WarpedLichen

Glad the "final" version came out so that I could beat the Dragon Emperor. Had to say it was a pleasant surprise that Death Spell was great against a certain roadblock. Unpleasantly surprised that the damn thing respawns.

That's still 80% of the game where he's not a credible healer because of how slow his cast time is. You're talking end game armor + 3rd class change + sizable int investment before cast time feels good. The equipment gap I feel starts from the Ghost Ship. You already have your baseline defensive gear and you're starting to get random resist armor of dubious general usefulness. Similarly, you're getting the alt stat weapons for a couple towns. I understand the intent of flat gear progression, but its also kind of lame to get to a new equipment shop and getting no progression. I feel like resist armor should be removed - you get resist accessories from Cats right around the God Beast fights when they're the most useful. A set of faster cast time armor/sudden cast accessory should be made available earlier so that 2nd class classes can make better use of their buffs in regular fights. A lot of it is also due to enemy layout - if enemy layouts could be changed so that you can specialize against an area then the specialized gear becomes a lot better.

Will admit I didn't that counter at all, I assumed Wishbone was the counter to the death penalty. Also will admit I don't know enough about the game mechanics to know what is what, just that I get hit by random damage quite a bit. Cleric Duran is probably possible, but I don't really rely on heal light for combat healing because the cast time is too much of a pain for me to bother. 10-15 seconds is a long time even after the proc. I do some of the proc weapons - petrify and chibiko for example. I think the Pedan gear in general are really cool competitive alternatives to each other. I just feel like there's a big gap where you get extremely situational gear options for a long time.

Zable and Koren both seem to cast Death spell randomly in their routines and are at too high of a level to negate with a level. Get hit with death spell = no bonus. Not to mention the occasional boulder getting off roulette and the like. I think you're overestimating HP+ gear. In general by the end game I am close to max HP (700-800+). An average enemy hit does around 120-170, 100 hp is less than one hit. The difference between high def and low is like 50-80 hp per hit. Early - Mid game - Heal Light casting is too slow, the main criteria in a boss fight is making sure your healing stocks last through an entire fight. Most often the difference between medium and light defense by feel is that a light defense hit takes me down to almost nothing, and I need to blow 3+ round drops to take another hit. Medium defense, I might only need 1 round drop before I die in the next hit. The difference in item and time efficiency is the deciding factor, not how many hits I can take in a vacuum. The problem with resist gear is that it helps you against one element of damage and increases the damage you take from everything else. Wearing Dark resist gear against Gorza for example is counterproductive, you take maybe 25% less damage from dark spells (due to lower base magic resist), but the trade off is that his physical attacks and ghost road now one shot you. Resist gear is only good against bosses (because regular enemies don't use elements too much, and the ones that do use AI to target your weakness specifically) and only against bosses that don't have non elemental attacks. Admittedly a lot of God Beats are kinda one trick wonders, but there's a quite a few physical attackers in the mix. And it seems like you're probably better off using Remove Weakness or More Magic Defense for those God Beasts anyway. I didn't like undead armor because end game enemies deal way too much damage to fight comfortably. Even with max defense Duran is taking 100+ damage a hit. Evade stacking feels way better than defense stacking and the lack of evade on the chest piece just makes it not worth it. Knowing that max evade is 90 changes things a lot, though i feel like 1% is wrong because I still got hit a lot at 127 in the Dragon Hole (feels closer to 5% to 10 %?) maybe enemies just attack a ton. It seems like in mid game, wearing undead armor meant that I could just about comfortably tank an entire screen of enemies, get really close to death, but get the free heal after. This is extremely relevant in the snow fields where you can't wear pure physical defense because of mages or in the wind area because enemies inflict status effects like crazy. In the end game, I can't rely on using pure defense to last me through a map with undead armor because I will die before I can even take out one enemy in melee, so I prefer having access to regular healing. For weapons, I think its quite clear because weapons use the same statline for every character despite being better/worse for each character due to their role. Duran's mp drain weapon is pretty bad for example, because he doesn't use spells very much in any of his classes. That one can probably be bumped to medium-heavy for him because of the relative lack of utility. Hawk can't get any innate healing spells, so his strong Heal Light item should probably be buffed to compensate. The random chance to inflict poison weapon seems really bad. Random amount of hits it takes to inflict status, you just run away? Even though the AI isn't capable of carrying out that strategy? Same with random chance to inflict silence - there are only a few enemies that I want a random silence on (bees because they buff before the FST and eyes because they don't cast often) - everything I else I want to silence asap or I don't care at all. I feel like those could probably be increased to medium attack but with lower crit chance or something. Armor wise, I think all of the resist status stuff is too weak, feel like it should be buffed to medium to make it competitive with Wendel armor. I already said my piece about resistance armor. Attack up stuff in general don't feel worth it right now. I wish there were a set of armor that negates enemy elemental resists, a weapon that negates evade, and a weapon that can do knock back consistently.

While I'm waiting for 1.0.0 to fight Dragon Emperor, got a few more questions about game mechanics. Are the increased power while deathless weapons only supposed to work if somebody has never died ever or just death score? It seems pretty much impossible to never die in this game, especially when Zable and Koren are in the mix. When do the resist increase gear come into place? It seems too situational for what they do. One resist isn't worth worse defenses. I've never fought a boss where I remove weakness or increased magic defense wasn't enough. Am I missing something, especially given how tight money is. I feel like a lot of the armor and weapons in the second half of the game should be brought up to medium at least to make them worth using. I stuck with a few tried and true sets basically the whole time (medium, pure armor, pure evade, magic + negate weakness). I think undead armor is the poster child of good design because its very useful when you get it because of key status resists with a drawback that gets worse as the game goes on. Finally, does evade work past 127 on the character sheet? Not sure if I get anything by going over with Max Agi Hawk.

So how is the counter mechanic supposed to work anyway? The readme suggests that its only the lvl 1 tech? How do I counter enemies who use screen freezers? Is it hitting them while they are in their casting pose?

Beat new Koren, got a few thoughts about the fight if somebody could confirm:

So close - I was holding off my run at the Dark Shine Knight and now I can continue. Hoping the new version is much improved compared to ridiculously op enemy that gets stuck on walls.

Anybody got any tips on Dolan? I can't figure out what causes Spiral Moon to do 999 damage. At first I thought it was dependent on how much damage I deal and that I need to slow roll the fight, but it seems that no matter what eventually he casts a 999 damage version that I can't deal with at all.