Soul Sacrifice and SS Delta

SimianWonder wrote:

Nuts to it, bought SSD and MK9.

MK9 was free on plus and i think the servers don't exist any more Sim.

Are you gonna solo Soul Sacrifice or should I grab it now? We don't seem to be online to play at the same times as each other. Don't worry I won't take offence if you're playing alone.

ye MK9 servers were taken down on the vita, only adhoc coop now

MK9 wasn't on Plus during the time I've had it, so I've not got it in my download catalog.  No online doesn't bother me either, I seldom play fighting games online due to lag issues.

On topic, I've got no objection to playing online, but yes, we do seem to be online at conflicting times (how the hell you and Moose manage to be online at 3 or 4 in the morning baffles me!)

I'll just buy this anyway here's a simple list of changes, I'll get a better one later:

http://soulsacrifice.wikia.com/wiki/Soul_Sacrifice_Delta

All the changes i'm seeing are making me think this will be the best MH clone on vita (I thought the original already was).

I didn't play enough of vanilla SS to tell you what has changed, only that something clearly has. I'm a little over five hours in now, and it actually feels like it's a year more polished. SS felt a little heavy in terms of movement, Delta feels fast and fluid. It's certainly faster than Toukiden, though combat is less focussed on dealing with individual boss limbs, and much tougher to boot.

Some of the monster designs are fantastic too; The Three Little pigs is basically a twenty foot tall fat pig wielding a pig-faced shield and a pig-faced club, and Red Riding Hood (both bossesin the apparently new "Grim" faction story line - see what they did there?) is a two part battle consisting of fighting a witch and then a bloody great wolf.

Is it better thank Toukiden? Jury's out at the moment. It's got loads of potential, but it's easily better than Ragnarok Odyssey Ace and it's horrible floaty combat, countless fetch quests and characterless art design.

There's so much depth to this, so many hidden combinations dependant on your sigils, and which offerings you pair up. It's great. Buu, if you haven't done so yet, buy it. It's easily worth the reduced price, even if you managed to platinum vanilla.

Skipping vanilla and just getting this is a sensible choice, only played a bit and this is outright the best game on vita. I might prefer it to demon's souls, which was possibly the best RPG i played this gen.

My only gripe is I chose to be a fat mage and those guys suck because me not getting hit on missions doesn't get me bonuses unlike the other factions. So for beginners just go fate, because sucking will not punish you in the long run. Whereas you are actually punished for being great.

Oh skip you should also go back and save anyone you didn't and keep that change with lacrima at some point. Going Avalon on a first playthrough is a terrible idea, you won't get any allies and being a glass cannon without the better spells later in the game will just make things get tiresome. I'm not sure how prestiging works in this game but i'll be doing tht constantly if you need help on missiosn just let me know. I platted the original game and nothing seems to be capable of killing me on this as yet.

I expect this is a free patch that will come out close to freedom wars launch time, looks awesome.



EDIT: oh wow click download when you boot up the game and you get a huge amount of free DLC.

I just completed my third prestige. I had a crap load of XP rumours i didn't notice and I hadn't used any up until i was like 35/35, but because i had so many my level sky rocketed easily lol.

Prestige:
Grim - 1xthrow
Avalon - 1xexplosive
Sanctuarium - 1xspear

I'll probably slow down now, I got one heart sigil for each faction which means i can do decent damage in each faction now, btw throw is considered a really bad weapon in SSD it was broken in vanilla, hence ppl say its shit now, that is probably an exaggeration though.

How in the hell are you levelling so quickly? I switched from Grim to Sanctuarium (I was fed up getting screwed with random rewards) and despite using the best rumours I have, I'm still only 46/27. Is there some amazing farming level I'm not aware of, or have you literally just played the game non stop for a week?

SimianWonder wrote:

How in the hell are you levelling so quickly?  I switched from Grim to Sanctuarium (I was fed up getting screwed with random rewards) and despite using the best rumours I have, I'm still only 46/27.  Is there some amazing farming level I'm not aware of, or have you literally just played the game non stop for a week?

Just do a high level mission. Unless you got gold level spells though they might be tough. My intelligence is 46+ i think which means most things are unlocked for me. If you want just let me know and i can put you in a high level mission with me and i'll just kill everything real quick if you equip a high rumour and take all the kills, you'll probably go up a lot of levels. I think i went from level 1-40 in like two missions. You get an insane XP boost when you prestige, so you won't be low level long at all.

I'd suggest go through the basic story beat magusar the normal way, if you hit a wall let me know and tell me what weapons you like and i'll find a mission to get you them. Keep in mind I already beat SS vanilla before i played this so i know how to beat pretty much everything because i beat all the DLC bosses on that version to. The only boss that irritates me on this is snow white because i don't get what makes her absorb my spells I mean i get its the eye but i don't get what the signal is. Admittedly i only fought her like twice and i didn't notice she reflected spells the first time as she died quickly lol.

I don't have many Gold level offerings, but I do have a couple. I managed to beat a Cthonian Fiend in one of the Otherworld Pacts (nine-star difficulty, IIRC, with help from two NPC allies), but even with a rumour boosting my exp, I only got around three levels from him.

My Vita's on charge at the moment, but when it's done, I'll likely finish the story (still haven't tried Magusar!) and take you up on your generous offer. Does it matter which faction you are when you max out?

SimianWonder wrote:

I don't have many Gold level offerings, but I do have a couple.  I managed to beat a Cthonian Fiend in one of the Otherworld Pacts (nine-star difficulty, IIRC, with help from two NPC allies), but even with a rumour boosting my exp, I only got around three levels from him.

My Vita's on charge at the moment, but when it's done, I'll likely finish the story (still haven't tried Magusar!) and take you up on your generous offer.  Does it matter which faction you are when you max out?

Work out what spell class you like then choose faction based on that, off the top of my head:

Grim: weapon/throw/homing/special
Sanctuarium: spear/blood/blitz/armor/heal
Avalon: explosion/arm

When you select prestige you can see the spell choices and then just back out change faction and choose one of the others.  Currently i'm just getting the level one sigil for a few weapons so i can change my sigil and faction to suit what might be most useful for a particular weapon.  I'm inclined to go sanctuarium though ultimately as the weapons are the ones i like.  I managed to get a few black offerings to those seem to be really powerful, don't even consider doing red 10+ star bosses without them unless you want a long ass fight.  The difficulty seems to go up exponentially with red stars going by comments i saw on the forum.

Keep in mind if you use SP to level up a faction when you leave that faction it costs you more lacrima, i'm going to not invest SP until i know what faction i want to stick with.  Apparently 11,200 SP is needed in a faction to unlock its perks, but at the same time that will cost you 4,000 lacrima to transfer, i've currently got 12,000 lacrima and i carried some over.  With about 250 points in a faction that faction is between 300-400 to change from.

EDIT: seems like PSN is down.

I like Offerings from all three factions.  For Grim, I love Mines and Weapons, moreso when you can use the former to empower the latter.  Sanctuarium gets spears, some awesome Blood weapons (the one from the Cthonian Fiend is just beastly) and some great healing utility, and Avalon gets Explosion class, which are great for raining down long distance heavy damage, especially on larger, slow-moving Archfiends.

In my (admittedly brief) experience, Throw and Homing kinda suck - they're simply too slow given the paltry amount of damage they do.
 
I'm leaning towards Sanctuarium or Grim to be honest, which is not what I thought I'd be doing at the start of the game!

The invincibility frames on Blitz are insane - you're basically totally invulnerable for the duration of the move, you can even knock charging enemies out of their attack animations if you time it right. Sanctuarium seeming to more and more offer the best variety.

SimianWonder wrote:

The invincibility frames on Blitz are insane - you're basically totally invulnerable for the duration of the move, you can even knock charging enemies out of their attack animations if you time it right.  Sanctuarium seeming to more and more offer the best variety.

General consensus is sanctuarium is the best and grim the weakest, but I think that opinion is nonsense. People seem to forget a major factor. To get most out of sanctuarium you need to be 99/1 or at least 80/20, but consider this grim is neutral always if they want to be. That means even at 1/1 they have access to their best sigils. If you are going to repeatedly prestige the one faction that is never at a disadvantage is Grim.

Also Grim gets boost for Force (thats non elemental damage) which can be used effectively against anything and also a lot of the force attack in general just do equal/more damage then their elemental counterparts. So at first glance sanctuarium is the best and yes they are the best if you've already levelled fully, but if you want to repeatedly prestige grim is the best.

I didn't spend much time thinking about it, either way though every single team has its own advantages, and i think weapons can be contextual. That said blitz is probably the best and safest melee damage and explosive is probably the safest long range weapon (it can destroy multiple parts at the same time due to blast radius. I'm going to flick through factions. If you're serious about being sanctuarium make sure you hit level 99/1 at least once because i think it will unlock the sigil that helps you gain blue XP (i'll confirm this later trying to go 99/1 at the moment).

The final battle with Magusar did highlight Sanctuarium's biggest weakness - Magusar, even in his dragon form, did very little damage to me, but it felt like I was wailing on him for ten minutes without much to show for it, my 59/27 build didn't really have the offensive chops to do that much damage.

Oh, and yes, I know what you mean about Grim. They're going to always be neutral, so have access to their best builds immediately, without running through the whole game to level 99/1 or 1/99.

I think i managed a prestige in less then 30 minutes (admittedly there was a massive chunk of luck in that). Anyway I just been pissing about (trying out weapons), I haven't done the bulk of the online missions as I thought I might as well do that with you. Anything up to ten star I should be able to whoop regardless of my level.

Current Heart sigils I have:

Sanctuarium - Spear, Blitz, Blood, solo healing, area healing
Grim - Throw
Avalon - Explosive
Any - Binding

I'm thinking of getting weapon from grim, and depending on the stasis extend duration I ight grab that. I'm guessing if you want help on bosses you don't want me to outright kill them, so I can just hold them in place while you beat the crap out of them, or I can try this damage boosting stuff. Either way I've got 550 spells at this point so lots of dumb stuff to play with.

God this game is soooooooo fucking complicated. They listed 100 differences between SS and SSD, but hell I'm thinking you can write an encyclopedia on the game alone and the changes.

Anyway basics arm affinity:

Spoiler:

I'm more than happy to use a divine arm IV, so going spears I can still have a high damage output if i go 60/40. I'm using an attack sigil on y forearm that is an avalon boost but still gives me a 50% general damage boost. My heart sigil and various other sigils can boost spear damage to aroun 200% I think. So doubt damage is an issue. The biggest proble with my build however is those body parts that are high up. However I can compensate by using bind to bring enemies to the floor and use cursed part damage boosts. I could look into elemental damage boosts but i'd rather raw power boosts, this also means i can wield a neutral weapon to back me up if I'm attacked in an ambush.

Anyway thats just my thoughts for now. I'd say keep in ind what build you're going for there's probably a few hundred combinations that you can make battle worthy.

I can't see the need for Heart Sigils for healing - even a 60/40 build is pretty tanky, the basic spells are all I've used so far and haven't had too many issues. I'd like Blitz and Spear sigils, maybe Blood as well, for Sanctuarium, Mine and Weapon for Grim, and Explosive and Arm for Avalon.

SimianWonder wrote:

I can't see the need for Heart Sigils for healing - even a 60/40 build is pretty tanky, the basic spells are all I've used so far and haven't had too many issues.  I'd like Blitz and Spear sigils, maybe Blood as well, for Sanctuarium, Mine and Weapon for Grim, and Explosive and Arm for Avalon.

You use healing, so you can use blood more. If you use a regen spell you'll heal at the same rate that you fire.

I dunno my build yet hence i'm fidlling with everything.

Hahahaha the ending to this is brilliant, i think i'm too strong though as all the last few fights were a complete joke, oh well.

Think this is my favourite RPG ever. I think previously it was SMT nocturne or demon souls.

I haven't fought God Magusar yet, but the story blew my tiny mind once I sat and thought about what they were doing with it. It's incredibly ambitious.

Game story is great, can't think of many that I cared about the lore so much in. God Magusar is really weak, chances are if you can beat the first magusar this one is easy, I wrecked him in a pretty short amount of time.

Finally got to 99/1.  Massive survivability, but it takes ages to whittle down anything above a ten star rating, even with Blitz boosted to 360% attack fights were dragging on for fifteen minutes a time.
As an added bonus, there are a couple of err... unique outfits that go with the unlocked Hand Sigils.

Divine Arm V (Hand Sigil: Holy Seal)

Spoiler:

Divine Arm VI (Hand Sigil: Holy Seal II)

Spoiler: