Needle being able to steal your buffs while negating yours makes the tactic DPS DPS DPS DPS DPS, HIIIITTTT THHIIINNGS and involves no strategy at all. Terrible addition that incentivizes the RPG equivalent of button mashing.
Its depends a lot on your party, there are still some buffs that worth risking to use, also... you cant negate that you should change your normal strategy to fight this boss... and even if its only "DPS" when your two copies appear you should use strategy by putting priorities on who to kill first, if you should heal etc... In my opinion is the contrary of button mashing, you are challenged with something new and you should adapt to be able to beat it, that's the core of strategy.
It would be nice if you could tell a customer that you will never carry the item that they're asking for, this way they would stop getting mad at you for them being an idiot and going to a blacksmith for an oaken staff.
Defeating different levels of a boss should give experience. Defeating the second level of the final boss alone is probably worth about 10k experience.
If you want to beat survival mode, plan to sit for like, 2 hours at least, and then have this set up:
Specials: Doppelganger, Moon Beams, Mystery Bounce
Ancient: Dagger Strike, Flying Dagger lvl 1, Nemesis lvl 3
Common: Katana 3 and 4
Anything with an OK recharge time and a lot of hits per attack will be OK in common. I'll let anyone who is interested in beating it figure out the strategy in those, but it's a pretty straight forward one.
I've only encountered one annoying thing in the game: there are battles against some bird enemies that are nigh unbeatable unless you grind. There's one where the enemies have extra attack and three of them are birds. I have monsters at a higher level that are resistant to their attacks, and they all die by turn 3 because the birds go first and have extra attack power.
You get first strike if the game decides you're weaker than or about the same strength as the opponent, except when you're sieging, in which case it seems like you always go second. If you go second against a level 8 ship, you should be fighting higher than level 8. A level 10 in which you go first will do less damage (cost you less in repairs) and will make you more money. I think this is to incentivize actually attacking higher level ships while also giving you a gauge for what level your team of ships is.
So from what I can tell given the other team's rankings, our team has a 2 star attack from the number of chances I get, and the number of goals the rest of the players make, and a 2 star defense, given the number of goals scored against us. Is there any way to make the rest of the team better? Also, oh good. The game can remember when I refresh because I missed a shot, but can't fricking remember when I just got a silver on a training session. Officially done with the worst game on Kongregate.
Am I the only person who can score on this team? Love those types of games. The rest of the team sucks so hard you have to be perfect. Yes, that was sarcasm.
And since my last two comments were complaints, I figured I will make a comprehensive comment that has positives in it. Fun, short little game. Has some button mashing to it, but there are definitely strategies you should adopt for each enemy. I give it a 4/5 because it entertained me successfully, partially due to the fact that I like the animation style. Two downsides *I am not counting survival because I never care about those anyway*: 1) the red box for revival and the actual box for revival do not line up, 2) It would be awesome if there was an avatar for defeating the 10 hydras!
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Its depends a lot on your party, there are still some buffs that worth risking to use, also... you cant negate that you should change your normal strategy to fight this boss... and even if its only "DPS" when your two copies appear you should use strategy by putting priorities on who to kill first, if you should heal etc... In my opinion is the contrary of button mashing, you are challenged with something new and you should adapt to be able to beat it, that's the core of strategy.