Xenoblade 2 progression

So is it true that this game picks up more as you play it? I’m at chapter 3 rn and it’s kinda repetitive, the compass is annoying, and combat is basically just building up combos or you die to enemies your same level.....and the side quests suck......when does it improve and when will there be fun grinding and quests

Did you play the previous games? This game starts slower than those but if you haven't played those and you're not really feeling this game so far, you may just not like the gameplay.

>and combat is basically just building up combos or you die to enemies your same level.
Literally what? Gid gud and buy core chips. Besides, chapter 3 introduces Driver combos and chain attacks, learn how to use them.

No gameplay is good especially the combat. All I’m wondering if the things I hear about it starting slow are true. Basically I hear side quests are actually appealing and there’s more layers added to combat...

Yeah that’s what I mean takes the game a bit to introduce all the gameplay elements
Also didn’t think gear from an early town would be all that good

A lot of the sidequest you get early are on just the generic "go get x" or "go kill x" sidequest, but more quests will appear later on will be better, and a lot only appear after raising a town's dev level up.

Plus each rare blade has its own special sidequest, some better and more fun than others.

ALWAYS keep up to date with your core chips.

The gear from the early town isn't THAT good but even the most basic of core chips can easily double if not quadruple the base auto-attack damage of a Blade.

Also the game does get significantly faster as it progresses. For instance, once you gain enough points to start filling in your characters' grid, you can start battle with arts ready, then unlock the ability to cancel arts into each-other without relying on auto-attack canceling. Mastering both auto-attack canceling and art-canceling GREATLY improves the speed at which you build special meter which, mixed with the mastery of break-topple-launch-smash Driver combos extending Blade combo timers, greatly improves your ability to properly stack elemental orbs which greatly increases the damage and efficiency of your chain attacks. And that's without mentioning you gain the ability to have three Blades per characters in chapter 4 which greatly improves the variety of Blade and Driver combos available to you as well as straight up giving you three more arts to use to build Special even faster.

The combat system is deep and multi-layered, but they introduce each layer at a steady enough pace as to not feel overwhelming and giving you enough time to learn and adapt to how to make use of each of them. That means the combat starts out slow so you have the time to understand what's going on and speeds up in synch with your degree of mastery of its systems.

Alright thanks. That’s what I’ve been hearing, so much stuff that they ease you into it which is slow but overall worth it for mid and late game gameplay that’s fasts and complex. Now I’m interested a lot more....

I just finished binging through this game.
Ended at level 97, after killing the level 130 Superboss, which was the strongest thing i could find. Also finished the story.

So let me give it to you straight;

Combat is what it is for this game; I never even used a driver combo until around level 50, as it wasn't needed. If you do some side stuff/quests, and putz around a bit here and there, you'll over-level all the main story stuff by significant margins. Especially if you use your rested EXP at inns.

There's a weird reality at level ~55 or so, when you'll basically be near the final sequences of the game. I jumped from around 57 to 90 in under a few hours, because you'll locate enemies 10-20-30 levels above you that you can kill.

There's a period where I finally opened up the combat system in more ways (Full Burst anyone? I literally didn't Full Burst until post-game, because it just isn't needed and doesn't ever touch on it).

Driver Combo, Full Burst, etc is all pretty cool but it's not really accessible until you're so far into the game that you're looking at doing superbosses. None of it is needed before that.

AMA if you have questions. I literally just finished all of this a day ago.

There's also a wide variety of different leveled enemies all around each area, which you CAN go back and grind against until you get to the next batch and so on to raise your level. You'll definitely be overleveled in the story by doing this, but enemies at that higher tier will drop appropriately leveled chips. For instance, a level 40 enemy in Gormott (first area) drops chips meant to be found in chapter 6, and another in Uraya drops chips meant to be found in chapter 7. It's totally possible to reach level 99 as early as chapter 3 or 4 this way, though it's much easier in chapter 4.

Go back to the Cliffs of Morytha and fight the level 100 Gladiator Orion on the upper path leading to the Jin+Malos fight. He's the hardest superboss in the game, far harder than the level 130 superboss you find at the end there.

>use rare blade stone
>always got common
Fuck. There's a reason why I hate gachashit.

I killed Orion for EXP from 95 to 97. He's susceptible to driver combo spam i found, i didn't have any trouble with him at all. May have to do with wearing Break resist down / No deflections from blocks on 2/3 characters.

Also ran purely
ATK/ATK/ATK (rex)
HLR/HLR/HLR (nia)
TNK/TNK/TNK (morag)
the entire game.

What games aren't repetitive?

Didnt even know he was supposed to be hard/anything. He did wipe the floor with me at level 50 or whenever I was progressing through Morytha for story.

I stopped as soon as i hit the low orbital platform thinking it was the Point of No Return and went and did most of the end-game stuff I could find. Also didn't look anything up, so may have missed some.

Also, favorite blade is Agate. Fuck yeah.

pulled her from a rare core today
is she the best blade?

No, Zenobia is.

Nah I’m good thanks just wanted to know if the game gets more complex and the side quests get better and by all accounts on this thread so far that seems true.

Nope. She's actually really weak and shitty, but she's the reason I was able to Driver Combo.

As i was using Rex/Nia/Morag nigh-exclusively, it ended up with

Rex
Mythra/Agate/Roc (This gives you topple, launch and smash all on Rex)
And just make sure both the others have a form of break
Lets you actually combo appropriately on-demand whenever break shows up.

I hear good things about Kos-Mos but i haven't used her much. Once i got my stable party i kept it forever.

Mythra/Agate/Roc (Atk/atk/atk)
Dromarch/Boreas/Vess (hlr/hlr/hlr)
Brighid/Aegeaon/Finch (tnk/tnk/tnk)

If i was going to replace anything it'd be Finch on Morag for a better tank blade, but this combo provided me all the things i needed.

Keep in mind your real damage potential skyrockets when finishing Morytha and unlocking green pyra.

Yeah I’ve noticed that even within the first big area of the game there’s a really wide range of levels of enemies I’ll most likely revisit places at later levels even if side quests don’t take me back to past areas

It doesn't really get 'more complex', with the sole exception of Green Mythra allowing you to combo at-will once per fight and do huge sums of damage.

The thing is that until you have the right weapon combo, you can't even *use* the combat system aside from the holy MMO trinity of tank/hlr/dps, and just attacking and using positionals.

Once you get driver combos figured out and functional and memorize enough elemental chains, you're done. That's all there is, really.

End-game fights go like this;
Spam driver combo when possible.
Set up elemental orbs. At least 4.
use Chain Attack to Full Burst (pop all 4 orbs)
-> Repeat
Once boss is low enough, pop Green Pyra/Mythra/Pneuma and do last chain attack for bonkers damage to finish fight.

That's every fight.

Side-quests and quality of life aspects of the game like the menus and compass suck throughout.
Combat kinda just becomes a pattern because it boils down to "get chain attack off before enemy goes into rage mode and uses their party wipe out move"

I gave Tora the vest you buy at the very start of the game and have never taken it off of him

>The thing is that until you have the right weapon combo, you can't even *use* the combat system
This is really one of the big problems the game has.
It can be a struggle to get some decent blades with Launch, so for a long while your driver combos are probably just the plain Break->Topple

And due to the mechanics of the AI and how the game works, mixing Blade roles on a character is generally a terrible idea, so many of your RNG Blade rolls may often be worthless without burning an Overdrive.

Yeah I think complex is the wrong word to use it does seem like they keep adding more features to combat though that I hope to unlock soon

I had no idea green could do so much damage. At level 60 on chapter 8 i nailed a unique enemy for like a 400k driver combo finish it was crazy.

If only Zenobia weren't wind, for fuck's sake.

Use commons. They exist for a reason, and 4 crowns can be stronger than some rare blades.

Yeah the fucking compass is horrible I wish there’d be a waypoint on your mini map or at least while skip traveling so you don’t just do it blindly

I was having a rough time at the beginning but that is because this game throws so much shit at you at once.

You gotta check your drivers and level up their shit and weapons and then check your blades to make sure they are getting affinity rewards from doing this and that, plus the weapon chips, plus the aux cores. Then you start getting multiple blades per character and have to keep on top of all that shit. Usually when I find I am falling behind or getting stuck in this game, its because a mechanic went way over my head (like I didn't know about Orbs making a chain attack go longer for the longest time), or I didn't max all my shit.

Go through all the various menus for the drivers and blades and make sure all your shit is up to par.

First thing first. Get the skill in the skill tree that lets you cancel driver arts into other driver arts.

Yep. I didn't even bother trying after most of the rare blades because from 60 to 97 and all superbosses I relaized there's no reason. Only a select few combos work, and there's no reason to want to grind overdrives or try to make it all work. I don't buy into waifu crap, so the game's over.

There's actually not all that much to it. Driver combo is break->topple->launch-slam, which causes the enemy to spam loot on the floor when slammed. Blade combos are just elemental and go in weird patterns like
heat -> steam bomb (water) or afterburn (fire) -> steam detonation (water) or nuclear explosion (light).

Once you get a solid 9 blades lined up together and start memorizing what combos into what, its' all pretty enjoyable and seamless but nothing fancy.

And that further locks you into never changing blades; because it all becomes very rote and cyclical and you know exactly what sequence to do things in to produce the orbs you need and then you just line up 4 orbs and full-burst which literally outright kills most things except superbosses.

Yep. Green is crazy strong and very important in superboss fights because you can't whittle them down, once they get to ~20-30% hp, they do OHKO insane aoe 'lol ur ded now' type AOE moves and you're basically expected to whittle down to ~40% and then full burst the rest down with a 6-orb finisher with green pyra... in all my experience at least. Killed them all.

Also, Mythra's level 5 cooldown reduction on crit is an insane game changer.

My Mythra is at 61% crit and 1310 atk, and that's before the +20% crit aux core and crit art.

I literally can just back to back rolling smash/side sword over and over and over, it combos off itself/cancels off itself, if you crit.

So when you get the level 5 CD Reduction and high crit, Mythra becomes automagically better than everything else in the game; as if she already wasn't due to all the other reasons.

Gameplay gets okay, but this is probably the worst of the 3 XC games when it comes to sidequests.

XC1 had many simple quests where you can quickly do them and get rewarded - they were not all that interesting, but they did not frustrate.
X kept those kind of quests at the main terminal, but also had plenty of full fledged side quests where it felt like you actually accomplished something at the end of each.
XC2's sidequests consist of a lot of arbitrary fetch quests which often way too many steps for a single quest to reasonably have for the small rewards, or can make you go through Blade Field Skill Checks which are terribly implemented. Many quests contain very little to no combat, which makes them feel like timewasting chores.

Some affinities both blade and driver are just locked with no explanation on how to get them

So how do I do it and complete a full tier of affinities

If I could change one thing about the game, it would be that the Blade Field Skills needs to simply check your entire roster automatically.

having to play magical merry-go-round with engaged blades every 30 seconds for 150 hours was fucking cancerous.

It was literally rage-inducing at times.
Swap 9 blades around to make absurd earth/strength check.
Okay, done, switch back to combat blades
kill 1 enemy
ANOTHER STR/EARTH CHECK
IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWED BY A 9 WIND/9 LEAP CHECK
IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWED BY A 7 DARK/7 FOCUS CHECK

Fffffuuucckkk

>61%
How the fuck? I'm using moon matter and I only have 53% with aux cores and shit. I'm not maxed out on trust or levels yet though

Do partners change their blades randomly during battle or what?

Trust level matters, i think. I was suprised because I went and piddled around and maxed out Mythra's trust before doing super bosses (I hadn't maxed anyone); her damage jumped from in the 850 range to around 1200.

Not sure if crit changed. I assume it must've.

>climb all the way up a ladder
>LEAP AND EARTH CHECK
>have to drop all the way back down and recall the Earth blades I just sent off on a Merc Mission
>then climb back up
>all the damn check does is let the character literally hop 1 foot up a broken segment of ladder

I don't even get why that one was there, it was in Morytha right after passing a Strength and Earth check

Did it bug the shit out of anyone else that eventually Pandoria's glasses changed from blocking her eyes to normal glasses? I get that there's supposed to be some metaphor around it but it was way more cuter beforehand.

If they have a Blade that can use Break, they'll stick with that primarily. They also prioritize Blades that can participate in the current Driver Combo over a Blade Combo, so keep that in mind when doing either or Fusion Combos.

Is there any sane way of raising Trust?

I've been in post-game a while now and my 5 Stars are only just breaking level 4 in their Affinity Charts.
And I need to get Praxis up in order to get Theory.

I hate foggy glasses, so no problem here.
She looks way cuter after

Can characters like Nia summon rare blades?

They'll switch to whatever the best Driver Combo participation is, and failing that, whatever available Blade Combo exists.

If you have an enemy toppled and in Steam Bomb, they will switch first if possible to a blade with Launch, and failing that, either Light or Water to finish the Steam Bomb combo at stage 3. If they have no blade with topple, and no Light or Water blade, they will default to the blade with the highest attack value.

:)

What do you mean "summon"? Nia can pull rares just like any other driver.

How do i move blades yo other drivers ?

Overdrive Protocols to do it directly, or release the Blade and reroll with your desired character.

I'm not sure. Most of my 5-stars hit 5-level trust in early postgame before i finished superbosses up; Dromarch, Brighid, Poppy Alpha and QT finished alongside Mythra somewhere around level 85. Pyra lagged behind as i didn't use her enough.

I used the same set of blades for most of the game though so that helps...

Sometime in chapter 3-4 i opened rare cores on Rex, Nia and Morag trying to get atk/atk/atk, hlr/hlr/hlr and tnk/tnk/tnk.

Succeeded on all but Morag who only got 1 TNK but that was later saved by Aegeaeon.

For awhile I was using Sheba on Rex. As soon as i got green Mythra i master-driver'd Agate over to Rex for Launch and from then on it was Mythra/Agate/Roc (topple->launch->slam all rex).

Healers for Nia started as dromarch/boreas/adenine, but switched adenine for Vess for more healing when i got vess.

Dunno.
Most everyone capped out early into post-game.

There are INCREDIBLY rare items called Overdrives that let you do it. They are not limited in quantity, but aside from the small few you can find you only get more by sending home a 4 Star Blade with a complete affinity chart.

Also...
CH 8 Game Mechanic spoilers:
Rex gains the ability to borrow and use anyone else's blade without use of an overdrive
Bonding blades to Rex alone at this point would be wasteful

Also keep in mind I figured out their favorite gifts and bought stacks of 50+ of all the favorites i could for people low on trust and left htem running 24/7.
May have a significant impact. I'm not sure.

It's not really a waste to do, getting to Ch. 8 is quite a while. It doesn't hurt to have at least 2 good rare blades on him before.

FUCK, i had like 3 of them in chapter 3 and used them on common blades.

I meant a waste at Ch 8, not before.

I mean whatever the fuck it's called. Gacha a rare. I haven't seemed to get one with Nia yet. Also do common cores give out rare blades?

Yes commons can give rares; rarely.
I've gone through probably 300-400 common cores and seen 2 rare blades from common cores.
Gone through probably 150 rare cores and gotten a lot of rares out of it. Probably like 25%.
Legendary cores are like 33% to be rare blades.

I also think it has to do with if you've gotten rares before, how many total you have, etc.

When i first used rares i got rare blades regularly. As the count of rare blades goes up in-inventory, the seeming likelihood goes down. Could be placebo. But it seemed severely so.

Yes. rare and legendariy cores just increase the chance of you getting a rare blade, but they're not guarantees. And as you get more rares, the chances of continuing to pull more decrease. Boost your luck stat to increase your chance of getting a rare blade as much as you can too.

Actually rare cores are way less than 25% now that i think about it; i burned piles of 50+ and got nothing towards the end of my game... but i also had most of the rare blades.

I haven't really counted them all or seen how many i have yet to get. Maybe i have them all.

I once got 2 rares in a row with common cores right after I used up my rares and got nothing. Shit was fucked.

Probably a base roll, not 10% at getting a rare blade, but 1% per blade for a common, 2% each for rare core, etc. or something to that effect and since you can't have duplicate rare blades, it does actually go down after getting more rare blades as there are less chances at hitting one of those blades.

What the fuck is this stupid gacha system
The whole rare blade system is fucked

>Need Premoum Cylinders
>Keep long resting at Mor Ardain because it's dev level 5 and it's the only city currently selling Gold Cylinders
>Slept for over 50 times now
>No Premiums
At this rate the damn inn will take all my money before the cylinder guy does.

I don't get it either, the whole reason anyone does gacha is to milk money out of people but they're not even getting the benefit of that.

It probably would've worked better if Legendary cores almost guarantee 4 crowns or rare blades, but were rarer/only come from 70+ bosses.

Not really. It picks up a little bit but you don't need to know any of the mechanics to beat the game. If you don't like it by now save yourself 60 hours of slogging through a poorly written story. This game is for the gameplay and post game.

>That's every fight.

This is what I hate about the game, it's literally 1 strat, everyone does it with nearly zero variation, I guess X wasn't all the different.

>but you don't need to know any of the mechanics to beat the game
t. "why is every enemy a bullet sponge, why is the combat so slow?" brainlet

Beating the game without fully capitalizing on the combat is the real slog, not the story.

Make sure you're using Pyra to do your Blade Combo's.

She gets a 50-70% bonus damage on them and will be by far your strongest blade until Mythra outscales her.

>once they get to ~20-30% hp, they do OHKO insane aoe 'lol ur ded now' type AOE moves

I mean, you can avoid those moves with the i-Frames on lv3 Combos or Level 4 specials.

People solo those bosses.

>I don't even get why that one was there, it was in Morytha right after passing a Strength and Earth check

That one's for a postgame quest, it's obnoxiously hard compared to the other ones

I know that feeling bro, I just finished doing that myself. I brought the full stack of 99 Cylinders when they finally did appear though and made my money back in about 20mins. (Stacked all my Salvaging Mastery blades on to get something like +12 Salvaging Mastery, not sure what a difference it makes but hey)

Do you have the max rank Salvager Level? I've heard that determines it too, but I don't know if that's true or not.

I've been mixing character roles and trying agro damage boosts with Katanas. Some Blades have some interesting abilities too So there is some variation too. Xcx had some varied builds too but you needed a stupid amount of grinding just to make them work.

>tfw using healer Morag

It's something else, I'll tell ya.

Also, I think I locked myelf outa completing the side quest where you fight a T-Rex for awhile.

Instead of choosing to retreat I chose to fight it and now the prompt to retreat doesn't open up.

Guess I'll have to wait until end-game to complete the quest.

Post unorthodox builds. I saw some guy that made Nia a tank so I was wondering how that ended up going

Dunno, most of my rare blades came from common cores.
Then again I opened them on a character with maximized luck, around 800 or so.

Although I'm still lacking three blades, for those I'll probably switch to grinding legendary cores too.

There is an item that will nerf the t-rex to lvl 36 if you chose to retreat

Well shoot, does the prompt show up again?

Guess I'm too late to choose that option?

Better result from beating it anyway. You can beat it at lv75ish

Does luck accessories help with chance of getting better blade from core? Also should I bind them to just Rex?

Yes, no. Minimise the amount of Blades you put on Rex.

Yes.

And no.

Pay attention to the tutorials and listen to what it's saying, even if you don't get it at first. People who find the combat hard to use or slow usually aren't making full use of their abilities.

When it says cancel, it doesn't mean "cancel the attack", it means "Cancel the recovery animation." If you're consistently cancelling after each auto attack the battles will go a lot faster.

Then with your affinity, prioritise the skills that let you use Driver Arts at the start of the battle, so you're not starting a battle just with auto-attacking. Also get the one that lets you cancel arts into other arts, speeds things up a LOT.

Other than that, don't waste Overdrive Protocols, they're the only thing that lets you move Blades from one driver to another. You get 3 in the story and then nothing until right at the end of the game, you're not going to be getting a lot of these. Just use them to fix up some bad luck as you need it.

Don't mix types, keep Rex as all damage, your healer as all healing, your tank as all tank.

This means you won't use your fourth party member when you get him, but that's fine, after Chapter 7 the game will switch up to offer you to be able to play as Tank/DPS/DPS(With healer blade) instead of Tank/Healer/DPS.

Rex doesn't need anything overdrived onto him really, so don't do that for him.

Your first tank doesn't need anything.

Your second tank starts with 1 Tank Blade and gets another through the story, so she only needs 1 more. Get it from cores or overdrive it to her. You can get a pretty good Tank blade from a side quest, but it comes pretty late in the game.

Your healer doesn't need anything, get her 1-2 more Healing Blades, but it's not a priority. You can get one healing blade from a side-quest, so you just need some luck.

Your final DPSer needs 2 DPS blades. So that's a good use of Overdrives if you can't get those blades through luck/cores. But there's also plenty of good DPS blades from sidequests.

thanks for the tips.

what's pneuma's name in JP?

Pneuma

>mfw +crit dmg and self heal on crit on top of that

Morgan Freeman

Do the blade skills (passives) work even when the blade isn't the one currently is use ?

No

FTR, you can give kasane to the second tank and she's sidequest obtainable not that long after you get 2nd tank, if memory serves well.

>trying to complete the uncover the truth sidequest
>realize I need to complete the Mysterious Note sidequest first
>compete that
>the guy doesn't show up in Torigoth

Did I just lock myself out of the sidequest somehow?

There is a quest in Uraya you need to do first

What do I need to start the Theory quest? I have Praxis already and want to bring them back together

First you must join the Tantalese nobility as the Duke of Cake.

Fonsa Myma or Garfront?

i believe you need level 3 or 4 affinity with level 3 of that deluge thing or whatever its called, then head over to fonsa myma and the quest starts near the barracks

Pneuma is written in Greek on her chest, they couldn't have changed it.

Pure padding to make up for how the story is shorter and less impressive than XC1's.
The post game is a joke with how easy it is to break XC2.

Toward the end of the game, it gets frustrating because you're required to have certain field skills in order to progress and the game doesn't really tell you that ahead of time, you just have to hope you had what was necessary, and if you don't, you have to leave and come back when you do, or just hope you randomly roll a blade that has what you need.