Best Party

[mrbiggest]

Any ideas? Tried a few so far and think maybe spearman, archer, valkyre, brawler but it doesnt have a lot of magic. My thief and dark mage kept dying. Knight seems weak for some reason. Haven't tried many of them.

[Yomigael]

Check the manual -- there's a section that shows the base stats of each character type and a short guide on the 'optimal' party in the FAQ section.

[MF Kraven]

Originally posted by mrbiggest:

Any ideas? Tried a few so far and think maybe spearman, archer, valkyre, brawler but it doesnt have a lot of magic. My thief and dark mage kept dying. Knight seems weak for some reason. Haven't tried many of them.

I had my best success with an Archer, Brawler, Mage & General. I grinded pretty hard in the first floor until my Mage started getting stronger. The meta is slash, pierce, blunt & magic. Never use magic against magic users, & even if you think you can win the second battle (whenever prompted) but your health is a little low, run away and find someplace to recover. It sucks to be grinding for a character so long just to have em be taken out by two butchers.

[smbhax]

I'm stubbornly trying my "four beefy dudes" approach from the Jam version ; )--although this time around you can't double-up on classes, so my 4 Executioner team is out. ;_; ^ _^ So grinding the first dungeon square with a General, Dwarf, Executioner, and Guard--have only lost two Guards in the first hour or so due to bushwhackings by AoE-casting evil mages, which I don't think happened in the Jam version. ; D

[mrbiggest]

Spearman seems to be my strongest so far.

[UltimaLuminaire]

Start with damage type coverage, but later on you can cycle through recruits until you unlock the coverage you need. It's just a matter of time spent.

Don't know if anyone else is posting findings on damage mechanics. It seems that enemy HP is a suggestion. Your attacks generally have a hidden lethality factor, and these are influenced by a number of things. Generally, your raw stats, skill rank, and resistance of the enemy should be the most obvious, but I also found that there's a huge variance if you do not focus-fire. On rounds where you have someone defend and others attack, the rate for lethality seems to diminish to a noticeable degree, even against enemies that no longer pose a threat. That said, when mastered, skills can overcome this limitation and multi-hit skills start to scale fast when it comes reliably killing 1+ enemies in a turn. Then there are the final skills, which can wipe out 10 or more stacks of enemies in a go, regardless of your team focus-firing or not. It's a weird but satisfying feature to what would normally be a slog ala Bard's Tale 99 barbarians lol. Of course, I'm not looking at the code as I type this. For all I know there is no lethality mechanic and there's something else at play, but this is what I'm experiencing atm.

[smbhax]

I don't think there's a "hidden lethality factor." The main difference in inflicting damage that I think I've noticed over the Jam version is that your characters seem to spread their hits out across all members of the targeted enemy group, rather than all hitting just one enemy in that group at a time--so you may not see any kills for a while as your damage will tend to be distributed evenly across the whole group, but then once they start to go down, they may go down in rapid succession, because they've all got fairly low HP by that time.

This is the same way the enemies attack your group (and did in the Jam version as well).

Overall, the effect of the change to your characters' targeting is to make combat more dangerous for the player, because more enemies remain alive and able to attack your characters for more rounds.

Possibly it worked the same way in the Jam version and I'm just imagining this. ^ _^

[Yomigael]

There's a bit more to that than meets the eye.

In the jam version, the attacks were focused on the last member of the monster group, while in this version, the attacks hit a random member of the monster group. In both versions, the damage would spread to other members of the group if the initial target got killed.

This makes battles a bit more dangerous and unpredictable when they start, but once monsters start going down, they'll go down fast, and with stronger attacks, you can start killing multiple weaker or dying enemies with a single hit.

As for the damage formula, it was changed quite a bit from the jam version. In the jam version, the formula was simplistic and quite unbalanced, while here it's way more complex, as it requires the player to not only grow the party's stats but also learn and develop skills, as their efficiency increases with skill tier. Some skills have a hidden ability to cause instant death, but they are very rare and limited to Master skills (slot 8).

[wendldaner]

i started with 4 beefy types messed around on level 1 until they all had 6 skills sent the two weakest to the guards and picked up 2 speedys did the same sent weakest to guards then went through a couple of mage types until i had one with skills i wanted. since recruiting gives you character on par with existing characters by the time i got to the mages they started with enough HP to be able to keep them alive.

[UltimaLuminaire]

Originally posted by smbhax:

I don't think there's a "hidden lethality factor." The main difference in inflicting damage that I think I've noticed over the Jam version is that your characters seem to spread their hits out across all members of the targeted enemy group, rather than all hitting just one enemy in that group at a time--so you may not see any kills for a while as your damage will tend to be distributed evenly across the whole group, but then once they start to go down, they may go down in rapid succession, because they've all got fairly low HP by that time.

This is the same way the enemies attack your group (and did in the Jam version as well).

Overall, the effect of the change to your characters' targeting is to make combat more dangerous for the player, because more enemies remain alive and able to attack your characters for more rounds.

Possibly it worked the same way in the Jam version and I'm just imagining this. ^ _^

Yomigael already responded, but I'm still perplexed because I've had many fights (b1 and b2) where I am standing against a huge wave and spamming my rank 3 tier 0 skills would kill staggering amounts of enemies with little to no damage on healthy mobs vs my bigger skills at lower rank killing maybe 1 or 0 enemies but doing way more "damage."

But now that I have even bigger stats, and have beefier enemies to contend with, I am seeing the pattern stated by Yomigael.

[mrbiggest]

Meta includes blunt? What uses blunt besides mages with staff?

[UltimaLuminaire]

Originally posted by mrbiggest:

Meta includes blunt? What uses blunt besides mages with staff?

Brawlers do some nifty blunt damage and have the hp, mobility, and sp to both survive and rank up their skills with ease. Priests can also wack stuff. Other than that, any weapon class can RNG into a blunt skill.

[mrbiggest]

doh yes brawler of course. thanks.

[acslacker]

Running with Lord, Brawler, General and Archer at the moment, very early, B1. Lord Regis has been with me since the beginning... but he will likely be benched... he keeps gaining Intelligence which is utterly useless to him. Maybe it'll make him smart enough to stop adventuring. ;P General is probably the best of the bunch with great all-around stats. Archer is doing wonderfully, with the exception of HP, and that's a scary stat to be low in this game, but she picked up tripleshot, easily my strongest skill by far.

Has anyone had success with Priests? I've yet to field one (Haven't seen one yet to recruit) but I'm starting to like the idea of a mid-battle recovery character. I'm assuming Priest cannot heal outside of battle, though, which is a bummer.

[UltimaLuminaire]

Stats will normalize over the course of grinding. I wouldn't retire someone unless they had multiple skills that are redundant or a mage that never learns a spell.

Healing is not guaranteed. Any class that can learn Light spells can conceivably learn a healing skill. My priest never learned one, but my Valkyrie did. Healing range is massive. It goes from 1 HP to something scaling with your Intelligence, based on Rank. Rank 1 you're stuck with healing in the range of 1-15 HP lol. It's hilariously bad early. You have to grind your attack skills first, that way it's safe enough to spam heal for rank increase. The best way to preserve HP is to know your status ailments and inflict the same kind so you don't override them. It's pretty sad to override a Paralysis with a Stun, afterall.

As for my priest's functionality, he learned Quicksand and Bloodlust. Just those two spells alone are worth a slot on the team. Every other skill could have been Stunner for all I care. That said, the other skills are fine, and cover damage types as needed. Still, nothing beats Quicksand and Bloodlust for long ambush cycles.

[Fantasma]

I play on GoG, the best characters I have so far are my Brawler, Excecutioner and... not sure if it's a Lord or General.
Those three are, so far, very hard to kill. Excecutioner even has Glare. Very nice to have and cheap, too. Especially against big groups.

My fourth member, so far, has little luck, though. My mages die too fast. Tried an Archer, but she didn't make it past the first basement floor. I'm currently running a Valkyrie for some magic attacks.