Underestimated/Overlooked Monsters?

Well, for the GBC DW3 there was a guy who broke down the game code a couple years ago and figured out exactly what treasures are on which pachisi boards and discovered there are 12 per board. According to the Brady Guide for DQ5 DS that number for each TNT is still the same: 12. My DQ5 Brady Guide happens to be right next to me and consulting it I find that according to it....

...consulting the book...

...they are possible ground finds on three of the five boards. Fortuna, yes, Ventuno, no, Faerie Lea Spring, yes, Nadiria, no, Stark Raving, yes. But what the book doesn't indicate is at what odds.

The DW3 codebeaker guy, Paulygon, also discovered the way the ground searches actually work. First it does its random process thing to decide whether it's going to give money, attempt to give a treasure, fall you through the trapdoor, or give you a monster battle. Once it makes that decision, then it decides which treasure to go for out of the 12 choices if it decides treasure. Then each treasure has its own odds. Once it decides it's going to roll for the specific treasure, in this case the one we're interested in above the other 11 choices on a given board is seed of magic, then it rolls to decide if it's going to award it or not, and some of the DW3 pachisi treasures have much greater odds than others at this step. Some are 1/32 or 1/64 or 1/128 at this step, while others are 100% or 1/2. Whenever you search the ground and get the null result, "but nothing is found", that means the game selected a treasure to look for but it didn't pass that specific treasure's find odds on that board.

That's how it works at GBC DW3, and because all the other elements of the DQ5 TNTs are the same as the GBC DW3 pachisis, right down to the 12 possible treasures per board, I would surmise that the process is probably the same. So because you're first overcoming the choice of treasure or the other possibilities, then you're in a 1/12 shot at a specific thing, then you're overcoming the treasure's specific find odds which are unknown by me at this point, I would figure that 1/64 from quadraheads is probably a better shot at them than the TNT process, unless you're also going for some of the other treasures on that board or just really enjoy playing a bunch of TNT for its own sake and whatever treasures you get are a bonus.
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Frazee uses the lunch!

I guess the summarizing thought on the TNT matter is pretty simple: because of the trapdoors, it's inevitable that if you search the ground every time you'll go through one at some point. So each jaunt onto a TNT should be thought of as either of two things but not both: either an attempt to farm treasures knowing you'll get bumped off soon, OR an attempt to finish the board.

Meanwhile, I'll post a completionism part 3 shortly.
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Frazee uses the lunch!

Part 3: January and February 2012. This one will be a shorter post.


JANUARY 2012

18. Purchased 99 Scale Armours. (Faerie Lea store-missable #2 of 2; overall maxed gear #10)


FEBRUARY 2012

19. Defeated 999 Brrrattling Snakes. (Gen 1 missable and overall monster #4)

While battling the Brrrattling Snakes and Drackymas in the winter palace, I discovered two things: Spiked Hares were just as common as the other two, and in fact more common in larger groups of up to 6 of them at a time than Drackymas, and that I could keep three active counts going in a given play session without overloading my brain. Therefore, a short time into the Brrratling Snake and Drackyma hunt I also started keeping count of Spiked Hares even though they are not Gen 1 missable. They ended up finishing almost exactly the same time as did Brrrattling Snakes and a couple days before Drackymas, and also at the very end of the month. So Drackyams won't be tallied until the March post.

20. Defeated 999 Spiked Hares. (non-missable; overall monster #5)


To be continued in part 4, March 2012.
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Frazee uses the lunch!

I'm sitting at 94 Bronze Armours right now. I think I'm going to leave it that way and not do my next play session until tomorrow morning so I can have a June completeness achievement right off the bat. I'll hunt Barbatoses on my other file before bed tonight.
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Frazee uses the lunch!

Played for a few minutes this morning in the completionsim file to finish up those bronze armours mentioned last night and also had a stroke of luck: the Terracotta Warrior dropped the 1/256 Seed of Resilience on counted battle #146. Now I can shift the Terracotta Warrior count from total battles because of curiosity about how quickly the drop comes to a raw number total count, and watch them blow by Eyelashers like Eyelashers are standing still. Eyelashers are currently at 185. I'm finding each session yields somewhere around 20 to 25 Eyelashers; they don't spawn as often as I would like. Too many Sizzards and Brownies.

I mentioned that starting with the Spiked Hares in the Winter Palace I've been keeping three counts each play session. The three I've been doing in the Ruins are total Eyelashers, Terracotta Warrior battles for the drop, and total number of the specific battle that's two Bags o Laughs, three Healslimes, and one Lesionairre. This last one will probably get me to 999 Healslimes before I'm all done in here, because outside along with the Screwballs one of my counts was that three each of slimenites, slimes, and healslimes squad that showed up all the time. Right now I need roughly 100 more of those Bag o Laugh Healslime Lesionairre squads to finish Healslimes.

And, yes, Healslimes are almost certainly well above 999 already because of all the ones in the Uptaten area as well as the Faerie Lea field, but only the ones counted during official counts count. For example, my current official count of Slimes is the 540 of them from the Slimenite Slime Healslime sqaud even though I probably did the 999 in Whealbrook Adit alone. This will be orders of magnitude easier once I defeat the Faux Dowager and get the Big Book so I don't need to worry about all these semantics any more.
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Frazee uses the lunch!

You're somewhat beating the odds to get them to want to that much; according to King Zenith's recruitment FAQ, the second and third Beastmaster recruit at 1/64, so it's as if you've gotten three of the various other hard recruits like restless armour or archdemon or flamethrower or any of the others to ask to join three different times. I've never leveled one up, so I couldn't tell you if they're a decent choice for a duplicate or not.

On that first file on which I'm still after my Barbatos, I have two slots left until Monty is at 80 capacity, which will be the Barbatos (obviously), and one other duplicate I'll decide later. Counting Dwight, Saber (who I always choose to name Spot), Starkers, and Rebjorn, there are 71 monsters thus nine duplicates, of which math that would follow would indicate I have eight. The duplicates I have right now, some are more useful than others. I have duplicates of Slime, Healslime, Powie Yowie, Old Man of the Sea, Samigina, Orc King, Brownie, and Mandrake Marshall. I've thrown back duplicate Hoodlums, Gigantes, and Minidemons, as well as probably a couple others I can't remember right now.
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Frazee uses the lunch!

I think a strong possibility for what I'll keep as my final duplicate will be once I have the Barbatos and I'm heading to that very location to try to farm seeds of magic from Quadraheads, if I get a duplicate of any of the conks.
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Frazee uses the lunch!

I'm assuming that it's the Hoodlum and the Gigantes that are causing that reaction, not the minidemon. Well, my logic for each of those two throwbacks is as follows: I had been grinding like crazy in the aboveground LMS places before discovering the encounter rate for them in the Gotha cave was better, and had been at it long enough unsuccessfully that I had all three of the hoodlums to take it out of the LMS's way. When I discovered the Gotha Cave encounter rate, I knew there was potential for me to need the extra Minidemons and Samiginas, so I threw back both extra Hoodlums because I was already down to the wire with available spots in Monty's. Had I actually gotten three Minidemons and three Samiginas before the LMS, I would have been at capacity prior to the LMS and I would have needed to throw back something else.

Well, I've already maxed out both my Powie Yowies to L40 so I didn't want to waste that work, I definitely wasn't going to throw back my extra slime or healslime as I have both of those also up in the 40s or 50s, I like my Ernest Hemingway naming scheme of my two Old Men of the Sea, I'm intrigued by my accidental extra Mandrake Marshall so I didn't want to give that up, and I also like my naming scheme for my two brownies, Bangers and Mash, which I'm told on another thread is also a punnish naming scheme for a couple characters in DQ8. Therefore by process of elimination I had already decided if something else was going away it was going to be my extra Orc King. So the Hoodlums simply got squeezed out by numbers.

The Gigantes was a relatively recent occurance. One stood up on a recent jaunt down into the fungeon on one of my as-yet-unsuccessful Barbatos hunts, and I went ahead and said yes and had him at Monty's for a while, but then I decided I didn't want to max out two of them even knowing he's formidable when built up. There's something a little frustrating to me about those monsters that take forever to gain each level and only gain a few of them even though each individual level gain is crazy growth. Plus, I sort of have in mind that I want my final duplicate to be an extra Conk of some sort that I'll go after when I'm grinding Seeds of Magic from Quadraheads after I finally get the Barbatos. The other thing I would consider doing is getting rid of my extra Orc King and getting a second Golem.

When the time comes, I have absolutely no idea how I'm going to allocate the nine duplicate slots in the completionsim file. I may among other things consider attempting to get three King Cureslimes.
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Frazee uses the lunch!

There must be another way for at least the Diamond Akillics, because I have one in my bag in my #1 Bianca file. I'll look into that.
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Frazee uses the lunch!

Because I can tell you this much: if I play 100 more files at this game I'll marry Bianca 100 times. I'm in THAT camp. I can't stand either Nera or Deborah.
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Frazee uses the lunch!

OK,well, then, I suppose my choice to marry Bianca will render those missed and I'll need to live with it. Never even having considered marrying Deborah, I did not know that, and I'll protect my mental well-being about it by virtue of the impression most of us have that Bianca is more or less the story canon wife, and the others are simply other options I choose to ignore.
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Frazee uses the lunch!