Puzzle & Dragons

[tnc]

I was going to try Fire Emblem Heroes but I guess it's more of the same thing huh?

I played Sega's Shin Megami Tensei Liberation Dx2 for a week and sorry to say it was just grinding to reach 5 star demons and the grinding was no fun. Especially the story quests.

[Immryr]

i don't play pad any more, partly cause they stopped updating the euro server, but i was already only playing it once in a while when they announced they were going to do that. i had a good time playing it for a fairly long time, but i have absolutely no interest in getting into any other kind of freemium game. in general i hate the way these games are designed, i just happened to really like the puzzle element of pad and once i got into the game the team building side of it really grabbed me too.

(I only played P+D for a few weeks. My biggest gripe would be how it pretty much locks progress behind the date on the calender or your willingness to put money into their pockets.

i really don't think PAD gates your progress behind a pay wall. i played for over a year and cleared most of the end game content that was available without paying anything. if anything i thought they were pretty generous with the freebies they gave out. even the day of the week thing isn't a problem since they added the ability to trade things, not that it was too much of a problem before that.

[tnc]

I don't know why I suddenly had the urge to play one of these games. Maybe I should just play an RPG.

[BryanM]

There are good features that come with the bad. I especially enjoy that they use illustrations when most AAA games these days all have floating polygons everywhere instead. (Granblue had the lead artist and composer from Final Fantasy 6, and man does it have some strong onboarding for the nerds nostalgic for that particular game and aesthetic.) The gambling aspect is an excellent source of randomization and variance. The feeling that there's something new every week can be very overstimulating to someone exposed to that for the first time - we're too used to content patches that take months and years to appear. New stuff every week? That's mind blowing.

It's important to look at them more as Soap Opera video gaming - something to supplement your other activities that aren't interesting enough to occupy your entire attention.

i really don't think PAD gates your progress behind a pay wall. i played for over a year and cleared most of the end game content that was available without paying anything.

Well, what I mean is the kind of progress in the sense of getting more useful stuff. These games throttle it by the date on the calender pretty heavily to maximize retention.

The worst kind of feeling is when a design gets to the point that it feels like gains are only made from logging in for two minutes every day. And actual time played or mastery of the game doesn't count for much of anything.

I actually think features like a slow multi-month grind for stuff like Myr or Eternals is conceptually great (though the execution is usually "do this trivial thing 10,000 times"). But having to sit around for an entire year to be able to get a Xeno weapon... that's just ass.

[guigui]

I can confirm that PAD can be played freely pretty well, and most game content can be cleared this way, especially with multiplayer.

The team building aspect is pretty nice ; I spent many off-game hours thinking of how I'd build my team for the next upcoming dungeon.
And I always thought this game, as opposite to regular match 3, does require skills. I mean I saw people regularly clearing a dungeon with my team, when I just could not do it.

Now the real threat comes when you want to play the game optimally : not losing stamina, clear every dungeons, get the best cards, max all your cards and so on. This is when you need to login all day long, everyday. No more social life.

the day of the week thing isn't a problem since they added the ability to trade things

I have quit before the trading system, how does this work ?

[Aisha]

I still play and enjoy the game, because I think the puzzling and team building mechanics are still sound, but my approach has become very casual. I just feel that, between GungHo's increased generosity with gifts and the quality of life features they've implemented over the past year and a bit, I'm better able to play the game on my terms. On many days, I won't do more than just log in for a minute to see if there are any gifts to collect, and if I feel the itch to play or speed progress on a project up, I can do that too. Micro-managing my stamina just isn't important anymore.

[Necronopticous]

I sold my account some time ago and have since moved on to girly Chinese dress-up game, Love Nikki.

[Vexorg]

I stopped playing PAD months ago, but still have my accounts active if I ever go back. For the most part I moved onto Legendary: Game of Heroes, which does some things better and some things worse than PAD, but which I've enjoyed reasonably well. In my experience, in PAD how well you can do in handling content depends a LOT on what you get out of the rare egg machine, and it's very possible to go for long stretches of gettng absolutely nothing that will help you. At least in Legendary it's easy enough to get some heroes and relics that will be immediately useful in any given weekly event and have fun with it, even if you don't spend money. That said, at the high levels it gets to be very much pay-to-win, and we're talking hundreds of dollars at a time, on heroes that will likely be useful mostly for the current event and little else. It's very much a Flavor of the Week meta, but at least it's entertaining.

[Immryr]

Well, what I mean is the kind of progress in the sense of getting more useful stuff. These games throttle it by the date on the calender pretty heavily to maximize retention.

The worst kind of feeling is when a design gets to the point that it feels like gains are only made from logging in for two minutes every day. And actual time played or mastery of the game doesn't count for much of anything.

I actually think features like a slow multi-month grind for stuff like Myr or Eternals is conceptually great (though the execution is usually "do this trivial thing 10,000 times"). But having to sit around for an entire year to be able to get a Xeno weapon... that's just ass.

hmm. i think skill is a huge factor in PAD, as guigui said i've seen plenty of people clearing really hard end game content with "bad" teams while i either struggled to or couldn't clear them with an op team. sure you can just wait for power creep and you will probably be able to clear anything once they introduce new stronger leaders or skills/awakenings which circumvent the most annoying mechanics but by that point there will also be new and harder dungeons which you'll need to improve your actual playing skill for.

also when you've been playing a while making something like myr is not really a multi month grind, again especially now that trading exists. i could do it in a day or two. i have no idea what a xeno weapon is so i can't comment on that.

when you start the game obviously it does take time to build up your box, with god fests happening twice a month and your stamina bar being really limited, but really all you need to begin with is a half decent leader.


@guigui: trading is just for non-rem monsters. iirc you choose a card you want to trade away and then put up some options of things you would accept as a trade, people in your friends list can then see this and make a trade with you. i think there is a cost for this in coins oh and you need to be friends with someone for 30 days before you can trade with them.

using discord made this system amazing as you can just become friends with the whales who have insane amounts of box space and 10 of everything sitting around to help you out.

[Immryr]

I sold my account some time ago and have since moved on to girly Chinese dress-up game, Love Nikki.

damn, i wish i could sell mine. unfortunately the value of an account on a dead server is probably very low!

[tnc]

Wow! The artwork on Granblue Fantasy is pretty awesome. I tried Fire Emblem a couple of hours and the gameplay seems basic and shallow from what I've played so far. BryanM, Would you say Granblue Fantasy is similar in that sense?

Yes, what I meant to say was that even if a game requires you to grind, you should be able to win with skill rather than grinding or paying money. When you lose interest in the gameplay itself and it becomes nothing more than repeating the same tasks to level up, there isn't much reason left to play it anymore. So you guys are saying Puzzle and Dragons is more skill based than the other games?

[Aisha]

@guigui: trading is just for non-rem monsters. iirc you choose a card you want to trade away and then put up some options of things you would accept as a trade, people in your friends list can then see this and make a trade with you. i think there is a cost for this in coins oh and you need to be friends with someone for 30 days before you can trade with them.

using discord made this system amazing as you can just become friends with the whales who have insane amounts of box space and 10 of everything sitting around to help you out.

In addition to this, they also added the Monster Exchange system. It's a separate system that allows you to exchange common drops for basic evolution materials and experience fodder, which you can subsequently exchange up for more uncommon materials and higher-value experience fodder. It kind of undermines the Monster Trading system which you described, because you don't have to deal with other people, but they are both useful in different ways.

The other main selling point of the Monster Exchange system is that, whenever there is a special REM or collab, all the 6-star and 7-star cards from it are made available at the Monster Exchange. So if you don't want to waste stones/money, or if you just aren't lucky enough to pull what you want, you can trade for it instead. (Granted, the cost is very high, but it's workable even for FtP.)

[guigui]

So you guys are saying Puzzle and Dragons is more skill based than the other games?

Well, even at high level, the game still requires you to play well and build your team very carefully to clear the new contents, so yes in this sense PAD is always skill and team-building based.

[tnc]

Well, even at high level, the game still requires you to play well and build your team very carefully to clear the new contents, so yes in this sense PAD is always skill and team-building based.

That sounds good. You are convincing me, guys wish me luck.

[BryanM]

Wow! The artwork on Granblue Fantasy is pretty awesome. I tried Fire Emblem a couple of hours and the gameplay seems basic and shallow from what I've played so far. BryanM, Would you say Granblue Fantasy is similar in that sense?

I consider the battle system as better than Dragon Quest/Final Fantasy, in that it's not yet another unnecessary clone of those games with MP spam skills. Active skills have recharge times, there's buffs, debuffs, barriers etc. This stance character is kind of like a rubix cube the first time you see her, taking a couple minutes to untangle how she works, for example. Which is more stimulus than "cast Double Ultima every turn except when you need to cast Heal".

A feature that's not something you see very often is that it has "raids". So it's a real time, and turn based game. Unfortunately when it comes to damage racing, this means most skills are inferior to hitting the Attack button. (Also since the servers are in Japan, gaijin are strictly inferior beings thanks to ping time.)

The first week is pretty fun, but after that I consider the game to be worse than those endless Baal runs in Diablo 2. It's not much different from pulling the arm on a slot machine for 2 minutes and hoping what you need comes out.

One advantage is it's a Chrome based game, so it doesn't require an emulator to play on a PC. Just put in the URL, register an account (hopefully with a secondary email address that can tolerate the mobaspam), and go. I believe they're giving daily free 10 draws right now, and that's a rare thing that only happens three times a year.

So you guys are saying Puzzle and Dragons is more skill based than the other games?

In the sense that it's more than just pushing a button to get a result, sure.

[tnc]

I consider the battle system as better than Dragon Quest/Final Fantasy, in that it's not yet another unnecessary clone of those games with MP spam skills. Active skills have recharge times, there's buffs, debuffs, barriers etc. This stance character is kind of like a rubix cube the first time you see her, taking a couple minutes to untangle how she works, for example. Which is more stimulus than "cast Double Ultima every turn except when you need to cast Heal".

A feature that's not something you see very often is that it has "raids". So it's a real time, and turn based game. Unfortunately when it comes to damage racing, this means most skills are inferior to hitting the Attack button. (Also since the servers are in Japan, gaijin are strictly inferior beings thanks to ping time.)

The first week is pretty fun, but after that I consider the game to be worse than those endless Baal runs in Diablo 2. It's not much different from pulling the arm on a slot machine for 2 minutes and hoping what you need comes out.

One advantage is it's a Chrome based game, so it doesn't require an emulator to play on a PC. Just put in the URL, register an account (hopefully with a secondary email address that can tolerate the mobaspam), and go. I believe they're giving daily free 10 draws right now, and that's a rare thing that only happens three times a year.

But you don't need a pc to play it, right? It is entirely playable on a smartphone?

[Vexorg]

PAD gets to be very skill-based at higher levels. A lot of the most powerful heroes are combo-based, and require either high numbers of combos (the ability to build 7-10x combos on a consistent basis), being able to match 5 or 6 colors of orbs, or being able to form very specific patterns on the board to do the maximum amount of damage. When I played I got really good at two-prong attacks (a lot of my teams were based around them) but something like a Shiva Dragon or a Dark Athena will get you through most mythical difficulty content and not much more beyond that.

[BryanM]

Yeah, the multipliers get crazy. I remember thinking "no way it's like that!" when first learning that the two leader skills are multiplied together.

But you don't need a pc to play it, right? It is entirely playable on a smartphone?

Yep, all these games are designed for mobile.

Personally I'd find PAD easier to play on a tablet.

[Jon]

Feel free to send an invite once you get your account up and running, tnc.

331,650,356

I would definitely wait until tomorrow to start playing so you have a chance at pulling a godfest exclusive card as a starter. Be sure to let us know what you get!

Reading this will help you get a handle on things:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2P ... XW0gvP/pub

[tnc]

Thanks everyone and thanks Jon! I will make sure to send an invite and tell you what I get.

[tnc]

I sold my account some time ago and have since moved on to girly Chinese dress-up game, Love Nikki.

I respect your self-confidence, sir. It takes some to play a dress-up game as a male adult.

I played Puzzle & Dragons for a while and I can't imagine playing it more than a week really. I'm not a very patient person. But I knew what I was getting myself into already so... not much logic to what I'm saying really.

[guigui]

I sold my account some time ago and have since moved on to girly Chinese dress-up game, Love Nikki.

I respect your self-confidence, sir. It takes some to play a dress-up game as a male adult.

I played Puzzle & Dragons for a while and I can't imagine playing it more than a week really. I'm not a very patient person. But I knew what I was getting myself into already so... not much logic to what I'm saying really.

Oh, that is a shame you cannot continue playing (or a blessing for your wife/GF, hoping you have one). Especially with Jon as a friend, you'd have a good start.
But yeah, I remember the early game is pretty hard, many things to understand. Reading to that beginner guide is scary indeed !

Well let us know if you keep playing, and ask some stupid questions if you feel like it.

[tnc]

Oh, that is a shame you cannot continue playing (or a blessing for your wife/GF, hoping you have one). Especially with Jon as a friend, you'd have a good start.
But yeah, I remember the early game is pretty hard, many things to understand. Reading to that beginner guide is scary indeed !

Well let us know if you keep playing, and ask some stupid questions if you feel like it.

Thanks guigui. The thing I mostly had a hard time understanding was which monsters to use for fusion to get the most experience out of and which ones to keep for future use. I understand that as you level up, the gold you have to pay for each fusion increases too. So it's best to get the most experience out of every fusion. So you level up whatever you're feeding to your main monster for five slots until the gold your paying for the fusion doesn't surpass your gain. But since there are many different monsters, I guess what you do is experiment? The carbuncles seem to give good experience though.

By the way I pulled an Oda Nobunaga from the rare egg machine.

[guigui]

Well, basically :

- Gold is not a problem in the game (except maybe until very endgame), you'll have too much of it very rapidly. See with Jon (or another friend ) if he can run you through a Goemon dungeon (if that still exists, Jon ?) to gain 100K's rapidly.

- Never feed monsters coming out from an egg machine, favorite them as soon as you roll them.

- Feeding regular monsters for experience is good at the very beginning, but does not last. The best is to feed Dragons such as this one : http://www.puzzledragonx.com/en/monster.asp?n=179
Again, see with if a friend can run you through an XP Dragon dungeon.

- This http://www.puzzledragonx.com site I just linked to is your bible. Here is your leader : http://www.puzzledragonx.com/en/monster.asp?n=2923
And YES, since it has 6 stars in its base form, Oda Nobunaga is a very good roll (unless things have changed since I quit...)

- With this leader, I guess you can create a pretty nice team since it gives attack multiplier to all devils in your team. So basically :
** Oda Nobunaga as leader
** Devils cards in your team (the type of a card is shown at the top right corner), preferably dark color
** Pair with a friend that also has a leader giving ATK multiplier to devil, or dark cards

Hope this helps you.

[tnc]

Well, basically :

- Gold is not a problem in the game (except maybe until very endgame), you'll have too much of it very rapidly. See with Jon (or another friend ) if he can run you through a Goemon dungeon (if that still exists, Jon ?) to gain 100K's rapidly.

- Never feed monsters coming out from an egg machine, favorite them as soon as you roll them.

- Feeding regular monsters for experience is good at the very beginning, but does not last. The best is to feed Dragons such as this one : http://www.puzzledragonx.com/en/monster.asp?n=179
Again, see with if a friend can run you through an XP Dragon dungeon.

- This http://www.puzzledragonx.com site I just linked to is your bible. Here is your leader : http://www.puzzledragonx.com/en/monster.asp?n=2923
And YES, since it has 6 stars in its base form, Oda Nobunaga is a very good roll (unless things have changed since I quit...)

- With this leader, I guess you can create a pretty nice team since it gives attack multiplier to all devils in your team. So basically :
** Oda Nobunaga as leader
** Devils cards in your team (the type of a card is shown at the top right corner), preferably dark color
** Pair with a friend that also has a leader giving ATK multiplier to devil, or dark cards

Hope this helps you.

Thank you guigui! It helps me indeed!

[guigui]

Is anyone here still playing this game on a regular basis ?

I'm asking because I have a quite up to date account (thanks Jon) which needs a new home since I cannot take care of it myself.
Some figures :
* rank 712, 370+stamina
* 8000+ plusses in bank
* many leaders good subs (Yusuke, Yog, Radra, ALB among many others)

I guess this is a great account to back up your main one on a second device, and to make multiplayer way faster by cooping with yourself.

Let me know if you have any interest in getting this account.

[guigui]

Necroing this to mention that the Switch Puzzle & Dragons Gold game is available since mid january 2020.

This game is purely pvp, and imho it captures the 2 primary essences of PAD quite nicely : skill needed to match, team construction.
It is full non IAP, there are 21 leaders to choose from, and about 600 subs.
Having quit PAD 3 years ago because it was too much time consuming for my OCD, I find there a great way to satisfy my matches needs.

Anyone here plays or intends to play it ?

Here is a good video detailing it, made by a guy who knows the mobile game :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_cont ... e=emb_logo