hard vs merciless: thoughts?

[yaoi hole]

playing p5r on hard mode atm and am up to kaneshiro, and i'm considering merciless instead. i've read up on the objective differences but i'm wondering which one you guys felt was more fun and challenging (comparatively).

my current concerns from looking at just the numbers (please correct/answer these with your insights):
1. the decreased damage dealt seems to be more or less redundant because of tripled technical/weak/crit damage (in most cases), which you're trying to hit 100% of the time anyways

2. i've also read online "merciless is just hard except you get more exp and money". if the combat approach for both modes is the same (weak/crit/tech), wouldn't i just be getting more rewards no strings attached (again, in most cases)?

3. merciless game over removes option to retry from previous safe room, but wouldn't this be negated by making (even more) saves when near one (making the "retry from previous safe room" option the exact same as "retry from previous save")?

4. how bad does the 1/3 cut to exp gain feel for sacrificial fusions? just numbers wise this feels the most "merciless", i spend half my time looking at a fusion calculator already and id rather not add to it lol, though i guess i could just change back for only this.

cheers

[Acheroni]

Play Merciless, theres gonna be a boss coming up, AND I SWEAR TO GOD ITS THE WORST BOSS IN THE GAME, that you will need to to be on Merciless. And it aint even the final boss lmao.

[Mayo]

1. The decreased damage dealt is entirely redundant for the bulk of the enemies due to the tripled damage. It greatly eases dungeon crawling and turns mid-bosses into 1 turn jokes. This does not apply to Palace Bosses who typically do not have elemental weaknesses, cannot be afflicted with ailments for technicals and cannot be crit. Even then, this hardly makes them any more difficult than Hard because:

2. Merciless gives you more exp and gold, and the player level factors heavily into the damage formula. For the same amount of time in a dungeon, a Merciless player will always end up with more levels due to their fights being faster AND receiving boosted exp and fash on top of it. Since Level has a major effect on damage dealt, you will usually barely notice the additional reduced damage on Merciless against a palace boss due to having those levels to prop up your lowered damage.

3. I didn't even know Retry from Save Room was an option. If you just save in Save Rooms I don't see how this is any different.

4. No idea what you mean here. If you mean that exp for sacrificial fusion is reduced in Merciless, I genuinely haven't noticed it being a problem, and in any case you get boosted Gold in Merciless too, so you can afford chucking Personas into the grinder.

Ultimately, it boils down to your approach to random mobs - Hard makes certain tactics more effective (eg. AOE physical spam, Ring of Envy Megidolaon for mob clearing), while Merciless hugely rewards crit fishing, Lullaby spam and hitting weaknesses, while slightly blunting the strength of the Hard mode methods. In either case you'll be yawning your way through random encounters if you know how to deal with them.

[Arifufu]

i am on first playthrough and i easily pick normal, because this is my truly first P5R experience, i also done 1st playthrough of my P4G run with normal and endup with very hard. I think in the end i will endup with Hard on P5R, my reason is i am loving doing critical hit and also hit weakness to trigger all-out attack on P4G, so merciless will prevent me to do All-out attack because merciless triple damage of critical hit + technical hit + weakness hit, but i think i will try merciless first then hard in the end, also increase exp is fine by me for merciless however the biggest downside is actually doing critical hit, i mean i do A LOT critical hit with my Chie on my P4G, so i want do the same on my P5R by pick Hard mode instead. But again this is very subjective to the player and i think most people easily pick merciless because increased exp so less grinding i think? I just wish i can bring very hard P4G to P5R: less exp, less money, less damage to enemies, more damage taken to party members, no retry on dungeon/battle and no triple damage at all.

[Jauhis]

Originally posted by Hentai Senpai:

Play Merciless, theres gonna be a boss coming up, AND I SWEAR TO GOD ITS THE WORST BOSS IN THE GAME, that you will need to to be on Merciless. And it aint even the final boss lmao.

Nope you dont need to use merciless on that boss, Game not that hard and i'm not that good on videogames. Hard difficulti it is.

[Faiyez]

I've never ever bothered with Merciless. The premise is so stupid.

The most challenging default difficulty is Hard.

[eXtonix]

Both are piss easy as soon as you get SP items. Don't bother looking up what difficulty to play on.

[Fahrenheit]

Originally posted by Hentai Senpai:

Play Merciless, theres gonna be a boss coming up, AND I SWEAR TO GOD ITS THE WORST BOSS IN THE GAME, that you will need to to be on Merciless. And it aint even the final boss lmao.

This. I just ran into this boss today. It's not hard, just so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ tanky that switching to merciless makes it more doable

[Acheroni]

Originally posted by Jauhis:

Originally posted by Hentai Senpai:

Play Merciless, theres gonna be a boss coming up, AND I SWEAR TO GOD ITS THE WORST BOSS IN THE GAME, that you will need to to be on Merciless. And it aint even the final boss lmao.

Nope you dont need to use merciless on that boss, Game not that hard and i'm not that good on videogames. Hard difficulti it is.

I doubt it bro but ok.

[yaoi hole]

Originally posted by Hentai Senpai:

Play Merciless, theres gonna be a boss coming up, AND I SWEAR TO GOD ITS THE WORST BOSS IN THE GAME, that you will need to to be on Merciless. And it aint even the final boss lmao.

haha im checking back on again after just beating kaneshiro, it wasn't too bad thanks to isis (mediarama) + rakshasa (recarm) + kin ki (bunch of debuffs/buffs) fusion alarms, but did have to use some coffee and takamedics since i didnt have anyone else on support duty but joker. is it harder on hard? id assume so because i leaned so heavily on technical at the end (i also had no idea you could stat ailment bosses? or is it possible to do for enemies in a boss fight who arent technically the actual boss?)

[yaoi hole]

Originally posted by Mayo:

1. The decreased damage dealt is entirely redundant for the bulk of the enemies due to the tripled damage. It greatly eases dungeon crawling and turns mid-bosses into 1 turn jokes. This does not apply to Palace Bosses who typically do not have elemental weaknesses, cannot be afflicted with ailments for technicals and cannot be crit. Even then, this hardly makes them any more difficult than Hard because:

2. Merciless gives you more exp and gold, and the player level factors heavily into the damage formula. For the same amount of time in a dungeon, a Merciless player will always end up with more levels due to their fights being faster AND receiving boosted exp and fash on top of it. Since Level has a major effect on damage dealt, you will usually barely notice the additional reduced damage on Merciless against a palace boss due to having those levels to prop up your lowered damage.

3. I didn't even know Retry from Save Room was an option. If you just save in Save Rooms I don't see how this is any different.

4. No idea what you mean here. If you mean that exp for sacrificial fusion is reduced in Merciless, I genuinely haven't noticed it being a problem, and in any case you get boosted Gold in Merciless too, so you can afford chucking Personas into the grinder.

Ultimately, it boils down to your approach to random mobs - Hard makes certain tactics more effective (eg. AOE physical spam, Ring of Envy Megidolaon for mob clearing), while Merciless hugely rewards crit fishing, Lullaby spam and hitting weaknesses, while slightly blunting the strength of the Hard mode methods. In either case you'll be yawning your way through random encounters if you know how to deal with them.

just got back from the 2 day in-n-out palace run on merciless and honestly i almost forgot id changed it til i realised id gained 3 levels and 150k gold lol. and honestly you're right, my approach is the same (weak/crit/tech) and the only difference between normal and hard/merciless is that you dont get to ♥♥♥♥ around and find out if you can save a few sp. other than that my merciless experience has been just hard but more enjoyable because im not suffering through endless exp grind.

i also got to try the fusion alarm for 3 major personas to use for shadow kaneshiro, and despite the 1/3 exp cut it literally didnt seem to matter since the biggest appeal (to me so far) has been the randomly upgraded skills (i ended up getting recarm + mediarama paired w SP adhesive 3, which did alot of heavy lifting).

i guess merciless has kept me abit more on my toes? might be a skewed opinion since i just beat kaneshiro, but i wont lie i could get used to this exp and money boost lmao

[yaoi hole]

Originally posted by Arifufu:

i am on first playthrough and i easily pick normal, because this is my truly first P5R experience, i also done 1st playthrough of my P4G run with normal and endup with very hard. I think in the end i will endup with Hard on P5R, my reason is i am loving doing critical hit and also hit weakness to trigger all-out attack on P4G, so merciless will prevent me to do All-out attack because merciless triple damage of critical hit + technical hit + weakness hit, but i think i will try merciless first then hard in the end, also increase exp is fine by me for merciless however the biggest downside is actually doing critical hit, i mean i do A LOT critical hit with my Chie on my P4G, so i want do the same on my P5R by pick Hard mode instead. But again this is very subjective to the player and i think most people easily pick merciless because increased exp so less grinding i think? I just wish i can bring very hard P4G to P5R: less exp, less money, less damage to enemies, more damage taken to party members, no retry on dungeon/battle and no triple damage at all.

ive just tried merciless and you will definitely still be able to do all out attacks, unless youre extremely overlevelled i guess? baton pass damage boost means you will be 1 shotting enemies though. its been more or less the same as hard but much more enjoyable because i dont need to sit for 30 minutes grinding exp.

that would definitely be cool but idk how much fun id have if its just mindless suffering for no particular gain (since theres not that much room for mechanically challenging yourself, its mostly micromanaging turns/skills/personas etc, which is fun in its own right but i dont wanna do that for 90hrs with a handicap), i definitely feel the harder the game the better the "reward" should be (see: dark souls). didnt base p5 have a similar merciless mode to p4g?

[yaoi hole]

Originally posted by Faiyez:

I've never ever bothered with Merciless. The premise is so stupid.

The most challenging default difficulty is Hard.

i was playing on hard but wondering if merciless actually made the game harder or not, seems so far its pretty much the same as hard except i dont need to dedicate 1hr to grinding to exp and gold anymore and im honestly ok with that lol, i rly dislike grinding.

[yaoi hole]

Originally posted by eXtonix:

Both are piss easy as soon as you get SP items. Don't bother looking up what difficulty to play on.

yea i have sp adhesive 3 on joker already, was just hoping maybe itd be more of a fun challenge on merciless. its the same as hard but i dont need to spend 1 hr grinding anymore so im ok with that

[yaoi hole]

Originally posted by Hentai Senpai:

Originally posted by Jauhis:

Nope you dont need to use merciless on that boss, Game not that hard and i'm not that good on videogames. Hard difficulti it is.

I doubt it bro but ok.

i feel like with the setup i ran its definitely doable on hard, would just take longer. detox + fusion alarm sonas made it much smoother of a ride. i did it with ryuji + ann + makoto to negate weakness one-mores. makoto with marakukaja (accessory) was a big help.

i had dekaja on kin ki iirc but never needed it bc hitman and guard were perma cc'd/debuffed. kinda just did the usual buff/debuff>cc>hit/heal/revive 100 times over until he died lol like many other bosses, prob wouldve been more infuriating on hard because id have to spend 1hr grinding exp beforehand, and maybe 100 more turns because no dmg boost. (id like to note at the end of this id only managed to use 80% of jokers sp pool bc savior/relief bloodline + sp adhesive 3 LOL)

[Emerald Lance]

I like hard better. Halving the amount of exp and money from encounters can be directly counter balanced by simply getting into twice as many fights; increasing grind doesn't increase difficulty, it only increases time spent. I do like the triple crit damage going both ways, that's more in line with what I want out of extra hard difficulty modes.

I played the vanilla game on PS4, and I feel like hard mode in P5R is about the same as normal mode in P5. The only thing I'm sad about is that it means there's nothing harder without imposing artificial difficulty by wasting my time grinding. Once mods are elaborate enough to be able to alter the difficulty settings, I may go that route for a tougher experience on the NG+.