Thread: Souls and null grids

It's often a good idea to match your soul weapon to your grid. Sometimes you might even need to use the soul weapon to complete the grid. This may involve using souls people don't normally use and aren't familiar with, so I thought a discussion on which soul to use with which grid might be useful. Here's my thoughts, but I'd like to hear what other people think

Lance: Shingen
Bow: Shingen
Axe: Herc
Gun: D'art
Arcane: Morgan (only choice)
Staff: Morgan for bursting, Andro for stability
Hammer: Sigfried (only choice)
Glaive: Sigfried???
Sword: Arther for bursting, Joan for defense.

An issue issue arises when you have a slow team or a glass cannon. Do you want a soul that fits with your team, or do you want to go the other way to balance it out? For example, with fire sword, Joan will slow you down, but with Arthur you may die soon. So I'm not sure which is better there.

You don't match your Soul with your Phantom Grid. You use the best Soul weapon for the Soul that you need - which is almost always the offensive one.

Your Phantom Grid will be decided by what you can put together. And for F2P players, there isn't much leeway here.

I actually like to think about null weapons to weapon grids first and then figure out which soul combinations work out for which element. The best null weapons (IMO) are the lance, hammer, and gun. There is a case for arcane (defender, vigoras), but you have to have a grid that can support that.

For a lance grid, the best soul choice is Shingen and the best elements are Fire (assault SR, Typhon, and Vlad... hat tip th3 fr4gil3), Water (defender SR), Dark (defender SR, Apocalypse, Chernobog), Thunder (Union lance, Mastema assault SR) and Light (Mike, Tish, and Lugh lances). It's hard for Wind to build a strong Lance grid. Water and Dark lance grids can tend to having SR defender fillers while searching for SSR assault lances and make them less powerful than Fire, Thunder, and Light lance grids.

For a hammer grid the best soul is someone who doesn't use a hammer and the best elements are Dark (Union Hammer, Nepthys, and Samael), and Light (assault SR, Cow hammer, Metatron). Both Elements can do fairly well with a hammer grid, but Dark edges out, since the Union hammer is assault/exceed, while the Light grid is SR heavy with hopes of getting better SSR hammers... eventually.

For a gun grid, the only soul is D'art and the best choice is the hitpoint gun (Charles blaster) and the easiest elements are Thunder (Mammon gun, Medjed, Union gun), Dark (assault SR, Thanatos), and Wind (defender SR, Icarus, Pazuzu). Gun grids can be defender heavy (as the phantom gun and Charles blaster are both defender+++). I believe both Wind and Thunder can pull this off, but it's not high damage. This can be disconcerting for elements that are powerhouse bursters. Tread carefully and or don't use D'art as your soul.

The glaive, bow and arcane phantom element grids are decent. I believe that Water has an easy time with Glaives and Wind/Light has a fair number of bows so either element will work for those weapons. I have very little experience with Arcane and the additional need of stacking pride to balance Vigoras can make this fairly cumbersome to work (but great if you can get it to work).

The sword, axe, and staff phantom weapons are fairly mediocre (with the axe being downright crappy). You can make a sword phantom grid work in Fire due to an Ascalon Sword Grid and with enough assault (ascalon has double assault!!) you can start focusing on DA and TA as being something that moves the bar more than just additional assault. But since this is 15 dragon eyes per ascalon sword... it's pretty expensive... normal whales need not apply!!


Dejnov.

Fire also has SSR Typhon and Vlad lances. can get another copy of Vlad from ori shop and theres another reprint of Typhon in febuary. so at the moment 2 copies of Typhon (unless lucky with drops) and 2 copies of Vlad (unless lucky with raid gatcha).

Originally Posted by Dejnov

-- The best null weapons (IMO) are the lance, hammer, and gun. --

Lance, Hammer, Glaive and Bow. In other words, the good ones are the ones with Assault.

For non-Assault Phantoms, you can use them, but you don't really gain much. Like, I'm using Axe Grid in Dark, and compared to a Assault SSR, what am I gaining from it? Uuuh, about one Exceed(++) and Elaborate(++). What is that worth? Pretty much nothing. Can't recommend anyone to "upgrade" to an Axe Grid, really.

But Assault-Phantoms basically give you an extra weapon into your Grid. And one extra effect, like Triple(++) for Glaives. Those things are well worth it.

For Thunder, Gun Grids can be worth it, mostly because Mammon Guns (even more so when FLB'd, which isn't here yet) are just so goddamn good. Add in how Gluttony Guns are pretty much the only FLB weapons Thunder has access to. And later on I think Olympia brings a good Gun for Thunder too, so there. So you just naturally go into Guns despite Phantom Gun being a piece of shit. Oh well, at least you gain some HP out of it, I guess.

Originally Posted by Slashley

But Assault-Phantoms basically give you an extra weapon into your Grid. And one extra effect, like Triple(++) for Glaives. Those things are well worth it.

Is this because of the 20% additional assault added to each non-phantom weapon so a glaive phantom weapon basically makes each non-phantom glaive be 1.2 times its base times the 5 glaives is like having 6 glaives in your grid... I like it. That's a nice way to think about what phantom weapons do.

Dejnov.

Best Null weapon is axe and sword.

Sword => get Ascalons for fire
Axe => Ashy+Eye Axe and a complete thunder eye axe grid

for f2p = DMM devs dont care about those guys.

I like how people are talking about ascalon grids and ascalons using plural, as if they just fall off trees or something, I guess for uber space whales they might, but even then they probs prefer to use those eyes to max out all those P2Ws they got anyway.

Seriously tho, I was lucky enough to pull 1 ascalon from a ticket. OFC it's FLB. Is 1 ascalon worth making a sword grid over, or do I need many to justify the effort?

Originally Posted by Unregistered

I like how people are talking about ascalon grids and ascalons using plural, as if they just fall off trees or something, I guess for uber space whales they might, but even then they probs prefer to use those eyes to max out all those P2Ws they got anyway.

Seriously tho, I was lucky enough to pull 1 ascalon from a ticket. OFC it's FLB. Is 1 ascalon worth making a sword grid over, or do I need many to justify the effort?

Let me be clear, in my original post I never actually advocated for 'normal' players to actually build an ascalon grid. The phantom weapon isn't one that can help tremendously in the short term and only truly starts shining if you have something like +200% assault AND fairly low DA and TA on your himes. Then it starts to be fairly substantial. For Fire it's a much better deal to do the Lance grid (with Vlad and Assault SR lances initially) and just upgrade to FLB Union Lances as you get them. That's fairly economical and something you can do in the near term and will be plenty viable in the long term.

Will a full ascalon grid be better than a full lance grid? Of course it will as Eye weapon's base assault and hitpoints are much higher than any Union or Hime weapon AND it's a double assault Eye weapon no less, but you'll have saved plenty of bricks and eyes to work on a second or third element's team which should be fairly valuable for events like tower, etc.

I put the ascalon grid into the same category as a full element eidolon; yes you could spend 150 eyes on one... but why would you? It's much better to up the power level of a second (or third) element team so that you can have elemental advantage in more situations than if you didn't.


Dejnov.


Edit: I would definitely work to leveling the Ascalon sword (as it's a great weapon) and even bricking it if you need to while running a full Fire Lance grid as your base weapon grid. You'll eventually have both phantom weapons and you have 10 weapon slots so it's not like a single ascalon is incompatible with a lance grid. If you ever find yourself with 5 comparable (or better) swords than your basic lances, you can switch, but having 4 swords and 6 lances or 6 swords and 4 lances is a small variation in what you have to build for a final grid.

Originally Posted by Dejnov

Is this because of the 20% additional assault added to each non-phantom weapon so a glaive phantom weapon basically makes each non-phantom glaive be 1.2 times its base times the 5 glaives is like having 6 glaives in your grid... I like it. That's a nice way to think about what phantom weapons do.

Dejnov.

I would go and look at the phantom weapons again. I became pretty lost reading most of the stuff here but 20% additional assault added to each weapon? Pretty sure that is wrong. I mean you get an increase in stats of all the weapons that are the same as the phantom weapon and you get the second skill on the phantom weapon, when you have enough of required weapons in your grid. However, this is only for that weapon. So, a hammer has Carnage and it will give 30% assault. This second skill is just for the Phantom hammer and it won't pass onto any of your other weapons in the grid.

The phantom weapons do give an increase in base stats to the other weapons. So all hammers in a hammer grid (Including itself) will get an increase of 45% HP and 30% att. Other weapons in the grid won't see an increase in stats.

In short. I have no idea where you got the 20% for each weapon in the grid.

Also Thunder is good with hammer since they have good hammers to use. Due to tower it is easier to build grids around Kami weapons even for players that don't spend a lot and you can even buy the hammer for 2 ori in the shop.

I also wouldn't decide the soul I use on the phantom weapon in my grid and that includes the souls weapon as well. Usually you would go with Herc or Shingen for your souls. There will probably be times that the soul does vary like GO missions or Tower and perhaps other events in the future.