The Shrine

<div style='font: 12pt Modern; text-align: left; '>Due to the recent drought of good games, I went back and play Phantasy Star Online. After playing Altima (Newman Hunter) to level 58 it becomes painfully obvious that this game confused challenging with instant kill cheese. I'm now at Very Hard Ruins where I can kill just about everything under 2 comboes with virtually no risk except against sniping Dark Gunners (e.g. 3 Dark Gunners while fighting 3 Delsabers), and then there's a big dead end at the last boss. The spikes hit for 116 damage and is not effected by evade or defense, and I don't think they're elemental damage either. They tend to stun lock so if you get hit at all you're probably dead. With 999 attack power and a 35% Varista I still can't shoot down all the Spikes every time, which means if I ever get frozen I'm dead for sure (I might escape from a stun lock, but it's impossible to dodge the spikes if you're frozen), and State/Maintenance isn't exactly an easy item to find. The blue rain of doom does somewhere around 400 damage of unknown elemental but my resists are 20s across the board which is about as high as they go until you can equip some of the level 70ish armors. The blue gatling gun attack rotates the camera so that you can't see where the hell you're going and you must have a running start to even have a chance to dodge that. Never got far enough to get hit by a Grants, but I'm pretty sure it's supposed to do more than the blue rain. The swipe attacks does about 400 points of physical damage too. I'm pretty sure there are classes with less HP than I do, and I wonder how they're supposed to survive these attacks at all. Yeah yeah, you say play online, sure, that'll work. It's not like he has that much HP. It takes under 30 seconds to kill him when I got my invinicibility on. As long as someone else ate up the instant kill attacks and that someone can survive the Grants, it shouldn't be that hard. But is that really teamwork? "Instant attack #1 coming, someone eat this up and Reverser him" is teamwork? I'm not seeing why I'd need anyone's help consider I'm killing everything in under two combos with a 30% Calibur, and that's usually the entire wave too. So a Force can cast Shifta level 15, I can cast Shifta level 12, a whole difference of 3%. I don't need Resta or Deband when things go down in two combos and I can always get two combos off on a full bar, and then heal before the next wave arrives. Rangers have Shotguns, yeah, but if I actually get a Spread Needle I'll still do more damage with it then the Ranger will, and until then I'll be content with 2 combos taking out a wave instead of one. Speaking of which, what's the point of evade if it never works on anything? I can't remember the last time I evaded something that's not a Claws and I can get my evade to 600+ pretty easily, and if you need like 800 evade to just evade things, why even have that stat at all? Ra series spell top out at 200 damage at most not counting resistances, which is barely more than my standard swing. It's exactly like Diablo 2. If I'm stupid and don't know how to play my class, then yeah conceivably I can derive some benefit from teamwork, but I've been killing stuff in the Ruins since about level 45 within 2 combos using pretty generic stuff (started with a Gunguir 20%, then Brionac 30%, and now a Calibur 30%). Yeah the online experience is supposed to be more than killing stuff in the fastest time and all that good stuff, but I find it hard to justify to play cooperatively when I can kill just as fast by myself. To make a game where cooperative play is meaningful it'd have to be literally suicidal for single player, and that's just not happening, except on the boss, which is just instant kill cheese.

Online RPGs have a long way to go before cooperative play is meaningful. This is not so much as against PSO in particular but to Online RPGs in general. I'm sorry but I can't just pretend I didn't know how to slaughter the enemy in two rounds and get impressed by 'teamwork' that does the same thing I could've done on my own. And I don't see PSO's approach with instant kills as a good way to remedy this problem, as it just adds frustration. I've been saying this for a while, but what RPG needs is better AI, that the boss doesn't need to have attacks that kill you before you have a chance to do anything to be challenging if they actually have a brain.

PSO is a decent Diablo clone for offline. The Ruins is a very well designed level, though the other levels aren't exactly impressive. But online, I don't see any real reason to play together, other than having more targets to eat up instant kill attacks on bosses.</div>

<div style='font: 9pt arial, Modern; text-align: left; '>Gee, perhaps because it's fun to play with friends and help others out?</div>

<div style='font: 12pt Modern; text-align: left; '>I'm not seeing why it's worth my time to waste my time to babysit people when I've plenty of spare weapons I can just give away and that's the same thing. If you need help getting XP I'll give you the weapons to do it, but I'm not wasting time to babysit someone. Now if you died and somehow can't possibly get your body back (how that happens is beyond me), yeah sure I've no problem bailing you out. I don't derive any enjoyment out of cooperative playing if it doesn't even beat my normal pace of playing. The point of cooperative is so that you can do things you couldn't on your own, and I can do everything aside from Dark Falz who is nothing but cheese.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "Copperplate Gothic", Modern; text-align: left; '>You're using a Varista and you're complaining about not being able to kill the last boss? Jesus christ, Don.</div>

<div style='font: 9pt Modern; text-align: left; '>Do you have any friends?</div>

<div style='font: 12pt Modern; text-align: left; '>I don't leech and I don't help people leeching</div>

<div style='font: 12pt Modern; text-align: left; '>They don't drop better handguns in VHard Ruins. It's kind of hard to hit him with anything that has less range than a Handgun on the third form because he runs around so much.

At any rate, Varista was more than enough to finish him off after I figured out how to rotate my camera on time to dodge his blue attack. Plain old Vise took care of the spikes pretty well.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "Copperplate Gothic", Modern; text-align: left; '>Screw 'em, handguns are absolutely worthless (other than the HP). Mechguns are entirely superior, especially if they're area appropriate. The Vise isn't even the best gun alone, % is what counts for anything with that type of weapon (Excepting Charge elemental).</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "Copperplate Gothic", Modern; text-align: left; '>A resounding 'No', heh.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt Modern; text-align: left; '>We kind of take care of things ourselves rather than asking for someone to babysit us through the game.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt Modern; text-align: left; '>Your character also has a nasty tendency to stop running in the middle of spikes even with the analog pushed as far as possible. Mechgun just can't reach Dark Falz's third form before he gets away unless he stops right in front of you. He doesn't stay still that long. If I use a Mechgun the only chance I get is when he's next to me, and he'd have knocked me down first so I won't have too much time to shoot him. There's virtually no way to run to the other side of the ring and shoot before he goes to another spot or floats up in the air.

Heaven Punisher is hacked and cannot be obtained by normal means (i.e. playing). You might as well go get some God HP++s if you really need a Heaven Punisher.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "Copperplate Gothic", Modern; text-align: left; '>Run around the outer ring until you have a clear shot, they can't crowd you if you don't stop moving there.

Is the HP hacked? It doesn't trigger a warning as other hacked weapons do. What do you know about it?</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "Copperplate Gothic", Modern; text-align: left; '>You still haven't come out and just answered the question directly, heh.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt Modern; text-align: left; '>You're supposed to participate in these PSO tournaments like those they got in Japan, and that's how you win them. Same with the Lavis Cannon. Except currently there are no tournaments in US.

The spikes are trivial to dodge if you're running, except the game decides that sometimes you really want to walk instead of running while going to the edge. Once you can get to the outside of the ring it's pretty easy to kill everything, though you can still die if your character decides to stop running at a bad time. There are times when the spikes get to the edge of the screen so you've to run inside, and if your character stopped running while inside you will die.

As for your other question, for you and those who cannot read, I've said that my friends don't leech from me and vice versa. This sentence implies that I've friends. I don't have anyone I know in real life that plays PSO since my friends actually have normal buying habits, which means they're not too excited about games on a dead system. In the usual Anime/Game (it's Anime, but most Anime guys are into games too) gathering where people talk about games before the Anime starts, no one ever talks about Dreamcast, ever, because no one cares about it. I think I'm probably the only one there that owns a Dreamcast. But at any rate, PSO is a trivially easy game for the regular XP grind. I won't help someone who is clearly capable of clearing an area, and likewise I don't expect to be helped if I'm capable of clearing an area. If you can't do it but you're playing a class that can, I'm certainly not going to babysit you through the area.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "Copperplate Gothic", Modern; text-align: left; '>Why exactly are you attempting to cheapen the topic instead of just answering 'yes' or 'no'?</div>

<div style='font: 12pt Modern; text-align: left; '>At any rate I've answered the question many many times. It's your problem if you can't pick up what is clearly implied.</div>