Part 45: King of the Ring

Update 45: King of the Ring



Sometimes I feel like I'm not very nice to Vahn. I mean, Noa and Gala are great and I love them, but Vahn's pretty cool, too, and today we're going to see him overcome his greatest challenge yet.





Music: The Muscle Dome


We've already covered Beginner Course, so let's go ahead and try Expert again now that he's got better equipment and stats. It should be a nice warm=up at this point.





Hey, it's Dark Ogre.





Counterratacks are pretty handy against powerful physical attackers like this guy. Couple that with the Mettle Goblet and Vahn can spam Fire Blow twice per round. Dark Ogre didn't last long.







Gold Bison is the fourth enemy and probably this course's biggest threat. 1000+ damage is nothing to laugh at. Fortunately, he still can't last long against Vahn's offense.





Spoon.







Anyway, the last four fights are pretty lame after Gold Bison. Xain is our final opponent once again, and while he's a little harder in this mode since we're without weapons and armor, he still goes down without too much trouble.





100000/1532=65.27.

...I guess I'll be farming Master course, then.





Master Course can be very brutal. Not only does it seal items and weapons/armor, but now we can't even use magic. This boils down entirely to accessories, stats, and maybe a little luck.





Our first foe is Ironman. Nothing to worry about.





Viguro lvl2 goes down in one attack...





Gold Bison is still a jerk but a more or less manageable one...





Remember when Caruban was scary? It's almost sad that he's such a chump now.





Zeto went down in two attacks, and wasted his one turn charging Big Wave.





Berserker, huh? I wiped my ass with Xain, are you sure you want to try and-





wait





fuck


Okay, let's try this again and actually put some planning into our accessories.





I didn't say much about it at the time, but there's a warehouse in Sol with a very important accessory. If you tell this kid that you're loaded with money, he'll let you inside.







I think you can haggle the kid down some, but it's not like I have anything left to spend money on, really.





This is my next equipment setup. The Life Grail restores 200 HP per turn. That may not sound like a lot, but it's absolutely, positively vital to my and anyone else's success at Master Course.

The Wonder Amulet is also mandatory, to prevent Rot and another crippling status effect.

I decided to keep the Mettle Goblet as well, in hopes that it would let me keep up an aggressive enough offense that I could kill enemies before they could kill me. It was a bad idea.

With this setup, I went back in and got through Berserker with no trouble.





Round 7 pits us against Xain. Harder still since I can't heal, and he can outdamage my 200 HP per turn regen if he gets aggressive with Bloody Horns, but still not overwhelmingly dangerous any longer.





And Round 8 is Dohati. He can dish out some real damage when he uses Chaos Breath if you aren't Spiriting, but Vahn is good about blocking his standard attacks and overall I can keep my HP at or near max most of the time.





Oh yeah, and the Muscle Dome confirms that Dohati does indeed get super huge as I damage him, and shrinks as he uses Chaos Breath. Sure enough, he falls like all the others before him...





...but the Master Course isn't done with us yet.









Fighting these three seems like it ought to be completely hellish without items or Spoon, but they aren't really that bad. They're as predictable as ever, and as long as you play defensively they really can't outdamage the Life Grail.





Okay, this is getting kind of ridiculous.





You can conceivably brute force your way through Berserker without the Wonder Amulet, but that just doesn't really work with Zora. She takes too long to kill even playing aggressively (which you can't afford to do because she'll outdamage you in the long run that way) for you to get by without her using this.

The plus side is that, with the Wonder Amulet/Life Grail combo, she's effectively wasting a turn and giving you 200 HP every time she Glares.





I lost my first try against her, so I decided to rework my accessories. I dropped the Mettle Goblet and replaced it with the Defender Chain to block hits.





This means that her standard attacks are lucky to connect, especially when I'm Spiriting. Furthermore, she seems to start using physical attacks more and more as the fight goes on until she starts using them exclusively, which means less and less unavoidable damage.







That brings us to our final opponent, Jette.





He's kind of difficult to manage.





I'm sure he's beatable at this point. Maybe it's a little luck based, or maybe I'm just not good enough to pull it off.

But you know, I'm going to have to grind levels sooner or later anyway...





Ahh, much better.





Like Zora, Jette stops really using his special attack later in the fight, at which point it's just a matter of blocking enough that he can't outdamage the Life Grail. He also clones himself, but I think he can only do that twice and they do trivial damage (as in they're barely able to break double digits).









This lets me attack twice in a row, very nice.





100000/13830=7.23





...Right, so six more runs of this happen off camera, and...









I believe the ultimate spell is already a talisman, so this should be our last visit to Zalan.

























4500? That's still not worth it to me from a practical perspective, but crashing a Gobu Gobu into the ground from deep space is pretty priceless.

With that, we've collected all of the Eggs. Only one magic remains...