Yup! LP/MGH is perfectly solid. You should probably max out your protector's back guard with that setup.Blinge wrote:If I swap out the beast, who isn't all that useful really, for a Hexer.. Will my team work with two up front?
It'll destroy his defenses. Dampen alters the target's damage resistances (cut, pierce, bash, fire, ice, and lightning) so that it takes at least 120% damage from all of them. If they already took 120% or more then it does nothing. With dampen golem will take about two and a half times as much physical damage as you're currently doing but it won't make him any weaker against elemental damage. Since your team is pretty much all physical it should help a lot. I don't think a hexer has a way to cancel his regeneration but hopefully the extra damage will be enough.Blinge wrote:And will Dampen take care of that frickin' Golem ?
Hexers also have a skill called frailty that reduces defense by a set amount but iirc it won't stack with dampen. If the enemy is weak or neutral to your damage go with frailty, if they're resistant go with dampen. If you don't know, dampen is the safer bet, and you can save skill points and ignore frailty if you want. Max out sapping, which will reduce all enemies' attack power by 20%. Against golem specifically, it will also cancel rocksoul. That should make up for the defense you're losing by trading a beast for a hexer. You can cast leaden to slow golem down and see if it makes your medic faster than him, which will help a lot. I believe some of golem's buffs will cancel your debuffs but just recast if that happens. If the golem does have a defense buff that dampen can't cancel, try putting one point in frailty and see if that cancels it. The nice thing about these debuffs is that, unlike conditions, they work 100% of the time.
One of the hexer's most interesting skills is revenge. It deals "almighty" damage (nothing resists it, nothing is weak against it) based on how much HP the hexer is missing. If you load your hexer with health enhancing equipment and deliberately bring them near death it can easily deal 4 digit damage. The downside is your hexer will die in one hit and since they're slow, dedicated revenge hexers have an unfortunate tendency to go down before firing a shot. After you get a polar rod for your medic, get a second one for your hexer. Even if you don't dedicate your hexer to revenge, it's worth having around for times when your health naturally falls low and for when you already have three curses on the enemy.
The protector's force skill makes your party invincible for one turn. There's a late game consumable called axcela II that fills up 50% of an ally's force meter. So your protector uses painless at the start of the turn, then two of your teammates feed them axcela IIs and your other two team members attack. Repeat that every turn until you win. A full inventory of axcela IIs you'll get 30 turns of invincibility which is enough time to beat anything. It synergizes especially well with revenge hexers. To a lesser extent you can pull the strategy off with a gunner or dark hunter instead of a protector, but neither is quite as reliable. The gunner needs to be faster than the enemy for it to work. The dark hunter's force skill won't stop certain attacks, notably including the true last boss's ultimate attack, and it will outright backfire against the dreaded muckdiles.Blinge wrote:What's that protector cheese method?
Regular axcelas should already be available, and while they're not as useful in battle, you can use a bunch of them before the boss fight to get an advantage. A free turn of invincibility from your protector, another from your gunner, and a one-time full party revive + heal from your medic should help a lot.
Yeah, removing FOE experience was stupid. Farming bosses seems silly but I don't mind it. It's easy to get your team trained up fast and it's the best way to make money. I like to retire my team at 70 and finish at 71 since boss farming is so efficient.Blinge wrote:I've already started levelling a hexer. Haven't bothered to run the clock to bring bosses back yet, seems absurd.
It was really dumb of them to remove xp gain from FOEs in this game.
I doubt i'll play Etrian 3 for years because this has burned me.
There are honestly a lot of frustrating things about 2, though. For me the worst part is how vague the side quests are about what you need to do and where you need to go. I wouldn't hesitate to look up a solution at the first sign of trouble. Another issue is how many enemies are nearly immune to physical or elemental damage, which can shut down certain team builds for no real reason. A hexer with dampen solves that just fine though. Remember those awful pumpkins that don't seem to take damage from anything? Cast dampen and they go down like they're random encounters. On that note, the class balance is a problem. If you're running RDPWH then it's smooth sailing the whole way through. If you're running something like LBMSA then you'll need to overlevel to win against anything.
The later games improve on all of those flaws. It's easy to make a bad team in 3 but it's because of the sheer complexity of the subclassing system. None of the classes are outright bad (buccaneer is the only one that comes close imo). 4 and 5 have idiot-proofed the classes to the point where pretty much anything will work.