Keter realization is way too hard

[ebola]

I just finished the game, and I gotta say I don't enjoy the second and final Keter realization fights. All of the fights after the realization are fine but the Heart of Aspiration and Silent Girl are way too hard. I get that the gimmick for the Heart fight is to use Learn on C when she's using her block counter dice to get cheesy staggers, but without doing that it feels like the fight is just impossible. And the only way I got through the Silent Girl fight is by blitzing the boss in her 2nd phase through her 9 protection with a lot of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Slash power stacking. Even then I failed to kill her five times before I was able to do it. In hindsight maybe I could have beaten Silent Girl by abusing Learn on the two tentacles in the back, but because they respawn anyway it seems hopeless.

I think the Heart fight would be better if the amount of strength the boss gets wasn't always a lot more than you could reasonably hope to win against, no matter what you do. That, or if it didn't heal massively after hitting you with its attacks. I think the Silent Girl fight would be better if the minions in phase 2 didn't respawn, since they're already extremely hard to kill, and you start off with a time limit. The devs are good with balance on the other fights, so just in general I think these two phases should get looked at.

[Starakira]

Well, we have to have something to challenge the "Let's just put all of my strongest pages on one floor!" strategy.

[changb1]

Agreed on HoA being pure agony, felt every clash decision must be carefully planned out, and even with the optional strategy available, one or two unfortunate clash loss could result in your whole team being wiped out during the mass attack.

Not to mention having all your hard work wasted on one of the spawns to see it restore full health during that phase.

[ebola]

Originally posted by Starakira:

Well, we have to have something to challenge the "Let's just put all of my strongest pages on one floor!" strategy.

True, but I don't want to dismantle the pages that I JUST PUT on all of my dudes for the Reverb Ensemble just to beat this (and then because of this have to make five more pages of teams immediately after...)

[Zairas]

Nah, the Ice Queen was the worst imo. Angela felt like complete garbage in that fight it was so painful. At least heart and silent girl were cheesable

[CarThief]

Heart of Aspiration was a definite POS, yeah. Can't stop the power-gain from being overwhelming no matter what you try, everyone so far has had their own methods of cheesing it, because it's the only way to win.

Using Learn, using Nikolai's Disposal to delete her counter dice, using Boris/Blue Reverbation's power-nullifying exclusives (likely along with Divinatory strike to block the mass-attack), and many other cheese strats.

If they redesigned it to make the power-gain much more easily disruptable, it would be less of a issue to beat it as intended, by killing 4+ or so lungs and taking her out when she's staggered. Or they could reduce the power she gets from all those stacks to half, or something like that.

---

As for the final phase... Eh, it's hard, but doesn't require total cheese. Still has it's issues though. It doesn't quite seem worth playing along with the Nail and Hammer, but having sort of cheesed it with Angela's summation mass attacks (which delete cards they win a clash against, handy vs the "+hit per light/+power per light" effects), it can be hard to say what exactly could use a change and what kind of change.

The final phase could stand to give the back hands a warning though. Supposedly they start attacking if left undamaged for 3 turns. Yet, nothing tells you that, you have to find that out yourself.

Overall i'd say the Hand phase is fine once they add a warning for the back hands. It sure is the easier of the two when you realize the power nullifcation effects going on. It's the Nail and Hammer phase that may need a bit of a rework with their intense complexity and difficulty in pulling off the cost increases/decreases.

Ah well, still tons better then dealing with Aspiration, that one was just BS.

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Ice Queen was also annoying, but once you got them out, it gets easier. My tactic was to just bumrush getting them out of there like in the original fight, taking hits as need be, but i suppose that just didn't work out.

Some have had better luck in taking turns focusing on breaking them out, and deflecting attacks, which in hindsight was probably better as the ice rotates between weak and strong defence cards every turn.

---

I've had some issues with Bloodbath but i got a feeling the triple stagger attack was meant to intentionally hit with the dramatic well-timed entry of the librarians afterwards.

It initially gave me the impression you needed a VERY specific set of card usage to avoid stagger before the battle properly started. Perhaps they should rework it to be something more... Unavoidable?
Like scripting it to Immobilize Angela with a single stagger-attack heading her way?

[ebola]

Ice queen isn't that bad, but the solution isn't obvious. You shouldn't be working towards getting your other librarians out until after you hit emotion level 5. It's not even that the back hands need a warning imo, because even if you know what's coming it's usually not good enough to stop it from happening.

The hammer and nail thing isn't worth bothering with the gimmick, I'll agree. They raise/lower the costs of their own pages anyway so there's no point in trying to counter that. Just kill them.

[AritheReaper]

Ice Queen is only difficult because you need to figure out how best to get a foothold. Once you've started freeing librarians, you've basically already won.

On the topic of the discussion, yeah, Heart of Aspiration and Silent Girl could use a redo. Heart's gimmick is so powerful that if you play by its rules, you're practically guaranteed to lose the fight. Silent Girl is no beautiful work of game balance, either.

[Sieg]

Just redid this fight today while achievement hunting

I'm kind of surprised Silent Girl is giving everyone so much trouble, but given this is the only realization with checkpoints and she's a surprise ALEPH and the final abnormality, I'd say she deserves to be ♥♥♥♥-kickingly tough

Heart of Aspiration has less excuses, but even without Learn cheese it feels reasonably doable. Xiao is nearly a guaranteed win if you keep her alive to max emotion, as HoA is really weak to mass attacks. Xiao + Maxim let me do the absurd pre-bugfix version of that fight, with some difficulty. Showing up with the A-team can really overpower it. (And yeah, Keter realization is our Day 49 equivalent, so it needs to be able to not instantly fold to a dream team of the most busted key pages)

[Starakira]

Originally posted by Sieg:

I'm kind of surprised Silent Girl is giving everyone so much trouble, but given this is the only realization with checkpoints and she's a surprise ALEPH and the final abnormality, I'd say she deserves to be ♥♥♥♥-kickingly tough

Actually, she's supposed to be a TETH level Abnormality.

[ebola]

I agree it should be hard, but the fights felt hopeless. What should be considered here is that the fight immediately after it pales in comparison to the difficulty of the realization before it.

[Sebee]

Originally posted by Starakira:

Originally posted by Sieg:

I'm kind of surprised Silent Girl is giving everyone so much trouble, but given this is the only realization with checkpoints and she's a surprise ALEPH and the final abnormality, I'd say she deserves to be ♥♥♥♥-kickingly tough

Actually, she's supposed to be a TETH level Abnormality.

And Army in Black is supposed to be Zayin

[CarThief]

Eh, is there any logic to their threat level designation from the Lobotomy days? They've all degraded in power story-wise due to neglect, and their power is balanced gameplay-wise to what we'd likely have when we unlock their fights.

How tough they are in LoR is no indicator of how tough they'd be story-wise. And perhaps one could think of it story-wise as their power increasing as the Library's power increases and collects more Light. That would kinda make sense.

[Sieg]

Originally posted by Starakira:

Actually, she's supposed to be a TETH level Abnormality.

In the non-canon beta version of Lobotomy Corp's gameplay mechanics she was TETH, sure. In Library she has the ALEPH-exclusive Third Trumpet play for her fight.

Just like how Price of Silence has been promoted to WAW, as only WAWs get Second Trumpet - ZAYIN, TETH, and HE get First

[DemonchanSama (Lilyia)]

Originally posted by ebola:

I just finished the game, and I gotta say I don't enjoy the second and final Keter realization fights. All of the fights after the realization are fine but the Heart of Aspiration and Silent Girl are way too hard. I get that the gimmick for the Heart fight is to use Learn on C when she's using her block counter dice to get cheesy staggers, but without doing that it feels like the fight is just impossible. And the only way I got through the Silent Girl fight is by blitzing the boss in her 2nd phase through her 9 protection with a lot of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Slash power stacking. Even then I failed to kill her five times before I was able to do it. In hindsight maybe I could have beaten Silent Girl by abusing Learn on the two tentacles in the back, but because they respawn anyway it seems hopeless.

I think the Heart fight would be better if the amount of strength the boss gets wasn't always a lot more than you could reasonably hope to win against, no matter what you do. That, or if it didn't heal massively after hitting you with its attacks. I think the Silent Girl fight would be better if the minions in phase 2 didn't respawn, since they're already extremely hard to kill, and you start off with a time limit. The devs are good with balance on the other fights, so just in general I think these two phases should get looked at.

Heart of Aspiration was real torture for me. If you win every clash optimally she will only have + 12 at the end, don't bother wasting cards on trying to kill any of the adds, you don't need to kill them to win.

What I did was I setup a nugget to have puppet strings and the passive from one of the reindeer that gave +1 str/end when recovering from stagger and let him clash HoA itself to instantly stagger him giving some free ups, and since puppet strings made him unkillable I used that same nugget to clash with the other attacks to spare my others the wrath.

When it was time to go on the offensive, Aka right after I got Learn, I had + 5 str, so a single clash with learn staggered HoA. After that it was GGEZ.

Silent girl wasn't really that hard for me, just spam mass attacks in phase 2, you want those first two tentacles dead or nearly dead after the first scene. then everyone can freely lineup and gangbang her. I ended up killing her without really meaning too, ( I didn't even get to see whatever the 9 light card did that you are supposed to use
situationally.)while using mass attacks to whittle down the back two.

[DemonchanSama (Lilyia)]

Originally posted by RSS:

Nah, the Ice Queen was the worst imo. Angela felt like complete garbage in that fight it was so painful. At least heart and silent girl were cheesable

Queen fight was a puzzle fight, once you learned what to do, it was pretty easy, you'll restart a few times on it for sure though.