I actually forgot how great the music was for this game, shame that season 2 just defaults on area 1's music.
Welcome back! Here's my two cents. Apologies if any of this is redundant
Thanks! And thank you for the input as well, I appreciate any help since I'm still trying to get back into the game again. All advice is welcome.
I wouldn't advise focusing on both Zerro and Piz'fer. Just one Z mage is all you really need. Magic damage from the initial 4 elements can carry you through most of the game, remain semi useful in the early 30ish chapters and then become borderline useless for the last chunk of content. I have Zerro and Jennish and very rarely bring both. If you're picking one to go with I'd say Zerro because you have A'merapact for Ice and Zerro can spawn capsules that will boost up Samatha a ton if you ever recode her.
Ah, alright then. I will focus on bringing Zerro up to par then.
So, the funny thing is that I had been looking back into what I was doing before my hiatus, and it seems like a lot of it were preparations for recoding a lot of my units.
What I have ready to go, but in need for levelling:
Samatha
Palpa
Bonna
Amazora
Zerro
What needs a bunch of Temporal Helices:
Diana
Amerpact
Grace
And then Gatz and Invincible (amazingly enough?) need Apirath as well, which I guess with Samatha and Rikken should be simple enough to recruit.
So Gatz and Palpa are pretty much the first to get recoded, but do you have any recommendation on who to go after? Samatha seems to me the obvious next step, since everything is ready except the levelling, but who should I focus my attention onto afterwards?
You can farm MZ 6 & 7 really effectively with just one of the mages. With the massive aoe and bombs you can simply just avoid the 3 columns the mirrors will retaliate in while still killing everything with good positioning. Obviously this isn't foolproof as you'll sometimes get nasty spawn positions with the mirror but the mage can usually take at least one hit if need be. Shadowbind and Freeze will make farming smoother and more efficient but aren't essential.
I generally had problems with farming efficiently in MZs because I didn't really understand how to make it simpler for myself through mages and companions, but getting it now is mind opening. It still sucks it is a bit random in terms of getting screwed with poor positioning, but I can manage with this I feel.
I would move Rikken higher on your priority list for leveling. Simply for cutting down the grind for recruiting monsters for recoding with negotiator pro. As important as SB is, like you I would never recommend straight up farming it. Unless you are back for the LONG haul you will burn out again. New skills and better stats are great benefits to recoding but IMO the main draw is a flat 40% boost to SB. I would stop there though. I also wouldn't generally worry about clearing the PoF. Seiryu, Suoh and Invincible are all good units but honestly not worth the effort especially when you have access to the units you posted.
Hmm, so priority list should look like this instead?
Zerro
Rikken
Bonna
Snapi^
Bahl^
Gatz
Palpa
With possibly recoding Samatha or other units?
As for Bonna, I see she gets a lot of love on TB forum but I'm not really seeing it. Recoded her the other day and nearly finished leveling her. I mean I guess the 15% exp is decent but she doesn't damage or heal as well as someone dedicated to that job. Decent utility unit for leveling and ok all rounder but wouldn't use her for endgame stuff. I kinda regret doing it because I sort of burned myself out on grinding recodes and left Palpa for last, who I really should have done first.
I'm mainly using Bonna for the levelling, yeah. It's also why I had been focusing as well on Gugba as well because from my understanding, he is pretty good in killing Runners (who I have always had problems killing).