A 4-player co-op run up to the final floor of Arcade.

[Own]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=CidV_4ePqoI

Since no one has ever made a video like this before, I thought you guys might enjoy seeing it. 3 of the people on the top 6 of 1P Arcade Mode were in this run, with the fourth never having played 1P before. Some notes:

Q: Why are you all spinning?
A: Because crowd control is king in Arcade Mode and we aim to set high scores. Spinning currently lets you deal with as many enemies as possible as quickly as possible. Magic would be used if it had talents to make it more viable, like being able to pre-charge a spell before entering a room ala 'Store a spell charge in your sword / shield / both' talents. As it is, magic is a poor way to get S-Ranks.

Also because spinning is the easiest way to get around the lag delay.

Q: Why are you dorks taking so much damage.
A: It's not my fault, it's the lag. I can't perfect guard anything and I have to account for where enemies will be attacking 0.150 of a second from where I see them.

Q: Why do you constantly backtrack to the start?
A: Timeconsuming as it is, we try to make the HP orbs as efficient as is possible. We intentionally don't get them even if they can refill us to full because the more damaged you are, the likelier a nurse is to appear, IIRC. I've never seen her appear when I've only been missing a few points of damage.

Q: Why not cast other skills?
A: Because the only two support magics in game are Protect and Haste. We'd cast others if they were available. Really interested in seeing what's coming there, eventually.

Q: How do you kill Winter in 4P?
A: Heck if I know. I solo'd the old bastard for 3-4 minutes with no HP pots and did this much damage to him.



Eventually I was just worn down by attrition. A little damage here and there, along with demoralization at realizing how little I was actually doing. By my estimates in order to kill him I'd have needed to keep fighting for 6-8 more minutes and after an hour I was already pretty fatigued. I'd say it would be interesting to see @Teddy, @Fred and @Vilya beat him in 4P to stand against the monster they've made at the amount of HP he has in there, but the game only has 3 developers.

I wonder how far they've all gone in Arcade?

 

[GarlicJelly]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=CidV_4ePqoI

Since no one has ever made a video like this before, I thought you guys might enjoy seeing it. 3 of the people on the top 6 of 1P Arcade Mode were in this run, with the fourth never having played 1P before. Some notes:

Q: Why are you all spinning?
A: Because crowd control is king in Arcade Mode and we aim to set high scores. Spinning currently lets you deal with as many enemies as possible as quickly as possible. Magic would be used if it had talents to make it more viable, like being able to pre-charge a spell before entering a room ala 'Store a spell charge in your sword / shield / both' talents. As it is, magic is a poor way to get S-Ranks.

Also because spinning is the easiest way to get around the lag delay.

Q: Why are you dorks taking so much damage.
A: It's not my fault, it's the lag. I can't perfect guard anything and I have to account for where enemies will be attacking 0.150 of a second from where I see them.

Q: Why do you constantly backtrack to the start?
A: Timeconsuming as it is, we try to make the HP orbs as efficient as is possible. We intentionally don't get them even if they can refill us to full because the more damaged you are, the likelier a nurse is to appear, IIRC. I've never seen her appear when I've only been missing a few points of damage.

Q: Why not cast other skills?
A: Because the only two support magics in game are Protect and Haste. We'd cast others if they were available. Really interested in seeing what's coming there, eventually.

Q: How do you kill Winter in 4P?
A: Heck if I know. I solo'd the old bastard for 3-4 minutes with no HP pots and did this much damage to him.

View attachment 598

Eventually I was just worn down by attrition. A little damage here and there, along with demoralization at realizing how little I was actually doing. By my estimates in order to kill him I'd have needed to keep fighting for 6-8 more minutes and after an hour I was already pretty fatigued. I'd say it would be interesting to see @Teddy, @Fred and @Vilya beat him in 4P to stand against the monster they've made at the amount of HP he has in there, but the game only has 3 developers.

I wonder how far they've all gone in Arcade?

You should join them in that 4p Arcade run. I'd be down to watch you guys stream that. Fred hasn't streamed in a while so I think this would make for a nice surprise stream. Maybe this could be done closely after the Steam release to pull some attention and show off the game?

 

[Teddy]

That's a lot of spinnnnnniiiinnnnng~~~~! It's honestly really fun watching you guys do your thing

About Winter:

I made an experiment with Winter's HP, and I guess the experiment failed

I've used 0.75-0.8 as the additional HP multiplayer on most boss encounters in the past, with the assumption that it's usually more difficult to get optimal damage done when you're more than one. So, as a general rule, if you're 4 players the boss will have 3 times the amount of HP as in single player.

With Winter I decided willy nilly to give him a solid "dumb scaling" factor of 1, so he actually does get the full 4 times as much HP as usual!

That said, trying to solo him probably isn't going to be a pleasant experience even if he's got 300 % of his usual HP.

About the dev-team's Arcade Mode prowess:

Full disclosure is that I haven't done a proper Arcade Mode run in a long time! My Arcading consists of cheating myself to the most recent floors and testing them out with the kind of build you'd get from a moderately successful run. It's actually a very interesting thing for me, balance testing Arcade Mode! I'm not that good at the mode, so when I feel that I'm struggling to get through, that's usually when I send it to the inhouse build and later on the Frontline for you guys to test it.

Ironically, I feel the bosses are the easiest part of Arcade Mode. At least they behave as I've told them to do! Procedural generation, man... screw that!

As for Arcade Mode as a whole, Fred is definitely the #1 in-house tester. He does a ton of proper runs with his girlfriend, and while I don't think they've beaten the entire thing yet they do get up to Seasonne fairly often. They always play off-meta builds, too, so I suspect if Fred decided to do a Spin2Win or Shadow Clone run he'd have good chances of beating the mode.

I'd love to do some more honest runs, but I've resigned myself to the fact I'm not in the field on this one. I just bitterly sit here and add snowstorms to the Marino fight and quadruple Winter's HP while y'all get to have all the fun!

 

[Own]

Full disclosure is that I haven't done a proper Arcade Mode run in a long time! My Arcading consists of cheating myself to the most recent floors and testing them out with the kind of build you'd get from a moderately successful run. It's actually a very interesting thing for me, balance testing Arcade Mode! I'm not that good at the mode, so when I feel that I'm struggling to get through, that's usually when I send it to the inhouse build and later on the Frontline for you guys to test it.

You know, you could join Pokesly and I if you wanted and run whatever build you wanted some more hands-on testing. We carried his friend to F12 and his friend had never played Arcade Mode before.

With Winter I decided willy nilly to give him a solid "dumb scaling" factor of 1, so he actually does get the full 4 times as much HP as usual!

So in order to beat Winter in 4P co-op even remotely reliably, all four players have to survive and contribute as much as if they were single-handedly fighting him in 1P? Ouch, that's a tall order. Only four people have even beaten him in 1P. I guess if all of them teamed up he might have a shot, but that might be a little difficult to organize with different timezones. Maybe when Winter/Season cards get put in (and the rest of the Story Mode drops, like the +ATK/MATK accessory, the Purple Flower Garland, etc) it'll be a little easier.