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EO3's classes felt off to me, even disregarding how overpowered subclasses are. They just felt like too much thematic cruft at the expense of mechanical unity and synergy. Most classes just didn't have abilities that self-synergized very well.
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Dec 8, 2020 17:36
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Even if there was better synergy a lot of the time it's usually not worth a lot of gimmicks because everything is so massively undertuned compared to just taking a gladiator or arbalist and throwing the biggest verb you can find at the nearest target eo3's numerical balance is completely rear end-backwards and generally rewards you for using overwhelmingly conventional setups while convoluted gimmicks struggle to kill just about anything in a reasonable amount of time just because their numbers are so drat low and that's before you get into idiot clown bullshit like buccaneer having 6 different chasers in a game where focusing on a singular damage type is almost impossible without massively gimping yourself That the game even managed to function at all seems like sheer coincidence almost Reco fucked around with this message at 20:15 on Dec 8, 2020 |
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Dec 8, 2020 20:13
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Zurai posted:EO3's classes felt off to me, even disregarding how overpowered subclasses are. They just felt like too much thematic cruft at the expense of mechanical unity and synergy. Most classes just didn't have abilities that self-synergized very well. See, I'm a little conflicted about this. EO3's classes basically went all in on trying to stick to a theme, which leads to very flavorful classes; they aren't balanced super well, and a lot of the interactions seem accidental, but that meant that getting good stuff going makes me feel like a big brain giga genius. Subclassing was clearly not really considered at all when they put together class abilities, so intelligent use of subclassing completely broke the game to pieces but also felt like a great power fantasy. EO4, by comparison, felt a lot more sterile and less interesting from a "loving around with parties" standpoint. The classes were clearly designed around function rather than thematics, and the player is clearly intended to do specific builds with them rather than them just kind of going "these are vaguely ninja-esque skills, figure it out" like EO3. Subclassing was clearly thought of from the earliest design phases and there's a lot of obvious cross-class synergies that are meant to snap together like a Lego set, to the point where for me a lot of classes feel incomplete until you subclass. From a clean design standpoint it's objectively better, but for me it kind of lost some of the magic of EO3. EO5 did a pretty good job of bridging the gap between the two.
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Dec 8, 2020 20:54
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Series definitely improved over the course of the series but it’s pretty interesting to see how it started out. EO1 nowadays would be considered mega outdated but at the time it was pretty much the most modernized dungeon crawler. DS era of EO was real messy in retrospect, but I still enjoy them quite a bit. 3’s still my favorite EO to this day though 5’s a close second.
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Dec 8, 2020 22:13
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blizzardvizard posted:https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3720891 You can look at this EO3 LP thread, it's got class and mechanics breakdowns Araxxor posted:One of the biggest general tips I can offer is that weapons are far more important to upgrade than armor. The former is a massive part of your damage while you need lots of armor to really reduce damage. Every 3 points of defense shaves off 1 point of base damage. Thank you, this is perfect. 
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Dec 9, 2020 02:35
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Hippogriff was bizarrely free. He just did a few Bind Claws until the first Sky Dive, then I hit him with Chain Blast and locked him down for a few turns. Getting around 650 damage per round from the two Dance Oracle spammers took him down in pretty short order, and now I've got Master skills. Somewhat frustratingly, Mana Oracle is pretty unusable unless I only want one character dealing damage per turn, since it purges the elemental prayers from the whole party. One thing I can do is have three people casting buffs every turn and two just constantly throwing out Invoke Gods (though 45 TP per cast makes that kind of unsustainable). At least I've got three layers of weak healing constantly up now, so my party should be fairly durable.
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Dec 13, 2020 05:56
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Still no word on if/when the next EO is coming?
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Dec 13, 2020 08:05
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Nope, but that's not surprising given the mess this year has been.
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Dec 13, 2020 09:50
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Undead King is pretty free when you one-round his summons. Onto the fourth stratum! Crystal Dragon is going to dunk the gently caress out of me though.
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Dec 14, 2020 19:09
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And now I finished tearing through 7th Dragon 2020-II's data. ...Mostly. More on that later. For those that intend on playing through 2020-II, here are the resources I dug out if you really need them. (Or if you're just curious. Not at all necessary for playing though there's a ton of buried lede in their skills.) Since the engine is really similar to 2020's and a bunch of design decisions stayed the same, I put in changelogs at the beginning of each writeup to show what did change if applicable. The basic mechanics and such for the game. Enemy stats Enemy skills and what enemies use them. Class skill data: Samurai - Your basic offensive unit. Trickster - Your agile rogue unit. Destroyer - Your heavy hitter that can counter and combo enemies. Psychic - Your mage. Hacker - Your support unit. Idol - CHAOS. Idol Part 2 - The whitelist for Order Action skills. Why does Idol get 2 writeups? Well... quote:Order Action: The Idol can command their allies to partake in an attack. These attacks use the respective party members' stats and proper skill levels, but do not use up any Mana if a skill is used, nor do they use those party members' turns. However, the skills the party members use and the target they go after are entirely random within set parameters. Though skills that are appropriate for the situation have bigger weights. (i.e. AOEs are prioritized more in battles with multiple enemies.) The order in which the party members attacks plays out goes from left to right in the party order. The Idol's EX can be used to boost the party members' attacks, but how much EX boosts it by depends on the skill being used instead of using the 1.5x damage multiplier from EX. Araxxor fucked around with this message at 23:00 on Dec 14, 2020 |
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Dec 14, 2020 22:58
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theshim posted:Crystal Dragon is going to dunk the gently caress out of me though. poo poo. 
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Dec 20, 2020 04:33
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Crystal Dragon down. Took 4 attempts, a couple respecs, an absolute fuckton of Somas, and fifty-five turns. My initial strategy was to try to drop an Invoke Gods every turn the boss was in its magic form to reduce the damage from Clear Breath, but it was straight oneshotting my party even with that (and it also was doing pretty low damage, I'm gonna need to do some testing on Invoke Gods). Ended up having one character use Purification as soon as it entered magic form and just defending and occasionally tossing healing items through it, then losing a turn in physical form to buff back up and then getting two or three turns of damage in. Was constantly having to heal and pick people back up the whole fight, it was an awful slugfest.
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Dec 20, 2020 19:36
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I am always impressed every time you do one of these, and also always just ask "Why???" as I read your boss summaries
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Dec 24, 2020 05:43
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Game clear. Bizarre run. The first stratum is absolutely horrid with 5 shamans, you can't even get Dance Oracle for a while and you can't support it for long when you do, but once you get past that point it's actually pretty reasonable. Two Dance Oracles is enough to clear most random encounters for a while once leveled up, and later on you can transition into a Mana Oracle second. The fact that you have exactly zero turn one offense is still very annoying and makes random encounters a good deal scarier than they would otherwise be, but having three layers of weak passive healing was enough to keep the party alive in most situations. Barring the first stratum, Crystal Dragon is by far the worst fight, as you basically can't do poo poo to it during the phys form and you need to purge all your buffs when it switches, meaning even more time wasted on setup when it switches back. Still, a maxed Dance Oracle followed by a maxed Mana Oracle is a pretty hefty amount of damage, totaling a little over 5k on the final boss, though it's really obnoxious that you can only do that every other turn. It might have been a good idea to invest in the skill that can refresh buffs when dispelled, but I didn't feel like relying on that. Oh, and Invoke Gods does very little damage comparatively, very disappointing. Not sure if I'm gonna do another run or take another break. I still have a 5 Pugilists run that's most of the way through that I should really finish, but after that, I'm down to Dragoons (probably pretty fun), Masurao (oh god they're all gonna die), Necromancers (now this one sounds interesting, with enough passive support for refreshing wraiths I feel like I could spam some powerful attacks)... ...and Herbalists. gently caress.
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Dec 27, 2020 18:20
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I think I tried 5 Necromancers before. I forget how far I got with it, but I'm pretty sure it was pretty decent once I was able to sink some skill points into them. Wraiths are fun. Great. Now I want to do it again. There are just so many things that make it an easy or weird group to play as. You only need 1 person to max Wraith Mastery and there are so many ways to spread a few points around to give a really high chance to spawn a new wraith every time you use one. You get access to party wide healing, damage mitigation, and increased damage (through debuff) early on. Plus, Wraiths don't need to be re-summoned between fights and even though Necros are extra squishy in the front row, you get an expendable row of targets to help with that. You don't have to completely rely on gimmicks, but later on you still have the option with Zombie Powder to do really weird poo poo. Shyfted One fucked around with this message at 20:38 on Jan 25, 2021 |
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Jan 25, 2021 19:44
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So this thread is understandably quite dead as it's now been TWO YEARS since there's been any movement on this series. But I need to get some thoughts out in the world and this is the only place that anyone might conceivably be interested in them so here goes. I've been playing Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk lately. I originally bought it cheap a little over a year ago out of curiosity to see if it could scratch the EO itch. I was kinda lukewarm on it and then other things took my attention and I just dropped it. Anyway since, as stated before, we're now 2 years out from the last EO I've really been craving a new one and decided to give Labyrinth another shot. I started over and have now gotten further than I did originally. In part it is doing what I wanted, giving me that dungeon exploration, map filling out satisfaction that's my favorite aspect of EO. However it also demonstrates just how much EO's stellar combat system and team building mechanics are the glue that holds the dungeon exploration together, even if they're not personally my main draw. In Labyrinth your actual characters are basically just a bundle of stats with passive skills and weapon proficiencies attached. The classes have no actual combat skills, there's no growth tree or any of the fun stuff that lets you plan out each individual like in EO. Rather, you slot them into "covens" which hold the actual battle skills. These have to be found and swapped around over the course of the game. Part of it is kind of intriguing in that you can ultimately have up to 3 characters in a single coven, which means eventually you'll have 15 individual characters in combat at once, for each of your party's 5 coven slots. The coven's stats are a kind of weird combination or average of the stats of the individuals inside it, and when you use combat skills the coven acts as one, though they take damage or auto attack individually. It sort of seems like it might end up being a potentially interesting system in the long run when you have lots of good 3 slot covens to choose from. The problem is I'm not sure WHEN it's going to get that interesting. The fact that you have to actually find the coven items as you go means that my team's growth is this agonizingly slow drip. I don't even have any covens with 3 slots yet, so my team is made up of 1 and 2 slots so far. Trying to keep exploring and hoping I'll find more covens that will give me more strategic options means that in the mean time I'm just cobbling together the best I can and it ends up being really dull. The combat is tuned such that most dungeon exploration so far is just auto attacking because what combat skills I do have are too expensive to even be worth using on trash enemies. And with no idea what kinds of covens lie in my future I can't really do any pre planning until I actually find them. So it's just a matter of continuing on through boring combat with no options or planning, hoping things will get more interesting in the future. It's a really weird design decision to do it this way and I don't really understand it. Why not tune the game differently so that it's harder and then start dishing out more powerful options sooner to compensate? And that's even accepting the premise that this weird method of building a team is any fun in the first place which I'm not far enough in the game to judge yet. I will probably keep going in the hopes that it gets any better because I don't really have anything else I want to play right now anyway. But I felt like getting this rant off my chest. God I wish they'd make a new Etrian Odyssey.
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Jan 30, 2021 16:32
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Regy Rusty posted:So this thread is understandably quite dead as it's now been TWO YEARS since there's been any movement on this series. But I need to get some thoughts out in the world and this is the only place that anyone might conceivably be interested in them so here goes. I appreciate you writing up your thoughts like this. I've come close to pulling the trigger on Labyrinth of Refrain a few times now, and ultimately held off; doesn't sound like its combat system holds a candle, and so I no longer need wonder what could be.
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Jan 30, 2021 23:42
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I will tell you right now that the Coven system never gets interesting and arguably gets worse when you find The Best Ones and your options become even more limited.
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Jan 30, 2021 23:49
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A few times I was curious about Labyrinth of Refrain but about every time, I hear something that lowers my interest. Also yeah, EO games were pumped out quite fast before though now it seems to have slowed down considerably. I wonder if it's even being worked on at the moment. Apparently SMT5 didn't even start development until a good while after the announcement.
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Jan 31, 2021 00:07
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LoR seems to want you to focus on the numbers instead of actual strategy much like a Disgaea game. I’m sure there’s some strategy somewhere but I mostly got through mashing attack while big numbers appeared and the anime portraits flashed. It’s a shame because the actual map exploration is fun and somewhat dynamic with the wall smashing ability hatty fucked around with this message at 00:49 on Jan 31, 2021 |
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Jan 31, 2021 00:47
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I really liked the wall smash but it got a bit stale after the first labyrinth when the vast majority of walls started being indestructible. I'm almost through the fourth today and boring still remains the primary adjective I'd describe the gameplay with. Even the story is just "sometimes mildly amusing" and not much of a motivator to get through the larger disconnected dungeons and combat. I'm probably just gonna drop it again, this really doesn't seem like the game for me.
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Jan 31, 2021 01:14
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A few posters were talking about it in the RPG thread earlier this month. The consensus seems to be that it's a steady downward trajectory as far as quality goes.
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Jan 31, 2021 03:28
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hatty posted:LoR seems to want you to focus on the numbers instead of actual strategy much like a Disgaea game. I’m sure there’s some strategy somewhere but I mostly got through mashing attack while big numbers appeared and the anime portraits flashed. Yeah, most of the strategy in Labyrinth of Refrain comes from figuring out what combinations of skills and equipment get you the biggest numbers. The actual moment-to-moment tactics never get particularly complex. The story does get... more present over time, although "better" might be an overly positive way to put it, depending on your tastes and your tolerance for stories about edgy tragic lesbians.
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Jan 31, 2021 03:48
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LoR Was interesting at first, then boring, then interesting again, but even though I now have Pacts with multiple attack and support slots it's boring because the only way to get stronger is through weapons and grinding for them suuuucks. Especially when you need to outfit like a dozen dudes. It's like doing an EO single class run and you need to grind a lot of drops to get everyone equipment, except you now have to do it for multiple single class parties simulatneously and the drops are more random. And yes, exploration is just mostly auto attacking, which is partly because most of the magic pacts suck and are few and far between compared to damage and support pacts. The wall thing is cool though and it's interesting having field skills tied to the currency you're gathering. I guess I could learn more about how their "retire" mechanic works and see if that helps get me past where I feel weak now, but I don't want to learn it and then have to do it with like 24 characters and then grind levels again.
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Jan 31, 2021 09:00
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I ended up really liking Labyrinth of Refrain, enough to finish the post-game completely which I've only done for about half of the EO games. I suppose I'm the audience their type of storytelling is trying to reach. Please don't tell anyone how I live. It's definitely a hellgrind to get strong enough to defeat the true final boss. Mages end up being your most powerful units overall though... For everything *except* that last boss, where I found that setting up some insane melee crit units were the only way to avoid grinding even more. I'd definitely recommend looking up Lucky Numbers and how the docks dungeon works though because both of those things are really dumb, even as someone way more positive about the game than most others seem to be.
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Jan 31, 2021 13:55
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I greatly appreciate everyone's thoughts about LoR. After taking everything people have said into consideration, and after literally falling asleep while playing it, I've decided to officially abandon it for good. Hopefully someday we can all come together again over an actual good game.
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Feb 1, 2021 14:12
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I did end up enjoying LoR overall, but I could only recommend it to people with a very specific combination of tastes in terms of gameplay and story.
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Feb 2, 2021 00:21
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I just wondered, how many EO games actually have you go UP a dungeon instead of down? I know in EO2, you climbed the tree while you descent in the first game.
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Feb 6, 2021 17:39
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Just restarted EO5 because why not, never finished it. Currently running Fencer/Pugilist/Masurao/Necro/Botanist and hoping using a dodge tank fencer will not bite me later. I have never used one (or a necromancer) before.
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Feb 6, 2021 17:59
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IMO the problem with a dodge tank (other than randomly dying every so often) is that it's harder for them to protect the rest of your team from AOE attacks. IE: they don't have the standard protect skills. I used one my first playthrough and while I don't regret it did feel kind of like a liability. That said, it's hilarious when the enemy does a random multi-hit attack and misses the fencer a dozen times.
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Feb 6, 2021 18:16
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Clarste posted:IMO the problem with a dodge tank (other than randomly dying every so often) is that it's harder for them to protect the rest of your team from AOE attacks. IE: they don't have the standard protect skills. I used one my first playthrough and while I don't regret it did feel kind of like a liability. That said, it's hilarious when the enemy does a random multi-hit attack and misses the fencer a dozen times. Yeah, that is my worry. I was hoping that using a healing herbalist, a binding pugilist and whatever a necromancer counts as would help me survive anyway, so I guess we'll see!
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Feb 6, 2021 18:51
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Tired Moritz posted:I just wondered, how many EO games actually have you go UP a dungeon instead of down? I know in EO2, you climbed the tree while you descent in the first game. EO5 has you going up too. That's it, though--even the EO2 dungeons in EON were reworked to go down instead of up.
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Feb 7, 2021 02:48
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How is Etrian Odyssey Nexus? I have an urge to play a good dungeon crawler and I remembered I never got that one.
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Feb 12, 2021 22:05
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It's kinda mixed. Their choice of dungeons to bring back is by and large pretty disappointing, but there are some decent ones. The new central dungeon is very good though and has some cool new gimmicks. The postgame is also particularly bullshit even for this series and I completely fizzled out on it by the end. Still if you're hankering for a dungeon crawler and you've played all the others you can do worse! Like Labyrinth of Refrain for instance  E: I'm sure other people could also weigh in better than I could on its options for team building but with such a large lineup I was able to craft a team made up entirely of classes I'd never used before, which was fun. Also Farmers are viable in it which is great lol Regy Rusty fucked around with this message at 23:00 on Feb 12, 2021 |
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Feb 12, 2021 22:58
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EON is a huge amount of fun, I loved it to pieces when I first played it. You do the first OC dungeon with wall climbing and you go, oh hey that's a neat gimmick. Then it keeps going. Then you do the wall climbing gimmick 5 more times. Then you go through every first stratum for some reason. Then you fight an absolutely bullshit subboss. Then it keeps going. But otherwise yeah, definitely a great way to end the series. Because there's not gonna be another game. Haha, unless...?
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Feb 13, 2021 00:06
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I enjoyed Nexus quite a bit overall. It overstays its welcome somewhat and the "main" dungeons that all have the same tileset and music especially so, but I thought it had one of the best postgames (dungeon and bosses) in the series so it starts on a high note and ends on a high note.
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Feb 13, 2021 00:25
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Nexus is a very chill game to play in chunks over a long period of time. I would’ve gotten burnt out if I played it all in one go, lots of forests
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Feb 13, 2021 00:29
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As everyone is saying, the game is too long and chooses pretty much all the least interesting dungeons from the series. On the other hand, you get access to a ton of different classes so it's fun to mess around with dumb teams.
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Feb 13, 2021 02:10
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Nexus is probably the worst of the 3DS EO games but it's still decent.
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Feb 13, 2021 02:29
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On the one hand, having just a ridiculous number of classes to play with sounds fun. On the other, I could maybe just replay EOIV or EOV instead, since I did love both of those and it's been quite a while since I've played either.
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Feb 13, 2021 02:41
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