Didn't play LoT1 before, but how did you compare those spells damage? I mean you have to consider their skills, stats, damage formula, type vs enemy's elemental affinities, enemy's defense and mind.
Umm, yeah. duh. Basically when LoT1 was hot and new people criticized me for factoring in TOO much stuff in addition to the obvious, such as skill point inflation being different for each character, and synergy with the other 11 members.
I didn't mention the Variables because I'm speaking generally, Patchy will do inferior damage to other magic nukes. Specifically, I'm calling out the damage formulas.. They are hidden this time around, but they certainly seem to have been nerfed hard for patchy this time around (or they were left the same and most of everyone else's were buffed). For example, in LoT1, I could spend all my level up bonuses on her mnd, not even her magic, and her royal flare would blow the socks off every other aoe trash nuke in the game unless they were resistant to fire. Even on enemies weak to other elements, it was often better to just royal flare their ass, guaranteed ownage... drawback was she was slow and squishy as @%#%@#..
Silent Selene was as good a boss nuke as royal flare was aoe.....Quite probably one of the best in the game inferior only to nitori's cannon, eiki's judgement, yuugi's KOi3, and youmu's slash of eternity (which also seems feeble in lot2)...That's assuming elemental affinities being neutral, and physcal/magic defenses on the enemy being compareable. Now it does less damage than magic missle resistances or not, and if there ARE resistances, marisa ignores them, and patchy does not.
What's even worse is patchy levels up slower, so you think she'd inherantly be better if you unify everyone's levels. But no, even though I'm unifying levels for the boss encounters, and even though patchy has more exp under her belt (since more expensive levels), she still hits less hard than all my magic nukes, on any boss, regardless of affinities, or what have you...and I spent her level up bonuses on magic this time around too =/.
Subclasses and whatever are not relevant currently since She has none for me atm, and so does her competition (I gave enhancer to raymoo and ran, and sentinel to momiji), any benefits they offer her will affect the others as well. Oh yeah, and some characters I'm comparing her to have skills they have yet to learn that increase their damage for certain situations, I already got hers because there are few, and the leftovers revolve around weird things like giving others mp, resisting elements that you just used, etc.
In my opinion, Patchy did indeed get nerfed, but not as much as I initially thought. You just need to take into consideration that the skill system affects damage output as well, and that making full use of it probably will get you close to how Patchy was in LoT1.
What, but she has very few skills that increase damage, and all of them combined don't hold a candle to ones other characters may have alone like arm-twisting, or maintenance, or whatever. I bet even Magical training does more.
Group attacks (Otherwise generally referred to as multi-target attacks) =/= Row attacks (For you programmers out there, in my daze of sleepiness, I almost wrote != instead). Needle Parade and Arrow Rain were multi-target attacks I believe so it makes sense.
I know, that's my point... group attacks were rare and predictable in lot1. Which is why she was so easy to keep alive even without switching her out. My point is in LoT2 that isn't the case because either a: All those "weak" attacks like magic wind or whatever in LoT2 are now group and not row and are owning her on virtually every boss... or b: Now she's so much squishier (or the enemies stronger), that even though she's on the far end of the row attack, it's still owning her.
point is it's almost like every boss has needle parade or arrow rain as far as patchy as concerned, what I mean is they have a spell that will simply smoke her ass, in LoT1, only the extreme few bosses with true-group aoe physical attacks (rare) could do so, and almost all of them were predictable (hibachi twins did it every 7 turns, tenshi/youmu would focus first, etc...only boss I really recall being unpredictable like this were some post-game rematch bosses like chinaV2).
Anyway, that person asking questions about what subclass for each character. I cannot say since I haven't touched any of them (aside form that one floor 3 boss fight which doesn't count).
However, one possibility (remote I know), is if you are using Yuyu for her shock/ atb bar deleting features... maybe monk for her.. simply so she can spam them faster and faster and reduce boss bars better... obviously it's a bad spec for her for general purposes, but if you're using her specifically for that (no clue if that's even viable or not in 2, it wouldn't be in 1 without some over leveling), monk is the way to go =P.
