Brave Frontier

double post grrr

Ditch hadaron for quaid. His crit buff is killing you.

Ishad_sl said:

Ditch hadaron for quaid. His crit buff is killing you.

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Have you heard anything about what is going on with that?

Up until the most recent patch, running Hadaron was a great way to be able to run both a crit lead and still be able to blast through crit resistant parts, because Hadaron's crazy Crit % was high enough to let him blast past resistance. Post-Patch, even just Hadarons group 60% Crit Chance buff - even without a +150% Crit Damage Lead - was enough to screw your group and make it damn near impossible to kill those parts before the main body dies.

I've heard folks saying that nothing has changed with Hadaron, but I've not heard a peep about what *has* changed. Something has definitely changed though. Before the patch, I had groups that worked like a dream vs that stuff, post patch, those same groups were completely unusable vs the very same stuff.

Really not a fan of whatever it was they changed....hoping they change it back.

Nothing official. Think they bumped up crit resistance on certain raid boss parts.

Ao-_sl said:

Yeah, Quaid didn't make it easier. I still need to stop most of my BBs and just focus on the tail to even get close. I might swap back to Deimos lead with Elimo and sacred crystal and Zenia friend with Yuura, Lava, and somebody else. I want to do Oguro but tree vs fire isn't going to work well.

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I only tried Balmedia a couple of times after the most recent patch. ....once with Hadaron + a Crit Lead, once with Hadaron + No Crit Lead etc.....even mixing in Zenias' BB (640% Single Target Attack), and Aarons' BB (480% ST Attack) + Hadaron, all focusing on the tail, I wasn't able to kill the tail. I haven't gone back since just because it was going to be a giant pain in the ass.

The combination that used to work for me back in the dark ages of the Pre-Hadaron days though, was an Oguro Lead + Quaid sub for re-typing. Oguro as lead provides very nice +Bulk with nice +BB on Hit, which is always welcome at raids (and stacks!) ...Oguro didn't have any dying problems and with Quaid around he'd always hit with strong-element typing so no issues there. Spark Damage Leads are nice, as they work vs Crit Resistance just fine....mixing in Rhoa for +Spark +Bulk would be a good move.

I only have two Blaze Pearls left myself atm, so I am going to have to go back to Balmedia soon also.....Last night I started Imp'ing up a Yuura (Oguro makes the better Leader, but Yuura will make a better Sub) just for that purpose. I figure a Yuura sub + No Crit Lead (No Crit % buffer of any kind) *should* be enough....if not, I'm going to write an angry letter to my Congressman in protest of the recent changes


They want us grinding out at least *some* raids every day for basically forever, so making any raids even more of a pain in the ass is the exact opposite of what they should be doing. No idea what they were thinking with the recent changes, but it sucks.

Ao-_sl said:

Was plodding along with Raaga lead, Krantz, Yuura, Quaid, Melchio, and Rhoa friend and was doing pretty good, then had 3 people join in and just fuck everything up. Might have to dedicate some games to just me doing it.

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heh yea, Reason #47,932 why that nonsense is the antithesis of a good time.

Even pasword protection on a group doesn't keep people out, they can still auto-join it or whatever. If I want to go in one alone, I set a password (not because it helps, but /shrug), then I also make sure that "Join Mid-Way" option is turned OFF, so if I start alone, at least nobody else can elbow their way in after the fact. Can still ensure 2-stars by using a God Stone or Beacon or something. As long as you can solo the mission it is a solid option, and probably what I'm gonna do.

Ao-_sl said:

edit: Anyone look at the two new spheres in the Merit Store?
25% all stats and 25% crit looks sort of nice.
The grudge bow seems hella-overpriced.

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The crit sphere has me a bit curious, not sure I'd pull the trigger on it myself or not, but it could potentially see some use.

The Grudge Bow is a disaster....never mind being horribly overpriced (it damn sure is), but seriously, status infliction spheres? that apply only to the person wearing it? If status infliction in an encounter is that important, I'll bring a no-shit status inflictor to the group and buff every character there with syphilis, the black death, the bubonic plague and even some ebola just for the hell of it. ....and if it isn't important enough to bring a real status inflictor, I'm going to want to use a different sphere anyway. Even before I had a good status inflicting character of my own those things seemed like a waste of space.

It's patch day bros! Rewards from 200-250 leveling campaign don't look bad, challenge arena will hopefully be fun, and Reddit is losing their shit on how good of a mitigator the trial x4 unit is.

For me Gaiza is a bit like zedus, a great individual kit that doesn't mesh well in current squads. He seems like he'll be a decent trial or ggc lead, but he doesn't fit in great in raid squads.

1 squaded x4 with bestie/tridon leads, zenia, Michele, krantz, Aurelia subs. Went in blind so almost wiped on the damage reflect.

Edit: Left Gazia up as my lead if anyone wants to play around with him. Initial reaction: his animation is ass and definitely hurts his viability.

Ao-_sl said:

Anyone else getting zeros for raid points? Twice I've crushed through some easy missions and gotten 0 for points and suffered 1 star ratings...

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It's possible if it was an easy mission that someone killed it before your damage registered with the server. Medal Rush is back again.

Dropped Kafka from my fg team, replaced with Gaiza. Switched friend leads from griff to zedus. Hitting in the 3.3-3.5 range for autobattle.

It is going to take me ages to wrap my head around the 10.0 magnitude earthquake that Gazia sent rippling through the meta game.

It seems half my units clash badly with him and the units that work best with him are all the units I don't have (go figure, eh?) Right now, I'm just plugging him in everywhere I used to use Aaron and not worrying about all the buff-overlapping and clashing going on. My Aaron was starting to feel pretty stale, so I wanted a change of pace anyway.

Zenia, Aurelia, and Libera all look a lot less shiny now than they did though.....I don't really have much in the way of DPS-buffers to replace Zenia (Spark buffing specifically)....I never got Raaga, I never got Zedus, or even Rhoa, etc....so for now I don't have much choice but to keep using Zenia and just let her 200% BB buff overwrite Gazia's 300% buff every turn.....at least she still retains a lot of her value as a Leader, clash or not.

I am going to have to consider rebuilding my groups from the ground up though....starting with a blank slate and looking at everything fresh.

Ao-_sl said:

Anyone else getting zeros for raid points? Twice I've crushed through some easy missions and gotten 0 for points and suffered 1 star ratings...

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There is/was a known bug with Global Exclusive Raids that would cause that to happen....nothing you can do about it client side, but as the global exclusive raids tend to have pretty good droprates anyway, if you were doing it for the drops no reason to stop....otherwise you can just do any of the other raids that will calculate contribution points properly.

Ishad_sl said:

Dropped Kafka from my fg team, replaced with Gaiza. Switched friend leads from griff to zedus. Hitting in the 3.3-3.5 range for autobattle.

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I'm still (and only just barely) hitting the 3.0m point mark. I'm afraid if I don't have a Zenia lead (either mine or a friend) that I'll end up having too many BC fill problems....every time I've tried variations that don't include some version of BC fill from a leadership slot, I have real problems getting SBB's filled every turn.

I'm considering ditching Quaid from my group and seeing if I can find somebody else that will bring more damage to the table (Quaid sparks badly if he goes first in the rotation and if he sparks badly, he doesn't fill his SBB, so I put a Demon Core on him rather than a high DPS sphere.)....while his quad-elemental retyping can be a huge benefit to my group, if I'm running a crit-lead in full Auto, I can't count on his elements hitting early in the rotation anyway. ...so his potential is wasted -and- he is running a sub-optimal DPS sphere setup. I'm sure it will still hurt some losing that elemental retyping in my group though, not sure where I'd find that much damage potential elsewhere.

I haven't tried to work in Gazia yet, but he's got great personal DPS potential even if half his attack animation is lousy for sparking.....dat BC cost doe.

/brag post incoming - you have my apologies in advance.

Hit my goal of reaching the 200 Energy threshold.

Also with a bit of luck from the slots and such, I finally caught back up on Sphere frogs. Now 100% of my 7-star units (and a handful of select 6-star units) are sphere'd. About a week ago I was able to max BBL 10/10 UBB/Extra Skill, 100% of my 7-star units. Nice combination to have 100% my 7-star units max-leveled, max-sphere'd and max-UBB'd/Extra Skill'd. I'm still a long (as in very, very long) way from being able to match that feat with Imps - However, I don't expect to ever actually do that...honestly, I'd probably retire from the game before that ever happened. Still, I'm much better off on imps nowadays than I've ever been in the past.

I've been slowly fodder'ing up 6-star units just because I need a place to drop burst frogs so they are not piling up, so I've been trying to target the higher quality 6-stars first and just going from there...getting them to Level 5 BB or SBB with fodder...then when I have excess burst frogs, dropping 5 burst frogs on 'em to finish out either their BB or SBB and moving on to the next. I've been hesitant to drop much in the way of fodders on units that are going to get a 7th star though just because any progress made gets cut in half on the rank-up anyway....not sure that makes much sense however because outside of a very few select units like Grahden's or Xie'Jing and Nick for item farming etc., (all of which are already maxed anyway) none of them I'm working on are ever going to see use anywhere. It would be less efficient but probably make more practical sense to just max-SBB any units that are getting 7-stars and just deal with re-foddering them again when the time comes.

I've actually started a modest collection of Arton Imp's. I'm keeping some as a "Break in case of Emergency" stash so I can instantly max-Imp any one (or two? /flex) characters that come along that are worthy of it.....on the other hand I'm not saving any single-serving imps for anything anymore. Late last night I finished Max-Imp'ing Breaker Andaria (for all the shit I've talked about her character, she still isn't useless, just very frustrating.), using only single-serving imps. Not sure who I'll Imp up next....maybe Ultor or Ark? I'll have to seriously consider Imp'ing out Dion/Rize if I want to try a Thunder/Earth oriented squad for Frontier Gate point farming - I just haven't been able to make that work yet, so I'm dubious about the value of the investment.

It just feels like I've made a crazy amount of progress with my game over the last several weeks and it has taken me by surprise. Hell, I even have 7 Occult Treasures crafted, 3 Revelation Books, along with 2 Buffer Jewels and 7 Malice Jewels waiting to be upgrade'd. I've got 36 Cataract Ores already farmed out ready to upgrade the lot of them, along with a dozen shock hearts etc...I've been avoiding doing more Blaze Pearl farming since Hadaron was made into a liability vs Balmedia, but I'm starting to run out of excuses not to just do it....and because I'm down to a handful of bottleneck drops for some things, my next several sphere upgrades could come along very very quickly.

Honestly, I'm to a place now where I feel like i can take it easy and just coast for a while....not sure that is even a good thing. I have 530+ Honor summons ready for the next SHS at the moment, but I have no idea what I'd even do with all that stuff besides max out/evolve a bunch more 5 and 6 star units.

I'm hoping they come up with something interesting to do for their Anniversary event besides just an extra helping of the standard 2x Exp, 1/2 Energy, Double Honor, fusion rate-up stuff we cycle through all the time anyway. I don't know if the "Challenge Arena" stuff they have been working on really qualifies.

If I still have a bottleneck on my game, it is Legend Stones. The pressure for merit points there isn't what it used to be, but there still are never enough points to go around for the characters who need the stones....seems like new legacy 7-stars roll out faster than I can catch up. ...but I'm not missing much as they are largely un-inspired and mediocre at best lately anyway....even Shera's thunder has been stolen by Gazia.


Anyways. First world problems, but it feels like I've made so much progress lately that a lot of the reasons to play the game are gone. The list of things I don't have any reason or need to do anymore is huge. I don't need to fodder/level/sphere anything...technically with unique spheres around, I already have enough Occult Treasures to satisfy 2 groups simultaneously without breaking a sweat...I'll craft more, just because why not, but there is no urgency left there. I don't need to level and barely need to raid. All Trials and GGC's are done.

Honestly, it feels kinda weird. I might put my device down and actually read some books or something lol

Damn that's a load of grinding. I haven't bothered leveling for a long time so now I'm just pushing to 245 just to get the two free gems.

I've pretty much stopped raiding outside of medal rush/drop rate events. Fg is the last long grind for the foreseeable future. Rc6 only comes for a week at a time. It's not a bad place to be at.

Right now I just play with team comps. I like my fg team and probably won't change much for fh. I like Gaiza as a nuker in those teams but I still can't find a raid comp that uses him that I like.

Now it's just waiting for the 2nd anniversary and debating if I should get a griff or zedus if they do a free unit of choice.