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Force in Ep1&2 Ultimate.


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So, I made a post couple days ago regarding endgame gears for my FOney - I did manage to get every piece that was recommended to me on the MST side but I'm coming across a real problem, and am a little confused, and slighty... idk, gracefully frustrated is the best way to put it.

Everybody I speak to is telling me that to excel in Ultimate Ep1&2 I'm absolutely going to need to melee/range AND I'm going to need max HIT, why? The whole reason I picked Force is because I want to be... a force, I don't want to use melee, I don't want to use guns, that's not how the game I remember used to be like, I'm not sure why this is required of a force? Unless of course you want to be a Fomarl who as far as I know is good at both melee and techs, but I don't I picked FOnewearl because it's my favourite class due to high MST.

Whenever I play Ep1&2 on ultimate with my new gears:

Psycho Wand/Summit Moon/Glide Divine
Mother Garb+
Adept
V801
Heavenly/M
Heavenly/M
Hylian Shield
140 MST sato mag.
High lvl techs

I do absolutely trash damage. It's just so upsetting to know that apparently force is borderline useless on 70% of the game.

Idk maybe I'm seeing it wrong, could someone please explain to me properly what's going on? And why I must do all this?
 

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Just now, Ricardo Gomes said:

any force is good at ep4, but for ep1/2 magid damage is very weak, and many times they are good only for suport.to make more damage, ya you will need some melee weapons

Yeah, I understand this, and yes I do a hell of alot of dmg on Ep4, but I want to know why I'm useless as a force in ep1&2?
I understand they buffed ULT and Ep2 but they shouldn't have buffed it so much that it deems forces useless, because that's just incredibly unfair.

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its the way this server works, to compensate that they made some new great weapons for forces to balance they. about buffed ultimate, they are like that since beggining and its a choice from server owner and it was a good change, or else it was too easy play ultimate

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Just now, Ricardo Gomes said:

its the way this server works, to compensate that they made some new great weapons for forces to balance they. about buffed ultimate, they are like that since beggining and its a choice from server owner and it was a good change, or else it was too easy play ultimate

Great weapons being what? Do you mean the Psycho Bridge/Dark Bridge?
But I was told they are extremely hard to get, or you have to pay upwards of $500 for them (extortionate price if you ask me).

I've not heard of any other attack boosting force only weps.

I wouldn't mind if perhaps they brought out stronger techs just for forces that were usable and effective on EP1&2, I wouldn't even mind paying, either, as you can see I'm already a donor so it's not like I'm against the donation system, however the prices seem to bit much too high for your average MMO.

 

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There really is no weapon for force to use in ep2 to deal damage with spells.  The resistances are simply too high.  This was an intentional change to curtail spell damage.  Force are still one of the best classes in the game because they have weapons as well as spells that enable them to do a very large variety of things.  Big numbers in ep1 or ep2 just isn't one of those things.

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Unfortunately, pso does not support playing a blackmage. It simply is not really viable. PSO clearly wants forces to play as more of a redmage/whitemage style of class, as there are many enemies that have extremely high technique resistances, ignore tech boosting gear completely, and/or have unfavorable ai reactions to being hit with techs; additionally spamming attack magic can be really detrimental in a team setting, where it causes a lot of bugs, unfavorable monster reactions, and a lot of damage cancel (techs generally have a larger window to cause damage cancel than other things).

In early ep1(forest and caves) attack magic can be quite strong. It starts to fall off a bit in mines (especially against the stronger enemies like sinows and baranz, and falls off a bit more in ruins where monsters are slightly more resistant and have more hp. Nearly all Ep2 enemies are extremely weak to hell and megid, however hell vastly outscales megid due to the unit v502 which doubles hell proc rates. Ep4 enemies are quite weak to magic and that episode can be soloed quite well as a force with decent tech gear(pwand+3seals/hylianshield), though it's still advised that this is mostly a solo / small team strategy and not a full competent team strategy. So around half the game is doable as a blackmage, but the rest requires you to actually make use of your entire arsenal and not just magic.

Techniques do have some very useful utility applications, but they are not used to be some kind of blackmage class (dps class or highdamage aoe nuke class) like other games do. They're used more to do things like stop charging enemies, periodically stun megiding enemies, take out ep4 lizards if team does not have good melee hell gear, various emergency situations,etc.. The best way to use attack magic in a team is with a glide v00 using single target simple techniques(which fonewearl does get a boost too), as good teamwork does not really favor using a wide aoe generalist strat over good target splitting specialist strats. Being a fonewearl that uses Si- techs for damage in teamplay like this is a viable option.

If you only played the game offline before, enemy stats are tweaked differently in that mode in such a way that techs are a bit better, due to things like giving extremely high resist monsters one weakness (i.e. Dark Bringer, multimode 90efr 90eic 90eth, 1Pmode 90efr 30eic 100eth), lower hp values overall, etc.. However, for online multimode it is pretty clear the game is biased against attack magic being a single solution to all of the games challenges. Magic does do a much larger range and higher target aoe with consistent damage and stunlock capability than weapons do, and due in part to these advantages it has the tradeoff of doing less damage than conventional weapons.

As a fonewearl main myself, I highly recommend considering using a few convential weapons to supplement your arsenal, especially Demon's weapons such as Bringer's Rifle and Slicer of Fanatic. Demon's does not care about fonewearl atp and does -75% of the monster's current hp, which can be a huge amount (more than most conventional weapons can do); Slicer of Fanatic can hit 3 targets, and if you hit all 3 at full hp that is easily over 9000 damage to most mobs (majority of mobs are >4000hp). Anything that you can't kill with magic will be brought to its knees in just 1-2 demons activations, even the mighty epsilon's 10k hp drops rapidly (10,000>2,500>625>162.5>41). Fonewearl is actually very good at attacking due to her high ata for a force.

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27 minutes ago, Fyrewolf5 said:

Unfortunately, pso does not support playing a blackmage. It simply is not really viable. PSO clearly wants forces to play as more of a redmage/whitemage style of class, as there are many enemies that have extremely high technique resistances, ignore tech boosting gear completely, and/or have unfavorable ai reactions to being hit with techs; additionally spamming attack magic can be really detrimental in a team setting, where it causes a lot of bugs, unfavorable monster reactions, and a lot of damage cancel (techs generally have a larger window to cause damage cancel than other things).

In early ep1(forest and caves) attack magic can be quite strong. It starts to fall off a bit in mines (especially against the stronger enemies like sinows and baranz, and falls off a bit more in ruins where monsters are slightly more resistant and have more hp. Nearly all Ep2 enemies are extremely weak to hell and megid, however hell vastly outscales megid due to the unit v502 which doubles hell proc rates. Ep4 enemies are quite weak to magic and that episode can be soloed quite well as a force with decent tech gear(pwand+3seals/hylianshield), though it's still advised that this is mostly a solo / small team strategy and not a full competent team strategy. So around half the game is doable as a blackmage, but the rest requires you to actually make use of your entire arsenal and not just magic.

Techniques do have some very useful utility applications, but they are not used to be some kind of blackmage class (dps class or highdamage aoe nuke class) like other games do. They're used more to do things like stop charging enemies, periodically stun megiding enemies, take out ep4 lizards if team does not have good melee hell gear, various emergency situations,etc.. The best way to use attack magic in a team is with a glide v00 using single target simple techniques(which fonewearl does get a boost too), as good teamwork does not really favor using a wide aoe generalist strat over good target splitting specialist strats. Being a fonewearl that uses Si- techs for damage in teamplay like this is a viable option.

If you only played the game offline before, enemy stats are tweaked differently in that mode in such a way that techs are a bit better, due to things like giving extremely high resist monsters one weakness (i.e. Dark Bringer, multimode 90efr 90eic 90eth, 1Pmode 90efr 30eic 100eth), lower hp values overall, etc.. However, for online multimode it is pretty clear the game is biased against attack magic being a single solution to all of the games challenges. Magic does do a much larger range and higher target aoe with consistent damage and stunlock capability than weapons do, and due in part to these advantages it has the tradeoff of doing less damage than conventional weapons.

As a fonewearl main myself, I highly recommend considering using a few convential weapons to supplement your arsenal, especially Demon's weapons such as Bringer's Rifle and Slicer of Fanatic. Demon's does not care about fonewearl atp and does -75% of the monster's current hp, which can be a huge amount (more than most conventional weapons can do); Slicer of Fanatic can hit 3 targets, and if you hit all 3 at full hp that is easily over 9000 damage to most mobs (majority of mobs are >4000hp). Anything that you can't kill with magic will be brought to its knees in just 1-2 demons activations, even the mighty epsilon's 10k hp drops rapidly (10,000>2,500>625>162.5>41). Fonewearl is actually very good at attacking due to her high ata for a force.

This is very interesting and the most thorough explanation of why this has happened that i've received so thank you for taking the time to write that out for me.

My following questions would be this:

What mags are best? Currently I don't think my mag is appropriate with this new news, would it be best to carry both a maxed MST mag and a maxed Power mag? I've heard that the Soniti is one that I should get? but I'm not sure how to. And also, why should I get the Soniti, what does it offer that's better than other mags?

What about Materials? Currently I just have used about 20ish MST mats and didn't go any further because of the news about the changes to force.

Last but not least, what weapon, I see you've mentioned a few already but I've heard the upgraded Excalibur (souls wep) is best? But I'm not sure, and I'm not entirely sure how to get it outside of paying a large amount of irl money (which I do not have) to obtain it. Also, what are the demons weps?


I will just have to come to terms that my FOney will not be how I remembered her, I don't just want to be a nurse for people on ULT, I want to contribute dmg wise, and I don't want to be stuck doing Ep3 (not only is it my least favourite episode but that would be boring and I feel excluded a little)

 

Edited by Electrochemist
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My fonewearl plan uses 2 mags, one for dex/pow and one for mst to create a pow setup and a mind setup (newmans have such high base to max differences that this is required). I use a 5/70/125/0 mag and a 0/0/0/200 mag, with 30power 35luck 85mind materials. This maxes atp, ata, and lck w/rr with the pow mag, and mst with the mind mag and v801+centurion/mind. This leaves your power setup open with battle unit + smartlink + v801 + 1free for situational units, your mind setup can be more flexible with the unit space.

Soniti is a good mag to have as it has triple invinicibility assists (for 100pb, entering boss, and 1<10th hp). It is made from Cell of Mag 502, which is quite plentiful already (many people have dozens from jack o lanterns) as well as being available as a reward from sunset base for doing the rappy love sidequest on hard or higher. Making it requires using the cell on a lvl 100+mag on a viridia sklyly purplenum redria or yellowboze (other ids would get pitri). Other popular triple invince mags are Tellusis (dragon scale from normal/hard ep4 bosses used on a Kama mag), Sato, and Nidra (last two are ep2 formula mags, need to feed to 5def 45dex 50pow/mind at level 100 on a viridia blue redria or whitill force, female force gets sato while male force gets nidra).

The upgraded excalibur, known as 100souls, is indeed a powerful weapon, but that won't be easily available until summer event (it does drop in easter but is much harder to get then). You use the Soul Booster item that drops then on an equipped Excalibur to make it. However, coming up very shortly in valentines is also the Lindcray rifle, which is another powerful weapon to get. While slightly less atp than 100souls, it is a rifle so it has much more range, is still quite strong and has spirit special, and has resta/anti range boost. That will be dropping from Dark Falz during Valentines. Slicer of Vengeance is a strong slicer that drops in that event too, but it's pretty hard to get and you can easily make do without it, Slicer of Fanatic is quite satisfactory. Other than those, a vivienne or inferno girasole can be useful for single targets, a rage de glace is pretty good, a banana cannon can be situationally useful for some bosses like gal gryphon (though it requires good sphering on fonewearl), an ultima reaper makes a nice aoe beatstick and hell weapon, holy ray can be used as an arrest rifle, Gal Wind for triggering mag invince, Mahu / vivienne / chameleon scythe for tp steal, striker of chao for s/d range, lindcray / marinas bag for resta/anti range, and probably a lot of other things I'm forgetting to mention right now and am too lazy to go through the whole list of. While fonewearl does usually have a focus on demons special to compensate for low atp, there are plenty of options that will still deal decent damage (even a diska of braveman with thirteen armor will do decent damage on a foney, for example I've taken out sil dragon that way many times before. I've also punched it to death with my fist but that was just for lulz).

When you play force, you won't always see the uber high damage numbers flashing over your screen. But you can be the most damaging member on the team. Your buffs and debuffs are what allow other members to even do high numbers in the first place, so really that's part of your damage, and demon's doesn't show a number but is one of the most damaging moves possible. You can still hit 2000+ damage with decent pb chains and strong sacrificial weapons, but even if you don't see big numbers all the time that doesn't mean that you can't contribute and deal tons of damage regardless.

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32 minutes ago, Electrochemist said:

What about Materials? Currently I just have used about 20ish MST mats and didn't go any further because of the news about the changes to force.

This thread has guides to max your stats which include which and how much materials to use.

 

32 minutes ago, Electrochemist said:

Last but not least, what weapon, I see you've mentioned a few already but I've heard the upgraded Excalibur (souls wep) is best? But I'm not sure, and I'm not entirely sure how to get it outside of paying a large amount of irl money (which I do not have) to obtain it. Also, what are the demons weps?

* List from the other thread

:gun:Banana Cannon (Halloween Event)

:swo:Hundred Souls (Excaliber + Soul Booster (Easter Event))

:gun:Lindcray (Valentine Event)

:gun:Rage De Glace (Rage De Fue + Chromatic Orb (Halloween Event))

:swo:Slicer of Fanatic (ult Greenill, Purplenum, Oran Goran Detonator 1/182 | ult Whitill Girtablulu 1/393 | ult Bluefull Girtablulu 1/393)

:swo:Slice of Vengeance (Valentine Event)

:gun:TypeME/Mechgun Demon (Guide to getting the gun, Need to redeem 10dts for the demon special)

:swo:Ultima Reaper (Halloween Event)

:gun:TypeGU/Mechgun Hell (Guide to getting the gun, Need to redeem 10dts for the Hell special)

:swo:Vivienne (ult Skyly, Oran, Whitill Pazuzu 5/16 | vh skyly, whitill Pazuzu 5/16 | vh whitill Dorphon Eclair 5/16)

:gun:Holy Ray (ult Greenill, Pinkal, Yellowboze Dal Rol Lie 2/73 | ult Blueful Sil Dragon 2/73)

:gun:Bringers Rifle (ult Viridia, Greenill, Purplenum, Pinkal, Yellowboze Dark Bringer 1/358)

 

Those listed from an event don't have drop mobs or rates because they change.

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First thing you can do which helps a lot is a solo ep IV quest called Restless Lion.  Any FO can solo it easily with rabarta/rafoie/grants/jellen, just freeze the npc's first.  I play FOmar myself.

 

Do it up until the npc drops a raygun and theres a good chance it will have 50% HIT on it - get a Demon's, Hell, Geist, and Arrest high hit rayguns and you'll have a very nice little toolkit in addition to your FO weapons.  And people will buy the Rifle and Shot for a few PDs if you get good stats on them.  There's a bunch of other weapons that drop, but Raygun is probably the most useful for FOnewearl, and FO's in general, maybe the Slicer too.  A smartlink to increase accuracy, and a v501 or v502 is good to increase the chance of status'ing with a weapon, and both are relatively cheap.

If you are redria, try farming a Magic Stone Iritista and getting a high hit slicer-type weapon to make Rainbow Baton which has unreduced Chaos and is excellent for crowd control when Rabarta isn't a good option (i.e. a confused baranz or two will take out a room for you, some stuff immune to freeze, some stuff you wont want to walk up to rabarta, etc.)  Until you get good weapons from Events, try to focus on Crowd control, debuffing, statusing, and hitlocking enemies.

 

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I distinctly remember playing as an offensive elementalist and getting by okay most of the time, even in groups where, details for performance aside, things were pretty fine (as a FOnewm, but still, I had met a FOnewearl who was also doing quite well), but now I see the messages at the beginning of this thread, I suppose that changes were made on this server to raise the monsters' resistances, sadly for magic users of that type.

Caves are good (or were) to use magic in, especially when you solo, but even in teams, you have your SI techs. In mines, Magical Piece + Gifoie, is not so bad, even if you're not a FOnewm, normally. Complete with Iggy (Ignition cloak) and gifoie merge. Other nice items are Sorcerer's Cane and Red Merge. In Ruins, when you face many enemies, and especially when you solo, techs are a good choice against packs. Eventually, you'll learn when to use echs and when to shoot or slice. This takes time. Offensive techs don't have to be restricted to their stunning function.

A good megid in ep2 is great. You don't really need the hell special and might as well forget about it altogether, unless you really want performance (although, if you look at the formulaes and resistances, you will see that Megid can sometimes do better!), at the expence of other things like inventory place (30 items is really not enough...). Other techs can sometimes be good in ep2 mind you.

Like I said in your previous thread, Bringer's Rifole, and Slicer of Fanatic (gotto love that SNS combo) do wonders. Think Epsilon, Gigues, Bringers, Delbiters, even Dorphons if you want to go faster; A strong SNH can even fell a group of threee ennemies!

Good luck. It's a long quest to find what work when, plus as your equipment changes, and to make it all suit your style.

Cheers

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18 minutes ago, shion255 said:

A good megid in ep2 is great. You don't really need the hell special and might as well forget about it altogether, unless you really want performance (although, if you look at the formulaes and resistances, you will see that Megid can sometimes do better!), at the expence of other things like inventory place (30 items is really not enough...). Other techs can sometimes be good in ep2 mind you.

Eh, I have 28 and I run out of TP before I kill more than 8 gee. Whereas a good hell gun will kill in 3-6 shots (plus it's free).

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51 minutes ago, shion255 said:

I distinctly remember playing as an offensive elementalist and getting by okay most of the time, even in groups where, details for performance aside, things were pretty fine (as a FOnewm, but still, I had met a FOnewearl who was also doing quite well), but now I see the messages at the beginning of this thread, I suppose that changes were made on this server to raise the monsters' resistances, sadly for magic users of that type.

Caves are good (or were) to use magic in, especially when you solo, but even in teams, you have your SI techs. In mines, Magical Piece + Gifoie, is not so bad, even if you're not a FOnewm, normally. Complete with Iggy (Ignition cloak) and gifoie merge. Other nice items are Sorcerer's Cane and Red Merge. In Ruins, when you face many enemies, and especially when you solo, techs are a good choice against packs. Eventually, you'll learn when to use echs and when to shoot or slice. This takes time. Offensive techs don't have to be restricted to their stunning function.

A good megid in ep2 is great. You don't really need the hell special and might as well forget about it altogether, unless you really want performance (although, if you look at the formulaes and resistances, you will see that Megid can sometimes do better!), at the expence of other things like inventory place (30 items is really not enough...). Other techs can sometimes be good in ep2 mind you.

Like I said in your previous thread, Bringer's Rifole, and Slicer of Fanatic (gotto love that SNS combo) do wonders. Think Epsilon, Gigues, Bringers, Delbiters, even Dorphons if you want to go faster; A strong SNH can even fell a group of threee ennemies!

Good luck. It's a long quest to find what work when, plus as your equipment changes, and to make it all suit your style.

Cheers

Resistances haven't really been changed, but the monsters have more hp so it takes more spellcasts to kill them with techs. And as for the Hell vs Megid, by the time megid has more chance than hell to ohko an enemy it doesn't matter anymore anyway. The break even point is at 86edk, by which point meigd and hell+v502 have only 14% chance to kill, which is highly unreliable. Around 75-80edk is where megid really starts to fall off (only 25%-20%), while hell still has a decent chance to work (36%-26%). Enemies that are considered 'weak' to hell/megid generally have around 50-60edk, which is 86%-66% chance to hell them with v502 on, but only 50%-40% chance to megid them with 30megid. The v502 bonus of double hell proc (and 1.5x paralyze confuse freeze) is just too good, coupled with the fact that you can often get way more hell attacks off in a shorter period of time and often with some aoe (s-rank hell j-cutter, type sh/shot, etc., are better than megid pierce) than megid casting which is rather slow even when done in 0delay chains.

I do agree that offensive magic does have some place and use, provided that one does know when and where and how much to use, without just spamming them nonstop and just cancelling more damage than they are actually dealing and messing with other players trying to attack the monsters.

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