The Mog Blog

All I really wanted was some cake.

Hey everybody. I decided to come back to writing these blog entries. There’s a couple of reasons why I initially stopped. In fact, I have a lovely numbered list here:

1. SEGA announced that it is against the Terms of Service for players outside of Japan to connect to the Phantasy Star Online 2 Japanese servers. However, they also said that they are not taking any methods to prevent people from connecting.
2. During this time, the game slowed down to a crawl. Not only did the ToS announcement drove NA people out of the game out of fear that they would lose their hard work, the game’s content was hitting a point where there was nothing much to do. The “Skylands” or “Floating Continent” was introduced but players were already hitting level cap long before then, some on multiple classes. Some of the new items just weren’t better than what you may already have had.

It was during this time where I decided to take a break from PSO2, On that note, we also dropped PSE Burstcast, a PSO2 Podcast, and will be picking it back up for the North American release.

However, in the past month or so, PSO2 has been getting some major updates. This includes three new classes, the subclass system, Very Hard mode, and the new level cap at 50.

So, let’s get caught up and I’ll write a bit about the new updates and what I think of them!

Fighter, Gunner, Techer: The New Boys In Town

The new classes for PSO2 represent a bit of a variation to the currently existing classes. Fighter has access to three new weapons that specializes in pure offense, Gunner has access to Twin Mechguns that lets you pull off some Gunkata moves, and Techer a support-heavy tech (magic) class that gets up close and personal. Each of these classes must be unlocked by doing two separate Cilent Orders and having Hunter at 30 for Fighter, Ranger for Gunner, and Force for Techer.

I can’t really speak much of Fighter since I have yet to unlock it, but it looks a lot more fun than my experiences with Hunter. I’m not too fond of the Hunter class myself since it always felt really clunky and stiff, but Fighter looks to be the opposite of that. The use of Knuckles, for example, allows you to get really creative with dodge cancelling your attacks. Double Sabers, a PSO favorite that was overall a great weapon, is still a great weapon here as the AoE is amazing, and as I understand it, fairly safe to use. Twin Daggers seems to make you into a Marvel vs. Capcom 2 character by letting you attack in the air and stay in the air for as long as possible.

GUNKATA!

Gunner is a bit of a mixbag when it first came out. Ultimately, it boils down to using the Twin Mechguns as Gunners also have access to the Assault Rifle. The Mechguns have a dodge mechanic which lets you do a backflip and fire shots. Doing multiple flips will put you in a short bullet time state. It’s flashy and it gets you out of situations as the dodges are mostly invincible. The Mechguns are much more orientated for up-close combat, and with additional use of the Chain and Mechgun gear, the Gunner class is about risk and reward.

It’s all great until you put it into practice. It was really hard to manually aim with the Mechguns, especially since the choice of Photon Arts aren’t exactly amazing. For the most part, I felt I was better off not playing Gunner in TPS mode and stuck to the free camera. Gunner felt like it was missing a lot of viability, and it wasn’t until the latest patch which made certain Photon Arts better, included a new Photon Art that allowed for free movement and high damage, and even made it easier for the Gunner to stay airborne. Gunner has moved up as my favorite class in the game.

Techer is given more support skills to help with Shifta/Deband, along with the new Wand weapon which can deal additional elemental damage with Wand Gear. For the stat buffs out there, Techer also has the highest S-Def in the game, which allows them to stand up against many different melee attacks (which is almost everything in the game, mind you). But Techer isn’t so much fundamentally different from Force, though there are reasons to pick one over the other. I enjoy Techer as it serves me more as one who is trying to make a “Melee Force” which I guess wouldn’t be a Melee Force since I’m not a force, but doing respectable damage as a melee caster is something I care more about than spewing spells from afar.

To go along with the Techer, brand new techs were unlocked. New Wind (Zan) and Dark (Megid) spells are introduced. The Zan spells are cheap to cast and if you’re all up for wanting to pretend that you’re Guile from Street Fighter, you got your Sonic Booms and your Sonic Hurricanes. Megid, at least those that come from a PSO background, does not do instant death at a low success rate. Instead, Megid and the class of spells can potentially poison enemies. Poison in PSO2 does percentage-based damage proportionate to the enemy’s max HP. Unfortunately, there’s only really 2-3 bosses that can be poisoned, but they die really fast to poison. There’s also a new spell called Megiverse, which acts as a field support buff that gives anyone standing in it HP drain whenever they hit an enemy. Why you would use this over Resta is a bit up in the air.

Subclasses: It’s what you think it is.

Subclasses in PSO2 allows you to equip a second class to your main class. There seems to be some confusion that you can’t change your subclass once you unlock it, so lemme be blunt for you:

Stop being stupid, you can change your subclass whenever you want.

Subbing a class will allow you to inherent a portion of its stats, all the skills acquired in the skill tree, and access to its PAs and techs. Now note that you can only perform certain skills or use certain PAs if you have the correct weapon equipped. Subbing a class does not allow you access to different weapon types. Techs, thankfully, can be assigned to your subpalettes.

This increase of stats along with the skills learned makes you pretty damn powerful assuming you have a proper leveled sub. At first, it’s not the most amazing thing ever. Considering a lot of skills require specific weapons, this tends to be a downer. However, what you do have access to can really break enemies. For example:

Woah.

What I do find to be a bit of a problem with the subclass system is that diversity tends to come at a cost of how you formulate your skill tree. In PSO2, it costs real money to buy an alternate skill tree or to reset it. There’s many clever builds that I’ve been hearing about, such as Techer/Hunter for a solid defense build. Unfortunately, this experimentation does come at a price. You’ll most likely be sticking with subs that gives you access to stuff that you already have on hand. I know I’ve been subbing Hunter to use my Soul Eater and Partisan PAs.

That’s it for now. I’ll be talking a bit more about Very Hard mode and the new shift in design a bit later. There’s a bit to cover, and I may end up doing some guides for classes and bosses in detail later on if there’s a want for it.

Until then, see you next fight.