Have i messed up with my game? (BR15)

[erick_far]

I've been enjoying the game since this is my first run, but iv'e read several times that i should keep my BR low, i just reached Balterossa and another town i cant remember it's name but i don't know if i should slow, I should really really avoid to fight enemies? to think about it makes me think it won't be a fun game, but i don't know if keep on playing the way i'm actually doing.

[Stabbey]

It depends. How have you been fighting before? How do you clear areas normally?

[erick_far]

until now i'm figthing almost 90% of the enemies around, and doing every side-quest it's able to do, what i'm afraid it's if it gets harder to beat the game if i continue this way. But by now i'm enjoying the game, actually i can have a max of 12 characters and a max of 4 unions BUT I'M WITH 2 UNIONS AND 10 CHARACTERS

[wimmsk]

I wouldn't worry too much about it. If you run around slaughtering every enemy, grinding the same place multiple times, then some of the later battles might turn out incredibly hard. Simply battling some enemies in every zone you have a quest or story event in won't hurt you much. In fact, unless you are already quite familiar with the game mechanics, a low br run can be quite hard.

Aside from that, a low br run is mostly so that you can later optimize your units; due to the way stats are increased, if you want to get the most out of units, you will want to control how much your BR increases compared to battles fought and therefore skills and stats increases (and only do so once you have assembled you final unions). That mostly means primarily fighting strong enemies and getting a few of your units killed (and revived) every time.

[Stabbey]

Yeah, you don't have to be overly concerned about your BR in the PC version. That said, you may not want to fight 90%+ of enemies in the levels. I recommend fighting enemies which are in your way, ones hard to bypass (birds, enemies in narrow corridors), and ones which drop components party members want for upgrades (the wiki has that information).

If there's no need to fight an enemy, don't. A lot of them can be dodged with good use of diagonal running, and in some cases, with strategic use of timeshift (although that has its own risks.)

[erick_far]

Thanks! ok, it's like to be balanced, not to go and kill every enemy revesiting places over and over again, i'll add the wiki to my bookmarks so I can keep growing into the game mechanics.

[PinkPаптҥэя]

Originally posted by erick_far:

...iv'e read several times that i should keep my BR low, i just reached Balterossa...

Battle Rank is basically the way the game tries to simplify your battle experience in a number.
BR is used to adjust the difficulty (mainly HP) of some enemies (but not all) to your battle experience.

http://lastremnant.wikia.com/wiki/Battle_Rank

The other effect of BR is that the growth of the base stats (STR/INT/HP/AP etc) is dependent on the BR difference between your party and the enemy.
If your BR is 25 below the enemy, your base stat growth doubles.
If your BR is 14 above the enemy, your base stat growth shrinks to only 10%!!
(To the rescue that BR growth also shrinks almost as much)

That is the reason BR is 'bad': You basically stop growing, once you outgrow enemies BR wise.
Fortunately as the games progresses, new areas open whose enemies become stronger and have a higher BR themselves.

Nevertheless you should not waste BR without getting something in return: A true improvement of your units, i.e. better stats and skills.

The problem is that the most important factor by which the game calculates the BR increase in a battle is the number of enemy unions you have defeated.
If the battle took you 20 turns or 1 turn makes only a minor difference.
So if you link a single monster with 2 unions and defeat it in a fraction of a turn this will give you a greater BR increase than defeating a rare that takes several turns.
On the other hand most stats/skills rise per number of arts assigned/executed, thus in general a 10 turn battle yields 10 times the stat/skill EXP of a one turn battle.
Therefore what you want is a lot of stat/skill EXP with as little BR EXP as possible.
That's why you keep reading that you should not fight.
This is only partially true, it should read: Do not fight what does not make you stronger!

So in a nutshell:
- As long as the battles are challenging, it's no problem to battle them out.
- As they become unchallenging or even easy, avoid them!

As you reached Balterossa you might have crossed The Southwestern Road. There the common enemies have a BR of 14. With your current BR of 15 you are already quite high for that area and on the edge of slowing your growth down. You should definitely fight more challenging enemies than these.

BTW you can tell the BR difference between you and your enemies by the starting position of the global morale meter: If more than half of the morale meter starts in the blue, the enemy BR is too low!

[SenMithrarin85]

Its generally a good idea to keep fighting to an absolute mimimum until you have your final party. Once that happens, everyone gets stats and BR is not too much of a problem anymore.

You can easily hit BR 15 by the heroic ramprts/darken forest (single soul quest)/southwestern road. I know I did when I first played the game.

The only unique leaders you've outlevelled (assuming you haven't hired them already that is) are Violet, Gabriel and Rhagoh. None of which are really worth keeping around. Gabriel is debatable, but has never worked out for me. So don't sweat it too much.

[BLiNDMaNKiND]

hm, i would say, play like you want
even you kill the ♥♥♥♥ out the maps (grind areas and kill all enemys)
one time i killed everythin allover, for a sample, i was with lvl~40 at nest of eagles..
and? ..nothin, i killed good boss (white conquerer) and final boss rank8 easy on first try, they did not even had a chance to use overdrive..., coz they was dead before, lol

keep br low is for, when you want near all your teammembers at near similar stats and skills - so they are not so "weak" as you would hire em on higher battle rank (weak is a bad word, they still do good dmg)

i would say, when you wanna play with fun, jus play like you want to

[erick_far]

Originally posted by pinkpanther:

So in a nutshell:
- As long as the battles are challenging, it's no problem to battle them out.
- As they become unchallenging or even easy, avoid them!

BTW you can tell the BR difference between you and your enemies by the starting position of the global morale meter: If more than half of the morale meter starts in the blue, the enemy BR is too low!

That's exactaly what i need to be aware

[erick_far]

Originally posted by BLiNDMaNKiND:

hm, i would say, play like you want
even you kill the ♥♥♥♥ out the maps (grind areas and kill all enemys)
one time i killed everythin allover, for a sample, i was with lvl~40 at nest of eagles..
and? ..nothin, i killed good boss (white conquerer) and final boss rank8 easy on first try, they did not even had a chance to use overdrive..., coz they was dead before, lol

keep br low is for, when you want near all your teammembers at near similar stats and skills - so they are not so "weak" as you would hire em on higher battle rank (weak is a bad word, they still do good dmg)

i would say, when you wanna play with fun, jus play like you want to

that's definitely the way i use to play, maybe i'm just worried too much after reading many things like that hahaha

[A Greg to the Past]

It's definitely not a huge issue. I had 181 hours before I beat it and only ended up at BR101. I did tons and tons of grinding. Nothing was ever impossible.

[Stabbey]

Originally posted by SenMithrarin85:

Its generally a good idea to keep fighting to an absolute mimimum until you have your final party. Once that happens, everyone gets stats and BR is not too much of a problem anymore.

That's not really "a good idea", so much as it is the IDEAL way to play.

But even though it is the ideal way to play, it is not necessary. I will never play this game like that, ever. Keeping fighting to an absolute minimum until you have your full party is just too ridiculously restrictive, because the way the 40+ party members are distributed, it takes more than half the game until you have your full party, and a couple really good people are not even available until like the three-quarters mark.

I don't care how ideal it is, I'd rather have fun instead of obsessing over perfectly avoiding as much combat as possible, and so that's why I dislike recommending that to a new player. It gives them a completely false impression of the actual difficulty of the game.

[SenMithrarin85]

Originally posted by Stabbey:

Originally posted by SenMithrarin85:

Its generally a good idea to keep fighting to an absolute mimimum until you have your final party. Once that happens, everyone gets stats and BR is not too much of a problem anymore.

That's not really "a good idea", so much as it is the IDEAL way to play.

But even though it is the ideal way to play, it is not necessary. I will never play this game like that, ever. Keeping fighting to an absolute minimum until you have your full party is just too ridiculously restrictive, because the way the 40+ party members are distributed, it takes more than half the game until you have your full party, and a couple really good people are not even available until like the three-quarters mark.

I don't care how ideal it is, I'd rather have fun instead of obsessing over perfectly avoiding as much combat as possible, and so that's why I dislike recommending that to a new player. It gives them a completely false impression of the actual difficulty of the game.

Whats to obsess over? Apart from one or two areas like the catacombs, avoiding battle is not an issue.

Fighting too much will nerf the capabilities of new recruits and if anything will make battles harder anyway. The "When the Rose Blooms" sidequest is one of the hardest to complete on low BR, but its actually no harder than it is if you go in at higher BR anyway. Thats where the confusion of a high BR's impact comes from. Enemies do not get "stronger" you get weaker due to nerfed stat growths.

The stats of new recruits are often pretty low and it does you no favours if their future stat growths are reduced.

A low BR game is "ideal" as you put it, but is also not as duanting or difficult for a new player as you make it out to be. There's a video series by Beau Lee on youtube that shows how to make a low BR game easier for newbies.

[PinkPаптҥэя]

For a first time player I think it's important to gain some battle experience early on and maybe even waste some few BR for that. But as soon as you know the weaklings well enough, you should avoid further battles with them and focus on the rares.

"When the Rose Blooms" difficutly mostly depends on whether you take it on with 9 or with 12 active party members. This quest pops up quite early in the game, where the differences in battle experience from different playing styles (low BR vs fighting everything) still are quite small. The more you delay this quest, the greater your opportunities to develop your units.

I think only by completing the following side quests, your party will get enough experience to beat this quest; no further battles needed:

• The Dreaming Rose
  
• For Love the Bell Tolls
  
• The Losing Game
  
• The Wanderer
  
• Bravery and Loyalty
  
• After a day's work
  
• A Single Soul

Actually just doing the side quests in the right order together with unlocking the guild ranks gives enough battle experience (skills/stats) to beat this game in a proper fashion.
But the game generally does a bad job in guiding you regarding the order of the side quests. As soon as you progress through the main story, a multitude of side quests become available, and with no external help from a walkthrough or assistant program you have no idea which of the side quests are managable or too hard at that point.