The second gives me the most trouble just because there is no real way to safely figure out his patrol route
I’ll have to give it another run to be able to offer more detailed advice - but what I usually do is get past the first and through the bottleneck, go off to the side (and make sure you watch him because he goes a bit in that direction) and get a handle on the timing of when he rushes back down. There’s a pattern to it where you can get in right after either when he goes up or when he rushes down.
Hello I got to Marianne story in the little town where you get umbral steel but I am stuck and I don’t know where to go or who to talk to I tried going around the entire town but I didn’t get any new conversations or hints, I don’t mind spoilers but if anyone knows where to proceed next I would be really grateful for that.
I would recommend checking the houses on the west/left side of the town - there’s one that has a woman inside that will give you your next hook for what to do.
So I was struggling with the caves for a bit and someone recommended drawing a physical map. So I did that and thought I might as well share what I made since I know I would’ve really appreciated that.
I only mapped out 3 of the areas, because I then just bumbled around on the 2nd area, trying to reveal it all before I started drawing since it’s pretty big, but I found the end down there so I didn’t bother going back to map it.
The "X"s represent the big purple slimes.
The "R"s are locations of rosemary for that side quest.
The "D"s with an underline are diary entries.
The circles in the walls are shortcuts, the ones I checked have arrows pointing to where they go, the NorthWest map doesn’t mark them in green for some reason, so I’m sure I missed a bunch.
There’s a “B” in NorthWest, this is a bridge you have to make, but you can only do that if you come at it from the left side.
There’s a couple of zigzags, those are walls that can be removed (I think, the one in East maybe not?) I haven’t marked the ones I already removed because I don’t remember where they were.
There’s an “H” in East, this is a heal, but it has a cooldown after using it that I never saw refresh.
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Yes! I did this as well and it helped a ton. Also was very satisfying.
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I’m really glad to see this. This kind of old-school solutions and passion really makes me feel good about what we’ve made thus far.
I’m going to ask this question here as I feel this would be more appropriate in this thread.
Let’s be honest, the cave, while on some levels like getting people to think of the game less of an interactive fetish experience and more like an actual game and even drawing IRL maps, which tickles me absolutely pink, is still a broken mess that, while meant to be challenging, was never meant to be as difficult as it is.
So what things would you suggest we do or add to help make it more manageable? Please tell us your ideas.
For the record, the cave’s encounter rate has been raised by ten steps.
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Anything with a !* is a tangent at the bottom of the comment. I wanted this to be a bit easier to understand than my prior walls of text.
I stated my thoughts prior, but it’ll be good to have them here for the record.
Increase the availability of mana recovering items. Either by buffing the fish to give more than a paltry 25, or making magic waters buyable but expensive (*!Mana balance).
Marianne due to no buyable swords and magic being difficult to recover even IF you do side missions and minigames (fishing for 99 fish to do a grand total of 15 damage until you get thoron is not worth it.) is just there at the moment. She CAN windsweep if need be (*!windsweep) but over all since you’re fighting mostly random encounters and she is balanced around blutgang being strong, but limited, using it in the vast majority of battles is not worth it. Their spells cost a large amount of mp (reasonable because of their multitude of second effects) which means that keeping them able to fight is difficult. Espescially since she’s going to have to be the one healing hilda and reviving lysithea when she gets 1 shot by a snapshot crit (pretty sure that kills hilda too, why does this crit for like 80).
Lysithea is working as intended, but they really start to struggle later on due to limited mana restoration items. They CAN survive for about 2 turns or so against most slimes, but vs white slimes you just luna, target with hilda, and pray. Of course once you stop having super high impact swarm turns, they go from really good, potentially clearing an entire troop if they have pursuit which offsets their glass, or killing one enemy, and being at risk of dying to rng targeting her down (or crits, love that mechanic.) She’s ok but adding more mana changes may put her a bit over the edge if the mana restorative items are TOO plentiful. Maybe tweak swarm to not work with pursuit?
Hilda is in a good spot. !*Sidequestsave. I forgot if cover has priority but if it does they’re in a really good spot, otherwise as I said good spot. No where near as impactful on a turn by turn basis as lysithea but that’s by design, and they have enough hp to survive multiple turns of attacks.
The cave honestly doesn’t need too many tweaks itself, adjusting the encounter rate makes sense, and since the mini-map was added it’s not too difficult to traverse. The slimes are in a decent spot, but honestly slime ambush should be more common as an attack, atleast on ONE slime. It’d keep the people who are just here for fetish content more engaged, and it would add an additional threat to gorging on fish for mana. I recommended the red or purple slimes (red if you want to keep the theme of red being the slime that forces you to do more prep, and black due to them already having the debuff theme), because unironically I have never seen slime ambush from anything but a blue slime. I even went into RPGmaker to check if other slimes have ambushes, and there’s heavy slime ambush for the white slimes but you’ll just never see it. (or you could have some of the slime attacks like the purple slime’s silence and/or slow also increase fullness, as to not change their patterns but still introduce the threat of fullness, which was mentioned to be a threat and shown to be such earlier.) As a whole though, slimes are fine. Maybe an additional green one that uses magic, to prepare you for the fact that the mage slime in the boss battle will remove you from existence, but that’s just a passing after thought. Nothing else I would really want to see changed about the cave, I think it’s good but so close to being better. Thank you for reading my obnoxiously long wall of text (if you did.).
*!manabalance
I can understand why you don’t have either done atm because Lysithea being able to start each random encounter at full strength could be a problem, but in terms of the cave untill you get overleveled or pursuit in the case of the blue slimes and only the blue slimes, she isn’t a massive problem balance-wise.
*!windsweep
please nerf windsweep it unironically is the best attack in the game atm and trivializes anything you choose to use it on, a guranteed stun in a game where you have multiple party members is crazy. You can apply debuffs, DOTs, silences, it’s actually crazy. (unless you intend marianne to be a boss killer but not very useful vs the rank and file)
!*sidequest save
Why do the saves not have the sidequests done? You miss out on so much if you don’t decide to replay the entire game all over again each update, and replaying the game from the start causes bugs that don’t happen if you go straight from the update’s provided saves.
2 Likes
I’m very glad to hear from you, I was expecting and hoping for a response from you so I can hear more about what you think about the game’s/caves balance thus far. A lot of complaints received are just “I hate getting hit by crits”, “Slimes are so annoying”, and “I get lost in the cave so much!”
While this are valid complaints to varying degrees, it doesn’t really help us get a better picture of what’s going on in the game itself.
In response to your text, I will give my official thoughts and design process for certain aspects of the game:
Marianne: Marianne is fully intended to be a well-rounded character, yet an offensive powerhouse when she’s using Blutgang. The intention is for the player to balance using Blutgang to breeze through default enemies and risk not having it later against more dangerous foes or not using it at the moment and saving it for later. As far as her MP is concerned, she starts with the highest MP stat, having 150 more than Lysithea and has the highest MP Stat Growth (80%) per level up.
Her spells are indeed strong, and having her run out is a problem I did foresee, but I didn’t expect it to be so often based on what you’re saying.
No Buyable Swords: This confuses me immensely, which means there must be a pretty major bug somewhere. The store in Erith sells both Steel Swords and Levin Swords (which are Blutgang lite). There’s also a hidden sword earned by fishing up treasure chests, though admittedly that’s not a good way to earn weapons.
Windsweep: Windsweep initially had a 50% chance of applying [Flinch]. In hindsight I should’ve seen that causing an issue. Hilda’s Crest of Goneril was reportedly broken at only a 20% of inflicting a special version of [topple] on every Combat Art. Right now, Windsweep is at a 40% chance, but I may lower it even further later on.
Lysithea: Thus far, Lysithea has been an absolute balancing NIGHTMARE and I don’t say that lightly. In the original build way before I came onto the project her Magic was god-tier and her poison spell invalidated what little of the game there was at that point. After I took the reigns (but before Redux replaced the original) and the stats were readjusted, Lysithea became a glass-cannon, just without the ‘cannon’ as most enemies were balanced with her high Magic stat in mind. She was infinitely more fragile than the original and died very easily, this wasn’t helped by a bug that had one of her skills lowering all of her Offensive stats to 1, making her literally useless.
At the moment, Lysithea has a small boost to her base HP value, and a 7% bonus to her evasion. Enemies have been rebalanced around her magic yet again, but this time to improve her damage slightly so she better fits that glass-cannon archetype. Swarm has gone through many changes, but I agree that Swarm with Pursuit is likely incredibly busted, it may be patched in the future, or maybe enemies with pretty much an ‘anti-pursuit’ or a way to seal pursuit with come up in the future.
Critical Hits: I’ve heard countless complaints about people getting hit with criticals and dying. I’m going to be honest, while I don’t outright see an issue with that, considering most enemies will die when hit with a critical as well, the sheer amount of people bringing it up causes me to consider that there may be a need to redo the critical formula from scratch. It seems to be way to common on both sides.
Slime Ambush: I’m not sure why it became so rare. The Purple slime had it as well and at a fairly high rate. I’ve increased the rate for now but we’ll see.
Sidequest Saves: I’ve yet to hear tell of these odd bugs that come from playing the game from the start so I’ll need to hear more about this before I can look into it. The provided saves are there to help older players who have played through the beginning several times get to newer content. I intentionally left out the sidequests to give some incentive to replay the game properly and let them choose their own path.
Mana Balance: I’m definitely going to be adding more chests to the cave with Pure Waters in there, I’ll consider making Pure Waters buyable but extremely expensive. In most of the RPGs I play, MP restorative items are either not purchasable, only purchasable in a limited quality, or restricted only to chests. I can see how, in comparison to the length of the dungeon and the heavy magic reliance of the party at this point, why this will be an issue.
Thank you for your input, it was very helpful! Could you give me some information and your thoughts on the Slime Queen and subsequent bosses in this update (ie the true boss of the cave and the optional boss you get from Bana’s quest.)
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Been a while since I’ve done the queen slime boss, I’ll try to run a fresh save onto it so I can get a good idea. I just remember from the few months ago that if I didn’t find a way to get past the mage (windsweep initially, I forgot if blutgang worked) I would die. I’ll go back in to try to get you more info.
I’m very thankful that you like to hear from me, I’m really thorough when it comes to a lot of things to a fault, but it comes in handy sometimes when giving feedback I guess.
On the topic of marianne, I forgot hoarding is a pitfall. Perhaps I should try using blutgang more on dangerous foes like the white slime. I never saw any buyable steel or levin swords in Erith, but i’ll be sure to keep my eye out and send screenshots in my playthrough i’ll do to get more info on queen slime.
Crits: I’m not sure what direction to take them in. They just tend to be unfun to interact with in most games they’re in. But unlike with fire emblem where you KNOW who has a crit chance vs who, and has (albeit) rare items to remove said chance, or Pokemon which has a similar system where everyone can crit, but you have more options to try to play around it in nuxlockes with switching and the like, in this game, you don’t even know the opponent’s crit rate. You just know “they can crit” You don’t know if it’s a 1% or a 20%, unless it’s a high crit/fixed crit rate move that you have already been introduced to or seen. You don’t know who they’re targeting, unlike a game like fire-emblem or pokemon, and unlike final fantasy, unless it’s hilda a crit will either be death or a large amount of marianne’s health. Getting crits meanwhile is a chance you can see, you can interact and improve your odds with things like the killer axe or a combat art, and even still I think crits on the player side are a bit iffy, but I’m super biased there. But even still with all the control the other games hand you, getting crit will always feel negative, it’s just in this game there’s just not much you can do to mitigate that chance besides “kill the enemies before they hit you”. Unless you hard rework crits people will still dislike getting hit by them, as they’ll see it as a death or large amount of damage outside of their planning that they did not “deserve”, and in the slime cave, it’s at the forefront since there’s so many battles atm. So it’s not a question of if, but when. If the when is bad enough you could have a decent delve turn into escape turbo. Such as snapshot critting hilda in a 2 whiteslime 2 purple slime troop (this troop does exist iirc). It’s just you’re likely hearing it now because the cave has more stakes and more battles. So having to run back to heal or use mana on reviving feels like being punished for something you could not avoid. It’s not something you can really fix about crits in an rpgmaker game unless you bend over backwards into a pretzel. It’ll be annoying, but there’s just not much you can do about it unless you rework them entirely which would be a lot of work for something that while unlikely to be noticed (since crits aren’t thought of unless they happen for most people), would have impact (albeit minor). So TL:DR, I don’t think you can fix crits being annoying in an RPG structured like how LSE is. But hey I could be wrong. I’ll be sure to comment here again once I finish that run to get you data on the boss. Best of luck!
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So a couple other frustrations here in terms of gameplay around the cave.
Not being able to buy bait in enough balk for cave fishing is such a pain. (Is there a way to because I was only able to get more from the old man.) It’s a decently long walk back to the starting town and the fishing spot in the cave takes about 3 fights to get to if you are lucky.
Money is a problem in terms of ease of grinding. Slimes do not pay out with much money at all so I had to stop exploring a couple times to grind Chimeras. I am not saying make it so you don’t have money issues, but it feels like you get maybe 300 gold from a cave dive sometimes and that doesn’t cover the cost of food and the inn at the starting town. Not even touching any consumables you have to bring in terms of cost.
I would also suggest looking at the hunger rate of the characters if you have the flowers/bracelet on. It some times feels like I give them a ration and then they are starving again after 5-10 steps and other times it feels like it takes an entire screen before the message pops up. I don’t know if there is anything actually wrong, but it feels inconsistent. It’s less inconsistent without the items equipped but it is still hard to gauge sometimes.
I would recommend a very expensive repellent item to ward away encounters in the cave temporarily. The repel item in pokemon comes to mind. Just make it expensive so that it isn’t the first option to do the cave. I do feel like it would help though to have a way for more frustrated people to skip some of the fighting if they are willing to burn resources for it.
I would also like an item to make it so you can move a bit quicker at higher weight levels. While I like the slow movement flavor wise, it gets a bit much when you have Hilda making the pace slow to a crawl after getting hit over and over with slime feeding attacks. (I know that it is part of the difficulty but I think it would be nice to have going forward, not just for the cave.)
At any rate, the game is still fantastic and I like what the cave is going for.
You can buy bait in Erith in the shack to the north of the ship.
Agreed that money gain from the cave isn’t quite up to snuff, and while chimeras exist they feed into an over-leveling problem this sect of the game has. (multiple delves + NME killing will definitely overlevel you to the point that lysithea starts 1-shotting most troops rather than just blue troops)
Yeah just don’t use the flowers honestly, a long sect like this is a bad place for them.
I find it interesting that you had problems with too MANY usages of ambush fattening your characters (iirc you need a combined weight total of 7 to get slowed down) while I had the exact opposite problem, perhaps the increased usage of rations was a major factor in this.
Nice to see someone else with a comprehensive response, Good Post!
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I’m glad to hear from you! More viewpoints are always welcome. Also, I’m so glad you think the game is fantastic.
I’ll address some problems by list, same as I did for Jerry:
Money: The initial plan of having money from item drops (bullions that you can sell), may not have panned out the way we intended. From both the usage of specific items, terms, direct references, and the music the Explorer gives you in the beginning, the exploration was very much meant to be done in an Etrian Odyssey style, where money is a scarcity and earned through dropped materials and mining/gathering etc. Unfortunately, I hadn’t the faintest idea how to emulate that at the time so had to settle on the bullions. I can understand money being a massive issue. I’ll go back through and try to redo things to increase money gain while still keeping it more akin to EO than something like FF or DQ.
I will also be adding more chests to the caves as well. There’s a shockingly small amount for such a big place.
Hunger: Hunger and flowers are a bit sketchy. Fullness typically works on variables that decrease as you walk around and do battle, same with pounds. The flowers don’t actually make the character’s less full, it actually forcefully gives them the [hunger] status, essentially FORCING them to eat food, even if they are too full to eat. The appearance of the [Hunger] status is entirely random as well. We will be adding a Fullness gauge to help with this though.
Speed: There will definitely be items that affect weight in the next update. Not just that speed up movement for obese characters, but ones that treat character’s as thinner than they are, until of course you get to fat for the item and it breaks~
There will be a lot more weight based equipment in the new update as well. Armor that can only be worn at certain levels, items to speed you up, weapons that slowly increase weight with use! There’s a lot planned.
Repellent: That’s a really good idea. I’ll see what I can do.
Again, thank you for your feedback! Any other observations you have? About gameplay/skills?
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I think Marianne’s melee without her special weapon needs to be touched up a bit, seemed like she does no damage without the weapon or using skills and that feels off. Maybe adjust the numbers so her base strength is higher but the skills damage is lowered. She does no damage with her basic attacks to some of the slimes and that feels bad when you are trying to clear out 1 trash mob at the end of a fight. This doesn’t come up to often because she was usually the second fastest if not he first but her clean up is terrible. You either have to spend durability or a lot of mana to finish something and if you don’t then you run the risk of getting fed again or Lys takes a crit and dies.
Hilda’s special guard is pretty busted. Being able to taunt then have all the enemies be charmed is pretty nuts. This becomes less of an issue when she get’s bigger and is slower than the enemies but it is still pretty busted when you can taunt charm and then have Lys poison. Recommend having the charm only last 2 rounds or have it be harder to inflict. I really like that it is an option you can use, but it feels a bit to strong.
Lys is interesting because if she is fast enough to double she can deal out very nice damage but it doesn’t feel like that is a good thing to hedge her damage on. She loses a lot of speed with even one higher weight level and if you get unlucky with your speed rolls on her level ups then your main damage dealer becomes an off healer more than anything. I also completely forgot her crest mechanic after the dragon was dealt with. I don’t know what that means for if you want to make it more or less relevant but I completely forgot that was an option.
Etrian Odyssey is one of my favorite game series and I am surprised I didn’t pick up the similarities till now. I think more minor points of interest in the cave would help. Maybe just a couple item chests or some half used weapons on a body. I wouldn’t say there needs to be interesting things everywhere, but enough to help players want to explore the cave than just the main quest. It would also help the caves from feeling as same-y as they do now.
I am also excited you are planning to include some food craft with the Inn keeper. I actually like carol’s buff foods being an option because its a good temp buff with a drawback.
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I read your inquire on the other thread asking for input on the cave and I’d like to give some as someone who beat it and didn’t struggle a lot with it (it was difficult, but I didn’t find it excruciating as other players have). I think the cave itself is mostly fine, but it could be a lot less tedious with some tweaks here and there.
Incursions on the cave are progressively easier as you level up, not really because of the augmented stats but because of new abilities. I believe Marianne always has Blizzard and that can help clear a group of slimes very easily, but especially when Lysithea learns Dark Spikes random encounters are almost a joke, especially in she’s thin and outspeeds them since enemies will get doubled. The fact that it only wastes 30 SP as opposed to Swarm’s 75 gives you leeway to use it much more freely. I guess Blutgang probably can help too, but I didn’t have it since it disappeared after Marianne’s paralogue, probably because of some glitch. When the girls are fat is harder to move and much more tedious to battle, but arguably easier in this front since most of the time they’ll get 0 damage and you can clear any battle with enough patience.
The thing is you can only do long incursions when you reach that point. Before that you are really taxed by lower attack power/range, having to use a costlier spell to get through group of enemies and worse equipment. Most of the times you won’t be able to clear the battle in one-round and the slimes will attack all and once and it’s likely that they’ll fatten up the girls (particularly the purple fuckers), what will only accentuate the problem. The fact that you can’t go through a lot of wall-shortcuts in the cave when the girls are fat and that escaping from battle is more difficult at reduced speed rubs some salt over it, making it really tedious since you can’t save inside and probably want to conserve your progress.
There’s a couple of solutions that come to mind:
- Cheapen the Ariadne’s Threads on the old lady’s shop (and give some clue that they are actually sold there) so that the earlier incursions can end more easily when Lysithea and company are too fat to move at an acceptable pace or/and MP-depleted. Alternatively, make the lady on the entrance on the cave give you five instead of one or something, you probably won’t need a lot more than that until you get Dark Spikes or something.
- Make a battle save system like the original FE games have, allowing you to make saves inside caves that will delete themselves after being loaded.
- Lower the price of Carol’s weight loss service, since you probably will need to use it everytime you come out of the cave on the first incursions and it’s very, very expensive. It’s a better idea to let the player spend that money on reviving and status-curing items, since they’ll need those too and bullions sell for almost nothing. I found myself only slimming them down one or two levels and not making them outright thin makes they snowball faster into fatness the next time you go in. It’s true you can get more money via fishing or selling slime jelly but I’d say the balance is still very unfavorable.
It took me a couple bouts on the cave until I found you could actually climb up the moss and get through some walls. I don’t think the game does a bad job at pointing that out since in the entrance of the cave there’s some moss you can climb if you are curious about the environment, but I think it’d be advisable to avoid dead ends when you are inside the walls, since long dead ends are plentiful and really painful when you consider the encounter rate. On other hand, there is a confusing flag that needs to be deleted. It is the wall where the girls say they “need something heavy against it” but can’t break it, and it actually glitches if you try. It made me think for a long time that the cave was actually incomplete and couldn’t be beaten, and in the end it didn’t even matter for anything.
It’s very generous to give the players two tiles to save the game and return to the entrance before every boss at the end of the caves, and I think it’s a good idea, but at the point you’ll finish the cave the bosses will be a complete joke, especially the second one. Not much of a complain honestly, since I wanted to get out of the cave so badly already.
All the sidequests related to the cave that you can do meanwhile are very good: the old lady one regarding slime jelly and rosemary and fishing for Mana. I think one or two more could make the incursions much more worthwhile, though. I read something about a library/chocolate sidequest on the thread, but I never found it so I don’t know. I’d also like to point out that cliking on the Retired Adventure sidequest on the menu after completing it results on a game crash, by the way.
Well, I hope my input helps you. Have a nice day and thanks for the game!
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Thank you for your input.
The next update will be coming out much, much later as there’s a lot of rebalancing that needs to be done.
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No problem, sorry if I focused too much on the negatives. This is honestly my favorite game from this forum and I wanted to give an elaborate response, but it is much better as it already is than I could have imagined before playing it. Thank you for your hard work.
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It’s alright. I’m glad to get a response in the first place. I love hearing about the positives of the game, I’m not going to pretend I don’t lol.
But the negatives are generally far more helpful in improving the game’s experience. I have a good deal of confidence in the writing and general story/character interactions, not to be braggadocious of course, but the gameplay and exploration need to be refined and tweaked to allow for both an engaging challenge while not feeling tedious and painful.
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Does anyone have a list of all the possible bad ends yet? I would like to know so i can manage my saves to have easy access to them when i want to see them later.