Usefulness of arts over crafts?

[Xbob42]

Maybe it's because of where I am in the game (finishing up level 3 of the Keep) but it seems like arts have been mostly useless so far. In older games it kind of felt like there was an ebb and flow of when arts or crafts were more useful, but I find I always just have a ton of TP for spamming abilities, and when I don't have TP, normal attacks build it back up fast enough, especially with link attacks, that wasting time casting seems silly.

Now obviously there's some arts that are great against bosses like shining and I'm sure if I reaaaally wanted to ruin the combat for myself I could find some arts builds that could bulldoze the game, but that's not how I like to play.

I guess my biggest issue is that I like it when the game demands I use all of my tools, but spamming crafts, even on Nightmare, hasn't only been perfectly fine, it has been wrecking everything the game puts in my path.

Is there a point where this changes? I pretty much just set all my quartz to stuff to help with physical attacks instead of trying to get a good balance of arts like I would in Trails in the Sky.

At this point, having my turn take significantly extra time to produce an effect (casting the art) on top of potentially being cancelled by something, all for a spell to hit maybe a little stronger than a basic CP move, while expending EP which can't be charged as easily, seems crazy. Again, buffs and the like, sure, but attack arts? I barely touch 'em unless the character just has a poor physical moveset.

There a mod like there was for Cold Steel 2? That thing could get pretty rough at times with the insane amount of speed it gave enemies (which actually could make it unfun at times) but I always felt like I'd be carefully considering every option at my disposal rather than blinding spamming whichever craft hit the most enemies.

[Koby]

Using Brave Orders and Bells makes Arts a much better ordeal. You can practically infinitely spam Arts that way, plus A/S/S+ Arts will typically out damage Crafts. Plus there is a MQ that will ensure you regain EP faster than you use it. Especially in Chapter 4 and later, you'll notice that Arts are often quicker in various fights.

[Citronvand]

It depends, some characters are better or worse at physical attacks / arts. If you only want to use physical characters, I think that is fine, but if you want to use characters that are very much arts users such as Musse you are kind of shooting yourself in the foot if you don't set her up as an arts user.

By arts user I mean characters that has few orbment lines and high ATS. Few orbment lines means the character will have high EP and that you cannot stack quartz that are good for physical/craft users such as abnormalities (ie: Freeze) and statdown quartz.

Arts themselves can be extremely strong when used by a dedicated mage. Having for instance 2 dedicated mages in your party and using the Brave order that lets you instant cast arts will let you nuke the ♥♥♥♥ out of your enemies/bosses. It's *very* strong.

On a dedicated mage you generally want to have a Cast quartz and a Bell quartz or equivalent such as Master Quartz. This will lower the amount of time required to cast arts significantly even without brave orders. If you use dedicated mages against normal trash mobs you want a easy way to regenerate your EP. Titania MQ lets you recover EP through offensive arts while the Ingenuity Quartz lets you regenerate EP outside of combat.

If you want an example how you can set up your mages here's 2 examples, I'm currently at chapter 3 so it's not like I have the best quartz available:

Musse: https://i.imgur.com/CqcNUFz.jpg
Specialized Schools: Space & Water.
Default art: Diamond Nova. She will usually be able to cast this before any enemy attacks, even without advantage. Since she regen EP outside of combat I don't have problem spamming it.
She can also recover the party from a partywipe with her Sophia MQ + Seraphic Ring and unlike a non-arts user she has Cast 3 quartz which increases her chances of casting Serapahic Ring before she is KO'd a second time.

Altina: https://i.imgur.com/0ka3iUW.jpg
Specialized Schools: Time & Mirage
Default art: Calvary Edge or Galion Fort

Please note that my examples are not supposed to be "THE BEST SETUP". It's not, I lack the quartz and resources to even attempt that and even then it is debatable. The purpose is to give players that have no clue how to use dedicated mages in the first place a baseline to stand on. So they get a feel for how you can do it.

[Xbob42]

Interesting, I'll give some of that a try. I wish the game demanded I use arts rather than me having to seek it out, but if it helps with some variety I'll gladly set up some mages. They clearly try to show you this is a thing early on with enemies strong to physical attacks, but the break system kinda... well, breaks that.

[Dragon]

Arts are total trash in all the Cold Steel games.

This is a consequence of Cold Steel vastly dumbing-down the previous great Arts system from the Trails in the Sky & Crossbell games, and replacing that with a vastly inferior system meant to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

And also, Cold Steel started implementing the power of Arts into Crafts in the Cold Steel games, whilst still leaving Arts worse than ever.

All of that is why Trails in the Sky & Crossbell have a great balance between Arts & Crafts, and both are required in those games as each serve a unique purpose. Yet in Cold Steel, Arts are mostly totally useless and not needed and not worth using, and Crafts are almost always way OP.

[Koby]

Dragon hasn't even played Cold Steel 3, so he knows nothing about Brave Orders or how they allow you to massively spam Arts in quick succession without enemies getting a turn.

But yeah, you can generally plow through enemies with physical attacks perfectly fine and so Arts users aren't a requirement. However if you do set one or two of them up properly, they'll actually far outclass your physical attackers damage wise by a good 4x utilizing A level arts, much less S+ or beyond. And the Brave Orders really help push Arts users up.

Unfortunately this doesn't really start coming together until early Chapter 4 when you start to finally build up a really nice set of quartz. Before that your mileage may vary depending on how much you've opted to upgrade quartz through the pawn shop I suppose.

[Yürei]

Originally posted by Dragon:

Arts are total trash in all the Cold Steel games.

This is a consequence of Cold Steel vastly dumbing-down the previous great Arts system from the Trails in the Sky & Crossbell games, and replacing that with a vastly inferior system meant to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

And also, Cold Steel started implementing the power of Arts into Crafts in the Cold Steel games, whilst still leaving Arts worse than ever.

All of that is why Trails in the Sky & Crossbell have a great balance between Arts & Crafts, and both are required in those games as each serve a unique purpose. Yet in Cold Steel, Arts are mostly totally useless and not needed and not worth using, and Crafts are almost always way OP.

Yes but doing so made it pretty much useless to basic attack for actual damage. I would find myself on resorting to art spam and craft spam whenever they came up. Meanwhile in Cold Steel, especially in 3, I find the need to use a mixture of all 3 combine with brave points. Obviously you can cheese more in Cold Steel, but when you had Oliver legit spamming arts (death scream anyone?) and instantly killing everything, it was kinda boring in Trails in the sky. It made Tita pretty worthless and Agate a S-craft Spammer due to basic attacks being mostly pointless.

The only problem with Cold Steel 3 is that it keeps your best Art user until Chapter 3 which is already halfway through the game. Add that to the fact that the majority of your team is always better off melee and it leads to arts being mostly utility early game. The moment you get your quartz together and a certain someone, you'll be using that as your main source of damage while the others do break damage and delay.

Legit my best team is 1 dodge tank + high damage during break, 1 high break damage, 1 delay spam, and 1 arts spam. I'm playing on nightmare too, so I need to optimize a bit to actually deal with the spike in hp and damage.

Hell, on my Trails in the sky 3rd ng nightmare run, I decided to bring 3 casters with good crafts and one healer instead of bothering to bring anything else. Its just not viable to use someone who melee attacks over spamming aoe arts and crafts.

[TheAssistantX]

Originally posted by Dragon:

Arts are total trash in all the Cold Steel games.

This is a consequence of Cold Steel vastly dumbing-down the previous great Arts system from the Trails in the Sky & Crossbell games, and replacing that with a vastly inferior system meant to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

And also, Cold Steel started implementing the power of Arts into Crafts in the Cold Steel games, whilst still leaving Arts worse than ever.

All of that is why Trails in the Sky & Crossbell have a great balance between Arts & Crafts, and both are required in those games as each serve a unique purpose. Yet in Cold Steel, Arts are mostly totally useless and not needed and not worth using, and Crafts are almost always way OP.

You have no idea how OP arts can be do you?

[Yürei]

Originally posted by TheAssistantX:

Originally posted by Dragon:

Arts are total trash in all the Cold Steel games.

This is a consequence of Cold Steel vastly dumbing-down the previous great Arts system from the Trails in the Sky & Crossbell games, and replacing that with a vastly inferior system meant to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

And also, Cold Steel started implementing the power of Arts into Crafts in the Cold Steel games, whilst still leaving Arts worse than ever.

All of that is why Trails in the Sky & Crossbell have a great balance between Arts & Crafts, and both are required in those games as each serve a unique purpose. Yet in Cold Steel, Arts are mostly totally useless and not needed and not worth using, and Crafts are almost always way OP.

You have no idea how OP arts can be do you?

Let me just put this here so he can see how stupid it can get once you get your build going. Legit nothing but arts after I break the enemy at 2:05 https://youtu.be/gNXRzig8a7A
This is also me being too poor for the best quartz in the game. I only have water and fire arts for her. I really need more time and mirage Sepiths.

[BeastSlayer]

Originally posted by Koby:

Dragon hasn't even played Cold Steel 3, so he knows nothing about Brave Orders or how they allow you to massively spam Arts in quick succession without enemies getting a turn.

But yeah, you can generally plow through enemies with physical attacks perfectly fine and so Arts users aren't a requirement. However if you do set one or two of them up properly, they'll actually far outclass your physical attackers damage wise by a good 4x utilizing A level arts, much less S+ or beyond. And the Brave Orders really help push Arts users up.

Unfortunately this doesn't really start coming together until early Chapter 4 when you start to finally build up a really nice set of quartz. Before that your mileage may vary depending on how much you've opted to upgrade quartz through the pawn shop I suppose.

I do agree with Dragon on Cold Steel series dumb down the arts, mostly because they streamlined the quartz combination system which is the one system that is unique to this series.

In Cold Steel, Arts are pretty useless at the beginning of the game, but could be useful later on if you have the right set up and character.

In older games, you can get really powerful arts pretty early on if you know how to get the quartz, so arts can be a very powerful option early game too.

[Xbob42]

Actually that's something I forgot about. What do quartz lines even do in Cold Steel? You used to use them to learn new arts. But all I've noticed them doing in these games is giving different amounts of EP? Having to think about the value of each quartz you put into a line to earn different arts was neat.

[Citronvand]

Originally posted by Xbob42:

Actually that's something I forgot about. What do quartz lines even do in Cold Steel? You used to use them to learn new arts. But all I've noticed them doing in these games is giving different amounts of EP? Having to think about the value of each quartz you put into a line to earn different arts was neat.

More lines = less EP and vice versa. In addition to that you cannot stack the same type of quartz on the same line. For example, you cannot put a petrify quartz and a freeze quartz on the same line. But if lets say you have 4 lines which I think Juna has, you can put Freeze, Seal, Blind and Petrify on her.

What it basically comes down to is:
Less lines = Good Arts user
More lines = Good Physical/Craft user

[Xbob42]

Originally posted by Citronvand:

Originally posted by Xbob42:

Actually that's something I forgot about. What do quartz lines even do in Cold Steel? You used to use them to learn new arts. But all I've noticed them doing in these games is giving different amounts of EP? Having to think about the value of each quartz you put into a line to earn different arts was neat.

More lines = less EP and vice versa. In addition to that you cannot stack the same type of quartz on the same line. For example, you cannot put a petrify quartz and a freeze quartz on the same line. But if lets say you have 4 lines which I think Juna has, you can put Freeze, Seal, Blind and Petrify on her.

What it basically comes down to is:
Less lines = Good Arts user
More lines = Good Physical/Craft user

Thanks. I guess while playing I don't even really consider any of these things, just kind of open every slot and equip everyone with whatever boosts stats the most and maybe a heal/buff. I'll give it some more thought to make it more fun.

[afterthought.btw]

Originally posted by Dragon:

Arts are total trash in all the Cold Steel games.

This is a consequence of Cold Steel vastly dumbing-down the previous great Arts system from the Trails in the Sky & Crossbell games, and replacing that with a vastly inferior system meant to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

And also, Cold Steel started implementing the power of Arts into Crafts in the Cold Steel games, whilst still leaving Arts worse than ever.

All of that is why Trails in the Sky & Crossbell have a great balance between Arts & Crafts, and both are required in those games as each serve a unique purpose. Yet in Cold Steel, Arts are mostly totally useless and not needed and not worth using, and Crafts are almost always way OP.

You clearly don't know how to use arts in Sky and Crossbell if you think arts and crafts are well balanced. Arts are more OP in Sky than crafts are in Cold Steel. The only crafts in the previous games worth using were very situational - if you needed to impede, you wanted to advance turns with Schera, or delay (or abuse the Zin bug). There'd be odd times when you'd use the others, but it'd be rare if you'd built your characters properly.

Hell, once Dark Matter EX came into being in Sky 3rd, only the Nightmare arena final boss needed anything other than that art to defeat, and even then only if you were playing it on Nightmare. (And, of course, the correct response to that situation was to earth wall spam: another art.)

In Cold Steel 3 arts offer a definite worthwhile strategy you can pursue. You don't have to if you don't want, of course, because you can go (eg.) the speed kills route instead (delay and debuffs combo), but at least it is a viable alternative because it hits for so much damage and the right Brave Orders allow you to fire them off machine gun style. (Also, Chrono Burst is even more broken than Dark Matter EX was in 3rd. You can get infinite turns even without being remotely efficient about how you set up your characters.)

[Mistfox]

Originally posted by afterthought.btw:

.....

Relax, you're talking to someone who by his own admission has not played Cold Steel 3 yet and when asked how he got his opinion replied that it is all online. You can easily guess how that went over with the majority of the players here. One of the many reasons why people hate on him.

[afterthought.btw]

Originally posted by Mistfox:

Originally posted by afterthought.btw:

.....

Relax, you're talking to someone who by his own admission has not played Cold Steel 3 yet and when asked how he got his opinion replied that it is all online. You can easily guess how that went over with the majority of the players here. One of the many reasons why people hate on him.

Oh I'm relaxed - I just found it hilarious that he thought the art craft balance in the other games was - well - balanced.