So I've been pushing through into Inferno and, with the help of a discord friend, eventually managed to get my hands a +99* (the * indicates a limit broken weapon, basically making it +198) perfected blade. I've found out some interesting bits:
-
Sharpness does not directly increase your damage output. On normal difficulty my damage
hardly went up at all compared to how much it went up on Inferno difficulty. Going from 780 sharpness to 1200 sharpness literally
doubled my normal damage output on Inferno. From this I surmise that what sharpness
actually does is
negate enemy defense. From this, we can further infer that:
-
Attribute and skills are your primary sources of damage output. Since your weapon's quality only determines how much defense you can ignore in your damage calculations, the real source of your damage is in your skills. In particular, having high leadership and strength will increase your base damage output (the former for your squad mates, the latter for yourself), and naturally there is no shortage of skills that increase your damage output directly through conditional (or not conditional, in the case of the titan research skill) modifiers. So, if you want the highest damage possible, you want to just stack as many level 3 skills as you possibly can along with maxing out your strength or leadership depending on what you're building for.
-
SOS flares are ridiculously OP! Thanks to manufacturing and supply bases you can basically have an infinite amount of incredibly strong assist moves. If you bring Mikasa or Levi along this pretty much trivializes any encounter, as you can instagib anything no matter how strong it is. That is... as long as you actually have more than one group assist character in your squad, and don't get stuck with Hange, Hitch, and Christa instead. Then it's kind of useless. Thankfully, this doesn't seem to happen very often.
-
Attack bases are worth their weight in gold. The game is not very forthcoming with how they operate, but basically, they give a
stacking 10% attack power buff. And mind you, thanks to the way this game's damage calculation works, this often means a higher than 10% damage increase overall, and stacking multiple attack bases will
very quickly get you to hitting for 99999 damage with every strike. Attack bases are
virtually required on Inferno mode if you want to make a good time, as large abnormals tend to be excessively good at soaking damage. Also note:
this affects your assists as well, and it seems to do so an outsized amount, as I noticed my allies hitting for almost as much as I do after stacking several attack bases, indicating that they probably have
very high base stats, but a crappy weapon with very low sharpness. Once their attack power is high enough to overcome titan defense, their overall damage output will
literally be multiples of their normal damage output.
The key to success in Inferno is thus: open up with two or three garrison bases, build one manufacturing base to resupply your SOS and battle readiness flares, and then fill the map with attack bases to multiply everyone's damage output. Once you get those attack bases down you're good to go - everything else is pretty much the same as in normal mode, aside from titans being far more aggressive and boss titans recovering their stamina in more 'phases' (that is to say, they'll reset their stamina after hitting a certain HP threshold more often than in normal mode). If you, like me, really disliked having to make multiple passes for
every titan in Inferno mode, this is the solution. You're welcome! :3
But is there anything that can be done to get more of those tickets for crafting though? That seemed like what held me back though I guess I didn't check if there were options that didn't use the tickets but needed higher grade materials since money was also a bit of an issue at the time for me.
The solution is to build dusters. Dusters only require wood to build and to upgrade, so the only limiting factor is money (and time, since you can only build one at a time for some
unfathomable reason).
Unfortunately, there is no "duster" equivalent for gear and scabbards. You have to go the long and hard way for those.
