The 44th broadcast happened today so let’s get this opinions machine rolling again.
Bumped has its bullet point write-up here as always. As usual, I’ll generally be sharing my opinions on the stuff I care about as well as a gathering spot for the various videos captured from the stream.
GODZILLA
Las Vegas Update Trailer 1:
Arks League
Seems to be a new ranking system in which you’re matched up with 19 other players. If you score well within your league, you can earn prizes like Stargem Tickets and Tri-boosters.
It’s nice that at least casual players will stand a hope in hell’s chance of actually competing as opposed to a ship-wide ranking. That said, I’m curious if there’s any matchmaking involved or if it’s just completely random.
SG Scratch Recycle
So this was finally shown and no surprise it’s a disappointment. For one thing it requires 40 Stargem Scratch items to be exchanged, which is a huge number of items. Secondly, the selection of items you can exchange for doesn’t include every item in the scratch. In particular, you can only exchange for the default variations of the Dark Falz costumes excluding the battle damaged Apprentice costume. So if you want any color variation or that, you’re still at the mercy of RNG.
To illustrate, you will need 3600 Stargems total (80 * 40), which means you need to be earning 21 Stargems per day (153 days until the scratch expires, so 3600/21). If you’re not, you don’t stand a hope of using this exchange unless they get very liberal with Stargems down the line.
As someone who has been wanting these costumes for nearly 4 years, this system continues to be an insult.
Chat Commands
Chat commands to change your facial expression and your fashion preset will be added. Not sure why it took them this long to add these, really.
New story stuff
Seems we’ll be learning more about “Earth Guides”, the resistance force against Mother Cluster. New Unite E-Trials will appear on Earth featuring members of the Earth Guides battling against Phantoms.
During the events, we meet yet another Mother Cluster Apostle, this time an Apostle of Fire named “Phaleg”. She’s demonstrated to have considerable power, which surprises the player even after the tough enemies they’ve had to deal with in the past. Not sure why we needed another apostle introduced so soon seeing as we’ve barely gotten to know the 5 they introduced all at once last time.
Bikini Scratch
Normally I wouldn’t write about this kinda stuff but it’s interesting because the three costumes on the right are the first conversions of old outfits into the Layered wear system. So it seems they are willing to do this after all, which naturally makes me ponder what other outfits are due for conversion.
Las Vegas Part 2
The two main things of note with this update are the new pet and selection of skill rings.
New Pet – Lucari- er Synchro
The main gimmick of this pet is essentially Tech-Arts, in that the pet’s power rises as you combo different PAs together.
Might be interesting, I just personally have no interest in playing Summoner myself so I’ll likely end up sticking to easy-mode Wanda whenever I’m on that alt.
Skill Rings
These are the skill rings shown so far (with credit to Bumped for the names).
L / Bullet Bow Homing
L / JB Elemental Keep
L / Standing Sign
L / A Launcher Mode
L / Short Mirage
L / Wand E Change
L / Mate Lovers
R / J Reversal Cover
Ranger finally gets some skill rings!
Another Launcher Mode changes Launcher’s basic attack to be like that of PSU Grenade Launcher weapons. Not sure why you’d do that seeing as I’m fairly sure that would make the weapon much more inconenient to use. Standing Sign on the other hand shows an effect when Standing Snipe is active which… why is this even a ring? Sure, it’s useful but this is a basic gameplay feature they’re relegating to something you have to grind for. I genuinely feel bad for Rangers right now unless those rings have some other bonuses.
Bullet Bow Homing sounds like it might change up Bullet Bow gameplay a bit, depends on how accurate it is.
Mate Lovers has a kinky name, but it’s hard to guess exactly what this ring will do. May be use-time, may be boosted heals, may change the animation, it could be all the above and other things I’m too dumb to think of.
Wand Element Change could be potentially interesting, enabling Wand users to get away with just having a single Wand rather than a rainbow selection of them. Kinda sucks for those players who already gathered a rainbow selection, but at least they have a ring-slot freed up.
Rider Quest
Kill enemies to get points, collect emblems to get bonus points. Try to get as high a score as you can within the time limit!
Enemies will still reward drops and exp, however all drops will be pooled into an end-crystal like with the current Odin Limited Quest and Mining Base Defence. The higher the score, the better your rare drop rate will be.
An emergency trial can occur during the quest which is essentially a giant Independence Day reference. Destroy the UFO’s shields before it annihilates the city!
This is a new type of quest which is separate from the Free Field. I don’t know what kind of limitations there’ll be on it if there are any. There is however at least a Klotho Client Order associated with it, though it only pays out a measly 10,000 Meseta. Sugar daddy letting me down.
Las Vegas Field
Las Vegas will first be appearing in story mode, which is slightly unusual for the release of a field but they did do it before with Kuron in Episode 3.
Aside the verticality of the map, the free field seems to be mechanically identical to the Tokyo field in that enemies are pointed out on the radar and you need to grind out quest points to clear. This may, much like Tokyo, make the field tedious to complete solo due to the smaller spawn sizes. The lower point requirement may ablate this somewhat, I also ponder if the boss may be guaranteed to spawn at a certain point quota as with recent event quests.
The map looks alright enough, albeit embarrassingly low poly in places. The most striking thing is how small it feels while riding around on the Rideroid vehicle. On foot, the map feels spacious enough but in the air it ends up feeling really small. It does also seem like it won’t be using the old map-generation system present in other areas.
Other Trailers
Es Update: Starring the new character EDGELord and a badly drawn weaponoid made by someone who has never seen a woman in real life or has no understanding of anatomy at all (Whipblade Paratizel). Some pretty dang nicely drawn ones in there as well.
Arks Festival Items: WUB WUB WUB WUB WUB
Live Concerts: Featuring Dark Falz Loser as an old woman firing lasers into the Arks Shopping mall.
I’m afraid this was the surprise trailer, so no grand surprises to talk about this time.
Question and Answers
Once again, thanks to Kami_Pepe on twitter for posting summaries of these. These are interpretations based on machine translation, so please please get in touch if you can provide something more accurate or if I’ve gotten something horribly wrong.
Q: Why can’t we have multiple weapon camos at once?
A: The original implementation of the weapon camo system was clumsy, so we can’t do this for now.
This is reminding a bit of the problem they had back in PSU when they wanted to expand the number of Photon Arts a character could learn but couldn’t due how the game was programmed. One day, Sega will learn how to do basic software engineering I’m sure…
Q: Is it possible you could allow for bulk weapon appraisal?
A: It’s something we’re currently doing a trial and error approach for, we may have something for the end of the year or early next year.
Nice to hear I guess, though I’m not sure how they’d handle the element portion unless people would be fine having bulk appraised weapons all having the same element. For the most part, I would be anyway.
As always, you can read the bullet-point rundown on Bumped here. I’m just gonna be sharing my thoughts on any particular part I feel anything about. So I’m not going to be talking about PSO2es and the additional lolis it’s gaining or the Anime character CD. That said, still quite a lot I want to talk about so strap in and get comfortable if you want to come along for the whole ride.
To start off, here’s a trailer for content coming up in July
Includes a new casino game, yet more Gunner themed outfits and this year’s Beach Wars quest which sees the return of Emperappy as well as a titled Chrome Dragon as its end-boss.
Casino Coins for Star Gems
What’s that? 1 Star Gem per day isn’t enough for you? Fear not, as you’ll soon be able to buy Star Gems with Casino Coins for the following amounts:
5 Star Gems for 5000CC
10 Star Gems for 9,800CC
20 Star Gems for 19,400CC
So you’ll be able to have a free roll at the Star Gem scratch for the low low price of 77,600 Casino Coins! Who knows, you might even get Casino Coins as a prize from the Scratch! You’re always wanted some of those!
So yeah, fairly obviously this is meant to be a bonus and not so you can use the Casino to gamble your way to victory on the SG scratch. That said, it still feels like a steep price for what it is, but I admit that even I’d be tempted to drop excess coins on it unless some good rare-boss triggers came up.
As an aside, in late July it seems you’ll be getting 1 more Stargem per account per day for simply logging into PSO2es. So they do seem intent on adding extra ways for players to earn gems, so over time the scratch may become more viable for free players. Right now the odds are still stacked against you if you want a particular outfit from the scratch.
Final Fantasy 14 Collab Stuff
Miqo’tes, Relic Weapons and more!
Most of the cosmetics stuff looks great and I’m sure this is going to be a popular scratch when it’s out. Again, it’s a bit of a shame there was no female armor among this lot but that would have been a mere cherry on top of a great cake for me.
The Limited Quest
The center of this update is going to be a quest set in the Ruins that’s essentially another all-star dungeon-style quest with set encounters. Featured enemies include Dark Falz Angel, Anga Fundarge and Guar Zigmorde among many others. Odin awaits at the very end of the quest.
Enemy drops are all pooled into a crystal at the end of the quest, much like with the recent Easter quest and the Mining Base Defense quests. That means you must clear the run in order to get any items at all.
Odin
Odin himself works much like he does in FF14, with all his AOE and spear mechanics in place. He also retains his Zantetsuken ability, which is an outright DPS race. If the MPA fails the DPS race and Odin gets to use Zantetsuken at all, the quest immediately fails.
Weakbullet is jammed on Odin, which is fast becoming the standard for PSO2 bosses it seems like. Really if they feel that strongly about Weak Bullet I’m not sure why they don’t just give the skill itself a direct nerf, except perhaps because they’d need to rebalance a bunch of existing content which expects Weakbullet at full strength (such as Magatsu).
Healing effects are also reduced during the fight, which I assume is an attempt to make the encounter feel a bit closer to how it was in Final Fantasy 14. If it’s just using the same method they use for Extreme Quests however the likes of Megiverse and HP-steal weapons shouldn’t be affected. Automate Users may want to be aware, however.
I’m really not a fan of the way this guest is engineered. Because the quest fails when Zantetsuken fires and because items are only handed out for clearing you will lose an entire quest’s worth of drops. Given this is a DPS check right at the end of the quest, for me this seems far too punishing. My worry is if the DPS check is too brutal, then after a short while it’ll be extremely difficult to actually get a run going at all as people furiously check each other’s gear and quit out of panic.
Could you blame people if they did that though? It’s not a short quest, so embarking with a group you know might fail the DPS check is a potential complete waste of your time and boosters! You will gain no items for doing so and you will make no progress with Collection Files either. If the DPS check is brutal, this is a disaster waiting to happen. If it’s forgiving however, it might be alright. The encounter looks fun enough without the DPS check. Yeah, you may argue what’s the point in a DPS check you barely notice as why have the check at all and I actually agree with you! Mostly because I detest DPS checks, however. For PSO2, this normally boils down to “how many people can get away with carrying the entire MPA”, as in how many people with the optimal builds and great gear are needed before the quest isn’t doomed from the start. Or I suppose the inverse question would be “how many people in terrible gear can the DPS check tolerate”?
In short, Sega better be careful about the design of this quest as could create an extremely toxic environment with the wrong numbers.
Comes complete with FATE JOINED message. FATEs are essentially FFXIV’s equivalent of Emergency Trials, so it’s a nice touch.
Odin will also spawn outside of the quest in regular Free Fields. Not sure if his Zentetsuken remains in-tact and I certainly hope it doesn’t retain its quest-fail mechanic! As someone pointed out on Bumped, it sure would suck to spawn into a map where a random Odin somewhere in the area uses Zentetsuken, resulting in an instant quest fail the moment you warp down there. I mean even if it doesn’t fail, getting randomly one-shot because an Odin across the map got to use the move would still be very irritating.
Weapons
The relic weapons themselves are going to be camos, not drops. There is going to be a weapon collection for this quest however and it’s a new weapon series called the “Aura” series.
What’s interesting about these weapons is more the implications it has for the game than their power. In terms of attack, they sit about the same level as Revolucio weapons. I judge this based on the Wired Lance shown, which boasts 1350 S-Atk at +35 (after removing affixes). Their latent is entirely focused on bosses however, offering a 12% boost to damage dealt to and a 15% damage reduction from bosses.
As you can imagine, this makes them relatively useless weapons in general but the interesting part of this is that they directly compete with Ideal weapons. In the case of the wired lance, the difference between Ideal Scissors and Aura Wired Lance (can’t interpret its name) is about 142 S-atk. Of course, the Ideal weapon latent is 18% damage to bosses vs Aura’s 12%. So does 142 S-atk cover the difference of about 6% damage? I’m not expert enough in the damage formula to say, but gut feeling says that the two weapons would end up fairly comparable. That fact alone is interesting, because it makes Ideal weapons redundant; at least for as long as this collection file is active (until late August it seems).
While challenge mode has had a bit of an incentive issue for a while now (Ideal weapons are already outclassed by other weapons even for bossing) to have yet another thing come along and erode it even further is kind of sad. Some of my fondest memories of PSO2 come from Challenge Mode…
AMERICA – FUCK YEAH
So yeah, they teased the next field and it turns out it’s Las Vegas in the good old USA. I’d joke that PSO2 is finally coming to America but I already did that. So did literally everyone else so… ahem.
Based on the enemies we’d seen in the data, Las Vegas was a strong guess and it turned out that one was correct! Other guesses were just America in general, Paris and Akihabara. I would not have been surprised with any of those outcomes.
Anyway, it’s just as crazy as the Tokyo reveal and I adore it, check out the trailer:
The music is “Neon Days” by a group named Rumblebee, who seemingly previously did music for Sonic Riders.
The chief thing you’re going to notice (besides all the FREEDOM) is that this map has more vertical space than any map released so far. Seeing as the ARKS can’t fly, in order to facilitate this they’ve introduced a chicken-walker style mech called the “Rideroid” that you can use to fly around the map. Vegas also seems to be enormous compared to what we’ve had so far, though that may be a misleading artifact due to the way the trailer was shot.
Notably, but not surprisingly, the Las Vegas field has an ESCA tower just like Tokyo.
Given the nature of the map, I’m pondering if it might not have the same random generation that all maps have had so far or even any at all. I’m not against this idea, as a properly hand-crafted map would be a refreshing change for PSO2, it’s just this seems like it might be the death of the old style of Free Field quest.
I should say, I don’t think the old style of Free Field quest is perfect by any stretch. I always felt like a free field shouldn’t even have a boss and should instead just be about freely wandering an area til you get bored. The boss arenas should go to a set map like they did with Train Ghidoran’s Arks Quest. In my opinion, the Kuronia and Tokyo fields becoming point grinds was not the right direction to take them as it runs counter to the philosophy of “run at your own pace”, never-mind the really irritating way Tokyo handles its spawns. Hopefully Las Vegas doesn’t handle its spawns in the same way, and with the shift from grinding stones to doing collection sheets there should be no need for a point system.
Enemies
As is tradition, let’s take still shots from the best video we can find and have a look at the enemies and, where possible, try to match them to data-mined names. As is always the case, these are caps taken from a live-stream so the quality of the images is going to be very muddy.
Let’s start with the first enemy shown, which is a thing walking on a ball. There is one enemy with AI that has a ball and that’s Phantom Pierrot A. The AI file suggests it also has a knife attack.
That thing in the bottom right seems to be a cow’s skull. While this could be Phantom Buffalo, it seems Buffalo’s AI includes the ability to stomp. I guess a skull could stomp, but these are phantom enemies so for all I know the little guy could suddenly grow a ghost body or something.
Clowns and Jesters
By appearance, I would assume this pair of clowns are the two Phantom Pierrot variants. There do seem to be two different enemies here, with the red jester in both of them.
Judging by the AI, however, it seems that both of them are in fact Phantom Pierrot B, as it’s the only one with a chainsaw attack and balloons. Unless one is a rare variant or they decided to split this into two enemies I’m not sure why the two are different colours.
In case you don’t know, a “pierrot” is essentially an old pantomime character which was a kind of sad clown.
Phantom Sniper
I did not expect this to be a rabbit riding the sign for a gun shop, but then who would have? There are two variants of this little guy, one of which seems to be the sniping variant we see above and the other can fire rockets. We only seem to see the sniping kind in the trailer.
Phantom Biker
Big beards, mullets and leather. Just about everything I wanted out of this enemy.
The AI for this guy is surprisingly complicated, but despite this there’s only really a couple of methods that stand out. It seems to have dashing attacks as well as the attack it uses in the trailer, which I assume is it’s “drift cutter” ability.
Phantom Caravan
Now, I’m making an educated guess that this enemy is caravan as it aligns with the overall circus theme the map seems to have going for it. Do a Google image search for “Circus Caravan” and you’ll see what I mean.
It has an attack where it fires something, a “cracker” attack and some slashing attacks. It also may be able to grab the player. It’s possible that it’s using the firing attack during the trailer, where it seems to be shooting balls all over the place.
Phantom Goddess
The boss is Lady Liberty riding a Sphinx. I mean, we had various guesses as to what “PhantomGoddess” would turn out to be but I don’t think any of us expected this! It’s dumb as hell and I love it.
Now, PhantomGoddess is one of the earliest datamined enemies for this area and is in fact the source of the speculation that this field would take place in Las Vegas. In particular, she has a number of attacks based on Roulette, attacks involving the Eiffel Tower (seemingly using it as a lance) and of course the Sphinx. These and of course the statue herself were all things present on the Vegas strip, which is where the assumption that the next field may have been Vegas came from. From the AI I’ve seen so far, I don’t see any suggestions as to what status effect it might be weak to however it’s a boss so naturally its AI is long and complicated so I may have missed something. It does appear to have a phase shift at 60% HP.
The rest of the enemies in this section are enemies that are presumed to belong to this field either thematically or because they arrived in the data at around the same time. However, they seemed to be missing from the teaser.
Phantom Maxwell
Has “red shot”, “blue shot” and it may have some self destruction mechanic. Beyond that, I really don’t have a clue what kind of enemy this could be. I just can’t associate “Maxwell” with anything related to the theme of the field and googling so far hasn’t turned up anything.
At least, it didn’t turn up anything for those themes. What it did turn up however was a scientific concept known as “Maxwell’s Demon“. I won’t detail too much, but the important thing is that it’s concerned with violation of thermodynamics by way of separating out hot and cold particles. There was a game based on this concept called “Maxwell’s Maniac” in which the goal was to separate red and blue molecules into color coded chambers. I suspect it’s not a coincidence that this enemy has red and blue shots!
Phantom Laplace
Again, much like Maxwell, “Laplace” as a name just doesn’t ring any bells for the overall themes of “America” and “Circus”.
Laplace does seem to have quite a number of abilities however, including a barrier of some kind, slashing and shooting attacks, the ability to summon things (summons “N” and “B”) and routines to keep track of and to go to its summons. It appears the summons are either Maxwells or it’s just that it has special routines for Maxwells in particular, I’m not sure. The complexity of its AI honestly puts it as a fairly good candidate as a mini-boss or even a boss.
So yeah, evidently Laplace and Maxwell are fairly closely related. So the question is raised, “Does Laplace turn up when I search up scientific stuff?”.Well, it doesn’t turn up in science (outside of the concept of “Laplace pressure”) so much but it does seem to come up a lot in mathematics. In particular, probabilities and statistics.
So we have potentially a mathematician/scientist theme with Laplace and Maxwell. This seems to be a fairly sharp departure from the overall themes in Las Vegas which makes me ponder if this pair of enemies may actually belong to a future field. Notably, Laplace has some routines specific to story mode.
Notably, Och Miller is a member of Mother Cluster who is a progeny mathematician. So odds seem pretty good that this pair of enemies are related to her.
Phantom Vulture:
Seems to have the ability to stick to targets and may include group-AI abilities. It contains a few grouping methods, but it’s possible that instead of having an enemy with actual flocking behavior it may be.that it’s spawned by a commanding enemy, similar to how Vardha summons Kindidds and Angel summons birds which he subsequently commands to explode.
Phantom “Track”
I guessed a long time ago that there was a good possibility that this would be an american themed field. With that in mind, I figured “track” was meant to be “truck”, especially given we already had a train in Tokyo. Its just “a” in Japanese sounds more like the “uh” sound in how most english speakers would say “Truck”, hence why they might spell it as “track”.
However, I didn’t take into account that roller-coasters were a thing, and seeing the focus on one during the trailer did make me consider the possibility that it’d be a bunch of rollercoaster cars attacking us or something. However looking at the AI it does seem like it is indeed a truck, in particular a circus truck. Its AI file is big compared to regular enemies, suggesting it may be a mini-boss. It attacks with its “carrier car”, has a “horn bazooka” and can drift. It also has methods “Circus” and “Circus Attack”.
Phantom UFO
Las Vegas is a city in the state of Nevada. Another thing that exists in Nevada is “Area 51”, so yes UFOs are quite thematically appropriate for this field. So while no UFOs showed up in the teaser I’m fairly sure this will be in Vegas.
Phantom UFO has a number of abilities, including multiple laser attacks, a method named “UFOCatch” and a “LittleGrey”. In case you’re unaware, Greys are very much a pop-culture icon in the US and the most common depiction of aliens in that region. Though the greys themselves don’t seem to be separate entities from the UFO, they do have attacks and theres a few routines for their height as well as “greydown”. Given how a common depiction of flying saucers has them grabbing things with tractor beams I’m surprised there don’t seem to be any grab or hold attacks.
Phantom Dog
Bark! The AI has a dash attack and a “fire” attack.
Phantom Roach
It has an AI file but it’s completely empty. While it’s true that Goldrahda-type enemies are all labelled “Roach” as well, it’s likely that in this case it means an actual cockroach. This enemy was only recently added, so there’s a chance this won’t show up in Vegas.
Questions Corner
Much like last time, Twitter user @kami_pepe reposted the summaries of the questions and their answers. Special thanks to Mewn and Espiokaos for help interpreting these. Let me know if theres anything drastically wrong.
Q: How do you know the breast-size of characters for the Arks Report?
A: It’s stored on characters as numerical data, so we just calculate the size based on that!
I’m glad the Japanese are asking the important questions.
Q: Sachiko has moving fingers! Will you be adding finger posing to PSO2 anytime soon?
A: There are no plans to implement this.
Presumably the main problem is they would have to add finger bones and rigging for every single outfit in PSO2, which would be a massive undertaking for such a relatively minor feature in the grand scheme of things. They’d also have to animate the fingers for most existing animations, which is a fair amount of work in its own right but not as taxing as rigging the 100s of costumes they’ve released. This I’m afraid is just going have to be something you’ll have to hope is present in PSO3 instead, whenever that happens.
Q: Why can’t we trade SG items?
A: There are two reasons for this.
Because if we didn’t, people with multiple accounts would take advantage of it given we distribute SG for free.
SG Scratch is aimed at only a portion of the userbase, so allowing trades would go against our intents.
Their first reason seems a little nonsensical to me. For one thing, you can already do this with FUN points. I mean, I guess FUN Scratch doesn’t typically last for 6 months, nor does it ever contain costumes but it can occasionally contain desirable haircuts, accessories and such, all of which are trad-able.
For the second reason, it’s possible that the system is engineered so that people are meant to log in every day. Letting people trade would mean people would just buy what they wanted instead. If this interpretation is accurate, it’s an irritating reason indeed especially given that right now even if people did log in every day they wouldn’t have nearly enough Star Gems for the amount of attempts they’d need to get what they want.There is of course the possibility that it’s aimed at whales which has its own unfortunate set of implications… Either way, I’m more convinced by their second reason than I am their first one and indeed I feel it explains their motivations for the first. A system that wants you to log in every day would potentially fall apart if you allowed people to trade.
Q: What are we supposed to do with duplicate items from the SG Scratch?
A: We plan to implement a way for you recycle duplicate items at a later date. For now,keep any spare items you have in storage! We’re sorry about this, there’s no excuse for expecting you to hold on to duplicate items.
So yeah, if you have any duplicate items or just generally SG items you don’t want I guess, hold onto them! I mean goodness knows what the eventual recycling items will end up being, but it’s better to hold on and be disappointed than to destroy your items and regret it later.
It’s anyone’s guess as to what items they’ll introduce into such a recycling shop however. I severely doubt it’ll result in a trade-in for additional Stargems, but hey that’d be appreciated!
Q: Why is there a 120 Casino Coin ticket in the SG Scratch?
A: The scratch will be up for six months, so it’s going to be a long-term thing. As you can get SG for free, you’ll have plenty of time to amass the Star Gems you require.
This is a particularly funky answer as it doesn’t really address the question at all… Assuming interpretations are correct it seems that the intention is for you to take an exceedingly long time to get what you want from the scratch. Unfortunately, as I’ve pointed out many times now, if you’re depending on the login bonuses logging in every day will give you an uncomfortably small shot at getting what you want.
Generally, I’m not at all satisfied with their answers justifying this terrible system they’ve concocted. However, as said elsewhere in this post, it’s plausible we may gain more ways to get Star Gems at time goes on, which may bring things into the realms of obtainable for dedicated players. As of right now, it doesn’t matter how dedicated you are as even if you used all the currently available methods to get Gems and logged in every day for the whole 6 months, you still basically have a small chance of getting what you want. That alone is criminal, and I hope the Japanese continue to pressure Sega over this system.
Ultimate Amduscia!??!?
There was no mention of Ultimate Amduscia, but fear not because it definitely is not canned.
As of the latest patch, PSO-World user Shadowth117 was able to piece together this shot by swapping out some of the client’s files with some recently added assets for Ultimate Amduscia.
As you may recognize, it seems to resemble Caves 3 from PSO. Of course, this is a work that is still heavily in progress and the file-swap may have altered the look of the area in unintentional ways, so this does not represent the final product at all. The little glimpse is appreciated, however.
Another thing that was added which suggests they’re working on it still is a new enemy showed up in the client, named “ult_waker_beast”. “Ult Waker” is the internal name given to Anga Fundarge, which may suggest that Ultimate Amduscia may arrive with a brand new variant. All the data can tell us is that it has a tail, has biting attacks and still uses bits like Anga Fundarge does. “Beast” is normally used to describe creatures similar to Rockbear (such as Wolgahda) but given it has a tail and bites, it may not be or resemble a Rockbear re-model at all.
So yeah, it’s still being worked on. Who knows, we may well be getting a teaser trailer for it in a live broadcast or two! Will be interesting to see what they intend to do with it with the apparent death of the stone grind post Episode 4.
Valentines is here again and once more we’re saving the women of the ARKS (of which there’s a fuckin lot of them) in the volcanic caverns of Amduscia. We’ve also gained a Limited Quest, “Chaotic Darkness”, as part of the PS Festa 2016 Web Event set in the often forgotten Facility field of Vopal, set to the Temple VR Field music of PSO (A Longing to Ancient Times). As it is a web event, I’m expecting the usual selection of prizes, so it may well be time to get your Dudu on soon…
Just gonna go over some details of the update quick. I know I’m behind on Episode 4 stuff. A Summoner guide is in the works, just been needing to get some particular bits of data for it… Kinda dropped the ball there but oh well.
As new information is coming out for this quest, the contents of this post may change. Let me know if there’s anything I got wrong.
Bingo details can be found at Bumped here. Frankly the prizes aren’t that good this time around, or else I’d put together a quick clear guide.
Limited Quest
As is the trend with these quests lately, it starts on a group teleporter before you’re allowed to begin the run. While I’m sure there are some advantages conferred by this, I’m not a huge fan of standing around waiting for the counter to hit 12/12.
The quest stars every kind of enemy that isn’t a Phantom or regular Aberrations. The bigger thing about the quest is it has multi-boss spawning E-Trials that can include multiple Dark Falz humanoids (as well as Dio Hunar). This quest also sees the introduction of 2016 Weapons Badges, which can be obtained much the same way as the 2015 badges could in their debut Limited Quest, however Bronze Badges don’t seem to exist.
The Exchange
You can use these badges to purchase a selection of nostalgic weapon camos (at 350 gold badges a pop) as well as exchanging them for stones. You can exchange 20 gold for 1 Caligula, Torana or Pleiades stones or 5 gold for a Yurlungur or Gale stone.
This means that you can effectively obtain an Orbit weapon using nothing but badges. You will need to obtain the Neros from elsewhere in order to get an Austere however. That’s not such a bad thing as Neros themselves aren’t too horrendous to obtain. They’re not exactly easy to get either but they’re a fair sight easier than Caligula.
Somewhat interestingly, they added an exchange to the Shiny Stone shop that lets you swap 100 of any spellstone for 1 gold badge. This includes small AQ stones, Elder’s Iritista and Loser’s Syncesta. This means you can effectively obtain an Orbit weapon by running VHAQs at the minute, which is a bit surprising though that’s quite a nasty exchange rate.
Just for fun, lets see the numbers required:
400 Caligula for 1 60% Austere weapon (requires 200 Nero from elsewhere.)
At 20:1, this requires 8000 Gold Badges
Requires 800,000 Spellstones of any variety
Yikes, that is a LOT of VHAQing! That said, clearly the intention isn’t to let you run AQs for Orbits but rather it’s to let you actually do something useful with all those stones laying around doing nothing. Let’s do the same for Orbit:
90 Torana and 180 Pleiades for a 60% Orbit weapon. As each individual stone is the same price, lets call it 270 stones.
At 20:1, this requires 5,400 Gold Badges
Requires 540,000 Spellstones of any variety
Given you can obtain the whole weapon this way, Caligulas only really seem worth it if you absolutely require an Austere weapon for whatever reason (maybe you’re close to the 400 Caligula you need already and so on..).
As for wether or not it’s feasible to obtain the number of badges required in the time the Limited Quest is available it’s hard to say. It’s only available for two weeks and the event itself only for a month, so I’m going to go with “no” unless your tolerance for grind is legendary.
Ultimately this exchange seems to be a means for topping off, not for starting from scratch. It lets you clear out your inventory of stones you don’t need to help you get closer to that Austere or Orbit weapon of your dreams. It’s a terribly impractical way of starting from scratch, particularly if you also want to get some Weapon Camos.
While you can exchange 2015 badges for 2016 ones, it’s at a rate of 10:1. The Yozakura series weapons still require 2015 badges though. While Yozakura are a terrible investment for 13*s anyway, they do have marginal use as fodder for element swapping and synthing, so bare this in mind before you throw all your 2015s away. The old ways of obtaining 2015s now only give 2016 badges at that, so unless they update the exchange the series has become completely unobtainable now (as opposed to almost unobtainable before).
Other Quest Info
Falz Angel can drop 13* weapons appropriate for your class, which seems to be limited to the slave-series weapons. He can also reportedly drop 13* eggs. This change applies to any Falz Angel in the lv71+ level range as far as I know, however it’ll only be in effect during the lifespan of the limited quest. It seems Slave-series weapons are also an area drop of the entire quest, but may not be subject to the class-based bonus to rates that Angel reportedly has.
Diabo Igrithys turns up, but is the regular slowed-down kind you encounter in Ultimate Naberius. It, Gal Gryphon and Falz Angel seem to be more likely to appear towards the end of the quest (around the 1800 point mark). I don’t think Gryphon can actually spawn any earlier than this, but the roughly 1800 point mark seems to spawn a guaranteed selection of rare-dropping bosses.
Unfortunately, Dio Hunar doesn’t seem to be able to drop Caligula or Ares stones (or at least if it can the rates are abysmally low) like it used to in the Christmas Emergency Quest. This is because the EQ version was Lv80 and this one only Lv75.
Valentines Emergency Quest
Another run around in circles affair with a gate that likely won’t get fired until your MPA is 12/12. Standard stuff, really. Has every flavor of Darker along with the Amduscia natives. The main attraction to this quest is the mutated Diabo Igrythis. This variant of the fire-y bird is the same as the pre-nerf Ultimate Naberius, so it will seem much faster and more aggressive than its Limited Quest cousin. As with other seasonals, this Emergency Quest can happen whenever there’s a general emergency on its planet, as well as at the scheduled times.
This Diabo interestingly drops a large number of badges and Gale stones. It also drops items with Mutation II affixed onto it, which boosts the chance of fusing Stat III affixes into Stat IV affixes. Diabo seems to be a guaranteed spawn once you hit the 210 point mark.
It’s something we’ve known was coming for some time, but the exact nature of the update was left purely to speculation. A certain shot from a teaser trailer for unrelated content showed us a later version of the title counter, which seemed to suggest that we would be getting one new XQ and possibly new floors for the existing ones.
Dengeki recently posted an article talking about the January update, including information on scratches and other uninteresting stuff. This is concerning early January, so presumably these are the final Episode 3 updates.
Extreme Solo
On January 13th, a new Extreme Quest will be added, with a few restrictions.
It consists of a mere 10 floors and can only be cleared once per week. It also costs 5 Extreme Passes to run at all and as the subtitle suggests it can only be run solo. Clearing the quest will give you a chance at earning a class sticker. That’s it.
No information on new stones or new weapons, so it seems it isn’t quite the Extreme Quest update I was expecting at least. The quest itself does appear to be tough at a glance, with Ultimate bosses being hurled at you along with the above pictured brawl with both Angel and Hunar.
Not sure what’s going to be more annoying here, the Nyaus or Karin…
While it’s nice to see a new quest aimed at solo players, it’s a little irritating that such a strict limit and steep cost seems to be placed on it. There’s a chance that once the reward is better understood that this limit may prove necessary. The rewards hinted at so far also don’t seem to justify the apparent difficulty and cost of the quest. Maybe they haven’t revealed all the details yet, but at this point I’m cynical enough to believe that they think a random chance at a bit of aesthetics you can barely see is reward enough.
If this is all there is to the XQ update then I would say I’m extremely disappointed… heh heh… heh.
These changes are set to arrive some time in January.
Character Storage
This is the major new addition and is completely free. Each character you have will have its own personal inventory storage. This will contain items only for that character and items in it cannot be transferred to other characters. Each character will be able to hold 300 items each, which can be expanded permanently with Arks Cash. The time of the mule is coming, given you could now roll an alt for an additional 350 storage slots.
If your character transfers ship, their personal storage will be transferred with them. Given how seemingly unstable transferring is at the moment (causing such severe issues that they had to change how the EQ system worked to a degree just to prevent them) I can’t help but worry that the addition of this character-bound storage may introduce even more hilarious serious issues whenever people decide to jump ships.
Storage Changes
On a more minor note, Premium storage space will be expanded by 100 slots, bringing it up to 400. Basic and OTP storages are not being expanded.
Extra rental storage will also not be being expanded, but it will have additional restrictions place upon it. You will no longer be able to send items to or sell items from any of your Extra Storage boxes. You will have to go to a storage terminal in order to interact with it. The “display all storages” tab also won’t show any items in the Extra Storage boxes. These changes will not apply to your other storages.
Sega admits that this is a downgrade but has deemed it necessary to do in order to implement the other changes for whatever reason. Given how flimsily put together their database seems to be, I wouldn’t be surprised that their hands really are tied on this issue. Sega being Sega.
So ultimately this is what your new warehouse is going to look like:
Basic Storage 200 slots
Character Storage 300 slots (permanently expandable via AC)
Premium Storage 400 slots
Extra Storage 1 500 slots
Extra Storage 2 500 slots
Extra Storage 3 500 slots
Extra Storage 4 500 slots
Extra Storage 5 500 slots
OTP Storage 200 slots
Thoughts
Hey it’s additional storage space, I’ll take it! While the changes to Extra Storage seem bizarre and un-necessary, it honestly won’t affect the vast majority of the player-base anyway as most people never rent the additional storage. This is more of an issue for Sega themselves, as it makes the extra storages seem less worthwhile.
While this does go some way to alleviate storage issues caused by all the currencies that they keep insisting on adding, I still feel an actual currency storage would have been a preferred change. As it is, this doesn’t prevent them from adding ever more currencies to eventually screw us down the line again anyway.
Also my storage issues are partly caused by how annoying it can be to sort through which items are worth selling on the player shops and which can just be NPC’d. Some UI improvements could go a long way to helping deal with inventory management, as to an extent additional storage space just adds additional work on the player’s part.
These details may be subject to change. Please let me know if anything in this post is inaccurate.
Just a short post having a ponder about the new latents discovered in the latest pre-patch data.
Here’s the list:
[幻精共鳴] – Increase the power of photon blasts
[天輪滅砲] – Boost the power of Sphere Eraser
[廻天輪滅砲] – Reduce the PP cost of Sphere Eraser
[廻転翔踏] – Reduce the PP cost of Grim Barrage
[絶対破砕圏] – Deal 25/27/30% additional damage to enemies at close range
[滅壊の光刃] – Deal 21/23/25% additional damage to Darker Aberrations
[龍の威光] – Deal bonus damage to enemies that are not Dragonkin
[心気一意の閃光] – Deal 14/16/18% additional damage while HP is above 70% and PP is above 40%
[清明なる加護 ] – Recover 30/35/40% additional PP on attack, regenerate PP 15/17/20% faster and deal 10/12/15% additional damage
[勇勢疾走] – Deal additional damage while HP is above 30%
First impression is that a number of them certainly appear to be similar to the Photon-Booster potentials that are already out, suggesting that some of these will be going to Dark Falz weapons. If I were to guess, I’d say 5, 8, 9 and 10 are the Photon Booster latents.
This leaves us to speculated about the rest, which is especially relevant given a certain weapon series is coming up; the Austere series. There is a worry that they could end up with latent 1 or 6, making their hefty material cost a lot more off-putting. If it got 6, it’d be strange given the materials require playing multiple areas of the game, making such a restricted potential feel kind of inappropriate. Right now, it’s too early to say for sure as not only is data-mined content not really confirmation of anything we also can’t rule a fair number of the other latents out yet.
For now, it’s better to wait until the next update before speculating. It’ll let us rule out any latents that went to other weapons, giving us a smaller pool of things that may end up going to the Austere series. I still feel that the first person who gets an Austere weapon and discovers its potential is a brave soul indeed and potentially taking a big hit for the rest of the playerbase…
Also what the heck is up with number 7 there? An inverse racial potential? Notably its labelled as “DamageBonusRaceUlt4_1” which may suggest it has something to do with the as-yet unannounced Ultimate Amduscia. If it is a latent associated with the inevitable 13* weapon series to be released with that quest, then they could potentially be the strongest series yet as long as your target isn’t a dragon!
Reduces recast time on Chain after a successful Chain Finish depending on the chain count.
I don’t see these in the data I have seen myself, so not sure where these have come from. This same post also speculates that these and the earlier latents will go to the following weapons (forgive me, I can’t transcribe Kanji from imagery):
Bardiche -> Unknown. It’s one of the latents that doesn’t appear to be listed.
Grigoros -> Unknown. Again, one of the latents that doesn’t appear to be listed.
Saika Hyouri -> Deal 20% additional damage to airborne enemies
God Hand -> [勇勢疾走] – Deal additional damage while HP is above 30%
Celestial Laser -> Reduces recast time on Chain after a successful Chain Finish depending on the chain count. (Hahaha)
Edel Arrow -> [心気一意の閃光] – Deal 14/16/18% additional damage while HP is above 70% and PP is above 40%
Lind Wurm -> [龍の威光] – Deal bonus damage to enemies that are not Dragonkin
I think I’ve gotten that correct. I only list these for curiousity’s sake. I’m not really sold on any of their guesses. They seem to include some Magatsu weapons in this list, which is fine however it doesn’t take into account that we’re going to be getting a new selection of the Nox-series weapons. We’ll know for sure in a few days, so let’s see how right this random post on the internet turns out to be because I have nothing better to do I guess.
Let me know if I’ve gotten anything wrong in this post, thanks.
So yeah, Sega revealed a few trailers and talked about the end of Episode 3. I’ll do what I can in this post to summarise and discuss this stuff. As is usually the case with these posts, some details may be hazy. I do my best to make sure information here is accurate, but if you spot anything factually wrong please let me know.
Halloween
Just a trailer about the Halloween stuff, including your usual affair of Bingo and a seasonal Emergency Quest.
Trick or Treat 4 is the same old map, but with a selection of new enemies. This includes the Toy Darkers from Kuron (which really are probably the most appropriate Darker type for the season), Falz Dourumble and Zeta Guranz. It also seems to include an emergency trial involving pumpkins, nice.
Of course, Gal Gryphon will also be attending this quest. Seems it’s gonna just be thrust into any Emergency quest from now on. Well, for as long as its weapons are relevant I suppose. Not really an issue.
Some new 12* and 13* weapons will be obtainable during the quest, including Daggers of Serafi that are actually daggers instead of boots this time.
Halloween festivities are set to arrive in PSO2 mid-October.
Additional Power – Main Class Weapon Boost
Similar to the class-boost titles, there will be titles added for finding a certain number of rare weapons of a given selection of categories. As it’s a title, it’s expected to be account-wide just like the class-cap titles.
They only show the requirement and numbers for Hunters during the trailer. While it’s likely safe to assume the power boost will remain the same for all classes, apparently the number of weapons required will vary per class. I assume this is to offset that some classes have fewer main-class weapon types than others. Here is a rundown of the values shown for Hunter:
20 7-9* Hunter weapons: 2.5% boost in power when using Hunter weapons as a Hunter.
25 10-12* Hunter weapons: 2.5% boost in power when using Hunter weapons as a Hunter.
40 10-12* Hunter weapons: 2.5% boost in power when using Hunter weapons as a Hunter.
70 10-12* Hunter weapons: 2.5% boost in power when using Hunter weapons as a Hunter.
Total: 20 7-9* weapons, 135 10-12* weapons, 10% boost in power when using Hunter weapons as a Hunter.
Will this help classes stand out I wonder? In particular I’m thinking about Bouncer as a main class for either of its weapons, as it’s currently inferior to sub-class combos such as Fighter/Bouncer. Or perhaps Hunter main using Partizans or Wired Lance, where again Fighter/Hunter out-paces it in terms of raw damage. Or Braver main Katana instead of… Fighter/Brave- basically Limit Break kind of trumps a lot of main-class weapon load-outs. Note that I’m not having a go at Limit Break, I actually don’t have a problem with it, just pointing out that it does seem to have this effect.
10% certainly will go some way to help close the gap, but the attack bonus from Limit Break as well as other modifiers available to Fighter main helps it edge out still. That said, this may well change as additional weapons arrive in the game, with a particular weapon series announced that I’ll go over later in this post.
Braver and Gunner Balance Changes
This has been something a lot of players seem to have been anticipating, probably Gunners more than anything given how they were treated in Episode 3.
Braver:
Katanas will be stronger as the Gear Gauge increases.
Rapid Fire will no longer have that “wind up” time. This is a really good change in my opinion, that wind-up made no fucking sense.
Skill point requirements relaxes for Katana Combat and Rapid Shoot. This should make builds that take both weapons more viable at least.
Some Katana and Bullet Bow PAs will be buffed.
Gunner
Increase the rate at which High Time accumulates power. Yay?
S-roll speed increased for the first and second parts. I’m not sure this is an improvement, it entirely depends on how the i-frames are affected I guess.
Buffs to nearly all of the Twin Machinegun PAs. Probably what Gunner needed most out of these to be honest.
Braver’s changes are more interesting overall than Gunner’s, which I have to say sound a little weak. It adds little incentive to play as a Gunner main and does almost nothing to encourage using it as a subclass. Though I guess to be fair, potentially nether does Braver’s changes in that respect.
This re-balance is set to arrive mid-October.
Dress Up!
Fairy Tail Collaboration
I like Fairy Tail and even I don’t care about this. Moving on.
New Costumes and Nostalgia
Well most are new, we’ve got the Halloween costumes and some ninja costumes coming up.
Halloween costumes are set to arrive mid-October.
Ninja and oriental themed costumes are set to arrive late October.
I actually quite like the ninja outfits, it’s somewhat unusual for their style. Notably, we also seem to be set to get two uniforms that were previously regional exclusives.
Those regional exclusives do make me wonder what the NA/EU ones might have turned out to be if they had followed through with that localisation…
They’re also continuing their PSO nostalgia series of costumes, this time finishing off the selection of Casts.
Perhaps a little more surprisingly, there will be item codes for Rico and Flowen stuff. This includes costumes, accessories and hairstyles. Attendees of the Sympathy 2015 concert in Japan will receive item codes for all of these.
More Anime Collabs
Other collabs coming up include another with 7th Dragon III, Aria the Scarlet Ammo Double AA (what?), The Legend of Heroes: Sen no Kiseki II, and even Disgaea 5. This game is anime collaborations featuring PSO2 at this point…
Double and Profound Darkness
Much like the previous Dark Falz raid Emergency Quests, this will be a two parter. Unlike previous ones however, Dark Falz is the first part and the Profound Darkness is the second. Makes sense in terms of hierarchy I guess.
Double and the Profound Darkness’s quest is apparently a “once per account” affair, where the fight will get easier as time progresses. Once Double has been defeated, you move straight on to the Profound Darkness.
It seems that both Dark Falz Double and the Profound Darkness both may have countermeasures against Weakbullet. Double’s comes in the form of a “jammer”, no real details on how that works and the Profound Darkness apparently will punish players who use it. Again, no real details. This could use some clarity.
The theme for the Profound Darkness appears to be a straight up remix of its theme “Ooze” from Phantasy Star 4.
Get ready to wrestle this dynamic duo late October. This will seemingly arrive close to if not at the same time as the release of the final chaper of Episode 3’s story.
Dark Falz Apprentice – Mining Base Defense 4
It took what felt like an age but she’s finally gotten her full body back. Bad news for you is you’re her first target (you ought to be used to this from the Falzes by now though).
As predicted, she is a part of the fourth Mining Base Defense quest, though whether she’s part of the one quest or if she’s a separate part in a quest series I don’t know.
Unlike the previous Mining Base quests, this one is set underground. The Darkers are bringing their entire arsenal that they deployed in other quests up til now, with the addition of Dark Falz Dourumble and Angel. In fact, aside Persona the entire Dark Falz family has come out for this one. Additionally, as seen above, the Darkers have learned to imitate even the AIS. These corrupted AIS have all the same abilities as the player ones do, including the photon cannon.
It looks like it’ll be fun, I just worry about the players going into it. If it’s too difficult for people, it’s just going to lead to chain-abandoning and people getting left out. At the very least, I can’t wait to be frustrated by people who are either inadequately geared for Extra Hard or simply don’t know how to play leading to catastrophic failures. Hey, at least those failures are set to look amazing if the trailer is anything to go by!
The queen of the bugs is set to grace our servers some time in December.
Weapon Exchanges
12* Exchanges
Zieg has had additional 12*s added to his Client Orders, to cover a few Falz weapons not previously covered for whatever reason.
The weapons include:
Serpent Grigoros (Live Radle, Live Spat, Live Rias)
God Hand (Live Dogaut, Live Fanger, Live Pyrus),
Celestial Laser (Live Zect, Live Slidawn, Live Trina)
Invader and Austere
A new selection of 13* weaponry is to arrive in a new exchange shop also hosted by Zieg. This will require a large selection of items, possibly meant as a way to encourage people to play a wider variety of the game’s content as the wait for Episode 4 to begin has started.
These new weapons will arrive late October.
This exchange comes in two parts; the Invader series and the Austere series. Austere is an upgrade to the Invader series.
The Invader weapons require 100 Caligula stones and 100 Excubes. As we don’t know how many Caligula stones are rewarded for clearing the Profound Darkness Emergency Quest it’s impossible to say how long it will take to get these weapons.
Austere weapons on the other hand require a huge selection of materials.Only the sword is shown so only its materials will be listed.
1 Invader Caliber
100 Caligula Stones
100 Nero Stones
50 Yurlunger Godstones
50 Garel Godstones
5 Heart Key Stones
5 Blood Moon Stones
5 Phantom Night Stones
10 Photon Boosters
300 Excubes
That’s some list. You’ll note that the weapon comes with 30% element as well and you know that what means. You’re going to need two to finish the weapon! So if we include the materials to buy the Invade Calibers necessary, the total comes to:
400 Caligula Stones
200 Nero Stones
100 Yurlunger Godstones
100 Garel Godstones
10 Heart Key Stones
10 Blood Moon Stones
10 Phantom Night Stones
20 Photon Boosters
800 Excubes
Some of these numbers may seem intimidatingly high, but remember we know the approximate acquisition time of most of these materials. This is naturally going to vary based on the parties you find (the Excubes may be 4 Magatsu sessions or 12 depending on your luck with randoms) as well as availability of Extreme Quest passes. Yurlungur and Garel stones both have daily Client Orders to help you obtain those more quickly, so those shouldn’t take terribly long to get.
Arguably the Extreme Quest stones may be the most irritating to get, as a full clear nets you 25 of the 2nd tier stones and you require 30 for a single tier 3 one. This means you’ll need to do 36 full clears (or 12 of each quest) in order to get the stones you need. Of course, this is a worst case scenario as it doesn’t include any of the stones acquired during the quest itself.
If you were starting from scratch and depended on only the daily passes, let’s assume the absolute worst case scenario for these calculations:
1 full clear of a single XQ requires 14 passes.
To get 10 of its respective stone, you need to clear it 12 times, totalling 168 passes
To get all three required for the weapon, you will need 504 passes total.
That’s only around 1.4 years! Of course Extreme Passes can be obtained in other ways now, plus you get additional passes for clearing the weekly Client Orders associated with them.
So how strong are they? This is also difficult to pin down exactly, but they do appear to be stronger than Ares weapons. Austere Caliber starts at 1244 S-atk. Now, we can take away Power III (30), Vinculum (20) and Mutation I (10) to bring it down to 1184 S-atk (a fair sight stronger than Ares at 1083), but it isn’t known what Darkness Soul contributes to this total. In any case, this means at +10 it can be roughly projected to be around 1657 S-atk, though this total is being calculated off the lowest value we have right now. There is also no information with regard to its potential. This notably puts it on roughly equal footing with the Invader weapon, which is displayed as being 1666 S-atk wth all its affixes. However it may be that Invader weapons don’t have a potential.
Essentially, the Austere weapon series appears to be aimed at people who have been playing most of the game’s content for some time now. Those who are starting fresh may have some difficulty obtaining some of the materials required for these weapons I feel.
That’s all for this broadcast. Seems like Episode 3 will have some sprinklings of interesting content to end on. I’m a bit disappointed that the main focus seems to be on 12-man Emergency Quests but oh well. This hasn’t covered everything there was on the recent long-term schedule, leaving the exact nature of the Extreme Quest update and the new Time Attack Quest a bit of a mystery. We’re also due a new Limited Quest at some point and of course Ultimate Amduscia still hasn’t been mentioned. We’re not done with news about Episode 3 just yet, it seems.
In July, PSO2 will be celebrating PSO’s 15th anniversary in a variety of ways. Just going to go over what’s known in this post.
First off, the event page for the anniversary can be found here.
Here is a trailer which includes video footage of the update. Skip one minute in to see the PSO stuff.
Gal Griffon
When this thing was found in the game’s data there was quite a reaction from the fanbase. I don’t think anyone saw this enemy coming, not even in the wildest of speculations. What’s more, it seems to be an original mesh with its own skeleton, which is to say it isn’t a re-skin! Aside the colour scheme in this picture, the model seems pretty faithful to the original. I mean the colours we’re seeing makes it look kind of like an Oceanid enemy from one of the Vopar maps but who knows, maybe that’s down to the lighting. The old Griffon was just brown rather than pink is all.
As far as I know, this is all it has so I don’t think we’ll be running through any of the Central Control maps. A shame really, as I’d have really liked to see a rendition of the Jungle area at least. Well, I think I would anyway, afterall PSU’s renditions of some of PSO’s areas left a lot to be desired (FOREST). In fact really, something’s looking a little off about the arena itself if you ask me, which… again maybe it’s just the lighting? Like the arena’s ground just seems to be way too brightly lit for what’s going on around it. Both incarnations of the boss seem to be set during dark storms, but the arena in PSO just seems better lit for it. As a result, it seems to lack that same intimidating atmosphere that the old one had. This video here I think helps illustrate what I mean. Still I’m working with still images and teasers, maybe it works better in action so to speak.
At this point we don’t really know the exact nature of the quest it’ll be involved in. There’s an unlabeled one in the translation files with operator chatter about “defeat the one who caused the accident” but that may not be related to this at all.
Team Room: Administrative District
Pump that nostalgia up to the next level by turning your team’s room into Pioneer 2. Very nice addition, the area looks pretty good so far. I don’t actually know if the area offers any unique functionality at this point and the trailer seems to show a bunch of empty shops. Essentially, it’s something that will be cool for a couple of days before everyone gets bored of it.
PSO Outfits
So far only Humar and Hunewearl have been revealed. While I am quite OK with this myself, this does leave Cast players a little out in the dust. I’d at least expect a Hucast and Racaseal given how iconic they appear to be to the fanbase, but I wouldn’t expect them to make a rendition of every single PSO outfit. Not unless this is a part of some larger content plan, anyway.
With today’s maintenance, the Advance Quest update has arrived. Gonna just start the post with a summary of the changes:
You can now raise advance risk by paying additional caps (from +0 to +50 costs 50 caps)
Risk bought this way persists for a week, the same as risk gained the old fashioned way.
You can also apply this to Very Hard Advance Quests, which I’ll discuss below
Enemies can now be leveled up to 80 (this occurs at +30 risk)
Drop rates for Large Pyroxenes is boosted at maximum risk
This is what they say, anyway. So far I’m finding it hard to believe.
Additional E-trials and bosses can occur, such as Nyau, Apprentice, Persona and Dark Falz Angel.
There may be others, at this point it’s too early to say
I’ll edit additional details in as they come to light.
Apprentice
Well not really, she’s a clone of the previous Apprentice made by Dark Falz: Double. She made her first appearance in story mode, much like Persona did, however unlike Persona she didn’t wait something like a year to appear outside of it.
I’ve only fought her once so far, all I can say about her is she seems to hit like a wet noodle most of the time however she seems to be considerably more violent than her story mode self. Small hits they may be, but they come often. She also has a hell of a lot more HP, but I was not playing the most DPS-oriented build. Additionally, she can also summon Predicahdas to assist her.
Like most other boss characters and unlike all gingers, Apprentice has a soul (ORIGINAL JOKE ALERT). Her soul gives +40 s-atk,r-atk and t-atk and also boosts the transfer rate of Modulator by a measly 10%. While small on its own, it will help with up-slotting modulator onto something. If I’m correct in how the formula works, instead of being 86% when pushing from 3 to 4 slots, it would be 93%. This is assuming you’re using a 30% booster, which I feel you should if dealing with Modulator because I’m poor. For 4-5 it’d be 84% instead of 78%.
Very Hard Advance Quests
As said in the summary, you can also raise the risk of Very Hard Advance Quests. This is particularly relevant to those wishing to level alts, as the exp gained from boosted rare enemies is formidable. That said, it does require that you can reliably kill max-boosted enemies at that level, which is why this is only really suitable for alt characters as they’re likely going to be the only ones that can be twinked to cope with it. As such, this method isn’t really suitable for new players.
The small pyroxenes you generate here can also be used on the new Live-series weapons at that!
Live-Series Weapons
This update added a new series of exchange weapons, the “Live” series. They’re straight-up recolours of the “Bio” series weapons from Extreme Quests. Each one requires a selection of 15 large pyroxenes of 3 different kinds (for a total of 45 large pyroxenes).
They require a rather daunting 450 dexterity in order to equip them, which may demand points in Mags or Skill trees for some race/class combos at 75/75. This makes them pretty strictly end-game weapons.
The exchanges for each weapon class are as follows:
Sword: Vayu, Agni, Prithvi
Wired Lance: Indra, Himalaya, Brahma
Partisan: Ishana, Nirrti, Yama
Twin Daggers: Yaruna, Sarasvati, Apsaras
Double Saber: Vayu, Agni, Prithvi
Knuckles: Indra, Himalaya, Brahma
Gunslash: Vayu, Agni, Prithvi
Katana: Ishana, Nirrti, Yama
Bullet Bow: Yaruna, Sarasvati, Apsaras
Dual Blades: Yaruna, Sarasvati, Apsaras
Jet Boots: Yaruna, Sarasvati, Apsaras
Assault Rifle: Vayu, Agni, Prithvi
Launcher: Indra, Himalaya, Brahma
Twin Machineguns: Ishana, Nirrti, Yama
Rod: Vayu, Agni, Prithvi
Talis: Indra, Himalaya, Brahma
Wand: Ishana, Nirrti, Yama
As can be seen, there are some which require the same stones. The weapons come with 20% element and 4 affixes (Stat IV, Arm IV, Ability III, Status Effect IV).
Their potential at level 3 appears to boost damage for each consecutive Just-Attack by 5% to a maximum of 10%. To take a single weapon as an example of attack power, the Live Katana has 499 S-atk at +0 which puts it on the same level as Orochi Agito and Evil Rakuka but inferior to Yamigarasu in terms of stats. However, the Live-series are all-class weapons, so it’s something to consider before writing them off entirely.
Zieg’s Order
You can also obtain a Dark Falz 12* weapon by showing Zieg 3 Live-series weapons. Which ones he wants to see depends on the weapon you want to get!
Here’s the list of weapons and their required Live weapons:
This leaves out a good number of Falz 12*s however, which is kind of a weird decision I feel. I get that they might not have wanted to give classes more weapons than others but this would be the case regardless anyway by virtue of classes having differing amounts of weapons they can use in the first place. In any case, if the Falzes have been stingey to you for the past two and half years then you can work towards getting one now. It will not be a quick trip, necessarily, but this is probably for the best.
At this time it isn’t know what affixes or elements the weapons have when you receive them.
Rumourmill – Hatou Rindou Nerf
ﾊﾄｳﾘﾝﾄﾞｳ!!(っ’ヮ’)╮▁▂▃▅▆▇█▓▓
Going by forum posts and twitter, it seems Hatou Rindou has been nerfed somewhat. The exact how has yet to be established, but it appears that it doesn’t land as many hits as it used to. As far as I know there’s no official word from Sega at this point, so it isn’t known if this is a bug or a stealth-nerf.
Thoughts
I’m pleasantly surprised. As I tweeted, I would not have been surprised at all if Sega had just updated 3 of the Advance Quests and then rolled out the rest whenever they felt like. The company is reputable for drip-feeding content like this, I mean it’s precisely what they did when they released SHAQs in the first place. So I’m glad I was wrong, it was good of them to upgrade the entire mode like this.
The downside is they’re still not worth running solo, even if you’re capable of handling them at maximum risk. The capsule reward rate simply varies far too highly, making profitability dubious and risking making a loss in caps overall.
Also solo PSE bursts are still the saddest things in the game.
The Grind
Live-series weapons have 20% element, which means you’ll need 3 of them to max them. As each requires 15 of 3 different types of pyroxene and each large pyroxene is about 100 regular pyroxenes this means you’ll need roughly 4500 of each stone or 13500 total. That number seems familiar somehow…
So far, running the missions solo I’ve managed to make something like 70 regular pyroxenes throughout 4 quests. I have yet to earn a single large-pyroxene, which feels roughly a similar drop-rate to how they were before. I’m feeling mildly cynical that maximum-risk actually boosts the drop rate at all, if it does then it’s such a small boost that it might as well not even be there. Regardless, this appears to demonstrate that Super Hard Advance Quests are still not worth running overall which is a pity. Once again the effort-reward ratio feels off judging by experience so far, especially given that you can still obtain Apprentice Soul on Very Hard as well as the materials you can use to buy the Live-series weapons without the risk of making a loss in caps. My opinion on this may change over time, especially if I can get some decent group runs going.
The worst part arguably is that as the weapons need specific combinations of stones, you’d better hope your entire group want weapons which happen to use the same or else people will be wasting their time. The issue is due to the fact that you can’t exchange Advanced Quest pyroxenes into any other kind.
All in all, not the most enjoyable of updates. It is nice that we have a higher tier of all-class weapons at least.
As always, please let me know if there are any inaccuracies in the facts stated within this post.
I can’t understand a word of Japanese! As such, all I can really do for a live broadcast post for now is post a gallery of images. I hope they’ll be useful for those who can read japanese and just something pretty to look at for everyone else. Well as pretty as screen-shots from a livestream can be, anyway.
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