#Ronin got an extra one shot but still all that potential is there | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

crystalelemental · 6 years

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Alright, listen. Since the Untold games became a thing, I've been hoping for EO3U. I think it's the one game that had a lot of potential early on, but wound up being unreasonably frustrating by the end. While I'd love to get another shot at the game itself, I'm not...overly optimistic about it.

On the one hand, with EO5 being the recent game in the series, this means that mechanics from that game likely carry over. Plus side, that means any summoned units go to a new row, and you can have up to three. This is so much better than EO3's initial take of "it costs a party member slot to do that, so have fun using Yggdroid or Ninja." I greatly appreciate this particular change. On the downside...actually, I can't think of any significant downsides. This seems pretty much ideal. The only mechanic I was less than thrilled about was the food thing, which didn't really interfere with anything but was kinda pointless. But gaining experience from the random events in the forest? That's great. Actually wait, there is one drawback: race skills. There weren't races in EO3, and I hope the Untold version keeps it that way, because I hated the race skill thing. "Yeah, make sure you've got one of each race so you can explore thoroughly!" Maybe I don't want to do that. Maybe I didn't want to run Masurao and didn't have room for a Rover. Maybe I don't want to reclass them to Fencer because I like the human Fencer portraits better. Stop making me do things!

But the real difficulty is going to be fixing what's most broken: the story and gameplay. Let's be honest with ourselves: EO3 was incredibly frustrating to play, because you had to play the main story a collective 3 goddamn times. This. SUCKS. On the one hand, if they remove it, it creates a situation where there's only one course of action, and players aren't really responsible for anything, which invalidates the entire point of choosing how to deal with the threat at the bottom of the labyrinth. On the other hand, if you don't get rid of it, players now have to go through the same five strata a collective 3 times, one of which involves figuring out the incredibly obtuse method to achieve the hidden ending. Personally, I don't know which I prefer. I like the idea of having a choice in the matter, but it's a slog to get through five strata three times, and if they don't at least give hints about the true ending conditions, which you have approximately 5 seconds to figure out and accomplish, I'll be upset. Oh, and it just hit me this would be even worse, because you'd be worrying about two different modes: Story and Classic. With Story mode, it could potentially require you to play every route 3 times to get what you need, then doing the same in Classic.

I think the best possible option is to offer players, upon completion of the story, the option to start over, but after the second stratum to make a different choice. Nothing diverges prior to that, and it cuts out a pretty substantial amount of time completing quests and exploring. The only other option, really, is finding a way to synthesize the story so you can still battle everything to get the drops and the classes, but I am 100% sure that it would be the sticking point that fans of the original games complain about. You know, like how the Ronin/Hexer are starting classes in Untold 1 and you lose story around Ren and Tlachtga. Or in EO2U, with all the extra story stuff that doesn't quite fit as well. It would simplify the tedium of playing the game so many runs, but I'd bet actual human money that if they took that option, fans would get mad.

Really though, my one, true wish is for the Abyssal God to just...stop. Stop being such an asshole. For the love of god, make this beatable. I'm serious, everywhere I look on EO3, it implies that you can't actually win without a gimmick build, and I'd believe it. That fight is outrageous to an extreme, and I just want to beat it.

Also, I hope they do the thing EO2U did and bring in classes. Highlander and probably Fafnir are a given. I don't really know what else they'd bring in, but I'd personally hope for War Magus, and maybe Ronin/Hexer? Point being, I love the abundance of class options in EO2U, and I really hope this continues.

#etrian odyssey

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feralknights · 7 years

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Palablog: OB56+OB57

Hoo nelly, fellas. OB56 + OB57 were absolute doozies for me, and I mean that in the best way possible. I'm sorry I haven't responded to asks or been updating much lately, things just got busy and then I was running a lot of hardware upgrades so I missed a chunk of the OB56 patch cycle, and ... yeah.

I'll get the Skye gushing for OB56/OB57 out of the way now: These two patches have been significant quality of life improvements for me as a Skye main and all across the board. I think the art team knocked it out of the park with both the Samurai Ash skin (I didn't call it Ronin for a reason, will explain!) and Kunoichi Skye. We saw the entrance of the Skye Mastery skins, too. OB56 brought us the 1800->2000 HP boost as well as Retribution finally getting the nerfs it's needed since Lex was released, and OB57 gave us the reworks to Debilitate and Surprise Attack.

In a weird way, Skye having that extra 200 HP made something of a negative impact on me early on. I was so used to the audio cues for low HP at 1800 that I'd overplay my hand and spent the first day or two fumbling around getting my butt handed to me. I've gotten used to it over time; the tweaks to her damage dealing and range made my life a whole lot easier and has enabled me to (in some cases) actually work around people that actually buy Illuminate.

I still haven't tried Surprise Attack, but I'm actually somewhat curious to now. At first I thought, "just slapping more damage onto it will not fix the fact that it is an objectively terrible legendary," but I gave it more thought and gave Raynday's video on SA a watch. Now, he did amazing with it, but he also had a team comp and players on his side that allowed him to have some of that pressure aleviated from him. Similarly, our test sample for his praise was one match-- I want to give it more hands-on time, but this means I'm probably going to have to build a deck that balances some of Skye's mandatory cards with cooldown cards and find what works right for me.

Is it weird I'm actually kind of looking forward to trying Surprise Attack at all?

Admittedly, I'm going to miss the innate cauterize effect of Poison Bolts, but if you think about it, the reworks to Decrepify allow it to actually be even more punishing, even more dangerous than it ever was before. Decrepify is a card that rarely leaves my Debilitate decks with Skye, and now it's more than likely going to be a cornerstone for the Twilight Assassin.

With Strix's introduction, it did highlight issues that Skye still has with cards, but I can understand if the team wants to pump the brakes on further Skye adjustments for the time being: Healing Vapors is still essentially a useless card at 1-2, mediocre at best at 3, and just not worth the value at 4. Comperable cards on different champions grant way more value at almost any level, from Androxus' Abyss Walker healing a burst of 40/80/120/160 to Lex's Fortitude healing 25/50/75/100 damage across 1.5s, and then they have access to healing items such as Life Rip-- and Life Rip is essentially the only form of feasable long-term self-sustain that Skye has available to her.

I'm still trying really hard to Devil's Advocate myself on how to justify Slip Away still existing in the form it does. Ninja and Dissipate both serve the purpose for stealth speed boosts, and I personally feel Victory Rush is one of the best cards in the game. Again, personally, I'd rather it be "gain damage reduction while in stealth" at the same values it has right now. Of course, it was easier to justify conditional up-to 20% DR when Skye was at 1800 HP.

OB56 brought a lot of exciting changes in general: Ash was given an additional ult charge on Rally Here, arguably her weakest legendary. Admittedly, if I know a team is going to try to maintain point presence and stay with me, I will play the hell out of Rally Here; the damage boost makes ally Ruckus players or even a good Fernando or Ying turn into crazy point-dominating monsters. Buck's Bulk Up was given an extra boost-- and I'll be honest, I'm glad. I sometimes feel bad for the guy, because I rarely ever see him played anymore.

Cassie's Exaction was given a light bop on the nose in OB56 though the thing I hear complained about the most is that her dodge roll is almost always up as long as you can land one shot-- and that's honestly not too hard given how much faster her projectiles move these days. Jenos' HP reduction was warranted and welcome; I love the guy and I play him pretty hard as a support, but he was just too hard to kill. I barely felt the adjustments to Stellar Wind or Astral Mark, I run a CD reduction build on him and just keep churning heals.

Jenos does present an interesting situation that I hope gets looked at: Though negative status effects are cleared from her when she goes into her ice block, Astral Mark will persist. Essentially, if Evie is running the Reprieve Legendary card, she will get all of that healing as well as the healing from Jenos, and all of that healing will just keep going right when she comes flying out of it. In essence, this allows even a mediocre-at-best Evie to be an absolute immortal monster.

Retribution got nerfed hard in OB56, and I could not be happier. I'm actually a bit surprised, if only because I was hoping for some QOL tweaks, or one or two touches, I didn't expect such a drastic swat on the ability. OB57 brought some interesting changes to Lex, and slowly he's coming to the point where I feel like he could potentially be fun to play as as much as against.

The semi-auto was a good change, I feel, but after a few days I started to see the problems with Lex's new Magnums: The ammo count is too high, the accuracy drop from rapid firing is too low, and it does nothing to address the problem of Lex having In Pursuit, still arguably one of the most devastating abilities in the game.

"Feral, you're mad. You just hate Lex. 1050 damage over 1.5s is nothing!"

I mean yeah I do dislike Lex's kit, but you can't argue with the fact that as he is right now, Lex can pop In Pursuit for unerring auto-aim accuracy for 1.5s at long range while Combat Sliding in at a target I dare say farther and faster than even Cassie's roll, then hammering 10 shots out for long-range *and* burst potential that comes dangerously close to Point Blank Skye.

In essence, I just hope that In Pursuit's functionality is given a second glance now that he's got these devastating new Magnums. I also would like to see if it's possible to get the rapid fire inaccuracy increased a bit, because gosh. dang.

Lian is an interesting case; I make claim about how much I hate auto-aim on Lex but I mind it slightly less on Lian. I really wish I could better explain it, but something just feels "off" about her kit-- maybe it realy does have something to do with her being able to have two auto-aims? I'll have to ruminate on it more.

and the grover puns man wtf arrghghhggh

Skipping ahead a little, the Ying changes are great. Back as recently as 3 patches ago, I was on the train that Ying needed to have Lifelike boosted by 5-10% to help address her throughput, but Illusory Rift is absolutely great and the changes to her in-hand attack are almost terrifying to play against-- but in a good way, of course.

A'right, now that we've gotten this far: It's time for Strix.

I love Strix. Dude is insane. His rifle feels great, offers a lot of feedback when you're firing, and it feels responsive. His pistol does a lot to offer him some close-range gameplay, and I like that he's so polarizing (long or short range) compared to Kinessa (long or mid-range). Flare is incredibly powerful, and I would argue almost *too* powerful-- I don't mean that this needs to be slapped hard, but definitely monitored. They say "large radius" in his skill description, but from some light testing it looks like it's a near-100 unit radius. I run Flare XL 3 (increases the reveal range significantly) and Overburn 3 (increases flare duration by 3s), so I'm covering a pretty massive swath of a map for about 6 seconds-- that's basically Cassie's ult without the CC/speed boost with a pretty short downtime.

I thought I'd be a little more leery of toggle stealth, but it actually works great. I've compared Strix a lot to some Warframe friends as being like a MOBA version of Ivara, and when I say this, I mean it in the most complimentary fashion that I can possibly achieve. Ivara is one of my favorite Warframes as her gameplay pushes for a methodical, strategy-driven focus, stealthing at opportune times, and playing to enemy awareness.

As I said earlier in regards to Skye and her sustain cards, Strix has a card, Escape Plan. If you aren't familiar with it, if Strix is at 65% or lower health, Escape Plan will heal Strix for 100/200/300/400. As a burst heal sustain, this is great, and arguably as good as a maxed out Abyss Walker and close to the potential of other non-legendary sustain cards for Flanks. I really hope the team considers giving HV a rework to be closer to this; the current state of Healing Vapors makes it take too long for too little effect. But, again, balance, and changing too much in too short of time, etc., etc. -- I can still hope, though!

And in case you didn't know, there's another one on the horizon: PALADINS STRIKE! A 5v5 actual MOBA-style Paladins game for Android/iOS. The game has me excited, and I've signed up for the alpha. I have some concerns and criticisms about the decisions the team has made for the game, however, and I'll highlight that in my next post.

edit: Made a few tweaks for clarity, going through and highlighting/emphasizing certain words. Also forgot:

Why did I say "Samurai Ash" instead of "Ronin Ash?" Because ... really, there's nothing about this incarnation of Ash that makes her a ronin. She's wearing full armor and helmet, discussing honor very heavily, and carrying a flag that would signify she's actually serving a feudal lord/house, rather than being honorless. I was kind of bummed that the only Ash/Skye interaction we got was a one-way "poison bad!!" thing from Ash that is just basically the same thing as her default voice pack.

#paladins #paladins champions of the realm #ob56 #ob57 #balance #palablog

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