Just want to vent about something for a moment

[RogueLikely]

I don't know who on the dev team thought that adding enemies that get "enraged" by having certain classes on your team was a good idea, but they should be fired. This game's main gimmick is the metaphor system and freedom of customizing your squad, and adding enemies that BRUTALLY punish you for doing so is just a terrible game design choice. Add to that the fact that (at least early in the game) there's no easy way to swap metaphors on the fly, and that there's no clear warning you're about to walk into a scenario where every single trash mob can now insta-kill your party in one turn, and this mechanic becomes nearly inexcusable.

Just to head off one inevitable reply, yes I've play SMT games before. I get that they're hard sometimes, but the enraged mechanic isn't remotely fair, and you can have to face it very early in the game without ways to mitigate it. For example, at basically the very start of the game on 6/12 I took the first quest for brigitta and whoopsy daisy I have a mage in my group and no way now to switch him out, so every goblin mob does massive AOE skills that kill my party instantly if they get their turn. And they do these AOE attacks every turn without fail. It's not even RNG. This isn't fun. There isn't some clever way to push through it. I either lose an hour of progress to load an old save or I quit playing.

[Charsiew]

Killed by goborn using mage archytype? Didn't buy info from informant? That's the problem if it is.

[Tiasmoon]

Originally posted by Younguns 375:

I think its worse that every enemy seems to have aoe attacks, debuffs and buffs early on and you dont get crap to counter play it, not to mention the amount of exp makes it near impossible to jump around and level different classes. their persona games definitely have better balances in the combat and gameplay. hoping this gets better

To be fair it took them a bunch of games and several itterations of said games to get the balance in Persona well tuned. I still remember when transfering skills between Personas was RNG and there was only a chance to get a specific skill transfered, with higher tier skills having a much lower chance.

I agree that there's balance issues in the game, some smaller, some larger. But at the same time for their first itteration of this kind of gameplay and mechanics I think its good enough.

My personal annoyance as far as gameplay goes is when enemies love to spend their turns applying both a party wide stats debuff and 1 or 2 party wide aoe status effect skills.

[Kyota]

This man's fefe's were so decimated, that he wished for someone, whom they don't even know, to have their entire livelihood rocked, because a handful of mobs, in a video-game, are stronger based on one's team composition in-game.

Huh!

That's actually the sanest steam user I've seen in quite some time...

We're actually improving!

[RogueLikely]

Originally posted by Kyota:

This man's fefe's were so decimated, that he wished someone, whom they don't even know, to have their entire livelihood rocked, because a handful of mobs, in a video-game, are stronger based on one's team composition in-game.

Huh!

That's actually the sanest steam user I've seen in quite some time...

We're actually improving!

It's just terrible game design to have a mechanic that forces you away from building your team how you want, in a game that is basically entirely about doing that. It's not just that guy that needs fired though, it's also the guy who designed the Merchant Archetype and any of the play testers that tried it out and said "Yup, that's not broken at all". Four Merchants absolutely trivializes the entire early and mid game. Probably will the late game too if I just focus on mitigating fire and holy. Just fought a midboss that uses nothing but fire and holy, and he died before he got to attack once.

[Freya Crescent]

I made the mistake of thinking they would have the "Rage" status when they saw a magic user, given how it was described... which seemed like a great trade off: they would deal more damage, and take more damage. It sounded balanced.

So I went to Brig's mission with my MC as a Mage thinking I'd get faster kills that way... but nope, it just unlocks constant AoE moves for the Gobbos. I realized I was being bullheaded, considering that every NPC and the Informant and the quest description and literally everything said "Don't use a stick" but I ignored them. Lesson learned.

Honestly though, the game really seems to punish anyone for trying to use magic for the MC. All the magic-based classes have story-locked Bond restrictions, so everyone else in the team will be on Elite while you're on Adept, (Your MC even gets a primarily-physical ROYAL ARCHETYPE for free before you get Elite Mage) your overworld damage is based on MC's Strength, and magic users have basically no basic attack damage and don't survive well enough in front row (most have a Physical weakness or other) to use basic attacks... so you're forced to use mana or items for basically every action in combat, though this is mitigated somewhat by many of them having passives for mana... but in long dungeons the costs feel horrible.

TBH I used the FLiNG trainer to swap my Magic and Strength stats for main character... I invested so much into magic Archetypes, trying to always have at least one elemental weakness for every enemy, but for all that investment my physical dealers were doing MORE damage with LESS Strength than my Magic against RESIST damage types... for less mana cost...

For a world filled with magic and how the characters make such a big deal about us using magic without Igniters, it sure doesn't feel like we're stronger for it.

[Soulcrusher842]

Originally posted by Younguns 375:

I think its worse that every enemy seems to have aoe attacks, debuffs and buffs early on and you dont get crap to counter play it, not to mention the amount of exp makes it near impossible to jump around and level different classes. their persona games definitely have better balances in the combat and gameplay. hoping this gets better

The counter play is to have someone with a resistance or high dodge to punish them. The game is based off of using a well rounded team composition.

[RogueLikely]

Originally posted by Soulcrusher842:

Originally posted by Younguns 375:

I think its worse that every enemy seems to have aoe attacks, debuffs and buffs early on and you dont get crap to counter play it, not to mention the amount of exp makes it near impossible to jump around and level different classes. their persona games definitely have better balances in the combat and gameplay. hoping this gets better

The counter play is to have someone with a resistance or high dodge to punish them. The game is based off of using a well rounded team composition.

Set all your characters to Merchant and then get back to me on that.

[archonsod]

Originally posted by RogueLikely:

It's just terrible game design to have a mechanic that forces you away from building your team how you want, in a game that is basically entirely about doing that.

I don't recall Atlus ever saying that was the case.

Originally posted by Freya Crescent:

Honestly though, the game really seems to punish anyone for trying to use magic for the MC.

I think the issue there is the game is basically designed around inheriting; all of the pure magic archetypes are a bit crap on their own. Mage for example only has the three elements covered, for pretty low damage for most of the game. What makes it interesting is what you can do with the inheritance system; in fact for a mage some of your best magic attacks come from non-mage archetypes (the 2nd tier mage fire spell and the commander fire spell doing medium AoE fire damage for example, except commander also adds a chance to inflict burn), and of course taking those mage skills over to other classes can also give some interesting results.
Other thing worth considering is it's not until the fifth character joins the team you get someone with a decent mag build, so it's probably worth going mage with the MC at least for the first half of the game just so you've got the magic side covered.

[Freya Crescent]

Originally posted by archonsod:

Originally posted by Freya Crescent:

Honestly though, the game really seems to punish anyone for trying to use magic for the MC.

I think the issue there is the game is basically designed around inheriting; all of the pure magic archetypes are a bit crap on their own. Mage for example only has the three elements covered, for pretty low damage for most of the game. What makes it interesting is what you can do with the inheritance system; in fact for a mage some of your best magic attacks come from non-mage archetypes (the 2nd tier mage fire spell and the commander fire spell doing medium AoE fire damage for example, except commander also adds a chance to inflict burn), and of course taking those mage skills over to other classes can also give some interesting results.
Other thing worth considering is it's not until the fifth character joins the team you get someone with a decent mag build, so it's probably worth going mage with the MC at least for the first half of the game just so you've got the magic side covered.

Many other classes have Magic that's better at being Mage than Mage, and that's what I meant about all the investment... I went so far as maxing out any magic-seeming Archetype just for the +3 Magic bonus for Mastering them... but since you can't advance Gallica's Bond it meant I could only have 2 Inherited skills most of the time. With so few slots, I'd have to put in spells from other affinities just the cover the gaps in Mage's meager 3 elements, and even then I had to swap frequently. It didn't seem worth it to put on an AoE Meduim Fire skill when I already have a Medium Fire skill. I ended up putting on the Medium AoE Almighty spell and just leaving that on at all times, but since it doesn't hit a Weak it never really fulfilled the purpose I wanted.

When the 5th and 6th members joined and I got more Magic users, I started to really regret my Magic Protag route. I thought I'd pick up some good skills from them, and their Archetypes ARE really good, but the way they work made it worthless for my Protag... and I wanted to keep 5th and 6th in the party for the XP anyways.

Having MC as a Mage early on felt OK but the further you get into the game it just feels like the usefulness fell off... I don't like having to use a Trainer to do it, but after swapping my 21 Strength and 53 Magic around, it feels so much better that it makes me sad there's no legit official way to switch.

[Hi.standard]

Originally posted by reimu:

the game tells you so many times to prepare before you go into combat
you proceed to not prepare/ start a dungeon too early (tbf a pretty easy mistake to make this early) then complain that it's too hard
you should be able to beat this dungeon by the time you hit level 10 or 11 as long as you're using the right classes and get the items you need
the hardest part about this dungeon is goblins lack of easily exploitable weaknesses
and that isn't that bad if you use ambushes properly

to be fair, the same thing happened to me, and it's literally the firs time you are free to decide where to go. So while I'm not really complaining about it, i totally see where OP is coming from.

And most of you need to stop thinking as someone who plays every single ATLUS game. This sort of mechanic implemented in this way is extremely off putting to a new players trying this type of game for the first time.

So while you may need to prepare, read all the tips etc. beforehand, developers should be aware that the average player may not do all of that and just try it out.

[otakon17]

Originally posted by RogueLikely:

I don't know who on the dev team thought that adding enemies that get "enraged" by having certain classes on your team was a good idea, but they should be fired. This game's main gimmick is the metaphor system and freedom of customizing your squad, and adding enemies that BRUTALLY punish you for doing so is just a terrible game design choice. Add to that the fact that (at least early in the game) there's no easy way to swap metaphors on the fly, and that there's no clear warning you're about to walk into a scenario where every single trash mob can now insta-kill your party in one turn, and this mechanic becomes nearly inexcusable.

Just to head off one inevitable reply, yes I've play SMT games before. I get that they're hard sometimes, but the enraged mechanic isn't remotely fair, and you can have to face it very early in the game without ways to mitigate it. For example, at basically the very start of the game on 6/12 I took the first quest for brigitta and whoopsy daisy I have a mage in my group and no way now to switch him out, so every goblin mob does massive AOE skills that kill my party instantly if they get their turn. And they do these AOE attacks every turn without fail. It's not even RNG. This isn't fun. There isn't some clever way to push through it. I either lose an hour of progress to load an old save or I quit playing.

Yeah but thankfully they don't use it often. But when they do it's STILL annoying, there are enemies later on that don't like you "getting close" and one that you fight that ONLY has a weakness to Strike damage; there IS NO LONG RANGE MAGIC BASED STRIKE DAMAGE SKILLS in the entire game. It's all Physical meaning at best you're doing normal damage and this thing doesn't rage and give itself a billion turns, fully heal then wipe your team with Almighty spam.

[Mayo]

Originally posted by otakon17:

Originally posted by RogueLikely:

I don't know who on the dev team thought that adding enemies that get "enraged" by having certain classes on your team was a good idea, but they should be fired. This game's main gimmick is the metaphor system and freedom of customizing your squad, and adding enemies that BRUTALLY punish you for doing so is just a terrible game design choice. Add to that the fact that (at least early in the game) there's no easy way to swap metaphors on the fly, and that there's no clear warning you're about to walk into a scenario where every single trash mob can now insta-kill your party in one turn, and this mechanic becomes nearly inexcusable.

Just to head off one inevitable reply, yes I've play SMT games before. I get that they're hard sometimes, but the enraged mechanic isn't remotely fair, and you can have to face it very early in the game without ways to mitigate it. For example, at basically the very start of the game on 6/12 I took the first quest for brigitta and whoopsy daisy I have a mage in my group and no way now to switch him out, so every goblin mob does massive AOE skills that kill my party instantly if they get their turn. And they do these AOE attacks every turn without fail. It's not even RNG. This isn't fun. There isn't some clever way to push through it. I either lose an hour of progress to load an old save or I quit playing.

Yeah but thankfully they don't use it often. But when they do it's STILL annoying, there are enemies later on that don't like you "getting close" and one that you fight that ONLY has a weakness to Strike damage; there IS NO LONG RANGE MAGIC BASED STRIKE DAMAGE SKILLS in the entire game. It's all Physical meaning at best you're doing normal damage and this thing doesn't rage and give itself a billion turns, fully heal then wipe your team with Almighty spam.

Summon Fury is magic strike damage.

Or you can do what I did for all the "enrage on front row enemies" when I had a full physical team and just hit them with the weaknesses anyway, ike normal, then Shelter Formation.

[Æthelred]

Pretty sure the NPCs, the Informant, and Gallica note about this mechanic.

You can always change your Archetype with More at the entrance or the Cat at certain points of any dungeon.

You're free to build your party as you see fit but that doesn't mean there won't be consequences. Whether you brute force your way or adapt, still your choice.

For example, Physical immune enemies. Your call if you still wanna roll with your Warrior and be equipped with igniter/inherited magic.

What I can agree with is the unbalanced difficulty at the start. For context I play on Hard and if I get ambushed it's pretty much death. It was a mistake doing Brigitta's quest before the Cathedral. I was able to get lucky and defeat the Bounty at level 11, excruciating experience.

[NijimaXL]

I never removed my Wizards enraged or not lol. They get destroyed anyway.

[RogueLikely]

Originally posted by Æthelred:

Pretty sure the NPCs, the Informant, and Gallica note about this mechanic.

You can always change your Archetype with More at the entrance or the Cat at certain points of any dungeon.

You're free to build your party as you see fit but that doesn't mean there won't be consequences. Whether you brute force your way or adapt, still your choice.

For example, Physical immune enemies. Your call if you still wanna roll with your Warrior and be equipped with igniter/inherited magic.

What I can agree with is the unbalanced difficulty at the start. For context I play on Hard and if I get ambushed it's pretty much death. It was a mistake doing Brigitta's quest before the Cathedral. I was able to get lucky and defeat the Bounty at level 11, excruciating experience.

Even being able to go back to the entrance after leaving isn't well explained. I didn't even know you could do it until I was introduced to that Thread item that teleports you back to it. I just don't like how poorly the game does at warning you about such a run ending mechanic.