Chase-centric party! Theorycrafting and my progress SO FAR

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Sup y'all! I wasn't originally planning on talking about this party, but it might be nice hearing some ideas for the post-game stuff at any rate.

Preface, "Why are you replaying Lagaard anyways?"
(Feel free to skip this, or read it because it humanizes the writing or something, idunno)


Intro/Theorydump

tl;dr, I want to make a chasing party work.

I don't think anyone who's beaten Lagaard would disagree that Landsknechts are pretty crap-tier. Aside from a decent str growth and access to the Bomb Axe reallly early on (which I can't get since I lack a DH or R), they don't have much going for them. Brawn CAPS OUT at 260%, and War Cry is something like 70% over 5 rounds, which means you can get at BEST 353.6% per round assuming combat lasts exactly 5 rounds. Sounds alright, but any time the enemy dies in less than 4 Brawns per war cry, the multiplier is even smaller. Look at Ricochet or Midareba's damage and total lack of setup/buff rounds

I'm basically describing an EO1 Ronin compared to an EO 1 survivalist at this point.

It's especially "meh" when you realize that even the freaking MEDIC AND PROTECTOR have better attacks than the supposed "weapon master". So, the only way to get good damage from an L is probably to make it attack more than once, innit?

2 chases is 380% damage off an L per round, almost at the level of Smite. Wasting the first round to War Cry brings that up to a beefy 646% per round (NOW WE'RE TALKING!), at the expense of requiring (slightly) weaker Elemental attacks instead of the typical midareba/ricochetspam of other parties.

This assumes we have at least 2 characters to chase. So, how do you maximize chase damage then?

My first thought was:
L -> War cry chases
A -> Elem-- wait, Alchemists suck. No good utility, overly-expensive spells, damage tapers real quick. Let's just scrap this party here and now...

So I went with Gunners instead, here's the first party plan:
L -> War Cry into chases!
G -> Risk*ele shotspam
G -> More risk*ele
T -> What? Really? Ifrit/Ymir/Taranis into Bravery into self-buffed weapon attacks
WM -> Healing and Warmight

As far as Force skills go, L's is decent for when my party's too busy buffing/riot-gunning to chase more than 1 element. G's is going to be a godsend for bosses and FoEs as it always is. The T's is dead freaking weight since it kicks War Cry off when the L buffs first, or kicks the Attack Up portion if the L buffs second. WM's is basically Immunize + Salve III for free.

So I was looking at....

1st Party plan


What about taking a Hexer? Frailty/Dampen and access to Torpor sounds sweet as hell for this setup. Would replacing the second Gunner be a good idea if I can guarantee at least 2 chases elsewhere? Is the Hexer dead-weight if I don't want to rely on Revenge this time around?

2nd Party plan

Party 2 looks like a bigger gamble (dps loss if Evil Eye doesn't land, but a major safety gain if it does), but offers much more utility with Torpor, Scavenge and Corrupt->Cursecut.

Current Status

In the end, I went with Party 2.

They're like, level 16 now after having killed the boss and thrown some new skills into their builds. I usually fight him at 14, but I didn't feel too good about this party so I grinded out another level. No deaths yet! Suck it, Evil Eye ambushers!

-L (pink guy) currently has 5/10 in Swords and Axes, 5/5 Freezer, and is working towards 5/5 War Cry. Freezer hit about as hard as my gunner's underleveled Riskice currently.
-G (blue lady) took 5/5 in Guns and Iceshot, working towards capping Riskice, taking medishot and switching over to Riskvolt.
-H (red facemarks) has 5/5 Torpor and something like 7/10 Sapping? I don't have my game open right now. Gonna get 10/10 in Sapping and then work towards Evil Eye+Suicide.
(She got lucky with Caprice on the stratum boss and had him paralyzed for 3 full rounds! It was impressive. No conditional though.)
-T (redheaded guy) went 10/10 Bravery and has like a point in the ice buff now (I think.) Working towards 3/5 in those buffs and maxing out the debuffs.
-WM (black-haired witch) has 5/5 in Warmight, 1 in a cure (cure II?) and is working up str 6/War Edge for cursecut. I might need Salve since this isn't my typical shut-them-down-with-ultspam party

I feel like I have literally all my bases covered for the main game, at least. Hexer and Warmage for exploration utility, Warmage and Troub for damage buffing, Troub and Hexer for debuffs and Gunner/Landsknecht for at LEAST one chase per round, bare minimum. The T gives him a second chase eventually and the WM can probably get in on that too (if my Evil Eye+Suicide plan keeps the bosses distracted for her.)

I'm worried about the third and forth stratum bosses thanks to their infamous bullcrap-opening-moves potential.

Pros:
- Feels synergistic, I love having characters work together to dish damage
- I'm actually using buff/debuff slots AS THE GAME INTENDED FOR ONCE
- First stratum was a breeze, but I got lucky with ambushes and my boss-tier caprice admittedly.

Cons:
- I really miss my P and DH portaits. They were with me from my very first party! This is the first time I ever play without them.
- The H looks like it'll be a FREQUENT coin-flip since I'm not relying on stacking force skills and spamming revenge this time. Maybe a second gunner would've been better
- I don't think I can do the post-game with this exact setup. The T at LEAST will make a certain floor 30 boss rather impossible, I suspect. Whatever I retire into, I'd like to at least try and keep the party thematically centered around chasing as its main source of damage.

I'm also working on a B-Team with a Dark Hunter and Revenge Hexer among other classes. The idea behind the B-Team is that they'll stay around the same level as my A-Team, but snag conditionals that my main party can't otherwise grab.

Future Plans

Get to 70, maybe retire the WM/H/T for something else. I dunno. I don't really know how to play a postgame H without Revenge, and I'm not sure how big a help Frailty would be over a second Gunner. Healing can be handled easily by items, which makes the Magus's big contribution Warmight. The T is definitely more damage than a second G, though buff-stacking will bite me in the ass much later if I remember correctly.

What would be the best thing to take if I replaced them? I haven't even begun to think about how I'm going to handle the post-game bosses. A few key Riot Guns might be enough, no?

If Evil Eye + Suicide doesn't work, I might replace the H with another gunner. That, or rest for Revenge. Honestly though, Revengespam doesn't feel thematic to my Chasing setup. Maybe I'll just hand her the Polar Rod and let her bait more chases after setting up Frailty? That seems stupid.

What I want from you, dear reader

Input for the late- and post-game would be great. So far so good, but the main game is usually super easy (especially on a replay).

Is the 40% off Bravery worth waiting til round 3 to give the T an elemental buff? Would I be better off debuffing round 1, butting round 2 and autoattacking from then on?

Are there any party members worth swapping out? Will the T pull his weight, considering all the setup rounds before the pay-off? Does the H even matter if I'm avoiding Revenge? Is Warmight worth sub-par healing from the WM?

Would it go against the spirit of my chase party if I farm up the Axe and Bow drops under the condition that my B-Team never outlevels my A-Team? I don't think so (it's a GUILD afterall!), but I'm a shameless min/maxer at heart so I need a second opinion here.

I'll post every now and then when my party does something notable.



edit:

[zamisk]

I made an all-Buccaneer and one other class party in EOIII that reminds me of this. Can't wait to see how this goes.

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[zamisk]

I think it was easier to make a chase party in EOIII because of multiclassing. But yeah, your party setup seems good, you've put a lot of thought into it. I like hearing about experimental parties like this. Last time I played EOII I was using a Ronin/Beast/War Magus party, which was challenging, but some Japanese guy did a solo Dark Hunter party.

Also, I'd never type that much about anything that wasn't mandated by a professor. I'm impressed.

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[zamisk]

My friends made me be the DM for 2 of the last 3 years. I know how that feels, haha.

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Update: 2nd Stratum down! I decided to gamble on a 20% chance and just threw myself against ...her? until I won. My party jumped from 24 all the way to 26 in that fight!

Here's the breakdown:
Round 1: riot gun, warcry, frost imbue, warmight, evil eye (IT LANDED)
Round 2: riskice, freezer, bravery, slash, suicide -> 2 chases out but my L was out of tp...
round 3: fed an amrita to the L, slash slash slash suicide
round 4: terrify wore off. chased 3 attacks and stumbled up the stairs at full health.

My earlier disappointment wasn't all for naught though; I'm very close to figuring out the "ideal" setup for defensiveness + usefulness of the Landsknecht (hint: it involves throwing a LOT of jars at things instead of relying on elemental imbues) Also, ignore my earlier criticism around the troubadour buff Health. Jars can largely replace the need to imbue, which makes that dead turn the ideal time to buff with it when needed.

A couple of notes about the climb to get there:
1) Poseidons hurt a LOT
2) their charge ability has nothing to do with that damage.
Fortunately for me, they're very weak to Ice attacks, which my party focused on in the early game. Huzzah!

I'll update when I'm more confident in my --postgame-- party setup, or if anybody has a thing they want to discuss with me. Cheers for now!

old update because why-not:

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Double post to dump a massive endgame plan session I threw together on notepad today.

(I think I played the game for maybe 40 minutes today, but number-crunched for maybe 2 hours. Dropping out of plumbing to go into Math was probably the major turning point in my life incidentally, even though I'm not really in Math anymore either...)

ANYWAYS

Assumptions:
Given our "average" party with a Ronin as x, rotation becomes:

This means the boss is probably dead at the very end of round 2, sitting on ideally ~13900 damage taken. Round 3, pretty much any hit is the one that will kill the boss if he survived.

Now, for the Elemental party the rotation becomes:

That's not-so-great. It'll kill the boss by round 3 like the first one, but gives them almost 2 full rounds of time to beat on the team! This, I learned from the 2nd stratum boss, was a bad idea.

I'm assuming a 1.5 elemental weakness on bosses (since I can't find the actual multipliers...)
1.9*1.5=2.85 innately per chase
3.4*1.5=5.1 innately per riskvolt
1.0*1.5=1.5 innately per imbued attack

Same rotation, taking weaknesses into account:

That's much better damage! I can kill on round 2! provided I actually ARRIVE at round 2 in one piece (doubtful...).

For the sake of completionism, let's see what frailty adds/removes over a third revenge...
That's a LOT more damage! I wonder if the modifier on weaknesses isn't actually 1.25 though... testing that some other time.

What's the smallest contribution to the party's damage output? We can replace them with a Dark Hunter in order to add another 1950 damage + a free round to attack.
- Taking the T out of the equation removes the 1.5 from Ymir and forces WM to carry elemental jars instead of imbues.
- Taking the WM out removes the 1.6 from my L, and an easy source of imbued strikes. T can chuck jars from round 2 onward instead though. Also loses out on healing and cursecut.
- Taking the H out removes 1.32 from Frailty, 2500 damage per round from revenge and also cuts the utility of Torpor + Cursecut for traveling around

T->DH (Jars are being thrown now)

WM->DH (troub is going brav->ymir; jars are being thrown now)

H->DH (no revengespam or frailty, everyone else fights as usual)

So, in terms of having a Dark Hunter present for some light bondage, we can organize the parties from highest to lowest:
- L/D/T/G/H - 23,240 over 3 rounds
- L/D/W/T/G - 21,842 over 3 rounds
- L/D/W/G/H - 20,905 over 3 rounds
- R/D/W/G/H - 20,331 over 3 rounds
With all of them being VERY close together and likely capable of winning by round 2!

Considerations:
- L/D/W/T/G is the MOST reliant on the L to chase consistantly, as well as being the most reliant on jars or elemental weapons. It also gets almost all its damage off the L.
- L/D/T/G/H is the most balanced between L and G's contributions to the party, since L lacks warmight. It's also the least reliant on jar spam. It also completely forgoes its HEALER...

So there you go. One final simulation on an enemy supposedly RESISTANT to all elemental forms, using an L/D/T/G/H team. Just to see how flexible the party is.

TL;DR -- If my numbers are correct, they balanced damage-dealing parties SURPRISINGLY WELL, since dropping the H/W or T for a DH creates a party that's -about- the same.

p.s. on the TL;DR -- You still need a way of avoiding damage. My preference is not getting hit in the first place, hence force-skill-abuse. Maybe playthrough #3 I'll try one of those fancy no force runs. After giving the game a rest for another couple of years to reset my palette, of course.

TL:DR on the p.s. -- balanced damage output =/= able to survive the fight.

[zamisk]

Holy numberwang, is that a lot of thought put into this.

I just play these games to explore n' shit.

[isometric]

EDIT: "Pack it up, go home, we're leaving!" Edition

I FINALLY found information on postgame boss weaknesses and (surprise!) they're WEAK TO NOTHING. That throws a wrench in all my previous calculations (where I was just barely keeping up with the standard setup, assuming I had a 25%-50% weakness in effect as most bosses give)

I guess that means my mission to find a way of making Landsknecht relevant is a TOTAL FAILURE at this point, since subbing in an R, B or even a post-game (for all those +str items) M or P would probably be more damage than the L.

Honestly though? I can probably still deal enough damage to take out everything but the final postgame boss in 3 rounds. I'm debating whether to delete the save and put it away again since the wind's kind of out of my sail now and I've already completed the game a long while ago, or just see how far my L can take it (since it's honestly not bad damage)


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[Wolkenritter]

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'nother double-post since I took down a boss. Hope that's alright.

Stratum 3's down! Not much to really report, except that this chasing party is both awesome and arguably far more tp-efficient than the cookie-cutter ever was. My massive damage rounds cost me only 14tp off the Landsknecht while everyone else fishes MASSIVE attacks from their fire weapons, rather than 20something off each attacker.

When I first started Stratum 3, my party's average level was 25. This is after having retired at 30 to throw a Dark Hunter into the crew, deciding against it and grinding back to 30 to retire back into a Troubadour, and finally beginning to level back up to 30 before finding myself bored out of my skull and just sort of setting my DS aside for a bit.

(As an aside, I am SUPER thankful for the blatantly broken leveling system Lagaard offers over, say, the original game. I wonder how many Treefrogs those two retirements would've cost me?)

A couple of notable things were probably my first run-in with a FOE and the boss fight...

Incursio vs the FOE:


Incursio vs the 3rd Stratum Boss:


We got the conditional and 2 levels out of that fight. Level 34 now, and on to the first floor of the 4th stratum. No tough battles yet!

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Update for my 1-or-2 mildly-interested readers! I'm actually having quite a bit of fun doing these write-ups! Hopefully those of you reading them are enjoying it at least a bit. Anyways...

4th STRATUM DOWN! Chase team's making good, solid work of everything it bumps into, but I'm starting to feel burnt out (pun not intended). ANYWAYS....

The first thing I did when I entered the stratum was save at the pole and tackle the first FOE I could find. Just to test the waters, y'know. It... didn't end well. So naturally, I decided to make it my new mission to kill every single FOE I came across without exception until I cleared that floor.

You know, for morale or something.

Anyways, the actual exploration was quite easy. Quite a few enemies were outspeeding my Hexer by this point, so I was taking chip damage here and there for relying on Torpor. A few times, I'd just go for a blazer -> autoattack to kill packs of 3-4 enemies instead since my troub and war magus still move pretty quickly. It didn't really matter what method I used, as I could usually clear them in 10-14tp, and I had a Hexer + War Magus to keep me fueled for long exploration periods.

Stomping FOEs and mapping the first 3 floors is pretty much all I got around to yesterday. Just cruised around beating up FOEs and reaching the 20th floor. It was smooth sailing right up until the Petaloids came. Today, I spent like an hour mapping the 20th floor before warping back to town and saving before tackling the boss.

I guess the Stratum Boss and that one big, scary FOE type are the only things really worth writing about. Everything else was swept in 1-to-2 turns.

Roaring-Rampage-Of-Revenge:
Incursio vs the Stratum Boss:

That's 4 bosses down for my crew.

Party's 43 (ALLLMOST 44) now, and ready to tackle the 5th stratum. Am I under-leveled? Also, I'm not really sure what I'm doing with some of my builds... Also, now that I have a stack of Caledfwlch's in the store, should I keep a couple in my bags for the later stratums?

Cripes, the decisions...

OH! Builds so far, in case anybody cares/wants to give advice on where to proceed.

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Fifth Stratum down! Took down the Miniboss at 48, Final Boss at level 53. Bit underleveled? Maybe. Did it feel that way? Heck no!

Bit of a retrospective now that the "main game" is over:


Notable FOEs:


Boss Battles:

So there you have it. Main game's cleared, with only 1 enemy being out of my league (and only because I didn't have Dampen yet!) I'm going to prep for the Post-game and see how far into the 6th stratum my chasing can take me.

Hopefully all the way to the end.
That's all for now. Thanks for reading, anyone.