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Xenoblade Chronicles 3 |OT| To Guide The Dead is My Lot

Jsisto

Member
I legitimately want to be as respectful as possible, because I understand not everything is for everyone, and I’d be stupid to think otherwise. However, I really don’t get a lot of the criticisms ive seen so far though. To be fair, im loving the game so far, but it’s far from perfect and I have some criticisms of my own. The fact remains though, this is a Xenoblade Chronicles series fans Xenoblade Chronicles. If you’re not a huge fan of the series, you probably won’t like it. I’m seeing people that either “liked“ all the way to “hated“ certain games in the series, and that’s not exactly a recipe for thoroughly enjoying the third one, which, for better or worse depending on your opinion, combines many of the elements of those two games.

What I really don’t get though is story criticism. If you’re new to the series, I get it, first go around maybe not your cup of tea. But for someone that played the first two, I’ve been completely enthralled in finding out why the world is the way it is now. It’s a very dark and very human storyline, with some much needed but overall light and tame comic relief moments for levity. Does it have the instant hook of the Mechon invasion only two hours in and the twist that we all know happens after that? No. That was an iconic moment and would be hard to top, but ultimately that doesn’t matter to me, because again, I’ve been so interested in this world and want to know more. I haven’t beaten the game yet, but little by little many of my questions have been answered and that’s been rewarding in its own right.
 
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Because you insist on reading between the lines while actually skipping, you know, the lines, here it goes:

I find combat boring. So to keep from being bored I main easy, when I sense something bigger is coming up, I turn up the difficulty, because I have no interest in wasting my time on endless battles with mobs that pose no danger.
If you actually played on hard, you would not find that mobs “pose no danger”, at least until you over level them. In which case you can avoid 99% of them aside from a handful of forced combat moments and whatever UMs you choose to challenge.

I'm 35+ hours in. This is a method I find works well for me to have maximum enjoyment after hours of experimentation. I'm not bored to death by mobs, and I get to have fun with bosses and the occational orange mob.
Please stick to a story instead of constantly changing it. First its “boring” now you have “maximum enjoyment” and aren’t “Bored to death”. Is English your second language? It is getting honestly hard to follow anything you state here.

Now kindly get over yourself and stop assuming you're the only one who knows what he's talking about.
Irony, thy name is Kimahri.

I've been analizing over jrpg combat systems since the early 90s. I'm not some clueless newcomer. I just have no fucking patience for bullshit.
Analyzing* for one. Two, you clearly haven’t as you are talking out your ass throughout this entire thread.
 
Man Riku and Manana Class fun as fuck to play around, the combat is such a improvement over pervious games.
Yeah I just got their class too, very fun. Every where I go I unlock some awesome new thing to play with.

I think I'm noticing that one of OP strats from previous games has been nerfed with this class though. In older games like XC1 you could build a really high chain multiplier and then cast one of Riki's or Melia's damage over time spells at like 700% damage or whatever. Then after the chain attack ends you watch the enemies health melt from the extremely high poison or blaze DoT. But when I add debuffs during chain attack in this game they seem to disappear a bit later before the chain attack is over. Not sure how it works.
 

TIGERCOOL

Member
was enjoying the first few hours of the game well enough when I had a party of 3. Then suddenly I've got 6 and certain pairs can swap their classes... for some reason? I don't really understand why it needs to be this complicated. None of the classes feel very different to play you're just waiting for cooldowns to finish and chaining attacks at obvious intervals anyway. Switching between characters feels arbitrary and there are too many to do it efficiently as you can't track all the cooldowns with the AI doing its own thing. Way too many cutscenes/party chatter and the characters are all typical anime characters so it's not interesting. Story is pretty shit. World isn't very interesting. I don't know.. based on the avatars in here I'm assuming this is another one of those games that anime fans love because they're anime fans. I've fallen for this so many times and I never learn.
 
Look. I´ve enjoyed most of what I´ve played so far but I´m playing on hard mode and the boss health bars are absolute fucking horseshit. I´m trying to fight consul J right now and it straight up sucks. I´m 4 levels higher than the boss and I still have to bash his face in for 25 minutes to get somewhere. I´m doing chain attacks for 150k+ damage and this shithead´s healthbar barely fucking moves and then he just randomly murks all my healers and its game fucking over. He doesn´t even have any kind of special attack animations or anything, just stands there swinging his stupid stick at me and kills anything in two hits while my healers run around constantly trying to revive everybody.
 

Xeaker

Member
Yes, I did. Because they are amazing games. Not *the* best, but very well made, excellently designed, and most importantly: *fun*.

If you think Dungeon Encounter is one of the greatest JRPG's made in the last 20-30 years then I can't take your opinion serious anymore anyway :messenger_tears_of_joy:
As for 5 hours, that isn’t enough to understand or make a statement on a post-SNES era JRPG.

I don't think so.
You are not even past first chapter and you already calling the game “garbage” it’s hard take you seriously when say stuff like this and your past posts alway on about how you hate “modern games”.

You never had any attention to give this game a chance, at least be honest about it.

I am in chapter 2. I had attention to give the game wtf? I was looking forward playing a JRPG again. But sadly the game has been nothing but boredom, very bad designed in every way possible (technical, narrative and gameplay). But yeah I am not checking in this Thread anymore because the game is sold. Bye Bye.


yes-man-jim-carrey.gif
 
Look. I´ve enjoyed most of what I´ve played so far but I´m playing on hard mode and the boss health bars are absolute fucking horseshit. I´m trying to fight consul J right now and it straight up sucks. I´m 4 levels higher than the boss and I still have to bash his face in for 25 minutes to get somewhere. I´m doing chain attacks for 150k+ damage and this shithead´s healthbar barely fucking moves and then he just randomly murks all my healers and its game fucking over. He doesn´t even have any kind of special attack animations or anything, just stands there swinging his stupid stick at me and kills anything in two hits while my healers run around constantly trying to revive everybody.
I'm in the same scenario, I just beat Consul J on hard, while being 4 levels above him. I lost 7-8 times before I changed to this strat and won straight away though.

It's fresh in my mind since we're in the exact same place so I'll tell you what useful stuff I learned that I hope helps.

First, I tried many times with the party I was using where everyone was training to learn new classes. Don't do that. Change everybody to their best class. I won my first try when I did this so maybe this is all you need to do although I think the other stuff in my strat was probably very important. All characters I used were rank 10 except I kept Sena on Riku/manana class so I have 2 different characters who can break. Debuffs almost never work on this guy but break works decently enough most of the time.

Second, composition. I only know what works for me, but people die a lot so you need a lot of healers, and you need 2 good tanks because when one dies the rest of the party will melt pretty quickly unless there's another tank while you resurrect him. I won with 2 tanks, 2 attackers and 3 healers, my hero character was Teach because he has the burst ability and burst can remove the super powered awakening state (the flames on the boss's health bar.)

Third, now that we just got the ability for all 6 characters to become Orobouros you can go into the menu after dying and upgrade all of their soul links. I didn't realise I could do this until a few deaths when I was tinkering with my setup, but half your Orobouros have an empty tree of upgrades during this fight unless you die and go to the interlink menu.

Fourth, I really went overboard changing my accessories and gems for this fight to lower attacker/healer aggro and increase defender aggro. Usually I can make my defender get enough aggro by equipping the sapphire which boosts his damage against mobs or by equipping a special item that gives him a massive boost for the enemy type, like 80% vs machines or 70% vs aquatic life, but this boss is Moebius so I have no way of buffing raw against him. I instead gave Lanz a dex boosting accessory in case he was missing too much to get aggro, and the standard HP stuff, then his arts were all about aggro and damage buffs plus topple. Mio was the back up tank with the standard evasion buffs.

Fifth, the healers had one gem on that makes them raise fallen allies faster and one gem to increase healing. Then they had one accessory for decreasing healing aggro while the other accessory recharged either healing spells faster when reviving the fallen or gave armour veil buff to fallen that you revive (both great accessories.) People die a lot on hard so I think it's more important to have gear that gets you out of that dying situation into a good situation rather than gear that just increases your healing.

Sixth, attackers did not have much damage enhancing stuff. gave them gear to reduce aggro and useful non damaging gear like accessories that extend break time.

All of those gem and accessory changes may seem excessive but I won my first try after doing that.

As for the actual battle, I only used 2 chain attacks. Like you said, it doesn't do enough damage to kill on hard so I instead saved it until things were going really bad and then activated it when multiple people were being raised from dying and everyone had low health. Try to get to get it right after the last dead person is revived so everybody can be in the chain attack. While doing the chain attack your whole party gets healed when your healers use heal spells in the late rounds so you'll be back in top form after. A lot of chain orders redirect aggro too so it really refreshes the situation.

I normally play as an attacker and switch around a bit, but I played as a healer this time (Eunie) so I could keep everyone alive with the regen ring that I made them walk into with battle commands when I activated it. Staying on one character means I got to build an interlink level 3 which I used at the end of the fight aswell. Make sure your healer has "Wide slash" equipped and when the boss floats in the air for a while hold your heals. After floating a bit he'll do a butt stomp attack called "ruined marionette" or something that does massive damage to everybody. Evade with wide slash and then heal everybody else.

Be sure to use battle commands to set the combo to "burst combo" so that the boss's awakening state will be removed. I used my second chain attack after his awakening was activated and he'd battered my party into bad shape. I healed up and break/topple/dazed him during the chain attack while healing everybody. That still wasn't enough to kill him but Teach used burst right after the chain attack to remove his firey awakening buffs and then towards the very end of the fight I was able to activate level 3 Orobouros to stay alive and do more heals.
 
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Danjin44

The nicest person on this forum
First, I tried many times with the party I was using where everyone was training to learn new classes. Don't do that. Change everybody to their best class.
This is highly important, especially for tankers and healers, they perform way better when they are at Rank 10. You will get destroyed when all party class low Rank trying to fight unique monster or boss.
 
This is highly important, especially for tankers and healers, they perform way better when they are at Rank 10. You will get destroyed when all party class low Rank trying to fight unique monster or boss.
Yeah it can be a pain if you're experimenting with an interesting party composition and building each character's repertoire of classes.

But it feels so satifsying when you tinker around optimize everyone's performance for the situation and then smash a tough boss.
 

Danjin44

The nicest person on this forum
Yeah it can be a pain if you're experimenting with an interesting party composition and building each character's repertoire of classes.

But it feels so satifsying when you tinker around optimize everyone's performance for the situation and then smash a tough boss.
Exactly! As for chain attacks, they are not as powerful as XC2 but you can use them much more often and it can save your ass when your party getting wiped out.
 
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Exactly! As for chain attacks, they are not as powerful as XC2 but you can use them much more often and it can save your ass when your part getting wiped out.
It's early days too. I'm still hoping by the endgame I can get the power to melt billion HP healthbars in chain attacks like in the previous xenoblade games. If Hard difficulty means I can only take 500 million off their billion HP health bar, that would be pretty cool too.

Right now at lev 30 the best chain attacks do around 200,000 and don't bother bosses very much. It all looks like tiny chip damage in streetfighter when you look at their health bar lol.

I am enjoying the challenge a lot though.
 

Danjin44

The nicest person on this forum
It's early days too. I'm still hoping by the endgame I can get the power to melt billion HP healthbars in chain attacks like in the previous xenoblade games. If Hard difficulty means I can only take 500 million off their billion HP health bar, that would be pretty cool too.

Right now at lev 30 the best chain attacks do around 200,000 and don't bother bosses very much. It all looks like tiny chip damage in streetfighter when you look at their health bar lol.

I am enjoying the challenge a lot though.
I just recently I unlocked Ouroboros chain attacks order, the condition to use them is you need to interlink 3. They do pretty decent damage and unlock multiple Ouroboros order if you get “Bravo” or higher.
 
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Finally beat J after 6 or 7 tries. I ran 3 healers and cycled between them to babysit my team for the entire fight and conserved my chain attacks for whenever he does his big aoe move to heal my party back up. The fight really left me wanting some kind of `disperse` option in the tactics menu. I was pretty much constantly swapping to different party members just to reposition and spread them out since it feels like they have a natural tendency to clump up and take too much aoe damage. Felt like I was taking considerably less damage if I had the boss sandwiched between two tanks but if I take my eyes off of them for 2 seconds they clump right back up again.
 

RoboFu

One of the green rats
A little tip about chain attacks.

You need a balance of attackers and healers. Your goal is to get as far over 100 as possible with as little people as possible to keep it going.

Healers will only ever get you 99% with healing attacks and not above.

The first round is usually the gamble. If you can get to 100% with two or three people and then get a big attacker returned then you are golden.

The second round use your light tp attackers and healers to push up to 99% then finish with a big tp attacker. This should return a character with a large amount of tp.

After that you can get some heavy attacks in again using light tp attackers and healers to get to 99 then releasing you large attacker.

If you get a high enough tp round you can get a fusion and get all your characters back for a big final round.
 
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A little tip about chain attacks.

You need a balance of attackers and healers. Your goal is to get as far over 100 as possible with as little people as possible to keep it going.

Healers will only ever get you 99% with healing attacks and not above.

The first round is usually the gamble. If you can get to 100% with two or three people and then get a big attacker returned then you are golden.

The second round use your light tp attackers and healers to push up to 99% then finish with a big tp attacker. This should return a character with a large amount of tp.

After that you can get some heavy attacks in again using light tp attackers and healers to get to 99 then releasing you large attacker.

If you get a high enough tp round you can get a fusion and get all your characters back for a big final round.
I worked out a way to regularly get 150% in the first round and for it to get easier after that really fast:

Hey I worked out a really good newbie strategy for always exploiting chain attacks, it should really help people who aren't able to get long or damaging chain attacks.

Sorry if there are way better guides and I missed something obvious, I'm playing spoiler free avoiding guides so this is just what I came up with on my own that works really well.

All you have to do is make Taion Lanz's "Heavy Guard" class and give him the "variable turret" ability.

Then just choose any defender's chain order in the first round. Lanz or Mio. Then in the chain attack, start with any attacker for the TP bonus, and in the first round you might need to use 2 healers to get to 99 TP safely, but that's the hardest part done.

At 99% in the 1st round, use Taion with variable turret. Taion has really high base TP, plus he'll be getting +10 because of the defender chain order bonus to defenders, plus variable turret is multi-hit and squeezes in a few extra TP.

You'll get above 150% in the first round and that means you'll get 2 characters back and even if you don't quite get 150% somehow, more importantly you will get back high TP Taion, because finishing on a defender means you'll always get the highest TP character back, which will always be himself. He'll have 70-90 TP really soon and keep bringing himself back each time when you finish using him so it will be easy to get 150%+ often and max chain attack rounds.

Just make sure to use your heroes chain order at some point since they give you an extra free round, and use an attackers chain order for the final round since attackers will get a lot more damage out of the high damage bonus since they are set up to do damage.

Again sorry if that's lame compared to what guides are saying, I just found a really simple way to always squeeze max rounds out of chain attack.
If you wanted to be sure to get 150% even more easily than this in the first round you could have Taion wear the accessory called "analyzer scope" for 10 bonus TP so you don't even need a defender chain order. You could also give the accessory to someone else so they can train up in the heavy guard class so you could still do this strategy without Taion, as long their TP isn't extremely low
 
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KàIRóS

Member
The Soulhacker class is absolutely bonkers I'm not going to spoil it but it's such a crazy idea for a class, this game just keeps throwing new stuff for combat even after 100 hours, insane.
 
Exactly! As for chain attacks, they are not as powerful as XC2 but you can use them much more often and it can save your ass when your party getting wiped out.
About this, what's the cost of reviving party members? Is it still tied to the chain meter? Sometimes my party members are KO'd then revived shortly afterwards, and then reviving becomes unavailable.
 
About this, what's the cost of reviving party members? Is it still tied to the chain meter? Sometimes my party members are KO'd then revived shortly afterwards, and then reviving becomes unavailable.
No longer tied to the chain meter.

Characters are revived only by healers in this game, so if all your healers die, no more revives.

There was a problem in XC2 where you could heal yourself using crit attacks, which kind of made healers pointless because you could just heal more by increasing your damage. It was broken but it was broken in fun way. Now healers are definitely very important in your party composition.
 
It is getting incredibly painful to unlock new classes. Nothing aside from UMs and bosses grant me much CP, unless I just grind for hours on low level mobs For 4-7 CP per kill.
 

Belthazar

Member
I really liked 1 but was bored 10 hours into 2 and dropped it... Should I just skip to 3 or soldier through 2? I really disliked both the characters and the story on that one.
 
It is getting incredibly painful to unlock new classes. Nothing aside from UMs and bosses grant me much CP, unless I just grind for hours on low level mobs For 4-7 CP per kill.
I just got 270cp for killing an elite that was only 1 level above me because of the overkill bonus, I started chain attack right when they were about to die and did a long chain attack to get a really big overkill bonus. I'm in the early part of the game though.

I really liked 1 but was bored 10 hours into 2 and dropped it... Should I just skip to 3 or soldier through 2? I really disliked both the characters and the story on that one.
As someone who likes 1 and 2 a lot it's really hard to say. I do think the story tone of XC3 is more similar to one, at least at the start, but it's not the same, and this is definitely a bunch of anime people. Maybe you could take another run at 2 if you still have it since 10 hours actually isn't much of a dent in such a huge game? There's a lot of characters you wouldn't have recruited yet that you may end up liking better than the early characters.
 
Because you insist on reading between the lines while actually skipping, you know, the lines, here it goes:

I find combat boring. So to keep from being bored I main easy, when I sense something bigger is coming up, I turn up the difficulty, because I have no interest in wasting my time on endless battles with mobs that pose no danger.

I'm 35+ hours in. This is a method I find works well for me to have maximum enjoyment after hours of experimentation. I'm not bored to death by mobs, and I get to have fun with bosses and the occational orange mob.

Now kindly get over yourself and stop assuming you're the only one who knows what he's talking about.

I've been analizing over jrpg combat systems since the early 90s. I'm not some clueless newcomer. I just have no fucking patience for bullshit.
Calm the snuff down.

Sparks.
 

Belthazar

Member
I just got 270cp for killing an elite that was only 1 level above me because of the overkill bonus, I started chain attack right when they were about to die and did a long chain attack to get a really big overkill bonus. I'm in the early part of the game though.


As someone who likes 1 and 2 a lot it's really hard to say. I do think the story tone of XC3 is more similar to one, at least at the start, but it's not the same, and this is definitely a bunch of anime people. Maybe you could take another run at 2 if you still have it since 10 hours actually isn't much of a dent in such a huge game? There's a lot of characters you wouldn't have recruited yet that you may end up liking better than the early characters.

I don't mind anime, I really like Persona and Tales of for example. It just didn't click that much with me, but I'll try to have another go at my old save.

Oke thing I really like about 2 was the world tho, it was very visually interesting... So maybe that could carry me over a playthrough
 
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Kimahri

Banned
Irony, thy name is Kimahri.

There is no irony in this, we have differing opinions about a game. I have no problem with that. But you just can't allow that to be.

The actual irony is, that you wouldn't get so inanely worked up about someone not loving that thing you love if you'd just get over it and pay attention to what should be important to you: The things you like. Instead of, you know, the people not loving the things you like. This is a discussion board. Having differing opinions is to be expected. I am sharing my experience with the game. In no way, shape or form am I, or have I ever implied that my experience is the universal truth, or that I know better than others what they might like, or whether or not they're doing things right.

The irony is, that if you'd just let it be instead of throwing a temper tantrum like a whiny 12 year old, it would have ended there.


Analyzing* for one. Two, you clearly haven’t as you are talking out your ass throughout this entire thread.
No, I meant analizing, as in being anal about something. Not a new term.


I'm... done responding to you. Enjoy your game. Genuinely, good for you that you love it. Focus on that.

I'll give you one thing, some of the boss tunes are crazy good.
 
I just got 270cp for killing an elite that was only 1 level above me because of the overkill bonus, I started chain attack right when they were about to die and did a long chain attack to get a really big overkill bonus. I'm in the early part of the game though.


As someone who likes 1 and 2 a lot it's really hard to say. I do think the story tone of XC3 is more similar to one, at least at the start, but it's not the same, and this is definitely a bunch of anime people. Maybe you could take another run at 2 if you still have it since 10 hours actually isn't much of a dent in such a huge game? There's a lot of characters you wouldn't have recruited yet that you may end up liking better than the early characters.

That is what I was doing! In Chapter 3 I spent a good 2-3 hours doing just that (Playing on hard, so I couldn’t just mindlessly AFK farm them). Was getting 270-300 CP per kill. But I overleveled it so much that by the end of Chapter 3, I was already 47.
 
I don't mind anime, I really like Persona and Tales of for example. It just didn't click that much with me, but I'll try to have another go at my old save.

Oke thing I really like about 2 was the world tho, it was very visually interesting... So maybe that could carry me over a playthrough
In that case I can say some of the better areas are later environments you explore in the world, and they have some fantastic music as well
That is what I was doing! In Chapter 3 I spent a good 2-3 hours doing just that (Playing on hard, so I couldn’t just mindlessly AFK farm them). Was getting 270-300 CP per kill. But I overleveled it so much that by the end of Chapter 3, I was already 47.
Ah, I see. That's probably why we can't level down in this game.
 

Wunray

Member
Ok so I'm in the starting area and mwamba or whatever his name is, that dude is working for the ops, when does he die?
 

Danjin44

The nicest person on this forum
Strategos class is very decent healer, I especially like its regeneration healing circle that I can use near my tanks to keep them alive.
 

Komatsu

Member
I play 99.9% of my JRPGs with the original Japanese voices, but the Xenoblade games are the exception. I loved how they used different accents in XC2, Welsh for the Gormotti, Scottish for Mor Ardain, American for the Blades, which contrasted nicely with the otherwise stale Tokyo/Osaka-ben duality you see in almost any kind of Japanese media.

I vastly prefer the English voices in 3 as well.
 

Danjin44

The nicest person on this forum
I play 99.9% of my JRPGs with the original Japanese voices, but the Xenoblade games are the exception. I loved how they used different accents in XC2, Welsh for the Gormotti, Scottish for Mor Ardain, American for the Blades, which contrasted nicely with the otherwise stale Tokyo/Osaka-ben duality you see in almost any kind of Japanese media.

I vastly prefer the English voices in 3 as well.
Yeah, I'm actually very impressed with english voice acting in XC3 so far.
 
Strategos class is very decent healer, I especially like its regeneration healing circle that I can use near my tanks to keep them alive.

It feels *so* nice once you get a few more healers leveled And can get those massive and quick AoE heals out. Always feels nice to see my party in the red and yellow back up to near full health.
 

Danjin44

The nicest person on this forum
It feels *so* nice once you get a few more healers leveled And can get those massive and quick AoE heals out. Always feels nice to see my party in the red and yellow back up to near full health.
Until you fight large number of enemies in hard see everyone instantly get killed other than your tanks. I would group of enemies sometimes can be more deadly than unique monsters.

How exactly does counter heal art for the class work?
You mean Mirror Trap? Honestly speaking I haven't used that art, I need to use it more to see how exactly works.

Edit: it think its a buff, every time you get hit it heals.
 
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MagiusNecros

Gilgamesh Fan Annoyance
In your opinion, is it the best of the Xenoblade games? A proper culmination?
Just beat the main game in about 70 hours or so. And I think it's probably the best Xenoblade game. I put it up there with Final Fantasy IX.

I think a lot of stuff in the game all contributes to building it's worlds up.

This is one RPG you don't want to miss.

It also introduces one of the greatest characters in the Xeno franchise under the guise of Captain Triton.
 
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