Hot Take about the patch

[ZexxCrine]

I think that the worst change is that crafting scales to your accumulated level and lacrima instead of your current level. it removes player agency.

for most people this won't matter and im happy this won't matter for them. however players like me will be deeply affected in new runs for the worse.

some background: I like to test things. I tested many builds and many skills. this required a lot of farming. I didn't want to vastly out-scale the content available to me though. so I would kill myself with large quantities of lacrima, I would also do this after boss fights I struggled on to avoid getting free lacrima for losing to bosses.

im not saying this is the correct method to play the game or anything but it was my way to play it. however, now I am greatly punished for experimenting. im level 141 about to start new game plus. the gear I can craft is level 149 and I expect that to change to 199 when I move to new game plus or at least much higher. not a huge deal I suppose given the nature of ng plus but im less worried about that and significantly more worried about what this means for a player like myself on a new file

by the mid game I could have probably crafted level 100 plus gear. this has 2 effects.
1. I could never craft any sets if I wanted to be on level
2. If I wanted to use a boss set I would have to manually farm each piece of the set because dropped items have a level limit.

I am deeply concerned about what a future play-through of this game would look like for me and any players who play similarly.

[Lexomatico]

Then there is me not even understanding the difference.

[sgrey]

I agree that this might not be the best decision... Though, having a few lower-level pieces of gear in your chest might help a bit with this issue.

[sgrey]

Originally posted by Lexomatico:

Then there is me not even understanding the difference.

It sounds like what they are saying, suppose you had 500k of lacrima and you were level 60, but it was enough to level up to 90. When you go buy or craft gear, they would craft it at level 90 instead of 60. So if you respect and do not level up all the way to test some things out, you won't be able to get gear of the proper level

[ScowlEasy]

Originally posted by ZexxCrine:

im level 141 about to start new game plus. the gear I can craft is level 149 and I expect that to change to 199 when I move to new game plus or at least much higher. not a huge deal I suppose given the nature of ng plus but im less worried about that and significantly more worried about what this means for a player like myself on a new file

maybe you should stop being upset about something that *might* happen

[sgrey]

btw if they say it's based on your accumulated lacrima, it means if you lose your lacrima, the level of items in the shop will scale down

[ZexxCrine]

Originally posted by Lexomatico:

Then there is me not even understanding the difference.

for sake of argument lets say you farmed the soul eater set from keshta in the early game. many people did this. then lets say you killed yourself with 10 unspent levels. your base value for crafting sets is now 10 levels higher than your current level. so once you unlock the blacksmith at recomended level 41 and you use him to craft a set, the 10 levels of unspent lacrima will scale everything he crafts to be higher level than you. as the game goes on this problem will compound,

[sgrey]

Originally posted by ZexxCrine:

Originally posted by Lexomatico:

Then there is me not even understanding the difference.

for sake of argument lets say you farmed the soul eater set from keshta in the early game. many people did this. then lets say you killed yourself with 10 unspent levels. your base value for crafting sets is now 10 levels higher than your current level. so once you unlock the blacksmith at recomended level 41 and you use him to craft a set, the 10 levels of unspent lacrima will scale everything he crafts to be higher level than you. as the game goes on this problem will compound,

you should test if this is how it actually works

[ZexxCrine]

Originally posted by sgrey:

btw if they say it's based on your accumulated lacrima, it means if you lose your lacrima, the level of items in the shop will scale down

this is untrue I have already tested it. I leveld down to level 1. died twice. everything in the shop is still 149

[ZexxCrine]

Originally posted by sgrey:

Originally posted by ZexxCrine:

for sake of argument lets say you farmed the soul eater set from keshta in the early game. many people did this. then lets say you killed yourself with 10 unspent levels. your base value for crafting sets is now 10 levels higher than your current level. so once you unlock the blacksmith at recomended level 41 and you use him to craft a set, the 10 levels of unspent lacrima will scale everything he crafts to be higher level than you. as the game goes on this problem will compound,

you should test if this is how it actually works

I plan to in the coming days. I have an old file just after viper. I plan to farm the soul eater set and do exactly that

[Lexomatico]

Well i thought it is impossible to unintentionally lose your lacrima completely but after i wrote it i realized you can spend it on re-rolling stat on gear so i guess this is where the difference kicks in. An absolute non-issue in my book.

[sgrey]

Originally posted by ZexxCrine:

Originally posted by sgrey:

btw if they say it's based on your accumulated lacrima, it means if you lose your lacrima, the level of items in the shop will scale down

this is untrue I have already tested it. I leveld down to level 1. died twice. everything in the shop is still 149

Oh, I see. That kind of sucks... so "accumulated experience" means what your level used to be, at the very least. Now we just need to find out if the total amount of lacrima is also "remembered"

[ZexxCrine]

Originally posted by Lexomatico:

Well i thought it is impossible to unintentionally lose your lacrima completely but after i wrote it i realized you can spend it on re-rolling stat on gear so i guess this is where the difference kicks in. An absolute non-issue in my book.

I already acknowledged that this wont matter to most, it does however factually remove player agency that previously existed

[Anime]

You guys actually craft things in this game? Why?

[ZexxCrine]

im willing to admit i'm incorrect. I need to do more testing to figure out exactly how this all works. however I did my run through the game from my post viper save. I farmed the soul eater set off keshta and had pretty bad luck doing it.

here was my accumulated lacrima that I died to lose
https://i.imgur.com/i8fL5Ft.jpeg

here is my level after unlocking crafting
https://i.imgur.com/hUloNJK.jpeg

and finally here is the blacksmith's inventory
https://i.imgur.com/Ur3t8dg.jpeg

its perfectly on level despite the 6 or 7 levels the lost lacrima would be worth at the moment

this leaves 2 hypotheses

1. prior to unlocking the blacksmith it doesn't count
2 it only counts your highest potential level reached

the latter makes the most sense to me. this still is obnoxious to me because it means now if you want to farm a boss for their material drops and not increase the blacksmith's crafting levels you would need to farm the boss and never leave with enough lacrima to level up.

that said, you basically can't use convert to lacrima as a function because that will powerlevel the blacksmith. such as in this image where I converted all found equipment from volbaino's stage to unlocking the blacksmith and it increased his stock to 51

https://i.imgur.com/o8OPBbi.jpeg

im still very annoyed with the change but I was incorrect about how quickly it will spiral out of control. either way this will greatly lower the difficulty of the game for most players in a very subtle way

[Jon]

Originally posted by Anime:

You guys actually craft things in this game? Why?

for me it is because gear is more on par with what level i am. also crafting little consumables like vitality spheres, or status-specific cleanse potions, etc is quite useful.