Draft:Shiren 5 Vita:Expert Badges
 | This article is a draft relating to Shiren the Wanderer: The Tower of Fortune and the Dice of Fate (Vita) for the PlayStation Vita. |
Expert Badges (Japanese: ???)
Basic Dungeon Strategy
For detailed dungeon by dungeon strategy guides and walk through's for each badge, see the below strategy guides.
Underground Manor
The Underground Manor in itself is a fairly easy and bland dungeon. In retrospect, it might have been specifically designed as an introduction to 99-floor-long dungeons.
Pretty much all items with potentially negative effects have been removed from the item pool, the only relative exceptions I can think of being the Sale Scroll, Sale Pot and Presto Pot. Hence, anything can be identified just by trying it, only at the risk of wasting a useful item. Unfortunately, this also means that most interesting tricks involving otherwise bad items are unavailable. Corridors are always lit no matter how deep you go into the dungeon, which prevents any risk of being ambushed. This is quite a crucial factor in any dungeon's difficulty. Last but not least, no Mixers dwell the Underground Manor. This is admittedly an annoyance. However, since most Mixer-only recipes involve the use of at least one negative item, they could not be put to good use anyway.
With such restrictions, most Expert badges are quite straightforward. Two of them deserve additional scrutiny. Namely, no pots and no direct attacks.
Gen's Turf
In most dungeons, the "No weapon" and especially "No shield or bracelet" Expert badges are clearly among the hardest. In Gen's Turf, however, they turn out not to be much of a hurdle. First of all, equipment found in this dungeon is few and far between anyway, not to mention nothing to rave about. More importantly, most direct fighting can be delegated to friendly monsters, if not avoided completely, with proper licence management.
My general-purpose surefire winning strategy is as follows. Fill a 5-slot Preservation Pot with 4 Nixer Scrolls and 1 Blank Scroll, and have 1 blessed Extraction Scroll on the side. This will require at most 7 Blank Scrolls, which should be easily gathered by hoarding licences in the very first floors of the dungeon. Extracting the contents of the pot will bless the 5 scrolls. Place the Nixer scrolls back into the pot, and fill the remaining slot with a new Blank Scroll as soon as one becomes available. The extracted blessed Blank Scroll will be used as an Extraction Scroll during the next iteration. The Nixer Scrolls can now be used 4 times, which will net you 2 licences on average, Rinse and repeat until the end of the dungeon. Each cycle will consume 1 Blank Scroll for an average of 2 new licences, so your licences supply will grow steadily until almost every monster family is at your service. Due to limited inventory space, some licences will need to be placed in Preservation Pots and swapped depending on which monsters are present on the current floor. Note that a similar trick could be performed with a Blessing Pot, allowing you to get 5 Nixer Scroll uses per cycle, but being able to use the Scrolls while leaving them inside the pot is invaluable, considering how cramped the inventory feels when you need to keep as many licences as possible active at the same time.
This method lets you walk peacefully through most floors, in the middle of friendly monsters, while even keeping a couple of pots filled with spare blessed Blank Scrolls for emergency situations that barely ever occur. Its major drawback, obviously, is that is becomes unusable when going for the "No scrolls" and "No pots" Expert badges.
Notes
- Expert badges vary by dungeon. You can check the list for each dungeon from the main menu (Other -> Adventure Log -> Expert badge)
- Attacks by allies don't break the no-direct attack rules. Attacks that do not hit any monster aren't either, even when they trigger some sort of interaction, like revealing a trap or opening a secret passage. hitting enemies with the flame from the Burning blade (or its blue counterpart) is also fine, which means that using a weapon is not necessarily pointless for this expert badge. Actually, another reason to equip a sword would be the resonance effect allowing you to wear two bracelets at once.
- For challenges that require finishing the dungeons with 3 allies, all that matters is how many are by your side at the end of the dungeon.
- Generally speaking, carrying a forbidden item does not count as using it. You may also safely sell it or place it into a Sale pot or Presto pot. As for weapons, shields and bracelets, you are free to throw them at the enemies' faces even when you cannot equip them. I believe it does apply to any item that does not have any special effect when thrown, but I'm not stricly positive about it.
- For the Tower of Fortune, this expert badge is quite trivial to get. You can take the shuttle to the Sparrow Inn and clear only the last 9 floors. To make it even easier, use a scroll to turn day into night and dash to the exit. If you equip a Time Stop bracelet, you don't even need to hurry at all.
Regarding generic Expert badges shared by several dungeons (mostly applies to dungeons where you cannot bring anything) :
- No herbs is usually not too bad, especially if you find enough Healing pots and Fixer scrolls to sustain your healing needs.
Still, being automatically revived by a Revival or Undo grass does count as using the herb. Considering how unlikely it is to get rescued past floor 50 or so, you will most likely have to treat this challenge as a no-death run as well, with the exception of dungeons where the sister Character has a chance to appear.
- No scrolls isn't much of a problem.
A very annoying side effect, however, is that your blessing and exorcism options are limited to pots, which means any sealed pot becomes definitely unusable. Cursed equipment also becomes much harder to remove : you can only rely on Nymph grass, Swordmasters, or unequip traps, while in normal circumstances you could use any of the Exorcism, Blessing, Fate/Earth, Plating, Fixer (and even Curse, Onigiri or Sale) scrolls. Don't let those Curse sisters come close at all.
Additionally, try to avoid picking up scrolls by mistake, because the Sanctuary and Oil scrolls are used by placing them on the ground. If you have an unidentified scroll in your inventory for some reason, you may want to place it into a Sale or Presto pot instead of just putting it down.
- No staves is somewhat annoying.
Nothing specific comes to mind, but you will find yourself in countless situations where just one use of a staff would solve everything so easily.
To compensate, you may want to rely on talismans. One useful trick is to take advantage of Fever pots. If you put 3 stackable items into a Fever pot, you will not get 6 items out of it, but 6 random stacks instead, which can make your supply grow exponentially. Use a Pot God scroll or two for even better results.
- No pots is probably the hardest challenge when it comes to banned items, not including banned equipment.
You lose a lot of inventory space, your best healing option, the ability to synthesize on floors without mixers, as well as the Zen, Dodger and Reflection pots which usually give you a free pass on some of the most dangerous floors.
Good thing though, some pots sell for quite a high price, so they may be worth keeping around until you hit a shop, at least early in the dungeon when you have some room in your inventory.
- No synthesis is tough, but a pretty fun twist on normal strategies.
Unlike standard runs, where you will use the strongest base equipment you can find and meld useful runes into it (with some exceptions, like the Day Shield which can make a sweet base shield thanks to the way its ability scales as it levels up), it may be a better idea to choose your equipment for its special ability.
The Blast Shield can be a good choice, for example. Depending on your financial situation, the Dirk of Debts and Pauper's Plank also scale very well at high level, which is convenient because the attack and defence bonuses you will get from Fate and Earth scrolls only will probably be nothing to rave about.
- No weapon turns out to be quite manageable.
I already expanded upon it in the previous thread, in the context of the Pitfall of Life.
The damage boost from your strength stat is no joke, so duplicating and blessing Strength herbs pays off quick. Max strength caps at 50, after which, even at level 1, Shiren can defeat most enemies in a couple of punches. Improving your strength also makes your arrows far more efficient.
In several dungeons, you can also perform a fast level up as early as floor 1 if you get the right items. Using a Glorious staff or talisman twice on a Cave mamel (or 3 times on a Mamel), then killing the resulting Gitan Mamel with a rock or electric staff makes you jump directly from level 1 to level 19 (then to level 21 if you kill a second one). A Growth bracelet is a much slower alternative, which will also carry you approximately up to level 20 before it becomes completely useless.
- No shield or bracelet is definitely painstaking, especially because of the "no bracelet" part.
Again, I touched on the case of the Pitfall of Life in the previous thread, saying that boosting your max HP was the crucial part. While this is true early on, because if you don't everything will kill you in one hit, focusing on strength once more is the key, allowing you to kill most enemies in one hit instead, even if it means whittling down their health a bit with projectiles first.
In standard dungeons, max HP is even less of a concern, and strength matters a bit less but still makes quite a difference. Placing enemy-type runes on your sword also boosts your damage much faster than plain upgrading.
Since the Wall Clip bracelet is not an option, the Breeze Blade proves to be an invaluable asset for this challenge.
- No direct attack... Now this one hurts.
For the first few floors, where you lack resources, your highest concern will be not to end up stuck in a corridor between two enemies, without any means to escape. Therefore, an Explosion or Blink bracelet will be your best friend. I've had a few promising runs with a Blink bracelet, but overall an Explosion bracelet is preferable : it thins out the enemy population, gives you more control over your destination, and can be used to create shortcuts or enclaves where the enemies will keep running around in circles. Even more than usual, a Blast Shield is welcome.
Weapons and spare shields are best used as projectiles, since they will do significant damage.
As soon as Cart enemies start appearing, you want to lure one into an empty room, use a Dodger pot, lock the doors by paralyzing any enemy trying to enter, and farm arrows for a while. I usually go for at least 5 full stacks of arrows. The drawback of relying almost exclusively on projectiles is that using a Dodger pot on subsequent floors will hinder you more than the enemies.
Rage grass is a run-killer. You can't take a chance with an unidentified herb, unless you know that it is not worth 500 Gitan. When you reach a floor with yellow grass-throwing enemies, use a Dodger pot or Immunity scroll as soon as the floor starts. That is, if you haven't already thrown an Extinction scroll at their tier 3 version, which I would recommend.
For the same reason, hypnotizer enemies are far more dangerous than usual, at least once they start acting from a distance. Fortunately, the Anti-gaze shield is rather common, and they are also affected by Reflection pots.
Last but not least, unless I'm mistaken (which I would love to be), killing an enemy by any other means than a good old wacking does not contribute to leveling up your equipment. Hence, the only way to level up your shield without direct attacks seems to be the use of the unreliable Gambler's scroll, with all the dire consequences it might have. In particular, you probably can't afford to have the Costly rune on your shield, in case you suffer the penniless effect.
References
[1]Expert Badge information: ExNihilo on GameFAQ's. (Used with permission.)
[2]Notes on Expert Badge functionality: ExNihilo on GameFAQ's. (Used with permission.)