~Hakurei Shrine~ > Help Me, Eirin!
Labyrinth of Touhou 2 - 18F
Serela:
Well, his tier list -is- specifically for lategame; so I don't take problems with stuff like Chen being in the bottom tier. It just seemed that it was less lategame and more "winner farming efficiency" :V Meiling sure got hit hard, though. I actually considered Healer to become a decently usable heal in Plus Disk, and colorful rain doesn't go out of style, albiet less critical with Reimu/Rumia heals being more accessible and spammable. Her durability is only obsolete with when it comes to Winner, the boss of "kill it faster, not safer".
And gosh, yeah, Utsuho is probably the worst character in LoT1. Even Mokou at least is passable, it's just that she's outclassed by pretty much any other option. Utsuho is a nuker without a nuke.
elminster1372:
Sorry, I probably got either carried away or misunderstood, so I should clarify^^
Yes, I'm aware that my "tier list" is centered around 30F farming (though not specifically WINNER farming - much of my assessment works for Serpent of Chaos too, as well as the various V3 bosses). The reason why I brought it up is that a common complaint I read - even on the current thread - is that LoT1 was somehow more balanced than LoT2 currently is. That's absolutely not true from my experience. Perhaps in the early-mid game, yes, LoT1 had more variety of chars than LoT2 - though the more stringent requirements for bosses meant that you still had little room for changing, and LoT1 was much more punishing than LoT2 about that, what with the worse leaked XP mechanism and lack of reset options.
But in the late game, I found the situation to be actually reversed. In LoT1, the game polarizes around a few chars which are far and away better than the others. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the best teams in LoT1's late-game (which, in this context, I assume to be 30F - that's the best comparison IMO to LoT2's post-27F meta) all include the same 5-6 chars, with the remaining slots being made out of a selection of 8-10 chars at most - thus leaving around half the roster in the dust. Conversely, in LoT2, I found that the way gems, library levels, and stat skill boosts work (as well as other quirks such as synergies, subclasses etc.) actually level out differences in the long run. Whereas a few chars, like Nitori or Yuugi, were impressively good at low-mid levels and a few others (like Youmu) were impressively bad, once you get past lvl 1000 the differences are much subtler. Even Nitori, often touted as the strongest LoT2 char, can be equaled in damage by any good nuker backed up by real family synergies, such as Kanako, Yukari, Tenshi and so on. And this, I think, is much preferable to how it was in LoT1.
You might be right to say that the pre-30F (or pre-27F) is 97% of the game for the majority of the players. But, personally, I'd rather have more constrained choices which slowly expand as the game progresses, than a variety of viable choices which eventually bottles up to a narrow selection in the end-game. Especially when the latter scenario is applied to a game which harshly punishes you for using "crutch characters" (chars good at low levels but bad at high levels) like Remilia.
EDIT: Also, please don't assume that the stat weights I assumed for my Excel sheet are based on lvl 3000 chars. I did the measuring on lvl 1100-1300 chars, and most of the "polarization" (like, say, Youmu's HP stat soaring above other nukers) starts to become visible as "early" as lvl 700.
General_Milky:
I agree with the basic point elminister's making. Labyrinth 1's more a game you kind of want to tierwhore on. Lab 2's much more forgiving and casual about it, it has its OP and sorta bad characters, but the gap is shorter between the two. Lab 1's a game I'd definitely "guide" a friend through to help them avoid wasting time on useless characters or worse, ruining them with bad levelup bonuses, but I'd let them find their own way through labyrinth 2, if that makes sense.
Also, super hyped about the coming update, even though I've already made up my mind that the ultra late game is the worst part of Labyrinth 2 by a noticeable margin. I already know I'm gonna have a lot to complain about in this last stretch of the game, and yet I'm thrilled to see it. Strange.
elminster1372:
--- Quote from: General_Milky on July 29, 2018, 10:40:56 AM ---Also, super hyped about the coming update, even though I've already made up my mind that the ultra late game is the worst part of Labyrinth 2 by a noticeable margin. I already know I'm gonna have a lot to complain about in this last stretch of the game, and yet I'm thrilled to see it. Strange.
--- End quote ---
That's sort of how I feel about it too^^ Unless HP and/or defensive values are raised to astronomical levels, I fail to see how anything 3peso comes up with could provide a decent challenge for my current team - which atm is almost lvl 3000 with most Mega boosts maxxed. I mean, one of the things I did like about LoT1's endgame was that it actually forced you to push the limits as much as possible, and even then, WINNER's fight always felt tactically interesting - maybe not as much as, say, Rinnosuke, but it still involved significant amounts of strategy, as you often had to react to multiple threats at once, often unpredictably so. WINNER in LoT2, on the other hand, felt a lot more tame in comparison. Sure, I was maybe a bit overlevelled, but he also felt a lot more predictable and abusable than he was in LoT1.
Also, what worries me is that I dunno if the game is equipped to handle such astronomically high stats. In LoT1, by level 3000, you were about ready to kill WINNER 256 (i.e. the last challenge in the game). In LoT2, you can reach lvl 3000 in a fraction of the time it takes to reach it in LoT1, and I'm not even sure it is gonna be the maximum amount of progression we can hit. Also, in LoT1, by level 3000, a buffed Yuuka's Master Spark would hit for around 170-180 million HP iirc. In LoT2, I can hit the same amount of damage with stuff like Yukari's Shikigami + with Murakumo's boost - I'm sure that if I used Marisa with full boosts and synergies I could almost break 1 billion damage at this point. What kind of boss is supposed to handle that?
General_Milky:
I'm still hanging out at about level 1100 myself. I didn't want to overlevel for the last bits, so after defeating King I pretty much put my file on stasis. I'd hate to grind and "prepare" for it and then discover the next boss is 1300 while my team's 1700.