Etrian Odyssey

[B.Leu]

I recently decided to go back to EO3, I'm at the 5th stratum The Porcelain Forest. I wondered if you guys could help me with my team, that I frankly consider to be half-failed. Telling me what's wrong, what I could do, what else I could use... Pretty please ?

Hoplite/Ninja

-Hoplite

Guardian 1/10

Shield Master 10/10

Line Guard 10/10

Provoke 9/10

-Ninja

Senpuku 10/10

Kazuwaza 3/10

Kagerou 3/5

Bunshin/5/5

Sarutobi 3/5

Kumugakure 5/10

Note: The only build I'm 100% satisfied with. Bunshin allow her and her clone to Line Guard two row at the same time, and her evasion rate allow her to be durable as hell, PV-wise and TP-wise.

Princess/Hoplite

-Princess

Royal Veil 10/10

Trimphant Cry 5/10

Mornarch March 5/10

Attack Order 5/10

Guard Order 5/10

Ad Nihilo 1/10

Prevent Order 1/5

Rally Order 7/10

Protect Order 10/10

-Hoplite

Nothing.

Note: First waste. If I remember correctly, I wanted to sub her as Hoplite so she could have more physical defense, as well as more defensive skills that would allow her to do what my Hoplite couldn't do.

Too bad I don't have enough SP or time in battle for that. :p

Not to say that she is useless, but she is not as useful as she was at the beginning.

Plus, it seem like I wasted a lot of opportunities, like with no Nobility Proof, and just one point in Ad Nihilo which is apparently a pretty powerfull skill.

Shogun/Buccaneer

-Shogun

Second Sword 10/10

Katana Mastery 2/10

-Buccanneer

Rapier Mastery 8/10

Gun Master 8/10

Swashbuckling 10/10

Lady Luck 10/10

Limit Boost 10/10

Eagle Eye 3/5

Note: I recently heard about how OP this build could be with a Gladiator/Buccaneer... that I never intended to use in the first place. No, really, I honestly expected my Shogun/Buccaneer to be just than a hard-hitting build, and it does hit hard, but not that hard, and this is the only thing this build can do.

And it's quishy, but that's normal, that's a Shogun.

Monk/Princess

-Monk

Form QI 10/10

Healing 5/10

Line Heal 8/10
Party Heal 5/10

Refresh 2/10

Unbind 2/10

-Princess

Royal Veil 9/10

Nobility Proof 3/10

Guard Order 2/10

Note: The other character I'm fully satisfied with. She do her job, Healing, and very well at that, and her Princess sub just help her more. Though I do wonder why I gave her Guard Order... probably for the line that my Princess/Hoplite didn't cover immediately ?

Zodiac/Gladiator

-Zodiac

Volt Mastery 2/10

Singularity 5/5

Etheric Return 3/5

Volt Star 4/10

Meteor 8/10

Etheric Charge 5/5

Dark Ether 5/5

Horoscope 5/5

-Gladiator

Avenger 3/10

Berserker Vow 7/10

Charge 5/5

Wolf 3/10

Note: I wanted to use the famous Meteor build, simply because it was the best out of the lot. And it is powerful indeed. There's just two problem with it.

The combos is as such Wolf Howl => Berserker Vow => Charge => Meteor. This takes three turns to set up, turns that could be used for something else, notably for random encounters. No matter how I look at it, this is way too long. What's more is that normally you should use White Flame so that your Zodiac won't be interupted by ailments, which make it four turns to set up, when you have to redo the whole things once again.

I decided to not waste point in it, but I can't tell you how much it was frustrating to see those turns wasted. And let's not even talk about the hilarity of your Zodiac killed because it's PV was too low thanks to Berserker Vow. :p

The other problem is the TP cost of all of this: 2 + 8 + 6 + 55 => 71. My Zodiac have 285 TP which make it so that my Zodiac can do this long set up four time before being useless, this is simply a miracle that I did the fourth stratum.

And even if I simply cast Meteor during random encounter, it's still 51 TP.
Unless of course I have a shitton of Amrita, but those are a pain in the ass to farm.

Going from the Inn to the dungeons isn't better, That also mean that when I want to go fight a boss, I have to go back to the Inn at the first 'wrong' encounter. Not very fun.

I guess this is the price to pay for such power, it can kick a lot of FOE's ass by itself after all.

Or maybe that's me who play it wrong, it's been a while, so I can't remember quite correctly. Or maybe it's more of a post game build.

Incidentaly, I don't even want to look at /spoiler ever again for now. XD

Edited August 8, 2015 by B.Leu

[eclipse]

I'm gonna leave the Hoplite/Ninja and Monk/Princess alone, since you seem happy with them.

Princess/??? - If Hoplite ain't working, switch to something that will. If you absolutely need damage, consider a sub to Arbalist, for Giant Kill/Front-Row Mortar shenanigans. Subbing to Zodiac, and giving her Dark Ether will help the guys in the back row! Then, you can do stupid things with Regal Radiance.

Shogun/Buccaneer - If you're going to be a Shogun, you might as well take advantage of it! Use Fore Honor/Rear Dignity if you need certain allies to act first/last (hi Dark Ether). If your Hoplite's got a free turn, you can trigger Daifuhensha for more damage. . .combine it with Warrior Might for lots of trolling. As Shogun builds are one of the ones I haven't fully explored, that's all I can help you with.

Zodiac/Gladiator - Try to get all the elemental Stars (one level for now), so you can pick on enemy weaknesses instead of relying on Meteor. I haven't experimented with this build, because I made mine a Monk instead.

Good luck~!

EDIT: And now for EO2:U stuff. . .

[spoiler=After the first stratum boss]Damaging things is HARD. . .but the story mode guys refuse to die! Having a sixth member was insanely helpful for the boss fight, because I had my protector dishing out damage with Hasta! Transforming makes things easier, because I can truly pick on elemental weaknesses! Once I get Absorb high enough to deal with status effects, I'm going to make those elemental attacks hit as hard as possible!

Edited August 8, 2015 by eclipse

[Irony]

Fantasia, just so you know I named my EOU2 MC after you. But I named my guild "Buckets."

Thank you! :D I'm now playing along in spirit, and waiting 7 months before I can actually play it. :)

[Original Alear]

B.Leu: you might want to consider giving the hoplite anti-element skills depending on what route you're on. Also, anti-volt is really great for the fox FOE in the 5th stratum but you don't necessarily need to beat them, so...

And if you decide to do post game anti-skills are near necessary if not completely so (however, you could make your zodiac your anti-skill user as well...but since you're going to bunshin your hoplite, being able to double up on an anti-skill is occasionally useful).

IMO your monk princess can consider taking the job your princess/hoplite does over as you gather more SP in endgame (you can go up to lvl 100 if you want). That's up to you though. IMO having two healing and buffing characters is kind of unnecessary. I don't think you should be concerned about not having royal lineage, since the tp restoration is pretty abysmal and probably won't even activate much outside of boss fights since your battles shouldn't be taking more than 3 turns all that often. Royal lineage at level does allow you to get a skill called knighthood which lets another party member to act first. IMO that sounds useful. But apparently it is bugged and will make the enemy act before the targeted ally if used on a character that isn't in the front left or center. I don't think that you should need both monk party heal and princess protect order in your party setup. I also kind of think that the royal veil skills are unnecessary with another healer already in the party. Sure, monk restoration skills require tp, but you should be able to afford amritas by now. Not to mention that you have a dark ether character.

You don't really need any SP in ad nihilo for your princess/hoplite. All it does is up damage. The useful thing about ad nihilo is mainly its buff dismissal.

I admit I don't know shogun/buccaneer very well. But I don't think that mastering both gun and rapier is a good move for your SP usage just to get swashbuckling if you're not chasing it.

In main game I mostly used my zodiac for dark ether on my front row, which had two gladiators and a hoplite. This meant that I could blade rave and 9 smashes every turn of battle (9 smashes is pretty bad but it's a much better deal for 0 tp) and thus clear out random battles very quickly with heavy offensive skills. Like eclipse said, you should put a point in each star. But if you want to keep your meteor build for bosses, that is fine.

Overall I think your princess/hoplite and shogun/buccaneer need the most work. I personally think retiring your princess/hoplite would be a good idea if you plan on doing post game, because low-tp healing w/ royal veil skills is kind of unnecessary in post-game and your monk/princess will be able to get the princess skills that best supplement the monk skillset (attack/guard order and maybe rally order, prevent order, ad nihilo), rather than accumulating hp restoration skills when your monk should already be enough on that front. And if you're on the 3rd route for endgame story you should definitely get anti-skills on your hoplite.

Right now you have three characters focused on defense/support which IMO is just way too much. With bunshin hoplite you shouldn't need two healers.

EDIT-Oh and Eclipse, I just got to the second floor of EOU2 in story mode. On expert the monsters were really powerful early on: hedgehogs were taking my fafnir knight from full HP down to around 5 hp with normal attacks, even though I had given him the best armor I could buy at the store prior to setting your.

Edited August 8, 2015 by Severian

[eclipse]

I'm on my usual Standard, so it's 2HKOs for me. Even then, I have issues dishing out damage (at least the story party is pretty good about mitigating damage). I went utility on the Fafnir first, because poison/paralysis/curse suck (not like he'll be able to clear confusion/sleep/petrification/insta-gib, though. . .eh, he can unbind himself too, so I guess it was worth it).

Now I have to figure out how to up my damage output. Strong weapons help on Standard, but it turns anything beyond a random encounter into a battle of attrition.

[TildeHat]

Fafnir's Elemental Sabres+ Arianna's Link Orders are the story mode party's damage dealers. Chloe's ailing slash can do a ton of damage but it takes her away from her healing tree(I got ailing slash around third stratum). Flavio's Multi-Shot does okay damage as well.

I pretty much ignored the Fafnir's Force tree. The party has a lot of ways to prevent status and binds so he just went straight DPS.

[Junk]

So how is the story in EO 2 untold anyway?

[B.Leu]

Yup, I'm on the third path.

I remember against Kirin, I was basically always on the defensive, and then it was time for his thunder-attack... LolAegisDefense.

For now I don't give Anti-skill to my Hoplite because it was not that necessary, though it might change. How many point in it would be useful enough ? I should also drop Provoke all together.

-Eclipse

Princess/??? Subing her Zodiac for Dark Ether sound good more versability.. Though I have to admit that I don't understand what I could do with Regal Radiance, since it just 'dispelds a weapon's enchantments to deal damade to all enemies'

Shogun/Buccaneer, I get most of it, but I don't get how Rear Dignity could be useful since it make the character act last. Daifuhensha boost is a Provoke that boost ATK/DEF, very useful for the Hoplite. Warrior might, one character attack and yolo multi-attacks for Shogun, though I question the usefulness of this combination.

Huh, well it's true that if I don't give my Zodiac other elemental skills, she's not going to be useful, I forgot about it since it's a shitton of SP I gave her for the Meteor. Just one point ? That mean two SP then.

-Severian (God you name is cool)

The problem I have with kicking my Princess out is that the moment my Monk can't heal or have something other than healing to do, I'm kinda screwed, my Princess allow me to be more flexible in everything, healing included. I guess that I'll change to something else for post-game.

Also, I was forced to have Rapier/Gun Mastery at 8 to unlock Swashbuckling. Costy~~ D:

All in all, thank you very much for your help !

Edited August 8, 2015 by B.Leu

[Original Alear]

Oh, by the way B.Leu, I just want to point something out to you that you might not know. When you bunshin your hoplite, he comes with a limit skill equipped. So, for instance, you could equip your hoplite with a 2 point limit skill and the rest of your party with a 4 point limit skill, and then access the 2 point limit skill with bunshin.

I'm on my usual Standard, so it's 2HKOs for me. Even then, I have issues dishing out damage (at least the story party is pretty good about mitigating damage). I went utility on the Fafnir first, because poison/paralysis/curse suck (not like he'll be able to clear confusion/sleep/petrification/insta-gib, though. . .eh, he can unbind himself too, so I guess it was worth it).

Now I have to figure out how to up my damage output. Strong weapons help on Standard, but it turns anything beyond a random encounter into a battle of attrition.

I agree with what Guy in a Chair says about Fafnir and elemental sabers. For ailments, you can get prevent order for Arianna. However, I don't think it blocks binds or debuffs.

Yup, I'm on the third path.

I remember against Kirin, I was basically always on the defensive, and then it was time for his thunder-attack... LolAegisDefense.

For now I don't give Anti-skill to my Hoplite because it was not that necessary, though it might change. How many point in it would be useful enough ? I should also drop Provoke all together.

It's probably worth noting to start that in some circumstances where anti-element would be useful, you can abuse limits to block damage completely, since those skills don't occur all that frequently. Of course, it's useful to be able to block those attacks with elements and then use your limit gauge to block powerful physical attacks.

Well...for the postgame, there's a fair number of bosses have elemental attacks that will wipe your party in one hit. For those, the investment to get lvl 10 element blocks is probably worthwhile (level 9->10 is a jump from 55% reduction to 100% reduction). Remember that if you don't want to invest in level 10 in each guard skill, you can rest a few levels back and then switch which guard your points are in.

Alternatively, if you are willing to forego meteor and use your zodiac as an elemental attacker, you can invest in the prophecy skills. These require investment in the elemental trees to get, but completely block the chosen element's damage at level 1.

Anyway, the reason I mentioned the third route is that the final boss of that uses volt, fire, and ice attack-all skills which also inflict status conditions. I believe they are quite powerful, though not instant party wipes. Prevent order will help deal with these, but you can also block the elemental status attacks with a level 10 anti-element - if you take no damage, you suffer no ailment. The worst status effect is probably from the volt attack, which can inflict petrify. Fire can inflict all three kinds of binds. Ice lowers your attack, which is not so bad. I'm not sure if prevent order blocks binds or debuffs in EO3, so do some checking yourself if you're not sure. The boss has other threatening physical skills besides these. Other checking you'll want to do yourself (as I can't help you with this) is whether the final boss's elemental attacks occur in a predictable order. If they don't, you can cover your party with 2 elemental blocks as necessary (bunshin). If they do, you can have one hoplite line guard.

EDIT: My experience is that I didn't need any ninja skills besides bunshin on my hoplite/ninja at any point in the game. The only part that gets tricky with a hoplite is healing both hoplites when you bunshin. I agree that extra durability for the hoplite is probably a pretty good build, but I think that skill points invested in a way that can help your whole party survive, such as anti-elements, are more advisable, at least for boss battles.

The problem I have with kicking my Princess out is that the moment my Monk can't heal or have something other than healing to do, I'm kinda screwed, my Princess allow me to be more flexible in everything, healing included. I guess that I'll change to something else for post-game.

The things I can think of that would stop your monk from healing are:

-death (taking too much damage)

-status ailments and binds

-running out of TP

If your monk is in the back and your hoplite is helping to defend your party, damage should not necessarily be a constant problem. Especially in a boss fight, where your hoplite can line guard the back row for great defense. Your monk can easily invest in prevent order by resting and not putting points in royal veil and nobility proof. That should keep you from getting hit with bad status effects. I don't think nobility proof is a good investment at all for restoring TP - 5 TP restored after 3 turns of buffing at level 3 is completely useless when you have amritas, which you should have - that's a difference of taking 1 turn to heal 50 TP vs taking 3 turns to heal 5.

Moreover, you should be able to buy some healing items to give yourself a chance to hold your party together should your monk be unable to heal. If your monk dies, you have nectar ii's available to you (and gathering crabapples shouldn't be a problem with a team of farmers).

Also, I was forced to have Rapier/Gun Mastery at 8 to unlock Swashbuckling. Costy~~ D:

I know, but I think that swashbuckling isn't worth those points if you're not chasing it. 36% chance to do 200%-400% damage (2-4 attacks) is not very good, and it sounds like that's your only decent damage that doesn't take a bunch of turns to set up (meteor). Hanging has a 100% chance to do 250% damage for only 12 tp at level 10, and can head bind. Pincushion is TP heavy but AFAICT will do way more than swashbuckling per turn. If you rest your shogun/buccaneer and retire or switch out your princess for another offensive character with a strong, costly TP skill, you can use zodiac to dark ether your front line and up your damage significantly (and also eliminate your front hoplite's tp costs). Edited August 8, 2015 by Severian

[eclipse]

-Eclipse

Princess/??? Subing her Zodiac for Dark Ether sound good more versability.. Though I have to admit that I don't understand what I could do with Regal Radiance, since it just 'dispelds a weapon's enchantments to deal damade to all enemies'

Shogun/Buccaneer, I get most of it, but I don't get how Rear Dignity could be useful since it make the character act last. Daifuhensha boost is a Provoke that boost ATK/DEF, very useful for the Hoplite. Warrior might, one character attack and yolo multi-attacks for Shogun, though I question the usefulness of this combination.

Huh, well it's true that if I don't give my Zodiac other elemental skills, she's not going to be useful, I forgot about it since it's a shitton of SP I gave her for the Meteor. Just one point ? That mean two SP then.

Regal Radiance requires the elemental arms, and acts by dispelling the elemental buff on the weapon AND DEALING THE SAME ELEMENTAL DAMAGE TO ALL ENEMIES. Combine that with Singularity for some pain (put the elemental buff on your Shogun for best results).

Use Rear Dignity on your Monk to ensure that you're fully healed for next round.

And you can spare two SP on your Meteor Zodiac. Picking on elemental weaknesses is a lot more efficient than Meteor spam for random encounters.

I agree with what Guy in a Chair says about Fafnir and elemental sabers. For ailments, you can get prevent order for Arianna. However, I don't think it blocks binds or debuffs.

Got all the elemental sabers ASAP. It's probably a matter of leveling them up. Prevent order's only for a single instance, and my substitute for status ailment healing is Chloe's Displacement. DPS is currently Flavio - the Survivalist's skill pool is only limited by its mediocre TP pool.

Also, binds suck. I can get rid of the more common debuffs with Arianna.

And. . .

If this is anything like the original EO2, I'll absolutely want the ability to unbind my sorry ass in a hurry.

Edited August 8, 2015 by eclipse

[B.Leu]

Oh, by the way B.Leu, I just want to point something out to you that you might not know. When you bunshin your hoplite, he comes with a limit skill equipped. So, for instance, you could equip your hoplite with a 2 point limit skill and the rest of your party with a 4 point limit skill, and then access the 2 point limit skill with bunshin.

I didn't knew that. Thank you !

Regal Radiance requires the elemental arms, and acts by dispelling the elemental buff on the weapon AND DEALING THE SAME ELEMENTAL DAMAGE TO ALL ENEMIES. Combine that with Singularity for some pain (put the elemental buff on your Shogun for best results).

Use Rear Dignity on your Monk to ensure that you're fully healed for next round.

And you can spare two SP on your Meteor Zodiac. Picking on elemental weaknesses is a lot more efficient than Meteor spam for random encounters.

Are the damage really that high ? Does it stack with the Mastery skill too ? Boy, if that at the same level as EO4's Venom Trown , it would hilarious. :p

Would Warrior Might follow those attacks ?

I haven't though about that. Funny thing is, I remembered how much I would've loved to have healing at the last moment, so not to waste turn and TPs.

Yeah, it's just that there was so many TP to spend that I forgot I ocould also do that. Clumsy me. :/

Once again thank you very much for helping me !

Also, I feel bad for not talking about EO2U like everyone, so here you go :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9bMITOo_f0

[eclipse]

Are the damage really that high ? Does it stack with the Mastery skill too ? Boy, if that at the same level as EO4's Venom Trown , it would hilarious. :p

Would Warrior Might follow those attacks ?

If I'm reading my sources right, the damage from Regal Radiance is based off of the attack power of whoever's holding the weapon (hence the Shogun), and the damage scales from 160% to 190% (rank 1 vs. rank 10) - so if you can exploit Singularity on top of that, it'll hurt! Dunno if it'll work with Warrior Might, though. . .but it should work for the Chase (element) that the Buccaneer gets~!

[Junk]

Hello, after trying out persona q i became interested in this series. my first experience with this series was with the EO 4 demo which i was quickly turned off by because i didn't have a stylus and trying to map was yeahhh...

anyway so i recently got a new stylus and am enjoying persona q's gameplay. i have EO 3 because aquatic exploration sounded cool. a bit nervous on the lack of story and characters in these games but i'll see about that i guess.

The biggest thing that intimidates me is the difficulty of this series. What classes should I use in EO 3 and any general tips?

[eclipse]

That depends on your play style. Since you're just starting out, I'd recommend something really simple. . .like this:

Front row:

- Gladiator (straight attack power with some defense mixed in; go swords for accuracy or axes for YOLO)

- Hoplite (reduces damage, which you'll need for a certain jerk on the first floor)

Back row:

- Arbalist (back-row DPS with amazing skills)

- Monk (healer, give him/her a staff and ignore the combat skills)

- Zodiac (pick on elemental weaknesses, GET FIRE STAR IMMEDIATELY, and make sure you have a point in each Star ASAP)

If you pay attention to what monsters you encounter, you should be able to get past the first stratum. From there, you can figure out which classes work best for your play style. . .in a nutshell. . .

- Gladiators hit things hard

- Buccaneers are squishier than Gladiators, but can hit multiple times and passively raise their critical rate

- Hoplites are walls

- Ninjas are a very squishy class that rely on "tricks" to get by (status ailments and clones)

- Princes and Princesses buff and heal your party, with a focus on buffing

- Wildlings summon animals, which deal damage and inflict status effects

- Monks heal, and their damaging skills are best done with no weapons in hand

- Zodiacs pick on elemental weaknesses, and deal TEC-based damage (in short, they're mages)

- Farmers gather materials, and have some weird tricks in battle (Ninjas do the latter better)

- Arbalists rain hell from the back row

- Don't mind the last two classes, they're conditionally unlocked. . .but once they are, they're unlocked permanently~!

[Original Alear]

The biggest thing that intimidates me is the difficulty of this series. What classes should I use in EO 3 and any general tips?

1: Dark ether is one of the more broken skills for much of the maingame, IMO. It's a skill available to zodiacs. At its highest level (5 I think) it costs 10 TP to cast. When you cast it, you eliminate TP costs for the row it is cast on for that turn. This means that your zodiac can act as a TP generator for frontline warrior units w/ low tp. Eventually this becomes outdated since your characters will have larger tp pools and you'll have plenty of TP restoring items.

Eclipse mentioned arbalist. I don't think it's a great class in postgame, but I think it's really great in early game. The elemental barrage skills that hit all enemies can be really useful. Even 1 tp put into a barrage skill will help you a lot vs the first stratum boss of the game.

- Gladiator (straight attack power with some defense mixed in; go swords for accuracy or axes for YOLO)

It's actually clubs or swords for gladiator :) Of the level 10 skills I like blade rave better because it doesn't seem to be that much worse than 9 smashes and it spreads damage during random battles, helping to do good damage to multiple enemies. One way to work with 9 smashes' accuracy is to use an arbalist to throw pop flares. You can also subclass arbalist as a gladiator and invest in proper form to give a passive accuracy raise.

Also, front mortar for arbalist is an amazing skill if you're in the front row, but arbalists are pretty squishy, and it's TP heavy so you'll probably want dark ether for a while if you plan to use it.

Finally, I'm gonna repost something I posted a few pages ago for EO3:

First off, you should go ahead and take whatever space you have in your guild left to fill, or nearly fill, your guild with 1 or 2 characters of each class. Go into their skill tree. I believe there's a button you can press to go to a second page of skills which are common to all classes. Go ahead and use all their skill points in the skill which allows that character to accumulate XP while benched as the characters you actually use explore and fight in the labyrinth. This means that if at any point you decide you want to use a character of another class, you have them waiting for you with some levels under their belt. You can use rest to reassign their skills from the passive exp boost skill to other skills.

[North888]

So is this where I post my rant about Persona Q and tell everyone they should get Etrian 4 and Mystery Dungeon instead since those are the best ones? :3

[Original Alear]

I've gotten through a lot of Etrian Mystery Dungeon and it is not very good compared to any mainline EO game, IMO. It's way too easy. The music is good though.

[eclipse]

That depends on which class' male portrait is your favorite, North.

Eclipse mentioned arbalist. I don't think it's a great class in postgame, but I think it's really great in early game. The elemental barrage skills that hit all enemies can be really useful. Even 1 tp put into a barrage skill will help you a lot vs the first stratum boss of the game.

It's actually clubs or swords for gladiator :) Of the level 10 skills I like blade rave better because it doesn't seem to be that much worse than 9 smashes and it spreads damage during random battles, helping to do good damage to multiple enemies. One way to work with 9 smashes' accuracy is to use an arbalist to throw pop flares. You can also subclass arbalist as a gladiator and invest in proper form to give a passive accuracy raise.

Also, front mortar for arbalist is an amazing skill if you're in the front row, but arbalists are pretty squishy, and it's TP heavy so you'll probably want dark ether for a while if you plan to use it.

IIRC, you NEED a multi-hitter early-on, to make a few things a lot less headache-inducing.

Since I never went Gladiator (I went Buccaneer, 'cause I thought he was cuter. . .stop looking at me like that), I had to go off of what I saw in the class tree. They're the counterpart to the Landsharks in the other EO games, who wield a variety of things and can wear heavy armor. . .but I don't remember if Gladiators can wear heavy armor (because it's a huge point in their favor after earlygame).

I'd stick to Blade Rave just because missing a couple of hits in Nine Smashes adds up. Proper Form is absolutely amazing on multi-hit skills, and it leads to Extend, which makes random battles a lot less painful!

Front Mortar, IMO, is best left to a subclassed Arbalist - one that's in a not-squishy class!

EDIT: Etrian Mystery Dungeon was amazing right up until DOE execution. Whoever thought up of that shield was off the mark. ;/

Edited August 9, 2015 by eclipse

[Original Alear]

Front Mortar, IMO, is best left to a subclassed Arbalist - one that's in a not-squishy class!

If there is an untold 3 I am doing this.

EDIT-I hope they make the yggdroid better if they make it.

Edited August 9, 2015 by Severian

[Masked And Dangerous]

So is this where I post my rant about Persona Q and tell everyone they should get Etrian 4 and Mystery Dungeon instead since those are the best ones? :3

Persona Q's map system is substantially better because it highlights walls and has one tile for shortcuts, and bonus SP cut down on the need to go back to town while grinding.

[Original Alear]

Persona Q's map system is substantially better because it highlights walls and has one tile for shortcuts, and bonus SP cut down on the need to go back to town while grinding.

EOU2 actually has an option for auto-drawing walls now!

[North888]

Persona Q's map system is substantially better because it highlights walls and has one tile for shortcuts, and bonus SP cut down on the need to go back to town while grinding.

Yes but that's one thing.

You're given too many party members to manage compared to the number of demons you can store

The list of demons is too restricted here. There aren't enough in each level to effectively maximize your demon fusion capabilities and fuse certain strategies up. I, routinely, had to run parties with random personas attached because I couldn't fuse the ones that made my characters actual threats up and keep their persona's abilities. And the amount you can keep doesn't leave room for you to hold onto specific demons for everyone in the party. For example, I had a Succubus I ran with Yosuke cause it boosted his hit rate with status effects and his action speed and gave him lullaby. Never needed to fuse it up, but even I did, I wouldn't be able to keep that setup. Either way, Yosuke with that setup was OP, because he could most enemies to sleep first try and remove the enemy's turn so the rest of my party could either build up, or go in and slaughter the opponet with no retaliation.

Menus are also counterintuitive. When switching personas you don't get to see full lists of all your stats and can never, EVER, see how much SP a skill will cost in any menu. Additionally, your equipment and character info is NOT displayed with your persona info, so you have to jump between menus to confirm minor things as you equip and unequip personas.

If you want to make everyone viable and not leave about 3/4 the cast in the dust, then the grinding is attrocious, and then the game makes fun of you, or rams it in that you aren't doing it right if you don't keep the others up.

Zen and Rei piss me off. Less so for Zen, but Rei is so generic and nonsensical that while a bit funny, all her jokes are painful and can be seen a mile away.

Each reference is overused and they totally screwed up Akihiko's personality while overusing Teddy and making one too many jabs at Kanji and Shinjiro's appearance as well as food jokes. Yosuke, Teddy, and Junpei carry or initiate about 90% of all comedy and quite a massive portion of the dialog in this game. They try to flip Yukiko's laughing spurts to bad jokes on its head multiple times, and makes it brutally honest its coming, only to obviously make her deadpan the joke for the sake of a cheap laugh that will come only at maybe the first of many, MANY times it happens.

ALL OUT ATTACKS AND DOWNS ARE RANDOM. This core mechanic that often determines your victory and strategy in the Persona series is RANDOM. I don't think I need to explain how wrong this is. Additionally, while status effects work mostly the same and binds are ok, the presence of criticals and elemental exploits with this random system makes most fights a crapshoot to get an all-out attack, which isn't even guaranteed if the whole of your opponents are downed or if your entire party is in Boost mode. It's only guaranteed if both they are downed and everyone is in Boost mode.

Boost mode and the Persona HP system is nice and functional, though the game starts you with way too low SP to really make use of it at first. Though that quickly becomes less of an issue.

Labyrinth traversal is at its best here and there are some really unique opponents, though the FOEs are pretty weak honestly. A lot of the time the game will say I'm too weak only for me to pull out a win. They still take a ton of effort and can be very close, but ultimately I end up being able to grind 2-3 of the FOEs that showed up only a few floors up before I need to retreat.

Fusion system is at a high point, but the emphasis on skill cards doesn't mean much when its a painful and long grind to get the personas to lvl up to be able to turn them into cards, and then you're still charged ridiculous amounts for said one-use item. This also doesn't guarantee which card you'll get, so you can't grind up personas to get specific cards until you have the persona that gives the card you want. This makes the whole system overall pretty worthless early on, even after its introduced, and only becomes worthwhile after you've unlocked most of the demons and know who to summon and grind to build your chars the exact way you want without relying on sub-personas. They try to keep it back to how the formula was in other Persona games, but it just doesn't work. Because you have to keep up with about 16 chars in total, but you only have 16 slots, yet you're expected to attempt to try to keep most of your party within a usage level range, it just makes it all counter-intuitive. Add in overused jokes and remarks that pile up per dungeon to the point of me predicting dungeon puzzles and most of the jokes before they happened and I just got bored. There are a few standout moments, but the whole thing just isn't optimized well enough and should have been more tuned in terms of demon summoning mechanics and the menu layout.

The game shoulda taken a few MORE note from P2, including allowing you to store Personas with Igor/Margaret in the case of Q, or allowing you to sacrifice Personas for useful items without as much of a grind, and a focused skill set instead of spreading barely fleshed out movesets with nothing to them (4 moves a char w/skill cards not counting Zen/Rei) out amongst the cast.

I wish it would have tweaked things MORE. Instead of just trying to mash the two series together with a focus on the Persona. It just made everything so intuitive and even went against many of things they wanted players to attempt to do.

[Junk]

Thanks for the advice people. Definitely have an idea on what setup I want to do now. One last question. How important are buffs in this game?

As for the persona q stuff I find it pretty fun. i find the characters interactions hilarious since i've played p3 and p4 and the dungeon crawling and the FOE's are fun too, I also find that quests can provide decent experience for party members lagging. My team at the moment is P4 MC, Junpei (front) yukari, zen and rei, and p3 MC (back). Some of my party members have already learned their medium attack moves on quests alone. Also the game gives you a growth 1 item.

Edited August 9, 2015 by DO NOT POST BAH POSTS GUY

[eclipse]

Meh early-on (since TP's sort of a commodity), amazing later on. A buff can cancel a debuff, and vice-versa~!

[TildeHat]

Persona Q's map system is substantially better because it highlights walls and has one tile for shortcuts, and bonus SP cut down on the need to go back to town while grinding.

The SP buffer made it so that randoms no longer deplete your resources and made dungeon crawling boring. Multiple colours for icons was a good call though.

My problem with PQ is that the party member's skills aren't unique enough to differentiate them. They all pretty much function the same way and in the end it's the sub personas that make up your party.

In EO2U news I hit 5th stratum(It looks majestic) yesterday in Story mode and fought a Ragelope in Classic. It died turn 2 due to the instant kill of beheading cut. I was disappoint.