Anyone still playing...

Sophie is more about weapons/armor than accessories. In particular it's about taking advantage of Enhancements, which take shitloads of money on top of everything else. The accessories are kind of mediocre, although the KO protection they give is pretty strong.

I want to impregnate Sophie

KO protection lets you sandbag to infinity and then you win

I don't even know what the story is. I just got the liscence and have been time sinking everything doing what I want to do. This is so much better than open world + craft because this is a crafting game first that went open world(ish). Don't feel like stopping any time soon but I gave up on rorona in the epilogue and quit sophie right before I had to fight the first boss.

maybe for the regular postgame. You can spam a heal/cure/revive all item all day so as long as you can keep one person up and keep doing damage you can win eventually. On the DLC bosses though Tormented Beast heals for about 5x the damage he does so you need either good strategy or damage (or both). The DLC final boss just murders you with AOE spam if you aren't tough enough, and KO protect isn't 100%.

I felt like firis was too grindy for me, where you end up having to grind both alchemy level's as well as bosses for decent drops, so I ended up giving up eventually.

Thought that way at first, but it's "grinding" new content constantly. Other than leveling up individual recopies, which is stupid but relatively quick if you have enough materials, it's just a natural progression.

That's what I hate the most though, I was okay with at first, working hard to level up my items so i could shove the traits I wanted, but then it got so repetitive, when I realized that every bit of gear I wanted would require me to grind every item I needed to max level and on top of that find a way to get them to max quality, it just became a ridiculous grind. I enjoyed the journey up until end game, but I think the lack of time limit just means that GUST put in more grind to make up for it.

on hardest (forget if it's NO HOPE or DESPAIR or NIGHTMARE) you can't survive a hit anyways, so that accessory helps a lot more than armor does

Precision Instrument Set, bought from the shop run by the little girl in Flussheim (forget her name, plot character). They stack, so you can use up to 5 although that competes for container space. Anyway each one you have placed grants a significant boost to the amount of experience gained towards mastering each item.

With those set up, just spam shitty materials to max level

for me Escha and Logy is by far the best one in the whole series, so I think you should try it out before moving to the new ones. Ayesha and Shallie are ok, but I would avoid them for the moment

I would say: E&L -> Sophie -> Firis

What's up with the floating island? At some point the game stopped me to tell me there was one and yet no other point did anyone say anything about it, and there's no observatory or anything to look for it.

Pretty sure it's one of the major post-game questlines. You probably get there while doing the quests for the twins, which again only pops up after the exam

dissome fine assshit you got here, nice thread.

so, floating islands are becoming a signature thing in the series? at least Escha and Logy had one too

Sophie didn't, but one of the areas supposedly was one that fell upside down.

Probably just because people like floating islands, and it's a good excuse to get you to build the fast travel airship

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Did you forget about Ar Tonelico? The whole series is set on floating islands.

Got to love some of those surprises. I just figured out I can rotate placement, I'm 23 hours in the game

This thread is lacking in the high impact sexual violence department

Good news is that Gods Gift and Heaven's Cleanser work pretty well together. Both of them set a time card for a second attack. You can't have more than one time card from the same item type, but you can have one from each of two different items just fine.

while I'm on the subject of bombs, the attack reduction from Blitz Core: Fire is absolutely HUGE. I don't know how the attack stat works exactly, but I do know that it tends to reduce a bosses damage by 2/3rds, taking it from instant-kill to easily-survivable, that, and it's only doing a -68 attack.

Yeah, it's really weird, as that seems to be the highest reduction in the game bar none. and it's only labeled as an L

Really? I never fucking though of making a powerful blitz core and it doesn't attack an area so it doesn't help in field battles.

When that single item can take a boss that does 120-140 per attack 3 times and reduce it to 40 per attack, I don't even care if it does damage at all.

I'm so bad at this. I don't get it high enough to do anything like slow or weaken.

I completely ignored the status effect line when I made mine, put everything into the yellow Steal Attack line to max that out

Status effects can fail or immune (miss or resist, respectively). Raw stat effects, like steal attack, lower attack, reduce level etc never fail unless the entire attack misses, which I don't think can happen with items.

Hey thanks! I beat my first boss (the tree faerie) doing this. Her attacks were like regular enemies and I just whittled her away because he did so little damage. If only I can figure out how to get to the god damn floating island now.

Since you seem to be struggling, you do know to try to get your use items as close to 999 quality as possible right? Quality is a large multiplier for damage and healing effects, not entirely sure what else it impacts but it can mean the difference between a bomb doing 100 damage and doing close to 1000 damage.

The trick for quality is first to get the traits "Super Quality", "Pro Perfection" and "Quality++" onto a single item, and then craft something that can use itself as a material. In Firis the easy 999 you want to use as a basis for absolutely everything is Distilled Water.

The issue being with no easy way to dupe those traits you can get fucked over easy if you blow them on stupid items

I mean in general, not with Distilled Water or Plywood. There's a few recursive recipes in the game

Duping the traits is as easy as putting one distilled water from the previous batch into the next batch. The quality up line is pretty common so if you had to make it from scratch it shouldn't be too difficult

Do I make the distilled water or farm it? Like do I get threads and water with quality + or just look for the distilled water with quality +

Distilled is something you craft.

First you need any materials with the traits "quality up", "quality up+" and "quality up++". If you have all three of those on "water" category items you're golden otherwise what you want to do is craft Neutralizers (any color) with the traits and then use those neutralizers to make Zettel (basic paper), which you can use for fuel in the Distilled water crafting.

Second, you have to start combining traits. If you put "Quality Up" and "Quality Up+" on an item, you get the trait "Well Made". If you do it with "Quality Up+" and "Quality Up++" you get "Pro Perfection". Finally, if you put "Well Made" and "Pro Perfection" onto an item you get "Super Quality". Note if you put 2x Quality Up+ and one of each "Quality Up" and "Quality Up++" while crafting you skip the middle step and just get "Super Quality". Traits are automatically combined BEFORE you are allowed to select which traits to keep on the final item, and combining traits "consumes" a copy of the original which is why you need Quality Up+ twice.

Once you've crafted Distilled Water separately with each of those traits you can put them together into another Distilled Water. It just so happens that one of the ingredients to Distilled water is 3x any water-category item, which of course includes the distilled water you've been crafting already.

Having all three of these traits on an item will roughly double the quality. If you use the improved item as a material in crafting the result will have a higher quality (starting quality is based on the average of all input materials), which you can double again with the traits. You just keep looping the outputs into the inputs until you have your 999 result.

Small thing to beware of though, Distilled Water can only carry 2 traits at a time naturally. You will need to complete a bonus chain with +1 (or more) trait to get the full 3. Fortunately the Alchemist's Dress outfit adds a bonus to "sythesize without catalyst" that does exactly what you need. Still annoying because it means you have to actually pay attention to grid placements whenever you craft more Distilled Water.

One more thing, if you combine the Critical, Critical+, and Critical++ traits in the exact same way as I described with the Quality Up set, the result is a trait called "One Hit Kill". Useful for those "field battles" you mentioend.

haven't played this series, where do i-

Where things get tricky is where you want 999 quality, but NOT the quality traits themselves. Add to that the component system for effects and that's where a lot of the actual game is.

One hit kill got nerfed really hard from sophie.

Also just to do a quick test on how much Quality effects an item, A quality 66 fire core with no traits does 150, while a quality 999 with the quality traits does 360.
Now obviously if you're actually making an attack item you don't want all three quality traits on it, but it was for the purpose of testing.

Sort of, it's level-based now. If the enemy is below your level 1 hit kill will work 80-100% of the time, depending on how far below they are. The higher their level above you, the less likely it is to work. Of course bosses are immune and always have been.

The same was actually true in Sophie too, you just didn't encounter very many enemies massively above your level because the leveling system was different (capped to 20 for player characters). You see it a lot more in the DLC dungeon where enemies are level 40ish and One Hit Kill might work 10% of the time if you are lucky.

No, it's way lower. Like even against shit 10+ levels below me if I spam it I'm lucky to get it to proc 1/6 times

IDK exactly where its set to. I'm about level 60 right now and it works on everything.

Just a thought, is the bomb you have with 1 hit kill high-quality? Quality could modify the chances. I KNOW level does though because I'm using some of the same bombs I had when I was level 25 and against the same enemies that I could maybe kill 20% of the time they are now 100%.

I don't know, maybe I'm just super unlucky then, it works so infrequently for me.
Quality 300 Blue bomb so that's probably not it

after finishing exam go back to flussheim and progress the quest
after exam progress the meklet and atomia quest
this unlocks the airship allowing fast travel to other regions from your atelier
east part of the game, 3-way crossroad area that connects snow and coast area, go south
They are there to change the layout of the dungeon while recycling the base layout.

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I want them to fix nights of azure. Cant pick up any items. Until then they get nothing.

book is for sexual

Who the christ is playing nights of azure? That IP is a fucking bust.

they didn't give her a succubus tail for nothing

Not really. It's designed to learn and adapt to the creation system and also see the various quests along the way at your own pacing. And then beast the fuck out of them with the next round. The key is replay value and comfort.

I would say I'd like to use it for extra leverage but I don't know how sturdy a handle it'd make

Need to decide whether I want to start NG+ or just finish the game completely in NG. The MAIN benefit to starting over is that in NG+ you get to have the benefit of all outfits at once, so no more running around in a bikini all the time just to improve material quality/traits, and I get to actually use the benefits like increased movespeed, rare item find and LP cost reduction.

The only things that transfer to NG+ though are current equipment (but use items or exploration gear), recipe proficiency (but not the recipes themselves), and whatever items I place in the Atelier (this is the reason the game lets you place bombs around). Bombs make fighting easy but it's still a lot of work to re-learn the recipes. On the other hand the longer I wait the more work I'll need to do to catch up again.

is Ar Tonelico still worth playing? how does it compare to the Atelier games?

I'm still in the first part of the game, how much ingame time do you get after passing the exam?

infinite time.

Eh, it's a way more standard JRPG. 1 and 2 are okay, Qoga is complete dogshit and should be avoided at all costs unless you really have a watersports fetish

Are you stupid? Telling someone to miss out on the series' own ending is idiotic in extreme.

Where is sex book's second weapon recipe? I don't even have it in my book so I don't know where to start to get a clue on what the upgrade to the moon caller is.

Ar Tonelico 1 is incredible, it's worth it to strugle through 2's bad translation, 3 is pretty bad because it not only is weaker than ArT it's weaker than Atelier and any JRPG made by other small japanese devs at the time. I suggest playing the first two since you can easily emulate them but pick up 3 if you really want to see the finale/find it cheap.

Also Ar Surge is set in the world but it's pretty unrelated to Ar Tonelico. It's very word heavy so it's more of a visual novel. If you don't like that thing don't even start the other Ar series. Character design, art direction, and music is p.good though.

Which girl has the best feet?

Footfags are worse than traps-aren't-gay shitposers.

To say 3 is worse than the Ateliers in the music, story, setting and characters department is beyond retarded.

And the translation for 2 has become a non-issue ever since the relocalization was completed.

At the least give the title properly (Ar nosurge). Also, no one in their right mind would go through Ar nosurge without at least checking Ciel nosurge's story first at this point.

Hmm nah. 3 is still pretty bad don't like any of it. Yeah we get games like the Dusk series and Sophie but I still like a handful of characters from Iris and Mysterious (not really Iris) better than anyone from 3. I guess I should have stated it like an opinion instead of fact.

Let's hope people do their research in to nosurge before they would pick it up, ya.

But are these simply generic rpgs, or would they be worth of my time? I mean, do they stand out in any particular point?

Having played a lot more, I think the one thing I really don't like about Firis is the way the recipes unlock and the hint system that goes with it. Often there is no hint at all, and even when there is it's vague as fuck. If all recipes unlocked through simple (first-time) progression it would be fine, but lots of them are like "do X 50 times" when there's no way to know what X is nor any other reason to actually do it more than twice.

I think most people agree that the recipe system is trash. That and the fact you have to grind each recipe up to full level to carry over traits. If both were gone from the next atelier I think it would be for the best.

Probably. Grinding the recipe experience isn't that bad though when you have several of the Precision Instrument Set installed in your Atelier. Each one adds +8 xp gained towards mastering an item when you craft it, and I'd estimate that each level requires no more than 100 xp, so with 3 instrument sets you can master an item in under 12 crafts, probably about 8.

I wish they were more liberal with the books, some of them should be extraordinarily expensive so that it would off your an alternative to needing to grind for recipes.

Btw guys I got the idea for Plachta's 2nd weapon but I don't know how to make the Blood Veil or dragon blood veil. Where's the idea for it?

For me it's the recipe system and alchemy grind being garbage, in addition to the endgame trait grind.
here's some spoilers on how it's done in case you want to know how to get endgame traits
There are level 70 skull monsters that spawn, you need to kill them on very hard (some people say any difficulty works, but most people say V.Hard) and they have an incredibly small chance to drop a special super high tier trait, and an even smaller chance for it to be one that isn't shit

You can complete all the content without needing those traits at all, they are only really there for people who want to grind their characters as far as they can

Also it doesn't have to be Very Hard, I found a couple of them on Hard. Very Hard PROBABLY has higher chances though,

Eh, it's there for when the uber dragon's 40,000 HP and 3 actions a turn just become a slog.

I just got the ideas for gems and ore from Sophie's after test quest.
HOLY SHIT THIS IS GETTING INTERESTING

I don't know what the fuck is going on anymore. This is what alchemists of the dark ages have always desired.

Haven't played an Atelier game since Rorona, how do the new games compare? Also, should I play Sophie before Firis or can/should I skip it?

Sophie sucks, Firis is one of the best games in the whole series maybe 2nd best. Just like the Arland series you only learn the backstory of a supporting character (the previous game's lead alchemist) when you play the 2nd and 3rd game so it doesn't spoil anything else. You can play it in whatever order but Firis is the best since. mana khemia

Seems like bombs have a diminishing return, if you spam the same bomb it does considerably less damage each time. Not ENTIRELY sure how it works though since the random damage is such that I have actually hit for 2500 with a Craft.

As it is I'm trying to rotate through a bunch of different bombs. Still too lazy to change out of the all-alchemist party

Yeah, there is, It's reset in seemingly 4 actions of that alchemist though, so basically just have a 4 bomb rotation for each alchemist.
Which is a bit weird considering no other game had that.

But yeah it seems to be First 2 times you use it you get full damage, then half on the next, and then 1/4th.