Just wanted to pop back in and thank the good people of the thread for getting me past my frustrations with the game. I've been slowly but steadily progressing in the game.
I had another question though. The element orbs, are they a good thing or bad thing? I thought they said that they make the enemy resist damage from blades of that element, but when you go into a chain attack, the specials seem to do full damage(SEEM TO) and breaking the orbs seems to add extra damage....I don't know. They seem like a good thing but I'm confuzzled.
Also I realized core chips are pretty cool, and I was wondering where to find the right ones for the different characters since some appear to be great for some blades but trash for others. This is one thing that holds back many of my blades because I can't give better chips to my blades.
Okay stay with me here for this question. When you cancel an auto attack to swap to a new blade, does this boost anything, and if so what. THEN, what happens if you time the new swapped into blade's art after going into it? Does that count as a third attack cancel only if the previous blade was swapped out on the third attack, or does it not matter? I hope that made sense.
I'm also curious about something. I got "Electra" as a special blade. Her quest unlocks her unique field ability, but I'm not sure what the purpose of such an ability in the end. I assume other unique blades have special unique abilites, just curious if its just there is a random spot where you use them once and it has some rad loot or something or if its a waste of time and I shouldn't bother to do it.
Does increasing an area's "development"(aka buying all their stuff) do anything special outside of reducing item prices? I thought it unlocked all shop stock to get their special key item, but that doesn't seem to be true because I had wanted to collect all the shop key items.
Oh and one more thing. What are the "shops" or whatever people that have the trophy? Like the guy that sends money back to your little village. There are several shops with that same symbol that do different things and I feel like they are special and I'm missing something cool there.
Element orbs: a mix of both. Indeed they do give the enemy a resistance to that damage type. For example, if you slap a Fire orb on an enemy, it'll reduce your damage if using someone like Pyra. However, the real reason why you want to stack orbs is for Chain Attacks. Breaking those orbs in your Chain Attack is the biggest DPS in the game, basically. The damage curve is heavily skewed to rely less on normal Arts and more on stacking the right orbs to Chain Attack. Unlike Xenoblade 1 where you could use Chain Attacks to setup some scenarios like Topple/Daze the enemy multiple times in the fight and/or destroy enemies by stacking same-colored Arts, in Xenoblade 2 you're more encouraged to keep building and building orbs until you stacked enough to just delete the enemy with one Chain Attack.
On that note, Chain Attacks are also an easy way to never have to grind at all. Just like Xenoblade 1, if you kill enemies with Chain Attacks you get extra XP, SP, and WP. Unlike Xenoblade 1 though, it's not a flat multiplier, but it scales to how much damage you do after you kill the enemy. The bigger your bonus %, the bigger your extra gains. If you Chain Attack every story boss and get at least like 200%-300% bonus, you're gonna be fine for every fight with no grinding on small fry.
Core chips: Megalances, chrome katanas, knuckle claws, Brighid, and Mythra are best by just pumping them with crit-boosting chips. Shield Hammers and Poppi α are best with block chance, and the rest can be outfitted with whatever you want.
Blade switching: This actually I'm not sure of. I don't think it matters when you cancel into a switch at all. Maybe it speeds up a tiny bit?
Electra: Generally, when Blades have Field Skills exclusive to them, it's generally only used for Merc Mission speed-ups or their Blade Quest. That's literally it. Kinda wasteful for a Field Skill slot, but yeah. In Electra's case, Mastery of Thunder is just used for her Blade Quest and has a bit of use for speeding up Merc Missions.
Increasing development: You get more access to Merc Missions and I believe more NPC dialogue from citizens. Those same Merc Missions gets you contracts so you unlock more items within their shops.
Trophy NPCs: This icon is extremely arbitrary, especially after the DLC. Basically, it's either a one-off activity you can do (like giving an NPC an item) or some special shop. If you see one, take a look at what it's like, but more often than not it's just a one-off event to do.
Holy crap, Malos + Jin is ing hard in Bringer of Chaos difficulty in Challenge Mode. But I finally beat him... and that fight took me 24 arceusdamn minutes!!!
Now for the rest of them. Oh boy. But with my new builds, they should fall down like a stack of dominos.
thanks @EvilLucario So funny I was confused that I thought orbs HAD to be good or bad, but are both as I thought. Is there a secret to breaking multiple orbs in a chain? I generally get 1 orb smashed per chain.
I also had no idea overkill actually did anything special, I figured it MIGHT give me extra xp or trust with blades or loot so I've been doing it anyhow. Good to know exactly what it does. I like the idea of not needing to grind. Generally I do chain attack bosses right at the end to finish them off just because I'm always afraid of fainting and having no party gauge for reviving. So by dumb luck I guess I've been doing that right at least.
I guess I'll have to figure out what party combo elements are best so I can get more orb varieties on enemies then. I've just been doing what triple special combo I could fastest and chain attacking with 1 orb. I'll have to start looking long and hard at blade element variety as I have 2 characters doubled up on one element.
Argh, the sidequests in this game should be good, and yet they're so frustrating. They actually have story and depth unlike 1, so I want to do them. But they go out of their way to make you not do them! I'm down to 3 full pages of accumulated quests from 5. I'm whittling them down. Some have been great. Some frustrating.
It frustrates to no end when a quest tells you to go to location X, and you have no idea where location X is because the maps do not list location names, and it's not the name of a fast travel point. But field skills still frustrate to no end.
I am still trying to get Praxis up to lv4 affinity so I can start the Theory quest (to start getting Noppon Wisdom on her). I'm trying to get Ursula up in levels to get....I forget her field skill I need to open Bana's chest. (How long is it supposed to take to upgrade all these things? I'm sending them on endless merc quests. My merc camp is lv3 I believe.....and it's a crawl spanning weeks to get enough merc points to level it up again. Most of my cities are 2-3 stars at this point.) They get there eventually but I feel like I need a Pokewalker for my blades. I imagine 2 weeks of real-world play time to get Praxis and Usula up to required levels.
So I just got Vess literally one quest before trying to get Super Poppi. I find myself in front of a blackboard requiring Lv5 Forestry. Right now I have Lv0 forestry...not a single blade with it. Reading online it seems like the only non-RNG blades with forestry are Vess and Blade Nia. Which is fantastic because that means I need one of them to have maxed out forestry and the other to have lv2. How many WEEKS will I have to grind those 2 on merc missions to get them to appropriate levels of that. And that's exceedingly frustrating as it halts my regular play while grinding merc missions since my build right now relies on Nia as a healing driver. Also, if I swap her out to a blade, does that mess anything up switching her back to driver? I mean is there any way other than grinding two clean slate blades from 0 affinity to nearly maxed just to get a third blade for Tora?!
Is it possible that some of these side quests are not meant to be completed until New Game +?
Edit: That whole block wasn't meant to be spoilered out but unfortunately NL seems to just spoiler out everything from the first spoiler tag to the last spoiler closing tag ignoring stops and starts...
@NEStalgia Open a bunch of cores and get blades with forestry. The skill checks are additive, so you can have 5 lv1 forestry blades equipped and pass the check today.
@Tsurii Basically just leveling HM slaves through merc missions exclusively (which seems like it should be easy considering my hordes of generics all largely maxed out doing only merc missions.) I mean I can't actually "play" with a bunch of noob blades with no skills Actually playing with a bunch of blades I don't actually want to use feels kind of like job-grinding in Bravely Default (which also bored me to tears....by the end it was like "ok, enough classes, let's just railroad through this...."...though it was at least straight forward, unlike Blades....just tedious )
I already have all the electrics I need for that gate you're talking about, I haven't gone through it yet...I don't actually want to end the game (believe it or not )
@subpopz RNGesus doesn't love me, apparently. I played half the game without a single electric or ice, as well. Just water and dark, endlessly (yet still not enough dark to clear the miasma in front of the mor ardain mine (not a quest, just a treasure.)
Weird thing is I swore I had someone with forestry, but the check came up 0, and I went through the blade list, and there was no one. I've opened lots of cores (well to me lots, like 12 per character or so. I have 99 common crystals and 30 rares and one legendary unspent ) But more than a small quantity of what's needed and there's way too many to manage to send on merc missions. I've been sending out merc missions non stop. But apparently not for good enough skills (and I'm sending endless missions out for Prax, Usula, and Kassandra to get their trust, Noppon & Fortitute up for specific quests.) No way you can send enough merc missions out to level dozens upon dozens of blades, but both merc mission slots are always in use.
And no, I haven't deleted any blades, and I have a ton of blades that are maxed or near maxed on affinity charts from the merc missions, but it doesn't cover every skill (and at least half of them are water..... )
I actually switched to focusing on rares to A) avoid RNG and B) I'm grinding merc missions on specific rares for specific quests (Noppon wisdom for the "real truth" of Argentum door, trust for Prax to unlock Theory quest, Fortitude for Ursula for Bana's chest. Things I can't get on commons.) That said regardless of generics, I still have nobody with forestry so whether story or generic I still have to grind that up from zero on any blades. Actually I didn't even know there were such a thing as rares until chapter 9 when I had to get the electric ones to get that gate and one of my common crystals spawned Ursula...I was like "what is this?!"
Basically I didn't rally understand at all how blades worked and how field skills worked. I had my 3 blades per character except Tora and was set for most of the game until Elpys gated me in Ch7. That's when I started getting more blades and grinding them, but obviously if I need 150+ blades to cover all skills and need them all leveled, that's going to take a lot of grinding. Right now I have about 60 or so and a bunch of those not leveled, and most of them with redundant skills. I mean I'm at electric gate on the tree....I could probably blast through and close out the story at this point.....but I'd like to do most of the sidequests first...and they all have these ridiculous RNG blade requirements (or RNG salvage/collection quests. I finally got the last ivy to help Pawley and close out the Gormott Concerned Carpenter quest. I must have farmed those collection points over 100 times spanning a month of play and only just got the final one, randomly, yesterday! So much RNG. And I tend to have really awful luck.
Good to know I can just RNG seek randoms with forestry. Getting FIVE, or 2-3 and leveling Vess is going to take work though. It took me 30 crystals to get 2 lightenings...
So how did you guys find quests like Ursula's in which you have to have slept at a specific in,. While she's in your party, and then after the h2h, go to a specific location in a specific town, only at night, only if you have a party of rex, nia, and Tora, and have pyra and ursula equipped, and if any of that isn't met, you never get the quest, and the game offers no hint about it.
Similarly, the "farewell friend" quest with the girl in mor ardain who's friend is leaving (involving Brionac) even if you return to her after completing the first requirement, apparently if Brigid and ageon aren't both equipped she won't show. And nothing in the game tells you you need him equipped.
How did you guys discover these things? Or is so this meant to be incomplete and is just a reward if you find it by chance?
@Tsurii but how did you know where to go, what to equip, who to equip, what time of day? All i knew from the chart was the heart to heart. Not the rest, and not where to go to start the heart to heart. And ageon and the brionac quest isn't in the chart
@Tsurii hmm, I'm not seeing the character or time requirements. I remember seeing a time indicator on one quest at one point. But I'm not seeing any now.
@NEStalgia basically, it usually tells you "go sleep at the Inn in X", you do that, cue a little cutscene of the blade telling you where they wanna go with your party.
That's when the H2H gets marked on your map, required party members/blades included.
You do that and if there's a quest attached they're telling you about that as well. For quests that require certain characters you gotta go into the quest log and check whatever you're currently doing. There you have the icons for the characters and, usually in the description, it'll say when you have to do stuff as well.
It's kinda roundabout for the longer chains, but it's all right there in the game. You just need to use the logs/info they give you.
I hadn't the time yet to explain it here myself, but it's essentially THIS. Thanks Tsurii for clearing it up for those who believe that Xeno2's quests are sometimes illogical, random secrets, or bad mechanics and designs.
I still don't get it though. I didn't see anything in the UI telling me what characters were needed. If I weren't on a hunt to do that particular quest, using the internet as an on demand strategy guide I would have never, ever activated most of the steps of most of the side-quests in the game. I only have a few left, but I've been whittling down my 5 pages of quests and have only 1 left. I did all of them following guides, and having done them I still don't know how anyone has managed to do it sans guide. The requirements for them are indeed "random secrets, bad mechanics and designs." The heart to heart part of Ursula's is straight forward. Knowing when and with whom to activate the quest after that was not indicated by the game. But you don't know where, when, or with whom to go to to pick up the actual quest.
The mystery of argentum....there's no way to know you need to complete 3 other complete quest trees to get that...some of which aren't completable until near the end of the game. One requires going to "Highway 7".....nothing in the game tells you where that is (I mean I know "where" it is, but nothing tells you where in that area it is.) You have to randomly stumble in the general area and deduce there's a door that goes there only you activate a high level electric gate. Ursula's affinity chart has an "approach the airborne throne in Tantal". Where is the airborne throne? I don't know. I found it...with a guide....it made sense....but it doesn't make sense to give you the name of a place that's hard to get to, obscure, and has no name accessible in the game or map until you've been there already. That one at least if you've been there becomes a fast travel, but many times quests give you names of places that are in between fast travels, with no nav beacon, and you don't know where they are since they're not on the map, you have to walk until you stumble on them.
I realize it sounds like I hate the game....I don't, I love the game. But the side quests are bad bad bad horrible broken. They're simply inexcusable by any means. There's no excuse for them to exist in their current form. The quests themselves are fine. The implementation of locating, activating, and navigating them/the items they require is unforgivable. I'm doing them because I want to see all the story pieces and precisely because I don't want the game to end, but my obsession with wanting to stay in Alrest aside, the game is much better if all side quests are ignored. (And I'm the kind of RPG player that avoides the main quest and plays mostly for the side quests!) XC1 did it worst of any game. XC2 got the quests right but botched the implementation of actually obtaining them and following their sequence. X probably did it best, though the game was built around the side quests.
It seems like basic design implies "if there's a quest to pick up the fact it's available should be known, not hidden unless a variety of conditions are met", and if there's a location to go to, it's position should be known either through a nav point, or by identifying locations on a map by name" And "if there are conditions required for a quest, they shouldn't consist of "somewhere out there you need to do something."
I disagree with the critics on XC2 not being great, but I do agree with the full harshness of critique on the questing. It really is bad. Maybe some people happen to be able to make sense of it (I still think that requires some pretty strange thought patterns to do, either you guys are rocket scientists and think on a higher plane, or you guys are "artistes" and don't think normally at all ) But it doesn't follow any form of logic most people will follow.
@Tsurii Thanks, but that's not necessary, I've found everything a single google search away (kind of an indication of how many people have the same problems in the same places....many games if I'm stuck I have to search forever with every weird combination of words I can think of and nothing comes up...XC2 definitely causes the same confusion for many, which is a shame on one hand, but makes finding solutions easy otherwise.)
It's not that anything is impossible to complete due to the internet being full of people that already answered the same conundrums for others. It's just frustrating having to resort to the internet and break the immersion of the game world to do it. Most RPGs you can glue yourself into the world and never leave until you want. Grappling my phone in one hand to look up "where is that location again? which collection points have the rare drop I need?" kills the immersion. (Especially when Reddit and Gamefaqs is the source.... )
If you still don't understand how the quests work, I'm pretty sure you missed or forgot the information about those. There were not many quests where I needed outside help. Ironically Ursula was one such a quest.
There's a map in the game and it has markers that show where Highway 7 and every other location in the game is. Exploring the map to find all these named locations and travel points is just part of the series, the reward for exploring. If you don't find them of course you won't be able to continue the quest. Why is this such a big problem?
The problem you have usually arises when the affinity charts are already beaten and you play in NG+. That's the only time where the game has no info about where to go to start a blade quest because it still reads like "you have already done this" and have resort to the internet. Similar to skipping a Tutorial and then having to find it online.
@NEStalgia The worst Blade quests are Ursula (need 99 of each item obtained from lessons) and Zenobia (imagine a made up area in a Pokemon game from gen 2 or 3 that requires every single HM to progress and then you have to face a difficult trainer at the end).
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