Aaand I've reached the end of the 'story' quests which means no more easy lapis until the indeterminate amount of time before its true release. Made one last pull with what I had and... got 4* Vivi.
So:
4*
Edgar
Vivi
3*
Garland
Shantotto
I feel like I could do better than that. Edgar's pretty nice. Really not sure what's so great about Garland though. Shantotto is... a black mage. Vivi seems like a slightly worse version of her at a glance.
Maybe I'll link this to one of my other dummy facebook accounts to preserve it since it's not THAT bad a set, and I only played all of like, a day and a half, and see if I can get a 5* or two. Or just half-ass the daily stuff until the actual release with the mass dump of summon stuff.
MAYBE BOTH! ...Commuting and meetings are so painfully boring and I can only watch so many movies on my phone.
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ResIpsaLoquiturNot a grammar nazi, just alt-write.Registered Userregular
When you tap "logout" from the menu -> options screen, and you're back on the title screen, try not tappion on "Log in" and instead tap on literally anywhere else on the screen. As weird as it sounds, give that a try.
That part I get. I'm just frustrated because I can't have my game backed up unless I go with my original pull.
League of Legends: MichaelDominick; Blizzard(NA): MichaelD#11402; Steam ID: MichaelDominick
When you tap "logout" from the menu -> options screen, and you're back on the title screen, try not tappion on "Log in" and instead tap on literally anywhere else on the screen. As weird as it sounds, give that a try.
That part I get. I'm just frustrated because I can't have my game backed up unless I go with my original pull.
Create a dummy facebook account specifically for this kind of thing to not annoy your friends.
Join the dark side.
Edit:
Oh, unrelated, but word of warning, you NEED some flavor of black mage. I've run across enemies in vortex battles that are basically immune to physical attacks.
I finally got a roll I'm happy with. 4* Garland. I wasn't expecting him to be a 4*, honestly I would've been fine with his 3* version, but this is pretty good. He can 5*, and is a beefy physical attacker with good defenses.
EDIT: And I done goofed. I thought I was overwriting the existing data on my device with the new file that pulled Garland.
NOPE. Other way around. It took the pre-existing account data and overwrote it with the crappier file that was saved to my FB. I do not know how to remove that old FB info, so it may just be that I permanently never sign in to facebook and save an account, which means if I ever have to replace my device, it's gone. Hmm.
EDIT x2: So, log out of Facebook on your device, log in to a dummy/secondary account, and then log in your game. It'll pull from the account the app on the device is logged into to save.
El Fantastico on
PSN: TheArcadeBear
Steam: TheArcadeBear
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ResIpsaLoquiturNot a grammar nazi, just alt-write.Registered Userregular
When you tap "logout" from the menu -> options screen, and you're back on the title screen, try not tappion on "Log in" and instead tap on literally anywhere else on the screen. As weird as it sounds, give that a try.
That part I get. I'm just frustrated because I can't have my game backed up unless I go with my original pull.
Create a dummy facebook account specifically for this kind of thing to not annoy your friends.
Join the dark side.
Edit:
Oh, unrelated, but word of warning, you NEED some flavor of black mage. I've run across enemies in vortex battles that are basically immune to physical attacks.
I'll keep that in mind. Incidentally, Garland is 3 star but it's max 5 star. Does that mean I could theoretically roll a 4 star version, and how do I improve his stars? Fuse with more Garland?
League of Legends: MichaelDominick; Blizzard(NA): MichaelD#11402; Steam ID: MichaelDominick
Doing some rerolls until I get something I like. Best I've had so far is a 4* Galuf, which made me consider stopping, but I can keep going for awhile. Rerolling is super fast in this game, after all.
Digging the game so far though, looking forward to getting more into it.
When you tap "logout" from the menu -> options screen, and you're back on the title screen, try not tappion on "Log in" and instead tap on literally anywhere else on the screen. As weird as it sounds, give that a try.
That part I get. I'm just frustrated because I can't have my game backed up unless I go with my original pull.
Create a dummy facebook account specifically for this kind of thing to not annoy your friends.
Join the dark side.
Edit:
Oh, unrelated, but word of warning, you NEED some flavor of black mage. I've run across enemies in vortex battles that are basically immune to physical attacks.
I'll keep that in mind. Incidentally, Garland is 3 star but it's max 5 star. Does that mean I could theoretically roll a 4 star version, and how do I improve his stars? Fuse with more Garland?
I'm pretty sure that yes, you could roll one. I rolled a 4* Vivi, but I've definitely seen 3* versions, and mine is totally blacked out for "Awakening."
And to answer your second question, yes. Go to Unit: Awaken Units. They need to be at their max level, and you need a bunch of random materials. Here's an example of a 1* -> 2*. http://imgur.com/a/KkSU5
If you get duplicate copies, You should usually fuse them together since it gives a big boost to Trust (which is why hers is at 5), which otherwise goes up really REALLY slowly, and gives some supposedly awesome thing, although some are more awesome than others.
It's also worth noting that you don't really get much for the daily things. Clear all the daily quests for 50 lapis. I'm not sure if the coliseum stuff can be repeated, but at least finishing a round for the first time (10 fights, 1 try allowed per hour (3 'orbs' stored on a different timer than Energy) gets you 100 lapis. Daily log in rewards are pretty meh too, so it's not like you'll get a ton just accumulating if you stick around.
And again, you can finish the whole released content so far in about a day and a half for enough lapis for about ~4 draws total. Granted, I did bare minimum of the exploration dungeons and none of the sidequest things since they're horrible, but... eh.
I adore the sprite work though, and lord knows there's not enough of that shit around. I'll probably see if I can reroll a few more times to see if I can get anything better. CoD with her resistances across the board seems fantastic. I'm not sold on having/using multiple black mages though considering how squishy they are. Thieves like Zidane can also get you some really awesome shit apparently, so it'd be nice to have one of those too.
Edit:
Also, again, once the pre-reg period is over, we're most likely getting 11 draws worth of free dudes/dudettes (plus one for getting to the end of the tutorial), so rolling and rerolling then is likely to be MUCH more fruitful than a ton of effort now for a few rolls at a time.
I saw a lot of people on Reddit shitting on how Cyan looks, but I think his sprite is pretty close to the Amano art. Sabin is probably the least interesting.
Never played Brave Frontier either. Prefer FFRK. There's too much here that's really opaque and hard to understand; mechanics, usage, and point. I'm gathering all these random materials without any idea for what exactly. I'm already drawing characters from the very start that I can't see ever actually using. The high star ones, I can't actually really tell if they're particularly good or not. There's equipment, sure, but half my party is totally naked and the "SWARM ATTACK" thing makes it hard to really tell what makes things much better or worse. I'm just hitting optimize and either they kill the thing in one hit or not. And like I said above, I've just kind of ignored an assload of stuff it's been spitting out because it seems tedious and the rewards are bleh. There's an assload of complexity, and in my experience, the depth that comes out of that kind of situation is usually more accidental. And so far, doing the 'daily' exp dungeon vaulted me straight into "You can auto-battle through EVERYTHING territory" for the end of the available content. So challenge isn't really here either. There's also only 8 'dungeon' areas at the moment, with 3-4 stages in each, so there's really not much content before you start repeating with the weird 'exploration' things or the pure grind daily stuff.
There are also some pretty severe performance issues at the moment, which I'm inclined to forgive since it's an obvious pre-release, but it seems that characters with tons of abilities (Shantotto especially) cause a 3-5 second lag when trying to open their ability menu in combat, which is just brutal for mages. This also hurts since you're supposed to be grinding the limit breaks at every opportunity, but it lags like hell when you try to. Or even just using a bunch on a boss at a time is a pain in the ass to select each in turn for all 5/6 characters, and then having to reselect the spells/skills and it's kind of a pain when it should be streamlined or simpler.
This does have the absolutely gorgeous sprite work and animation, but FFRK has the kind of basic-art-Disgaea-factor where I really love how much they do with it for SBs and such, which is a lot less impressive here. I do really like its implementation of the daily dungeons in comparison though.
Bottom line/tl;dr, overly complexity makes it a lot harder to understand and needs some streamlining/performance fixes. An assload of stuff that seems dedicated just to grindyness and/or randomly wandering around more than anything else. Pretty as fuck.
I do have way too much dead time from now until the end of summer though, so *shrug*. I also prodded at Tales of Links and Kingdom Hearts:Unchained (among a couple others) in the last month or so and moved on from them for various reasons. I'd probably put this a little ahead of those (again, as having only played for ~2 days), assuming that when it actually opens up, there's an ASSLOAD more areas to get through to start with, but FFRK is still my pick for best by a heavy margin.
ArcTangent on
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ShadowfireVermont, in the middle of nowhereRegistered Userregular
Are you playing on iOS? Because the game runs like a dream for me on Android, unlike Record Keeper which chugs through every menu.
Otherwise I agree with pretty much everything you said. Especially the confusion.
No, Android. FFRK is up and down performance wise for me. It's usually relatively fine (at least consistent), but there are definitely times when the animations are running much smoother and faster than normal, especially re: Zack's Air Strike which as often as not seems to lag the whole game to fuckall as often as not, and it's easy to tell when it's running at the proper animation speed. It's pretty consistent though, not random times when it'll just freeze outright for a few seconds, although I have seen that (moreso around when I started playing in January than recently). In FFBE, everything seems to run great EXCEPT when it has to load a menu with a bunch of stuff. Abilities in battle was the first one I noticed, but I found another one this morning along with another possibly major pain point.
Apparently you have only 50 slots for materials before you start having to use lapis to expand it. Mine was full at 51, and it was taking a good 4-5 seconds to load it, then I tap Sell, and another 4-5 seconds to load the same set of items, and note that because I have no idea what basically anything here is used for I'm just picking something to get rid of at almost random, then after selling it, another 4-5 seconds to reload the item list without it.
This is really no more confusing than FFRK in general. It's no more obtuse than worrying about honing and RM grinding and crap.
They do explain most of the mechanics pretty clearly. Chains and elemental chains are just damage and crit multipliers. When you feel real hardcore it's about chaining smaller hits to high chain to heavy hitter. Basically the Valkyrie profile shtick without the air time.
Grindy like woah though. Then again as someone who just picked RK up again after a year or whatever so is that game.
Materials are a hassle and having an inventory limit on them is kind of a slap in the face though. They are basically ubiquitous specifically to push you into getting more inventory space. Something I've usually hated in these games.
From looking over the wiki and such it seems there is a good bit of content already there so hopefully the full launch should give us a good amount of things to do.
This is really no more confusing than FFRK in general. It's no more obtuse than worrying about honing and RM grinding and crap.
They do explain most of the mechanics pretty clearly. Chains and elemental chains are just damage and crit multipliers. When you feel real hardcore it's about chaining smaller hits to high chain to heavy hitter. Basically the Valkyrie profile shtick without the air time.
Grindy like woah though. Then again as someone who just picked RK up again after a year or whatever so is that game.
Materials are a hassle and having an inventory limit on them is kind of a slap in the face though. They are basically ubiquitous specifically to push you into getting more inventory space. Something I've usually hated in these games.
From looking over the wiki and such it seems there is a good bit of content already there so hopefully the full launch should give us a good amount of things to do.
It's less about understanding what things do as it is understanding what is actually valuable or you should be prioritizing. In FFRK, it's easy. High star = better. Abilities need orbs of the same star they are. Here, fuck if I can tell what's good and not at a glance, and that goes for characters too, since it's not immediately clear how far characters can be promoted or what gains they get when they are. The chain/elemental stuff I quickly decided really wasn't worth trying to min/max, especially in the battles where you'd really want to do that because reselecting spells/skills is just so much of a pain. You can select everything, and IF your timing is good, eke out a little more damage... or just hit Repeat where it'll trigger all at once.. But god help you if you need to do something slightly different, like heal, because then you have to reselect every skill/spell all over again. It's ridiculously cumbersome for what should be simple and streamlined.
I'd probably be a little more into continuing if I wasn't now stuck at a brick wall of content for an indeterminate amount of time, with no new events or ANYTHING AT ALL but slowly advancing through the coliseum for the next few... weeks? Months?
The game does have a deeper level of complexity than FFRK though, mostly to do with the gacha.
FFRK, you'll know immediately whether an item you pull is going to be an improvement and at all useful to you. The only thing preventing you from taking full advantage of it is the realm it's used for, and whether you have a character viable enough to use it.
With FFBE, you still have the character issue in determining which characters are useful, but it's taken to a higher degree. At least with some of these characters, assuming familiarity at all with the Final Fantasy universe, you can get a sense of what kind of skills they'll bring to your team and what they're capable of. With the unique FFBE characters, who knows if they're actually any good? Without a spreadsheet or some foreknowledge (thanks Japan) you could get a pull from the gacha and be all "Uhh, is this a good pull?"
For some of us who do at least try to be ahead of the curve of the game, making sure we'll be able to pull a known high-tier unit like Cecil, Exdeath, Bartz and the like is going to increase the enjoyment of the game. There's a little bit of this in FFRK thanks to knowing in advance which events are coming up with in-demand relics that greatly improve the performance of your team, but generally speaking, any relic you pull is going to be useful to you somehow. FFBE's character pool, with some units restricted to capping out at 4 or 5* when there are units that are objectively known to be better could mean some of your pulls will literally be fodder to your strongest team members, rather than having them sit around with the potential to be useful someday.
Half the SB in ffrk are totally worthless. Gods know how you can even tell without hitting up a wiki most times. Then you have random abilities in the same tier being worthless due to multipliers that again require a wiki.
There are entire lists in ffrk dedicated to which relics are total duds while certain things are overpowered as crap. God forbid you weren't around for ramza or didn't land his relic. Now you're behind the curve of any scrub who got lucky.
Both are pretty damn guilty of requiring the gacha to advance in the higher tiers, but both are easily beatable in the bulk of content without it.
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Idx86Long days and pleasant nights.Registered Userregular
Is this going to be on the Apple platform as well?
2008, 2012, 2014 D&D "Rare With No Sauce" League Fantasy Football Champion!
For me it takes three seconds to swap my entire teams skills. I don't have any lag on swiping into the menu and such. So it's pretty hassle free.
Pretty much everything has stars and works much the same way. No more difficult to understand except in vague niche strats.
The worry about who can awaken is basically like waiting for mc2. It's useful to keep in mind but a lot of that is pretty far down the line.
Materials don't, and unless I'm missing it, there's no way to tell at a glance that, say, Rain can be promoted from 2* to 5*, or Garland is 3* to 5*, but Vivi is 3* to 4* only. It only takes a few days to hit the 3* level cap and then promote using the experience vortex dungeon too (which is quasi-permanently around), so while the MC2-like thing being hidden is the same between them, the jump in power between * ranks and the ease of getting to that level is very different.
Is this going to be on the Apple platform as well?
It should be. The registration site gives you options to select iDevices as your means of play. I think just due to the open nature of Android's platform, the application for Android is already available. Apple/iTunes may be a bit more difficult to work around that, but I wouldn't know for sure. I'm neither an Apple user nor familiar enough with their applications to know if it could be made publicly available for download without going through the store.
Gacha games are always tough to balance. They need to encourage you to spend money in order to make profit, so they need to make the gacha very important. But on the other hand, if the game isn't playable unless you get lucky or spend a ton of money, then nobody will play it. I haven't seen enough of BE yet to see if it treads this line very well, so as of now, I can only really judge the game based on presentation and gameplay. Both of which are pretty impressive, aside from the bug that makes dialogue get repeated at the end of battles.
Gacha games are always tough to balance. They need to encourage you to spend money in order to make profit, so they need to make the gacha very important. But on the other hand, if the game isn't playable unless you get lucky or spend a ton of money, then nobody will play it. I haven't seen enough of BE yet to see if it treads this line very well, so as of now, I can only really judge the game based on presentation and gameplay. Both of which are pretty impressive, aside from the bug that makes dialogue get repeated at the end of battles.
Typically I'm not a fan of Gatcha games where the characters themselves are the Gatcha element. So far it hasn't been too bad in FFBE, but I've been lucky in that I got a couple powerful characters right off the bat. I much prefer the FFRK method where the characters are easy to get and are useful in their own right even without an associated relic. 90% of the game in FFRK can be done easily without any unique SB relics since you can get powerful abilities via orbs. It is of course much easier if you DO get lucky with awesome relics, but outside of the most endgame of content you are only limited by the time you have put into the game.
Conversely with FFBE your characters are the key, so getting lucky with good characters will be more important in the long run. This is my assumption at least. It seems you can only raise a character so high, so having a bunch of 1* and 2* characters won't be helpful, meaning you really need to get at the very least some good 3*. Luckily 3* is guaranteed via the gatcha rolls. However it seems some are much more useful than others. It remains to be seen if you can get through the difficult content that is to come with the unlucky characters.
That being said the game is so far quite fun and I'm having a blast. I'm going to withhold any real judgement about the gatcha until I see it in action in the live game or when I hit some sort of wall (that's typically when the real test begins)
NNID: delphinidaes Official PA Forums FFXIV:ARR Free Company <GHOST> gitl.enjin.com Join us on Sargatanas!
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ResIpsaLoquiturNot a grammar nazi, just alt-write.Registered Userregular
edited May 2016
Anyone else having a connection error?
I was exploring a forest (where the hell is that last secret path?!), and finally giving up, I try to exit. It gives me a connection error and boots me back to the title. I then touch the screen and it loads right back to the forest. If I try to leave, it does the same. I closed the app, restarted my phone, same issue.
edit: giving up resolves the issue, and fortunately, that was my second run through the forest.
ResIpsaLoquitur on
League of Legends: MichaelDominick; Blizzard(NA): MichaelD#11402; Steam ID: MichaelDominick
There have been videos of people beating high end content in ffbe with nothing but friend summons and the main dudes.
So I'm guessing there is something you be said about being able to grind trust rewards and craft/find gear and abilities.
Now how grindy that will end up being I'm not entirely sure. Brave frontier had some awful grind here and there but they seemed to be learning over time. So who knows. I'm not actually very hopeful.
Brave Frontier really was all about the gacha characters. Some team comps existed that relied heavily on having characters with particular Brave Bursts, which became more ubiquitous in an effort to "balance" things. I stopped playing BF right around the time they added units that you could feed to characters that permanently boosted their primary stats (Pwr, Def, Rec), but the power creep before that was also a bit unreal. New units showed up every month or so, or old units getting a whole new rank with the sprite art getting more and more ridiculous.
Kikuri as a 3 star unit.
Kikuri as a 7 star unit.
I'm a bit hesitant that the later content of the game will rely on particular character comps to be able to win, but they've also made many abilities obtainable on many characters. In this way, it's not much different from FFRK and wanting a specific relic SB.
Yeah I stopped BF a year or so in. Then again bursts were some of the only ways to heal effectively so they were hideously mandatory. Or the consumable grind.
So from the start it at least looks like they learned a little.
I'm just unsure how far or deep that lesson burrowed into their brains.
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ShadowfireVermont, in the middle of nowhereRegistered Userregular
So what is the deal with feeding characters to other characters? I have a white mage and black mage that are both maxed out, and I have a replacement for the white mage that is better. Should I feed that white mage to her to increase her stats? Does that just give the character a bunch of experience, or does it do other stuff?
It's just for exp. Only same units, like Leah being fed to Leah, regardless of rank, would also transfer the Trust Mastery and a 5% bonus. Otherwise, treat feeding characters to others like feeding relics and adamantite/scarletite in FFRK.
The big exp items are metal cactuars. You get a few as log-in bonuses, and maybe a few would drop if you're fortunate enough to run into them while on exploration maps.
According to Reddit, the 1*/2* friend summoned characters are great sources for gil if you max level them and then sell them. About the only other thing you can use them for is maxing their trust to get some reward, though that sounds like a lot of effort or just a lot of duplicate summons. Though, for those interested you can beat all of the current story and get Ifrit perfectly fine with just those low tier summons, my team was Biggs, Montana, and Bard Lady (forget her name ATM).
Finally! Rerolled my way into a 5* Cecil. I was at the point where I would have accepted any 5*, or a 4* for a character I like (Terra, Bartz, Rydia, etc), but this is beyond expectations. Can finally go deeper into the game than I did in my very first account.
Player ID is 862,543,689.
Finally! Rerolled my way into a 5* Cecil. I was at the point where I would have accepted any 5*, or a 4* for a character I like (Terra, Bartz, Rydia, etc), but this is beyond expectations. Can finally go deeper into the game than I did in my very first account.
Player ID is 862,543,689.
Lucky, I spent the commute to and from work, and 45 minutes at the dog park rerolling and got bupkis. It really is pretty quick and easy to promote a unit though, so if you hit a 3* for one of the awesome ones, I'd say stick with them.
I think I'm just going to go after characters that are fun for me, and otherwise just go with what the game gives me. This pal-point 3* bard lady provides some pretty crazy power boosts to my team, so I'll probably cruise through a bunch of the new stages once the full game comes out. I probably go after characters like Locke, Celes and Agrias again if they get a promotion.
The 3* versions of units really are pretty strong by themselves.
But I have seen the light. The light that a 5* level 35 Exdeath brings. ~aga spells for daaaays.
I am accepting the current situation the game offers me, "beat" it, and then maybe I'll either try re-rolling for something better and save it to a different FB account, or just go for re-rolling with the milestone rewards active at launch. The daily rewards are barely great. Friend points, some items, and not even enough lapis in the month to give you a gacha pull. :P
The 3* versions of units really are pretty strong by themselves.
But I have seen the light. The light that a 5* level 35 Exdeath brings. ~aga spells for daaaays.
I am accepting the current situation the game offers me, "beat" it, and then maybe I'll either try re-rolling for something better and save it to a different FB account, or just go for re-rolling with the milestone rewards active at launch. The daily rewards are barely great. Friend points, some items, and not even enough lapis in the month to give you a gacha pull. :P
The daily awards are bizarrely awful, although I guess once you get a character, you're set for a very, very long time.
Rerolled a few more times as dinner was cooking, and got me a 3* Vaan. I'll so take that. Full Break + Steal. Delicious.
That said, if the rest of the draws with what's available, and the 11 draw from milestone awards don't give me another couple top tier units, I'll probably bail on this account and reroll in the 12 set until I get something I'm happy with. But that's not for a month probably, sooooo...
Edit: Second draw post-Siren was 3* Galuf. Well, at least he can be promoted to 5*. Not entirely sure what he is though. Seems like a jack of everything with the usual array of awful Galuf skills. His animation bothers me almost as much as Cyan's does.
Edit x2:
Motherfucker. Third summon was a 4* Galuf.
Posts
So:
4*
Edgar
Vivi
3*
Garland
Shantotto
I feel like I could do better than that. Edgar's pretty nice. Really not sure what's so great about Garland though. Shantotto is... a black mage. Vivi seems like a slightly worse version of her at a glance.
Maybe I'll link this to one of my other dummy facebook accounts to preserve it since it's not THAT bad a set, and I only played all of like, a day and a half, and see if I can get a 5* or two. Or just half-ass the daily stuff until the actual release with the mass dump of summon stuff.
MAYBE BOTH! ...Commuting and meetings are so painfully boring and I can only watch so many movies on my phone.
That part I get. I'm just frustrated because I can't have my game backed up unless I go with my original pull.
Create a dummy facebook account specifically for this kind of thing to not annoy your friends.
Join the dark side.
Edit:
Oh, unrelated, but word of warning, you NEED some flavor of black mage. I've run across enemies in vortex battles that are basically immune to physical attacks.
EDIT: And I done goofed. I thought I was overwriting the existing data on my device with the new file that pulled Garland.
NOPE. Other way around. It took the pre-existing account data and overwrote it with the crappier file that was saved to my FB. I do not know how to remove that old FB info, so it may just be that I permanently never sign in to facebook and save an account, which means if I ever have to replace my device, it's gone. Hmm.
EDIT x2: So, log out of Facebook on your device, log in to a dummy/secondary account, and then log in your game. It'll pull from the account the app on the device is logged into to save.
Steam: TheArcadeBear
I'll keep that in mind. Incidentally, Garland is 3 star but it's max 5 star. Does that mean I could theoretically roll a 4 star version, and how do I improve his stars? Fuse with more Garland?
Digging the game so far though, looking forward to getting more into it.
I'm pretty sure that yes, you could roll one. I rolled a 4* Vivi, but I've definitely seen 3* versions, and mine is totally blacked out for "Awakening."
And to answer your second question, yes. Go to Unit: Awaken Units. They need to be at their max level, and you need a bunch of random materials. Here's an example of a 1* -> 2*.
http://imgur.com/a/KkSU5
If you get duplicate copies, You should usually fuse them together since it gives a big boost to Trust (which is why hers is at 5), which otherwise goes up really REALLY slowly, and gives some supposedly awesome thing, although some are more awesome than others.
And again, you can finish the whole released content so far in about a day and a half for enough lapis for about ~4 draws total. Granted, I did bare minimum of the exploration dungeons and none of the sidequest things since they're horrible, but... eh.
I adore the sprite work though, and lord knows there's not enough of that shit around. I'll probably see if I can reroll a few more times to see if I can get anything better. CoD with her resistances across the board seems fantastic. I'm not sold on having/using multiple black mages though considering how squishy they are. Thieves like Zidane can also get you some really awesome shit apparently, so it'd be nice to have one of those too.
Edit:
Also, again, once the pre-reg period is over, we're most likely getting 11 draws worth of free dudes/dudettes (plus one for getting to the end of the tutorial), so rolling and rerolling then is likely to be MUCH more fruitful than a ton of effort now for a few rolls at a time.
There are also some pretty severe performance issues at the moment, which I'm inclined to forgive since it's an obvious pre-release, but it seems that characters with tons of abilities (Shantotto especially) cause a 3-5 second lag when trying to open their ability menu in combat, which is just brutal for mages. This also hurts since you're supposed to be grinding the limit breaks at every opportunity, but it lags like hell when you try to. Or even just using a bunch on a boss at a time is a pain in the ass to select each in turn for all 5/6 characters, and then having to reselect the spells/skills and it's kind of a pain when it should be streamlined or simpler.
This does have the absolutely gorgeous sprite work and animation, but FFRK has the kind of basic-art-Disgaea-factor where I really love how much they do with it for SBs and such, which is a lot less impressive here. I do really like its implementation of the daily dungeons in comparison though.
Bottom line/tl;dr, overly complexity makes it a lot harder to understand and needs some streamlining/performance fixes. An assload of stuff that seems dedicated just to grindyness and/or randomly wandering around more than anything else. Pretty as fuck.
I do have way too much dead time from now until the end of summer though, so *shrug*. I also prodded at Tales of Links and Kingdom Hearts:Unchained (among a couple others) in the last month or so and moved on from them for various reasons. I'd probably put this a little ahead of those (again, as having only played for ~2 days), assuming that when it actually opens up, there's an ASSLOAD more areas to get through to start with, but FFRK is still my pick for best by a heavy margin.
Otherwise I agree with pretty much everything you said. Especially the confusion.
Apparently you have only 50 slots for materials before you start having to use lapis to expand it. Mine was full at 51, and it was taking a good 4-5 seconds to load it, then I tap Sell, and another 4-5 seconds to load the same set of items, and note that because I have no idea what basically anything here is used for I'm just picking something to get rid of at almost random, then after selling it, another 4-5 seconds to reload the item list without it.
They do explain most of the mechanics pretty clearly. Chains and elemental chains are just damage and crit multipliers. When you feel real hardcore it's about chaining smaller hits to high chain to heavy hitter. Basically the Valkyrie profile shtick without the air time.
Grindy like woah though. Then again as someone who just picked RK up again after a year or whatever so is that game.
Materials are a hassle and having an inventory limit on them is kind of a slap in the face though. They are basically ubiquitous specifically to push you into getting more inventory space. Something I've usually hated in these games.
From looking over the wiki and such it seems there is a good bit of content already there so hopefully the full launch should give us a good amount of things to do.
You can make an iTunes account in soft launch countries and download it that way. Dunno about side loading or anything like that, not an iOS user.
It's less about understanding what things do as it is understanding what is actually valuable or you should be prioritizing. In FFRK, it's easy. High star = better. Abilities need orbs of the same star they are. Here, fuck if I can tell what's good and not at a glance, and that goes for characters too, since it's not immediately clear how far characters can be promoted or what gains they get when they are. The chain/elemental stuff I quickly decided really wasn't worth trying to min/max, especially in the battles where you'd really want to do that because reselecting spells/skills is just so much of a pain. You can select everything, and IF your timing is good, eke out a little more damage... or just hit Repeat where it'll trigger all at once.. But god help you if you need to do something slightly different, like heal, because then you have to reselect every skill/spell all over again. It's ridiculously cumbersome for what should be simple and streamlined.
I'd probably be a little more into continuing if I wasn't now stuck at a brick wall of content for an indeterminate amount of time, with no new events or ANYTHING AT ALL but slowly advancing through the coliseum for the next few... weeks? Months?
Pretty much everything has stars and works much the same way. No more difficult to understand except in vague niche strats.
The worry about who can awaken is basically like waiting for mc2. It's useful to keep in mind but a lot of that is pretty far down the line.
FFRK, you'll know immediately whether an item you pull is going to be an improvement and at all useful to you. The only thing preventing you from taking full advantage of it is the realm it's used for, and whether you have a character viable enough to use it.
With FFBE, you still have the character issue in determining which characters are useful, but it's taken to a higher degree. At least with some of these characters, assuming familiarity at all with the Final Fantasy universe, you can get a sense of what kind of skills they'll bring to your team and what they're capable of. With the unique FFBE characters, who knows if they're actually any good? Without a spreadsheet or some foreknowledge (thanks Japan) you could get a pull from the gacha and be all "Uhh, is this a good pull?"
For some of us who do at least try to be ahead of the curve of the game, making sure we'll be able to pull a known high-tier unit like Cecil, Exdeath, Bartz and the like is going to increase the enjoyment of the game. There's a little bit of this in FFRK thanks to knowing in advance which events are coming up with in-demand relics that greatly improve the performance of your team, but generally speaking, any relic you pull is going to be useful to you somehow. FFBE's character pool, with some units restricted to capping out at 4 or 5* when there are units that are objectively known to be better could mean some of your pulls will literally be fodder to your strongest team members, rather than having them sit around with the potential to be useful someday.
Steam: TheArcadeBear
There are entire lists in ffrk dedicated to which relics are total duds while certain things are overpowered as crap. God forbid you weren't around for ramza or didn't land his relic. Now you're behind the curve of any scrub who got lucky.
Both are pretty damn guilty of requiring the gacha to advance in the higher tiers, but both are easily beatable in the bulk of content without it.
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Materials don't, and unless I'm missing it, there's no way to tell at a glance that, say, Rain can be promoted from 2* to 5*, or Garland is 3* to 5*, but Vivi is 3* to 4* only. It only takes a few days to hit the 3* level cap and then promote using the experience vortex dungeon too (which is quasi-permanently around), so while the MC2-like thing being hidden is the same between them, the jump in power between * ranks and the ease of getting to that level is very different.
And I envy you for your lack of lag. It's awful.
It should be. The registration site gives you options to select iDevices as your means of play. I think just due to the open nature of Android's platform, the application for Android is already available. Apple/iTunes may be a bit more difficult to work around that, but I wouldn't know for sure. I'm neither an Apple user nor familiar enough with their applications to know if it could be made publicly available for download without going through the store.
Steam: TheArcadeBear
Steam: TheArcadeBear
Typically I'm not a fan of Gatcha games where the characters themselves are the Gatcha element. So far it hasn't been too bad in FFBE, but I've been lucky in that I got a couple powerful characters right off the bat. I much prefer the FFRK method where the characters are easy to get and are useful in their own right even without an associated relic. 90% of the game in FFRK can be done easily without any unique SB relics since you can get powerful abilities via orbs. It is of course much easier if you DO get lucky with awesome relics, but outside of the most endgame of content you are only limited by the time you have put into the game.
Conversely with FFBE your characters are the key, so getting lucky with good characters will be more important in the long run. This is my assumption at least. It seems you can only raise a character so high, so having a bunch of 1* and 2* characters won't be helpful, meaning you really need to get at the very least some good 3*. Luckily 3* is guaranteed via the gatcha rolls. However it seems some are much more useful than others. It remains to be seen if you can get through the difficult content that is to come with the unlucky characters.
That being said the game is so far quite fun and I'm having a blast. I'm going to withhold any real judgement about the gatcha until I see it in action in the live game or when I hit some sort of wall (that's typically when the real test begins)
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I was exploring a forest (where the hell is that last secret path?!), and finally giving up, I try to exit. It gives me a connection error and boots me back to the title. I then touch the screen and it loads right back to the forest. If I try to leave, it does the same. I closed the app, restarted my phone, same issue.
edit: giving up resolves the issue, and fortunately, that was my second run through the forest.
So I'm guessing there is something you be said about being able to grind trust rewards and craft/find gear and abilities.
Now how grindy that will end up being I'm not entirely sure. Brave frontier had some awful grind here and there but they seemed to be learning over time. So who knows. I'm not actually very hopeful.
Kikuri as a 7 star unit.
I'm a bit hesitant that the later content of the game will rely on particular character comps to be able to win, but they've also made many abilities obtainable on many characters. In this way, it's not much different from FFRK and wanting a specific relic SB.
Steam: TheArcadeBear
So from the start it at least looks like they learned a little.
I'm just unsure how far or deep that lesson burrowed into their brains.
The big exp items are metal cactuars. You get a few as log-in bonuses, and maybe a few would drop if you're fortunate enough to run into them while on exploration maps.
Steam: TheArcadeBear
Player ID is 862,543,689.
Lucky, I spent the commute to and from work, and 45 minutes at the dog park rerolling and got bupkis. It really is pretty quick and easy to promote a unit though, so if you hit a 3* for one of the awesome ones, I'd say stick with them.
But I have seen the light. The light that a 5* level 35 Exdeath brings. ~aga spells for daaaays.
I am accepting the current situation the game offers me, "beat" it, and then maybe I'll either try re-rolling for something better and save it to a different FB account, or just go for re-rolling with the milestone rewards active at launch. The daily rewards are barely great. Friend points, some items, and not even enough lapis in the month to give you a gacha pull. :P
Steam: TheArcadeBear
The daily awards are bizarrely awful, although I guess once you get a character, you're set for a very, very long time.
Rerolled a few more times as dinner was cooking, and got me a 3* Vaan. I'll so take that. Full Break + Steal. Delicious.
That said, if the rest of the draws with what's available, and the 11 draw from milestone awards don't give me another couple top tier units, I'll probably bail on this account and reroll in the 12 set until I get something I'm happy with. But that's not for a month probably, sooooo...
Edit: Second draw post-Siren was 3* Galuf. Well, at least he can be promoted to 5*. Not entirely sure what he is though. Seems like a jack of everything with the usual array of awful Galuf skills. His animation bothers me almost as much as Cyan's does.
Edit x2:
Motherfucker. Third summon was a 4* Galuf.