For Those Who Played Them-Thoughts on the Trails and Xenoblade Games

All other video games not related to the main farming series - Pokemon, Stardew Valley, My Time at Portia, and other indie-developed games.
User avatar
infel
Growing Garden Gnome
Growing Garden Gnome
Posts: 83
Joined: Jun 23, 2019 4:24 pm

Post  Posted:

Kikki wrote: Oct 02, 2022 11:11 am Every character has different base abilities. Dunban is the most agile character in the game. (Sharla at her max, without any gems, is actually only 121.) Reyn has naturally high defence. Sharla has naturally high ether. Etc. That's why it's more effective to kit your characters out differently, depending on their role. Sharla's a healer and can do some damage from a distance...she's never meant to be on the front line, drawing the aggro. She has lower defence, too...she's best off to be protected from damage with Arts Stealth, as defence gems don't help her enough...but Arts Stealth will make her draw less aggro any time she uses one of her healing arts, so the enemy is less likely to target her (especially if the other party members are doing their jobs right and drawing the aggro to themselves.)

Defence gems and attack gems are okay. But they're a waste of a gem slot that could be used to increase agility, instead, or improve a character's specific role within the party. Defence gems just add a few points to defence, and you already tweak your attack and defence by changing your armour. High agility means your character has a better chance of dodging an attack entirely, and not taking ANY damage several times is way better than just mitigating a few points of every hit.

I hate grinding :) I like getting my levelling up from quests, story, and the few fights I can't dodge while 100% filling in the maps. I do always have to grind somewhere around level 70 or so, though, to be able to do all the extra end-game stuff easily.

You get crystals from mining...but mostly from fighting. There's ample info on the internet if you ever want to know what enemies to fight to get certain types of crystals. :)
Ah, thank you so much for the advice on some of the characters and the best gems for them. Honestly, maybe me going to Shulk or Dunban would be better. I just have to hope the AI for Sharla heals us correctly. This is why I mixed about items, because on one hand its nice to not have to worry about them, but on the other, sometimes the healing abilities of the characters aren't fast enough. Still, thanks so much on the info for Sharla and Dunban. I'll have to refit everyone with the right gems and all that.

And I thought this was going to be true for the defense and attack part. After reading about agility and some other stuff, I've come to realize that I can't do my normal strategy. Usually for RPG's, I focus on attack and defense, and things like speed after. For this game though, it's better to be able to dodge attacks as you've said. My only thing about armor is I never know what the best thing to equipped is because while a certain armor may seem very good, it'll still pull, for example, defense down. It can get very confusing. Can I ask is it better for me to equip armor/weapons that have slots in them, even if one that doesn't have a slot gives me a good boost?

I can understand that honestly. I do like grinding in games like Disgaea and Digimon since i love the combat, but it's not something I tend to want to jump into outside of these games. Skyrim is the best example of this since I rarely would grind and when I did, I didn't like it. For this game, I do like the combat actually, but am just confused on how to make my character survive.

I'll also remember that for when needing crystals. Maybe I should do some monster hunting lol.

Still, thanks for all the help with this. This is my first time playing with this type of combat, so certain things are new to me. Today, I'll try to redo there gems. Luckily, I can test this for a certain mission I really need to finish =).
User avatar
Kikki
UNoT Extreme Mooomber
UNoT Extreme Mooomber
Posts: 4252
Joined: Apr 14, 2015 6:01 am

Post  Posted:

Xenoblade is now really popular, so there is loads of info for it on the internet. EVERYTHING is covered. If you get stucka nd want someone to outright tell you what gems to try on Sharla, you can always Google 'best gems for Sharla' to get some popular suggestions. (Or for other characters.) I don't always agree...I saw one article on the best gems for every character in XC1, and they suggested Arts Seal Resist for Shulk. Of course, you DO want to avoid having his arts sealed, but the number of monsters who can even cause Arts Seal is so low...it's not worth wasting a slot on that. Not unless you're gearing up for a boss battle where you know that boss is prone to using Arts Seal.

Still, you'll run into the same suggestions over and over and those are the ones you know are really appropriate for that character. :)

Sharla's AI is quite good...she heals well under control of the computer :) All the better if you have Arts Stealth and Heat Sink on her, as they protect her and make her need to cool her gun off less often. (Heat Sink is tough to get. Only one level 106 monster drops the crystals, and you can only get 2 level 3 Heat Sink gems in the game, one via a quest and the other from completing a specific Collectopedia page, neither of which are available to you yet. But when you get one, stick it on her! :) )

As for your armour, that depends. I tend to equip my characters in the best armour I can that has a gem slot, if I have a good gem that I want to be able to use. Since I tweak their other abilities with gems, I tend to be pretty simple when choosing armour and go for the best defence with the lowest weight. (Weight subtracts from agility unless you have a mitigating effect in the character's Skill Tree.)
Velvet
Growing Garden Gnome
Growing Garden Gnome
Posts: 68
Joined: Jan 26, 2012 10:52 am

Post  Posted:

The first games in the Trails series were amazing, but they made newer games worse, they're full of shallow stereotypes and with a harem and an ever present obnoxious innuendo everywhere. Trails in the Sky trilogy is worth playing, though, those three were the best RPGs I've ever played. If you've only played halfway through the first game you don't know why they're so great yet. The Crossbell duology is worth it, too, if you happen to like Trails in the Sky, and it was recently re-released. But I'd ignore the rest.

Xenoblade games are very different and I don't know how to compare. In terms of characterization they're definitely much worse than the Sky trilogy, in case you care for that. But the rest I really don't know how to compare, they're too different. I'm not a fan of Xenoblade, though, so I can't really comment on strong points of these games, only on weak ones. :lala:
Post Reply