Capcom Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen

Or you could play it on Hard now knowing what you learned.

 

I was already playing on hard, mostly because I incorrectly thought that bandits and goblins were supposed to be kinda threatening and worth fighting. Just run by. I think it made a lot of things maybe less enjoyable if I look back and think that most people should ignore all the open world stuff and like 75% of quests. I had more fun in the pure copy/pasted vanilla post-game farming dungeon than I did in all the open world stuff, much less doing what part of BBI that I did.

About Death: All those BBI "horror bosses" are mostly just extreme-defense HP bags, what makes them interesting is when they show up in the middle of you doing other shit and force you to deal with them (often by runnin' the fuck away).

Also they're typically balanced (at least on hard) so that when you first meet them they 1-2 shot you and are very difficult to kill (as in, skill aside, the stats aren't there), but by the time you've levelled up from exploring and looting those zones you can generally chop them up in a reasonable amount of time.

 

man fuck melee classes, they do shit damage and can't hit half the enemies, Ranger >>> everyone else

oh and it's a good idea to go around and max every shopkeepers affinity before finishing that playthrough, it gives you more items in the next NG+.

 

Isn't Hard mode still Easy mode or did they fix it?

 

How well ported is this?

 

I've got nothing bad to say about the port. It retains a lot of the annoying things from the console version, mostly to do with the UI, but the black borders have been removed and it runs really well.

 

Spent 45 mins fighting the tentacles used up all my healing items and a resurrect stone.

Feel like a massive idiot.

 

lol. I guess your pawns constantly shouting, "we cannot beat this thing now" or something along those wasn't clear enough.

 

You have no pawns? They kept telling me "Flee, there is no use in fighting", "We must leave now", "Run you fucking moron".

Also, the lack of save slots is annoying as fuck in a game that kind of WANTS you to experiment.
Oh, and jail is stupid.

 

Just managed to kill off Grigori on Hard, level 47 after receiving the kill XP. Took me about 20 tries, most of which ended with me being oneshot by either a tail swipe or his area of effect homing missile bullshit. I would really prefer not dying in one hit in a fight that long, my first try went fairly well and after like 15 minutes getting oneshot and having to start the whole fight over seems a bit much. Thankfully my main pawn eventually figured out how to cast maelstrom and aimed it at the heart, first time she did that took away 4-5 of the 9 healthbars. Assassin seemed fairly weak for that fight since he is neither tanky enough to survive any of the attacks, nor does he have good enough ranged damage. Climbing seemed like a good idea at first but again getting fucked when he tries to swipe you off made this almost impossible. In the end I just stood at maxrange, dodge-rolled every tailswipe and supported my pawns with a rusted bow to poison the motherfucker. The fight would probably have been fairly easy if I had leveled a little more or actually prepared for the fight though, so it's not too bad. Going in blind may become an issue though, especially since having just one save file means that if you're stuck, you're stuck.

Story-wise I feel like the whole stereotypical "stole your beloved" could've been explained a little better, unless it really is supposed to be that cheesy. Still better than Bioware.

Anywho, Everfall/BBI here I come. Also, I don't know if I just spent too much of it, but I am constantly strapped for gold on hard. Having a shitload of 100 gold drops from every single enemy doesn't really help much in that regard. I obviously skipped killing goblins/bandits after a certain point though, maybe thats the issue?

 

If you whack Greg's weak spot from the lowest possible point on his chest where you can still hit he'll miss you when he tries the "grab this dude of my chest" attack, at least if the PC is pretty tall.

 

I tried to find a safespot for hitting the heart but at one point or another I have to reposition myself, am slightly off and get hit by his "dude piss off" swipe. Since it onehit me I decided to not screw with melee at all which turned out to be the safer strategy in the end. It certainly is doable but since my damage was somewhat lackluster it took forever to get him even close to dying. My best attempt ended at like 20% and that one took me about 10minutes, after I lost all that progress I just switched over to ranged attacks and killed him the following try.

 

You discovered one of the two trick ways of defeating the "Gazer" as well as the direct method.

NG+ starts the game over from the beginning, but you get to keep your character and pawn, with their levels, vocation ranks, skills & augments, equipment, gold, and so on. In other words, you can easily make your way back to BBI, but you'll have to redo the sections you already completed.

There's enough expensive equipment that it's easy to spend your gold reserves on weapons and armor that aren't much better than what you already have. On the other hand, if you act like a miser and only purchase equipment when it provides a substantial boost, then you should be able to quickly accumulate a substantial reserve of gold even playing on easy mode.

 

Some absolute hero hired my pawn from the rift, did absolutely bugger all with him (zero rift crystals earned and no new bestiary knowledge) and left no comment but gave him five star ratings and a gift of Cursed Bitterblack Weapon Lv.3! Maybe it was a fellow literature lover? I've no imagination when it comes to names so tend to draw from various novels, in this case Tietjens and Macmaster from Some Do Not...

 

Well considering 90% of the pawns comments are "There is a split in the road, make sure to check your map." and they feel the need to comment every 5 seconds. I turned that shit off and removed the subtitles. Who knew that 10% of the shit they say is the ONLY information available on how to deal with a monster. Fucking retarded design is retarded.

 

Yeah the pawns are a double edged sword when it comes to that sort of thing. There really should have been something stopping them from repeating the same crap a thousand times so the useless advice only goes off once or twice.

 

Gotta listen to those pawns man.

I like that they keep repeating stuff in case I missed it, but this game could definitely benefit from a frequency slider à la Desperados.

 

Just turn it off in the options and talk to them if you want advice.

 

a bit late but when I restarted on Normal I noticed I wasn't able to rate Pawns anymore like I had been able to on Hard. Is that exclusive to Hard? Or would it have to do with my being online/offline?

 

I'm rating pawns all the time on Normal.

 

So, what ENB mod can you people recommend?

 

The pawns offline are randomly generated by the game, so you can't rate them for obvious reasons.

 

Is there any way to raise the fov more and disable screenshake? The motion sickness is making this game unplayable for me.

 

Most of the bloody Pawns are daft as a brush. I was standing in front of one of those Bitterblack chained Cylopes, who are weak to Ice, with my ice-enchanted mace ready to cast Great Cannon and slaughter it, and what does the rented Mage Pawn do, without any D-pad input from me? Enchants my Mace with damn Fire! Utilitarian/Medicant my arse, more like Useless/Muppet.

Also, I swear to God, another rented Pawn killed herself on purpose. I was in Black Abbey, a few feet away from a chest near the edge of a cliff overhang, and without any input from me whatsover - no D-pad command, no combat going on as all enemies had been killed long ago, and neither my other Pawns nor my Arisen moving about near to her and brushing against her, forcing her to move out of the way (I'd in fact just loaded a save, so we were all stationary up til then) - she just decided to jump off the fucking cliff to her death, for no reason whatsoever. I would have left the idiot to rot in the Rift with the default 3-star ratings and no gift, but I was Godsbaning for a specific item in that chest so loaded up the save and restored her. I'm not sure whether she was killing her self out of shame for being so useless (this was a Ranger pawn and, again versus one of those elite Cyclopes, instead of following me to the top of a safe nearby tower and blasting it with ranged attacks - she had an Ice enchanted Longbow for Christ's sake! - she thought it wise to start climbing on it whilst it was rampaging about, getting promptly thrown off and squished to death...), or whether the suicide was simply part of some arcane ritual to bless me with luck, as after reloading not only did I get the right Cursed item I was after in that chest, it also Purified to exactly the item I wanted - but there we have it. Fun times.

 

So, what's up with this eternal ferrystone?
Just found it in my stash, was it a reward for some quest or is it a dlc cheat item?