Enemy attacks are too focused on strong area-of-effect attacks.

[AZESON]

One thing that bothered me the most while completing the game on Expert difficulty was that the enemies' attack ratio was too focused on powerful area-of-effect attacks.

Early in the game I tried using Maell as a tank, but it didn't take long for me to realize that she was capable of killing bosses with one attack with her strongest damage.

For these reasons, it is unfortunate that in Expert difficulty, enemies use such strong area-of-effect attacks that the characters' defense and recovery skills are useless, and in Expedition difficulty, enemies are not strong enough to use those skills, so most builds are made as one-turn-kill builds that maximize attack power.

[Spudi]

Even without considering area attacks, there is no point in defending and hp by the end of the game. For any difficulty

[Observer]

Yeah that's rly not well done. Creating hard bosses and making them fun at the same time are two different things that devs seldom manage to achieve. Especially if you look at the optional bosses. They are hard but not fun. It reminds me of the horrific decision to kill every optional boss in FF10, god, no1 know what terrors you had to do to even consider figthing them. However, it's hard to programm fun and hard (optional) bosses

[asdf]

Originally posted by Spudi:

Even without considering area attacks, there is no point in defending and hp by the end of the game. For any difficulty

Tanking is a lot more viable than you think.. you can get -40% damage from greater shell, -40% damage from greater powerless, and -30% damage from the lumina that reduces damage by 30% at the cost of 1 AP per hit (you can combine it with the kumina that gives +1 AP whenever you get hit to mostly offset the drawback), and if you stack HP pictos on top of that, there isn't much in the game that tanking isn't viable for if you try. You can also potentially get another -30% from enfeebling mark too, although that's a bit less consistent since it's unlikely you'll always have mark up on the enemy turns.

With the pictos that give rush, shell, powerful on heal and the picto that gives a 15% heal whenever you apply a buff, it's trivially easy to heal everyone back to full every turn too. That being said, it's so easy to one shot enemies that there isn't much of a reason to go through that much effort to tank hits when you can just kill everything before they act anyway.. but if you don't want to just one shot everything, it is possible to tank enemy hits straight up if you're built for it, even from Simon.

[asdf]

Originally posted by Observer:

Yeah that's rly not well done. Creating hard bosses and making them fun at the same time are two different things that devs seldom manage to achieve. Especially if you look at the optional bosses. They are hard but not fun. It reminds me of the horrific decision to kill every optional boss in FF10, god, no1 know what terrors you had to do to even consider figthing them. However, it's hard to programm fun and hard (optional) bosses

In the case of this game, the lategame balance is just too broken to create any interesting challenges by changing the bosses themselves. I think if they wanted to have a more interesting lategame they would need to put a hard limit on the amount of lumina points a character can have so that you can't just pick everything you want and change the damage scaling so that most of the lumina/picto damage buffs stack additively instead of multiplicatively so that you can't do ridiculous amounts of damage just by picking all of the damage buffs.

[Ratsplat]

Tanking is viable. However, you NEED cleanses because many late game hits just outright put debuffs on you.

[AZESON]

Originally posted by asdf:

Originally posted by Spudi:

Even without considering area attacks, there is no point in defending and hp by the end of the game. For any difficulty

Tanking is a lot more viable than you think.. you can get -40% damage from greater shell, -40% damage from greater powerless, and -30% damage from the lumina that reduces damage by 30% at the cost of 1 AP per hit (you can combine it with the kumina that gives +1 AP whenever you get hit to mostly offset the drawback), and if you stack HP pictos on top of that, there isn't much in the game that tanking isn't viable for if you try. You can also potentially get another -30% from enfeebling mark too, although that's a bit less consistent since it's unlikely you'll always have mark up on the enemy turns.

With the pictos that give rush, shell, powerful on heal and the picto that gives a 15% heal whenever you apply a buff, it's trivially easy to heal everyone back to full every turn too. That being said, it's so easy to one shot enemies that there isn't much of a reason to go through that much effort to tank hits when you can just kill everything before they act anyway.. but if you don't want to just one shot everything, it is possible to tank enemy hits straight up if you're built for it, even from Simon.

If you make full use of defense and recovery pictos, you can expect the effect as you said. However, that's a situation where you give up dealing damage and only maximize defense, so if you set up all party members like that, it will take too long to deal with the bosses in the later stages.

The problem is that most of the attacks have area-of-effect effects and make you tired by continuously parrying or evading, but I don't think going all-in on defense will solve it.

[asdf]

Originally posted by AZESON:

Originally posted by asdf:

Tanking is a lot more viable than you think.. you can get -40% damage from greater shell, -40% damage from greater powerless, and -30% damage from the lumina that reduces damage by 30% at the cost of 1 AP per hit (you can combine it with the kumina that gives +1 AP whenever you get hit to mostly offset the drawback), and if you stack HP pictos on top of that, there isn't much in the game that tanking isn't viable for if you try. You can also potentially get another -30% from enfeebling mark too, although that's a bit less consistent since it's unlikely you'll always have mark up on the enemy turns.

With the pictos that give rush, shell, powerful on heal and the picto that gives a 15% heal whenever you apply a buff, it's trivially easy to heal everyone back to full every turn too. That being said, it's so easy to one shot enemies that there isn't much of a reason to go through that much effort to tank hits when you can just kill everything before they act anyway.. but if you don't want to just one shot everything, it is possible to tank enemy hits straight up if you're built for it, even from Simon.

If you make full use of defense and recovery pictos, you can expect the effect as you said. However, that's a situation where you give up dealing damage and only maximize defense, so if you set up all party members like that, it will take too long to deal with the bosses in the later stages.

The problem is that most of the attacks have area-of-effect effects and make you tired by continuously parrying or evading, but I don't think going all-in on defense will solve it.

Eh.. that doesn't really match up with my experience at all. I found it so easy to do damage that even with a tanking build most bosses got one shot.

I mean, this is my fight against Simon for instance on expert difficulty, no dodging/parrying:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzkotwJdzIk

I left my weapons at level 20 so that the enemies didn't die too fast because that made the game too boring which cuts my damage in about 1/4 compared to what a level 33 weapon would do.. and to be honest, even at level 20 weapons if I were inclined to I could've pretty easily one shot Simon without sacrificing any tanking potential just by putting the 2 lumina with +50% damage on the first attack on Maelle and not using any attacks until I had 3 gradient points for Gommage.

[AZESON]

I know what you mean. But isn't that a setting that everyone can do in the middle of the story, when you've collected all the pictos until almost the end content? The developers need to take into account that not everyone will go fight all the optional bosses.

Originally posted by asdf:

Originally posted by AZESON:

If you make full use of defense and recovery pictos, you can expect the effect as you said. However, that's a situation where you give up dealing damage and only maximize defense, so if you set up all party members like that, it will take too long to deal with the bosses in the later stages.

The problem is that most of the attacks have area-of-effect effects and make you tired by continuously parrying or evading, but I don't think going all-in on defense will solve it.

Eh.. that doesn't really match up with my experience at all. I found it so easy to do damage that even with a tanking build most bosses got one shot.

I mean, this is my fight against Simon for instance on expert difficulty, no dodging/parrying:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzkotwJdzIk

I left my weapons at level 20 so that the enemies didn't die too fast because that made the game too boring which cuts my damage in about 1/4 compared to what a level 33 weapon would do.. and to be honest, even at level 20 weapons if I were inclined to I could've pretty easily one shot Simon without sacrificing any tanking potential just by putting the 2 lumina with +50% damage on the first attack on Maelle and not using any attacks until I had 3 gradient points for Gommage.

[asdf]

Originally posted by AZESON:

I know what you mean. But isn't that a setting that everyone can do in the middle of the story, when you've collected all the pictos until almost the end content? The developers need to take into account that not everyone will go fight all the optional bosses.

Originally posted by asdf:

Eh.. that doesn't really match up with my experience at all. I found it so easy to do damage that even with a tanking build most bosses got one shot.

I mean, this is my fight against Simon for instance on expert difficulty, no dodging/parrying:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzkotwJdzIk

I left my weapons at level 20 so that the enemies didn't die too fast because that made the game too boring which cuts my damage in about 1/4 compared to what a level 33 weapon would do.. and to be honest, even at level 20 weapons if I were inclined to I could've pretty easily one shot Simon without sacrificing any tanking potential just by putting the 2 lumina with +50% damage on the first attack on Maelle and not using any attacks until I had 3 gradient points for Gommage.

I know what you mean. But isn't that a setting that everyone can do in the middle of the story, when you've collected all the pictos until almost the end content? The developers need to take into account that not everyone will go fight all the optional bosses.

Simon is the strongest boss in the game. There's nothing after him. If you're not expected to have everything else when you fight Simon, then when are you expected to have them? My team was still a pretty long way from being "maxed out" too - there were a lot of pictos that were available in shops that I didn't have enough chroma to buy that could have made my team a fair amount stronger.

Anyway, if you want to see something in early Act 3, then here's the Sprong fight - I don't believe I was particularly overleveled, it was one of the first things I did in act 3. I wasn't at the point where I could trivially one shot everything yet, but I was fighting him quite a bit earlier than I needed to (there were many bosses I could have fought before him that were much weaker than he was and would have given rewards that would have made this fight much easier)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jwcx5vIXfcs&t=17s

It was a build based around tanking, and it didn't take all that long to kill him. In fact, I've beaten pretty much the entire game tanking hits from the enemies on expert difficulty (well, at least up until the point where I started seriously outscaling the enemies and everything just died before they could do anything).