Together Retro: Disgaea

[noiseredux]

yo... I just realized something (obvious): You can replay earlier story battles. This is probably a good way to grind for character XP, huh?

[Flake]

yo... I just realized something (obvious): You can replay earlier story battles. This is probably a good way to grind for character XP, huh?

There are a few specific battles that are designed to be replayed for fast grinding. They'll be pretty obvious when they show up.

[noiseredux]

y'all still playing this?

I tried Item World last night. Didn't go well. Died on the 2nd battle. And that was after a good 30 mins. So I'm not real confident about having time or skills to beat ten battles in a sitting...

[alienjesus]

I'm planning on getting back into this soon.

I'm having a shitty time with trying to level up for the mid0boss fight though. I clearly need levels but there just doesn't seem to be many good ways to get them right now, especially for my mages and cleric.

[noiseredux]

yeah same. All I can think is to just go back and keep doing the early battles, but that's not super exciting for me.

I like this game in concept. But so far, it's ranking low on my list of strategy RPG's. There's a lot of annoyances. Even the interface. I feel like just doing something simple takes forever... summon character, open menu, Move, actually move them, open menu, Attack, pick who to attack, open menu, Execute, rinse/repeat. So many clicks to do something simple!

[Flake]

The original Disgaea definitely has some UI issues - they get incrementally fixed as the series goes on. The jump from the first to second is amazing.

My advice for anyone just looking to play through the main story is to keep your party small. I generally only have about 5 characters that I am actively using. My last time through Disgaea 1, I completely ignored Magic users, generic fighter characters, etc. My main team was:

Laharl
Etna
Flonne
Jennifer
Gordon
A Nekomata

I also had a Succubus and a Thief that I used when I needed to hold territory or set up team-up attacks.

If you're having trouble progressing, I have three recommendations:

1 - Abuse the Mentor/Vassal system. Only create magic users in order for Etna or Laharl to learn their healing or attack spells. Most characters have specials with inherent elemental types making most mage/skulls completely useless. A mentor gets a percentage of their vassal's progress and this will stack so try to always have Laharl or Etna generate any vassals so that they get stronger and stronger.

2 - Ignore Flonne. She requires many, many hours and re-incarnations to overcome her poor stat growth. I love her as a story character but she is completely overshadowed by even generic characters.

3 - Choose one character to super power. Give them the best gear, unlock their movement and counterattack bonuses in the dark assembly. Go to item world and subdue specialists. Stack them over and over again and just give them to the character you want to super power. If you focus completely on Laharl or Etna (instead of trying to level everyone equally) you can get through most item world runs in a few minutes.

[alienjesus]

1 - Abuse the Mentor/Vassal system. Only create magic users in order for Etna or Laharl to learn their healing or attack spells. Most characters have specials with inherent elemental types making most mage/skulls completely useless. A mentor gets a percentage of their vassal's progress and this will stack so try to always have Laharl or Etna generate any vassals so that they get stronger and stronger.

Wait what? How does this work?

[MrPopo]

I'm currently midway through chapter 3. I think this is where I left off last time, as I had a previous save that was also in chapter 3 (but I wanted to start fresh). Personally, I've been reminded that the opening of Disgaea is just not as well put together as Disgaea 3. Everything ramps up much more quickly in the first game, and not in a good way.

[Flake]

1 - Abuse the Mentor/Vassal system. Only create magic users in order for Etna or Laharl to learn their healing or attack spells. Most characters have specials with inherent elemental types making most mage/skulls completely useless. A mentor gets a percentage of their vassal's progress and this will stack so try to always have Laharl or Etna generate any vassals so that they get stronger and stronger.

Wait what? How does this work?

This is my one big gripe about how NIS has handled the Disgaea series. They deliberately make the main game fairly easy to play through without any expertise on the game's systems and hide a lot of the meat of the gameplay for post-game content players to figure out.

When you expend Mana to create a new pupil, the Mentor gets certain benefits from their relationship. A mentor can learn generic spells that the pupil knows, for instance. If Laharl creates a healer, he can access her spells when they stand next to each other on the battle field. If he casts a spell enough times to level it from 0 to 1, he then memorizes that spell and can use it on his own.

As a pupil levels up, the game calculates the total stat bonus between levels and will then add about 10% of the increase to the mentor with a max of one bonus instance per state. So if Laharl has 3 pupils and they all level up, he'll get stat bonuses in each stat field that equal the highest possible bonus per stat (as opposed to 3 bonuses on each stat stacked).

This happens EVERY time a pupil levels so if you keep your team small with the same character being the mentor to new pupils, you can rapidly increase stats.

[Ivo]

I beat "mid boss", that stage is rough with the two "snipers" (I sent a couple of guys to destroy the geo effects before going really in but still took several hits from that archer). Then the boss used a special I wasn't counting on, and even surrounded he countered some 4 times killing most of my weaker team members.

The level to grind for exp before that is clearly the one with the +50 Exp geo effect, I did it maybe 4 times so that Laharl and Etna learned Heal. I'm not sure it is worth teaching the elemental attacks but maybe.

About the mentor system, doesn't see to be worth it to the Vassals, or do they also get bonuses from the Mentor? I wonder if I should have Vassals create Vassals, but I don't think the level up benefits will work for the main Mentor.

Haven't tried Item world yet, but the hospital is giving out some nice items.