Capcom Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen

[Mozg]

why? that's what I was doing when I left off...

BBI gear completely obsoletes all the everfall shit and makes enemies there do scratch damage. If you want to have RPG fun there fighting appropriate enemies and getting appropriate gear you should do it before BBI.

Now, I thought everfall dungeon crawling in cut and paste rooms with reskinned enemies and lots of backtracking was still better than the main game before I played BBI - which is a better c&p reskinned enemy dungeon crawl, with no backtracking - but you may or may not want to squeeze everfall for its latent funjuice.

 

[Mozg]

Spoiler

The dogmatic belief in the neverending cycle of death and destruction that leads to the rise of an Arisen to become the new Seneschal. The same cycle that your PC eventually breaks by committing suicide at the end of the game.

Spoiler

The previous seneschal pulls the godsbane out of his ghost chest and hands it to you to kill him with. He does not pull it out of a storage container where he's been hiding it so he wouldn't be tempted to kill himself with it despite being avowedly tired of being God. Then later on you put it in your chest. There's no cycle breaking and suicide is not a revolutionary act.

 

[Blaine]

I do appreciate that the Dragon is handled as more than just a creature, even a very powerful and intelligent one. It's instead treated as a spiritual and/or cosmic force—or perhaps more properly, as one aspect of, or a personification of one aspect of, a spiritual and/or cosmic force. It's almost an allegory of sorts. Yet the story still retains a Brothers Grimm feel due to the Duke's part in the story.

It's not super-highbrow stuff, but if there must be a dragon, they should at least attempt to do something pseudo-profound with it and I think Capcom succeeded well enough at that, given that this is a video game.

I also appreciate the little puns that are everywhere in this game. For example, all of the golden weapons inflict silence when heavily upgraded, and apples high on trees must be shot down with an arrow; they fall with the arrow sticking out of them.

 

[polo]

why? that's what I was doing when I left off...

BBI gear completely obsoletes all the everfall shit and makes enemies there do scratch damage. If you want to have RPG fun there fighting appropriate enemies and getting appropriate gear you should do it before BBI.

Now, I thought everfall dungeon crawling in cut and paste rooms with reskinned enemies and lots of backtracking was still better than the main game before I played BBI - which is a better c&p reskinned enemy dungeon crawl, with no backtracking - but you may or may not want to squeeze everfall for its latent funjuice.

This.

 

[mediocrepoet]

Spoiler

The dogmatic belief in the neverending cycle of death and destruction that leads to the rise of an Arisen to become the new Seneschal. The same cycle that your PC eventually breaks by committing suicide at the end of the game.

Spoiler

The previous seneschal pulls the godsbane out of his ghost chest and hands it to you to kill him with. He does not pull it out of a storage container where he's been hiding it so he wouldn't be tempted to kill himself with it despite being avowedly tired of being God. Then later on you put it in your chest. There's no cycle breaking and suicide is not a revolutionary act.

Yeah, that's an interesting point.

Spoiler

Course, it brings a question about how you can end him with it then considering he's still a cosmic being, etc. It's not clear to me that pulling it from his chest is literally pulling it from his chest as opposed to willing it into being or summoning it, etc.

 

[Blaine]

Holy fuck man, I'm so sick of this shit.

Fighting two cockatrices in Everfall; normally I'd smash a single one in seconds. I'm still playing Warrior, though, and the game was designed by a bunch of shitheads whose go-to method of protecting boss weak points is to put the boss way up in the air. Any bow user with Pentad Shot can turborape any standard boss completely effortlessly by simply pointing the cursor at a huge weak spot. The amount of ridiculous leaping I've done just to scratch a weak point with the tip of a half-mile-long greatsword is infuriating.

Both of the bow-using pawns (one is Hirato's level 100ish Archer), whom I know have cockatrice knowledge aplenty and good inclinations, are apparently completely unable to shoot the fucking five-foot-wide gizzards when they light up. I was able to reach one gizzard a single time, and nearly killed that cockatrice by myself on the spot. After that they only filled their gizzards when aloft, and I couldn't touch them.

I quit and reloaded after the pawns started chewing through shitloads of consumables. Times like these, I have no doubt why this game flopped. See, Dark Souls battles were all harder than Dragon Dogma's, but also a lot fairer. This is just gay.

 

[cw8]

Something about 4 Sorcerers creating mini-armageddons that make them so enticing and fun to watch:





Gonna try that once my Sorc/MK/MA reaches a higher level and with BBI items for the grand versions of spells.

 

[Blaine]

Holy shit.

All right, I'm gonna go switch back to Assassin or Strider now. This is completely ridiculous. Hidden areas? Need double-jump or levitate. Condemned Gorecyclops? Pawns too stupid to snipe sorcerers on catwalks high above, can't use special arrows to get the helmet off; all Warrior can do (after laboriously running up catwalks to bonk sorcerers while the pawns refuse to follow and let themselves get stomped to death) is hit the foot over and over for tiny damage, or jump up to graze its chode with the tip of the sword. I would've won eventually, but I don't have two hours to spend hitting a fucking foot.

I'm not too overly fond of Warrior anyway, but man, come on. They didn't give even half a thought to heavy melee classes when designing the endgame of Dragon's Dogma. Might as well throw this Dragonforged Gryphic armor in the trash, because pawns are even more useless than the Arisen when set to melee vocations.

Game confirmed for Arrow's Dogma: Dark Arrowsen.

 

[Mystary!]

Yeah, it's why I proposed double jump for warriors. Would fix most of the issues for them.
It's just retarded since there is no trade off, warriors arent better at anything else, there are just drawbacks.
Limiting exploring isnt really a meaningful consequence either, since you can switch class freely and come back later, it just becomes a time-sink.

You can get by with well-trained pawns thou, with the right monster knowledge they will aim for weak spots etc.

 

[mediocrepoet]

Yeah, pure melee can be really painful at times. Even if they'd given the ability to aim thrown weapons like you can a bow or the ability to give more detailed instructions to pawns (e.g. aim at the head/wings/etc. - fire your bow, quit walking back and forth!) would've done a lot to alleviate this. At the same time, I generally appreciate the frustration posed by certain situations due to class limitations since they're the flip side of the simulationist atmosphere of the game. Just sometimes it's a pain in the ass, like when you're getting knocked around like a rag doll by any huge monster that's having a bad day or air juggled by multiple aggressive enemies.

Most tough jumps in the game can be done by a sprinting jump - even if it's much harder, but yeah, not all of them. The pure red vocations really suffer there and although it sort of makes sense since levitate is definitely a magical ability and double jump is roguish... some sort of pure red travel ability would've been nice.

If you like the feel of the game's melee, but just want some quality of life stuff, I'd suggest trying mystic knight and setting it up with mostly melee abilities. Great cannon or equipping a staff for ingle, etc. when you need it can do wonders. They can also levitate and wear pretty much any plate that the warrior can. Perfect blocking with an enchanted shield is pretty great too. I tend to prefer melee and my go to classes are mystic knight and assassin, though lately I've been messing around with magick archer just because of how utterly broken it is in BBI and how fun some of its abilities. I'm still not a fan of the easy aim nature of the MA's archery, but its ability to utterly wreck most of the giant monsters that may have given me giant headaches before is cathartic.

 

[Hirato]

Holy fuck man, I'm so sick of this shit.

Fighting two cockatrices in Everfall; normally I'd smash a single one in seconds. I'm still playing Warrior, though, and the game was designed by a bunch of shitheads whose go-to method of protecting boss weak points is to put the boss way up in the air. Any bow user with Pentad Shot can turborape any standard boss completely effortlessly by simply pointing the cursor at a huge weak spot. The amount of ridiculous leaping I've done just to scratch a weak point with the tip of a half-mile-long greatsword is infuriating.

Both of the bow-using pawns (one is Hirato's level 100ish Archer), whom I know have cockatrice knowledge aplenty and good inclinations, are apparently completely unable to shoot the fucking five-foot-wide gizzards when they light up. I was able to reach one gizzard a single time, and nearly killed that cockatrice by myself on the spot. After that they only filled their gizzards when aloft, and I couldn't touch them.

I quit and reloaded after the pawns started chewing through shitloads of consumables. Times like these, I have no doubt why this game flopped. See, Dark Souls battles were all harder than Dragon Dogma's, but also a lot fairer. This is just gay.

If you look at the thing you want to shoot and issue a "go", the pawns will tend to get the message and shoot.
This is how I bested the Metal Golems, because their runes are very annoyingly immune to Magick.
Henry also spent most of his life as a warrior, so he probably doesn't have quite the right inclinations, and I tend to zip through enemies with Cutting Wind half the time too; the pawns love picking up their owner's bad habits.

Most tough jumps in the game can be done by a sprinting jump - even if it's much harder, but yeah, not all of them. The pure red vocations really suffer there and although it sort of makes sense since levitate is definitely a magical ability and double jump is roguish... some sort of pure red travel ability would've been nice.

They do have the ability that uses their greatswords and stuff as a platform for their allies to reach higher places.
I think it would've been cool if they could use their weapons to do vaults, particularly the warrior.

 

[Mystary!]

Tying double-jump to encumbrance would make sense, so you would have the option to choose between mobilty or defense.
I never used heavy armor anyway cause I couldn't stand the slow running speed.

 

[Blaine]

As long as we're dreaming, longsword users could perhaps "pole vault" using their weapon. It wouldn't really matter though, since once mounted on large enemies all they can do is tap with the pommel. I don't much favor climbing large monsters at this point anyway, aside from hydras, since even with multiple augments and the gloves it still takes six years to climb where you want to be; six seconds later, you're shaken off or grabbed and/or instantly lose 90% of your stamina.

Speaking of which, my plan to nail the Condemned with Assassin also failed. It's easy enough to get the mask off, but climbing to eye-gouge isn't worth it since he grabs you almost immediately, Plegic Arrow takes 10+ shots (or more) to induce Torpor (so, 20+ seconds), and aiming at the unmasked eye is incredibly difficult because he shakes and flails his head around so violently it moves at the speed of a pitched baseball. Also, there are serious camera issues if near the periphery of the arena. Finally, I think my weapons are still too shitty. I've knocked two or three of his health bars off in various attempts, but it turns into a huge slog and I don't want to spend an hour there.

I'll just grab the key and move on until I have a very strong bow, then bring piles of Conqueror's Periapts and blast arrows, right after throwing the pawns in the garbage because they're more hindrance than help (that might change if I hire two strong Sorcerers though, but I'd rather kill it myself).

 

[mediocrepoet]

Yeah, gorecyclops are a bitch to climb around. Not really recommended without at least adhesion and the strider augment. If you're just starting BBI, you probably need to upgrade your weapons... It doesn't take too long, but it can be painful up to that point, depending on what you're doing.

Also, if you did want to try warrior again, I'd suggest trying the knockdown augment (impact?) from that class as well as the nail jewelry that upgrades knockdown and stagger.

 

[Hirato]

As long as we're dreaming, longsword users could perhaps "pole vault" using their weapon. It wouldn't really matter though, since once mounted on large enemies all they can do is tap with the pommel. I don't much favor climbing large monsters at this point anyway, aside from hydras, since even with multiple augments and the gloves it still takes six years to climb where you want to be; six seconds later, you're shaken off or grabbed and/or instantly lose 90% of your stamina.

Speaking of which, my plan to nail the Condemned with Assassin also failed. It's easy enough to get the mask off, but climbing to eye-gouge isn't worth it since he grabs you almost immediately, Plegic Arrow takes 10+ shots (or more) to induce Torpor (so, 20+ seconds), and aiming at the unmasked eye is incredibly difficult because he shakes and flails his head around so violently it moves at the speed of a pitched baseball. Also, there are serious camera issues if near the periphery of the arena. Finally, I think my weapons are still too shitty. I've knocked two or three of his health bars off in various attempts, but it turns into a huge slog and I don't want to spend an hour there.

I'll just grab the key and move on until I have a very strong bow, then bring piles of Conqueror's Periapts and blast arrows, right after throwing the pawns in the garbage because they're more hindrance than help (that might change if I hire two strong Sorcerers though, but I'd rather kill it myself).

Remember,

Spoiler

The condenmened gorecyclopes are weak to ice.
This makes the MA's multi-arrow capable of easily taking off half a health bar per use, with just un-upgraded post-grigori weapons.
Sorcerers should be even more effective.

 

[Perkel]

god damn. Just got to gran soren i take my shit to black cat to make forgery of something and....

wtf.

unlimited ferrystones for 2k ?
shitload of overpowered gear with pricetags of 100k-200k ?

Back when i played it on ps3 each ferrystone was like 30k per one piece and initially you could only buy 4 of them with later unlimited stock and possibility to lower price of those to just 10k.
Also i didn't notice it but there is already port crystal near cassandris...


i hate shit like this. It would be ok for that gear to be later in game but from start just for 100k where you get 100k without any problem ?
I know there is hidden stamina debuf for higher level gear if you are lower level but still this is radicolous.


I hope there will be mod that mods that out from game and changes ferrystones price to original price. Ferrystone were proper goldsink and actually worthwile investement of your gold. At 2k piece they are worthless and you can hop around as much as you want completely anihilating night/day system purpose.

One of my best experiences with game was when i gone to quest at the morning and was coming later at night constantly being surpized by chimeras, ogres and shitload of other stuff on way back.

With ferrystone at 2k i can just tp back to soren no problem instead of treating it like last stand option.

 

[Mystary!]

Or you could just not buy them.

 

[DDZ]

Have you missed the free Eternal Ferrystone in your storage?

 

[Mozg]

As long as we're dreaming, longsword users could perhaps "pole vault" using their weapon. It wouldn't really matter though, since once mounted on large enemies all they can do is tap with the pommel. I don't much favor climbing large monsters at this point anyway, aside from hydras, since even with multiple augments and the gloves it still takes six years to climb where you want to be; six seconds later, you're shaken off or grabbed and/or instantly lose 90% of your stamina.

Speaking of which, my plan to nail the Condemned with Assassin also failed. It's easy enough to get the mask off, but climbing to eye-gouge isn't worth it since he grabs you almost immediately, Plegic Arrow takes 10+ shots (or more) to induce Torpor (so, 20+ seconds), and aiming at the unmasked eye is incredibly difficult because he shakes and flails his head around so violently it moves at the speed of a pitched baseball. Also, there are serious camera issues if near the periphery of the arena. Finally, I think my weapons are still too shitty. I've knocked two or three of his health bars off in various attempts, but it turns into a huge slog and I don't want to spend an hour there.

I'll just grab the key and move on until I have a very strong bow, then bring piles of Conqueror's Periapts and blast arrows, right after throwing the pawns in the garbage because they're more hindrance than help (that might change if I hire two strong Sorcerers though, but I'd rather kill it myself).

I wish they'd given warriors something like assassin's dire gouge, maybe with a long Arc of Deliverance charge-up, so they could do something badass while climbing instead of the sad warrior pommel bash. Striders are the strongest physical class without even considering climbing, which is supposed to be their forte.

If you get the secret climbing augments from BBI (opportunism and the "harder to shake off" one that I forget the name of), and either be a strider or wear the gloves of might, you can climb a gorecyclops effectively with a dagger class or an assassin with gouge. Also using the egression fighter augment that makes it easier to mash out of grabs makes getting snatched up waaaaaay less dangerous. Like that Eliminator OTG that's normally a one-hit killer is completely useless against an egressor. I'm doing solo mystic knight and I can just open maneater chests and mash out only taking a few hundred damage.

 

[Perkel]

Have you missed the free Eternal Ferrystone in your storage?

thrown out it along with other free shit like armors or BBI stuff.

Or you could just not buy them.

Or you could just get lobotomy if you want. I think it will be good choice for you.

 

[polo]

Have you missed the free Eternal Ferrystone in your storage?

thrown out it along with other free shit like armors or BBI stuff.

That was stupid tbh. The armors and stuff i did too, but the ferrystone? That ferrystone works as a patch for the tedious long walks and painful backtracking dude. If u still enjoy the game, then nvm, but for me it was a downer.

 

[Mozg]

If it wasn't completely trivial to run past enemies in this system it might be a balance thing, but since you can travel is purely a time sink. I like a simmy travel system in Risen/Gothic (for a while) because you aren't the fastest thing in a flat, rarely chokepointed open world and travel can be a challenge in itself, but in this it's butt.

 

[DDZ]

And you still have to walk a lot in your first run anyway.

The only thing it really trivializes is the escort quests.

 

[Mystary!]

Or you could just get lobotomy if you want. I think it will be good choice for you.

I'm guessing you already had yours? Because it's very simple, the items are optional, if they make the game boring you don't have to use them.

 

[Invictus]

Blaine you could try to recruit a decent sorcerer with ice magic and ice afinity, the fight is still slow but at least you can cause better damage than just climbing and arrows
I used almost the same techinque as with the drake by having my fighter do stupid things (equiped with properly upgraded rusty sword) while my heal mage fixed her up, and I cast my ice spells while my archer pawn used special arrows and it was mot a breeze but not a damn you capcom moment either