アンスウェラー

I’m actually that busy.

This post has been sitting around as a draft for the last few weeks.

Trolling Aeria doesn’t really take much effort since I’m just copypasting things that have already been stated before.

Now, on to the changes:

Crystals/Synthesis

Other than the new crystals listed here, a few of the existing crystals have been changed as well:

Pazuzu
Tarot: Level limit 45+. +1% shock resistance, +1% damage to all magical attacks.
Soul: Level limit 75+, extra. +3 magic(stat), +2 int, +5% chance to absorb shock damage. If you’re law, +15% shock damage.
—
The stat addition is new.

---

Bishamonten
Tarot: Level limit 50+. +2 sta, + 1 str. If you’re chaos, you get an additional +2 str.
Soul: Level limit 55+, head. +10% spin damage, +60% spin cooldown. If you’re chaos, +5% pierce damage.

When you equip items enchanted with all the crystals from the 4 kings, you gain +10% damage to all skills that depends on a weapon for affinity, +10 sta and + 10int.

If you’re law when you equip these items, you get -100 hp and -15 p.attack.
—
The cooldown penalty has been reduced from 120% to 60%.

---

Seiten Taisei
Tarot: Level limit 30+. +2 str, +0.02% chance per level to reflect fire.
Soul: Level limit 30+, head. +5% damage to all skills that depends on a weapon for affinity. When your HP drops below 50%, you again an additional +5% damage to all skills that depends on a weapon for affinity.

If you’re chaos, you gain +10% spin damage and +20% spin cooldown.
—
Tarot now gives strength and the soul enchant now gives a spin damage boost for chaos.

---

Uriel
Tarot: Level limit 50+. +2 str, +3% fire resistance, -2% ice resistance.
Soul: Level limit 60+. +0.5% chance per level to absorb fire. +5% melee damage. -50% ice resistance.

If you are law and your HP drops below 30%, you gain +50% melee damage.

If you are chaos, +50% hp cost to all skills.
—
Tarot now gives 2 str instead of 1, remaining effect unchanged… Hurray?

---

4 new synthesis weapons have been added as well. They are basically elemental version of Kotetsu.

Each of these Kotetsu does fire/ice/lightning/shock damage and 3% boost to it’s element.

All of them have 31 p.attack, 1 m.attack and 20 durability.

Kotetsu + 1 elemental crystal + 1 sublimation crystal = 2 slot elemental Koketsu.
Kotetsu + 2 elemental crystal = 3 slot elemental Koketsu.
Kotetsu + 1 elemental crystal + 1 elemental rosary = 4 slot elemental Koketsu.

Out of the ice one, rest are pretty useless since the 3 old synthesis swords have better stats.

The rare gifts given by devils are now usable in synthesis, basically stuff from this list.

Rumors says that 4/5 slotted relic version of death colt etc… can now be produced by using these rare gifts instead of a sublimation crystal, but no solid proof has appear yet.

---

LNC/Archtype Balance

Tying to the crystal changes, balance among the various LNC/Archtype combination has been shifted around quite a fair bit.

Melee

Previously, chaos is better than the other alignment for melee as they were the only ones with access to +3 str tarots, on top of the 4 king bonus.

Prepatch, if you break it down simply,

4 kings for neutral/chaos: +10% attack, 20% spin, 20% rush, 15 int, 15 sta

To match, law with Seiten + Oberon + Nozuchi + Azumi: 5% attack, 15% spin, 5str

or

Neutral with Chernobog + Oberon + Nozuchi + Azumi: 10% spin, 17str

or

Neutral with Chernobog + Tanki + Nozuchi + Azumi: 10% spin, 15str + no knockback

You’re looking at around a 2-3% damage difference, before even factoring the 13str difference from tarot, and the difference will be even bigger for law melee who go enhance/regal as they’ll need to sacrifice Nozuchi etc to match the 15int given naturally by the 4 kings.

Post patch, the superiority of the 4 kings is still there, and in fact, the set bonus is improved since the spin cooldown penalty is reduced, but at least the 2-3% damage difference isn’t further amplified by the tarot difference.

Chaos melee also have a new choice now by using the Seiten + Oberon + Nozuchi + Azumi combo for +5% attack, +20% spin and +5str; a larger spin damage boost and a shorter cooldown penalty.

Law melee, typically the weakness melee archtype gain a fairly gimmicky lightning-based build for PVP, but it isn’t that practical out of it. Getting 14 Thor crystals (13 tarot + 1 soul), along with his plugin is another nightmare by itself.

For PVP, all melee are able to use Hokutoseikun without any significant penalties since all PVP melee only cares about attack, and that doesn’t have any cool/cast associated with it.

Overall, all melee gain a decent boost.

Gunners

While gunners only gained 1 new crystal, it’s still helpful since it targets legs.

For a MB gunner in Ichigaya Gold, your face slot is going to be taken up by Kerberos and your head will be taken up by Mithra, making the harpy sisters typically unusable.

As a result, top and legs are fairly limited in damage boosting enchants. Most will go for Titania + Oberon for a HP/MP and slight magic boost or Succubus + Koumokuten/Paravati for an int boost if you are going enhance/MB.

The -10% shot casttime from Oonamuchi is a quite a decent reduction in your cast speed, and the +5% shot/rapid damage is a good boost for the rare chaos MB gunner.

For rapid gunners though, chaos has always been slightly better due to the relic guns.

Rapid gunners don’t really use Mithra too, and thus do keep the harpy sister bonus. They can always use Seiten Taisei for their head for the +5% boost though, in order to use Oonamuchi for their legs.

For PVP, MB gunners aren’t really able to make use of Hokutoseikun.

Chaos rapid gunners are able to make use of it though, since a 30% penalty to rapid’s casttime won’t affect it much.

Mages

I seriously don’t know what was Cave thinking when they implemented Nyarlathotep’s crystal.

3% damage vs +3 stat… Geez, I wonder what scales better…

The +20% to all magical damage from his soul enchant is pretty unbalance too, considering that other archtypes typically get only a 10% boost to a particular movement type for an enchant.

Phantom and Scathach’s crystal are similarly unbalance, and in most situation even worst since mages can depend solely on rush attacks alone.

A chao melee with Seiten Taisei + Nozuchi is looking at only 20% spin damage.
A chaos gunner with Mithra + Oonamuchi + 13 emperor is looking at 54% shot damage
A chaos mage with Nyarl + Phantom + Takemikazuchi is looking at 20% to all magical damage, 25% rush.
A level 95 law mage with Scathach + Takemikazuchi is looking at 33.5% rush damage.

Add 13 nyarl for 39% magical damage for the last 2 cases, and you get a huge scaling advantage over the other archtypes.

Not to mention, getting 13/14 nyarl is significantly easier than getting 13 emperors.

Mages are now doing way too much damage, though the drawback is still there; the inability to do any damage, except fire/ice/shock/lightning.

I’m sort of thankful that Cell Gold is a crappy dungeon, as mages can only do 25% to 50% of their usual damage there, while gunners and melee aren’t affected, and can still deal weakness damage normally.

This is kind of ironic as in most games, mages are the ones that deal the larges variation of elemental damage, and yet in Imagine, they are limited to 4.

For LNC balance, neutral mages get the short end of the deal as they can’t use Scathach or Phantom, making them have the least boost.

Chaos mages have the best damage boost, but it also comes with a huge fire resistance penalty, and they’ll have to lose the -20% rush cast time from Cu Sith.

The fire penalty though isn’t really an issue in the current game where spamming 0 HDD Jikokuten is the most common way to level.

Law mages have the second best damage boost, have a less fire resistance penalty than Chaos mages, but still keep the cast time reduction from Cu Sith.

In terms of PVP, law mages have an advantage in that they can use Hokutoseikun’s crystal without much penalty.

Even for a shot mage, cooldown penalty is much easier to deal with than a castitme penalty, and typically an enemy is dead by a few dyne/megidos anyway.

Law mages are also able to make use of Thor for the lightning boost.

General

Neutral and Chaos characters are now able to use their ring, earring or extra to void charm/bind, allowing them to once again use Kerberos/Orthos as they don’t have to depend on angel to void charm for PVP.

Lilith too allows a Neutral to void charm using their talisman.

Due to this, fire is reappearing in PVP, although in a limited manner as fire damage is easy to deal with.

Got to love Imagine’s design… Chaos/Neutral are more defensive than Law for PVP.

Pallas is basically an overpriced version of Gorgon usable by all except Chaos DD mages.

It’s only useful for PVE in Ichigaya Gold though, since they are hardly any magic(element) based attacks out of there.

---

Modification
As previously mentioned, there are now material for slot 3 and 5 to go up to +4(20%) for percentage based mods now.

Magic/mind/nerve have percentage mods for slot 3 and 5 as well.

This in turn makes a 5 slot Mistilteinn for most purpose the best magic weapon, as it’s able to hit +50% magic (10% from the weapon itself, 20% from slot 3, 20% from slot 5), compare to only 40% for Magnum Injector/Sword of Bishamonten (20% from the weapon itself, 20% from slot 3)

Crafted 5 slot weapons have always been better at slash/blunt/pierce/hangun/rifle/shotgun over even CP/AP weapons and the gap is slightly widen by this modification change.

Typically a CP/AP weapon will have 20% from the weapon itself + 30% modification, giving a total of 50%.

A 5 slot weapon will have 30% (slot 2) + 15% (slot 4) + 20% (slot 5) = 65%, 35% shy from the cap.

5 slot crafted weapon will now match CP/AP weapon in terms of elemental damage as well.

Typically a CP/AP weapon will have 20% from the weapon itself + 20% modification, giving a total of 40%.

A 5 slot weapon will have 20% (slot 3) + 20% (slot 5) = 40%.

For Yoseitou/Dagger of phantom star, it’ll be:

20% (weapon) + 20% (slot 3) + 20% (slot 5) = 60%.

Though the low p.attack/durability on the dagger is still a pretty big drawback.

As for melee/gunners, you’ll have to enchant your weapon for elemental damage and that’ll cause you to lose out on a racial enchant, so a CP/AP weapon might still be more desirable.

Though crafted weapon on paper are matching CP/AP weapons, a painful fact still remain: Modding is still heavily dependent on CP/AP consumables, namely cabinets and sequencers.

Modding 3 slots is a pain. Modding 5 is an even larger pain.

The various rosaries are needed for percentage based slot 3 mods to hit +4.

i.e. Fire rosary -> Fire +4

For those who don’t know what rosaries are, they are crystals obtained by enchanting a sublimation crystal/Elementine to an elemental machete. Aeria’s butchered up translation is elemental orb or something.

Right now, the high-end enchanters on the JP server has about a 10% chance to produce the rosaries using mirrors.

To compare, soul enchanting Uriel is a 100% chance to succeed and even crystallizing him is around a 30-40% chance of success.

On average, you’ll need about a million or so to manufacture a rosary.

For slot 5, Maha~ stones (from PVP) are needed for the 4 basic elements, sol blade for expel, luna blade for death, ogre cannon for magic, mirage for mind and gauss cannon for nerve for +4 elemental mods.

Don’t have the modification item list for slash/blunt/pierce/handgun/rifle/shotgun offhand, but I’ll update the modification list with them later, along with the percentage chances, plus the CP/AP alternatives.

These new modification changes also make the PVP weapons even more useless, especially for mages, as they either have 0 or only 2 slots.

---

Enhance

It was first highlighted by Clinth that enhance isn’t cap by rank/class on Aeria.

After the 25th, the same behavior is noted on the JP server.

Right now, like on Aeria, enhance isn’t capped by rank/class on the JP server, while previously it was.

Why was this change made? No one knows since Cave like to make stealth changes to the skills without mentioning it. e.g. the dyne changes.

Aeria probably got a weird patch as usual, and so the changes got applied there before the JP server.

Beginner Area

The quest there are fairly simple and appropriate for low levels I guess. Farm 10k makka, get some makka as rewards, yada yada.

A fire machete and ice machete are given free in there, so the days where newbies melee don’t have any elemental weapons are over.

The drunken NPC also gives a 2x xp boost every 30mins until level 20, if you’re not in a clan.

Help System

The help system is largely still unfinished. Mainly give a short description of the control system of the game, yada yada.

PVP

The XP per round is around 20k, fairly little. Don’t expect much from it.

The ability to form groups has open up a new can of worms: bp/gp farming using alts.

Match selling wasn’t really common on the JP server previously due to the larger population, and hence encountering the same opponent is relatively rare.

However as more and more retarded CP stuff are release, the amount of people PVPing has gotten lesser and lesser since for instance, there’s no way in hell for me to have any chance against a Chiaki powered team.

The general population has decreased as well due to lack of content, but that’s another story.

This led to a situation where people with multiple PCs are entering their alts to lose, a situation pretty similar to what happened on Aeria.

It’s even worse since you can easily field a team of only your alts by entering them as a team.

Note that multi clients/boxing is allowed on the JP server, and we don’t have an active GM staff in-game to stop this.

This is one of the aspect of Aeria that’s actually better than what Cave is doing.

---

Lottery

This week’s lottery is pretty tame compared to previous ones.

The new set is voucher only.

When you use it, you get to select a male or female top/bottom, a headband voucher and a shoe voucher.

You can in return select the headband/shoe you want from the respective voucher.

The set works a bit differently from normal.

The top/bottom is statless, but the headband and shoe requires the top to be equipped to have boosts.

Available boosts for the head are:
- +10% damage vs law enemies
- +10% damage vs neutral enemies
- +10% damage vs chaos enemies
- -10% cooldown to all skills
- -10% cast time to all skills
- +1 activation stack to all fire based skills
- +1 activation stack to all ice based skills
- +1 activation stack to all lightning based skills
- +1 activation stack to all shock based skills

Available boost for the shoes are:
- +15% fire damage
- +15% ice damage
- +15% lightning damage
- +15% shock damage
- +15% expel damage
- +15% death damage
- +15% magic(element) damage
- +15% mind damage
- +15% nerve damage

While 15% seems a lot, do note that the top is statless, and you need the top equipped for the headband/shoes to have boosts. In fact, my top alone adds 20% damage…

The fireworks are interesting in that they are considered as daggers, so they’ll work with regal.

BTW, Cave fails for advertising. They are saying that +10% chaos and +15% expel damage is the recommended combo for Ichigaya Gold…

---

New “event”

Tons of speculation about the new event.

Cave isn’t giving out those 3 devils. They’ll only implement them into the game if certain conditions are met.

The event last from the 23rd of July until the 6th of August.

By the 6th of August, if the number of accounts that logged in during the event period reaches a certain number, Dionysus will be implemented.

By the 6th of August, if the number of character who belong to a clan, and logged in during the last 30 days reaches a certain number, Moloch will be implemented.

By the 6th of August, if the number of character who is listed on someone friendlist, and logged in during the last 30 days reaches a certain number, Suparna will be implemented.

More information will be released on the 30th of July.

All devils will be implemented in the middle of August. Do note that they didn’t mention which year.

p.s. Raijuu still isn’t fusible, Pazuzu etc… still have a buggy friendship value, Nue etc… still aren’t implemented even though they appear in dungeons.

---

Unimplemented Skills

Seems like some work is being done on the skill system. Quite a few new skills have popped up in the client files.

They might be expert skill, they might be devil skills, they might be devil features and they might even be skill effects from CP items yet to be released.

Some examples:

ID:173 NAME:魔脈高揚 DESC:攻撃魔法による攻撃がアップするパッシブスキル。
Magical Boost – A passive skill that increase damage done by magical attacks.

ID:218 NAME:報復の撃鉄 DESC:ＨＰが５０％以下になった時、射撃による攻撃ダメージが１０％アップするパッシブスキル。
Hammer of Retribution – A passive skill that increase gun damage by 10% when your hp drops below 50%

ID:219 NAME:反逆の撃鉄 DESC:ＨＰが２５％以下になった時、射撃による攻撃ダメージが５０％アップするパッシブスキル。
Hammer of Treachery – A passive skill that increase gun damage by 50% when your hp drops below 25%

ID:394 八頭の焔甌 DESC:自身を中心に灼熱の八本の炎柱を上げ、焼き尽くすことで、範囲内の敵全員に火炎相性のダメージ＆呪いの状態変化を付与する。
Eight Flame Tower – 8 pillars of flames are centered on you, burning all in its path. Does fire damage to all enemies within a certain radius, and cause them to be cursed.

On a side note, there are a lot of expert and chain experts that are unimplemented.

The list of expert skills yet to be implemented can be easily viewable from the in-game expert skill list.

Some of the chain experts that are yet to be implemented are:

魔放圏
破壊魔法のエネルギーをその場で開放し攻撃を行う戦闘エキスパート。

Mahouken (Destructive spin)
A combat expert skill that allows you to release the energy from destructive magic within a certain radius.

Initially, demolition dash will suppose to be a spin and this chain expert was left over from there.

ランページ
自分の周囲に銃を乱射する暴力的な戦闘エキスパート。

Rampage
A violent combat expert skill that allows you to randomly fire your gun at enemies around you.

Probably a chain expert designed to grant an AE attack to rapid gunners.

タリオン
敵からの攻撃を無効化すると同時に、範囲攻撃で報復を行う戦闘エキスパート。

Talion
A combat expert skill that allows you to void an enemy attack, and retaliate them with an AE attack.

Probably the initial design for regal. Heck, Talion means law of retaliation, which is probably where the blotched translation comes from.

絶影
威力は低いが隙の無い攻撃を次々繰り出し、敵を翻弄する幻の戦闘エキスパート。

Severe Shadow
A combat expert skill that allows you to do low damage, but continuous attack against an enemy.

Probably a hand to hand chain combat skill.

When will these be implemented? No one knows.

---

Time to clear my fansubbing backlog…