Postgame Farming: The Shards for those Accessories

[Talithmara]

Just thought I'd ask to fill in the gaps in my knowledge.

As far as I can tell, the rules for getting the shards are:

1) They can only be collected for the four in your main attack party.
2) They only drop from the "Powerful" monsters, not the "Formidable" ones.
3) Best farmed in the final stratum where you get 3 each time you get any.
4) They stop dropping for a character once you get their halo? (PLEASE tell me I'm wrong on this one, I DESPERATELY want two halos on a few specific characters!)
5) The drop rate on them happening at all is... less than ideal, so you WILL need to reset the corridor dozens of times if you want a bunch of them for a bunch of characters.

In particular, I'm curious if anyone knows if...

1) Is there like... specific enemy types that ALWAYS drop them? I've been assuming it's random, but if it's specific enemies I can just single them out and reset faster without fighting everything!
2) Will they "spill over" into your support line if your attack line is already decked out? I tried testing this for a bit but for all I know maybe I just never fought the right enemies or something.
3) Am I wrong about the halo thing? Was it purely RNG prioritizing other characters?
4) Anything else that might be good to know about this?

[Endora]

1) Up 'till now that seems to be the rule, never got one for the supporters. But, to be honest, as soon I got for one I changed their position for a supporter, so I can't say it's a valid test;
2 and 3) Thanks for the tips.
4) I have 2 of Rean's, Ruffu's and Wazzy's halos, but maybe I just got the material before crafting the item, I'll have to test it some more to be sure;
5) Yeah, but that's ok for me, since I'll get new fresh chests to open :)

Sry I don't have any conclusions about your questions, but I have to thanks because now I'll have some more things to go after.

[jlawleraz]

Originally posted by Talithmara:

Just thought I'd ask to fill in the gaps in my knowledge.

As far as I can tell, the rules for getting the shards are:

3) Best farmed in the final stratum where you get 3 each time you get any.
4) They stop dropping for a character once you get their halo? (PLEASE tell me I'm wrong on this one, I DESPERATELY want two halos on a few specific characters!)

In particular, I'm curious if anyone knows if...

3) Am I wrong about the halo thing? Was it purely RNG prioritizing other characters?

You're not wrong with the 3 each time thing, I just found other stratum to play much faster and I got more from groups of 2 than the 3 simply because I could go through so much quicker.

You can definitely get a bunch of the same crafted items for the same character. I had like five+ for some characters. I had the opposite problem you did - I kept getting drops for the ones I already had instead of other characters in the same party. But I wanted to see the special group scenes, so I was sometimes using characters that already had the crafted items.

[Scais]

Yes, the shards only drop for the 4 active party members. Save before fighting a powerful foe. If it drops a shard, check what party member it was. If it isn't for the character you want, load your game. In your party menu, swap the desired character with the character that received the shard. Fight the boss again and the shard drop will be for the desired character. Basically the shard drop is seeded and will always be for the #1, #2, #3, or #4 position in your party roster. So if Rean is your #1 and the shard drop was for the #3 character, reload your game and make Rean #3 and this time you'll get his shard drop.

You cannot get more than 9 shards per character (ever, even if you turn them into accessories). If your active party is full on shards you get a silver stone instead.

[jlawleraz]

Originally posted by Scais:

You cannot get more than 9 shards per character (ever, even if you turn them into accessories). If your active party is full on shards you get a silver stone instead.

That part of the game might be a bit buggy. Here's six auras for Juna.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3011943540

[Talithmara]

Originally posted by Scais:

Yes, the shards only drop for the 4 active party members. Save before fighting a powerful foe. If it drops a shard, check what party member it was. If it isn't for the character you want, load your game. In your party menu, swap the desired character with the character that received the shard. Fight the boss again and the shard drop will be for the desired character. Basically the shard drop is seeded and will always be for the #1, #2, #3, or #4 position in your party roster. So if Rean is your #1 and the shard drop was for the #3 character, reload your game and make Rean #3 and this time you'll get his shard drop.

If this is how it works, I've got some testing to do. I've been just keeping one slot in the party who didn't have their Halo yet to try to force the shards for specific characters I wanted to prioritize, but it also felt like the drop rate for them was lower than in the lower stratums (just more shards when it DID happen.) But maybe that seeding will just turn it into a Silver Sealing Stone if it would have been given to someone who was maxed. Or maybe that seeding is rolled upon entering a floor and is fixed regardless of who is in that slot by the time you fight it, which could be how people have been getting around the limit of 9 shards per character, unknowingly, by shuffling characters around between fights or something?

Just a thought. Seems like something that'd be easy to set up a conditional branch to stop so I doubt it, but clearly SOMETHING is a bit wonky right now if people are getting that many for one person!

[Seagal]

Originally posted by Talithmara:

If this is how it works, I've got some testing to do. I've been just keeping one slot in the party who didn't have their Halo yet to try to force the shards for specific characters I wanted to prioritize, but it also felt like the drop rate for them was lower than in the lower stratums (just more shards when it DID happen.) But maybe that seeding will just turn it into a Silver Sealing Stone if it would have been given to someone who was maxed. Or maybe that seeding is rolled upon entering a floor and is fixed regardless of who is in that slot by the time you fight it, which could be how people have been getting around the limit of 9 shards per character, unknowingly, by shuffling characters around between fights or something?

Just a thought. Seems like something that'd be easy to set up a conditional branch to stop so I doubt it, but clearly SOMETHING is a bit wonky right now if people are getting that many for one person!

You should keep one member in the active party who doesn't have their accessory yet. If shards drop and it's originally for someone who already is shard capped, then you will automatically get shard drop for a party member who doesn't.

It's only when everyone in the active party is shard capped that the game will automatically give you a sealing stone.

The game RNG resets whenever you kill a formidable foe, so you can also save scum sealing stones if you want by checking them and then reloading and killing formidable foe if you don't like the drops.

[Philosopher]

If you set the game's difficulty to very easy, you can breeze through the last stratum, killing only the stuff you can't defeat with a field attack. Makes farming stones and accessory shards much faster. And it's even faster with High Speed Mode.

[Philosopher]

Originally posted by Seagal:

The game RNG resets whenever you kill a formidable foe, so you can also save scum sealing stones if you want by checking them and then reloading and killing formidable foe if you don't like the drops.

At some point as I was grinding stones for Lion King, Kagura and other rare lost art quartz like that, it seemed to me like this stopped applying. So I just unsealed all the 20 or so stones I had kept. =/

[Koby]

Trying to collect 9 of these shards for each and every character (or even just for the main ones I like to utilize) is an even bigger pita than grinding out 1,500 battles. Following the advice here, I've ran through Stratums 5-0 three times and only managed to complete shards for a single character while getting 2-6 shards for all the other characters I had in my party. Unfortunately instead of giving shards.. the game continues to just give me those the Silver Unsealing Stones... and there is pretty much nothing left for me to get or want from those. I've already max leveled every character and I'm only around 1,250 battles completed.

[Dr. Rudolf von Richten]

If you want to get all the shards for every character (and I did) the best thing to do is to run only the 0th stratum and ignore every enemy except for the 'strong' ones (the ones with the black and yellow 'danger' bars). Don't bother with the 'formidable' ones either, they don't drop shards (they do drop Black Zemurian Ore Fragments for your weapons though).

On the 0th stratum, the 'strong' monsters have about a 50% chance to drop shards, and when they do, it's always 3, up to a maximum of 9 in total for any given character, including those you turned into Orbs already, so if you have one Orb (3 shards) and 4 shards, you will get 2 more, not 3.

Oh and don't forget that you can only get shards for characters in your active party, not for those on support of back at the base, so you need to keep switching them up if you want all of them. It is a load of grinding, but such is the way of this game. At least it's not needed for any achievements or missions.

[Koby]

Originally posted by Dr. Rudolf von Richten:

On the 0th stratum, the 'strong' monsters have about a 50% chance to drop shards, and when they do, it's always 3

I get that, but only like 1 out of every 3-4 of them actually tend to drop Shards for me... I just keep loading up on the Silver Sealing Stones. I guess I just have bad luck, cause it's feeling more like a 25% chance to drop shards for me.

[Dr. Rudolf von Richten]

Originally posted by Koby:

I get that, but only like 1 out of every 3-4 of them actually tend to drop Shards for me... I just keep loading up on the Silver Sealing Stones. I guess I just have bad luck, cause it's feeling more like a 25% chance to drop shards for me.

OK, that's just unfortunate. Or maybe my assessment of 50% is wrong. Farming for items is all about zoning out and just putting in the hours, which isn't fun in any way shape or form, but it is what it is.

One thing though, I leveled up all character to 250 by fighting monsters (at lvl +100), and got a bunch of shards (as well as BZO fragments and lvl 15 on all MQ's) in the process. If you shortcutted the leveling through Azure Droplets, you missed out on those 'free' shards.

[Stabbey]

I don't think there's any need to grind out 9 shards for all 51 characters, just pick some of your favorites. Plus, not every character really benefits from having super-high CP regen instead of other accessories. Even in the final Coda boss, you're limited to three teams of 8 for 24 total.

Originally posted by jlawleraz:

Originally posted by Scais:

You cannot get more than 9 shards per character (ever, even if you turn them into accessories). If your active party is full on shards you get a silver stone instead.

That part of the game might be a bit buggy. Here's six auras for Juna.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3011943540

That definitely seems like a bug because even on the last stratum where said enemies drop 3 shards at a time, if three would put a character over the 9 total shard limit, they would get less than three.

[Talithmara]

I don't know if it's been fixed yet since I haven't played in a bit (the classic "I'm not ready for this to be over" I feel with sendoff games like Sky 3rd) but I did notice a visual number display bug, where it said some characters had two of their ultimate items when I clearly only had one.

I can't help but wonder if the reason some people have been getting more is because of this happening with the shards themselves, bypassing the limit. The fact that the shards themselves limit how many you get (Ex: If you have 7, you only get 2 instead of 3 from a fight that should have given 3) leads me to believe that they might not have a simple "If actual number is greater than 9, reduce to 9" handler, and put all their faith in the "only give X many total" code... which can hypothetically, via glitches, go over the cap and therefore never be limited again for that specific character.

This is all just speculation though.

[Philosopher]

Originally posted by Talithmara:

I don't know if it's been fixed yet since I haven't played in a bit (the classic "I'm not ready for this to be over" I feel with sendoff games like Sky 3rd) but I did notice a visual number display bug, where it said some characters had two of their ultimate items when I clearly only had one.

I can't help but wonder if the reason some people have been getting more is because of this happening with the shards themselves, bypassing the limit. The fact that the shards themselves limit how many you get (Ex: If you have 7, you only get 2 instead of 3 from a fight that should have given 3) leads me to believe that they might not have a simple "If actual number is greater than 9, reduce to 9" handler, and put all their faith in the "only give X many total" code... which can hypothetically, via glitches, go over the cap and therefore never be limited again for that specific character.

This is all just speculation though.

I don't think so. I have seen the same issue you describe, but had no problem farming all the shards for all characters. =/