Tactician Mode - How to survive Fort Joy?

[Premu]

I wanted to start a new game with a higher difficulty as before. As the game allows you to min-max builds you can get some very powerful combos later on.

Unfortunately, I can't really get through Fort Joy. I've collected my four party members, but I don't have the money to equip all of them with decent equipment and spells yet. The opponents I run into on the other hand have armor values far higher than those of my rag-tag group, and they bring a lot of nasty bonus abilities with them, too. At some point even the cheesiest tactics won't help you to overcome raw power.

So - has anyone tips how to get through the early phase of the game? How do you manage to get decent armor and equipment for your members, so that you can actually tackle the enemies.

[Yavale]

One of the biggest struggles is not having anough skills to use, instead you have to spam autoattack. Try pickpocketing every trader you meet to get some skills and gear.
Summoning school is one of the best ones there. Also polymorpth and its chicken claw is a fantastic cc.

[Yojo0o]

While Fort Joy is certainly possible taken straight up on Tactician or Honor, you can also beeline straight to Atusa, get her leg, play hide and seek, meet Withermore, sneak into the dungeons, pick the lock on the big door, distract Kniles with Atusa's leg, escape through the sewers, and then re-enter the fort. This should catapult you to roughly level 4, at the low cost of making magister patrols attack on sight.

[Chaoslink]

Thievery helps a ton. If you don't have it, dismiss an ally and pick up a different one as a shadowblade. Use that to steal a bunch of skillbooks and get yourself going.

Your team setup can still matter early on as well. A general rule to follow is that INT > FIN > STR and Ranged > Melee. So if your team is melee heavy and mostly Strength builds, you're already finding yourself on the potentially weaker end of things because you end up using too much AP moving into range with all the melee. Point is, your setup might still hold you back even if the early game doesn't have the scaling to make certain builds better than others.

[NouH]

Make ample use of Ground effects and elemental comboes to defeat big group of enemies, makes fights on tactician much easier (at least early game/fort joy), want a example?

Spam rain on the area around the fight (you can do this even before you start the fight), then contaminate the water and then explode it with a fireball or any other fire skill/item, enemies will have to walk through fire for quite some time, which can eat more than their entire armor + half hp (or till they die) before they can reach your group. Sometimes, if enemies are outside the fire area and cant reach your group without going through the fire they will just skip turns until the fire is out, this means that sometimes you can completely remove some enemies from a fight because they will just sit back and skip their turns, for so long in fact that you can kill everyone else bold enough to walk through the fire then go and kill the ones that kept skipping turns.

[Calico-Jack]

Originally posted by Premu:

So - has anyone tips how to get through the early phase of the game? How do you manage to get decent armor and equipment for your members, so that you can actually tackle the enemies.

you don't say what your party make up is so it's hard to give specific advice, and your party underperforming or not meshing skills could also be a cause

I never usually buy gear, you can make armour for your current level by crafting with needle, thread and leather scraps which you can get from the trader in the square.

As a general rule of thumb you should be looking at Fort Joy in terms of the encounters and quests or exploration bonuses that level you to make the encounters easier - this includes going to the marshes as early as possible - I usually do this around level three to grab the loot from the chest on the beach, and the one surrounded by the hoxious bulbs and the talking heads taking care to avoid the two undead groups and Windego. Going back into the Joy to finish the quests there of course means every guard will attack on sight but if you've been looking for explorer XP you should have found ways in and out of the Joy that are not patrolled.

[[N63] chrisragnar]

Maby just do line wolf until you have some money to equip 2 more?

[The.Spaz.]

Yeh, I just threw myself blindly into tactician mode just shy of perma death mode. Its a log the first area and you have to trade/pickpocket like a fiend to outfit your team with a decent list of skills and attacks.

[Premu]

I have to admit - I screwed myself up a lot. After remembering that I finished the game on the second hardest difficulty, I wanted to go one level up and chose the third option for the difficulty. That's surely the third hardest, isn't it. And I really wondered why the difficulty was so much higher than the last time I played.

After remembering that the difficulties are weirdly ordered I still took the challenge and started a new game. This time I did initially steal quite a lot of skill books, and they helped a lot. I also did create a more synergetic party.

Now I have Lohse as my main character. She's a summoner and hydro-mage. Those totems and summons are really helpful and versatile - depending on the surface for the totems they can deal with both magic or physical armor. She also has ice spells to additionally being able to freeze enemies in order to do some crowd control.

Beast is also a mage (hydor + aero). While Lohse mainly focuses on freezing, Beast can shock them. And electfified water also provides a nice option to create air totems which might also shock wet enemies. These two work really well together.

Sebille is my shadow cloak to deal with mages, and dishes out a lot of damage if in the right position. And she can turn enemies into a chicken which is really great fun. ;)

The final member is Ifan who is a ranger - also great at dealing physical damage, but with elemental arrows he can also deal with those pesky enemies with low magic but high physical armor effectively. And he gets this awesome crossbow early in the game.

This time, the game went a lot better. Most of the fights are challenging, but solvable. I've now managed to be "overlevelled" compared to most enemies, which makes the fights a lot easier (Currently everyone is level 6, while the last enemies were all level 4.)

[Raeynoc]

Yeah, on tactical difficulty. The tactics and strategies really matter. Sometimes just chaning your approach completely changes a fight. And the best part is, you can escape and come back after killing a few or even just one enemy.

[MeanJim]

You sound like the first group of friends I attempted to play coop with. The beginning is supposed to be tough. You're in prison, fresh off a prison ship, wearing rags and have tableware as weapons, and you expect to be able to take on the prison guards and everything right away? Stop trying to fight everything. Do quests that don't require combat to gain some levels first.

We never finished that game, a couple of friends abandoned us, so I re-started with the last remaining friend, which was the same friend I played DOS coop with. We played on tactician difficulty and we certainly didn't do any min/maxing or planning, we just winged it. Most of the gear we used was found as loot. We stopped buying gear because every time we bought something, a few minutes later I'd find something better as loot.

[Premu]

Originally posted by MeanJim:

You sound like the first group of friends I attempted to play coop with. The beginning is supposed to be tough. You're in prison, fresh off a prison ship, wearing rags and have tableware as weapons, and you expect to be able to take on the prison guards and everything right away? Stop trying to fight everything. Do quests that don't require combat to gain some levels first.

We never finished that game, a couple of friends abandoned us, so I re-started with the last remaining friend, which was the same friend I played DOS coop with. We played on tactician difficulty and we certainly didn't do any min/maxing or planning, we just winged it. Most of the gear we used was found as loot. We stopped buying gear because every time we bought something, a few minutes later I'd find something better as loot.

My initial problem was not that I picked too many fights, but that after a long break forgot about some easier fights. So I missed out experience and loot which was very helpful in my second approach. Plus more skills due to some pick-pocketing.

Obviously you need to pick the fights you can win and not start murder-hoboing everyone right from the start. But fighting not enough can also become a problem, as you'll need the XP as well.