Is Tiger Break the best single target attack?

[AH-1 Cobra]

Considering its defense ignoring properties, it does a consistent 5k+ damage with 40 skill, with good stats for unarmed (STR + SPD). With shadow servant up, you can do 9999.

For characters like Leonid, Khalim, Robin, (maybe a few others) I think fist might be the best for those characters. They only need 2 techs sparked and mastered, Tiger Break, and Powerup fist (the AOE). You can fill the rest of the slots with wards.

I sparked Tiger Break pretty early off a poison gion in Leonid's castle basement when I wasn't even trying to spark techs, just clearing mobs with powerup fist.

The strongest AOE attack appears to be Millionaire with Bow. It did insane damage for me, even with only 30 bow skill, using a 26 attack power bow, I was doing 2800 damage with millionaire. It seemed to do consistent damage to enemies of varying types, which leads me to believe it's using a special elemental type that's not very resisted. The damage would increase to well over 4k with the best bow, and 40 skill. Nothing mages can do tops that damage, not even super gravity.

The best way to clear trash, is to put an archer on point in a formation that gives a good SPD bonus (Etc, dragon formation, desert lance) and let them clear the screen with millionaire before the mobs have a chance to attack. If you've been sand bagging SP healing items like I have, you should have plenty to clear larger dungeons.

[EarthSaga]

Yeah Kung-fu is great. Way of Focus is good too for self-healing. I used high strength and speed characters like Peony, Khalid and young Robin using Tiger Break to take down the full power final boss. For characters with low speed but high strength I use one handed swords with Doppelslasher or Golden Dragon. For spear users If you can actually get a Sm'augg spear Round Slicer seems to be the best repeater tech in the game.

[Rabouk]

Kung-fu is great yeah. I wouldnt say Tiger Break is "best" tho.

Bow is pretty OP too. Millionaire and Multishot (6sp only) do consistent ~3.5-4.5k dmg endgame.

And Sword is great too. Doppelslasher (6sp only as well), does 5k+ endgame. I was doing 6/7k with silver hand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGA2QvkRbPk

[rane]

the best single target attack is splitting image / split image slice / however it's named in the english version, the humble 6 SP sword tech that surrounds the enemy with mirages and slices multiple times. Initially perhaps underwhelming, it can and will reach 9999 at high skill levels, something perhaps only orbit borer and round slicer might match and those are both expensive and tied to a weapon (extremely rare and hard to get weapon too, in case of Round Slicer)

well, unless they meddled with its damage calculation but as far as I can tell they didn't do that in the ports

Tiger Break is pretty damn good because it deals high damage and ignores most defenses; but it's twice as expensive as SIS and doesn't scale *that* well

Other good single target techs to look out for are Sky Drive (generic axe), aforementioned Round Slicer (tied to Dragon Spear), Orbit Borer (tied to an axe, but don't recall which axe exactly), Golden Dragon (generic sword), Meteor Thrust (generic spear), and Harvest Moon (generic greatsword, incredibly hard to spark for most characters)

[InsanityForce]

Multi-hit attacks like Split Body and Yoyo have been fixed, they don't use the damage multiplier of the previous trech anymore.

[rane]

...well at least now I won't feel bad about not having the persistence to get the dragon spear

[rane]

and oh yeah, completely forgot about blade canes / sword staves, their draw sword tech is single use per battle, but it's pretty brutal (currently dealing 2.2k damage vs 1.2k on dynamic chop)

[Brave Sir Robin]

Kung-Fu is brutal endgame but holy hell does it suck early on. The throws are all such garbage since they constantly miss and deactivate your shield block. You're basically stuck with Kick for ages.

[Ahzi Dahaka]

Falconwind (aka Hawkwind) is the axe that gives Reverse Orbit (aka Orbit Borer). You find it in the Rotten Sea Ruins.

Black with that and two Bladed Canes (and thus two Reverse Swallow attacks) can dish out some serious hurt. To unlock Reverse Swallow you'll need a type 9 or 10 learner like Young Boy (aka Shonen).

[AH-1 Cobra]

Originally posted by rane:

...well at least now I won't feel bad about not having the persistence to get the dragon spear

The Dragon Spear/Balmug isn't worth farming. Round slicer is on par with what doppleganger does with the top 1h swords, all of which are easier to get than the spear. The Matriarch Spear works very well, if you want a spear user. Use the special skill to buff your kung fu and sword users.

I remember years ago when I played this on emulator, and I manipulated save states, along with massively accelerated game speed, and it still took me 15 minutes to get one of these spears to drop. That was me attacking, landing the last hit on the monster, then reloading if I didn't get the drop, at 8x game speed, repeat that for 15 minutes. That's the equivalent of about 8+ hrs of farming in game. It's about the equivalent of getting a rat tail to drop from pink slimes in FF IV for the adamantite armor. In other words, good luck! But it's nowhere near as good as adamatite armor in FF IV is.

Or, you can use a trainer like I did and swap your equipped weapon for the weapon digit ID for the Dragon Spear, and get one with no grinding just to have it.

[rane]

having now beaten the game, split image / doppelslasher is still pretty good, it hit 6k on destroyer at skill 35, and otherwise consistently kept at around 2k (pre-wing) / 4k (post-wing)
reverse orbit is also pretty damn powerful and it gets powerful way sooner than doppelslasher does

[Damon]

I did play Martial Arts with Ellen in first playthrough. It's great sure, but I noticed one of my favorite formation Tiger's Ferocity (Nora or Mikhail) massively reduced the damage due to speed penalty. Other weapons don't depend on Speed so anything works. Tiger Break (for single damage) and Punishing Palm (aoe) is awesome with high speed formations and more power if possible. It can be higher damage than all other weapon types.

Personally my favorite is Dragon Spear (Sm'augg). It's because I often notice it ignores enemies in high defense whereas Dragon Sword or Axe may do little to nothing damage. Other stable damage type is also Hypergravity.

[Damon]

Actually I think Peony is the best character for fist build? Good stats and brings ideal formation for it too.

[Damon]

Originally posted by The Legend:

Seems like 1 in 255 is your chance of getting a weapon skill up after 42. That's about the minimum chance you can have for a stat up. It's possible to level up to 50 eventually even on the weakest enemies, it's just not very likely. That 1 in 255 also applies to sparking a tech. Regardless of "type" you have 1 in 255 of sparking whatever tech against anything, and I believe the same applies to getting stat ups after battle.

Where did you get this info from? I think is 1 in 255 is a bit too low if farming high enemies like Asura. Feels more like 1 in 100 or something.

[Meganesuki]

Actually, for the extreme hard tech like Harvest moon, the type that is not proficient or unsuitable to spark the tech has more chance to spark the tech with Asura, based on the formula.
https://romancing-saga-3.blogspot.com/p/rs3-techs-waza.html

"This means that when trying to spark techs with a high SparkLV, it can be easier to do so with a character who does not have the tech on his aptitude list. Concretely: when trying to learn Tiger Break, have everyone in your party use Powerup Fist: sometimes you'll be surprised to see Type 01 characters, for example, learn it first."

[Damon]

Doing Martial Arts run with Peony and she is excellent & fast as hell. Super good for clearing trash creatures (no Charm problem). But the best AOE damage is probably Ice Sword which I'm using on Thomas... while Punshing Palm and Millionaire is pretty much even with Peony's formation.

But it has disadvantages against very strong enemies there defensive formations is better and therefore other weapons work better. So I would assume it's glass cannon depending your playstyle. But not unbalanced.