[FFRK] Cagnazzo U+ and a Relic Reckoning

I'm still playing FFRK, over a year after I started, which makes this the longest I've ever played a mobile game pretty well ever. The next closest would've been Puzzles and Dragons at 270 days.

Clearly the game is still entertaining me. The developers have softened the need for the ye old S/L trick by having the AI unlock attacks in the harder fights as the fight goes on, instead of letting them blast you with their full unmitigated power. Mostly. The latest super difficult fight--Cagnazzo U+--would crush one of my mages for twice their health if I didn't have mitigation up yet.

On the bright side, the Ultimate+ fights only cost a single stamina, so I feel totally free to experiment and change up my strategy. This has made the game more fun for me because now I don't feel obligated to go look up the datamined AI to save myself 60 stamina (3 hours worth). On the other hand, I'm good enough with good enough Relics that even the plain Ultimate fights I don't need to look up the AI anymore.

Cagnazzo Ultimate+ is the same Elemental Fiend from FFIV. The annoying thing with that is despite FFIV's large cast, their ability usage is a little limited. No spellblades, D.Cecil has a tiny moveset, and the entire group is super magic heavy.

In hindsight, a mage party probably would've been a decent option, given Cagnazzo's propensity for countering physical attacks with Stop. Thankfully, my bullheadedness didn't do me in. It just meant Agrias spent 60% of the fight Stopped. Cagnazzo's MND is pretty high.

My FFIV synergy is pretty weak overall. Lots of 3*++ items, but only a couple natural 5* meant synergy wasn't going to help me as much as it does on other fights. Similarly, only taking a single FFIV character also probably didn't help there either. Still, my Relics and my decent armor saved the day.

Name	Level	Ability 1	Ability 2	Record Materia	Soul Breaks
Squall	Lv 80	Thundaga S. (8)	Blizzaga S. (8)	Rebel's Might	Fated Circle
Ramza	Lv 80	Magic BD (8)	Full Break (6)	Mog's Teachings	Shout
Agrias	Lv 80	Thundara S. (10)	Saint's Cross (6)	Ace Striker	Cleansing Strike
Rydia	Lv 66	Thundaja (8)	Blizzaja (8)	Vow of Vengeance	Radiant Breath
Garnet	Lv 80	Ramuh (5)	Dispel (8)	Mako Might	Divine Guardian
RW: Sentinel's Grimoire

Not looking at the AI meant that I totally missed out on taking Poison, which would've helped a lot. Honestly, I'd consider it over Blizzaga Strike on Squall given the sheer number of times Blizzaga Strike did 0 damage because Cagnazzo decided to activate his water wall.

I got low on Thunder-based hones by the end of the fight. Also missing out on Runic for easy-mode kinda sucks, as it would've neutered his Stop and a lot of his Water spells. Grand Cross would've been even better given his propensity for buffing, too.

You'll notice I didn't take any healing aside from Divine Guardian's Heavy Regen, which was the correct move. Made it a little bit touch and go a couple times, but as long as I kept my mitigation up, it was okay. But Garnet was around largely for her Soul Break, and providing Thunder damage and Dispel. Originally I had her healing, and Agrias used Banishing Strike for Dispel, but I needed a 4th Thunder user just in case things went south and someone was busy at an inopportune time.

So Garnet basically sat on standby, using Ramuh or Dispel immediately when needed, which was quite helpful. The rest was pretty straight forward. I realized after the fact that I was missing Shellga (Garnet's only gives +50% RES, not +100%), but thanks to Agrias' Cleansing Strike, it wasn't a huge deal after the first few rounds while it charged up. All in all, aside from his extreme defenses and rnadom mode switch rendering my Blizzard attacks useless half the time, he wasn't too shabby.


Relic Reckoning

Up until a couple months ago, my Character Relics were pretty pitiful. I had a couple of Medicas, and Planet Protector. Every other character relic I had was crappy one-hit damage ones. Then we had some SSB festivals plus the Final Fantasy Tactics banner and now I'm awash in awesome relics:

Name	Realm	Soul Break	Effect
Luneth	FF III	Advance	+150% ATK, -50% DEF
P.Cecil	FF IV	Radiant Wings	3 Hits, Holy Physical Damage
Rydia	FF IV	Radiant Breath	2 Hits, AoE, Holy Magical Damage; Blur 2
Galuf	FF V	Unyielding Fist	Stupid Galuf Solo tricks
Yuffie	FF VII	Clear Tranquil	AoE, 40% Heal, Instant Cast
Aerith	FF VII	Planet Protector	AoE, +50% ATK
Squall	FF VIII	Fated Circle	3 Hits, 1 AoE Hit, Physical Damage
Rinoa	FF VIII	Wishing Star+	5 Hits, Magical Non-Elemental Damage
Quistis	FF VIII	Mighty Guard (VIII)+	AoE, Hastega, Shellga, Heavy Regen
Edea	FF VIII	Inaugural Parade	AoE, Hastega, +20% MAG
Zidane	FF IX	Scoop Art	3 Hits, Physical Damage
Garnet	FF IX	Divine Guardian+	AoE, Hastega, +50 RES, Heavy Regen
Steiner	FF IX	Sword Art Stock Break	AoE, 3 Hits, Physical Damage, Paralyze
Quina	FF IX	Mighty Guard (IX)	AoE, Shellga, Protectga
Rikku	FF X	Machina Sabotage	4 Hits, Physical Damage, -50% ATK, +50% ATK self
Auron	FF X	Dragon Fang	AoE, 1 Hit, Physical Damage, -30% ATK
Fran	FF XII	Shatterheart	AoE, 1 Hit, Ranged Physical Damage, -50% ATK/MAG
Penelo	FF XII	War Dance	AoE, Medica, +50% ATK
Lightning	FF XIII	Crushing Blow+	AoE, 5 Hits, Lightning Physical Damage
Vanille	FF XIII	Oerba's Boon	AoE, Medica, Protectga
Hope	FF XIII	Brutal Sanction	AoE, 3 Hits, Non-Elemental Magical Damage, Stop
Y'shtola	FF XIV	Medica II	AoE, Medica, Esuna
Thancred	FF XIV	Death Blossom	AoE, 1 Hit, Physical Damage, Slow
Agrias	FFT	Cleansing Strike	3 Hits, Physical Damage, -50% ATK/MAG
Ramza	FFT	Shout+	AoE, Hastega, +50% ATK

As I mentioned, this isn't all of them. Anything that's a plain old AoE or single target with few or no effects are basically not listed. I've been doing the 100 gem pulls, which have gotten me a fair few of those. Only 8 of the above came before I pulled Quistis' Red Scorpion 2 months ago.

To be fair, I had saved up a lot of Mythril for the FFT banner and the SSB fest, so that helped. I also ended up spend $30 for an extra 11-pull on the FFT banner (which turned out to be worth it in hindsight given it got me both Ramza and Angrias' Relics). But I've gone from pauper to prince as far as options go. The game is much, much easier now that I have these relics, for better or for worse.

But it's nice because I can be more creative about what RWs I bring with me, which is more fun for me. But without these soul breaks, I'm not sure I'd be able to down fights like Cagnazzo U+ at all, let alone as relatively easily as I did. I've definitely had some good Relic pull luck, though.


More Fun To Come

The devs keep adding new content, new characters, new systems, so I'll keep on playing. Still having a lot of fun with the game, and I don't see that stopping anytime soon.
#FFRK

[FFRK] Ultimate Rubicante: A Puzzle Cloaked in Fire

I'm still playing FFRK, and it's been a lot of fun, despite some of the wonky balance issues that pretty much necessitate the use of S/L tricks to reset the fight. As the game moves forward, you have power creep as you are wont to have in a mobile game, but the developers have started putting in extremely difficult fights that are FFRK at its best: a puzzle game with an execution phase.

There have been 3 of these "Ultimate" fights so far: Exdeath (FFV), Yunalesca (FFX), and Rubicante (FFIV).

Exdeath was a bit of a wake-up call for a lot of players. The ability to spam AoE magics, AoE physical attacks, and Dispel the entire party as a counter attack meant that while the standard Retaliate/Reflect strats were pretty well required, you also really needed a lot of mitigation. Stacking Shellga, Full Break, and Magic Breakdown reduced damage to tolerable levels (though it still required a lot of AoE healing). The fun part was that while he got twice the actions per round once he hit 50% health, because most of them turned into single-target mega-spells, suddenly you could just Carbuncle to reflect-all. The latter half of the fight was easier than the beginning of the fight.

Yunalesca was crazy easy, especially compared to her FFX counterpart which was probably one of the harder fights in the game. Retaliate was the name of the game here, and you'd pretty well rip through her in no time. Because of her Stage 3 Osmose spam pretty well reducing you to no ability uses left, Retaliate allowed your party to dish out impressive damage still.

Rubicante Ultimate, though, oh man, this required some impressive thinking to try and fight the mitigation required onto your team, deal with his gimmick, and still dish out enough damage to win, but quickly enough to keep taken damage low and kill him before your mitigation ran out. This fight really stressed having access to specific abilities that could only come from pulling certain gear.

The FFRK community on Reddit has determined there are 3 types of Soul Breaks (SBs)--super special attacks characters can learn from equipping gear, and can only be cast when your soul break bar has enough energy gained from taking damage/using actions--that are pretty much essential. Named the Holy Trinity of SBs, they are Wall, Medica, and Hastega (or Boostega).


The FFRK Holy Trinity

Wall is only on two characters currently: Tyro, and Y'shtola. And both of them require a very specific relic to learn said wall. But the effect is to raise the Defense and Resistance of all allies by 200% (!!!) for 25 seconds. This stacks on top of Shell/Protect, which both raise Resistance and Defense by 100%, so combined you're looking at a damage reduction of nearly 88% (since they stack multiplicatively), which makes this incredibly powerful.

Medica is basically any AoE heal (as they are only available via Soul Break). There are currently 19 Medicas in the game, of varying effectiveness. I have Y'shtola's and Vanille's, which are two of the most powerful ones available. On top of that, many Medicas have secondary effects. Vanille's also casts Protect as well as healing. Y'shtola's has an Esuna effect, both quite useful. I also have a "Shared" Soul Break from the armor "Mystery Veil" that cannot be learned, but a character can access while they have the item equipped, which has helped in a pinch as well.

Hastega/Boostega is generally a two-buff AoE Soul Break, generally one of which is Haste. You cannot get AoE Haste outside of these Soul Breaks, which is why it's so powerful. Currently there are only 3 Hastega Soul Breaks: one for Red XIII (Lunatic High, Protect/Haste); one for Sazh (Boon, Shell/Haste); and Eiko (Emerald Light, Medica/Haste). All three are incredibly useful, especially when you need to bring both Shellga and Protectga to a fight, saving you an ability slot.


Mitigation While Missing The Trinity

I'm a Day 1 player of FFRK, which means I have an impressive amount of gear and abilities. A really impressive amount. Yeah, I've spent probably about $100 on the game, but I've also played for 9 months, which works out to less than what I'm paying for WoW, so I'm okay with this. But even still, I'm missing Wall and Hastega from the Trinity. As mentioned, I have three Medicas (Y'shtola, Vanille, Mystery Veil), though only two of them are really fantastic.

Unmitigated on a character with ~250 Resistance, Rubicante dishes out ~5400 damage single target to a character. Most of my characters have 4000 health of so. Rubicante resists Breaks, so Magic Breakdown will "only" reduce that by about 41%, bringing each shot down to ~3,175 damage.

Shellga increases Resistance by 100%, so stacking those two brings him down to ~1,774 damage a shot, which is still not enough. He'd roast me well before I could heal my party. Even with two Medicas that heal the entire party for ~1,800, I can't spam them every round, so we need to reduce damage further.

So either I had to find a way to fit Full Break on my team, or I suck it up and use my "Wandering Record Warrior", AKA friend power, for 2 uses of Wall. This would mean that with Shellga, Wall, and Magic Breakdown, said attack would only do ~991 damage, well within healable range.

For funsies, Celes' default Soul Break, Magic Shield also boosts the party's Resistance by 50%, and is stackable, bringing us to a total of ~705 damage with all my possible mitigation up for the largest single target attack he can bring to bear. His AoE attack would only hit the party for ~423 damage.

So we can survive, and I'm pretty much obligated to bring Celes, Y'shtola, and Vanille, and a Wall for a friend, leaving me with 2 other characters to bring, but no Hastega.


Dealing With Mechanics and Dishing Damage

The next step was to fit someone on my team who could use Thief 4 abilties. Rubicante is weak to ice/water damage, but every 3 turns he'll put up his cloak, which makes him absorb those elements instead, and counter pretty much everything. Basically, when he cloaks, you're going to get wrecked.

However, you can force him to remove the cloak early by "stealing" from him, similar to the mechanic in the original FFIV game. In this case, your options are Steal Defense or Steal Power. Steal Power is the only that ups your own damage, and given most of my attacks are going to be magic since Rubicante counters physical attacks often, Steal Defense makes not much sense.

So now my party was:
Celes (Magic Caster)
Vanille (Magic Caster/Healer/Buffer/Whatever)
Y'shtola (Healer)
Magic Caster
Thief

No Thief can use Full Break and Steal Power, so rather, I decided to use Spellblade for Watera Strike. That meant using Balthier, as he is the only current Thief 4 with Spellblade 3.

Which left us with a Magic Caster to bring. Since I had a fantastic weapon for Rydia, and she would get the Realm bonus, Rydia it was. For Celes I had a FFIV synergy 5* Ice Rod thanks to the earlier FFIV event loot that increased ice damage dealt, so she got all my ice spells, and Rydia got all my Water spells.

I still needed to fit Magic Breakdown, Shellga, a heal, and to deal with the fact I didn't have Hastega, I needed Haste. Y'shtola can use Magic Breakdown, so that meant Vanille was going to be my buffer with Shellga and Haste. I finally had a party:

You'll notice that pretty well every character is wearing a Mage robe of sorts, for Resistance. Most characters had 300 Resistance or more rather than the 250 I was using baseline for my calculations, which meant taking a further 39% less damage or so. Add to that Vanille and Y'shtola wearing Fire Resistance accessories, and my mitigation was through the roof.

You'll also notice that my two offensive casters weren't using Devotion or Impetuous Youth for their Record Materia. Those would reduce their Resistance, and frankly, survival was more important than DPS in this case, especially since I could capitalize on elemental weaknesses.


The Battle

Combat with Rubicante himself still required a few S/L's. Interestingly, his first attack is always Blaze, which does 25% of the party's HP in damage, unmitigatable. This allows you a round to set up defenses, and solves to an extent the problems I had with other fights being RNG heavy and taking a blast to the face off the bat.

However, timing issues and figuring when to use abilities are really what caused me to have to reload a few times. Who to Haste first, in what order for maximum survivability. The timing of Steal Power got me a few times, too. Rubicante is fast. Even with Haste, if I hadn't started an action by the time his second attack got off, I usually waited until I could Steal power for his third to uncloak him. Also, Water spells have a faster cast time for some reason than other spells, so that timing threw me a couple times too.

Sentinel's Grimoire, my Wall, I had to hold off from using for the first 25% of the battle or so. I couldn't kill him fast enough to keep the buff for the entire battle, and he does less damage in the first 50% of his health than he does in the last 50% (Triple Firaga can go sit on a tack, thank you).

But eventually:

Woohoo! Nailed him! It was a hard fight, and when you think mobile games you don't necessarily think of the strategy required to beat an enemy of this difficulty. These Ultimate fights are really where FFRK shines in my eyes: when both the meta setup and the actual fight execution itself are a puzzle.

Despite having to go through 262,029 health to kill him, I had just enough ability uses to make it through. I had just run out of Steal Power, I was down to 1 heal left, no Soul Break power left in the tank for my two Medica users, both casters had maybe 3 or 4 casts left, and Balthier has 1 use of Watera Strike remaining when Rubicante went down. Talk about balanced on a knife's edge!

All in all, I've really been enjoying these fights. Well done, DeNA!
#FFRK, #Theorycraft

[Final Fantasy Record Keeper] Exploit Softens Terrible Game Design

For the past 3 months I've played a lot of Final Fantasy Record Keeper. It's a mobile game where you end up having to save the Final Fantasy worlds by battling it out with their enemies/bosses brought to life. It's a bit of nonsense story-wise, but the game itself is...well, somewhat fun generally with moments of great fun, but mostly satisfying I guess?


What is FFRK?

The gist is you collect characters from FF games, gather gear to wear and upgrade, collect orbs to build and upgrade abilities, to take on more and more difficult challenges. It plays (preys?) upon nostalgia quite effectively, as everyone has been given the sprite treatment (if they hadn't been sprites already) and backgrounds, music, victory music, enemies, bosses, and gear are from the Final Fantasy games.

Where the collecting is interesting is it's easy to get characters, collecting orbs for abilities just takes time, and gear is where they use the gacha-style shop to pay for pulls. But they're pretty free with the currency to make pulls all around. I've made 4 11-pulls so far with their currency, Mythril, which if I had paid for it would've cost me $120. But characters and gear are more powerful when you're fighting in the realm they're from. Example: you want to fight an FF6 boss, so bring along Terra and she basically has +10 levels worth of stats. Equip Tidus from FFX with an FF6 piece of armor, and the armor would provide a lot more defense.

Items with Record Synergy for the realm you're in are highlight blue, and characters have a blue aura.

This Realm Synergy makes collecting highly satisfying, because it allows you to take on challenges more difficult than you would be able to otherwise. But almost more important than stats are the abilities. Each character can bring along two abilities, based on that character (ie: Celes can bring Spellblade and lower level Black Magic, whereas Locke can bring Thievery and some lower level Combat abilites), so boss fights become a puzzle. Should I bring elemental magic? Should I bring status effects? Defensive abilities?


Terrible Game Design Choices

This sounds like the basis of a somewhat interesting game, and indeed, FFRK is at its best when it's giving you those puzzle elements. However, the game as a whole is marred extremely by massive difficulty spikes and horrendous RNG. Because of how stats work, and how Realm Synergy plays into things, there's a limited window of opportunity where "difficulty" is meaningfully encountered.

It takes a little luck with equipment, but it's relatively easy to overpower lower encounters to the point where the gameplay is simply where you choose to spend your stamina. Otherwise, auto-battle it out (made even easier by a recent change to give you battle speed, which is a nice convenience function). Mind you, you can choose lower level characters to give you a challenge and them some experience points, but since equipment and abilities can be moved pretty easily, that's tempered rather quickly.

Later on, the difficulty spikes immensely. Random battles become a herculean task unto themselves, where you will be cursing your Black Mage for getting two attacks in a row that you couldn't think of countering and watching him die. Oh, and you get penalized for taking too much damage or too many deaths by getting less experience at the end. That being said, having some difficulty isn't a bad thing. There are definitely cases where I'm clearly attempting to bat above my weight class, and that's okay that I'm getting demolished. Smart usage of abilities mitigates that quite a bit.

But the RNG, holy cow. I realize that DeNA wants to push people to use money on battles, but some of the RNG is absolutely stupid. Enemy AI isn't terribly bright. The grand majority have a list of attacks, and each attack effectively has a percentage chance to activate each turn. Many of them are entirely unfair, with absolutely no way to counter it.

One such ability, until recently, was insta-kill attacks. Oh sure, you could resurrect the character, but your performance was penalized severely for an attack you literally could do nothing about. Thankfully DeNA has softened that stance recently and only penalize you for dead characters at the end of combat, allowing you to react to the damage at least.

Another such insanity were some enemies that cast an ability called "Gale". Gale is an AoE attack that reduced your entire party to 5% of their maximum health, regardless of how much health you had. Often, another enemy on screen would attack just after and kill a character. Outside of a single character's Soul Break (like Limit Breaks), there are no AoE heals in FFRK. Oh, and one of the things you were penalized for is total damage taken, which a single use of this attack would reduce your performance score to zilch on that count.

Gale is unadulterated bullshit.

A second example was a level where random enemies had a 75% chance to spam Tsunami, and often times two of them would do it, taking out half your party's health and there was nothing you could do about it because you didn't have a chance to set up defenses.

So in the face of such enemy "tactics" alone I'd have given up in frustration long ago. You start battles with your ATB bars filled at random, so sometimes enemies could kill you off before you had a chance to react and set up defenses. Sometimes enemies had unfair attacks period. Combined, there were fights that made me want to throw my iPad through a wall in frustration.


Exploiting a Feature to "Fix" the Game Design

But there is a workaround! To keep people from losing stamina when internet cut out or the app crashed, or someone had to walk away, the game stores the state at the beginning of each individual combat on the server. However, if you cut out in the middle of a given combat, and the app reloaded, you'd be back at the beginning of that combat. The FFRK Reddit community calls this the Save/Load Exploit (or S/L for short). Basically, this allows you to restart any given individual combat without eating your limited stamina, working around bullshit starts (or mistakes).

Enemies killed your Black Mage before you could act? S/L. Gale? S/L. Missed Blinding the boss 4 times in a row because the stupid ability only has a 10% activation rate? S/L. You still need to complete the puzzle aspect, because you can't just waltz into a difficult boss with any combination of gear, characters, or abilities, but if the game didn't have this exploit? I'd have probably stopped playing long ago.

I've spent some money, $30, for a single 11-pull, because I felt I had enough enjoyment to do so. The nostalgia factor with the music, the bosses, and the characters has been very satisfying. I enjoy the puzzle aspect of many of the bosses. I'm okay with some aspect of P2W with pulling gear, especially since they're quite generous with handing out currency as you complete content. And the fact that abilities are just a factor of time and digging up the right orbs is great, meaning even free-to-play accounts can do quite a bit--the Reddit community has a number of strict F2P players who've managed to complete the hardest content in the game, so kudos to them.

But the sheer RNG and some enemy ability bullshit factors are frustrating in the extreme, and the widespread usage of the S/L exploit to combat it tells me that it's not good game design, but likely a way to milk players. Thankfully, DeNA probably won't be able to "fix" this exploit without screwing over legitimate disconnects and the like, so I don't see it changing anytime soon. I would prefer, however, that DeNA fix some of the egregious terrible combat issues instead. A little judicious use of better AI would certainly help, as would just not designing bullshit "AI wins!" abilities. Until then, I'll keep using S/L so I can enjoy the rest of the game. #FFRK, #GameDesign, #Exploits