LordKasual
Banned
I didn't have any magic accessories on, so i doubt it.
The stealth IS unfun. I tried it once just to see, got caught, and just murdered all of them after that. My immediate conclusion is that it wasn't actually for stealth. It was a way to hide and regenerate MP if you ran out while trying to kill them...like the cover spots everywhere else in the game.
If you didn't think the ring was fun, then that's where the disagreement comes from. I thought the ring was awesome. It was dark, it was different, it killed things way faster than I could have with actual weapons, and it had an ominous effect on Noctis the same way it had on enemies. Helped with the tone shift.
Mechanically, Death as a spell was interesting to me because of how it very visually altered the enemies you were fighting. Even if it does take 15 seconds to kill an Iron Giant with Death, by the 9th second they are very obviously being affected by the spell. The game even gives them a death status debuff icon. This is where much of my confusion is coming from.
Admittedly, I only used Alterna when it was obvious I wasn't going to get the chance to kill anything with Death. I felt like it was overkill and kind of enjoyed sucking enemies dry anyway.
I actually discovered Holy before it told me about it and i didn't know what it was. I never deliberately used it because it didn't feel like it was designed to actually combat enemies with.
Didn't mind popping Ethers because Ether in FFXV is useless in the vast majority of areas because warpstriking replenishes all your MP anyway. I was actually happy to make use of them, and this is where i stopped deliberately spamming Alterna because I actually began to feel like i was cheesing the area. Again, this is where my confusion comes when people say the ring wasn't working for them.
Finally...and this is the important bit....I didn't really feel like being MP-less was a design flaw. It felt like it was a design choice, because the chapter is about loneliness, foreboding and desperation. You have issues in ch.13 that you don't have anywhere else in the game.
My only issue with the experience is that it just lasted a bit too long, and of course there's the narrative problem of it also being used to patch up some lore information before the chapter ends, which honestly is THE biggest design issue with the chapter to me.
I guess my experience was just a bit different from others.
I had a huge stack of Ethers because I never found any real use for them. If i felt like my MP was taking too long to replenish, i'd just pop one, so i never had this "waiting" issue in the chapter.
And It didn't really matter to me how long it took to kill the enemies because even though their lifebar never moved, you could visibly see how close they were to being insta-killed.
It also helped that Death slows the enemy down alot while you're using it and it heals you afterwards.
