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freshfeelingThis session was played on March 25, 2023.
The big plan for this day's play was to check out Echigoya's ship at the docks. Having seen some recommendations about key grinding locations, I knew that other than Hermit (who I thoroughly exploited in the previous session) the next best place to grind was in Echigoya's basement, which opens up after his trial immediately after going through the ship. There's a room with repeatable battles of a reasonable rank, and my goal was to get there so that my characters would be less weak.
My very specialized characters are an interesting bunch. Bart the knight is a somewhat effective tank and a moderate damage dealer. His tanking has been improved with his Dragon Helmet and Dragon Armor as well as his access to shields. Fari is an excellent damage dealer, except that she can only really strike a single target with a CatClaw or Laser Sword. Kril heals and can't really effectively do anything else, and Lenn has loads of group-targetting elemental magic that makes him borderline essential in a lot of random battles. They could all stand to be better in some regard, except perhaps Fari who is really a one-trick pony.
An early battle on the ship was a harrowing one, because of this:
I was really worried about petrification; it hadn't happened yet, as far as I remembered. I was so excited to have Kril's Heal ability... but I didn't remember that for some stupid reason, Heal is only usable outside of battle. Why? Oh well. It is still nice to actually have a solution for this unfortunate and improbable situation. Heal was also handy for curing blindness a few times here.
I was realizing that Lenn's Flame and Blizzard abilities have aged pretty poorly. While it's really nice to have so many elemental attacks that target all enemies, and his damage is fairly good, they are quite a bit weaker than single-target spell abilities or spellbook abilities. Getting something like Flare or P-Blast sure would've been great.
Before Echigoya's trial, I tried going to his shop one more time before it closed down permanently. I grabbed a Flare spellbook... just in case.
With that, we triggered the trial and went into the basement of Echigoya's shop. My grinding goal was to get everyone's primary stats to about 40. I thought that the room full of Hatamotos would actually have Hatamotos as enemies, but it didn't. Still, it was easy-to-trigger screens full of same-ranked enemies that were steps away from a town where I could rest, so I made use of it... for about two hours.
The fights were different, and not really all the same difficulty. Knights, for example, had some pretty strong sword-based attacks and a good chance of using shields that blocked Flame and Blizzard. On the other hand, Knights appear as a single stack of enemies, so Thunder can handle them fairly quickly. Similar could be said of Gazers; they had nasty attacks but the stack could be taken out more quickly.
Y'know, thinking about this after-the-fact, I kind of wonder if I was grinding in the wrong place all along. I would much rather be fighting actual Hatamotos.
These enemies were tough, but at least the building was literally next to an inn. There was a lot of back-and-forth and it happens that eventually, while I was streaming, an old acquaintance of mine was chatting with me and that allowed it to go by a lot faster. Stat gains were made but otherwise it wasn't particularly eventful. The new HP totals were like this at the end:
That seems quite a bit more comfortable! Especially the money. Golly.
We're probably reasonably prepared to finish Edo now. That will happen next time.
The big plan for this day's play was to check out Echigoya's ship at the docks. Having seen some recommendations about key grinding locations, I knew that other than Hermit (who I thoroughly exploited in the previous session) the next best place to grind was in Echigoya's basement, which opens up after his trial immediately after going through the ship. There's a room with repeatable battles of a reasonable rank, and my goal was to get there so that my characters would be less weak.
My very specialized characters are an interesting bunch. Bart the knight is a somewhat effective tank and a moderate damage dealer. His tanking has been improved with his Dragon Helmet and Dragon Armor as well as his access to shields. Fari is an excellent damage dealer, except that she can only really strike a single target with a CatClaw or Laser Sword. Kril heals and can't really effectively do anything else, and Lenn has loads of group-targetting elemental magic that makes him borderline essential in a lot of random battles. They could all stand to be better in some regard, except perhaps Fari who is really a one-trick pony.
An early battle on the ship was a harrowing one, because of this:
I was really worried about petrification; it hadn't happened yet, as far as I remembered. I was so excited to have Kril's Heal ability... but I didn't remember that for some stupid reason, Heal is only usable outside of battle. Why? Oh well. It is still nice to actually have a solution for this unfortunate and improbable situation. Heal was also handy for curing blindness a few times here.
I was realizing that Lenn's Flame and Blizzard abilities have aged pretty poorly. While it's really nice to have so many elemental attacks that target all enemies, and his damage is fairly good, they are quite a bit weaker than single-target spell abilities or spellbook abilities. Getting something like Flare or P-Blast sure would've been great.
Before Echigoya's trial, I tried going to his shop one more time before it closed down permanently. I grabbed a Flare spellbook... just in case.
With that, we triggered the trial and went into the basement of Echigoya's shop. My grinding goal was to get everyone's primary stats to about 40. I thought that the room full of Hatamotos would actually have Hatamotos as enemies, but it didn't. Still, it was easy-to-trigger screens full of same-ranked enemies that were steps away from a town where I could rest, so I made use of it... for about two hours.
The fights were different, and not really all the same difficulty. Knights, for example, had some pretty strong sword-based attacks and a good chance of using shields that blocked Flame and Blizzard. On the other hand, Knights appear as a single stack of enemies, so Thunder can handle them fairly quickly. Similar could be said of Gazers; they had nasty attacks but the stack could be taken out more quickly.
Y'know, thinking about this after-the-fact, I kind of wonder if I was grinding in the wrong place all along. I would much rather be fighting actual Hatamotos.
These enemies were tough, but at least the building was literally next to an inn. There was a lot of back-and-forth and it happens that eventually, while I was streaming, an old acquaintance of mine was chatting with me and that allowed it to go by a lot faster. Stat gains were made but otherwise it wasn't particularly eventful. The new HP totals were like this at the end:
That seems quite a bit more comfortable! Especially the money. Golly.
We're probably reasonably prepared to finish Edo now. That will happen next time.
