Part 92: Walker, Texas Ranger
It's time to set aside all the omni options, all the non-Ranger bullshit. It's time to get this done the wayBy forgetting everything and acting like a cowboy.
Solo Ranger, Episode Thirteen:
Walker, Texas Ranger
I grind for about an hour and a half (one and a half episodes of This American Life). Things speed up noticably when I switch to the Chicken Knife. The knife animation is about twice as fast as the bow animation. That alone speeds things up so I don't get too bored with it. I only need four levels, but I don't have a lot of great places to get them. I end up back int he sky tower part of The Void, because the ninjas and aevises there can't hit Walker before he kills them. Between the damage he does, the Mirage Vest, and the Hermes Sandals, Walker is a juiced murder machine.
Alright. Walker is up to Level 56, and this is what he looks like at the moment:
I should have enough HP to survive a Flare or Holy if Exdeath goes into freak-out mode, and I'm doing exactly 2,540 damage per !Rapid Fire hit with the Chicken Knife. Moving to the front row and getting the damage bump from level 56 will hopefully be the difference. I was having a hard time doing enough damage fast enough to reliably get past the first form because of the freak-out script, but 10,000 damage per !Rapid Fire should damn well be enough.
Let's tango, Woodsy Owl.
(Walker isn't running. He's walking back to the line after an attack, I think. Melee attacks are new to both of us.)
I'm not going to post the AI script because I'm not using it any more than I have already, having checked it a bit before when he killed me fifty fucking times in my last update. I don't care about it anymore. I've seen everything he can do, and I'm just going to ram the Chicken Knife into his face twenty times regardless of what he does.
I open with two volleys from the Magic Lamp (Bahaumut and Leviathan). In my experiments before, I realized it has a predictable pattern. That just never came across in any of the other LPs in the thread. (That isn't a failing of the LPs; I'm just more ignorant about the game's intricacies than most of the folks ITT). I'm assuming (hoping) that it doesn't reset and that I now have an Odin in the chamber for the start of Neo Exdeath.
I still need some luck avoiding White Hole. He opens with a physical attack that the Mirage Vest absorbs, and I hit him twice with !Rapid Fire for a total of 20,000 damage. The summons did about 4,500 combined, so I'm about halfway there. Exdeath then uses one of the many instances of White Hole in his AI script but it misses. This is still a bizarre (but welcome) change to me, since it never seemed to miss before unless I proofed Walker from petrification completely with a Ribbon. I guess I just had incredibly shitty luck when I first tried all this. Maybe the RNG will be kinder now.
I hit him twice more and that dips him down into his freak-out script. He hits me with Flare, so here's the moment of truth:
I pretty well knew this was going to happen. It did just about the same before, and I had barely enough HP to live through it then at level 32. Now I have several hundred more HP. I Elixir up so I don't go into the fight with NED maimed (like I did before), and I touch off one more !Rapid Fire:
Aww yiss.
LETS DO THIS
I'm not posting NED's script either, nor I have looked at it. I know the important stuff from other runs, otherwise I'd have to look it up: the rearmost part is susceptible to death, the top part uses Grand Cross, and each one has a freak-out script when it gets lonely. I'm using !Rapid Fire, so I don't have the luxury of hammering the top part to get rid of the threat of Grand Cross ASAP. I'll probably eat a few of those by the time it's over, so I'll just have to get lucky with the status effects.
But first:
One down. Three to go.
I also use the hand switch trick that the goons suggested to reset the Mirage Vest. It works, and it will basically neutralize his physical attacks and Vacuum Waves. That will give me a fighting chance, because the vest is otherwise not great at defense. Between Walker's speed from the Hermes Sandals and that, I get in Odin and three !Rapid Fires before he lands anything at all:
Almagest hits hard and inflicts HP leak, and I have no answer to it. I pretty much have to cure it with an Elixir, because between it's base damage and the HP leak, two will kill Walker. Luckily, though, it appears to be the only thing he can use that can deal HP damage to Walker. Unless I fuck up or something weird happens (see below), I can switch the knife hand fast enough to always have the Mirage Vest protecting me. I go back to laying down !Rapid Fires, and I get two more in before Grand Cross goes off for the first time:
Side note: I love how the animation on this thing takes so long, so you have all that time to fret about what horrible shit is about to happen to you.
Walker lucks out on this one, though:
Just Frog. It feels like Christmas. I fix it, and go back to work spamming !Rapid Fire. I have to do the weapon switch trick about every other turn in order to keep the Mirage Vest protecting me, but it's worth it. I get hit with Algamest a couple more times and have to use Elixirs each time, but that is the only thing I have to do besides spam !Rapid Fire. I wish I could say !Rapid Fire picked one target over others, but it spreads out pretty evenly. Nothing else to do but
Then here comes a second Grand Cross:
I get Old, and this is very bad news. Every time I act, my damage output (and speed and everything else) halve. I go from doing 2,500 per hit to 2,200 to 1,300 to 750 to 400. I can't survive long enough to beat him doing that little damage, and I don't have a proof or cure for Old as a Ranger.
When my own damage gets down to 750 per hit, I try the Magic Lamp to see if the summons from that don't check Walker's stats:
As it turns out, they do. This was the damage for Syldra. It's a shame too, because I think I'm pretty close to killing him. At the point I stopped counting, I was two !Rapid Fires shy of the number I needed when I eventually kill him.
I start to notice I'm just barely able to get actions fast enough to keep my Mirage Vest up. Once NED goes faster than I can keep up on that, I'm dead. Which is exactly what happens a few turns later. He hits me with successive Almagest and Vacuum Wave before I can reestablish the Mirage Vest. He wouldn't even come close to being able to back-to-back those if Walker wasn't 300 years old right now.
Even so, I think I have this one solved. I think I was about two or three solid !Rapid Fires away from winning. I knew it was going to take the same kind of luck most runs have with Grand Cross. I got in 12 !Rapid Fires before Walker got hit with Old, and that's a lot of progress (120,000 damage) toward killing him. If I had gotten a manageable status from that second Grand Cross, or I had gotten a timely Dispel from NED, I might have been able to do it. And this was my first try after the level grind to level 56.
Attempt number two ends early with a White Hole.
Attempt number three goes even easier than the first, at... first. I spin an Odin into the chamber and Exdeath only uses physical attacks twice (which are absorbed) before I kill him. No freak-out script, no Flare or Holy, and no White Hole.
NED is even easier this time, too. The first Grand Cross gives Walker exactly what he was missing all along:
It's a freebie, even aside from making Walker look like a cool dude. Better yet, !Rapid Fire is going after the top bit with extreme prejudice, and 13 !Rapid Fires kill the top bit right before it uses Grand Cross a second time. Now, all I have to worry about is the freak-out scripts for either the front bit or the bottom. I'm keeping track of my !Rapid Fire hits, and the bottom has been hit more than the front. Just a couple more !Rapid Fires later, the bottom part dies. Now the front bit is in freak-out mode, but I beat it to the punch with one last !Rapid Fire and it dies.
A few things made this possible and tolerable:
-The fact that !Rapid Fire ignores the Chicken Knife's run proc.
-The Mirage Vest knife switch trick. It wouldn't have been impossible without it, but it would have been insufferable to use Elixirs so much more often. Thanks, goons!
-!Rapid Fire doesn't care about defense, hit %, or blindness.
-Considerable luck form the RNG for Grand Cross. In two tries, I got Frog, Old, and Blind. Not too shabby, and I even had a bit of chance with Old, since I had him so close to death when I got hit with it.
-Luck of the draw in the freak-out script. I have a feeling I was going to eat a Meteor if I didn't beat NED at quick draw right at the very end.
Exdeath/Neo Exdeath
Walker Level: 56
Deaths: 52 (50 last time + 2 this time)
Total !Rapid Fires Used: 22 (5 on ED, 17 on NED)
~Epilogue~
The Ranger isn't as bad as I had imagined. I remember bows being pretty lame, and I never got deep enough in the class to get !Rapid Fire when I played the game ten years ago. But there are enough bows to make the Ranger a somewhat versatile status threat, even when he's using !Rapid Fire. The inclusion of the elemental bows, Dark Bow, Killer Bow, and Rune Bow make the Ranger a sort of non-magical tactical status specialist. !Rapid Fire is the obvious crown jewel of the class, but !Animals provides a decent early to mid-game option. That's about what it should be anyway, since !Rapid Fire should replace it mid-game or late-game. There may be more Animal Friends beyond level 50, but they would be hard-pressed to make the ability better than !Rapid Fire. I still feel like I always used !Animals out of necessity, though, and in a normal game you'd probably have something else in that slot. There isn't much else to the class to speak of (Equip Bows and !Aim), but it's worth it for !Rapid Fire alone. This run would have been much, much tougher without the omni options in a few places. It's definitely possible, but it's tedious as fuck in a lot of spots and isn't as fun or interesting as other solo runs. But I'm glad I was able to beat NED with only Ranger stuff. I'd give the Ranger a C+ as a solo class, but a B+ as a party class.
I was going to screen cap the endgame screen for Walker, but my game froze right after the credit roll, and it did so in the most American way possible: with some gratuitous T n' A:
Walker's run ends bizarrely, with victory and a naked lady.
Final Stats:
Walker Level: 56
Total Deaths: 81 + about 50 before the last level grind
Animal Friends: 8 (Rabbit, Squirrel, Bees, Nightingale, Flying Squirrel, Falcon, Skunk, Wild Boar)
Total !Rapid Fires to kill all bosses in The Void: 55