Augments and their effects.

[Requimatic]

Has anyone really played around with the different augments and figured out what works best for what situation?

As it stands, I'm unsure if I should use something like flat damage boosts (Garnets, Rainbow Shells, etc.), Ingots (weapon power), or things like Genbu Shells. (25% armor ignore is pretty nice, I think.)

I've found that using a Nail Gun with Ingrid augmented with as many Diamonds and the Hourglass (+1 attack). It makes for 4 decent-hitting attacks with a pretty high chance to critical.

Kind of unsure on what to use with anyone else, though; Lucian especially, since I don't use basic attacks with him much and I don't know if weapon power or the flat damage augments boost skill damage or not.

Thoughts?

[Dancing Dragon Games]

The %-based boosts are really strong, especially later on. If you put 4 rainbow shells in a weapon, you'll get an extra 60% damage on every attack.

Or, you can just go with Ingots. If you can handle the weight increase, more weapon power is always good.

The Temporal augment is REALLY strong as a weapon augment. That AGI boost and the extra attack is great. Applies to counter attacks as well.

Coral is nice because it applies slow down effects, and the effects stack!

[Requimatic]

Originally posted by harmonic42:

The %-based boosts are really strong, especially later on. If you put 4 rainbow shells in a weapon, you'll get an extra 60% damage on every attack.

Or, you can just go with Ingots. If you can handle the weight increase, more weapon power is always good.

The Temporal augment is REALLY strong as a weapon augment. That AGI boost and the extra attack is great. Applies to counter attacks as well.

Coral is nice because it applies slow down effects, and the effects stack!

That's the current trouble I'm having: Ingots vs. %-based flat bonuses. I tried doing some testing in Lucian's final arena battle, but didn't really notice much difference.

I really enjoy the Temporal augment setup I have for Ingrid. A Nailgun, that augment, and 3 critical augments is borderline overpowered when the weapon is also crafted with poison... although DoT effects don't seem to do a whole lot of damage at all, poison especially. That one would likely have been better made with Nerve Powder, or something else.

But with this stuff in mind, I'm also curious of the tradeoff between using an Adamantite Sharpening Tool vs. the Counterweight. The tooltip for the Counterweight states that it essentially ignores all armor. Is that the case; does it ignore 100%, or a very high (80%+?) amount?

The Sharpener only adds 20 weapon damage (to the base Adamantite Greatsword) and whatever amount of critical. If the critical value is high enough, I think it would be worth it... however without knowing the values, it's hard to gague which would be better.

[myhr2]

Poison damage is based on Intelligence, if I'm not mistaken. Try stacking Int on Ingrid with this set-up. Bleed and Blood tap are based on Strength.

This means that Eskandar can be either build Str or Int, but you should not do both (and Dex for the crits, of course)

I'd say, in general, weapon with low Weapon attack benefit more from Counterweight, and sharpened stone are for high power weapons. Exception may be Ingrid, as she's all about Weapon Power.

[Requimatic]

I actually experienced a Burn debuff tick for over 1200 damage just a bit ago. How I achieved it, I'm not sure. I was just using a base Adamantite Greatsword with nothing other than Counterweight/Sharpener.

I'm not sure if it was a combination of the weapon's stats plus Lucian's "Spellblade" specialization or what, but yeah, I definitely see now that DoTs can actually be pretty devastating.

Still on the fence about the Counterweight vs. Sharpener, but it may not matter considering how much damage you do with the thing anyway. I prefer more crits myself, so the Sharpener is what I'll likely go with for the Adamantite weapon.

Now I'm curious if there's any schematics better than Grandmaster's..

[Dancing Dragon Games]

Originally posted by Requimatic:

I actually experienced a Burn debuff tick for over 1200 damage just a bit ago. How I achieved it, I'm not sure. I was just using a base Adamantite Greatsword with nothing other than Counterweight/Sharpener.

I'm not sure if it was a combination of the weapon's stats plus Lucian's "Spellblade" specialization or what, but yeah, I definitely see now that DoTs can actually be pretty devastating.

Still on the fence about the Counterweight vs. Sharpener, but it may not matter considering how much damage you do with the thing anyway. I prefer more crits myself, so the Sharpener is what I'll likely go with for the Adamantite weapon.

Now I'm curious if there's any schematics better than Grandmaster's..

Counterweight stacked with something like greatsword mastery ends up bypassing a LOT of armor, which is the main source of damage reduction.

That said, crits are nice too, and the adamantite stone provides +20% crit chance. Good if you're using "Press The Attack" passive on Lucian.

Nothing higher than Grandmaster's Schematics.

[Luthan]

I like the really special augments that give some different stuff than only +x percent of some damage or armor ignore. The one that lets you attack 1 more time with normal attack is nice and I used it with Soha (in addition to her passive that lets her get 1 more attack) when I had trouble for the first time in the game and had to try different stuff.

That was (playing in hard) at Ezrum when the party was split and I usually had "party builds" when I made Soha into a solo killing machine. :D

[Requimatic]

Originally posted by harmonic42:

Originally posted by Requimatic:

I actually experienced a Burn debuff tick for over 1200 damage just a bit ago. How I achieved it, I'm not sure. I was just using a base Adamantite Greatsword with nothing other than Counterweight/Sharpener.

I'm not sure if it was a combination of the weapon's stats plus Lucian's "Spellblade" specialization or what, but yeah, I definitely see now that DoTs can actually be pretty devastating.

Still on the fence about the Counterweight vs. Sharpener, but it may not matter considering how much damage you do with the thing anyway. I prefer more crits myself, so the Sharpener is what I'll likely go with for the Adamantite weapon.

Now I'm curious if there's any schematics better than Grandmaster's..

Counterweight stacked with something like greatsword mastery ends up bypassing a LOT of armor, which is the main source of damage reduction.

That said, crits are nice too, and the adamantite stone provides +20% crit chance. Good if you're using "Press The Attack" passive on Lucian.

Nothing higher than Grandmaster's Schematics.

That's good to know, thanks! It's kind of hard to gague how well armor penetration is in most games because you're likely to encounter lightly-armored units that it isn't as effective on, in which case the Sharpener (or a similar effect, etc.) would be better.

In fact, me not noticing much of a difference when I used it on that particular enemy may have been exactly that. (The last round of testing I did ended up being on one of the Ninja units of the second-to-last party arena fight; probably lightly armored.)

Originally posted by Luthan:

I like the really special augments that give some different stuff than only +x percent of some damage or armor ignore. The one that lets you attack 1 more time with normal attack is nice and I used it with Soha (in addition to her passive that lets her get 1 more attack) when I had trouble for the first time in the game and had to try different stuff.

That was (playing in hard) at Ezrum when the party was split and I usually had "party builds" when I made Soha into a solo killing machine. :D

Yeah, I agree. Having more than just flat damage bonuses is always a great thing; variety in general like that is lacking in a lot of RPGs, and one of the RPG elements I love most.

[myhr2]

After doing some testing, when speaking about adamantite sharpening stones vs counterweights, the damage difference is 0 against ennemies without armor, but the difference is 25% against an armored ennemy (for exemple, if you deal 7.500 damage with the sharpening stone, you'd deal 10.000 with the counterweight).

That being said, sharpening stones add critical chance, so...