Persona 4 Golden Catch-All

Has anyone made it to the top of the castle for a second time?

EverythingsTentative wrote:

Has anyone made it to the top of the castle for a second time?

Yup. Couldn't defeat the

Spoiler:

boss

there yet, though.

EverythingsTentative wrote:

Has anyone made it to the top of the castle for a second time?

Yep I pretty much did is straight after the first run but could not defeat the boss, I went back sometime later, restarted on the final floor and killed him without issue.

grobstein wrote:
tuffalobuffalo wrote:
Spoiler:

It's pretty expensive on hard, too. I was wondering if it would give you all your SP or not. It cost 22,000 yen or so, so I couldn't even test it.

I haven't tried it either, but it has to give you all your SP! It has to dammit! (In seriousness, the cost seems to be something like [A*(HP depleted) + B*(SP depleted)], with B much larger than A. It would just be super-weird for them to charge you based on how much SP you need to heal, and then not heal the SP.)

Spoiler:

He actually heals SP but not HP, so make sure you use your healing spells before you use him! Yes, he's ludicrously expensive. To my knowledge, though, he's not more expensive on hard or very hard -- although on Very Hard you're only getting like half the gold and exp that you would on other difficulties, so I'm sure it feels more expensive. He does become pretty affordable at the end, but you've got to get him all the way up to SL10 to really appreciate it.

Yeah, what Minarchist said re: costs on Hard/Very Hard.

Spoiler:

Last I checked my cost would be 25k to heal, and I have a total of 32k on me. I can't even afford weapons for all my characters, let alone armor/healing items, so there's no way I can afford those healing costs.

That said, you can abuse the SOS system for free easy heals. Trigger SOS, sneak up on an enemy, and immediately flee. Bam, free healing. Run around floor 1 & 2 doing this for about 10 minutes and you'll be fully healed.

ahrezmendi wrote:

Yeah, what Minarchist said re: costs on Hard/Very Hard.

Spoiler:

Last I checked my cost would be 25k to heal, and I have a total of 32k on me. I can't even afford weapons for all my characters, let alone armor/healing items, so there's no way I can afford those healing costs.

That said, you can abuse the SOS system for free easy heals. Trigger SOS, sneak up on an enemy, and immediately flee. Bam, free healing. Run around floor 1 & 2 doing this for about 10 minutes and you'll be fully healed.

Yeah, for the same reason you can heal a bunch by spending time in the lower-level dungeons and triggering SOS a lot. I find it annoying enough to repeatedly trigger SOS when I am playing in at-level dungeons, so this sort of thing is mostly not for me. (But if there is some other reason to be in a lower-level dungeon, like finding an item or something, then the added bonus of healing is pretty cool.)

I've done it while farming items. It worked better in the Castle than it does in the Bathhouse, mostly because a number of enemies in the Bathhouse are physical resistant.

ahrezmendi wrote:

That said, you can abuse the SOS system for free easy heals. Trigger SOS, sneak up on an enemy, and immediately flee. Bam, free healing. Run around floor 1 & 2 doing this for about 10 minutes and you'll be fully healed.

I'll be honest, this seems to defeat the purpose of playing on VH. Isn't the point that it's more challenging? If you're grinding up to where you would be anyway...?

+1 to your comment about resistances. Playing P3P on Normal mode I never had to worry at all about what I was vulnerable to, but now it's my #1 concern when deciding on which persona I'm going to use. It's changed how I decide on fusions, and caused me to switch Persona almost every turn in combat.

It is frustrating, particularly because you can't ever relax and just watch the game flow. Every battle is a battle for your life, but that is precisely why I chose this mode.

Minarchist wrote:
ahrezmendi wrote:

That said, you can abuse the SOS system for free easy heals. Trigger SOS, sneak up on an enemy, and immediately flee. Bam, free healing. Run around floor 1 & 2 doing this for about 10 minutes and you'll be fully healed.

I'll be honest, this seems to defeat the purpose of playing on VH. Isn't the point that it's more challenging? If you're grinding up to where you would be anyway...?

It's a tool, or option if you will, and thus it has its time and place. Being fully healed merely mitigates some of the frustration, or perhaps saves you from having to spend 2 afternoons in the TV. A poor choice of persona, or a single missed key move, will still end the game immediately.

Put another way, no, it doesn't defeat the purpose, because the challenge is still there.

ahrezmendi wrote:

It is frustrating, particularly because you can't ever relax and just watch the game flow. Every battle is a battle for your life, but that is precisely why I chose this mode.

Yeah, I agree with both sides of this comment. That's part of why the non-combat parts of the game are so brilliant, though! When you're going to club and gardening so on, you can kinda relax and go with it. Always a nice change of pace after dungeon-crawling.

EDIT: it would be truly harrowing if the higher difficulties not only upped the combat difficulty but made the main character's life like way more stressful! Y'know, you're getting bad grades in school, you're getting suspended, your S.Links are getting reversed, you're grounded, there's construction outside your home and you can't concentrate or go to sleep, your parents are sick, the river is poisoned and there are no fish, the culture clubs lost their funding, you get mugged on the way to school, your healing items are adulterated, etc.

I have been doing some free publicity for Very Hard mode on Twitter. Patricia Hernandez tweeted about its frustrations and I offered some defenses. It is frustrating though!

EDIT: To expand on what I said, I feel like in most RPGs if you encounter an enemy that can instantly 'Game Over' you with high probability, you are getting a signal that you're in the wrong area. But in P4 on Very Hard, you kinda have to face enemies that can just wreck you, or you won't be able to advance. (I mean, it is possible to varying degrees to grind in lower-level areas and increase your power-levels without serious risk of death. But the game discourages it.)

grobstein wrote:

EDIT: it would be truly harrowing if the higher difficulties not only upped the combat difficulty but made the main character's life like way more stressful! Y'know, you're getting bad grades in school, you're getting suspended, your S.Links are getting reversed, you're grounded, there's construction outside your home and you can't concentrate or go to sleep, your parents are sick, the river is poisoned and there are no fish, the culture clubs lost their funding, you get mugged on the way to school, your healing items are adulterated, etc.

Stop it! Stop it! I'm getting stressed out just reading that.

*goes back to enjoying nice relaxing hard mode*

What do the HP/SP restore cards do? They have yet to restore HP/SP.

EverythingsTentative wrote:

What do the HP/SP restore cards do? They have yet to restore HP/SP.

You mean the Cup card? It does, just not a huge amount until you hit rank 3 or higher.

ahrezmendi wrote:
EverythingsTentative wrote:

What do the HP/SP restore cards do? They have yet to restore HP/SP.

You mean the Cup card? It does, just not a huge amount until you hit rank 3 or higher.

By "not a huge amount" do you mean 8 points?

EverythingsTentative wrote:
ahrezmendi wrote:
EverythingsTentative wrote:

What do the HP/SP restore cards do? They have yet to restore HP/SP.

You mean the Cup card? It does, just not a huge amount until you hit rank 3 or higher.

By "not a huge amount" do you mean 8 points?

Yeah. When I first saw that I thought it was literally restoring all HP and SP.

I basically ignore that card now unless I need to take it to get a sweep bonus. At level 30 see no discernible increase in HP / SP after picking the restore card.

EverythingsTentative wrote:
ahrezmendi wrote:
EverythingsTentative wrote:

What do the HP/SP restore cards do? They have yet to restore HP/SP.

You mean the Cup card? It does, just not a huge amount until you hit rank 3 or higher.

By "not a huge amount" do you mean 8 points?

Yes, I do mean about 8 points. Rank 1 Cup restores about the same as getting a single SOS response. Rank 2 is a tiny bit more. Rank 3 will make a noticeable difference if you're in the high teens, it's enough for another 2-3 spells and will give you back about 10% of your HP. It's an OK card, I wouldn't take it over an EXP Bonus or Triple Coins, but it has allowed me to conserve healing items quite a bit.

Last night I beat a Wealth Hand, and then got a Rank 2 EXP Bonus, for a total of 750 EXP. My entire party gained a level. Best, fight, ever.

EDIT: And this morning my Vita hard-locked when I suspended it to get off BART. *sigh* at least I only lost one floor.

I've tried

Spoiler:

The bathhouse boss 3 times or so. I'm gonna have to level up a bit more to do it. I just run out of juice after killing the 2 side bosses. I've gotten him down to about 1/8 health remaining, but that's as close as I've gotten. Oh well, It will be easy just to run through the dungeon again quickly. I should gain a few levels and have a much easier time with the bathhouse boss. It's nice with the SOS system that I won't have to end the day. I really want to have all the rest of the days to get those social links. What level were ya'll at when you beat him? I'm at level 22. I must just be missing some tactics or a persona or something. At any rate, I don't mind going through the dungeon again.

Spoiler:

1 - Are you using weaknesses to get All Out Attacks, or are you going for Dizzy? You can't Dizzy bosses, but you can Dizzy their henchlings, so I recommend trying that.

2 - Physical Mirror/Magic Mirror? Not only will they save your hide, but they'll usually hit the enemy for quite a bit too. Also Smart Bomb, Diamond Shield, Assault Signal, all these will help you.

I haven't gotten to that boss yet, but these strats have helped a lot on earlier bosses, particularly on Very Hard.

ahrezmendi wrote:
Spoiler:

1 - Are you using weaknesses to get All Out Attacks, or are you going for Dizzy? You can't Dizzy bosses, but you can Dizzy their henchlings, so I recommend trying that.

2 - Physical Mirror/Magic Mirror? Not only will they save your hide, but they'll usually hit the enemy for quite a bit too. Also Smart Bomb, Diamond Shield, Assault Signal, all these will help you.

I haven't gotten to that boss yet, but these strats have helped a lot on earlier bosses, particularly on Very Hard.

Spoilers about that boss are below if you don't want to know anything about weaknesses/tactics going in.

Spoiler:

Oh yeah, I'm exploiting everything that I can think of. It's pretty easy to get the side bosses with fire/ice. I completely massacre them. I'm also heavily using the hit/evade skill to help avoiding the main bosses attacks. The problem is the main boss doesn't have a weakness, and he's got a lot of hit points. So, you can never get an All Out Attack. Also, he doesn't have an exactly regular attack pattern. The pattern sort of depends on how many members of your party are alive and also if any of them are poisoned or enraged. I've got a couple of magic mirrors, but that's it. One more reason to go through the dungeon again.

If poison/enrage are part of your problem, fuse a persona with Dekunda, that'll help a lot.

ahrezmendi wrote:

If poison/enrage are part of your problem, fuse a persona with Dekunda, that'll help a lot.

Does that get rid of both poison and enrage? That sure would be nice. I used a skill card to get the de-rage thing which helps, but I've just been letting the poison die out. It doesn't really make a huge difference to your health, but if I could get rid of it, it would force

Spoiler:

the boss to go and waste a turn using that spell again.

Anyways, I'll keep an eye out for that ability.

I've decided to stop using, or stop routinely using, the SOS.

It's just kind of a pain to press the SOS button after every fight, wait through the animation, and then wait through the "you're not alone" animation at the beginning of each fight. I guess I will call for it occasionally when I think I'm in trouble -- but most of the time the effect is small enough that one SOS can't really turn the tables. (Plus, I am now seeing healing discounts that make it basically feasible to pay for healing.)

I actually think the feature is kind of a failure. In exchange for a repetitive operation and lots of interruptions to play, you get a 2%-10% HP/SP boost at the beginning of each fight. Not that I don't want a 2%-10% boost, of course I do, I'm dying out there! But the action required to get it is annoying and boring, and the mechanic itself is not really balanced into the game.

I think when Atlus was first designing this feature, they may have wanted something more like the direct intervention offered by Demon's Souls, or the rescue runs of Shiren the Wanderer DS (great mechanic in a great game!). At least, some kind of mechanic where network players can reach in to help out a player that's really in trouble. The fact that the feature is still called "SOS" hints at this. I think Atlus must have quickly decided that a Souls / Shiren in-depth rescue system was not really feasible, and decided to go with a blunter system where you call for help if you're in trouble, "SOS!", and if someone answers the call you get the help you need.

Imagine you're in a tough long fight, and your resources are dwindling. You could win if you had more SP, and if you weren't on the edge of death. In these desperate circumstances, you SOS! Somewhere across the net, someone responds to your call. You get 20%-50% HP/SP recovery, right in the middle of the fight! That changes everything, and you are able to turn the battle around and win.

That sounds dramatic and interesting, to me. Of course, to implement such a system well, you'd have to make sure people don't just spam SOS whenever they don't have full health. You could implement some kind of cost or limit for SOS'ing . . . but now you're introducing complexity into the game for the sake of what is basically just a fancy recovery item; the game has plenty of recovery items. Plus, you want SOS requests to be answered very quickly, or the system breaks down. That means you need a high percentage of your online population keyed up and ready to grant SOS requests. If an SOS is something rare and unusual, players will not get in the habit of keeping the system on all the time and instantly answering requests; the system might just not catch on. Make the SOS system something that fires very frequently, and you will also get players responding more often; the system will be more reliable and more people will use it. So you make SOS something that you can use a lot. But now it doesn't make sense for it to be powerful. If you make it a big effect that can swing a fight, the balance of the game will be completely lost. So instead you make it a weak effect. If you use it a lot, it makes a big cumulative difference but it doesn't completely overbalance the rest of the game.

So through a series of sensible design decisions, you've gone from something ambitious and dramatic, to something small and boring.

I like the feeling of togetherness and camaraderie that requesting and giving help engenders, and I like the idea. But ultimately I don't think it really worked out. I think the devs had ambitious intentions that didn't pan out and we're stuck with a kind of modest, out-of-place version of something much cooler.

tuffalobuffalo wrote:
ahrezmendi wrote:

If poison/enrage are part of your problem, fuse a persona with Dekunda, that'll help a lot.

Does that get rid of both poison and enrage? That sure would be nice. I used a skill card to get the de-rage thing which helps, but I've just been letting the poison die out. It doesn't really make a huge difference to your health, but if I could get rid of it, it would force

Spoiler:

the boss to go and waste a turn using that spell again.

Anyways, I'll keep an eye out for that ability.

Oh wait, my bad, Dekunda is only for stat penalties not status ailments. Amrita Soda will do this for you, but I doubt you have many of those. Try fusing a persona with Posumudi for the poison, and you should already have Me Patra to handle the rage. You can also equip some of the accessories that reduce vulnerability to status ailments, I've gotten a TON of them from golden chests so you should have a few.

ahrezmendi wrote:

If poison/enrage are part of your problem, fuse a persona with Dekunda, that'll help a lot.

I don't think I've ever cast Dekunda, so I had no idea it did that. That's great! The descriptive text just says it nullifies "stat penalties," which I though was limited to Rakunda, etc.

EDIT:

Oh wait, my bad, Dekunda is only for stat penalties not status ailments.

Damn!

Yeah, sorry for the confusion. There's a high level spell which will remove all status ailments, but none of us have access to it yet.

However, speaking of Rakunda, here's another approach that might work tuffalo - Use a Double Fangs card on a Persona with high ATK (Eligor, Valkyrie, anything in the Strength category), then Rakunda the enemy (if you can), Tarukaja your MC, and Double Fangs for great awesome.

ahrezmendi wrote:

Oh wait, my bad, Dekunda is only for stat penalties not status ailments. Amrita Soda will do this for you, but I doubt you have many of those. Try fusing a persona with Posumudi for the poison, and you should already have Me Patra to handle the rage. You can also equip some of the accessories that reduce vulnerability to status ailments, I've gotten a TON of them from golden chests so you should have a few.

Will do. I actually have nothing in the way of items that affect ailment status or prevention, so yet another reason to go through the dungeon again. I really should have just done that straight away. I was just sooooo close to being able to do it.

grobstein: Your comment is very interesting, and I think you're right. For now, I'll keep using SOS some of the time. If they had a mechanic where you can SOS when you're out of health/sp in the middle of a boss battle, but you lose like half the XP gained as a cost, that would be interesting. I don't think that would work, though.

Ultimately, I think it's just a tacked on mechanic that doesn't really have much of a place, but I'm glad they threw it in because it's at least an interesting concept.

I'm getting too bold and not playing it safe enough. I just lost to a pair of Magus enemies because I didn't put up a Magic Mirror on Yu, and he got one-shot by Agilao.