Primitive rocks in the world of ruin

[McFrugal]

Yeah I'm doing a third run. Again on RUIN mode, this time with a gimmick party.
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/939467286415762576/1822C3E994FD38646D4701CB2131AEB746016147/
Say hello to Olive, Grant, Soda, and Flynn. Rock puns aside, these guys have a quirk. I'm only allowing them access to the three basic classes: Warrior, Scout, and Scholar.

It's going to be tough but I think it's doable. Even the army fight should be possible thanks to the barrier shield, though I doubt the double boss is without access to Ward so I won't be choosing that option.
My battle plan is to have everyone with Warrior as mainclass or subclass so I can use the first turn to Guard at least half of my party. Healing is restricted to Focus Energy and First Aid, but I discovered Focus Energy is boosted by every type of magic skill so I can raise that pretty high, and First Aid is pretty good on its own. Also I'll have splints.
Diecast have lots of HP which will help a lot in the long run, though their weakness to frost will make the necromancer fight VERY difficult. I'm honestly not sure if that fight is possible, and just getting to it will be a nightmare. Might have to skip out on that. I can't even sneak into the backdoor since I won't have Gate.

...hmm, maybe if I run off to one side of the boss room so the archers can't get to me, and focus down one undead before the other reaches me? Trip Up would be useful as a delaying tactic too...

[McFrugal]

Just switched my archer to crossbows, after getting Quick Hands and a few mithril-quality crossbows. The difference in power is very noticeable. My mages are pretty weak by comparison. Scholar spells are quick but the base damage is low. I wonder if I can even outfit two mages with enough magic power to do decent damage?
Passives are okay. Battle Ready works for everyone and so does Alertness. Melee passives are obvious(Counter!), so are archers'. Mages less so, but Quick Hands has some use for a mage since it lets you swap in magic equipment to boost whatever spell you're about to cast. The other option is Teacher.

I realized that later on I want everyone to have some form of quick movement. Warrior has Charge, Scout has Sidestep. Unfortunately Charge can only be used with melee weapons, which means I can't have both scholars subclass Warrior. One can and use the flame cloak for a dash, but the other one either has to have Scout as subclass or use a shield. It's tempting to have one of my scholars use the drill spear for the morale bonus, but the damage would be pretty low.

[McFrugal]

I was worried for a second after I encountered the dark bone walls in the jungle secret(I don't have Dispel), but found out you can blow those up with bombs just like the strong barriers. I think there are only two bombs in the game though so I can't get that early Lasher if I want to try fighting the necromancer.

[Rad Codex]

Nice, I think this is the first class challenge I've seen. My bet is that Trip Up, Guard, and Charge will be the most useful abilities. Good luck!

(You can also bash open bombable cave walls with a pickaxe.)

[McFrugal]

I meant the bonemeld walls. There are some in the way of getting the Lasher, and you have to get past some to get to the Necromancer too.

[McFrugal]

Well I got through the jungle and met Ekrast, decided to take a crack at him early since I'd never done so before. He's exactly the same as in the double boss fight! So, I got a taste for how much damage he'd be doing to me. Bad news, his Hellfire does about 60 damage without Ward, killing my entire party in one shot. I guess I'm just going to have to try not to get hit with it during the fight and hope the army is enough help. Or get more than 60 hp on all my party members, which... isn't really that difficult actually. Diecast have HP if nothing else. On the other hand I can't really recover from getting hit by it; a splint via someone with maxed First Aid heals around 35 hp and four lifeshards... well, actually I guess that's about 60 hp too, but he moves about 50% faster than me.
His staff's lightning strike does around 55 damage, which is also enough to oneshot any one of my party members at this point. So the early Ekrast fight is definitely impossible for this party on RUIN.

His Gale does ice damage which would be bad news for my Diecast party, but thankfully it doesn't do as much as Hellfire. I think it'll wind up doing 30ish damage to everyone, which is definitely possible to outheal, so long as I have someone hitting him with a sleep dart. I would just need to somehow keep him casting that every turn. I expect keeping him in place with Trip Up is essential, and standing in a spot such that he doesn't want to use Hellfire or get a hit with the lightning from his staff. Better would be keeping him attacking two people with his staff, but I doubt I can manipulate his AI to do that. Of course, this is assuming a 1v1 fight, but he'll be distracted by the army so it's probably fine. The solo fight with him afterwards is much less dangerous since he's slower and weaker.

I went back and barely beat him with my original, relatively unoptimized Normal difficulty party since I had an old save nearby. He drops an Infinity Band, so I guess two of those exist! Makes me wonder if his dialogue changes later on if you beat him early.

[McFrugal]

Progress report: got my third aerstone, from the swamp. Getting through the swamp was a bit harder than other areas since I had no access to Dispel nor did I really have any way to keep important targets locked down for long. I wound up just hiding behind water so the Urzibels couldn't cross or pounce and gradually wore them down with crossbow bolts and Frost. The Ruluorn boss was a bit of a problem, since its spells do about 40 damage and I don't want to be spamming lifeshards at this point. Thankfully I could just focus on offense and kill it before it killed me.

Speaking of offense, crossbows are real good with Quick Hands. With Bide, Brave, and a post-mythril crossbow, I can oneshot a lot of things. I feel it might've been better to have two crossbow archers instead of just the one, but I'll just keep going like this. I'm trying to turn one of my mages into a sort of hybrid archer-mage but I'm not sure it's working.

Anyway, the things in the water in the basement were a serious problem at first attempt as I had no way to remove stun. I went back and bought the Grapple Whip for my warrior to pull my more useful party members back after they got tongued, and that worked to keep everyone in the battle long enough to kill the things.

[McFrugal]

I have discovered that the graven eyes are one of the most dangerous enemies in the game if you don't have a Sage. I *almost* won the fight against two of them. Problem is they use Freeze and then Lightning and I can't do anything to save whoever was targeted. I need to check if bows(and high level throw rock) can attack from outside the range of Freeze. That would leave lightning, which I definitely can't escape but might be tolerable damage-wise if my units are spread out enough.

[McFrugal]

Haha, nevermind about the graven eyes. They cast regen on themselves if you're not within range of Freeze, but you can sit there just within range of lightning and heal through it with first aid or whatever, and let them run out of MP. Can't outrange it with bows, and even max rank Frost is the same range, but it doesn't matter. Once they're out of MP all they can do is Ruin Sight, which only does like 13 damage. Easy.

[McFrugal]

Ah, I haven't posted in this thread in a while. Got distracted with other games, to be honest.
The final Celia fight was a bit of a pain, since she has a Rogue helping out and that's one of the worst classes for this party to run into. Blind is awful, and so is Poison. I can at least get rid of Burn via a low-damage Gust. My first attempt at the fight failed since the rogue didn't die early enough.

I fought some of the smaller Undead packs in the Blood Quarter and they're pretty tough. I don't have any way to disable them aside from Trip Up, so I pretty much just have to kill them as fast as possible. My crossbow archer is starting to accumulate high-end guns now... I'll come back to clear out the larger packs when I have more guns.

[McFrugal]

Heh, you can use Quick Hands to swap elemental weapons. For instance, if you set someone on fire you don't want to attack with an ice weapon since you'll both douse it and suffer a damage penalty. You can instead switch to a fire weapon and get a damage bonus while keeping the ailment intact. This could also be used to take advantage of Wet or Water with an electric weapon.
This is good since I want to set undead on fire, don't especially want to use the backblaster anymore (it's annoying to use if you have no good options for healing) and have an ice hammer for my main melee weapon.

My crossbow archer's big box of guns is quite full. Three rifles, a blunderbuss, a pile of pistols, and assorted types of crossbows. Probably won't be running out of ammo anymore.
Time to take on the blood quarter.

...oh god I just realized I have no good way of getting to the lever in the necromancer fight. Bow attacks work to trigger levers in Alvora Tactics, maybe I can do that? If not, then... lattice seeds.

[McFrugal]

Okay, no, you can't shoot it with a bow. Levers can be shot, switches and buttons must be used by clicking on them. The one that triggers the ramp is a switch, while the one that swaps the barriers is a lever.

It took several attempts to get through the necromancer fight. He's the biggest threat by far since he does about 40 damage a shot against my poor Diecasts and Guard doesn't help since he's using the ruin bow. It's not feasible to just run him out of MP, but thankfully his AI prioritizes applying chill instead of doing damage. His first four attacks will be spread out among your party members and so you will have a chance to kill his melee undead before he starts shooting to kill. However, the combined damage of the melee undead and his bow shots is extremely difficult to keep up with. My first few attempts I kept losing my crossbow archer before I killed the first undead minion, meaning I had essentially lost the battle. I tried setting the necromancer on fire with a firebomb to get him to heal himself instead of shooting me but he wasn't cooperating.

On my successful run, I figured out there was room to walk off to the side before alerting him, so that got me a little closer to the first undead which let me attack it a bit easier. I also tried lightning the necromancer on fire again and this time he cooperated with the plan and started spamming splints. This gave me the time I needed to kill his undead while keeping up with healing, and I was able to eventually place the seeds and climb up there, very very slowly... Vines take two movement to cross! Near the top the crossbow undead came down to block my path so I set him on fire... and accidentally burned one of the vines. That's when I discovered you can't grow another vine on the "burned vine" tile. Maybe it doesn't count as a wall anymore? In hindsight it might have been easier to go through the right side of the room and shoot the lever through the wall then kill that undead before moving on. For some reason, the walls in this room do not block projectiles at all. That also ruined my plan of hiding behind the walls to recover. Later on in the fight I started hitting my own party members with Fireball just to remove the Chill status. Good thing neither of my magic users had invested in fire skill.

[McFrugal]

Oh, and I cleared out the big room full of the spooky eye undead. You don't need bonemeld at all, just stand at the entrance next to the bone wall so there are only two spots where they can attack you. Killing an undead in one of those two spots will block it, so you can either try to manage that immediately or clog up one of them then just keep healing the other party member blocking the other spot until you can kill another undead there. After that, you just need to have skills or weapons that can reach the undead despite them staying at such a distance. Rifles and max-level Frost work fine. The Harp Bow can reach certain spots, and so can Focus Energy. Of course, more advanced classes have better skills for this.
This room would be absolute madness to clear in a melee-only party. I think you'd just have to keep moving the corpses out of the way to lure more of them to you.

During the fight, I noticed some weirdness with my hit chances with my crossbow archer. Occasionally, I would have only a 65% chance to hit against a target, whereas against other targets I had 95%. Nothing was boosting the target's dodge chance as far as I could tell... perhaps you get a penalty if you can only barely aim at the target tile?

[Rad Codex]

Nicely done. Defeating Volkyre while being weak to ice is hard enough, let alone using only 3 classes. It's been very enjoyable and enlightening to read these adventures.

The hit chance weirdness sounds like you were taking a penalty from shooting into darkness.

[McFrugal]

The versatility of the three base classes helps a lot. Scholar is the least useful in RUIN because of lower damage scaling than crossbows and hammers, but ranged healing, long range with Frost, and occasional AOE damage is still worth having.

Wanna know the big secret though? Buffing before a battle! Bravery on three physical attackers then Guard on two or three more, open the fight with a Bide crossbow/gun shot if possible. Battle Ready will trigger on top of that so you've got like three turns of major damage while being very damage resistant. I didn't do this at all on my normal RUIN playthrough, as I figured it out later, while playing Alvora. That probably would've made things easier for me.

[McFrugal]

I took on the army fight!

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/984505745337858454/A4C9954A24062C1BCD02830AA7753BD0FBB9ED03/

Good old rock. Rock always wins.

Turns out you don't need Barrier. I didn't even really need the barrier shield, though I guess it did reduce the damage my warrior took by preventing enemies from getting in his face for the first half of the battle (eventually the shield went down at the wrong time and someone stepped in). All you need to do is get to the chokepoint before the army starts shooting you, which is pretty easy when everyone has a movement skill. Charge and Sidestep both work. So does the flame cloak, but I didn't use it since my mage had quick hands and I could just swap to a shield to use charge.
After you reach the chokepoint you just apply Guard to everyone and heal through the damage until Jin runs out of MP, making Vise a priority target otherwise since he has Quake which is annoying. Or kill Jin first if you can manage it. Splints and First Aid are the obvious healing options but life crystals are good too. When possible, throw a Firebomb to light a large portion of the army on fire. They will start spamming bandages to heal, but each soldier only has one bandage it seems. The second firebomb will likely kill a bunch of soldiers. After that it's just a matter of Frost and gunfire to start piling up bodies, then head to the high ground when you can't reach any more enemies. Scholar was very useful for this fight!

I'm not even gonna bother making an attempt at the dual boss fight without army assistance. That fight is impossible on RUIN without Ward.