Act 3 has me very, very disappointed and IDK if I want to finish out the game...

[Kitty]

It seems the best thing to do is make glass cannon build comps and one shot enemies. Anything else is too weak.

Lune's abilities are very weak in the late game. She doesn't have a single "extreme" damage ability nor a single high damage 1 hit ability. Her support abilities are all she has and support pictos/luminas are very weak in act 3.

Enemies are way too strong to be using "normal" or "conventional" builds against. Unless you want to be at it for hours and hours per boss. If that is fun for you, so be it.

I like a well-balanced challenge that I can scrape by with "any" playstyle and any build that has some thought put into it. Alas, this game does not allow for any meaningful build variety.

[toughnails]

Act 3 is non-linear, you're supposed to figure out the zone order yourself, but if you can't be bothered:
- do the party member quests first, Maelle's in particular takes you to a big new area where you will level up
- go to Lumiere to finish the main story, don't wait until later, else it will be too easy
- go to Frozen Hearts to keep leveling
After that it should be pretty straightforward

[Kitty]

Originally posted by toughnails:

Act 3 is non-linear, you're supposed to figure out the zone order yourself, but if you can't be bothered:
- do the party member quests first, Maelle's in particular takes you to a big new area where you will level up
- go to Lumiere to finish the main story, don't wait until later, else it will be too easy
- go to Frozen Hearts to keep leveling
After that it should be pretty straightforward

Oh don't get me wrong, I'm max level with maxed weapons and made one-shot builds for Maelle, Verso, and Monoco.

It's just so anti-fun the way the game is balanced. Even at the strongest you can make your characters, the difference between stacking stupid damage buffs and not is insane.

Why do we get 100mil+ damage builds (post-patch) that get to play first twice (first strike, cheater pictos) but no shield on heal pictos? The lack of pictos that let you fight longer and make a few more mistakes is saddening.

The game is so balanced around getting a bunch of trade-off damage boosts so you can chip away at Simon's 50 million HP (not exaggerating, and on normal diff). Trying to fight him like a normal human is nigh impossible for your average player. I can max VIT and DEF, put on the tanky pictos, survivability luminas, and have perma shell with Lune healing and buffing every turn, and STILL die in one turn to that guy after slugging away at his second phase for what feels like eternity to the hands and brain.

[Tiasmoon]

There's a decent amount of shield Pictos and a few weapons, but there's so many Pictos and weapons in the game you really have to look to find these.

However Simon removes all shields and transfers them to himself at the start of all his turns.
So shields are bad against him anyway.

[Platapoop]

Let's for now pretend Simon doesn't exist when we consider balancing.

I think they need to squish the damage number down. Right now the opportunity cost of going tanky is way too high. As in your option is like tank 3 hits and take 10 turns to kill a boss or one shot the boss. How pictos damage stack is way too crazy and they should have lowered the values or not make everything multiplicative.

Like I mentioned before, a comfy MH build would prob be at most 2x-3x slower than a full sweat speedrun build. That's kind of what I want a fully damage optimized build would be like in this game too. (well besides damage, they would need to nerf break spam too, and i think some on death skills are too good).

Now unfortunately, these changes are so much that they shouldn't be put in the game. They need to create a new difficulty if they want to do an overhaul and only affect that difficulty. As other people have suggested, parry should still make you take some chip damage, dodge needs some negatives too.

[Kandidaten]

Originally posted by Platapoop:

Let's for now pretend Simon doesn't exist when we consider balancing.

I think they need to squish the damage number down. Right now the opportunity cost of going tanky is way too high. As in your option is like tank 3 hits and take 10 turns to kill a boss or one shot the boss. How pictos damage stack is way too crazy and they should have lowered the values or not make everything multiplicative.

Like I mentioned before, a comfy MH build would prob be at most 2x-3x slower than a full sweat speedrun build. That's kind of what I want a fully damage optimized build would be like in this game too. (well besides damage, they would need to nerf break spam too, and i think some on death skills are too good).

Now unfortunately, these changes are so much that they shouldn't be put in the game. They need to create a new difficulty if they want to do an overhaul and only affect that difficulty. As other people have suggested, parry should still make you take some chip damage, dodge needs some negatives too.

Except Simon you can tank everything with Monoco shielding you party, if you can avoid 1 out of 3 attacks. That was what I was doing my first play through, and then Simon stole 9 shields. Uh-oh. I need to learn to play suddenly.

EDIT: And the floating sperm wyrm, unique boss fight that was easier in my solo character play through than my first one. It was easier dealing damage as Maelle (my solo character this playthrough, some 600 lumina dumped into her, no one else) than it was actually fighting the boss having him absorb 18 AP every chance. However - damn glad I did the actual strat of the game prior to going full on ALL PICTOS ONE CHARACTER, and play dodge or parry.

Still dreading Simon in this playthrough. I'll need to learn how to parry (or dodge) his attacks.

EDIT2: I prefer being CHONKY in games, and it worked in this game, obviously playing on the expert difficulty, any screw up was more penalised than normal or story. Simon however deals the same damage on all difficulties. You die, or you have a tanky build that don't die in one hit. There's no difference.
After 2 hours on Simon I had him on like 5% HP, and I thought yeah, alright, I got him basically. I'll switch to story from expert. Guess what. I didn't do shiz. It still played out exactly the same way, he dealt exactly the same damage

[Abysswalker]

Yeah, I agree with this. For me the only reliable way to actually survive in battles are shields (I am on expert difficulty) cause everything else just doesnt cut it. There is a picto that gets you 10% damage increase per shield but there should be more pictos that actually increase damage without being a glass canon. Against Simon shields are useless though so unless you spend hours leanring to perfect parry his moveset (even then its prob still difficult cause of the speed he attacks) its either get one shot or one shot him.

After Act 2 the balancing went completely out the window. You can tell they didnt know what to do once you unlock damage beyond 10k. Imo they should have adjusted health and damage output on enemies in Act 3 and simply have us increase damage output to 1M instead of unlimited and remove the limit once you actually are in NG+.

[Kandidaten]

Originally posted by Abysswalker:

Yeah, I agree with this. For me the only reliable way to actually survive in battles are shields (I am on expert difficulty) cause everything else just doesnt cut it. There is a picto that gets you 10% damage increase per shield but there should be more pictos that actually increase damage without being a glass canon. Against Simon shields are useless though so unless you spend hours leanring to perfect parry his moveset (even then its prob still difficult cause of the speed he attacks) its either get one shot or one shot him.

After Act 2 the balancing went completely out the window. You can tell they didnt know what to do once you unlock damage beyond 10k. Imo they should have adjusted health and damage output on enemies in Act 3 and simply have us increase damage output to 1M instead of unlimited and remove the limit once you actually are in NG+.

Eh, game works fine. But sure, they could have gone that route.

It's a single player game, where the power fantasy is present, and feels "in game lore accurate". ♥♥♥♥ can be broken. Only thing that was ABSOJONGLES broken was Medalum prior to last patch. It is supposed to, at 20+, double burn damage. That it did. Except it also increased ALL your damage if target was burning. And this also made it so burn dealt 2x damage, beyond the 2x it already dealt.