Incline Elminage Gothic (former Japan only dungeon crawler)

[gman42]

Yup, you can always choose a new ex skill upon a "normal" class change (not one performed by invoking an item, but there are very few of those).

Definitely forging turn recovery (regen) onto an item is the best way to use your ores early. Most people pick a "blank slate" item like a cape or obi early in the game, which A) makes it free to trade around between all your characters if you get a better ore later and want to give the highest regen to a certain character, and B) you don't have to worry about having the regen on, say, a piece of armor that you might upgrade later and have to lose the ore. You won't find misc items with -AC or anything really early in the game anyway so that's a good use of that slot.

Regen is just huge to have early in the game because often you can just passively heal during an easy encounter, and save your limited healing casts, which means longer expeditions. Having to leave a dungeon floor halfway through and then trudge back through it when you don't have Diomente is kinda painful, it helps to avoid that as much as possible. Much later in the game when HP levels are well into the hundreds, regen becomes fairly meaningless compared to forging for AC, better resistances, status effects on weapons, etc.

 

[Dorarnae]

What's going on with the damage rolls in this game lol? My Dragon Breath deals everything from 1 to 46 damage on the same enemy (so resists prob don't explain it - and on the first turn, so it's not the scaling of that ability).

So what are some forge bonuses you guys like? There's a lot of options, but honestly I'm wondering whether I shouldn't just put everything into AC at this early stage.

one item with hp regen, pretty much the only thing you need in the beginning.

Thanks! Now I feel silly for picking Song of Healing, lol. It's definetely going out if I can switch skills on class change?

breath is based on your Hp, if you get hit, it'll lower your dmg. also dmg decrease the more you use it in the same battle.
you can switch skill when class changing, except if you class change with an item by releasing it's special power(like the medal once you finish the main story).

 

[Deuce Traveler]

What's going on with the damage rolls in this game lol? My Dragon Breath deals everything from 1 to 46 damage on the same enemy (so resists prob don't explain it - and on the first turn, so it's not the scaling of that ability).

So what are some forge bonuses you guys like? There's a lot of options, but honestly I'm wondering whether I shouldn't just put everything into AC at this early stage.

one item with hp regen, pretty much the only thing you need in the beginning.

Thanks! Now I feel silly for picking Song of Healing, lol. It's definetely going out if I can switch skills on class change?

Is it your Dragonewt that is doing the Dragon Breath? I have a good feeling about that character.

 

[Grunker]

What's going on with the damage rolls in this game lol? My Dragon Breath deals everything from 1 to 46 damage on the same enemy (so resists prob don't explain it - and on the first turn, so it's not the scaling of that ability).

So what are some forge bonuses you guys like? There's a lot of options, but honestly I'm wondering whether I shouldn't just put everything into AC at this early stage.

one item with hp regen, pretty much the only thing you need in the beginning.

Thanks! Now I feel silly for picking Song of Healing, lol. It's definetely going out if I can switch skills on class change?

Is it your Dragonewt that is doing the Dragon Breath? I have a good feeling about that character.

It is indeed!

 

[Jason Liang]

Alchemists have a Breath Attack spell, so I never had much use for Dragonnewts.

Elminage Gothic's class system strangely lines up well with Rance characters, so I basically played a Rance party in my playthrough.

 

[gman42]

Yeah Pomedoon is a super useful spell, it's really the only mass damage spell Alchemists get but they get it right away and have 9 casts before you know it. It's great against even highly spell resistant or Barrier-using enemies too, since the idea is basically that the caster is casting it on himself to make himself physically breathe fire, not casting it on the enemy.

 

[gman42]

lol, every time I think I might be keeping up with the difficulty curve, this game shits on me again. Just got to F15 of the tower and finding no way whatsoever to defeat Stargazers with my current party, they're just too fast and too deadly in groups of 3. I've been able to avoid intentional grinding for the most part, but I may finally be at the point where I have to say fuck this floor until I get everybody another 10+ levels or something.

 

[Dorarnae]

lol, every time I think I might be keeping up with the difficulty curve, this game shits on me again. Just got to F15 of the tower and finding no way whatsoever to defeat Stargazers with my current party, they're just too fast and too deadly in groups of 3. I've been able to avoid intentional grinding for the most part, but I may finally be at the point where I have to say fuck this floor until I get everybody another 10+ levels or something.

you can craft items with alchemist(dove bell?) to remove fixed encounter, so you can reach the top without too much trouble.

 

[gman42]

Eh I have plenty of dove bells but what fun is that? I want to earn my way to the top. If I beat the final boss but had regular enemies that I always ran from or banished with the bell or reloaded to avoid, I wouldn't really consider it a successful run.

I have to say for the most part, the game is pretty damn balanced in the sense that if you're mapping every dungeon level thoroughly and doing all the fighting associated with that, you *usually* wind up at a pretty good level for every new set of monsters they throw at you to be challenging but beatable.

 

[Tse Tse Fly]

Hello,
Have shamans any utility in the beginning of the game? I had the folly to take one in my party, only to find out he can't use half the equipment currently available to me, and has no offensive spells. So now my shaman has to sit in the back during battles and let the others do the job. I've bought some charm - a weapon - that my shaman can equip and attack with, but it doesn't seem to deal any damage to any of the enemies I've encountered. Looks like he is going to be almost completely useless, considering I already got 3 melee classes in my party. Do you think I should swap him for someone else, before I've ventured too far?

 

[Dorarnae]

Hello,
Have shamans any utility in the beginning of the game? I had the folly to take one in my party, only to find out he can't use half the equipment currently available to me, and has no offensive spells. So now my shaman has to sit in the back during battles and let the others do the job. I've bought some charm - a weapon - that my shaman can equip and attack with, but it doesn't seem to deal any damage to any of the enemies I've encountered. Looks like he is going to be almost completely useless, considering I already got 3 melee classes in my party. Do you think I should swap him for someone else, before I've ventured too far?

they're good against ghost/demon monster and their barrier ability can be good to block ennemy spell(probably not that useful once you hit the tower in the post game though). I'd say it's probably best to first start as a mage,cleric or alchemist and then class change, to give them a bit more tools. I often wanted to use one but having to lvl a class and restart to lvl 1 takes some time. End game they're probably not too bad against that belial monster and if they can get something to hit dragons/god type. I think they can use instrument as well? at least in other elminage I think you could so you can always cast some spell without using charge but will need an alchemist to repair items...

 

[Tse Tse Fly]

DAMN my characters keep losing critical stats on level up, so now some of them have fewer points in some of the stats than at the beginning. Is there a specific cause for this or it's just random?

 

[Matador]

DAMN my characters keep losing critical stats on level up, so now some of them have fewer points in some of the stats than at the beginning. Is there a specific cause for this or it's just random?

Random. You can retry until you get at least not depressing level ups.

 

[gman42]

DAMN my characters keep losing critical stats on level up, so now some of them have fewer points in some of the stats than at the beginning. Is there a specific cause for this or it's just random?

It is random-ish, but also if you started your characters at the bare minimum age, they're way more likely to lose stats at levelup until they hit, say, "adolescent" age for their race. Early in the game there's not a lot you can do about this short of killing and resurrecting them intentionally to age them (which I don't recommend lol), so that leaves you with savescumming as Matador said.

 

[gman42]

Finally picking this game back up after a couple months being too busy with IRL stuff, just hit level 16 of the tower and dealing with the latest and greatest difficulty spike.

Just curious, for those out there who finished the whole postgame, what levels were your characters at by the time you finished? I'm just curious whether my solution for having a chance against some of the new enemies (*cough cough* fucking Stargazers) is to just grind like crazy elsewhere and come back way stronger. Like currently my party levels range from a lvl 99 ninja to a lvl 157 cleric.

I don't *hate* the idea of grinding but so far in this game I've mostly managed to avoid it.

 

[Dorateen]

I cannot speak for others, but I pushed to get higher levels, into the hundreds. The final encounters, last few enemies, will be quite the challenge with less powerful characters.

 

[gman42]

Thanks, I just wanted to gauge whether I was at like half the level I should be or something, lol.

So many encounters are a piece of cake at this point but there's just those few that are brutal. It does feel like just brute forcing things by grinding out hundreds of extra HP for everybody would be one solution, for things like surviving six fucking confusion breath attacks in one round from a Black Dragon, or the batshit crazy amount of damage a few Stargazers can do even to characters that are in the -40AC range. I can't even imagine how it would be if I wasn't exploiting the Aura Punch/Replica bug and farming the hell out of 40+ AP ores to beef up everyone's armor massively.

I think one thing I don't have a great handle on in this game is how much 'hidden' effect there is of just pure level vs. level in battle. Like it *feels* like my To Hit improves subtly as I level up but I'm not sure. Does initiative improve as well? Do I ever have a chance of getting any actions in ahead of some of these stupidly agile enemies?

 

[Dorateen]

Does initiative improve as well? Do I ever have a chance of getting any actions in ahead of some of these stupidly agile enemies?

I was going to mention, yes, I think the biggest advantage of over-leveling enemies is that your initiative improves. It is not so much about raw power or survivabilty, but just the chance to go first.

 

[Dorarnae]

Does initiative improve as well? Do I ever have a chance of getting any actions in ahead of some of these stupidly agile enemies?

I was going to mention, yes, I think the biggest advantage of over-leveling enemies is that your initiative improves. It is not so much about raw power or survivabilty, but just the chance to go first.

I think it's more about agility stat. if you class change with the medal of power, even if you're lvl 500 you'll still be slow due to stat going back to default.
might also be hard if they use the ability that hunter have to act first (I don't remember if they have it)

I guess the best solution would be to have a party of ninja/samurai(with very low AC) and maybe 1 valkyrie. samurai can defend others and will return some hit.

 

[Dorateen]

Does initiative improve as well? Do I ever have a chance of getting any actions in ahead of some of these stupidly agile enemies?

I was going to mention, yes, I think the biggest advantage of over-leveling enemies is that your initiative improves. It is not so much about raw power or survivabilty, but just the chance to go first.

I think it's more about agility stat.

It might be that, as our party's fairy thief turned ninja did have an agility of 24. But I'm pretty sure other characters had the chance to act before high level groups including stargazers. One of the tactics I used by the end of the game was to cast that spell on the ninja, which directs all enemy attacks at a single character. With his ridiculously low AC, was able to score enough misses and withstand their damage, while allowing party members time to cast confusion/paralyze.

 

[gman42]

Yup, my ninja is finally Bifei-worthy at this point with a -59AC, which helps in some battles but not the ones where I can't even get the damn spell off before 3 other characters get pincushioned for like 1200 damange, lol. I guess it's time to go farm some Greater Demons for a while.

 

[NoSoup4you]

I gave up on this game... I like it in principle, but it's heavily dependent on save scumming, and each reload makes the whole thing mean less and less to me.

 

[Dorarnae]

or maybe you need to git gud? :D

the game is hard but if you know the mechanics etc, it's actually not that bad.

 

[gman42]

I gave up on this game... I like it in principle, but it's heavily dependent on save scumming, and each reload makes the whole thing mean less and less to me.

Are we talking savescumming because your party's getting wiped frequently? Or are you playing with the mentality that you don't even want to deal with one character death? This game definitely isn't the type where you can expect the latter to hold up.

That's not to say I won't just say fuck it and reload if half my party gets wiped in one unlucky round, or someone gets drained for multiple levels etc. And yeah I save super frequently in dungeons because it can happen any time.

 

[Grunker]

The constant awkward menu interactions is what killed the game for me unfortunately. Would definitely finish it if it ever got a usability overhaul