The Balancing in this game is Atrocious.

[Proudly Toxic]

I see people complaining about the modern themes in this game. I'm going to be galaxy brained and instead actually complain about the gameplay.

I expected this to be a game where I would use the job system to tailor a well balanced team that could handle any situation thrown at it by being able to hit a variety of weaknesses, that I'd adjust further if I found that there was a pattern to enemy types in a specific area.

Instead the game has abilities that give you bonus damage and crit chance if you have duplicates of the same archetype in your party, and gives you access to a Phys Almighty skill with 35% crit chance before the first real dungeon.

Phys Almighty will benefit from Heat Up and from Discipline, since its a Physical Skill, despite doing Almighty damage. Because its Almighty, it will bypass phys repel, phys resist, phys null, and even phys absorb.

Because you can get its crit chance to 55% with 4 people going merchant, it is more effective than trying to hit weaknesses since you'll almost always crit and do more damage thanks to the 40% damage boost from Heat Up.

It costs money, but Merchant on the protag is a money printer anytime you kill lower level enemies in the overworld. So if you ever are running low on money, you can just go back to Akademia in whatever dungeon you are to force respawn all spawns in your current level to go whack a moling for cash.

I just did the second story dungeon, I'm thinking of stopping here, since I now also have access to sukunda, tarunda and rakunda as consumable items. The story boss was unable to get any of my party members below half HP, and if it wasn't for the fact he has a phase hp gate that stops you from killing him, I would've skipped his entire second phase with this strategy.

Do yourself a favor and skip this game if you haven't bought it yet. Who at atlus thought it was a good idea to give Phys Almighty to your character WITH NO MP COST this early in the game?

Phys Almighty has been Meta in every atlus RPG it has been available in.

[REBirthTheEdge]

So did anyone finish the game with the 4x merchant build?

How was it?

[Volcano Princess Enjoyer]

Diposting pertama kali oleh causality:

Cool.

Anyway. I personally don't like minmaxing in SMT games, they are already easy enough by giving you more tools than the enemy.

For the most part it is balanced. Just in Metaphor its broken broken. Even the potentials system would fix some of this a bit. But in SMT V you 100% have more tools than the enemy, in the older games its sorta negligible since skills like Tables turned and a bunch of other mechanics existed. Many which either don’t exist anymore or ultimately undermined when overleveled. Even in Nocturne, Masakados absolutely ignores the entire end game, but underleveled hard mode runs are much more difficult and tests your knowledge on Press turn. In SMT 4 as well, underleveled runs makes its more apparent that the number of tools are somewhat the same

[Unforgiven]

Diposting pertama kali oleh REBirthTheEdge:

So did anyone finish the game with the 4x merchant build?

How was it?

idk, the guy who claims this is so broken hasn't even finished the third town so we will never know i guess

[Unforgiven]

Diposting pertama kali oleh AH-1 Cobra:

Diposting pertama kali oleh Unforgiven:

You don't necessarily need single target if your aoe hits 20k too but yes this is why i said elemental master with meteor which u can get up to almost 40k dmg is a lot better than merchants

Also idk if u play on normal but every endgame boss has at least 40k hp (dragons etc) so 25k is not 1 shotting but its good dmg

The damage was 50k in a hit. There's room to boost that damage even higher with the destroyer's passive that boosts damage at lower HP. Possible to boost the damage to potentially 60-70k.

I said 1 turn cycle, not 1 shot. The dragons never got a turn to act, and that was on hard mode FYI. If I do NG+ and get an extra crit charm, I'd be able to do 50K+ with 2 different characters in a single turn, can you do that with elemental master? I'm sure unscathed victories are possible utilizing a number of methods, some more specific for a given fight, but tycoons are a one size fits all solution for every problem.

yes thats normal dmg in this game with proper build and setup as i said a few posts before where this guy called me out saying hitting over 10k is not possible on hard, which is funny af
This game has the most broken endgame builds ive seen (compared to boss power)

[Mayo]

Diposting pertama kali oleh REBirthTheEdge:

So did anyone finish the game with the 4x merchant build?

How was it?

Pretty easy. Like most people mentioned, Merchant is strongest in the early game and gets a substantial boost to longevity with the 200 atk, x2 gold damage abacus.

Worst bit was just before late September when you're feeling a bit underpowered due to gold attack having fallen off, so you have to deal with an enemy turn or three. But its still sufficient to break most bosses over your knee with buffs and debuffs, just not as strong as the Elite Classes would be performing at this point.

After unlocking Tycoon and Gunner (for stealing the 3x damage abacus), its a non-stop OTK of every single boss including the depowered Final Boss. The full powered final boss (80k hp, increased endurance) might take 3 turns (Pressure kills all your turn icons on the 2nd turn) or 1 Sublime Spoonful or Gallica's bonus turns, but nothing that will really bother you too much.

[REBirthTheEdge]

Diposting pertama kali oleh Unforgiven:

Diposting pertama kali oleh REBirthTheEdge:

So did anyone finish the game with the 4x merchant build?

How was it?

idk, the guy who claims this is so broken hasn't even finished the third town so we will never know i guess

Good to know.

Diposting pertama kali oleh Mayo:

Diposting pertama kali oleh REBirthTheEdge:

So did anyone finish the game with the 4x merchant build?

How was it?

Pretty easy. Like most people mentioned, Merchant is strongest in the early game and gets a substantial boost to longevity with the 200 atk, x2 gold damage abacus.

Worst bit was just before late September when you're feeling a bit underpowered due to gold attack having fallen off, so you have to deal with an enemy turn or three. But its still sufficient to break most bosses over your knee with buffs and debuffs, just not as strong as the Elite Classes would be performing at this point.

After unlocking Tycoon and Gunner (for stealing the 3x damage abacus), its a non-stop OTK of every single boss including the depowered Final Boss. The full powered final boss might take 3 turns (Pressure kills all your turn icons on the 2nd turn) or 1 Sublime Spoonful/Gallica's bonus turns.

Yeah, so it's not really broken then, and it does fall of upper-mid game.

Might as well just play it normally.

[spoonygundam]

Diposting pertama kali oleh Unforgiven:

You don't necessarily need single target if your aoe hits 20k too but yes this is why i said elemental master with meteor which u can get up to almost 40k dmg is a lot better than merchants

There was literally a screenshot a couple pages back of somebody hitting the final boss for 40k with Tycoon.

The fact that you were making a big deal out of Tycoon's weaknesses VS the dragons earlier indicates that you actually saw them get a turn, which means whatever you were doing was worse than 4x Tycoon.

[Mayo]

Diposting pertama kali oleh REBirthTheEdge:

Yeah, so it's not really broken then, and it does fall of upper-mid game.

Might as well just play it normally.

Yeah, pretty much. The worst part of 4x Merchant is that Tycoon takes so long to come. If anything, the sheer boredom itself is a pretty good reason to just not play it.

Tycoons are what you play when you just want to get it all over with, or if you like big numbers. Did you know the damage cap in the game is 99999? With Tycoon you can!

[Volcano Princess Enjoyer]

Diposting pertama kali oleh Unforgiven:

Diposting pertama kali oleh AH-1 Cobra:

The damage was 50k in a hit. There's room to boost that damage even higher with the destroyer's passive that boosts damage at lower HP. Possible to boost the damage to potentially 60-70k.

I said 1 turn cycle, not 1 shot. The dragons never got a turn to act, and that was on hard mode FYI. If I do NG+ and get an extra crit charm, I'd be able to do 50K+ with 2 different characters in a single turn, can you do that with elemental master? I'm sure unscathed victories are possible utilizing a number of methods, some more specific for a given fight, but tycoons are a one size fits all solution for every problem.

yes thats normal dmg in this game with proper build and setup as i said a few posts before where this guy called me out saying hitting over 10k is not possible on hard, which is funny af
This game has the most broken endgame builds ive seen (compared to boss power)

Tbh thats not surprising adversity Masakado status effect passive strats in SMT V can hit 99k damage in a single turn. Metaphor is much more graceful with viable broken builds than other megaten games and once again it isnt unique to just metaphor.

The 100k+ dmg ninja strat into one shotting the abyssal god is another very funny strat or just resetting the DS to 1 shot many bosses in EO3. FF5 stunlocking all end game bosses and super bosses with Free Lancer Spell Blade, dual handed, rapid fire builds or chemist chicken knife builds. These things existed for long before Metaphor.

[REBirthTheEdge]

Sound like I need to play that Regicide clean save mod after I finish it on Hard!

[Unforgiven]

Diposting pertama kali oleh Mayo:

Diposting pertama kali oleh REBirthTheEdge:

Yeah, so it's not really broken then, and it does fall of upper-mid game.

Might as well just play it normally.

Yeah, pretty much. The worst part of 4x Merchant is that Tycoon takes so long to come. If anything, the sheer boredom itself is a pretty good reason to just not play it.

Tycoons are what you play when you just want to get it all over with.

and as we figured out, that was on normal or even easy and not hard. How do i know this? i loaded my save for the exact same boss and used the exact same build and it only did less than a third of the dmg, even with double crit dmg amulet it only barely reached 15k
My dragons got 1 time on my first playthrough yes, because i used elemental master and didn't know hyper existed so it only did 17k a hit

[spoonygundam]

Diposting pertama kali oleh Mayo:

Worst bit was just before late September when you're feeling a bit underpowered due to gold attack having fallen off, so you have to deal with an enemy turn or three. But its still sufficient to break most bosses over your knee with buffs and debuffs, just not as strong as the Elite Classes would be performing at this point.

I'll also point out the setup has major advantages even here at its weakest. Sogne seems to be a very common roadblock boss because people are going in without the right skills unlocked, but it was the same as any other boss VS Merchants.

Diposting pertama kali oleh Unforgiven:

i said a few posts before where this guy called me out saying hitting over 10k is not possible on hard, which is funny af

I was saying hitting 8k+ against that specific 9/24 boss, which is before any of the endgame equipment and many of the Tier 3 Archetypes, including Mage ones, become available seemed unlikely, and wanted you to clarify how you did that, and you kept replying with builds that were literally impossible at that stage of the game.

[Mayo]

Diposting pertama kali oleh Unforgiven:

and as we figured out, that was on normal or even easy and not hard. How do i know this? i loaded my save for the exact same boss and used the exact same build and it only did less than a third of the dmg, even with double crit dmg amulet it only barely reached 15k
My dragons got 1 time on my first playthrough yes, because i used elemental master and didn't know hyper existed so it only did 17k a hit

Are you replying to the right message?

And yeah, for sure it's possible to get higher than 15k. There's two options, one where you're willing to sit through a full video of me showing the difficulty settings and loadout in Akademia and going through the boss phase 1 and one shotting the depowered phase 2 (jump to 7m 15s for the 41k money shot), or this other video I have of the full powered final boss (my crit here is only 35k due to not having max strength) and you can decide whether it's the Hard boss based on the damage it's dealing, keeping in mind my lads have ironclad bond.

[Volcano Princess Enjoyer]

Diposting pertama kali oleh spoonygundam:

Diposting pertama kali oleh Mayo:

Worst bit was just before late September when you're feeling a bit underpowered due to gold attack having fallen off, so you have to deal with an enemy turn or three. But its still sufficient to break most bosses over your knee with buffs and debuffs, just not as strong as the Elite Classes would be performing at this point.

I'll also point out the setup has major advantages even here at its weakest. Sogne seems to be a very common roadblock boss because people are going in without the right skills unlocked, but it was the same as any other boss VS Merchants.

People struggled with that boss? I just like 1 shot him on hard lol. anyways I gotta say Sogne is honestly so weak compared to the Ice Dragon in EO. Most of the dragon’s in ReFantazio are much weaker than their EO counterpart

[AH-1 Cobra]

Diposting pertama kali oleh Unforgiven:

yes thats normal dmg in this game with proper build and setup as i said a few posts before where this guy called me out saying hitting over 10k is not possible on hard, which is funny af
This game has the most broken endgame builds ive seen (compared to boss power)

So what buffs are you using to get 40k with the elemental master's meteor attack? I equipped the 2 turn amulet, used hyper (huge magic buff), then used the nuke. It hits mobs for about 15k a piece, and also for passives I had x4 mages with all the magic and almighty damage boosting passives, and synthesis damage passives, one of them had long range (the full party back row buff, doesn't stack with multiple equipped) So, what else were you using, or did you get 40k+ by counting up damage to multiples 15k x 3 = 45k, etc.