u/Sure-Wing-1737

I was hoping that I could still beat the fight while doing the previous challenge, that I avoid all optional things that give me any XP.

This one took me some time to realize that I can't actually do the fight without getting any eggs for better genes in the process, the dps check was just too high, and required way too much RNG, and I'm still not sure if it's possible.

After giving up on the original setup, I gathered some eggs for a dragon Ratha, fire Tobi and a fire Velocidrome build where I would set them up for the dps check with adamant rage and ate the attack meal (I did forget to give Velocidrome Fireball Frolic that almost made me lose the run, thankfully he still had another attack gene)

The gathered genes didn't really help in fight besides that, actually made the rest a bit harder since I needed to use turns just to setup for the last phase.

Here is the full fight and the setup, if anyone is interested in it.

Still conflicted on what's my opinion on the update is, the royal elders and invasives are great imo, it's just that the rest of the royals and the reward system for it falls flat. And it seemingly closing off the entire game makes it a bit sad.

What are y'all's opinion of the update now that the dust settled a bit, especially if you tried it out, I'm curious about it?

I'm not really here to rant about the update and how it should have been more or batter, rather I'm here to show what I think are the only winners of this update, the Invasive Monsters.

Getting the others out of the way first, almost all of the normal non boss fight monsters did not receive a huge enough buff / change to be actually interesting, neither do they reward the player in any meaningful way. That is a shame since I would have liked an actual progression between the royal monsters not the current way of only the hardest ones giving any sort of rewards for the player.
This also means that ferals and story exclusive fights are not refightable which is also a shame because they ones in the late game were actually really fun and interesting.

Royal Calamitous Elders:
They are a really good edition next to Invasives, but since they were already good before their royal versions, the quality did not change that much only the difficulty by minor hp buff, a decent dmg buff, and a varying amount of wyvernsoul defense.

As for the fights overall the structure of them did not change that much. For Namielle and Velkhana they accelerated their recovery from topples making them much harder to lock down with stagger, while also doing a bit more AOE attacks. Yama turned into a somewhat dps check on partbreaks, since he will start spamming attacks after a while. Narwa and Ibushi got a massive defense buff to their wyvernsoul gauge making it really difficult to stagger them, it was already difficult to track their attacks so I'm unsure how much their move cycles changed but it's for sure somewhat different.

Royal Invasive Monsters:
I don't really know what the consensus was about invasive monsters, but I generally disliked them. I'm strictly talking about the refights in dens, the retreats were fun one offs, but they turned into an actual nightmare, that you just wanted to kill as fast as possible to not have to deal with them, since half of their gimmicks just didn't work or was not enough of a payoff to do it.

So I'm really happy to say that most of them received a slight rework that changed them in a really good way.

First off Exhaust is back for most of them, specifically the ones who have wyvernsoul stocks that prevent topples. (Exhaust turns the diamonds on the gauge blue and will make the invasive monster miss their next attacks, this WILL make them miss their special invasive attacks and even when they have lock on).

Garuga got a nice glow up with him being able to do a double poison tail attack in the same turn and not being a complete punching bag while in the invading state, while on low hp also using his territorial raid when he has a lock on buff and doing the invasive poison raid imminently without 1 full turn of charging. His wyvernsoul gauge seems the same as before and with the addition of exhaust the fight has been mostly rebalanced in a fair way.

Arzuros stayed pretty much the same with the addition of exhaust and a much more powerful selfheal of 3000.

Nercylla in addition to it's already existing gimmick got a new speed debuffing AOE move and at the end of every turn where an ally has a debuff on them nercylla will do an extra chaser move, which hits really hard so you need a way to deal with it in addition to the gunlance.

Shogun Ceanataur can now use guard while it's shell is broken, this does not give you the defense debuff, but it's sightly stronger than it's counter when he has it's shell.

Diablos has gotten back his retreat animation on his gimmick, in addition he is able to use Maximum Horn Jab even outside of Enraged, while taking really low wyvernfell dmg while not enraged (~40% hp). To balance this out the "Earthquake" aoe attack while burrowing is completely gone and replaced with a really strong single target attack that, only happens if you mess up his burrowing gimmick.

Odogaron has had it's gimmick reintroduced in an actual good way and is probably my second favorite rework of a fight so far. First off his high dodge chance is completely gone and the mud weakening his claw attack stays the same, but if you mud his claws he will do two single target attacks instead of one. When you break his claws while mudded he will topple and then enter Frenzied state, if you don't break his claws in a set number of turns or break them without mud he will immediately enter Frenzied state. In this state he received one new very powerful aoe attack that he will start to spam after a wile if you don't stop this state. In frenzied state you need to focus on staggering (topple if there are no wyvernsoul stocks left) odogaron as fast as you can, he will not take any wyvernsoul dmg until this stage. Once you stagger it in frenzied state he will be in Starved for a turn and will regrow his claws no matter if they are mudded or not (still good to mud his claws here so he starts his normal state without a powerful attack, since in frenzied he is immune to be mudded).

Seregios the best rework for the invasives in my opinion. He stayed a really hard fight while also changing in a lot of ways. Now when he does a hth attack after an invasive roar you need to double attack him otherwise he will launch a follow-up attack that will most of the time one-shot whoever he went in a hth against, if you lose the hth it will be an aoe version instead. Double attacks stop this follow-up attack from happening in every stage of the fight. But wait there is more, he can now chain these roars (3 at ~70%, 5 at ~40%) becoming a sort of memory game while also being your main dmg window in the fight since he is a menace while not doing these hth attacks.

As for Khezu and Plesioth I don't really understand those fights enough to give an actual opinion about them since I can't even know how much they changed.

Although I don't really like most parts of the update especially the reward system with the gear making everything else absolute, and kinda shutting down any further expansion of the game. These royal invasive and elder fights still remain a really good highlight of the update.

Obviously I could be wrong about these changes and just misremembering what they were like in the normal version so do correct me if I said anything wrong and do tell me what your opinion is about the royal fights if you did get back to the game to check them out.

They did reintroduced the retreat animation for Invasive Diablos for both the normal and the royal fight.

Now you can see on the status tab if the enemy (or ally) is doing an AOE attack shown by a much wider arrow, and you can also see if your ally is missing out on a hth attack (AOE hth attacks are shown as normal AOE moves).

All the battle allies have received the moves pet, breather and pep talk, while also improving their ai in taking hth attacks.

You can now run away from royal invasive and elder fights which is especially great for some of the invasives if you forgot your setup.

I know a lot of people (me included) are not satisfied with the update, but I do think that these gameplay changes, and most of the royal elder and invasive fights are actually really good. It's just everything else surrounding them that is more than questionable. Commendations being a random drop from 0 - 3 per fight is also really annoying.

Please do tell me if you noticed any more improvements that I don't know yet.

These are not from the actual royal monsters themself.

Whenever you slay a Royal Invasive or Royal Calamitous Elder you get 1 commendation (You need 6 of them to fully upgrade any gear). They look the same as the base versions.

There is 1 armor for each element all with 2 XL and 1 L skill, and 3 Deco slot.

There is 1 weapon for each element within all weapon types, each weapon comes with 1 XL passive and 3 Deco slots.

Not impressed...

I wanted to see for myself how unique the fights truly are in stories 3, so I went to test out (almost) every refightable large monster in the game to see how they differ from each other and figured I would share these cycles that I discovered while trying them. Currently there isn't any reason to know these you can quick finish or 1-Hit-KO all of them, but it could potentially be useful for the royal update.

I also tried to explain any additional mechanic in the fight like what partbreaks do exactly, what happens when you ignore monster mechanics, if moves can't be skipped in turn order using kinship, traps or topples.

I do want to say that in Stories 3 covering a fight to the full extend can be very hard since there are a lot of variables - monster specific mechanics that can largely alter fights, and unlike in stories 2 the fights are a lot more random and can hugely vary depending on topples and status.

With all this in mind there are just base randomness to monsters movesets, for some I could not decide on a factor on how something worked so I just left it as an RNG thing.

Enough coping that I could not understand simple movesets, if you find any incorrect information or one of the million typos in the list please do tell me, also if you think something is poorly explained then that as well, since I'm not really good at it.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LInL2LHnAFi6OYlejPnv-2Thp8ySJSEBT_7uWs24g_U/edit?usp=sharing

I've want to talk about what I think is to be the most underbaked aspect of the combat system in my opinion.

While I do enjoy the combat system as a whole this 1 part of it makes me feel like it has some wasted potential.

So I should start by explaining what my main problems with it are which I have 3 of.

Little to no reason to build it
Partbreaking is not something that works on a separate system like wyvernfell. The value is taken directly from your actual damage and partbreaking skills are probably just increase the percentage that is taken. This means that building dmg results in the same if not more partbreaks than actually building around it. Meaning that not only something else just invalidates partbreaking skills, it does that while giving you other benefits.

Little to no payoff
The payoff for partbreaks varies in every fight in the game and they are pretty extreme differences between them, so I categories them into 3 types.
Normal, State based, Progressing

Normal figh's are probably the worst, there is nothing about them that is remotely interesting, you have the base parts usually around three and two of them result in wyvenrfell dmg and a stun. Throughout a fight getting 1 stun and 2~4 diamonds of wyvernfell dmg earlier than it would usually happen is laughably bad for building around a mechanic.

State based are where it get's a lot more interesting. By these I mean fights where monsters receive multiple parts after becoming enraged (Magnamalo, Astalos, Arkveld). Breaking these parts usually results in a topple. These fights fix the problem of partbreaking not doing anything after you run out of parts to break.

But here comes my second issue, how do you justify if a build is good or not. When i was trying to test stuff on these fights I consistently run into the issue of monsters dying before I could get my partbreaks off in these fight. And for getting topples, wyvernfell builds were much faster and usually I could get topples even before going into enraged state. I think in these fights where it shows the most how underbaked the mechanic truly is, failing to show any potential in using it, when they clearly wanted it to be used with the mechanics attached to it.

And progressing fights like Yama are probably the best designed ones. When the partbreaks determine the state he is in, stuff like overdoing dmg instead of part damage stops being an issue. And it also means that you never have turns without any parts to break.

The combination of my previous problems
I guess the system could be viewed as fine enough. My problem with it is that i like when a game has many build options and stories 3 is no exception to it. The fact that you can build into dmg, kinship dmg-generation, wyvernfell is what I really like, but partbreaks don't really have that significant and seem to be shoehorned in-between these systems.

I would've liked it much more if partbreaking was a system similar to wyvernfell allowing you to utilize it while also being able to do full on builds around it, since the tools are already there, they are just really inefficient at what they do without any payoff.

I would love to hear your opinions about this do you think about this system, is it good enough or should have been more / should change?
Well that's pretty much what i wanted to say about this, I'll just hope that they do some sort of a rework for it in the update this summer or that royal monsters will interact with the system in a much smarter way.

This was brought up to me by u/Gadjiltron-A. Thanks for him on this.

I don't really see this information talked about in the Narwa fight, but for me it was a really big help in the fight.

You can actually tell if the serpents are doing aoe attacks or buffing themself.

Both their Aoe attacks and the self buff's are yellow non targeted abilities, so that means that they will look at a random target without a hth or a red line the turn they about to use it

Except the self buffs are actually targeted at the sides of your team and they will always look at the same spot

(Narwa will look to your RIGHT, While Ibushi will look to your LEFT)
(You only need to differentiate between the closest target to it since it's clearly visible if they are not looking at the side of your team)

Easiest way to check for them:

- For Narwa aim your monsties move on Narwa and cancel out of it, this way the camera will shift to her without having the part indicators block your view

- For Ibushi aim with a monstie move on Narwa, or if you need more perspectives, aim at your monstie with a single target item for a better view (Do not use the item on accident)

Ibushi is definitely the harder one to tell, but keep in mind that without his Wind Mantle he can't do any aoe attacks so if you are not seeing a hth or red line on him he is definitely doing his buff

By default they only use their buff in Mind Connection, but under 50% they will both be in their mantle and will use their buffs. They can do both buffs in the same turn.

Probably most people have beaten them, but maybe this will be very useful for the royal version of them.

Now I'm truly satisfied with this one.

This is probably the hardest thing I done in the game, and I can't wait for the royal update to come into the game for even more challenges.

Until then I'm probably taking a break from the game if there won't be any challenge mods made for it.

Even though I have my problems with the game in some aspects, the combat system is so well made that it really grabs me into doing stuff like this.

Please do tell me your opinion on the games combat system if you feel like discussing it.
I'm probably in a far extreme of people who want the game to move into a more challenging direction so I'll be happy to hear what others think about it.

Another low LVL Narwa clear, managed to do this 11 levels lower than my previous one.
And the monsties besides Ratha were LVL 18 - 19

Still not a no repel sadly, and that's way out of my skill range.
The first 50% repel took me 344 turns because at this level gap the attack stat just can't keep up against narwa's defense and very few things could actually deal dmg to her. I had to switch from Ogden to Eleanor since i could not keep up with Chirpy messing up Narwa hth-s and wiping the team out.

Besides that I went for a wyvernfell build, and staggering them whenever I was about to be nuked (like 50% of the time).

For main dmg source I had Ratha with venom queen and an inflict rate up L gene, tail stun with a fixed 30 dmg, deviljho hammer and some of Eleanors attack also dealt some decent dmg .

I have the slay recorded if anyone is interested in it, the first 2 repels are uploaded as well, but those are really boring since they almost 4 hours together.

I hugely overestimated this dude
The fight really just comes down to magia charm / kora tanking
I do have the problem of the mud dot doing nothing from what I can tell, well besides lowering his dmg
But it also would not be great if they were to force you into using one of like 3 moves to be able to defeat him, while they did force you to use it on the retreat so it's weird
Anyways it can definitely be done on a lower lvl I just really don't want to play through the starting part of the game again and to do the grinding for what is needed for this fight

He was surprisingly easy to stunlock, you just need to stagger his single aoe while above 50% health, and when he goes below that you have kinships as backup for turns when you mess up or just can't stagger him on time.