About to start Xenoblade Chronicles 2, any tips or tricks I should know for a better experience?

About to start Xenoblade Chronicles 2, any tips or tricks I should know for a better experience?

Don't worry about cores until the post-game, just open everything you get. Try not opening too many rares on Rex.

NIA IS A CUTE!!!! CUUUUTEEEE

shave her minge

Screencap tutorials because there isn't a reasonable way to view them again.

Rex automatically gets fantastic blades so you don't need to supplement that with random cores.

Get skill that lets you combo arts into arts as soon as you can.

Swapping blades refills their arts palette.

You can combo into and out of swapping blades.

Most enemies will aggro you if you aren't 8 levels above them.

Don't use bonus XP at inns unless you really need to because it can completely trivialize the game.

Nia is the best girl.

Overclocking Bangle is one the best accessories in the game, if you find it, keep it.

On skill trees, you will see an ability unlock "Cancel a driver art with another driver art". It's imperative that you unlock this ASAP because it boosts the flow of battle tremendously.

Keep an eye out for "Pippito" enemies. These cute little guys are bonus enemies that can be difficult to beat due to evasion and a tendency to flee, but killing it will drop some really good gear. Drops vary by location.

Focus on the Driver Combo of Break > Topple > Launch > Smash. The sooner you can get this set up, the better.

You can raise the affinity between a Driver and their Blade by repeatedly using pouch items over and over again. It costs money, but later in the game money is a non-issue.
Raising affinity will quickly unlock a Blade's skill tree in most cases.

Don't get too attached to common/generic blades.

Release your Blades, scum.

Don’t waste protocol overdrives. Especially on common blades. The game only gives you a few.

Also one of the most basic things that tons of people miss is that all weapons have 4 arts and you can equip 3 at a time, so pick the ones that are most useful to you.

Damage ratio is a ratio applied to auto-attack damage, so auto-attack damage is your base damage for arts and specials too.

Arts per weapon vary by driver. For example Nia gets a party heal and a Break art on Bitballs. Rex gets a much weaker HP absorb thing.

Nia is a blade

You're asking to be spoiled.

Never played another Xenoblade, I don’t really give a shit about spoilers

Thanks anons

>Never played another Xenoblade
You'll be back here in a week asking us to explain the final chapter to you.

watch out for territorial rotbart

Then he can just play the first Xenoblade. You might even get more out of it after 2.

Brace yourself for basically watching an anime with some video game elements in between episodes.

Avoid all Xenoblade threads and all spoilers until you're done with the game, that's probably the best advice.

Also
>Rex automatically gets fantastic blades so you don't need to supplement that with random cores.
You may want to put a couple of Blades on him at most, but you're usually better putting them in any other Driver, regardless of who you choose to control in battle.

How the fuck do you change arts for a blade? can't seem to find it anywhere in the mess of a menu

So can I farm overdrives or what?

They're driver arts, so you change them from the driver's menu. It's Characters > Driver > Enhance Arts and then there's a button that lets you swap arts around with slots corresponding to B, Y, and X, and a 4th extra slot. The arts in B/Y/X are the ones you have equipped.

Start reading up guides on combat and shit. The game goes through tutorials at lightning speed and you can't even replay them. I'm still confused at 5 hours in.

Another reason I think this game is shit
You have to BUY the fucking tutorials? Jesus christ.

Next game, please...

Technically,. You need to get mad affinity with 4 crown blades and release them.

Buy? The fuck? No you don't you fucking idiot.

...

That's why you screencap them if you need them.
But you really don't need them.

...

>ads a
Wow, you aren't...bright are you?
Yes, you buy tutorials in game. Why do you think you don't? That's weird of you...
Obviously I mean with in-game money you retard. Still buying.

...

...

To elaborate before this braindead cunt replies again,

You buy tutorials from Informants in game
I look forward to you reading this post, not replying out of embarassment, and then killing yourself, retard

Speaking of xenoblade 1
I just got to the shoulder of bionis (snowy mountains) and I've been rocking with shulk/dunban/heropon, but I feel like I'm just not dealing enough damage. What party members should I be rocking at this point?

>let's make a game overly complicated when one of the best JRPGs is simple as sin

return it

yes you do, you buy them from the informants.

the retard thought i meant buy with real life money probably hahah. he left the thread after killing himself for being such a mong anyways.

I've been playing JRPGs since I was a kid and I actually think XBC2 has the most consistently fun combat of any I've played. The game has a very long give on the learning curve, it only throws a little at you at once so it's not a clusterfuck. A lot of JRPGs bore me after about 50 hours, this one still has me doing postgame after 150 and the battles are still fun. I agree that simple design is often better, but in this case I like the complexity.

If you want to break the game, play as Melia.

Still doesn't beat XIII-2's combat

I'm also a noob and somewhat get overwhelmed by how much shit there is to do.

I'm a completionist so I like to do all the side quests and open every fucking thing I find but sometimes I'll wander into an area and it'll progress the story.

Can you go back throughout the different maps after beating the game and keep playing? Or once you beat it do you have to restart to do all that shit again?

Do you just spam bolt and discharge everything straight away?

Here ya go OP

The combat system feels really shallow once you get past the contrived terminology.

No, you stack bolts. Each one gives you some ridiculous ether buff so if you stock two and discharge your third element, Melia will put out ungodly amounts of damage. Stack that with element and ether gems and she'll out damage everyone else in the game.

If you're at risk of dying, you can stack one bolt and one earth, but as long as you're not pulling aggro, the game plan is to summon bolt, summon copy, then throw ice/flare/earth on the enemy, and then start firing off bolts if the DoTs don't kill them outright.

The problem is that you have to control Melia because the party AI doesn't know to stack bolts.

Not really. It moves fast and you have more to manage than other combat systems so you're always busy thinking about the next move.

>no guide on how aggro works

Don't kid yourself man, the whole combat system is pretty much Invoker for retards.

HOW DO YOU TELL IF AN ENEMY WILL AUTO ATTACK YOU OR IS JUST DEFENSIVE???!!!

I've still yet to figure it out

I would slightly go against this and say to get two Rares on each driver in your first playthrough, since it's easy to just level those two "mains" up in their affinity charts as you breeze through the game at a natural pace

Literal trial and error. The only thing you can know for sure is that Unique Monsters are always aggressive except a single specific one.

>Don't get too attached to common/generic blades
Try to stop me

You should be wary of element overlap regardless on what plans you have. If you need to sacrifice a certain element, Darkness is definitely the way to go as there are not that many good dark blades and the element itself is not super useful for combos.

I don't know what that is.

You can't really. If it's an herbivore, it's generally non-aggressive. Everything else aggros. Unique monsters always aggro.

I'll WORK my ASS off

I can't stop growing!

You're my new best friend!

AIBOAIBOAIBOAIBOAIBOAIBOAIBO
AIBOAIBOAIBOAIBOAIBOAIBOAIBO

Play with jap audio btw

Exactly.

Thanks. So if I see a cave for example and enemies in there are 10-20 levels higher than me should I take the chance to see if they're passive and wander in or wait and come back when I'm higher level as well?

There's no penalty for dying, but no they're going to fuck you up.

>mute audio, skip bonding video
checkmate feefies

Never relax around Ignas.

In ezman terms
>slash the bad guy
>use your specials
>match colors
>use more specials
>keep slashing bad guy
you'll figure out the rest just by playing

One other thing that the game doesn't really talk about is Fusion Combos. If you do a Blade Combo simultaneously with a Driver Combo, you get stat bonuses, extra damage, and the buffer time for the next stage of the combo is increased. For example if you put Aqua on an enemy and keep Break -> Topple -> Launch -> Smashing the enemy, the Aqua effect's duration will keep getting refreshed.

Element effects are true debuffs by the way. I'm not sure if they do anything but DoT, but there's at least that.

I unironically think some of the old and stagnant JRPG series stuck with turn based combat could use implementing a system similar to XBC2.
Pokemon, I'm looking at you.

>About to start unlocking some rare cores
>Have to get rid of some generics
>Start releasing them
>"I hope we'll met again someday."
>"Thank you for everything!"
>"...Goodbye"
>"Was I not good enough?"
I'm going to need this game to fucking STOP. I actually had to mute the game the next time I did this.

How were the threads back in December? I stopped browsing Sup Forums since mid-November. What's the general consensus of the game? It was my first xeno game and I loved it, I hope the new story later this year will continue after the ending.

>Don't use bonus XP at inns unless you really need to because it can completely trivialize the game.
This. I got completely overlevelled so every story quest never really had a tough fight

The general consensus is very positive, many claim it's the best Xenoblade so far, but there are some dedicated shitposters.

Return the game and watch the cutscenes on youtube.
Seriously, just save yourself the grind. Only about 15% of the game is actually enjoyable and the rest is grinding and RNG bullshit.

>elemental (type) strengths and weaknesses
>limited number of arts (moves) during combat
>equipping aux cores (items) on blades (mon)

I think your on to something here, though redoing all 1000 Pokemon would keep them from changing things up too much short of a total reboot

From what I remember it's been rather popular. You had/have anti-weeb posters shitting on the art style but most people saw a solid game behind it so threads have been a mix of Welsh cat memes and actual game discussion.

>Defense...I'm good at that

>That's a important task; no objections

>Just you wait, I'll show you something AWESOME

They didn't need to make these generics be so lively, they could have just been automaton.
But then again, that's the point isn't it

I want to play this game but my car keeps eating all my money, should I just go emulate the Wii and play xenoblade 1 lads?

Definitely, this game borrows a handful of lines and iconography from XB1 that can be funny if you know the history from XB1

If Xenoblade 3DS is already on my backlog should I finish that first?

It's up to you really. You can play them in whatever order you like.
But don't play the N3DS version of XC1. Emulate it or get the WiiU VC version

Is there something to pulling enemies that I'm missing? I know Tora is supposed to be the designated tank but I'd like to help take the pressure off sometimes.

Certain blade arts and battle skills will increase Aggro, use those.
Typically, the Blade weapons that increase Aggro and survivability are Hammer Shields and Katana

>Most enemies will aggro you if you aren't 8 levels above them
Oh is it 8 levels? I assumed it was 10 levels like Xenoblade X. Unless it was also 8 there and I'm just stupid.

The only trick that works to get rare blades

>though redoing all 1000 Pokemon would keep them from changing things up too much short of a total reboot
I'm aware Gamefreak is not kind of a dev willing to heavily rework their series like that, but I think 'starting from zero' with only about 100-200 Pokemon (with following games re-introducing the rest), but with each one actually feeling different and relevant in some way would be preferable to just doing the same thing over and over again.
And don't forget about affinity charts, this one could be easily implemented within the current model.

>used bonus xp at inns
>still struggled with some bosses
I guess I just suck then, lmao.

First you need obviously a lot of cores, you can get her as quick as the beginning but farming cores is an easy task with break>Toppled>launch>Smash combo, doing this method I got 4 blades in the process

They will never change Pokemon combat because that would destroy the ability to use your pokemon from the old games, and no one wants that.

Same here, user.

Then you need to see wich character has more Justice stat, this factor in wich kind of blade you will get, it doesn’t matter if it’s 1-1-1 and 2 in justice, if you have one character with justice higher than the others use it,

Alrest is an unwelcoming place.

I'm assuming those arts and skills mention the aggro increase in the description. I'll take a look the next time I play, thanks.

I mean, they already give every Pokemon a couple of attack animations and the like and I wager a Pokemon spinoff could muster more resources than a mainline Xenoblade game.

I would especially be up for replacing normal leveling on Pokemon with randomized affinity charts

no one wants a reboot because then all of our Pokemon in Pokemon Bank would be useless.
Don't you remember when Ruby and Sapphire lost the ability to use pokemon from the old games? It nearly killed the series.
If you think pokemon should do this "soft reboot" shit you literally are a brainlet with no business sense.

We have spin-offs for that, there's no reason to fuck up the main series.

Now here is the trick, for this to actually work you need to keep only at most 2 types of blades from the pool, since I’m going for kosmos I need to keep dark blades since dark is paired with light (kosmos element), I was keeping lighting too because I was searching for another blade

In the post game you can keep around 250 blades so you will start to be flooded with at least 60-70 shitters

Yeah, they'll specifically mention that it increase the Aggro pull of blade arts or auto attacks

Specifically, there are certain Blade arts that will say "Aggro up"
In this game, every auto attack and art has a certain amount of Aggro generated. Enemies target the party member who they have the most Aggro with

It was extremely comfy.
I have like 40 saved since

This method guarantees you get a rare blade of the element you are farming, and since I was doing this with 99 rare cores and 50 legendary I got 4 rare blades out of it

Now for core farming you can farm them easy in the relentless arduran, and doing the combo above described it will get you around 20 legendary and 40-50 rare each time, (don’t go for the kill with orbs, just keep doing break>topple>launch>smash till it does)

Thanks, I'll give it a go. The shitty motion controls don't affect it much do they?

>passing placebos as actual science
dude pls

Should I be fighting mobs or what? The game is always feeling like a struggle because I'm only fighting foes who attack me first. It seems like having even few levels of difference makes the battle either a win or a lose. Why do levels matter so much in this game?

They're basically nonexistent in Xeno games

Delete every other type you are not farming and you will eventually get kos-mos this took me around 2 hours including farming cores, and items to raise luck(I almost forgot, use blades that raise luck% and put chip cores that raise 50 luck to that blade, you easily combining it with gold gear chocker and comet choker will get you to 999 luck, that also raise the chance to get rarer blades)