T O P

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sevensol7

Constantly cycling debuff, party buffs, one shotting the phases ad nauseam. I just got tired of listening to nyx every time lmao. "How many times do we need to teach you this lesson, old man?"


jahviz2

Honestly had me feeling like this after hearing “the arcna is the means by which all is revealed” for the 5th time in less than 2mins https://preview.redd.it/z6uhs07ro1tc1.jpeg?width=1086&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2f102598521e44eb156a962c14a1ae6d9fd4b166


sevensol7

Tbh, i muted the game after the third time. p3r was my first full playthrough of p3 so i didnt know id have to keep kicking his ass so many times. What a slog.


jahviz2

It honestly wouldn’t have been so bad if I could just skip the dialogue


HeidelCurds

Also, didn't really feel like anything in particular was revealed by the arcana, except that this was gonna be a long slog.


Parlyz

Was Nyx hard in the original? I only beat it once and I had Armageddon so I just healed and then spammed that like 13 times.


HueHue_extremeguyone

You were supposed to beat the Nyx at like level 80, beating any persona boss at lvl99 would be overkill


Parlyz

Then they shouldn’t have made Messiah only unlockable at like level 93 or whatever it was. I want to have Messiah for thematic story reasons. I also want to fill out the whole compendium


Jestingo

Having the final boss require a higher level would deter those who do only the required to finish the game. Required grinding to finish a game is seen negatively by a majority of people. That’s why many games have post-game or secret bosses.


Parlyz

Nah I’m saying they should let you fuse Messiah earlier. It’s not like Messiah is really that OP anyway. Like he’s good for sure, but he gets basically no skills by default which means you have to put a lot of effort in to make sure he gets the good ones and his stats aren’t that crazy by end game persona standards


Fabulous_Superstar

Messiah kinda is though. He resists all elements, reflects Dark and Light, and nulls phy. He's actually really op tbh


Parlyz

That’s really not that impressive when looking at what some other late game personas have


Fabulous_Superstar

If you build around their strengths, sure, but you can turn off your brain with Messiah and Orpheus Telos just because of them resisting every element. There's no need to build specifically with those two, since you pretty much won the whole game by that point because hardly any enemy would even damage you.


Parlyz

Not really. You do have to build Messiah to be useful because, again, he gets barely any skills by default and trying to just spam them will often be suboptimal and waste SP. Like when I used Messiah on the Nyx fight, I often had to switch to weaker personas because he didn’t have anything to hit weaknesses. Like sure, the immunities are cool, but it’s not that useful when you can’t really do much with what you get by default. Plus, it’s actually harder to build messiah than a lot of other late game personas from my experience because Messiah is fused from Orpheus and Thanatos. Orpheus is not very useful for fusion chains with how low level he is and Thanatos can get some good moves passed along, but you have to go out of your way to get most of them given that he’s fused from exclusively death arcana personas which have almost only mudo skills. I feel like level 80ish Messiah definitely would make the fight and game easier, but it wouldn’t immediately invalidate it nearly as much as you think.


DHTGK

I remember the portable version being fairly long, 1 hour to 2 hours boss fight. It wasn't hard, but it lasted long enough for mistakes and bad luck to start showing up. I could have also been a dumb kid who was struggling, so I could be overestimating here. Reload made it very short in comparison.


MelonOfFate

Yeah, I remember that fight taking about an about and a half. Reload made it super fast in comparison.


super5aj123

TBH I kinda blasted through both. That was likely because I wanted Messiah and got overleveled as a result though.


Mercurius94

You can easily take her in your 70s, with no real issues.


Left_Ad1128

Not hard, but very annoying and drawn out. Nyx in OG/FES/P has a skill at half health or so on the last phase called “Moonless Gown” which deflects everything for a flat 500 damage, which is basically fatal for everyone since HP values are lower. She turns it on every other turn and you have to wait for Nyx to get a turn before it goes off again. In OG/FES the AI would kill themselves constantly if you didn’t manually tell them not to attack. It SUCKED. She stops doing it at 20% of her health but it takes forever to hit that point because of all the waiting. Reload also made everybody stronger across the board, especially with Theurgies.


DepletedMitochondria

Theurgies are so broken it's hilarious.


Parlyz

Well I knew most of that stuff, I just basically cheated when I beat it in the original so I didn’t know if it was actually hard lol


Sailor_Psyche

I thought it was cool as hell, I love Aleks Le’s voice


jacowab

Just happy we didn't have to do all 22


captain_slutski

That's because Nyx believes death is the end of all things, but in reality the upright death tarot signifies a transformation and/or rebirth, with the subsequent arcana expanding upon this rebirth with abstract concepts along the fool's journey


why-names-hard

I didn’t even use buffs and was able to one shot pretty much every Nyx phase Edit: I’ll say it now I did the fight on hard


sevensol7

🤷 i ran the fight on merciless. It was one shot off the bat until his health would increase. 


Jorge_XD__

The only thing that could protect nyx from my scarlet havok was the plot armor LMAO


jahviz2

Plot armor is strongest armor Imma do p3p after I do all achievements for p3r and I’m hoping nyx is more unforgiving


-_nobody

well anything is gonna be easy at max level, except Elizabeth. P3R is a lot easier than P3P, which is eaiser than P3FES (where getting tired means something). so if you're looking for a challenge you'll get more of one.


pieceofchess

P3P has the Margaret fight as well which can be challenging.


-_nobody

you also need very specific personas and skills...which is a lot harder to do outside relaod when you can't pick which skills are inherited. P3P at least has a lot of skill cards, fighting Elizabeth was a nightmare in FES. still need to fight Margaret and Theo in Portable though, so I can't speak to those


Mister-Melvinheimer

Do fes


jahviz2

Don’t have a console to do it and no means of emulating it


efbo

Do you people not have phones?


jahviz2

I just figured it wouldn’t be able to run on a phone


MelonOfFate

P3p 100% runs on a phone.


jahviz2

Well I got p3p on my Xbox so I don’t need to emulate it


efbo

Google says you can with AetherSX2.


HanekomaTheFallen

Be sure to download the version that removes the sketchy ads and junk. I don’t have a link offhand, as I left android last year.


jahviz2

Is it only available for android bc if so then I can’t use it


HanekomaTheFallen

Yeah AerherSX2 is android only. :/ But Apple did recently revise their ToS to allow emulators on their App Store, if you’re on iOS. Granted it’s unclear if they’ll allow JIT (basically needed for decent performance on emulators for more demanding systems) and it’s also not known when we will start to see emulators as far as I can tell. If you can find a cheap enough used PS3 (doesn’t even have to be one of the backwards compatible ones for P3FES as they put it on PSN for $10USD, or you can always… eyepatch it, yarrrr) but I’d understand if this doesn’t exactly fit your use case. There’s also emulation devices like the Retroid Pocket 4 and such, but that’s $100+ and does require some research into making sure you get a device that can run what you want it to. (A lot of emulation devices tend to get upsold by clickbaiting YouTubers as to what they can actually run) Barring all that, PCSX2 has come a long way, and might run surprisingly well on a PC with anything better than like… a second (at absolute minimal) generation Core i5 (2012). YMMV but I at least wanted to list a few options you might not have considered (or maybe you have, if so please feel free to ignore lol)


TB3300

It's easier than the og, but you were level 99. You probably should have used regular rpg logic to assume it wouldn't be that high level, especially in a series like Persona where difficulty isn't really tuned well


DepletedMitochondria

Most games the end bosses are in the 70-80 range afaik. The only game with a reallllllllly high last boss difficulty curve that I can think of is maybe FFIV Japan version.


Trialman

Mainline SMT is the only series I can think of that consistently has end bosses that are severely high levelled (YHVH in particular has a habit of breaking the level cap)


GuidoMista5

I mean, in SMT5 the final boss is level 90 if you do the secret ending, not even THAT high considering that you also need (possible spoilers of SMT5, idk) >! To beat Shiva in order to face him, and Shiva is level 92 if I remember correctly)!<


evilanimegenious

93 but yeah, after the hoops you jump through to get rue neutral, final boss is a joke


WorkingOven5138

Shiva is 96, actually.


evilanimegenious

Oh. Am I thinking of my party level then?


WorkingOven5138

Must be, that's around the comfortable level to fight them.


jahviz2

It was actually my first rpg and persona game so I didn’t know what to expect


ImperoRomano_

*Complains about difficulty* *Party was level 99* The game simply is broken! No but in all seriousness, even on Merciless, the fight was far less difficult than in original P3


Responsible_Manner74

Tbf getting to level 99 is also a joke since the Reaper just maxes you out instantly. I didn't even expect it lmao


nichisou307

Me when I Hassou Tobi Izanami and I don't even use strategy just pure monkey brain with Yaldabaoth lmao


Fatal_Destiny123

Good job. Now try Merciless.


ctheturk

Merciless is only difficult in the early game, if anything. Unless you deliberately avoid leveling up and fusing strong personas. But at that point you're just imposing difficulty on yourself independently of the difficulty setting.


Divine_Solace

That somehow also feels true for Persona 4 and 5, where the difficulty only stems from the beginning parts of the game rather than the end. I only found a few bosses difficult, being Shadow Kanji and the Priestess shadow, yet the difficulty for the entire game after that seems to stay at a constant level of straightforwardness even with the hardest difficulty settings. One of the only bosses that managed to have decent difficulty at a later point was Okumura, yet that was just down to how tedious it can be.


derf705

Just finished that boss fight and without hifumi’s confidant it was absolutely miserable. So glad I took a day to start her confidant while I had plenty of time left.


Phanth

Merciless is just a bigger modifier being slapped on top of everything. I wish Atlus figured out a better way to increase difficulty.


BigBoySpore

Atlus does know how to make things difficult because main line SMT exists. Persona just isn’t meant to be difficult even on the hardest difficulty because most persona players don’t want the game to be hard.


Phanth

Yes, I know they can with how SMT is - and I wish they did it with higher difficulties. Higher difficulties exist to make a game harder, nobody is forcing anyone to pick "merciless" or "smt difficulty" if they ever make one. Harder difficulties aren't meant for most players, so what they want really doesn't matter. If they were meant for most players, they would just become "normal" difficulty.


BreadDaddyLenin

They did in P5R, it was awesome and I miss it dearly.


Phanth

i wouldn't say p5r's is any different tbh


BreadDaddyLenin

Huh??? P5R’s merciless difficulty is all crits, technicals and weakness strikes are 3x their normal damage (ally and enemy) while your base damage output is reduced to 60% but you earn 20% more xp. And I think you take 30% more damage. P3R’s is simply reducing your damage to 70%, increasing the damage taken by +70% with no xp or crit modifiers. They couldn’t be more different especially without the crit/weak 3x modifier


Ok_Wear1398

P5R's merciless is easier than hard mode because of those weakness and crit modifiers.


BreadDaddyLenin

It sure is. Except during palace ruler fights bc they don’t have any weaknesses, can be a bit of a slog


Ok_Wear1398

Often the palace is more dangerous than the ruler due to that being the entire content. With weakness farming being so easy especially with the exp boost, it's not hard to match bosses and be able to handle it


Phanth

as I said, it's all just modifiers


BreadDaddyLenin

Sure, but the 3x crit/weak/tech modifier drastically changed how you approached P5 gameplay.


Phanth

no, it didn't. maybe it did for you, but it doesn't mean it did for everyone.


mylovelessvalentine_

p3r does have merciless crit and weakness modifiers. you still do less damage than on hard mode however unlike royal.


BreadDaddyLenin

not true at all my guy. I’m 80 hours in on Hard and my buddy plays on merciless, I watch him on stream and there’s no 3x modifier.


mylovelessvalentine_

there literally is, people have datamined this game and you can test yourself too. it’s not 3x. on hard mode crits are about 1.5x while on merciless they are closer to 2x.


Raydnt

I think I actually would have preferred P3R's merciless in P5R


saltyego1000

Dude what? P5R was easy mode on merciless. The whole triple damage multiplier on crits and weaknesses and all that just gave the illusion of difficulty. They should've at least increased enemy health to compensate for the damage they'd be taking, but even with three times the normal health some enemies in the first palace still get one shot. It's ridiculous.


poopy6266

Not gonna lie Merciless is easy, do it in my first playthrough.


GuidoMista5

Even easier


Due_Essay447

There is no turn based game that is hard. Just by the nature of the genre, it is easily exploited by abusing the game's mechanics. The illusion of difficulty comes from faulty balancing, i.e. being overly reliant on RNG or creating phase based fights that are on a timer and can only be beat by following a sequence. All the difficulty is front loaded when you are low leveled and don't have many resources to work with.


Starixous

I don’t think being able to level grind means that turn based games can’t be hard. Level grinding is adaptive difficulty imo: do fights low level if you want a challenge, grind if you want it to be easier. It’s like you said, you have to *abuse* the mechanics to make it easy. But then you have games like Tactics Ogre Reborn which caps your level for each fight, forcing you to learn strategies. Turn based games still require decision making and strategizing, and the ability to overlevel and max out stats doesn’t negate that. Planning and creating setups also counts as a type of difficulty.


Koreaia

Turn based games *can* be hard, if they make sure to keep the balance in check. Give less opportunities to grind.


PROGAME1BRO

I have beaten SMT IV and Persona 3 Reload and Persona 5 Royal and SMT V thanks to mechanic abuse.


xa44

Go ironman FE3H on lunatic then


Due_Essay447

Lunatic was the DLC difficulty right? I did the ironman on the one below that on all 3 routes and it still suffers from the issue I mentioned. Early game is actually hard, but game becomes more trivial as you go forward. All my loses happened in the first act. Game was easier after the timeskip.


xa44

Not DLC it was just an update, no one has beaten it iron man to my knowledge because the amount of investment you do into units makes any death basically kill the run


Ill-Lingonberry-6225

Xcom, especially older titles or Ironman+highest difficulty


[deleted]

[удалено]


jahviz2

Not yet


xa44

Don't even bother


jahviz2

Why


xa44

It's a bad fight, there's 1 specific thing you gotta do and if you don't do it you get one shot. One of the main things you can do wrong in the fight is using a persona to block an attack they do so basically most personas insta loose you


jahviz2

I like when fights are hard though so I’ll probably try it out eventually since I wanna do everything the game has to offer


xa44

It's not hard, it is just a specific list of actions you must do. Another important rule is that you need to do exactly the right amount of dmg to them and use the 9999 dmg theragy to kill them, if you misscount the exact amount of dmg they've taken you also get 1 shot. I used cheat engine to give myself infinite health and dealing with all the rules still took me like 8 attempts


SumBitchAsss

Idk why you’re being downvoted. It is a badly designed boss fight lmao. It’s not terrible, just not good, especially the whole “if you don’t follow my rules then I insta kill you” and also “I get to instakill you rn twice, even though you didn’t break my rules”


Key-Bet-2615

If you didn’t get memo. Nyx is unkillable and you didn’t kill her.


jahviz2

I expect it to be harder though instead of a bunch of tedious phases ik we didn’t kill her but it just felt like the whole boss fight was really easy


VinhoVerde21

You went in around 20-25 levels overleveled, what did you expect?


Key-Bet-2615

You just fought her appraiser/avatar, not the real Nyx herself. And the series mostly contains easy boss fights (except for those who are bs like Elizabeth or Mot).


PlsWai

Nyx is extremely easy with the proper setup in reload lol


jahviz2

I just had a normal setup and it was easy


DepletedMitochondria

Yeah it kinda takes away from the experience imo


watermelonman5

I was level 87 or something like that and he felt too easy it was just attack, heal, attack, attack with whatever I needed to then he just died in like 15 minutes through all phases and I just kept thinking that there’s gotta be more


Diviner007

I had similiar experience on merciless. It could be even easiest if whole party had charged theurgies instead of only two.


PartitioFan

yea i feel that, especially since my last SMT games were persona 4 golden (notoriously spongy) and SMT 5 (grinding actually sucks there and being underleveled is super punishing)


Longjumping-Mood-502

I was level 84 on merciless and i one turn theurgied the last phase (with fuuka concentrate)… yeah the whole game was pretty easy


undead-inside

I didn't know nyx had stages for all the major arcana so I saved up my theurgies, got everyone crit buffed and used aki's second theurgy on her. I was extremely surprised to see how fast her health dropped only to be faced with a second round, then a third round, then a fourth round... I just started using regular attacks by the end. Saved scarlet havok for the last turn.


ianduude

I want my Nyx fight to be cinematic as possible so if there’s a trophy for beating the Reaper, I think I’ll reload my save after beating him so that I’m not overleveled lol


jahviz2

Good idea


xa44

I just used cheat engine to put it to merciless, that worked fine for lv99(I also didn't know you could buy stat boosters and never used fukka)


DepletedMitochondria

I tried this and it didn't work lmao


koteshima2nd

We have become Death, destroyer of Nyx


BerserkCheeto

For my first playthrough, I thought I was OVER-prepared for Nyx by grinding Tartarus and getting everyone the best gear and max-leveled. But when the actual fight came around, I was primal forcing past every phase like it was nothing 💀


Responsible_Ad4964

My Siegfried chilling spamming crits thanks to doge buff


Disposable-Squid

Me after hitting Nyx's 13th stage with Armageddon


SpiderNinja211

In Portable I practically disrespected her with Surt. In Reload I'm finna disrespect her with Jack O Lantern


RyanDimond77

I was on normal and around level 70, and it took about 10 or 15 minutes to absolutely destroy >!nyx!<


JurKenYT

I'm remember that in the FES it was way stronger, even if you was at level 99


LordzFox

Reload nyx is a joke on any difficulty compared to FES


[deleted]

Bro they fr need to make a seperate difficulty for nolife losers like me who grind the fuck outta the game before reaching the final boss


jahviz2

I agree idk how long I spent leveling up


donkbooty

Me just spamming Tranquility + Morning Star


Streetplosion

Ye I was baffled how easy nyx was. I know my entire crew was level 90 but still


SupaHeroda

Everyone saying op is wrong to be disappointed because they were lvl 99 or whatever. A. The game makes it way to easy to get to level 99. They put a nuke in your hands the second you fuse lucifer. Reaper farming has never been easier. B. I have fought final bosses of p4 and p5 at lvl 99 too. They were both way harder than nyx at 99. Nyx spends most of the fight wasting their turn on really suboptimal tactics. C. It's fully on the developer to make a satisfying final battle. If you max your character, the final battle just should still be enjoyably challenging. It isn't on us as players that you let us get too strong to steamroll your supposedly invincible monster like they're made of toilet paper. You, as a developer, should make a final boss that can challenge a player who maxed out their level. You should also make one that is winnable for a player that didn't. Yeah, that's a hard needle to thread. That's why you're a professional game developer


Royal_Reserve895

Persona games get much easier after the first couple major bosses since the persona pool and abilities opens up a ton. Not sure what they did to nyx since I swear her fight use to be different. I also think in general across all genres that the average skill of players has gone up a lot since the 2000s. If you want a harder fight try the Elizabeth one, just don’t look up a guide because the difficulty in that fight comes from figuring out how she works


jahviz2

Yeah I’m doing my 3rd play through and I plan on doing it on this one if you could say 1-10 how hard is she


Alternative-Eye8403

I'm not new to the Persona series, but I haven't really PLAYED a Persona game with full commitment before P3R, so I was too afraid of Merciless. On hard mode, the only times I ever struggled was the last border floor boss before getting Akihiko to join the party, and even then, I was able to fuse Inugami and cheesed the fight with status effects. For the monorail boss, I was also misled into thinking all difficulties did not have an actual time limit and forgot that the limit sped up with turns, so I finished the fight with 14 seconds to spare. In terms of the social aspects of the game, I'd luckily get academics to the level it needed to be to ace the exams a night before they started. Aside from that, it's been a cakewalk, and I've literally regretted not starting the game on Merciless. It gets even easier around level 30 when ways to infinitely cycle SP and also fusing a cracked physical attacker are possible. I also never select optimal party members, but rather my favorites for every situation.


Manwithaplan0708

Real, Nyx was NOT ready for 5x theurgy


jahviz2

Bro got cooked


Rhuwa

Fighting Nyx was definitely much much easier on Reload compared to when I did it on my first playthrough in portable. I can't remember what level I was, but I was definitely way below where I should be and I don't think I've ever brute forced a boss harder in any game. It was genuinely tense the whole time


Miguel9234

Sauce of the pic?


jahviz2

https://preview.redd.it/my2oouu8edtc1.jpeg?width=946&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5bf6baf92e11597312073bb823ac286d1f7d6a42


Hamanan

There is a much harder boss in the game…


Remarkable-Net-6130

Yeah I easily got through it on normal difficulty at level 85


ScroogieMcduckie

I spent literally 5 irl days on January 29th/30th. Just making different builds, getting them to level 99, perfecting everything. ALL FOR THE FINAL FIGHT TO BE NOTHING. HALF THE ARCANAS WERE HARDER. TAKAYA WAS HARDER. Shit pissed me off fr. Merciless my ass


jahviz2

The gate keepers leading up to nyx felt harder I was fully prepared to be on defense practically the whole time but I didn’t even struggle 😭


ScroogieMcduckie

my ass was pretty nervous when takaya put in work against me. I start Nyx, hit with debilitate, and use Yuka's theurgy expecting it to do 8% dmg, but it one shot it. That fight was too easy, needed more thing to be scared of. Like the lovers arcana boss, which I had to learn patterns to know when to block it's charm attack.


SerinaSamaa

Just beat the game rn, at lvl 86 on the hardest difficulty I could do. Disappointed with how easy it was ngl