Incline Elminage Gothic (former Japan only dungeon crawler)

[gman42]

Hi everyone, I've beaten Cyclanos after cheesing it with Miracle and currently exploring the Soldier of the Giant Gods dungeon. But, but having a tough time with enemy parties that have demon lords and squid mages (whatever they're called). They frequently act first, and there's no way for my party to defend against their powerful attacks. I'm debating whether or not to continue the post game.

What does leveling actually do after the stat caps are hit besides increasing HP? I wasn't able to find any explanation on this.

You level the special class skills (at least those with variable modifier/rate). Such as Samurai parry & retaliate chance, Lord bonus to resistances, spell damage bonuses for mages & clerics, martial damage bonuses for fighters, thiefs and such, enchantment point budget for alchemists and so on. The bonuses you get each level are not huge though and it will be a while before they reach significant amounts.

More importantly, you level your attack bonus - and number of strikes per attack (up to a cap). Ninja and Brawler also level their unarmored AC (meaning in the post game they evetually leave other classes in the dust, AC-wise). Summoners have a shot at capturing higher level mobs/bosses (plus need to succeed in fewer dice rolls to do so).

If you're already struggling at the SotGG dungeon, you're not gonna have a good time at the Ibag Tower. Things get MUCH more crazy there.
If enemy Surprise Attacks are wrecking your party, consider hiring a Ninja. They greatly reduce the risk of enemy Surprise Attacks.

Yeah, some skills are more maxable than others. Stuff that has a hard cap like the ninja's behead, the samurai's swallow killer, and the lord's court sanctuary are probably realistic to max somewhere in postgame even if it takes some grinding.

The ones like the attack and spell bonuses, and the alchemist's pure synthesis % (basically all the stuff that's quoted as having an oddball uneven max like 237.6% or whatever), will technically never stop going up, but the formula is based off of square root of level, so those eventually slow to a trickle. The max amount is technically based off of your character hitting 4.2B experience or whatever the ceiling is.

IIRC Ninja/Brawler AC can go as low as -80 (-127 combined with equipment), but I'm pretty sure the chances of getting hit are clamped to the 5%-95% range so you'll never become invulnerable. After my Ninja got below -50ish, I never noticed a difference vs. anyone but Incarnation with his batshit crazy To Hit bonus.

Also I'm pretty sure there's a lvl vs. lvl calculation done that can eventually improve your relative initiative against fast enemies, but not sure how far it goes and whether it has the same diminishing returns as some of the skills above. I really wanted to see if I could eventually act first (at least some of the time) in Stargazer fights but I got bored before I could do that kind of grinding.

 

[webman]

More importantly, you level your attack bonus - and number of strikes per attack (up to a cap).

I've already reached max strikes (10 + extra strikes from weapon) with my fighter who's at level 100+. I got the King's Sword from the tomb dungeon and deal around 450+ damage max. It seems like the weapon's stats have a greater effect than whatever attack bonus the character has.

I've read about people needing to be at level 300 to 1000 to beat Ibag Tower. What's the difference between a fighter at level 100 versus a fighter at level 1000 besides having more hp and a bigger attack bonus?

If enemy Surprise Attacks are wrecking your party, consider hiring a Ninja. They greatly reduce the risk of enemy Surprise Attacks.

Do I really to hire a brawler, ninja, or lord to play through the rest of the post game? Would simply leveling my current characters increase overall survivability from surprise attacks, beheadings, and stoning?

Also I'm pretty sure there's a lvl vs. lvl calculation done that can eventually improve your relative initiative against fast enemies, but not sure how far it goes and whether it has the same diminishing returns as some of the skills above.

My characters are already above or more than twice the level of those demon lords and squid thingies but they always attack first when I encounter them. What level should my characters be to play through Soldier of the Giant Gods dungeon and the rest of the postgame dungeons comfortably without too much savescumming? If actually it's in the thousands, I don't think I would want to grind that much.

 

[gman42]

I guess the big question is what your party composition is right now. There's definitely not just one way to beat the game, but there are some quality of life aspects of certain characters that I feel like you have to have at least one or two of in your party to survive postgame. Ninja with his ambush prevention and Replica EX skill would be one, a pure Alchemist is another (can't undersell the ability to forge extra AC onto every piece of armor at an increasing rate as his mastery skill goes up). Hunter with Lightning Strike and Pursuit Sweep ain't half bad.

So like when you ask the question of what the difference is between a lvl 300 and 1000 fighter, part of the answer might be "well he's playing alongside a lvl 1000 Alchemist that can lower his AC by another -20, or alongside a Lord that gives him 60% resistance to everything". Party synergy is a big thing. You definitely have room for vanilla characters like a fighter (one of the very best weapons in the game is fighter-only), but if your party is too vanilla as a whole you might be in for a rough time.

Also a lot depends on what your definition is of "comfortably" and "too much savescumming". If you're having to reload 5x to survive one random battle, then yeah your party's not good enough. But if you're just the type of player that wants to make reloading a rare thing because you feel like it's semi-cheating, you probably have to ditch that attitude for the EG postgame. It's meant to be a huge pain in the ass.

 

[webman]

I guess the big question is what your party composition is right now.

Fighter, Valkyrie, Thief, Alchemist, Samurai, and Bishop.

Do I absolutely need a lord and a ninja just for protection? Are there viable postgame party compositions that don't require them?

Right now, the alchemist isn't very useful after crafting QoL items since good ore and good armor is hard to find.

Are there any good grinding spots? Right now, the best place I know of fighting is the dragons repeatedly in the ice dungeon after talking to the old man.

 

[Reality]

I'm hardly a post game expert but if you are training super party members converted from monsters you can get away with level 350~ (Phoenix, brainsly, floor bosses etc)

Most "real" characters I'd want level 800 though~

The healthy option is probbably to quit Ibag once you beat Nordetanit and just forget about getting to the top again for the the second superboss.

 

[gman42]

Lord levels really slowly and is fairly optional, if you did decide you want one, best bet might be using your medal of power from the end of the main game and convert your fighter so you can keep all his current EXP. I will say the good thing about Court Sanctuary is it reaches a "good enough" level quick enough, and that allows you to concentrate on forging armor strictly for more AC, which is enormous in terms of survivability as you start to encounter some of the more ridiculous enemies late in the postgame.

While the thief gives great peace of mind for opening up chests in the postgame that will fuck you up, he doesn't bring that much else to the table, as there's not a ton to steal in this game outside of the final superboss. Converting him to Ninja would make a lot of sense, if you can find a Hermit's Knife you can do it directly, but then you can't change his Ex skill to Replica which is not only useful in its own right, but also will allow you to exploit a glitch and mine unlimited +2 ores early in Ibag Tower. Since you have a Bishop, I assume you're sitting on a ton of gold at this point, so you could do a traditional class change and buy the max experience for him to give him a headstart.

As far as grinding for experience, best bet is to find some Greater Demons and do some marathon battles where you let them keep calling for help. They're relatively harmless, really won't be able to touch you after a few buffs, and you can fight them for hours if you want. Pro tip, turn animations and delays down to the minimum before you go in. (Once you get as far as Cave of the Ancients you'll have access to Chaos Demons for even more EXP, and they're barely any tougher). If you go with my above advice and want to level up your Ninja (or any lagging character) to catch up with everyone else, have everyone else run near the end of the battle and let him reap all the rewards.

 

[gman42]

The healthy option is probbably to quit Ibag once you beat Nordetanit and just forget about getting to the top again for the the second superboss.

Probably, but if you've made it that far, you're already a glutton for punishment, so why the hell not. Incarnation is exponentially tougher than Nordetanit, but they did give him one semi-weakness that gives you a method to strategize against him, at least. One of my goals if I ever go back to my old party for more grinding is to see if I can ever get good enough to square off against him "straight up" without casting Miracle or cheesing my weapons for a certain status effect.

 

[Haplo]

I guess the big question is what your party composition is right now. There's definitely not just one way to beat the game, but there are some quality of life aspects of certain characters that I feel like you have to have at least one or two of in your party to survive postgame. Ninja with his ambush prevention and Replica EX skill would be one, a pure Alchemist is another (can't undersell the ability to forge extra AC onto every piece of armor at an increasing rate as his mastery skill goes up). Hunter with Lightning Strike and Pursuit Sweep ain't half bad.

So like when you ask the question of what the difference is between a lvl 300 and 1000 fighter, part of the answer might be "well he's playing alongside a lvl 1000 Alchemist that can lower his AC by another -20, or alongside a Lord that gives him 60% resistance to everything". Party synergy is a big thing. You definitely have room for vanilla characters like a fighter (one of the very best weapons in the game is fighter-only), but if your party is too vanilla as a whole you might be in for a rough time.

Also a lot depends on what your definition is of "comfortably" and "too much savescumming". If you're having to reload 5x to survive one random battle, then yeah your party's not good enough. But if you're just the type of player that wants to make reloading a rare thing because you feel like it's semi-cheating, you probably have to ditch that attitude for the EG postgame. It's meant to be a huge pain in the ass.

Exactly. I did not have a high level or high purity Alchemist synthesis.
To be honest, I did not beat the post-game. Reached floor 16 and decided beating the fucking Stargazers somewhat reliably would require way too much grinding then I was prepared to do. Guess I could try to push trough/save scum to the 1st boss version. But I didn't bother.

Anyway I had the party around level 100-150, BUT my Summoner mostly carried my game/party. I did have mostly monsters-turned-adventurers with their unique properties and abilities (except for dwarf Valkyrie and Summoner). Plus summons - Gaia floor boss carried me hard trough a large part of the post-game. So actually I've found early post-game relatively easy. Later tower levels are another story, though.

 

[gman42]

Yeah Stargazers are their own personal level of hell. My strat for them was usually some version of the following:

--Have ninja protect my alchemist that was 100% guaranteed to be targeted and slaughtered first
--Have hunter fire off a lightning strike and pray it didn't get swallow returned
--Pray that my samurai would get targeted and *would* swallow return
--Have everybody else cast whatever group instant death/stoning spells they had (thankfully the one thing they did to be "nice" was give them very low resistances, but it still doesn't help when they always go first and get in 8728352345 attacks each)

Really couldn't beat them with any consistency until I had everybody's AC in the -40s *and* had everybody up to ~2000 HP. Ridiculous.

 

[webman]

Thanks for the info everyone. I'll level my characters some more and see if that would overcome the enemies I'm having trouble beating.