Take your Time Godzilla
Sundown.. i will Send you a new attack today.. let me know how strong or weak it is
A few days ago I posted story stuff in spoilers about ch.4. I’m going to post more stuff in spoilers now. It's all about my party and team composition, but if you didn't read the previous spoilers, you should probably hold off on this one.
Since last time I posted about story stuff, was full on into Ch. 5, and I collected the remaining jobs from sidequests, mastered some of my old classes (Patissier for Yew, Black Mage for Magnolia for group cast, Fencer for Edea, and Charioteer for Edea and Tiz for Quad Wield. It’s hard to overstate how hilarious quad wielding Ninjas are, and how much damage they can put out (around 60,000 in one turn with the proper setup, including a supereffective element and Harpoon applied). That said, I think I prefer triple wield combined with Multitask from the Swordmaster; if you attack three times you’ll most likely get in a free fourth hit, but also it lets you wear armor which makes a big difference in not dying. I’ve also played with some new classes like Exorcist, and man, its really good as a support/healer thing. But mastering these classes involved a lot of grinding, and I may already be overleveled for the rest of the game. Everyone’s was at level 70 when I finished the last side quest.
Along those lines, I really want to call out Hawkeye as the MVP class of my game so far. Ninja has all the flashy hits, but adding an element to your attacks and bypassing DEF has gotten me through so many battles. Never leave home without one if not two people with Hawkeye somewhere in there.
I’ve also started to think more about my team composition. I really don’t like what I’ve seen for offense magic since about chapter 3. It was good early game, but has clearly fallen behind at this point. Wizard gives you access to all of the elements, but they’ve fallen behind in damage, while Black mage hits higher damage numbers, but only with Fire/Ice/Thunder/Dark, which leaves a lot of elements that I would use in common battles and grinding off the table. And Summoner eats through MP. So I started thinking about what sorts of support stuff I can do with Yew and Magnolia, using some combination of Bishop/Astrologer/Performer for Magnolia, and Knight/Exorcist/Performer/Patissier for Yew, so have them be the two support classes and to keep Edea and Tiz safe while they’re triple wielding and unloading attacks all the time. This is for boss battles of course, I still need everyone able to attack for grinding. And I need more group attacks, since Hawkeye and Ninja are not good for groups. Maybe I need to grind up Valkyrie on somebody?
By the end of the chapter, I settled on running Knight/Exorcist with Yew, who can sometimes do good damage but his goal is to protect squishy units and restore people’s HP or BP as needed, and Astrologer/Bishop with Magnolia. I also have Group Cast All and Group Cast Master (from White and Black Mage) on Magnolia, so it means full strength heals or buffs (that have priority over everything else) for the whole party at the cost of one spell. I also have her maxed out as a Performer, but I like the priority buffs of the Astrologer for now. She is 100% a support bot now, but she does it really, really well.
And after collecting all the sidequests and powerleveling, I resumed the story, which I'll talk about later.
I've been away from the game for a few days. I jumped back in last night, only to realize that I had no idea what I was going to do next. I'll sort things out soon by heading to the nearest quest marker, I'm sure. I did take the time to wipe out another Moon Ba'al. That was a quick two levels of experience! Woot!
Well.. I am to very tempted to PUT ALL MY TIME ON FFVII remake.. but I try to divide my time. I am having a good time on this game! I just got anotehr job side story in chapter 3
Put it on the board, since I’ve rolled credits and beaten Bravely Second.
I’m first going to talk about my final party setup. There’s no real spoilers here, since I wasn’t using any of the later spoiler classes, and it’s largely an evolution of what I was using earlier in the game and talking about here. Still, in case someone wants to come up with their own end-game viable teams, it’s in spoilers.
I didn’t really mess around with some of the crazy setups I’ve seen mentioned in this thread, like creating a BP battery; mine was pretty straightforward with taking a couple of turns to do setup to take advantage of weaknesses and defenses, and then unloading some huge damage, and mass heals and buffs.
Yew – Knight/Exorcist
Abilities
M.DEF 20% Up
Undo Trois
Dual Shields
Angelic Wad
Chivalrous SpiritMy tank, and maybe the least crucial member of the team. He was very good at not dying, though. His main job was to draw enemy attacks (I finally got an accessory to draw aggro, so he was taking more hits), protect someone who was about to die from physical hits, and also to use the Exorcist abilities in support, especially for undoing HP or BP. The BP undo is real interesting, since I would max out Tiz or Edea on attacks, then have Yew undo their BP so they could do it all over again the next turn. Only really lined up once per boss fight, but considering how much damage could be done in one turn, let alone two, I didn’t need to use it too many times. I could have flipped him over to another attacker, but having someone to take hits was nice to have around.
Magnolia – Astrologian/Bishop
Abilities
Group Cast All
Group Cast Master
Limit BreakerSupport bot, pure and simple. This set up meant that support moves applied to everyone, heals healed in full to everyone, and stats to go to a higher maximum. And the passive Astrologian ability Prescience meant that the buffs all had priority, so I could slip in some attack boosters right before my attackers were to go off. More effective than one might think.
Edea and Tiz – Ninja/Hawkeye
Abilities
P. Attack 20% UP
Frenetic Fighting
Triple Wield
Multitask
CrossfireYeah, I had the exact same setup for both of them. At some point, I just realized that Ninja/Hawkeye was too good at dropping crazy damage (picking an elemental attack, piercing defense, hitting 3 times per attack, and hitting a ton of times per hit) that there was no real reason not to make both of them do it. And it’s entirely built around them getting set up and blasting something into oblivion with maximum hits. Usually I would have Magnolia set up a couple of priority defense buffs, set up my ninjas, and buff attack twice the turn Tiz and Edea were supposed to unload and let their abilities combo together. Triple wield means three weapons (could do quad wield, but I like armor for not dying), the native Dual Wield of ninja means no damage reduction for using multiple weapons, Frenetic Fighting increases how many times they hit and how much damage they do, Multitask means a 1/3 chance of doing a free extra attack, and Crossfire means a ¼ chance to get in a free attack when someone else attacks. So they are geared to hit A TON of times and do A TON of damage. And either one of them could plough through more than 100k damage with a couple turns of setup and a good dice roll. They were the center of my team, and did more than enough damage by themselves.
And now I’m going to talk some story spoilers. Probably shouldn’t read this unless you’ve beaten the game or just don’t care about spoilers.
So to start right off the bat, there’s a Ch. 5 and Ch.6. So depending on how long you think the game would go after jumping dimensions to the new game plus, you could be surprised how much more story there was. I also didn’t want to tip off how much further this thing went since the game continuing after beating Denys was a good twist although not unsurprising considering how many threads were still outstanding, so once I was done with Ch.5 I stayed silent on story stuff until I was done with the game. I was also jotting some of these points down as I was going, so if the tenses don’t make sense in some sort of retrospective post, that’s why.
-Ch. 5 went along really well for our heroes, and they were ahead at every step. They recaptured the compass. Enemies were talked down with the power of friendship. It was good times.
-Danys had good and sympathetic motivations, even if destroying the family line would not have prevented the abuse of power that the family committed since another would likely have taken up that mantle. So his grand plan for changing history and rooting out some of the corruption was too small, in actuality. But I can’t blame him for trying.
-Never got to see how strong he was though, since Edea and Tiz got set up, and then a flurry of physical attacks from cut through him down like a wet paper bag (for both phases of the fight through one series of attacks, in fact. It was an utter massacre).
-And the last boss of chapter 5 is another one that seemed like there was more to it but I easily ploughed through. Or, Edea attacked it a couple of times and died to a counterattack, and then Tiz Ninja’d up and blew through whatever defensive system it has. Still don’t entirely know what it was, but brute force won the day with little trouble. I had grinded some of my main classes up to lv. 10, but this also meant that I was like 10 levels overleveled compared to what the dungeon recommended, so that didn’t hurt either.
-But of course the game continues. Denys got his heroic turn and a heroic sacrifice (and I finally realized that his name is yet another pun, since he’s always denying everyone. They pronounced it like Denny so it never occurred to me for some reason)
-And now that we know he was little more than a pawn for Anne and her master, the real end of the game is in sight. That, plus figuring out what was up with Yoko and dealing with that part of the past.-But the game continued along into Ch. 6. At this point, I largely had my team in stone, but I trained up Edea in Ninja as well, so I have both her and Tiz as Ninja/Hawkeye, which is my favorite offensive setup in the game, for sheer hits and DPS, but also being able to ignore defenses and pick an element to attack with. For a long time I was planning on let Edea be her own thing, but it got to the point where I couldn’t think of a reason not to just have both of them do maximum stabbing. And if I went nuts, I could do the same with Yew, and toss defense to the wind.
-Ch.6 just kind of went along. At this point, I was just so overleveled that nothing really slowed me down. One round of setup and one round of attacks was enough to take down the Ba’al at the tower.
-Way too many of the Tent events were about food. Way too many.
-The Tower of Truth just seems like the optional story content lore dump session about the setting’s history. Nor did I expect it to have some dive into Edea’s psychology, especially considering she’s the most talkative one (she’s like the only one who talks in all of the sidequests). Weird that it was all optional, since it seems kinda important. And weird that they decided to tie Yoko into it all.
-And then there was the weird sin monster hunting sidequest. I didn’t plan on using the yokai class at this point (although it has good stats), so I only knocked out a few of the beasts before moving on.
-Anne went down easily to my dual ninjas, it just took some setup. Having the Astrologer case reflect all elements made her damage output negligible, and dialing up my ninja offenses with fire warhead, default pierce and DEF pierce, boosting offense with Astrologer, and then the ninjas hit for a ton of 9999s. Also, Multitask is hilarious; those free hits make everything easier. I think Edea got two free attacks during her barrage.
-Having my face show up on the screen when we revealed the Celestial Realm is a weird use of the camera.
-During the final dungeon, they kept talking about beating Providence who was using Vega’s memories with Altair to create the Ba’als. The whole time, I was thinking that Vega was going to be the actual final boss or something, and she was sending the Ba’als to get Altair to remember or something, and that if this was the case, then it meant we may end up fighting Altair at some point.
-But instead, the game pretty much played it straight, where Providence was the enemy. Considering how crazy the first game got, I was kinda expecting it to be more subversive.
-The first time I fought Providence, I actually lost. I had put magic reflect on the team instead of mystic barrier or whatever its called, so when I tried to buff my own attack, it went to him instead. And he had some thing where I had to kill him in 2 turns or lose, but Edea and Tiz had exhausted their Braves so I lost. The second time, he died to one giant chain of attacks from Edea once I had gotten properly set up and knew he was weak to wind. She Ikkikasei’d and attacked three times, plus picked up a couple of Multitasks, plus got Tiz to jump in with one Crossfire as well. And to be clear, he fully heals himself around half health, so I did somewhere over 150,000 damage with those attacks. Crazy.-And then the final battle. The actual boss wasn’t particularly interesting, but the 4th wall breaking stuff was fun, especially when it made you try to delete your saves, and then Yew literally taking the SP out of the title screen and using its power was actually kind of clever. I wonder what the pun was in Japanese. Plus when Providence took over the normal text boxes when talking to the player. And it had that one attack that could hit you while you were in the menu (New World Order), and it seemed to trigger before I healed.
-And we get a happy ending for most of our heroes. I imagine some of it would matter more if I had played the first game, to see Tiz and Agnes together, but I get the gist of it.
So final thoughts; I think this was a pretty good game. I like quality of life features and the job system, and I feel like that part obviously opens up the further you go into the game. That said, the middle to end of Ch. 2 is where it feels like the game really picked up, and that might be my favorite section. I also wish it had pushed me a bit more; I felt like I came up with my general strategy fairly early on, and built the team around that, and never really had to mix things up much after that. I’ve seen some of the crazy setups mentioned, and while those are wild, I felt like I could get by just fine with my bread and butter. The story felt a bit thin, but it sounds like most of the best stuff was in the first game, surrounded by hours of frustration and grinding.
So my final ultimate takeaway is that Bravely Default 2 is now on my radar after not really caring about it, since if they can pull both story and gameplay together in that one, it could be really good. And I look forward to seeing some of you in that thread as we do this all over again!
How long did it take you to get to the end?
(I'm still in chapter 1, about 7 hours in. I have to admit I haven't been playing all that much lately.)
67 hours, but I did some grinding and maxed a few classes I wound up not using.
I am around the same pace you are, Bobby. I am in chapter 1 and just got the catmancer asterisk. Seems like the chapter might be wrapping up soon? I am way overleveled for where I am due to some grinding and killing 3 ba'als.
Congrats Sundown! Glad you enjoyed it, and I’ll level you up.
Out of curiosity, what difficulty level did you play on? In Bravely Default, I think some of the crazy part setups were necessary if you were playing on hard, going for the true ending, and fighting some of the final asterisk holder encounters. Once they started appearing as their own party of four, they got pretty brutal. But I’m not sure if anything like that happens at the end of this game.
Only on normal.
And to answer your last sentence,
A few of the enemies you fought earlier in the game team up in logical pairs later in the game, but never more than 2 at a time. Haven't tried any postgame content, so I can't comment on that.
Ahh. On normal, and with those combinations, I can totally see that some of the crazy strategies wouldn't have been necessary. Seems like you had a pretty kickass party!
I am around the same pace you are, Bobby. I am in chapter 1 and just got the catmancer asterisk. Seems like the chapter might be wrapping up soon? I am way overleveled for where I am due to some grinding and killing 3 ba'als.
I'm just a little bit past this, at the start of chapter 2 after 17 hours. I spent a little while getting all the Catmancer skills I could. It seems like a useful class, but I'm not sure if the utility is worth it with the raw damage you can dish out with the fast physical classes.
Alas, as a crazy-cat-guy, I feel like it is my duty to figure out how to make the best of the class!
I’d strongly recommend getting White Wind. That skill alone makes the Catmancer a badass healer.
Update!! All my characters are LEVEL 51. Moon base full and restored and now working to upgrade my ship.
Just got the performer Asterisk and working on the main story atm.
Btw.. the Valkyrie job feels VERY very weak. I have Edea on job levle 8 and seems weak... Any comments?
I ended up switching back to Fencer for her. I maxed out summoner on Yew and will do the same on Bishop.
The game keeps getting me interested although FFVII remake has me hooked up as well.
Is there a good guide out there without spoilers on where/ when you can get the catmancer abilities?
I was wondering the same thing...
All i know is that the CATS in the cities give you hints
If you open up the journal (right bar, near the moon base), there's actually an entry for Catmancy (and later, Cat Mastery) which explicitly tells you all of the abilities you can gain and which monsters grant them.
A whole bunch are available right around the time you get the Catmancer Asterisk. Spoilers in case you don't want to read them explicitly:
Wing Scales can be obtained from the forest that you have to go through for one of the side quests right around that time -- I think the Summoner / Swordmaster quest. Two other abilities, including the excellent White Wind, are available in the cave where you fight the Catmancer. (White Wind requires Wing Scales or some other way of charming an enemy.) Perforator and Panzerlied are available in the story dungeon right after you acquire the Catmancer Asterisk. And, I think there's one available from an aquatic enemy and one available from an enemy in / around the Ba'al crater.
Right, I meant to comment earlier about the Valkyrie. I have not gotten it in Second, but assuming it operates the same way it did in Default, the class is not really a standard attacker. It relies heavily on its BP skills to do damage, and gives physical character a way to attack all enemies at once. Jump removes characters from battle for a set number of turns, making them unable to be attacked or affected, which is both good and bad. Their default weapon of spear seems to be rather weak in single target damage (Magnolia seems to do less damage with one than Edea on a similar/weaker Katana), but does bonus damage when attacking multiple enemies (Crescent Slash or whatever it's called). They have a skill that ignores Default, and I believe one of their passives is just called "Pierce Default", allowing you to do full damage to a guarding enemy. I only ever used it to farm enemies or to break the final encounters in the first game. Sad that the legendary dragoon class has fallen this far.
I’d strongly recommend getting White Wind. That skill alone makes the Catmancer a badass healer.
This was tricky to get, but so worth it I already had my Catmancer set as a healer, but this tops pretty much anything they could do previously.
Update!!!
All of my characters are level 54, I think I am about to get the TIME MAGE asterisk. Workin on upgrading my ship as well.
There is something that has had me wondering for a while now, so I will ask away. It is a STORY related question that was mentioned early in the game.
Early in the game, when Magnolia contacted this dude in the moon, this guy for a moment "hesitated" and then called himself "Appleberry". This left me wondering ever since.... will this come and haunt us in the future? You know how like in the 1st bravely default game. the Fairly turned out to be evil or am i just reading too much into things?
Update!!!
All of my characters are level 54, I think I am about to get the TIME MAGE asterisk. Workin on upgrading my ship as well.
There is something that has had me wondering for a while now, so I will ask away. It is a STORY related question that was mentioned early in the game.
Spoiler:Early in the game, when Magnolia contacted this dude in the moon, this guy for a moment "hesitated" and then called himself "Appleberry". This left me wondering ever since.... will this come and haunt us in the future? You know how like in the 1st bravely default game. the Fairly turned out to be evil or am i just reading too much into things?
I'll answer it. Don't read if you don't want to know.
It doesn't come up again during the main game, nor does he go bad or anything like that. I also read his hesitation as coming up with a codename, but I could be misremembering that.
argh.... lol sundown is it a big spoiler?
Just but your non spoiler answer has let me wondering even more LOL argh
It’s
not a big spoiler :)
argh.. ill have dinner and then decide to click
Alright, let's do a quick Monday check in since I'm curious where people stand. We've been playing Bravely Second as a club for about a month now. How are people liking the game and the job system so far? What sorts of party compositions has everyone started settling into? What are you experimenting with? Those sorts of things.
Sundown.. i will Send you a new attack today.. let me know how strong or weak it is
And this is from two weeks ago, but last I checked, you had sent a level 48 character (so the Send worked), but with 0 power, which I assumed was a support ability of some sort. Don't know if you've updated since.
I am still pretty early in chapter 2, just finished the merchant/ white mage side story. Have not done too much job experimentation yet since I am still leveling most my jobs. Here is what everyone currently is:
Edea: fencer + bishop
Magnolia: catmancer + freelancer
Yew: summoner + wizard
Tiz: astrologian + thief
Tiz is in a weird place not having another dex based class yet and I realized I had no support type character yet so he got stuck with it.
I just finished Chapter 4 and have some questions.
I will send a new summon, so please let me know its power
So I finished Chapter 4 and the moon was lost.... I had encounter set at -100% and i talked to alot of people. Some said about New Game+, but that did not (still does not) made sense to me. Finally I decided to set encounter to +50% and booom a Ba ál atacked me and destryoned me. The game forced me to start new game+ Now I am on chapter 5.
Is this how its supposed to be? So confused
I just finished Chapter 4 and have some questions.
I will send a new summon, so please let me know its powerSpoiler:So I finished Chapter 4 and the moon was lost.... I had encounter set at -100% and i talked to alot of people. Some said about New Game+, but that did not (still does not) made sense to me. Finally I decided to set encounter to +50% and booom a Ba ál atacked me and destryoned me. The game forced me to start new game+ Now I am on chapter 5.
Is this how its supposed to be? So confused
Short answer, yeah. This sort of only makes sense if you read the recap to the first game on the first page. After a reveal, these games seem to have a lot of dimension or timeline jumping. So in Ch. 4, Oblivion 'won' the dimension you were in by destroying the moon, and hopped to another one. I don't remember if you learn his motivation in Ch. 4, but if not you do so later. And by doing new game plus, the party chased him to a new timeline to continue the fight and to try to stop him for good.
I had the same thing with fighting the Ba'als, where I tried my bag of tricks at the time and got absolutely destroyed.
Since you are in Ch. 5, I assume your party has hopped over now. The story will continue from there. You should also see that you can now redo all of the sidequests, and get all of the classes you passed on the first time.
I also wrote about my thoughts on this in my spoiler post on 4/18, if you want to go back and read it now.
Slight cross post but I put the game down to play Alliance Alive. Had a great time, just plowed straight through it. Probably a good candidate for the club although maybe in a few years considering it was ported only recently.
Pages