Dragons Dogma Dark Arisen

Sentiel wrote:Two minutes? More like 15 seconds.

Only good thing about it can be the fact that it makes it easier for you to interrupt Daimons annoying spells, but you won't get any damage increase from it for enemies like him. You'd have to get the weapon buffed by your Mage for that.

 I guessed, I've never actually timed how long it took. 

Idk it still works great for me.  I love being able to take out whole health bars in one hit

Ok. I'll admit I can't take Daimons whole health bar in single hit, I do around half.
I saw a vid of a guy having a pure hybrid MK and doing around 3/4 HP bar of Daimon per hit. Unbuffed.
That was damn impressive.

I'm a little confused about stats and their relationships to weapons. I know if I equip a physical weapon, say a sword, and that sword increases my strength stat a specified amount that increase counts towards any damage I do that's physical, be that normal attacks or abilities right? So with a staff, or in this specific case an archstaff, that increases my magic stat, will that increase both my normal attacks and my abilities or just my abilities? I guess an easier way to put that would be: do staffs/archstaffs do damage based off strength or magic? I'm also wondering if a staff/archstaff has an elemental attribute if that will affect my magic abilities, or just the normal attacks I use with the staff? I'm asking because I just found an archstaff that has a way lower strength increase than the current staff I'm using, but has a higher magic increase, so I'd assume it'd be the better choice because my sorcerer pawns normal attacks should be negligible in relation to their spells regardless of which stat affects normal attacks, but the weapon is also a dark elemental weapon, and I know that in the vanilla game that's not going to do me any favors. So I guess my real question is would I be better off with a staff with higher magic stat increase and lower strength with a dark elemental effect, or a staff with a lower magic increase, higher strength increase, and no elemental effect? It must be the one with higher magic right? I'm just hoping I don't shoot myself in the foot here with the dark element.

Maybe I should also note that I'm at a point in the game where I'm fighting a lot of undead enemies. I'd assume that enemies from the skeleton and zombie families have high resistances to dark.

Magick is what you want to look at in your Achistaves.

http://dragonsdogma.wikia.com/wiki/Archistaves

Yes, the Undead resist dark. In all honesty, with the exception of High Maelstrom dark isn't very good.

But is that weapon element going to have an affect on my spells? I'm guessing no, but I'd like to know definitively

Oh, you mean like if you have a dark elemental staff?

Pretty sure no, it's just a bonus really. For example when I used my Ice staff (Frozen Tomorrow I think it was called) I found that it didn't really underperform when I used spells from it, provided I didn't use spells like Gicel on cold resistant enemies. On the flip side, it being an ice staff, pretty much cut down all manner of Saurians laughably easy with just its light attacks.

Okay cool. I'm going with the dark staff then.

Also, I've been wondering whether or not affinity has any worthwhile bearing on merchants? As far as things like discounts or extra stock or anything along those lines?

Not a hundred percent sure, I know there are items that help you with bartering and the Sorcerer has a passive which does exactly that but I'm not sure if just having an NPC like you will get you better prices.

Affinity seems pretty worthless. I'm yet to discover anything it does that's beneficial. I maxed affinity with Selene just to see what would happen, and it doesn't seem like much did, aside from the fact that she gives me bedroom eyes and flirts with me now.

Permanently enchanted weapons have no effect on the skills you use with them. It does affect damage dealt by their attacks though, but this does not apply for spells. Use buffs instead. Temporary buffs change your weapons attacks, especially staves and such and will also boost your magic damage, giving an edge to your spells. However the buff doesn't affect the spells themselves, so if you have fire enchanted staff, it won't affect damage of fire and ice spells, so no need to worry about that.

Imho, the best buff for staves is Holy. It adds HP regen and those charged bolts do a lot of damage and are self homing, so you can keep on moving and attacking at the same time.

I've been using buffs all along, this is just the first staff I've found that had an innate element so I wanted to make sure of a few things before I slapped it on my pawn and went on my merry way.

Just out of curiosity, is there any way other than holy buffs for a non-magic vocation to damage enemies in the phantom family? I'm still playing as an assassin, so I'm having to rely on my pawns to buff me when I run into them, and seeing as though I'm exploring Soulflayer right now I'm running into them a lot. I'm back at the Greatwall Encampment now, and it just occurred to me that I might try one of the assassin abilities that damages with flame. Not sure if that'd be effective or not though. So far that's really the only thing I haven't liked about the assassin. They have to be completely reliant on the actions of a party member that you have very little control over the direct actions of during combat with enemies that're either wholly or partially susceptible to magic. That was one of the initial reasons I decided to go with MK. Heavy armor, decent melee options, and access to magic. I haven't tried it yet, but it sounds like the most well rounded hybrid to me.

Most phantoms, ghost and other spectres are weak to Holy, although other elements can usually damage them to some extent as well.

As an Assassin myself with almost completely useless pawn when it to comes to attacking enemies, I rely on her Hole buffs and consumables. There are items, books mostly, that enable you to cast spells for some damage. I always carry few of those with me.

If you want to go a Hybrid, I strongly suggest Magick Archer. It's the ultimate class imho.
Magick Bow will take care of ranged attacks and its skills are pretty strong and useful. Daggers will help with evasions and will give you the best DPS move, Hundred Kisses. Staff will help with traveling and can use some basic spells, but other than traveling, Magick Bow will outdamage it.

MK is very good, but it relies on buffs and parrying too much. It's also pretty useless when you need to attack something ranged, especially flying, because it's Great Cannon has horrible vertical tracking. Even though MK has a big shield, it can't block very well. Fighter is 100 times better for blocking and since the class lacks evasion skills of daggers, it will get hit a lot.

The game is generally super easy, so most of these don't matter, but once you step into post game Everfall and later BBI (if you get the DLC) then these will matter a lot.

I'll be the judge of that sir.

My main pawn is going to be a ranger anyway, and I always travel with at least one spellcaster with some decently fast ranged spells, so I figure that'll take care of the annoying small flying enemies anyway. I played fighter/warrior my first probably 25 hours of play anyway. Pretty comfortable with my ability to fight flying enemies with a melee weapon regardless at this point.


Good call on the spell tomes. I forgot I even had those. I have a huge stockpile of them in my item storage. Only thing I've used them for so far was to accidentally blow up the innkeeper in Gran Soren. I crafted one and I'd never seen it before, so I left the crafting menu and went right into my inventory still standing at the counter and I figured I'd try it to see what it would do. I assumed it'd just have me read something right in the menu the same way it does when you read the training manuals, but that's definitely not what happened. Instead I killed my innkeeper, also discovered that you can get arrested for the first time, and then didn't have inn services in Gran Soren for 7 days. It was AWESOME. Let me tell ya.

LooooooL The same happened to me.

"Salomet's Grimoire you say?"
"Surely gonna teach me some nasty spell. "
...
BOOM!
Oh, Sugar Honey Ice Tea!

Am I the only one who doesn't keep a Mage in their party?

WhatDoesThePendantDo? wrote:Am I the only one who doesn't keep a Mage in their party?

Yes.
To be fair, I sometimes go four Sorcerers and pray that I don't fry my PS3 with those combined spells. Four tornados are a thing of horrific beauty.
...
Just don't run into any Golems.

I don't think there's been a single point in the game after the encampment that I haven't had one. It's nice to have a party member that can heal you and fix your status without items. Spreads your items out longer. Because of it I've pretty much been using greenwarish and potent greenwarish the whole game, and have saved every other healing item I've picked up that's stronger. Now if I ever fight something that's giving me trouble I'll have a huge stockpile of amazing healing items

I mostly use Mages not because of heals, which are sweet of course, but for buffs. While Sorcerers can also buff, they are more prone to use offensive spells instead. Also, AI is useless when it comes to long spells, like Bolide, unless the Arisen is also a Sorcerer and they combine their casts. As such, I find having a Mage cast Grand Ingle doing more damage, because it takes less time to cast and the spell is thus less likely to get interrupted.

Grand Ingle, Grand Frigor and Grand Brontide are my favourite combo. Takes care of everything.

If you go for Sorcerer, I highly suggest Grand Gicel. The last spike usually takes three, HP bars of Dire Drake, even on a sort of hybrid Assassin build. The thing is OP like hell.
And if it's immune to Ice, Grand Seism all the way.

The sorcerer I just got rid of last night was awesome. He had high ingle, high levin, high gicel, high whatever the meteor thing is, high maelstrom, and holy affinity. He was a monster. Only thing I didn't like is that there was a lot of times I'd be fighting something big in close range and would suddenly be inside a high maelstrom and wouldn't be able to see what I was doing for however many minutes. With battles against small enemies that was fine, but if I was up climbing on something big it could be annoying.

Yeah, that's the only reason why I never allow pawns to use High Maelstrom when I'm a melee class.

But I'm never short on healing items, I have millions of monies. I need something to spend my cash on.

Oh and high brontide, which I actually found to be pretty useful. I'd be up climbing on something big, like a cyclops or what have you, along with my warrior pawn, and he'd be down on the ground whipping and connecting with so many parts of his body that it'd make it very difficult for him to counter attack at all.


The path on the way to the Blue Moon Tower is really fun. I'm doing the Griffin's Bane quest right now, and I'm going deeper in than I have before. The combination of arrow abilities that send your targets flying on impact, and all the cliffs around is just hilarious.

Once you put down your port crystal you can pick it back up and move it right? Or is it a permanent placement?

Yeah, you can.

That's really awesome. Makes farming so much easier. You can put one down near groups of the enemies you're hunting, and fast travel back and forth from the inn to continue respawning them and making it the time of day you need it to be for them to appear.