Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Hatorade said:

Pump defense, makes an insane difference if you miss timing.

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Yea that's what i did on lune. 2 glass canon dps and lune (rezz skill) with max defense attribute max pictos defense and some self heal on parry. She s the last man standing and allows me to learn the timing of parry without reloading all the time. Still really doesnt change the fact that DPS optimization (enemy weakness, good choice of skill etc) all take a backseat, and it's just about learning the parry.

... said:

I think so too. i was explaining to a friend about the pictos. how you get new ones and need to master them. if the game was FF7 you'd be out in the map grinding monsters for hours to master it. here it's "four fights" for the whole party.

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Do you mean new skills from weapons in FF7? When equipping/changing weapons they'd all have a little blurb to tell how using a new ability in a certain way would give massive boost to learning it. 1/2 fights tops for basically all the new skills.

i meant grinding up materia in the olde FF7 on ps1

oh damn, they are itemizing my playstyle!

Not sure how I feel about this one, cause it sure as fuck feels like cheating lol.



Lune is absolutely cracked in half in A3 though once you've got 150ish points to spend. You can rig it up to where she can cast typhoon as her first action every battle and the heal from it gives shell/rush/powerful and +6AP to the team, and it just refreshes every turn for no cost. Unless you actually get oneshot by something it just heals the team to full every turn and maxes their AP. Combined with the weapon that gives 2 random stains if you have none means you can just alternate between typhoon/earthquake for free sustained damage while spamming elemental genesis every other turn for like a million damage.

Hatorade said:

I mean you can brute force this game but if you hate the combat you won’t like this game. I loved the parry as a whole in all games so I never even tried to dodge was all parry and counter or die.

The pacing though was perfect, never played an RPG that had this kind of progression, every fight and every time you explored a new area you were getting stronger either through pictos or stats or getting good. If this game has a lull anywhere I didn’t experience it.

None of that matters though if you hate the combat because that is 80% of this game.

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Honestly, I would have thought I would hate the parry/dodge system before I tried it, but it's actually kinda fun, although rage inducing at times.

It's not all or nothing though, from what I have seen:

Regular mobs - you can just ignore parry/dodge completely, checkpoints are common, healing skills are common, you have free restocking in combat and out of combat potions, and even if you are underlevel for the area, you don't lose exp for dying, so the worst case is you level up a time or two and then pass that area.

Elites ( like chest guardians ) - you need to spec into def/heals if you want to do no dodges/parry, but it's still practical, just annoying.

Bosses - they seem to be balanced around ~30-40% dodge/parry rate, you won't get past them with zero unless you farm like crazy.

Optional Bosses - there is zero chance whatsoever of beating them without dodge/parry. This is hit you for 100% of your life 3x a turn kind of stuff. Outlevelling them is *technically* possible, but in the same way that it is technically possible to go back and solo early raids in WoW. You aren't doing it when you run into them, you are skipping them and coming back 5 dungeons later when everything in this dungeon is totally trivial.


Paying attention to the mobs and what they are doing isn't just for the dodge/parry though - there are a lot of huge advantages you can get that way as opposed to just unga-bunga attacking everything the same attack order.

one thing i find to be absolutely queerballs is the random ass auto saving. I walked 'behind' a monster to get an item and had to fight it to get out, but it was auto kill monster man and i couldn't so i load. it saved BEHIND the monster. no problem. second save file. also behind the monster within the same minute on the clock. the save before it? 11 minutes ago before i traversed some maze and got some items.

why no option to choose save? why no stuck command?

i hope they fix these things over time.

ronne said:

Not sure how I feel about this one, cause it sure as fuck feels like cheating lol.

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Lune is absolutely cracked in half in A3 though once you've got 150ish points to spend. You can rig it up to where she can cast typhoon as her first action every battle and the heal from it gives shell/rush/powerful and +6AP to the team, and it just refreshes every turn for no cost. Unless you actually get oneshot by something it just heals the team to full every turn and maxes their AP. Combined with the weapon that gives 2 random stains if you have none means you can just alternate between typhoon/earthquake for free sustained damage while spamming elemental genesis every other turn for like a million damage.

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Yeah, I kind of had a similar setup going with Sciel and her "dark damage" party heal she gets. But her damage seemed pretty underwhelming and I was mostly just using her as a buffbot for Verso/Maelle, with the whole +ap, shell/rush/powerful on heal shit. I'll have to try out the Lune version, because a lot of her spells are powerful as fuck once you get the right stains built up.

man i just got the ability to traverse the map more freely (

Spoiler: spoiler

Esque can swim

) and i found a cave. ran in it.. mosters toasted me. came back ran around like scooby do with them all chasing me, grabbed all the items and giggled and ran out the door. now i am at the start of act 2 with a level 23 picto that gives 1200 or so defense. pretty awesome.

Lampmaster skill really carried me through some difficult Act 3 stuff I was struggling with yesterday, it can max a break bar with a single attack even on a lot of chromatic enemies. I didn't want to fully lean into the busted one shot builds and miss cool fights, this feels like a pretty good compromise.

Lenas said:

Lampmaster skill really carried me through some difficult Act 3 stuff I was struggling with yesterday, it can max a break bar with a single attack even on a lot of chromatic enemies. I didn't want to fully lean into the busted one shot builds and miss cool fights, this feels like a pretty good compromise.

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I added this to my auto death bomb build in NG+ and it's super good for anything that doesn't just die.

That carried me through the last fight of the challenge tower, no doubt. I couldn't get all the timings down.

apparently these guys already have a movie deal for clair obscure. not bad for a squad of 30 pedo stached frenchie white biggots.

Bah. Wanted to get a physical copy. Good fucking luck. I’m not ready to start it yet, but still.