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I don't know how many of you are into comp Pokemon, but I just wanted to share this: http://pokemonshowdown.com/replay/ou-19578666
Dose Switches
I liked the "one look" version of that line better. I think it makes more sense.
I just beat Goldbeard Ceadeus without much trouble and unlocked G-rank.
And now a Great Baggi (normally a really easy monster) is taking off over half my health in 2 hits.
help
G-Rank Baggi is not to be trifled with. Especially given his increased access to sleep status attacks. Hope you've got plenty of energy drinks.
I pretty much just rocked my High Rank Azure Rathalos armour until I could get the G-Rank equivalent, which has a similar skill set that is likewise fantastic for generalist Blademastering. You could grind Goldbeard if you want the Helios Z set, which is popular for good reason; it gets both Sharpness +1 and either Earplugs or HG Earplugs. In particular, I'm fond of the G-Rank Gigginox and Barioth sets. The Glacial Agnaktor set is brilliant for lances and gunlances, if that's your cup of tea.
But if you're maining switch axe and hammer, then I expect you'd want something with evasion skills for the former and the standard KO setup for the latter. In which case, Barioth, Sandy Barioth and the standard Nargacuga sets will suffice for switch axe and you've got the whole set of desert monsters to help with hammering and greatswording.
^I'm already working towards a Helios Z + Vangis coil set, with Evade Distance gemmed in thanks to a lucky charm drop. With plans for an Awaken+Sharpness+1 Grongigas set, and a Helios X Kelbi Bow cheese set for stuff like Alatreon.
The bad part is that I'll probably be grinding Goldbeard forever.
get out
Alright, Helios Z with Sharpness +1, Water Attack +1, HG Earplugs, and Evade Extender gemmed in completed with minimal frustration. Now to head into G-rank proper.
Who else is as excited about Destiny as I?
So I think it's worth mentioning how convoluted and complex the Monster Hunter damage formula is.
It's the damage displayed in the item specifications, multiplied by a number of factors including sharpness, the type of attack you're using and monster hitzone, then divided by the weapon's class modifier. Ultimately, this means that the damage of the weapon you see in its specifications doesn't mean a damned thing. Let me give you an example.
You have a long sword with 800 raw damage and blue sharpness, and you're measuring the power of the thrust attack (pretty weak, insofar as long sword attacks go). You're hitting a monster in the chest or belly, which is typically worth good damage insofar as hitzone modifiers go. So that equation goes something like:
(800*1.2*0.14*0.5)/3.3 = Actual Damned Damage
That comes to 20.36 damage, although since calculation results in code don't use decimals unless you tell them to (not that you'd want them for a HP value in a game), that means it's just 20 damage. Does anyone have that Jackie Chan disbelief face on hand?
That's pretty typical for damage formulae, really. Compare the Pokémon one, for instance.
It's endemic to Japanese games in general, but what really gets me is the class modifier (in the Monster Hunter example). It makes sense that damage will be modified by the sharpness of a weapon and the location of the hit, but the modifier seems completely arbitrary. They could divide the damage you see in the specifications for all weapons by the modifiers, ditch them in the calculations, and the damage values you see would more closely represent what damage your weapon actually does.
How this confuses things is the way in which different weapons of different types have similar damage values, but very different modifiers. A good example is switch axes and greatswords, which have modifiers of 5.4 and 4.8 respectively. This is sensible in context of having those modifiers, given that switch axes are quicker weapons are need to be modified down more for the sake of balance... but why give them similar damage values in the specifications to begin with? Some players will likely be misled into thinking that switch axes are simply more damaging weapons, having similar presented damage values, but not knowing of the modifiers (and that 0.6 certainly makes a significant difference).
It's a matter of what information the game presents being so far from what actually happens that it's almost meaningless. Western games don't seem to suffer from this to nearly the same degree, if at all; the damage calculations for Mount & Blade are based on a weapon's initial damage, plus percentages accounting for user skill and momentum, minus the armour value of the target. It's all very logical. A bunch of Western RPGs lift the essence of their formulas from D&D, anyway, with damage being within a range of random numbers determined by the weapon. Or even more simply, the recent XCOM: Enemy Unknown represents armour as additional hit points, and more advanced weapons simply do more damage. Accuracy is represented by percentages, which means that anyone with half a grasp of probability theory can do rough calculations in order to determine the best course of action.
Games like Monster Hunter, Pokemon and so on, though, use values and relationships between values that don't make a whole lot of common sense. The Pokemon example is even more excessive. I can see the logic behind it -- the "raw" damage is calculated first, and then modified by other factors. But the way that initial damage is calculated seems really arbitrary, since those values and relationships are dependent on factors the developers chose to use in their game. It's as though they had an idea of what final numbers they wanted to represent certain things and then engineered a formula that would allow those values to work together, rather than building a system that could be logically inferred by the player to begin with.
Pokemon very much works on a "shut up and get big numbers" basis. Unless you're playing competitively (in which case you probably know the formula and approximate values of your most likely opponents) the specifics don't really matter as long as they scale in a balanced way.
I dunno, I look at that and it's really straightforward -- unusually so for JRPGs. (fraction of Level) * (Attack/Defense) * Base * modifiers. Those added numbers are just there to keep it smoothed a bit at low levels when tiny differences in stats still make a tremendous difference, and are negligible at higher levels.
The Monster Hunter one I'll admit is needlessly abstracted and most of those factors could have been folded into the displayed damage rating.
Yeah, I suppose the Pokémon one isn't as bad since in fact, a move with 80 base power will do twice as much damage as a move of the same type with 40 base power.
That said, I wouldn't say Western games are immune to unintuitive damage formulas. For instance, in Guild Wars the effect of armour rating on damage is not linear, it's exponential: adding 40 armour halves damage, and subtracting 40 armour doubles it, regardless of what your armour rating currently is.
World of Warcraft has a shitload of hidden modifiers based on weapon type and speed. While I see what they were going for in normalizing damage for specials compared to white damage, I feel like there should've been a more explicit way to do it.
JRPGs' combat damage algorithms also trace their lineage to games like D&D.
The question is why they are so much more complicated.
I think it has to do with the "shut up and big numbers" thing. They do appeal more to spectacle than do WRPGs. Also, the numbers have gradually been increasing over the years, so what would have been 99 damage is now 9999, and so forth. There are some exceptions, obviously.
Also speaking of World of Warcraft, pretty much every expansion has multiplied all numbers involved by a factor of at LEAST 3 and oftentimes entire orders of magnitude. I left when big spells were hitting in the range of 40,000 damage. One expansion and five levels later, they're hitting over a million.
Apparently it's gotten to the point that the devs are talking to players about ways to deflate the displayed HP/damage values into something more immediately comprehensible.
I think the classic CT/FF cap of three to four digits is probably best. Maybe with a bias toward the lower end, if anything.
I think an ideal system will have player-characters NOT hitting the HP cap, actually. And coming nowhere near it. So it never seems like an arbitrary limit.
The system I came up with the preliminary bits of goes up to 32767 or 65535, but using natural means caps your characters' HP growth at somewhere below 9999. Basically, any human characters, playable or not, have roughly the same effective HP cap, which is somewhere below ten thousand, but this leaves open the possibility of features like temporary HP or overheal, as well as the possibility of attacks dealing well over 9999 damage (like how in CT you have max 999 HP but you can get a Lavos Spawn's shell to smack you with over 1500 damage).
Additionally, human enemies ALSO have roughly the same amount of HP as you do. And they also come prepared, with items, buffing, actually-good AIs, and stuff. Imagine if the quality of AI design used in Fortune Summoners' platforming action went into designing JRPG bosses.
One thing you'd have to address with that is how RPG characters tend to inflict way, way more damage than they'll ever be able to take.
One approach would be the Golden Sun route, where player characters have shitloads more defense than anything else in the game. But it also turns VS battles into tedious slugfests where nothing ever rolls over and dies.
I think avoiding this is one of the reasons why I kinda like the Pokemon single player campaigns, even if they are piss easy.
^^ Yeah, see, if we control damage output, we can actually make things like Reflect spells useful.
Just tried fighting the HR DLC Alatreon.
well
at least i cut off its tail
I haven't fought him, but apparently he's not as strong as the village one. Which I beat with a whole 59 second remaining, by the way.
/heartattack
Does Monster Hunter have a narrative other than just killing monsters?
Nope.
Cthulhu Saves the World, Highlander complete and Angels Insanity complete.
Highlander is amusing, but there are a couple early stonewalls that make it seem a lot more grindy than the majority of it really is. I think most of my playtime on the mode was grinding up several levels to kill the Ape Princess in the forest, and then almost everything else went really smoothly as long as I saved frequently (anything that stuns you is pretty much death with one character). I wound up being able to take all the bonus bosses right after Innsmouth, and then just rush through R'lyeh without bothering to get the gear and stuff because I could kill Azathoth in like four hits. Between Innsmouth and the end of the game, the bonus boss kills gave me like 35 completely unnecessary levels.
Umi, as expected, was a scary good boss killer at the end of the game, with most of the ones up to the 2/3 point of the game best handled by Sharpe. Cthulhu was the only real choice for exploring because Drain Strike is pretty much the only way to keep yourself alive while still thinning the crowds, and he took Soulcaster down admirably. By the end of the game you get the Curse Sword to auto-insane everything, then an all-target Tentacles that'll oneshot most enemies.
Angels Insane was like the exact opposite. The early encounters on Insane were brutal with Cthulhu's party, but October can nuke pretty much everything for...well, most of the game. So it started out really easy, but then runs into roadblocks late in the game because October is worse than worthless against bosses, and Molly is kind of crap against everything but the final boss because he's ridiculously weak to Holy Strike. throw in the fact that Elona has way too much party responsibility because she has to simultaneously heal, buff, and tank because Molly's terrible at those too, and has both of the really crucial unites to boot. Doesn't help that the final dungeon for the Angels is too short to get much experience and has no gear, so you have to farm the final boss a bit before you can take Sara and Soulcaster.
One thing I noticed while doing both runs simultaneously is that the game chooses its random encounters based on how many of them are left in the area -- introducing more difficult ones as you exhaust the counter, etc. On Insanity, that counter is 9999 and won't reasonably go down, so you're always fighting the "easiest" sets of enemies and never see stuff like Beltmen, Horror Writers, or T-rexes. Which is probably for the best, because they'd fuck you up pretty badly.
Well, I've now done everything that game has to offer except a Score Attack that's bugged to not actually give you points. So yeah, fuck that, I'm done.
Alright, so what should I do next? I've got some half-done games that I don't remember what the hell I was doing and will probably have to start from scratch.
-Fortune Summoners
-Recettear
-Trine
-Grimrock
-Avernum 6
Recettear. Or Grimrock. Maybe.
Also, this is an ad that actually ran for Monster Hunter Tri during its initial release on the Wii.
...that is so radical.
Recettear it is. And I'm now into the third week.
I seem to be having considerably more luck than I did last time. I'm still getting all my good gear taken by old men while my adventurers sell me fucking apples and walnut bread. But at least the old men are paying well this time around, and the little girls are actually buying stuff (one just paid me like 20,000 for a ring. bitch was LOADED). I'm consistently hitting my payments like five days in advance, often more than doubling them by payment time, and I just got a price hike on my entire stock.
I'm also noticing my new adventurers have like, no wallet. Caillou just bitched me out for daring to try and sell him a 2800 armor at a considerable discount. Again, when 9-year-old girls in the same room and "eats flowers in the town square" Louie are dropping five figures. Which is a shame, because Caillou is actually really good if you know how to use him, and I'd rather not waste inventory slots giving him functional gear because he's too much of a cheapass to comply with local nudity laws.
Also, there seems to be a cult of hats or something. I just had four people in a row place bulk orders for hats.