Etrian Odyssey

The problem with using Nightseekers for Ailments is that they have really bad stats for inflicting ailments (low tec and only okay luck). Poison damage is based almost entirely on the skill, so Venom Throw is pretty gosh darned good, but for paralysis you'd be much better off with an Arcanist (also, Arcanists are AOE by default so you don't need to rely on Auto-Spread). This also makes it pretty pointless to use a Nightseeker before level 40, compared to any other melee class.

That said, I'm using one as part of my "entirely different team" plan. And 700 damage poison feels so good. I'm also using a Bushi, and while it's not the worst thing in the world, I'm still not sure what the point is supposed to be.

Subbing Arcanist and maxing out Ailment Boost rather nicely solved that problem for me, which is good since my Arcanist concentrated on binding baddies and keeping the party healed

As for the Bushi, well... [DISCLAIMER:This is entirely based off my opinion and experience, YMMV] as a subclass, they bring some really nice skills to the table for anyone you want to make into a heavy hitter. Charge > [your preferred attack] gives you more than double the damage for only 2 extra TP, Blood Surge gives you a nice sized boost (as long as you stop at 2 points, anyways), and pairing it up with Deep Breath lets you restore TP basically anytime you can spare the turn for it. As a main, on the other hand, they don't really do anything that another class subbing Bushi can't do at least as well. Blood Surge quickly becomes Awesome, but Impractical if you go past 2 points and especially if you take it up to the full 6, their Katana and Mace skills both have rather lousy damage/TP ratios, and the "capstone" ones come with additional drawbacks (needing dangerously low HP to get decent damage out of Multi Slash, Fierce Smash inflicting paralyze on the user)

edited 2nd Sep '15 6:17:42 PM by Reflextion

and I'm in the postgame so I used a Script of Scrolls and made myself a level 45 NS immediately. Haven't even subclassed him yet, but I know he's getting an Arcanist sub. The big reason to grab an ailment NS over an ailment Arcanist is that you can only have one circle up at a time. It's much more useful for the Arcanist to go for the head bind (+50% elemental damage) and leave the NS to throw poison or paralyze. I did notice the NS is lacking in the primary stats department, and I think that's the reason I chose against using one when I last played two years ago.

And yeah, Bushi are a terrible primary class. They're workable with the Nightseeker's double weapon skill ability but they're so much less viable than just about any other class with a Bushi subclass.

Anyway, just spent about three minutes hunting sheep with a QR party and my NS and got him five levels. This is honestly pretty extraordinary. I'm now grinding golden Sky Emperors in the Cloudy Stronghold for four levels a pop per character.

edited 3rd Sep '15 2:43:39 PM by Watashiwa

Bushi seems to do pretty good by using their super-hit with paralyze with a Dancer(sub) in the party for Refresh dance. Just looking at the numbers, it does more damage than an Imperial's Drive Blade if you can spam it every turn. Or, realistically, even better than that because Bushi have higher base strength and Maces are the strongest weapon type. The problem is TP I guess (obviously Charge helps with that too). Nightblade(sub) helps a lot for getting TP back, at least, since it doubles your auto-attack. The only problem with that is that you sometimes paralyze yourself out of a double megahit. Although I guess the other way to look at is that you sometimes don't! Sadly, Charge only works on the first hit.

Also, I feel like Auto-Surge should be 100%. Blood Surge should be the default for any Bushi.

edited 3rd Sep '15 7:00:26 PM by Clarste

There's a couple problems with going with arcanist over nightseeker early on. First, most obviously, you don't have arcanist available until you clear the second land. I want to inflict status ailments right from the get-go. Two, if this is still your first run, if you want to build an arcanist up to snuff with the rest of your team, you have to go back and slum it for a bit - they are exceptionally squishy. Finally, as pointed out, arcanist locks you into just one ailment, while you can throw out several with nightseeker.

I mean, I did eventually sub out both my nightseeker for an arcanist with sub nightseeker, but my nightseeker was an undeniable asset until my first class reset.

For bushi, well, they're supposed to be the best consistent DPS class in the game, thanks to Blood Surge. Every other class that can do large amounts of it either require big TP expenditure, setup ahead of time, cooldown issues, or some combination of them all. There are several issues, though. One is that the class wasn't particularly well put together, which is why everyone recommends that you get no more than two levels of Blood Surge (and honestly, I always preferred just one; more skill points to spend elsewhere, and the jump from level one to two in terms of power wasn't enough to tempt me). Two is that there are plenty of ways to mitigate the issues that other classes have with their heavy abilities. Three is that their defenses are just awful; at least nightseeker (who can activate an ability to negate damage) and sniper (who can do full damage from the back row) can do something to mitigate that. Bushi are too high on the risk scale for me to feel that great about their reward. That said, as pointed out, it's a great sub to pretty much any melee class.

Kind of curious - what do folks prefer to sub fortress with in 4? I had success both with nightseeker and dancer; what do you guys like?

I used Medic, put 1 point into Revive, and never looked back. Off the top of my head, Landsknecht makes some kind of sense because of Swordbreaker.

I'm pretty sure that's why they give you the trainer to get them up to 25, which should be about your level. You can make a new Arcanist and have them be immediately effective with no trouble at all. Or you could just use Wufan who's the same thing except she starts with equipment.

I don't really see how being locked into a single Ailment is a problem: it's not like Nightseekers can use two different attacks in a single turn. If you want to change the Ailment then just change the Circle. Frankly, the fact that circles can stick around try to reapply the effect seems much more like a bonus to me than a penalty. Otherwise you'd just have to recast it every turn like a Nightseeker and get nothing else done, ever. Also, Arcanists can apply Ailments without waking up flowers, which is always nice.

That said, my Nightseeker is definitely pulling her weight in the postgame dungeon. All-targeting sleep is just ridiculously good, especially since she always goes first in the turn. I think the skills themselves must have a higher infliction rate too, once you factor in Ailment Boost. Assassinate is also pretty useful. I've never seen it miss when they have an Ailment, actually.

edited 4th Sep '15 2:35:57 PM by Clarste

You know you can change the Circle, right? You're not locked into it for the 3 turns.

I'm going to go back to EO4 and EOU after I farm ingredients and Grimoires in EO2U. I feel like I better understand how classes are built now, which is really good because there are a number of dumb mistakes I made in the previous games.

My level 99 Troubadour in Untold had Holy Gift, HP Up, and TP Up maxed out. whyyyy

O!

finally killed coeurl!

he's pretty easy if you take out the bird FO Es before fighting him.

all the same, frederika and raqua both died cuz i got unlucky with the ai target roulette.

huh. cernunnos looks...very different from what i expected him to (something like a monkey)

EOU is currently $15 in the American eShop (50% off of $30); not sure about other areas, but you can check if you're curious. Just be advised that EOU is around 6300 blocks on your SD card, so watch out for that.

If anyone is interested, I updated my Etrian Odyssey 4 Guild Cards.

And here are my EO2U Guild Cards as well.

anyone got any tips for the blue patroller FO Es in sector 2 of gladshiem in untold1?

i dont want them intruding on my fight with the queen bee and holy shit they're annoying even on their own

they evade everything and the only way i have to lower evade is shell shock, which rarely works anyways.

I used leg binding bullets, that seemed to work most of the time. Also, isn't the queen on her own? I don't remember being invaded by FO Es in her fight; does she summon her own?

i havent fought her yet but 4 patrollers route takes them into the queens room and from the entrance of that room they notice and start to go after me, so i assumed the same would happen during the fight.

ive also heard she does infact summon something, but hopefully they're not as big a nightmare as the patroller.

edited 26th Oct '15 2:32:26 AM by Tarsen

I can't remember exactly how that fight goes, but if you're really worried about it you can just kill the patrols first. I know you seem to find them hard, but if you can't beat them you don't stand a chance against the boss anyway.

Also, leg-bind, paralysis and blind all lower evasion.

edited 26th Oct '15 2:27:30 AM by Clarste

Yes, the queen has her own summons. They are basically buffed versions of Blue Patrollers.

Yes, it's one of the most annoying fights in the game due to the accuracy BS.

You can block off the bees' paths into the central room by closing the side doors.

As for lowering evasion, leg binds, paralysis, blind, panic, sleep (only for the duration) all get rid of evasion.

killed the 4 blue patrollers

deal with the noble bees she summoned. only the one on the left used gale, so once you got that one you could ignore the other.

if you didnt ignore it then when you killedit and the queen bee went to front row, say hello to a lot of poison.

head bind had a pitifully low chance of succeeding, only managing to do it once in at least 24 rounds.

however a large part of the difficulty actually came from the fact that i thought she had the same weakness as the other bees, volt. turns out it was fire and when i realised this, i was able to kill her veeeeery fast. she never even got a chance to use royal jelly and heal higher than my damage output.

edited 28th Oct '15 1:50:27 AM by Tarsen

Just reached the fifth stratum in EOU 2, having never played EO 2.

My god it's gorgeous. Not quite as jawdropping as EO 1 floor 21 and the music isn't quite as good, but EO 1 is a special kind of super twist. Really dig the aesthetic, all the other games go for ruined civilization looks during their endgame rather than the other direction.

Also Fafnir is OP, but I kinda like the class's theme. Hope to see it refined in the future.

Way better looking than the DS version of that Stratum.

Just Defeated the last boss of EOII Untold's Story mode! It was kinda easy, compared to the Overlord and the Ultima Weapon on the 5th stratum. I was able to get through the game on the Standard Difficulty, dying only to Unpredictable attacks from F.O.E.s or just bad luck,now i'm playing on Classic/Expert with just Gold and Ingredients carried over from the story mode,I hoped the Classic mode's dungeon maps were different than the Story's but oh well.....

Chloe is definetly my MVP; Random Disease and Ailing slash are awesome,I(the Hero) also dealt huge chunks of damage to everything but every opportunity i have to get Arm/Head Binded is almost a 100% of getting it.....

Well, it becomes a damage race towards the end, so killing it quickly makes it pretty neutered.

The development of Etrian Odyssey V is nearly complete.

And we still don't know anything more then we did when it was announced over a year ago.

Atlas, ultimate troll.