Hard (sadly he never finish his LP I dunno why) and it looked really fun, so here I am picking this mod on the hardest difficulty right away (What the hell was wrong with me at that time I wonder ^^).

Having little knowledge of the game I picked my team by just looking at the abilities (without actually knowing the effect of each ability) and how the character looks (yeah yeah bad way of thinking), but I think I had a solid team Star Lancer, Ninja Master and Bishop. When I was told about the lack of Anti-Magic I kind of feared my playthrough might be impossible to finish but it turns out Anti-Magic wasn’t nearly as crucial as I thought it will. Looking back they are ton of ability that might have been worth getting but I think I had the basics cover (Buffs, Debuffs, Sabers, Physical and Magical damage).

I want to say first yes I rage quit the game for 1 year, it was because I was at a point I wasn’t making any progress and was stuck which admitadly piss me off, this is a fault of my part for going the wrong way and playing wrong, as once I figure out where to go, how to procede and make better use of the gameplay the rest of the game was going more smoothly.

So my experience is outside of that part where I quit the game, this was a really fun mod to play, I think most of the downside are due to the base gameplay having some clunky mechanic that takes time to get use to, also it’s a shame we can’t add description for equipment this is where this mod really shine as almost every piece of equipment are viable, I want to address 2 piece of equipment however :

-The Spike Armor and Armor that gives you HP boost, I think this is due to ennemies doing so much damage on hard, but basically once I got this 2 armors for each of my characters I never get any other armor, as this 2 are just to valuable, Spiked Armor allow to easily kill most mobs that would otherwise be a pain in the ass to deal with (these damns Werewolfs comes in to my mind) and it even make bosses that rely a lot on physical (Bigieu and Black Rabite) way easier. As for the armor that boost HP they are just to valuable for boss fight on Hard bosses hits very hard, so having a huge buff in HP to be able to take more hit is just awesome, there are some bosses that I honnestly don’t know how I would deal with without these armors (especially bosses that reduce Max HP like Dolan), and so once I got these 2 armors I was always switching between them.

Speaking of bosses most of them were really nice, however I would say there is disparity in difficulty :

-The first bosses up to Bill and Ben were really tough due to the lack of option, Jewel Eater is a candidate for hardest boss in the game in my opinion.

-The bosses from Gorva to Gildervine were the easiest especially after the second class change.

-The God Beasts are a mix bag of easy and hard bosses, Mispolm and Lightgazer were kind of a joke, Drungaard is just an endurance fight, God Beast of Earth was quite easy to (well except when his IA fucked up then he became the easiest if that happen), Fegmund was the most annoying one, Zable Fahr and Xian Bhe were hard but not to hard, Dolan however OH Boy Fuck this bastard easily the hardest of the god beast (maybe even the hardest fight of the game) for me.

-Then for the Dark Castle boss (excluding the rematch) Jagan might be my favorite fight I like this one I think it was a really fun boss, Bigieu I had to kind of cheese her due to the constant one-shotting don’t know if it’s a glitch or what.

-As for the Final Boss of Hawk/Lise’s scenario, he is a satisfying fight providing a good final challenge.

I’d like to try the others final bosses, and the character that I didn’t use, so I might do a playthrough with Duran, Kevin and  Angela in the future, I think the strong point of this mo dis it has a ton of replay value on pape rat least a ton of different team could work and be a blast to play. I don’t know if I’m gonna replay this in Hard tough cause while it’s fun if you want challenge Hard is definitly intense so maybe I’ll lower the difficulty for future playthrough who knows. Anyway a really fun mod, was a blast to play and I will probably come back to it in future.

 

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It's interesting that you thought Bill & Ben were easier than the prior bosses; I actually thought this was clearly the hardest boss battle up to this point, because of how hard and how frequently they hit (including their techs which they often end up chaining).

I've never tried this, but I wonder if it's possible to silence them with the silence weapons?

Edited by rpschamp

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Well don't get me wrong they are definitly hard boss and took me few try, however I think previous bosses were tougher :

-Jewel Eater was hitting like a truck for the point of the game he is, and the fact that he can inflict Silence and increase his defense makes him really hard for me, this is actually one of the very few bosses I had to grind to beat (most bosses I was able to manage somehow at the LV I reach them).

-Tzenker can be extremely annoying due to the fact she can spent a lot of time out of reach which allow her to safely damage you from far away, however I assume that if I had Angela and Earth Spell maybe this fight would have been a lot easier.

-Genova is just one of the toughest boss for me, and one of the most random it all comes down to what form his add take in my playthrough if they were taking Lise apparence I was screwed due to the LV2 tech being FST, then there is MT Power Up, MT Mind Down and MT Def Down against which I had no way to properly respond at that time, like I say this is quite a random fight, I died to this guy a lot of time and when I actually beat him he and his minions were being very nice for some reason and so he went down in less than 4 minutes with a strat that I had already tried (and I didn't grind), what a troll boss.

Compare to that while they were strong I find Bill and Ben not doing as much damage as Jewel Eater for the point of the game they respectly are (not to mention that I had stack up Evasion so a lot of their hits were missing me), and for me they were more consistent than Genova.

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I agree that Jewel Eater is tough for where he is. I think what makes him especially tough is that he can hit hard both magically and physically, so you have to be prepared for both. Similar to Bill & Ben, keeping your HP high is crucial. But with Bill & Ben it just seemed that those attacks come so much more quickly; I take my eyes off of Angela's HP for three seconds and lo and behold, she's down at 15%! You have to react almost instantly, and I think I ended up using at least three times as many items in my fight against Bill & Ben as with any previous boss. I would definitely rank Jewel Eater as a tough boss, though (my girlfriend lost it when I threw my controller down and yelled at the screen "This f---ing mole!").

The Genova fight can be made easier if you manage to time your MT spells and level 2 techs effectively. I usually try to control the character with a MT level 2 tech, and chain that with a MT Holy Ball when he summons a fresh batch of a-holes. As long as I keep up the attack between summons he usually goes down without too much of a problem. The nice thing about the Genova fight is that when he's putting his effort into summoning and buffing his minions, he's not focusing his attack directly on you, giving your characters not involved with the minions a chance to get some uncontested damage.

Edited by rpschamp

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Well if we compare to Jewel Eater, I actually have the opposite feeling since at this point I had Speed Up and good Evasion equipment Bill and Ben weren't touching me that much + it's actually easier to see when they attack, while Jewel Eater I honnestly couldn't see what hit me 70% of the time, sometime he just double hit a character instantly killing it, and yeah his AoE spell were also hiting really hard and he use them more frequently than Bill and Ben were using their jutsus.

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Hmm.... The problem for me with an evasion build is that if I don't pump up my physical defense, Bill & Ben's techs hit for over half my life, meaning that if they happen to target the same character, I'm done. Speed Up is an option, though Lise is way too slow at this point for the spell to be useful, especially with Earth Jutsu ready to negate it. I usually sell all my Bird's Scales for extra cash.... Maybe I'll start saving them for the early game next time!

Edited by rpschamp

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Jewel Eater's design was meant to scare player away from being purely defensive; at the time I edited him the most common play style was "just max VIT/defense".

Tzenker was designed with getting 1 level after class change in mind as basically everyone learns something useful for the fight.
You know, use the shiny new feature you just got.
Duran: heal light or diamond saber
Kevin: heal light or ... well, it is still Kevin
Hawk: arrows or shuriken (both physical damage, one of Tzenker's weaknesses, the other being earth)
Angela: she should already have diamond missile or even learn earthquake
Charlie: heal light and/or holy ball, isn't too bad
Lise: def up or speed down

Otherwise the disparity of bosses is easily explained: I've no good guideline what the player really has at any point past Tzenker.
the most I can expect the player to really, really have after Tzenker is Lv2 techs, everything else is optional.
So I tried to hold a bit back in the early game and for the godbeasts I just said "screw it"; you should have enough money and potentially monster drops to have now access to mostly everything; so yes, hard required defense buffs and attack debuff as the bare minimum.
Honestly, hard wasn't meant for a new player. Far from it.

Gildervine though, was just a casulty, him and I have... history >.>
so I just used him to feed the player exp so that you really have 50 around the time godbeasts arrive and therefor have access to all your spells.

 

Spoiler

Also, did anyone try to poison Lugar? ^_^

 

Edited by praetarius5018

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Honestly, hard wasn't meant for a new player. Far from it.

Yeah I realise that when I saw how clueless I was on some aspects of the overall gameplay which lead to my 1 year rage quit, but after 1 year I just say "fuck it I'm gonna finish that" ^^. At least due to being accustome with J-RPG (especially Atlus's game) I pick a team that could use all main Buffs and Debuffs, tough I choose Carlie kind of randomly as I just wanted a healer originally turns out her Sabers where much more valuable than I thought they would (especially since some fight resolve around the use of Sabers in the second part of the game) as well as Magic Shield which I found good use for, I think I had a good team for beginners like me as I was covering almost all the basics (Buffs, Debuffs, Healing, Sabers, good physical offense and decent magical offense). But overall beat this on hard while being my first time playing this game is pretty damn satisfy not gonna lie ^^.

26 minutes ago, rpschamp said:

Hmm.... The problem for me with an evasion build is that if I don't pump up my physical defense, Bill & Ben's techs hit for over half my life, meaning that if they happen to target the same character, I'm done. Speed Up is an option, though Lise is way too slow at this point for the spell to be useful, especially with Earth Jutsu ready to negate it. I usually sell all my Bird's Scales for extra cash.... Maybe I'll start saving them for the early game next time!

Honnestly I didn't know how Evasion Build would turn out, I just though for Hawk "Well he is a thief/Ninja so he must be fast and evade ^^." turns out Evasion is handy on some fights like Bill and Ben Shadow Dive was dealing a little less than half of HP thanks to Protect Up but the chance of them hitting the same character are low and hey Angel's Grail were there just in case ^^, I had realise how scales could come handy thanks to Jewel Eater (yeah him again) so after him I never sold them.

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I'm trying decide on final classes for light Lise and light Angela for two teams. Two questions:

1) Does Freya return full exp if you kill the enemy outright with it, rather than first inducing chibikko?

2) Is there a damage reduction for spells cast on your own team for sabers using Grand Divina's final weapon?

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1) yes, though if even 1 HP remains you get nothing and the enemy is replaced with a full-HP chibikko of the same level (or higher if you wear +monster level items)

2) yes, it should be -75%

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Started a duo game now, just got out of Bucca. Team will be Rogue, Archmage, Vanadise. Since the Vanadise is the AI character, she's basically just a meatshield healbot.

Comparing this Hawk's and Angela's performance's to the previous team's Lise's and Angela's, Hawk does feel to be quite a bit closer as a damage dealer than Lise was. So now I'm inclined to say that it's Lise's jack of all stats nature that holds her down if you try to use her as a dedicated physical.

Edited by Valenhil

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sudden is meant for support spells, see skill sheet, the affected ones are listed there

Lise is meant as a jack-of-most-trades; you can dump her into most teams and she'll easily fill holes in your skill set but she'll never excel.

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On my part I started a second playthrough with Duran, Kevin and Angela as I mentionned in the other topic I did go Gladiator, Monk and Sorceress (planning to go Swordmaster, Warrior Monk and Arch Mage for second class), I just get through Bucca Island and man having AoE Evil Gate for the Cave makes it so much easier, as everything in this cave except the Slimes is weak to Dark so really this place was Angela spamming Evil Gate, with Duran covering her and doing some damage with Kevin.

I notice that globally having Duran with a Shield to make ennemies focus on him while Angela is casting and Kevin is punching everything is a really viable strategy (+ since ennemy focus on him he is more likely to hit 2 or more ennemies with the weapon that double his Tech Point it allows him to build his tech pretty fast and FST Tech is nice not gonna lie ^^), for now it looks like compare to my previous team I will have an easier time with mob fight, Bosses might more challenging tough (up to now Genova and Bill&Ben were noticably harder with this team for me)

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Yeah, about the shields, would it be possible to put half of them as Lise-only after all?

The Item limit could be circumvented by keeping Duran's in Forcena, but putting Lise's in Byzel instead. Byzel has 1 armor for each and 6 accessories, so it has 3 slots open.

Removing the status resistance shields, we have exactly 3 shields for each.

Edited by Valenhil

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hmm...
I could maybe fit 3 shields in there without removing them from Duran.
In that case 3 shields (to be decided which) would be available in Byzel if you have Lise in your party.
The loadout in Forcena would still require Duran.

So if I go with that which 3 shields would you want on Lise?
Dark classes only, light classes are good enough with MT buffs and potentially heals.
So you might have to grab them via backtracking after Tzenker or after the island expedition.

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Since I don't see Star Lancer as being too overloaded with the addition of the shield, I take it the problem would be mostly Vanadise stepping on Light Duran's toes. However, since Vanadise can't AoE heal or cleanse without the Whitelight Ring, she's already pressed enough on accessories to allow it, in my opinion. Equipping both means no increased healing, for example.

You could just keep the Def/MDEF/Eva options for both, probably being worth less than the accessories that only grant those effects, or give Lise different options, perhaps one offensive, one defensive, and one caster themed, to go with her jack theme.

Aesthetically, could differentiate them by making the kite shields (Gold, Sacred, and Adamant) Duran's and the bucklers (the elementals minus Earth) Lise's. Dragon and Oath shield are ugly as sin anyway, but they could be kept in altena/deen/mintos as a gimmicky endgame shield for each.

Edited by Valenhil

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