Has anyone started working on route for new game?Interested to see what it looks like so far.
A few people have started, but no-one has finished anything yet. Part of the problem is that Reflect is very very strong especially early on, but its not strong enough to carry through the whole game, so no-one has really got anything finished up
Replace very strong with outright broken but also bizarre and hard to use and you have the jist of it. I've got a theory route to the boss of chapter 4, but Draug is a like... 30% chance fight and the next mini boss has only worked once for me. The problem is that Draug at a tiny percent chance is almost faster than any single grind fight would be so theres no reason to try anything else other than spam it and wait for his attack pattern to work for you, and... that's kinda the case for most of the game to that point. I'll post what I have eventually, but I want to continue working on it.
No prob. Not really in a speedrun mood. Kinda being a filthy casual and playing persona 3 fes.
I'm currently routing NG as well, and I have to say that the first mini boss in Ch 4 is really, really dumb (at least with my route so far). Mandatory characters in party AND regenerating mobs? Ewww, no thanks.
Not sure if this is still relevant but I've been working on making a route that fuses Ghoul's route and O-den's route, with O-den being the Japanese runner that actually finished a run. If anyone is still working on this, I'd be down to compare notes. I haven't had a whole lot of time recently but I've been trying to buckle down and finish this once and for all.
Currently routing the game myself. Been about a week thus far. Currently on Excellus.
Come to the conclusion that trying to push through the game with mirrors is sketchy at best. You become extremely underleveled, and there comes a point when enemies will start doing double AoEs, let alone almighty moves. You also miss out on Stage Rank which neuters your damage because you lack Open Auditions. At some point you have to grind for weapons and levels, so it's best to look at the mirrors as a way to minimize grinding.
Chapter 4 seems to be the point where you are forced to buckle down, but even before then having to reset fights because your mirrors are misused (or not used at all since the game checks evasion over reflect) makes me not like the route everyone has gravitated towards, especially after watching (some of) O-den's run. Consistency is more valuable to me in a run than speed. Especially one that pushes to 10+ hours.
Eventually, mirrors will stop working. Not going to argue that.
But the fact that you end up underleveled does not cause an issue with them, since once they outlive their usefulness, you can still return to prior areas where enemies remain killable or the Arena potentially.
Also... they're kinda really consistent. Gangrel is, for all intents and purposes, 100%. I'm pretty sure Draug can get to 75% with more work.
I've always been sure that at some point, bosses were going to outscale reflects. But I imagine that not using them is going to cost 3+ hours in the mid game, only 2 or so of which are going to be recoverable because the make up from being outscaled is going to take a while.
Good point on returning to prior areas. I never thought of it that way, since you can push to Level 30 prior to Excellus just by mirror-rushing, so in theory you can rush to Excellus and then start grinding there, and it's be faster than grinding regularly.
Excellus is definitely the point where mirrors stop working and you have to be able to tank attacks, unless you plan on using Tarunda + Rakukaja which drastically lowers the effectiveness of mirrors anyway.
I don't agree with Gangrel being 100% unless you're doing something I'm not, as I only see Kiria's Lullaby and Sleeping Sands being the only way to control Gangrel's adds. I get Kiria's ad-lib for Draug and it seems more like a freak accident when none of the adds are confused, so Draug is more controllable for me than Gangrel.
Kiria's Ad Lib is 100% guaranteed in the first fight after you get it. So I rush it and use it against Gangrel. It will never not go off and confuse the full enemy team, and takes maybe 2 fights to get the stage rank and 4 minutes to complete the side quest (basically nothing)
Apparently this is cut off, but it shows basically the whole thing. I think I just drop a spell or something to finish him. It's not hard.
Maybe it's more useful against Draug. Didn't consider using it there, but I'm pretty sure Draug is at a 60% if not higher chance right now, at least with what I'm using. And again, even if it takes 2-3 tries, this is ¤insanely¤ fast and efficient. The entire dungeon is possible without a single grind fight.
I've used Kiria's Ad-lib on Gangrel before. To be honest I find it far more useful vs Draug.
The question is which fight you'd rather roll the dice with, and controlling Gangrel with Lullaby and Sleeping Sand is more bearable than trying to handle all the variables and heavy damage output vs Draug. Confusing all the adds also neutralizes the mages and especially the Dark Cleric. The Dark Cleric in particular is a massive pain to handle otherwise due to Diarama. There's just a lot more going on vs Draug.
Chapter 4 is rough to get through, but Chapter 5 seems to be even worse. Dark Yashiro takes a year and a half to kill off, and that's after grinding for Heavy-tier skills and getting Chapter 5 weapons for everyone.
Killing Dark Yashiro took approximately 25 minutes for me. I'm not going to Chapter 6 until I figure out how to make that battle reasonably short.
Update: Defeated final boss. Party was roughly 58-59, with main party being Itsuki/Touma/Yashiro, with Tsubasa occassionally used for healing. I didn't time myself, but if optimized I think 12 hours will be the average until this route is really tightened.
For those wondering: You mainly want a charge team of Itsuki/Touma/Yashiro to handle the majority of bosses, with Tsubasa going Wyvern Knight to learn xxx-Lunge EX skills. Her healing really doesn't matter until she learns Mediarahn and Prayer. Healing items can carry you through any rough patches until the Final Boss really.
Kiria and Mamori are benched right after Chapter 3, and they're only used for mirror abuse in later chapters.
I've taken a look back at my NG timing since I'll be doing NG+ in an upcoming marathon. So far, for me, after chapter 5, I've clocked in at 7:16 IGT. Chapter 5 took me about 1:40 to complete (with fake Yashiro taking about 20 mins), so I expect chapter 6 to be much longer than that. If I were to make a guess, I would say 3 hours depending on the mini bosses, so 12 hours doesn't seem too far off of what the final time could be with decent optimization. I was planning on an Itsuki/Mamori/Whoever else build, so I might go back to routing it once I've done my NG+ run.
How so? Also, Nightbarrel, O-den's run is about 11:30 and has at least 30 minutes to an hour of mistakes in the first couple of dungeons so I'm guessing 10:00 could be easily obtainable. I haven't really looked into how clean their mid and end game is yet. I've been trying to work on this more but school and work piled up fast so my routing is basically only up to the second dungeon.
Oden's run has about 43 minutes worth of RNG fighting that caused resets. He also made movement mistakes and forgot some items that he had to run back for. So yeah, sub-10 hours is obtainable with his route, but would require some good luck.
As for Excellus, open with Itsuki/Tsubasa/Kiria, full mirror stock. Kiria with Endless Song is required to make this work smoothly.
Itsuki strike-a-poses and uses magic mirror block Excellus' first wave of attacks, then Tsubasa uses attack mirror then guard, then with Kiria she boops Yashiro with her weapon. He'll counter Kiria, which will get reflected. This'll put him at half hp or critical hp if he crits. Attacking another member with repel will either kill him or put him at such a low hp that it saps 2500+ hp from Excellus. From what I see, we prefer him dead because Excellus can kill himself in three rounds after he starts spamming -Dyne spells. Once he starts spamming -Dyne spells you swap out Tsubasa for Mamori since she doesn't get oneshot, and repel the second set on -Dynes (Itsuki will die, you'll need to revive him), then Excellus should die on the third set.
As for the almighty attack that comes before it, Guard is pretty OP.
I'll have to record it and put it up later for visual reference, but yeah this changes a lot since this skips all grinding post-chapter 1 until Yashiro, who can carry your team until they catch up.
Edit: You can use Mass Destruction to kill the next two mini-bosses. Mirrors for safety.
Finished Chapter 5 at 6:58.
Don't think Mirror rushing Chapter 3 and 4 is worth it, considering O-den's run does not do this and he finishes Chapter 5 at roughly the same time. This is probably 5-10 minutes faster than his route up to Chapter 5, but he has better preparations for Dark Yashiro while my route is praying that Yashiro's Taunt works.
The grind to catch up to the game is a massive hill to climb. Chapter 5 from start to end is roughly three hours, so I feel the best thing to do is make that as easy as possible.
I think that finding the grind/skip ratio might take quite a bit of testing to figure out how much grinding is needed in later chapters. I need to take a look at Oden's run and take notes on that.
Also worth noting that I'm currently doing my route on easy, and while I may not remember my exact strats on bosses, I think I get a tad more aggressive than usual. I was going to have vids showing what I did, but just forgot.
