Labyrinth of Touhou 8F

[I have no name]

Seems kind of pointless to me. If you can't beat the bosses of the first 2 floors with a full party of any 12 characters, I don't really see how you could survive the rest of this game.

This really just means that Komachi can't be used to attack, and Yuyuko only has 1 available move for Meiling, Chen, Youmu and Cirno-all of which are fights that a normal playthrough wouldn't have 12 characters yet.

Basically, we're going to fight the fights instead of using "loldeath" on them because it's fun that way.

[Nerv-Faktor]

Chen is good on trash? I never really used her much on trash, because row-target attacks usually aren't that great. I guess she can outspeed most enemies and remove that one annoying mob with ATK-buff+Flight of Idaten before it gets a turn, but Aya, Remilia and Orin should be able to do that too.

I agree with Parallaxal on instant death vs bosses. It only works on the first 2 floors and if you're starting with 12 characters it's basically just a time-saver.

[Raikaria]

Chen is good on trash? I never really used her much on trash, because row-target attacks usually aren't that great. I guess she can outspeed most enemies and remove that one annoying mob with ATK-buff+Flight of Idaten before it gets a turn, but Aya, Remilia and Orin should be able to do that too.

I agree with Parallaxal on instant death vs bosses. It only works on the first 2 floors and if you're starting with 12 characters it's basically just a time-saver.

Build her pure ATK and SPD.

Pair her with a second somewhat fast AoE, like Marisa. Make the other two characters who can handle tougher single targets and take some punishment. Remi comes to mind instantly.

Spam Pheonix Wings.

Wipe trash off the earth.

[Nerv-Faktor]

>Build her pure ATK and SPD.
I don't think there's another way to build her.  :V

I still don't see it.
I'll try it, but right now it doesn't seem much better than just using another somewhat fast character with a multi-PAR move and then killing everyting off with big multitarget attacks or just using 2-3 multitarget attacks to kill everything off before most enemies get a turn, because there really aren't many enemies in this game that can outspeed most characters.

For the faster trash, a single Phoenix Spread Wing won't kill more than maybe the first enemy and while Chen is extremely fast she's not fast enough to act again before the enemies after using a Phoenix Spread Wing, so I don't see the big advantage over using another character with stronger multitarget moves if you can't kill all the fast enemies before they get a turn. Taking attacks from 2 Tengus instead of 3 is certainly not bad, but not that amazing either. Maybe I'm missing something here...

[Hanzo K.]

What I did was pair her with Aya, have both use their multi-target/row-target attacks, and watch the giblets fly!
Well, if you have Aya available that is.

[Zil]

My own method for most of the game was to paralyze everything with Cirno, then win by default. I also have a hard time believing Chen can kill everything before it moves where someone else couldn't.

[Parallaxal]

Took down Alice, she was quite easy. Opened up with Three Treasures: Orb into Saigyouji Flawless Nirvana and Silent Selene, which took out most of Healing Light's HP. Royal Flare ended up finishing it off. I didn't even have to use Last Judgment, which I had prepared just in case. Beautiful Light and Magical Light both died at the same time from Royal Flare and other multi-target spells, then I switched in Flandre while Alice's gauge was low, buffed her speed with Sakuya, and landed two Starbow Breaks for 4k damage each to finish her off.

Got Alice's drop on my first try too, nice.

EDIT: Now on Yuugi. I decided to fight her before embarking to the 6th floor, since I already had 400 battles down. My team ranges from level 26 (Minoriko) to 22 (Shikeiki). Keine at level 24 is capable of tanking Yuugi reasonably well, with about 1.3k HP and 650 DEF. Supernatural Phenomenon does about 1-1.2k damage, depending on buffs. Yuugi herself goes down pretty quickly thanks to double Three Treasures: Orb buffing up both Patchouli and Ran. The MAG buff also ensures that Minoriko can heal for more than enough to counteract Supernatural Phenomenon. A Luna Dial to start things off keeps Minoriko's speed up to the task as well.

Now farming Yuugi for that stupid Lion King's Soul. She's easy enough, but please drop already!

[Raikaria]

The main selling points to Chen:

Pheonix Wings costs almost nothing [24 SP] and has short delay, it's also pretty good damage, 330% ATK - 50% T.DEF
High Focus Recharge, so if she's on low SP she can just regain 30%+ of it and let the rest of the party clear if there's a trash wave that's easily killable without a pheonix wings.
Pretty high TP
Very fast leveling rate
Non-elemental attacks
She sucks hard at boss fights so you don't need to worry about her being low on SP getting to a boss or something.
Selfbuff with 1% delay

Of course, the downsides:

Paper
Purely physical
Purely non-elemental.
Multi-target is a row attack [Easily cleaned up by single target cheap attackers, like Remi]

[Parallaxal]

When trash sweeping with Chen, I like to pretend that she just has a single really powerful row-target attack that costs 72 SP, since her self-buff is fast enough to let her go again immediately, and that + Phoenix Spread Wings is enough damage to rival most trash-sweeping nukes. It works very well on enemies that are in groups of 3; she'll usually kill the first 2 and bring the 3rd down really low. It's also great against fast enemies that tend to stand on the left side for some reason (like those floating swords on floor 7).

[Nerv-Faktor]

The main selling points to Chen:
She sucks hard at boss fights so you don't need to worry about her being low on SP getting to a boss or something.

What? I think she's a high-tier damage dealer against bosses.

she'll usually kill the first 2 and bring the 3rd down really low.

Doesn't that stop working around floor 13 when trash starts getting decent hp?

Don't understand me wrong, Chen is certainly not bad on trash, I just think she's not even close to being the 2nd best trash clearer in the game. Let's take Orin as an example - she can outspeed almost anything too and Blazing Wheel has no trouble killing the enemies in position #3 and #4 as well.

[Mr. Sacchi]

I just took down Yuugi and got Lion King's Soul on my second try, I have all available characters up to 7F, I'm running this party:

Meiling (Slot 1)
Remi (Slot 2)
Youmu (Slot 3)
Patchy (Slot 4)
Iku
Minoriko
Yuugi
Reimu
Marisa
Sakuya
Cirno
Aya

All are doing very standard stuff, level-up wise I've been building Yuugi, Remi and Youmu on pure offensive, while taking care of Remi's tankyness and Youmu's speed through Skillpoints. Sakuya, Cirno and Aya I've been building pure SPD (Which explain why they are the fastest chars on my party), the rest has been either pure MND (With some SKP on Minoriko's and Reimu's MAG to help with healing) and MAG for Marisa, as well as all-around tankyness for Meiling (though with some emphasis on MND).

Please tell me I've been doing stuff right, my heavy emphasis on MND is thanks to the fact that I want that Eientei Trio dead when I get to them, simply because I've never beaten them before without cheat engine  :colonveeplusalpha:

(Also, Yuugi is currently my streongest nuke, her KO in 3 Steps deals 14k damage when fully buffed, patchy can barely break the 10k mark with Silent Selene.)

[Nerv-Faktor]

either pure MND (With some SKP on Minoriko's and Reimu's MAG to help with healing)

Please tell me I've been doing stuff right, my heavy emphasis on MND is thanks to the fact that I want that Eientei Trio dead when I get to them, simply because I've never beaten them before without cheat engine  :colonveeplusalpha:

Sentences like that always confuse me. By "pure", do you mean that you "only" raise that single stat through SKP on that character? The sentence after that sounds like that to me and I think that's horribly, horribly wrong.
It's right to put a heavy emphasis on the characters strengths, but completely neglecting to raise the other stats is just not good when you can get 10 levels in DEF for the same cost that would get you 1 level in ATK.
I usually think of primary, secondary and (sometimes) tertiary stats for my characters. (And unused stats like MAG on Remi or EVA on all characters and I also count stats like Flandre's or Patchy's DEF as unused, because no matter how much you raise them, the skillpoints are wasted). Of course I never invest anything in unused stats. Late in the maingame or at the beginning of the plus disk it'd be something like DEF lvl90, ATK lvl70, HP lvl70+. MND lvl 70, MAG lvl30 (it factors into her healing), SPD lvl 50+ on Meiling, for example.


Other than that: If your problems with Eientei were Astronomical Entombing and Hourai Barrage in your earlier playthroughs then raising MND will get you nothing, because both of those spells completely ignore it. If you want to reduce their damage you need to raise your SPI affinity.

[Parallaxal]

Usually I just assume they mean level bonuses when they say "pure" ATK or MAG or MND or whatever. Skill points are plentiful and there's more to go around.

[Nerv-Faktor]

Usually I just assume they mean level bonuses when they say "pure" ATK or MAG or MND or whatever. Skill points are plentiful and there's more to go around.

I'd think so too, the sentence just confused me. It might be because english is not my first language.

[Zil]

It is confusing. At the start he said "level-up wise" but later said "some SKP", so I'm not sure.  Saying "some" there does sound a bit dubious though, since with skillpoints you should certainly be increasing everything in varying amounts, aside from useless things of course.

[Raikaria]

What? I think she's a high-tier damage dealer against bosses.

I just don't like using Chen in boss fights, because if she gets so much as poked she's dead. One misjudgement of the enemy speed and Chen dies.

[Mr. Sacchi]

Sorry, that was written in a hurry.

Anyway, when I said "some SKP" it's because they are only two characters, and I'm focusing my points mainly on my four most active members (Meiling, Remi Youmu and Patch), for Reimu and Minoriko, most of the SKP being spent on them is being put in their MAG (Though I'm not completely neglecting their MND) while all of their Level-Up Bonuses are being spent on MND. Reimu has 900-ish MND and 600-ish MAG at level 27, Minoriko has 700-ish on both, also at level 27. (Though their Equips are focusing on MND (For Reimu) and MAG (For Minoriko))

That sound okay?

(Also, I'm barely using Marisa at all, any suggestions on who should I swap her with?)

[Nerv-Faktor]

(Also, I'm barely using Marisa at all, any suggestions on who should I swap her with?)

If you want to replace her then replace her with another MAG-based character, otherwise Patchouli will be your only character who can deal good damage against high-DEF targets.

Don't put too much emphasis on MND if it's only for Eientei. A high MND-stat is certainly nice to have in the Eientei battle (and not only there), but their big killer spells that ruin most attempts are MND-ignoring. 

[Zil]

I'd say Alice, assuming you have her. She has both magic and physical attacks, a good single target, and she's pretty durable. She'd also give you some debuffs, I think.

[Raikaria]

I'd say Alice, assuming you have her. She has both magic and physical attacks, a good single target, and she's pretty durable. She'd also give you some debuffs, I think.

Def and M.Def lowering attacks, to self-support her own damage.

[Parallaxal]

Alice debuffs everything except SPD, actually. Artful Sacrifice debuffs ATK, Seeker Dolls lowers MAG, Little Legion hits DEF, and Hourai Doll weakens MND. Artful Sacrifice is also her most damaging spell, although it's only single-target and FIR elemental.

[Nerv-Faktor]

I made some custom portraits for my 4 character run. They're not perfect, but maybe someone likes them and wants to use them, so I'm attaching them to this post.

Edit: Goddamnit, this post got longer than I thought because of that, sorry for that. Maybe I should've made a .rar instead

[Pesco]

Bonuses from levelups will always be less than what you buy with SKP. So when I say 'pure XXX' it means levelups and SKP levels on that stat. Something like 'hybrid with MND slant' on a character like Kaguya would mean SKP focus on MND and levelups into MAG to me. If a build is just termed hybrid, I assume equal split of levelups and SKP into the stats.

[Parallaxal]

Still doesn't really make much sense to me.The actual functional difference between the two stats is a lot smaller than the effect that your level bonus should have, because it depends on the difference between the skill level of the stat you're emphasizing and the ones you're not.

For example, let's say you have a level 50 Kaguya that you were doing your "hybrid with MND slant". You might have 50 SKP in MND at that point, and only 30 SKP in MAG, but you spent all your level ups in MAG. However, a difference of 20 SKP levels in MND only means an additional 60% more MND compared to MAG, but a full 50 levels in MAG means you got 100% more MAG than MND from levels. So your "hybrid with MND slant" is still technically emphasizing MAG in the long run.

To put it another way, whenever you're considering focusing on different stats for SKP and level ups, if the SKP cost of raising the stat your focusing ever surpasses 150% of the cost to raise the stat you're spending level ups on, then you're no longer spending your resources efficiently. That 150% threshold is fairly low as far as SKP levels are concerned, as it will pretty much ALWAYS result in a much lower impact on your stats compared to how you've been distributing your level ups.

You can also look at it as meaning that the opportunity cost and gain from your level up bonus is equal to 2/3 of the SKP cost needed to get another skill level into that stat. Because of this, it's actually most cost-effective to be spending your level up bonuses on whichever stat you've emphasized the most in terms of SKP. If you're spending, say, 3 level up bonuses on MAG and 2 SKP on MND, but MND costs you a lot more than MAG to skill up because you emphasized it for SKP, then you probably could have spent those 3 level up bonuses on MND and gotten maybe 3+ levels of MAG out of that SKP, for a net gain in your total stats.

As the game goes on, it only gets more and more impractical for the difference in skill levels to grow greater than your overall level. The mechanics of the game encourage you to keep your SKP distributions even, thus minimizing differences in skill levels, but your level will keep growing linearly. In the long run the opportunity costs from level ups are actually far greater than what you buy with SKP. Thus, I'd define focusing on a particular stat as spending comparatively limited and precious resources (i.e. level ups) rather than something relatively plentiful (i.e. SKP).

Does this make sense, or should I give some specific examples (with numbers) to illustrate what I mean?

[Raikaria]

Finished sweeping Floor 3, although I've not fought Rumia yet.

Starting on Floor 4, and I have one thing to say:

I Hate Aeros.

These things are faster than anyone I have right now except Aya, and like those Tengu, they resist Wind. If they Swoop, say, Cirno, she dies instantly.

HNNGK.

I miss Chen Q_Q

I'm Lv 14~16 right now.

[SuccinctAndPunchy]

I just stick all of my level up bonuses into one given stat for a character and just spread my SKP as evenly as I possibly can among everything else, skipping stats like ATK and MAG for characters who don't use one of them, basically raising anything but totally useless stats.

Boring, yes. Practical, most certainly.

[Pesco]

Shouldn't have taken my Wriggle if you wanted Chen :V

[Raikaria]

Shouldn't have taken my Wriggle if you wanted Chen :V

I knew I wanted Wriggle for bosses, I picked her somewhat early, I just never realised how much I'd MISS Chen and her trashclearing.

You took my Rumia so it's K.

[Parallaxal]

A few SKP into SPD, and now Sakuya is easily outrunning and sweeping most fast and annoying enemies, like the Aeroes on Floor 4 and those sword thingies on Floor 7. Usually after a level or two behind Sakuya, Ran is capable of the same feats (I had forgotten how AMAZING she is at trash sweeping: high speed, cheap and strong spells, and even decent TP!).

[Raikaria]

Beat Rumia with relative ease besides Orin and Cirno dying due to her spamming Dark Side of the Moon at one point, and both having heen debuffed by a Demarkation which caused havoc on her first turn. Remi got ALL her stats debuffed!

I'm guessing Rumia is resistant to MYS seeing how little damage Marisa did to her with a Spark at full SP compared to everything else. Even Remi's Tepes Boosted Spears were doing more damage.

Was Lv 16~18 for that fight. I'm currently farming Bomb Cores for Ifrit, because they raise Cirno's Fire Affinity to where she can take hits from it, and they're generally good items at this point for composite attackers like Cirno anyway. Sure, I have Orin and Utusho who could probobly tank it all day with their inherant Fire Resistances, but this is how I beat it the first time I fought it in a normal game so I'm fairly confident it works.

Thanks to speedbuffs I was finding time to buff with Sanae as well as heal during the fight against Rumia.