Saturday, September 10, 2016

Ciao, Cia

See you in two months...


As you may or may not know, my favorite playable character in Hyrule Warriors is Cia. And so far she is my only fully completed character in Hyrule Warriors: Legends. She reached Level 200, which is the current maximum, has all badges (though the majority of my character do) and also a perfect weapon. Time to play with someone else...


As you can see, the Strength of characters now completely exceeds the current maximum weapon attack power (900 for the Master Sword, 840 for Legendary weapons), which is a shame. I really liked, how in Legends the focus was set on getting better weapons, but in the very least you don't have to grind as many levels as on the Wii U to get the jobs done.

You now also have a total of 56 Heart Containers for every character. The characters that came with the base game all found two Heart Containers on the new Adventure Maps and gained two Heart Containers from leveling with the last two DLCs and updates. And it obviously will be the same with the last one, where everyone should reach the maximum of 60 hearts.

In my case Cia is completely ahead of everyone else on the roster. The only other two characters above Level 100 are currently Link and Lana, where Link is at Level 130. But since you can chose a second character on the Grand Travels Map most of the time, I often selected Cia in case things get more difficult. And I also did a lot of grinding with her, like today I was playing the Challenge Battle level with Ganon, King Dodongo and Gohma, because I still need all of their materials. But mostly it was about getting that perfect weapon, which took a total of two evenings.

Getting that perfect weapon in Legends is a pain, which is why I originally wanted to settle for those best rank, five star, seven slot weapons that you can get from amiibo and Network Links. However, since there is always the possibility that you still might find that best possible weapon, I'm hesitant to actually put all my good weapon skills on one of those. (If only you could buy slots and maybe stars in the Smithy.) And for your favorite characters you still might want to have the perfect weapon out of principle anyway.

Now, I followed a method by Tortus2 on GameFAQs and adjusted it a little bit. You want to have the Koholint Map completed, where at the base of Mt. Tamaranch, on the three squares south of the Windfish Egg you can find three "Stop the enemy merger!" missions, Levels 11, 12 and 13. They are all equally good and work very quickly, since you only have to beat a series of officer enemies. You want to alternate between these three missions for the sake of variety, but also in order to get different materials (e.g. if need Moblin Spears) and to have the Thunder Drum to the left of the Windfish Egg reappear more quickly. You want to use this item card for the double weapon drops for six battles.

In addition you want to use a weapon that has Stars+ and Slots+ on it, as well as a Weapon Rank II or III mixture, however, I didn't have any favorable experience with the latter. If you really invest a golden material, you'd expect to find rank 4 and rank 4+ weapons the entire battle. But that's not the case, you still get rank 3 and even 2 for the majority of the time, which was utterly frustrating and the reason, why this weapon grind took so long. Maybe these potions are broken like the Material Master mixture was at the release, but it wasn't until I started using the Focus Spirit weapon bonus effect that I've finally started to find, what I wanted: rank 4+ weapons with five stars and eight slots.

For this Level 12 of the "Stop the enemy merger!" missions works best, because you have two enemy crowds right next to each other. It's also the quickest of these three missions.

On my way I even managed to score best possible weapons for Marin (a rank 4 in this case), Midna, Fi, Tingle and Skull Kid... Which to a degree also felt like the game wanted to troll me, because I don't really play with Fi or Tingle that much. The game also trolled me with weapon that only had a single flaw. Five stars, eight slots, but only rank 4. Rank 4+, eight slots, but only four stars. You get the picture. But after dozens of attempts I eventually found this baby:


I also want to put "Legendary" on it, even if it's just for the sake of aesthetics, as well as "Vs. Dragon" to have damage advantage over a majority of the enemies in the game. Darkness and Lightning already is a very good combo, but you can always do a little better, though I will probably hit the damage cap with her levels alone.

But for now Cia will be on ice, until the next big update, where they will raise the level cap to 255. I will probably beat Legend Mode on Hero difficulty with her, while unlocking one of the Legendary skills at the same time, but it's best, if she also gains some Experience from that journey, which is why I will stop playing this character for now and focus on the other characters in the mean time. I haven't done much grinding between the last two DLC packs, but before the A Link Between Worlds Pack arrives, I want to finish as much as possible.

In the very least Twili Midna with her Darklight Mirror deserves another perfect weapon as well...

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