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This is 100% wrong and is what you hear from people who are not that good at the game.
In fact, they are below the Dunning & Kruger line, making them incapable of properly assessing their own expertise.
Mixed damage party, or Lone Wolf duo, is perfectly viable. You can beat the game on Tactical with that kind of group.
But, it is much easier, almost to the point of being broken, if you go single damage type, and play well.
Usually when you pontificate you should explain yourself instead of just asertering that you're right. Might help if you're actually trying to convince someone.
The topic has been discussed to death.
You see, the problem is how you began your comment, "I find that hard to believe."
You admit that you've made up your mind without actually knowing! Reality does not give a ♥♥♥♥ about what anyone believes. Actually play the game both ways and then you won't have to waste any time believing anything -- you will know.
When you have 4 characters focused on 1 damage type, having some mobs with higher armour of that type is completely irrelevant. You will blast through it just as fast as you do with the ones who have it as their lower armour type.
When you split your damage types, you have only have half as much firepower to focus on the lower one and end up spreading your damage accross multiple targets instead of rapidly elminating/disabling individual enemies.
I think the game needed a significant amount of enemy that were immune to one of the form of damage (maybe make them all optional).
Also I might be wrong there, but I feel like physical focus is a bit better, alot of good CC are on the physical side.
In terms of how optimal it is, as you can see, there's a bit of argument. For your own knowledge, a pure physical or a pure magical party is actually better, damage-wise, than an even split (2:2 in 4 man or 1:1 in LW). Now, I'm going to explain this with some examples, but this is primarily for the other posters who think that a split party is better--I actually used to believe that as well, until I played through the game a few more times. I in no way want to dissuade you from doing a split party, so please don't read into it too much.
Ok, so to explain why having either a pure physical party or a pure magic party is better, damage-wise (by which I mean overall damage output: purely physical parties have issues with healing early on, while purely magic parties tend to be squishy and cooldown locked), you need to understand the concept of Effective Damage. Effective damage (ED) is basically how much damage you deal to an enemy's vitality.
Let's make some examples to show you what I mean: Let's say we have an enemy with 100 Vit, 100 MA, and 100 PA. You can deal 100 damage in a turn (because you're playing Lone Wolf!). With a purely physical party, you deal 100 damage to PA on turn 1, then you deal 100 damage to Vit on Turn 2, an the enemy is dead. Easy Peasy. You get the same thing with your magic LW party: 100 damage to MA on turn 1, 100 to Vit on Turn 2, Dead.
Take the same enemy, and Split the damage. You've got 50 Physical Damage and 50 Magic Damage. Now, Turn 1, you do 100 damage, but the enemy still has 50 MA and 50 PA. Turn 2, they have no armor, and you can't kill them until turn 3. So already, on an even playing field, a split party is worse than a pure party.
But wait, there's more! Let's consider what happens if someone attacks something, but their shields do no go down before they die. So let's say your damage on magic and physical sides are not equal, as they often aren't. Let's pretend that the magic dealers are actually only doing 30 damage, because they are busy cc'ing, debuffing, healing, buffing, whatever magic users like to do. To compensate, you've also got a swole af rogue who can help the physical group deal 70% of your party's damage each turn.
Turn 1, MA 70, PA 30 , Vit 100.
Turn 2, MA 40, PA 0, Vit 60,.
Turn 3, MA 10, PA 0, Vit 0, enemy is dead.
This is what I mean by effective damage. If the enemy dies, but they had damage incomplete removal of a damage type despite effort on the part of the damage dealer, such damage is wasted, i.e. their ED is reduced, or possibly 0. Basically, despite casting damage spells each turn, the magic users actually did absolutely nothing to assist with killing the enemy, because they did not do a single point of vitality damage.
Now, that's a fairly extreme (albeit somewhat realistic) example, but ED peaks its head in all the time when you play a split party, even if their overall damage output is similar. Using the above example, if we buffed the magic users to 40 damage per turn and nerfed the rogue to make the physical side 60, we'd get:
Turn 1: MA 60, PA 40, Vit 100
Turn 2: MA 20, PA 0, Vit 80
Turn 3: MA 0, PA 0, Vit 0.
So it takes the same 3 turns, but look a little closer at the damage done to the enemy: Assuming the best case, that the magic users attack first, They have an ED of 20% Vitality, while the rogue daddy did 80% (20 on Turn 2, the other 60 on turn Turn 3). If the physical damage went first, they'd be doing even more (especially with rogue putting in work).
Basically, no matter how you work it, all things being equal, the pure party is going to kill anything as fast or faster than the magic party.
Now, I can see the complaints already--I am godwoken, after all. "This is wrong because in the actual game, there are some enemies with more physical or magical armor, so if I cater a group to handle either situation, I will succeed in both!"
This isn't entirely wrong, but most of the time, it's not "optimal." Basically, if you choose to play this way, it's because you want to play this way, not because it does the most damage. To TL;DR this part: the effects of stacking pure damage types add onto each other, and ED rears its ugly head once more.
There are two main situations where this occurs. First, there's a single enemy with unequal armors. Let's take a magister caster with 100 MA, 50PA, and 100Vit. Using out LW physical party, they're going to shred the magister to bits:
Turn 1: 100 MA, 0PA, 50 Vit.
Turn 2: 100 MA, 0 PA, 0 Vit, dead.
The pure magic party does worse:
Turn 1: 0 MA, 50 PA, 100 Vit
Turn 2: 0 MA, 50 PA, 0 Vit. Dead
Then let's try our evenly split party:
Turn 1: 50 MA, 0 PA, 100 Vit
Turn 2: 0 MA, 0 PA, 50 Vit
Turn 3: 0 MA, 0 PA, 0 Vit, dead.
What's going on here is basically this: When you have a pure party, you deal so much damage to that single damage type that it makes the increased armor that enemies have often meaningless, UNLESS one armor type is at least 2 times as high as the other. Basically, a pure party does twice as much magic damage, so unless the enemy has at least twice as much magic armor, it doesn't actually slow them down. If we used the last example, but buffed magic armors to 150, then both the pure magic and split party would take 3 turns to do what they have to do...but ED is showing up:
Pure magic:
Turn 1: 50 MA, 50 PA, 100 Vit
Turn 2: 0 MA, 50 PA, 50 Vit.
Turn 3: 0 MA, 50 PA, 0 Vit, dead
Even Split:
Turn 1: 100 MA, 0 PA, 100 Vit
Turn 2: 50 MA, 0 PA, 50 Vit
Turn 3: 0 MA, 0 PA, 0 Vit, dead.
Again, it looks like they are both taking the same amount of time to kill something, but look at the numbers: The pure party puts in so much work, that they have 50 points of overkill damage. More on this later, but that's a good thing for them. The split party, on the other hand, bearly eeks out that 3rd turn win, AND the ED of the magic users was 0! The magic users would have been better off buffing or healing the physical damage dealers than actually trying to attack in this case. If the enemy had anymore MA, the split party would take 4 turns to kill it, while the magic party could have kept 3-turning it up to 1
The other main situation is when there are multiple enemies, which is the bulk of the game. Here is where a split party has a chance to shine...or does it? See, with like 5+ enemy combatants, it's a bit too cumbersome to type out the full situation, but it calls back to some of the earlier ones I described. In short, unless a large number of the enemies have 1 type of armor at least 2 times greater than the other, a pure party is going to win out damage-wise, because they so efficiently shred armor and thus eliminate targets. Remember that overkill damage in the last example? Instead of overkill, that last 50 points of damage might (theoretically) have been sent to a separate opponent instead. The pure party kills things quickly, which lets them kill other things quickly as well.
Finally, a couple, more qualitative points, so fewer numbers here. First, sometimes your characters die. If you're me, it's fairly often. The problem with a split party, however, is that when a character dies, the loss of potential for that side is much more massive. It's best seen with a 4 man party, but say they're evenly split on damage, and one physical member dies. Now, instead of doing 50MA, 50 PA, you're doing like 50MA, 25PA : The physical side is literally 50% less effective. In game, its often worse because the enemies like to kill your squishy characters, which often tend to be the ones more specialized for damage anyway. In a pure 4 man, the impact is much less, because there are 3 other characters who can help pick up the slack, rather than just 1 (I.e. ,you're going from 100 PA damage to 75; a 25% drop, which is better than the 50% in the prior example). This is somewhat mitigated with Lone Wolf: in part because you either lose 50% or 100% of your type's damage, in part because LW is OP as hell anyway so it hardly matters when Papa Fane is coming to town with that big D Damage per turn.
Second, CC. Basically, once you shred an enemy's armor, you've got them on the ropes, and you want to do that ASAP. However, being realistic, you've only got so many AP. Taking time to shred an enemy's armor often takes away that AP, at least in my experience, and having 3 other characters that can capitalize on that (as opposed to 1 in a split party) makes fights go much smoother. You can kind of consider the effects of a single damage type additive: by having characters focus on a single armor type, it becomes much easier to CC enemies, thus making fights easier. Again, this is mitigated somewhat in LW because you have extra AP, and because your characters can shred armor much faster.
To summarize everything, it's a numbers game, and a pure party, despite the apparent lack of flexibility when it comes to dealing with different armors, is more optimal than a split party. In a split party, every time you damage something's armor and it dies without losing that armor type, you've wasted potential damage; as opposed to a pure party, where it is much harder to waste any damage.
Quite frankly, the only numbers that matter, is the total damage you need to dish out. Ideally, that'd be the weaker armor plus vitality of each target. If you take on just one damage type, you're adding the lower for some targets and the higher from others. Total vitality wouldn't change. This would mean you'll be required to dish out more total damage of one particular type. You'd never be using physical and magic on the same target. While magic damage is often a bit less than physical for individual targets, magic damage total when you consider AoE makes for much higher damage output.
Point I want to make with all of this is that on paper, when crunching the numbers like you did, you lack perspective of the actual combat. In practice, when actually doing the fights, a split party has less total damage they need to dish out. While it might take longer for individual targets to go down, the fight as a whole will be faster. People focus too much on how quickly a single enemy goes down, something that is entirely irrelevant.
If you want more proof of concept, try out some mods that increase enemy armor and health scaling. I've played a bit with one that takes the usual 50% from tactician and raises it up by 200% instead. The overall ratio is still the same. Splitting up the damage types to focus weaknesses becomes almost required as single targets can't die nearly as fast. It becomes much more important to hit the weakness simply to get through to the vitality for CC's and that kill.
It's super fun doing wacky and weird party builds, especially if theres some roleplay value in it.
Stuff numbers! lol, but seriously, I don't think it's really important to have the optimal build as another guy pointed out since the game isn't THAT hard, unless you're playing on really difficult levels. Or you're going up against higher level enemies - that is the biggest spike in difficulty I noticed, the difference in quality of gear even one level apart is fairly big, and it can snowball pretty quick if you're trying to fight people more than a few levels above.
I kind of want to try a wizard themed run, where each member specialises in Pyromancy, Hydrosophist, Aerothurge and Geomancy 9Although I think Geomancy mostly does physical damage except for its poison side? Maybe Summoning then).
I agree with that. In fact my current game, level 6, is one two-handed melee and one elemental mage.
Doing it just for fun.
I did a 4 mage, all elemental damage, run on the 1 modded run I did through the game. Used 3 mods:
- More Monsters (triple)
- 75% less combat xp (with above extra mobsworks out to 25% less xp)
- Enemies have 50% more life, phys and magic armour
On Tactical it was fun to work out all the different combat encounters early on as mages are weaker at low level with their small set of abilities ending up on cooldown. Those 9 crocs were tough!
Later on it was much easier.
Oh yeah, totally. That's why I put that disclaimer at the beginning. I much prefer RP parties over "optimal" ones (which is also why I started using a ton of class mods after my 2nd playthough). Honestly, once you've played it once and know how the mechanics in the game work, just about everything can be viable to beat the game with on tactician.
I've tried that for part of a playthough, and I will say that the lack of spells is really painful throughout act 1. Qiox is on some crazy stuff though--here I thought I was good at the game!
I disagree with the idea that the total damage is the only number that matters, because sometimes that damage doesn't really mean anything. I do agree, though, that split parties need to do less overall damage, because they take advantage of MA/PA inequality in enemies. However, pure parties can do that damage faster and potentially more efficiently, as I tried to describe in my earlier post. I think you're playing down the point of spot-eliminating enemies a bit too much in this regard: The major resource in this game is AP, and by killing a target (or even removing their armor, such that they can get hard cc'd), you reduce the enemy side's AP, thus reducing your own damage taken and swinging the momentum of the fight (more) in your favor.
What I might try is another vanilla split party run on tactician as LW to see if it was easier than my pure physical tactician run, so that I can have some solid evidence. My first run was a split party, but it was on classic, and I've felt that it was much harder than the tactician runs that I've done since, but I haven't done a true split run since then. Might take a while though, since this is such a long game, and I won't have as much time soon.
I haven't tried that boosted vitality mod, but it sounds interesting. I might try it on a future playthough--but not going to lie, fighting a 10k+ health Mordus'Akaim at level 11 sounds oh so painful.
personally i would say that a pure one-type party has more damage output as a mixed party too. But i didnt beat the game yet and dont know which enemy/ability will appear.
Which point which seems to be forgotten are the enemys healing/buffs/debuff.
For example if the enemy cast MA against a full PD-Party it is clear what it does - nothing. On the other hand it exist debuffs which doesnt allow physical attacks/spells so it will be very effective.
It can be fatal to damage all enemys and not finish one guy, because they can regenerate HP with abilitys or items (which can work about more rounds). As example we take the standard healing spell from Hydro. It heals instant 40 HP and next round 40 again, means each round the enemy is alive you need to do more damage + they will attack/disable your party. Another bad point would be, that this 1 enemy kills a party member because he wasnt finish.
One simple example is, that a tank units use his Shield ability to raise magic/physical armor.
Example A:
Enemy: 150 PA / 150 MA / 100 Vit
Ability: Get 50 PA / 50 MA, 3 sec CD
Party: 50 PD / 50 MD
Round 1:
Enemy gets 50 PD/MD and regenerate 50 PA/MA
Enemy: 150 PA / 150 MA / 100 Vit
Round 2:
Enemy gets 50 PD/MD
Enemy: 100 PA / 100 MA / 100 Vit
Round 3:
Enemy gets 50 PD/MD
Enemy: 50 PA / 50 MA / 100 Vit
Round 4:
Enemy gets 50 PD/MD and regenerate 50 MA/PA
Enemy: 50 PA / 50 MA / 100 Vit
Round 5:
Enemy gets 50 PD/MD
Enemy: 0 PA / 0 MA / 100 Vit
Round 6:
Enemy gets 50 PD/MD
Enemy: 0 PA / 0 MA / 0 Vit
6 Rounds in a mixed Party.
Example B:
Enemy: 150 PA / 150 MA / 100 Vit
Ability: Get 50 PA / 50 MA, 3 sec CD
Party: 100PD / 0 MD
Round 1:
Enemy gets 100 PD and regenerate 50 PA/MA
Enemy: 100 PA / 150 MA / 100 Vit
Round 2:
Enemy gets 100 PD
Enemy: 0 PA / 100 MA / 100 Vit
Round 2:
Enemy gets 100 PD
Enemy: 0 PA / 100 MA / 0 Vit
3 Rounds in a pure Party
Legende
P = Physical
M = Magical
A = Armor
D = Damage
After a personal experince i had 1 Summoner, 1 Hunter, 1 Tank and 1 Thief. The Summoners standards attacks with scepters werent effective, because he was the only one which did MD (yes, normally you shouldnt focus on 1 Ability Tree) and wasnt able to do any Vital damage.
A small number of enemies have an evasion aura. This affects them and any allies they have close to them. It reduces your chance to hit them with weapons to only 10%.
Aerothurge magic also has it as a temporary 2 turn buff that can be cast.
It makes an all physical, melee weapons and bow, group tough to hurt any enemies buffed with evasion. However, there is one very simple way to deal with it. Have 1 character in your party with an investment into retribution.
The reflected damage from retribution never misses. Just have your tankiest char with retribution stand next to the evasion enemy and let them kill themself beating on you. The rest of your group can just cast heals if needed. The retribution char can just drink potions or eat food to stay healed.
Since it is a very rare thing you will encounter, you can just respec into retribution when needed then drop it.