I'm having a little bit of trouble with Shadow Rise. Each attack is absolutely devastating and she casts fire break / ice break every time you switch to a persona with the suitable resistance. Do I just need to level up some more? My party is currently sitting at between level 27 - 29.
The limiting factor for dungeon runs right now seems to be SP. With no cheap/reliable way to replenish SP, I'm a sitting duck once my characters burn through it and at my levels I'm absolutely dependent on the judicious use of elemental weaknesses and status effects. Is it that I'm playing hard mode so the SP replenishing drops / cards are rarer or less effective?
Does anyone know how you trigger shuffle time more often (other than a run of sweeps of course)? I am just loving the skill upgrade card. I have Mediarama earlier than expected and it's really handy.
You're under leveled at the moment.
The main thing to keep in mind in terms of your level is to keep your personas up to date as well. If your main character is level 29 and you're using a level 18 persona, your character is going to have stats like a level 18 character, which means you'll be doing less damage and taking more damage than you should. Gold Hands are a great tool to fast leveling if you haven't been killing them yet, but they're kind of tricky as the only thing that does full damage to one is an Almighty attack(either a Megido branch spell or an All Out Attack). Keep in mind items that do damage do what it says to them, so early on it's neat to buy firecrackers/ice cubes from the store and use them to easily kill the shadows. After that, Chie is a beast with high crit rate Black Spots to knock down them one at a time to fish for an all out attack, since you don't get access to Megido until the mid-30s.
I think OP for the Shadow Rise fight I almost always had a Ganga on me, since it has pretty good nullifcation stats and high magic, plus mediarama. Failing that, you don't want to access that fight unless Yukiko has either Mediarama or Media + Divine Grace.
For SP, there's a few tricks you can do that I probably should have mentioned earlier. One vending machine by the item shop sells TAP soda, which restores 10 SP per use(can buy 5 at a time, machine recharges each week). The other vending machine all the way at the end of the district sells 3 different sodas, each restoring 5 SP per use(same 5 weekly limit, though the machine can give you bonus ones based on RNG). You should also be planting Tomato Seeds at your home garden to get Tiny Soul Tomatoes, which restore 20 SP per(get 3 a harvest iirc). Leveling up the Hermit social link helps a great deal since it lowers the cost per SP of the fox inside the dungeon, but more than that, pay attention to the mood of the fox before you decide to run a dungeon for a day(can only tell by talking to it inside). If it is happy(*yip*), costs will be reduced by a bit for his services that day. If it's normal(...), costs will be normal. If it is unhappy(*growl*), costs will be increased by a bit for his services for a day.
Failing ALL of that, if you want an easy way to restore SP go back to an early dungeon, avoid fights, and just loot treasure chests as they can contain SP recovery items. If you have a persona with Invigorate on them, you can restore SP by getting in fights and just auto-attacking. Difficulty just means you're taking more damage/doing less damage for the most part, and you HAVE to constantly keep the enemy off balance or you can find yourself dead very quickly. Hard on a first playthrough is really hard, especially if you're not familiar with how the game works.
For Shuffle-time, the only way to increase it seems to be to at least kill one enemy in the fight with an All Out Attack. It's not 100% from what I've seen, but I don't remember a time I finished a fight with an All Out and didn't get Shuffle Time. Also don't forget to eat exp/gold/item penalties to ensure you keep getting Shuffle Time.
