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Good replayability with the the time pressure, resource scarcity, and relatively strict game balance shifting the rpg grinding from a forced conceit of the genre into an optimization puzzle leading to NG+ rewards that add enough to avoid monotony on repeat playthroughs without breaking the game balance. At the same time, these things do make the game a bit linear

That being said, the lewd route seems  a bit too pressed for time as a resource; trying to get a good lewd score felt like it got in the way of making progress on the game's plot or gaining stats. Combined with the pink run having a lower score potential than the pure route, I'd say there need to be more ways to boost one's loserscore.

The flavour text on the cursed women seems to indicate that a temporary suppression of the curse might be enough to evacuate them.

Could we get an option to feed them a blessed water instead of absorbing the curse? This is not only expensive to do for every curse victim but also ties in nicely with the newly reduced availability of said blessed waters.

It also makes for a good callback to the deliver medicine quest.

Most willpower reductions reset at the end of the day.

Womb of Lust doesn't.

Tunnel does not require combat if you have Fire(which you should have if you've unlocked the south forest). Simply wait at the edge of the bottom right bandits' 4-tile aggro radius and rush from the vine to the bed once they look down. Apparently you don't need the tunnel, but I'm telling you anyway.

Lack of Charlotte when Aura has NG+ stats mostly means a delay on the Minotaur and Low-Demon since you should be able to kill the Slime and Young Spider Queen without her. Being a lower level doesn't affect the strength of her Heat Up either, just that of her Fire.

As a tip, the room unlocks do not count as mental changes. Free -3 corruption in the outer chamber without if affecting your score.

That run ended at 30/34 corruption and enough gold for holy water, I'm operating under a 50 point budget assumption. Run 2 is probably going to end with a higher score anyway.

Could it be an idea to +2 the AGI, use a vitality potion after the duels, kill the Goblin Shaman first for Albrecht's ring and the level 2 stat increase before going Ogre Commander?

I think that one might require yakety-saxing your way through the bandit tunnel for the poison coating, a bunch of mana stones, a slime companion, thunderbolt and lightning blade.

Pretty much the collar for the bounty. There's a case to be made for just doing everything normally(with maybe a collar use on whiteoak to get Aura through act 1 faster). You ideally want to complete the festival of greed before day 30 though, and the combination of its bounty, giant's bone, area unlock, bonus salary, and exp trickle are a really solid way to speed up your run.

The hp/mp reset combined with fire, NG+ stats, and level 2 should also be enough for Goblin Shaman IIRC(not sure if this relied on RNG or Water Skin though)

Central forest + bandit camp(sneak through the tunnel to get behind the bandit leader) + North forest Scorpion cave + refugee camp... ah right, I suppose the Northern mines would require a day 2.

It's just one day, true. It's still enough of a waste that I generally choose to either pay up or wait since getting those early equipment upgrades is so impactful. Allied npcs(slime doesn't count, slime MVP) on nightmare are largely useless except as meatshields and buff monkeys and you should be able to clean everything up to the minotaur with just John and Paul by the time Charlotte gets out of jail.

If you've switched to avoiding consumables, disregard what I said on those. I thought you were still doing a mostly pure run where the alchemist discount was treated as a necessary sacrifice and consumables were used for certain bosses.

If you can, I recommend using the collar to kill one last boss before you  start a new run. If you have a spare water or two, maybe collar, end the day, and collar again before using the gem. It'll net you another 2-4 points.

Thunderbolt can be a big help against stuff like the Minotaur, Ogre Commander, and Avian, but the mana consumption is pretty taxing early and I'd recommend scrounging up the points for a starter slime instead. 

While technically free to learn, Fire can be great since it allows you to get the star metals in the bandit and refugee camps without needing to get/keep Charlotte out of jail(although leaving her in jail delays Fire II, which is needed in the underwater sections). More importantly: it gives you the option to get those star metals on day 1 and hit the level 5 workshop milestone early.

Water Skin speeds up the engagement ring and stolen food quests for early leveling and makes the bandit leader bounty easier as a possible alternative to the Ogre Commander.

Given the hints to your playstyle in this thread so far, you might enjoy starting with Desmond's proficiency skills if you've learnt any.

There's a weaker respawning version of the Low-Demon outside its domain.

Monster A is monster A. All Minotaurs have the same stats, all Young Spider Queens have the same stats etcetera. The only thing that changes between bosses of the same type are the terrain effects(e.g. facing a Young Spider Queen in the dark or near torches) and the presence of allies(on either side, some bosses have adds).

Using items before the fight means weapon/armour coatings. I think you're intended to use poison since the duelists have a lot of health and can heal themselves.

A Watsonian explanation for the switch would be that Arwin needs a way to win the card game, either because he's bound by rule 0 and needs to win the Perika 'fairly' or because the money magic doesn't work without a way for both parties to win.

The Doylist reason is of course because Aura needs to be able to get just enough Perika to save everyone and finish the festival without dipping into lewds or burning stats if she does everything right, and another stealth segment fits the game better than forcing players to win a blackjack minigame.

Since Aura ends up using the collar anyway, the best time for stat liquification is during the Pokémon battle:

Eastern Forest is a mid/lategame area and the tree monsters walk slowly out of combat so you can sneak around them.

Also, unless it's a boss, a humanoid enemy, or necessary to clear a path, it's generally better to avoid fights since combat doesn't award EXP and non-boss non-humanoids don't drop anything to my knowledge.

That damn tree is also a good collar target to build tempo on a run.

To play devil's advocate for a bit: there's a bunch of spells you probably want to learn anyway, ATK is also a pretty massive money sink, the Slime can be built as a pretty strong melee attacker and Defensive Stance does not reduce MATK so mage Aura tends to be a pretty tanky Aura against physical fighters.

I think the game is trying to be balanced around the idea of your Slime filling the role Aura isn't filling. Dueling becomes an absolute pain on mage runs though.

At to the optimal use question: 

Probably best to either sell the living hearts or feed them to the Slime(materials fed to the slime give EXP based on their gold value) with selling winning out as far as I'm concerned. DEF/MDEF/Resistances  tend to matter more for survivability than HP since good fights are the ones where you can stat-check hits into single digit damage and honest hard work at the blacksmith(or drugs if you need them) is a better way to bump Aura's HP. Pyromantium and Ether are best saved for when you unlock Verdeaux since their stat gains aren't great and the workshop gets more expensive every time you enhance equipment.

1300 on nightmare. If you're trying to kill him without using the collar, wait until you have enough attack to almost oneshot regular Ogres when you have tactical advantage.

 At this stage in the game, you're better off getting more attack than learning Heat Up since Aura doesn't have a lot of ATK to buff yet and Heat Up eats into your action economy. Weapon coatings are  also expensive and largely unnecessary this early on(you're better off spending a couple of days dodging fights, harvesting materials, and getting salary/upgrades at the workshop).

General rule of thumb is that Thunderbolt is your go-to counter-spell for enemies with wind-up martials. If you land it during the wind-up, they don't get to do their fancy wind-up attack.

Tailwind dispels the Hydrangea accuracy debuff on melee attacks,* and spells(fire/light) are better than bombs if you have the MATK for it since their attack debuff doesn't reduce MATK.

Ogre Commander is tanky, but Ogres are extra vulnerable to being attacked from behind, his attack pattern is/was very predictable(attack, attack, windup, defense debuff IIRC), and his damage isn't very threatening if he can't land his windup martial to debuff your DEF. The Goblin add is also weak to just about every type of magic, so killing it with fire is a cheap way to get tactical advantage.

The Low-Demon's clones have 1 hp each(2 on nightmare). A single AoE attack(e.g. slash) by John or Aura should bring the 5 back to 1.

*I think storm is supposed to do this too.

Aside from guarding even more loot, the Ogre Commander has a 500 gold bounty and is one way to complete a quest that gives +10 experience(level 2 get?) and unlocks the refugee camp. It also drops a very strong(by early/mid game standards) DEF-boosting monster material for either Aura or her future slime partner. Using the collar to get an early kill on the Ogre commander can be viable as an alternative to taking a few lewd options for gold if you're trying to protect Aura's innocence(and your victory score). Especially if you know fire(since this lets you skip combat when harvesting the star metal in the refugee camp).

The collar will also reset Aura's hp/mp so you can get more done on your day 1(or day 2/3).

While you could save and test for yourself:

1. One of multiple events that end the day while increasing your corruption and lewdness. 

2. Game over with score penalty.

3. A favour that serves as your non-lewd means of attending the festival of greed but can also be cashed in for gold.

If purification is still -3 corruption for 6k perika? That happened on version 0.32.0 I believe. Just over a month after the notion of using the festival to shed corruption by deliberately converting max hp into additional purifications got posted in the community. Apparently Richard decided that kind of lateral thinking wasn't allowed.

Furthermore, I consider that NG+ options for +[ally stats] or +[ally starting exp] should be added.

Light spells on the core to gain advantage followed by an AoE attack like slash or splash worked for me. Lightning sword if melee, water skin if mage, and whatever autocast will let you frontload the most area damage at the start. The aim is to kill his adds before they can do anything while keeping a steady damage output going.

Most of Aura's power comes from stuff like blacksmith upgrades, drugs/elixirs, books,  whatever skills she can learn from people/books, and challenging people to duels.

Playing the game 'right' involves talking to npcs to learn how certain mechanics work, learning what mechanics specific enemies use, what their weaknesses are, and knowing when you are strong enough for fighting them to be worth it.

Also avoiding unnecessary fights. Unless an enemy is either a boss or a human(oid), there's no loot, which means that the only reward for killing a monster is that you no longer need to sneak/run past said monster.

I think you posted this in the wrong thread...

0 trust drugs are possible. Low trust just means 'Mary' can't 'exit' the city through the sewer entrance and can't 'enter' the city  through the basement. That does not mean the inverse is true. Aura just needs to talk with Liliana to unlock the disguise, use the sewer entrance once to discover it, exit, and go back in. The teleport beacon also allows you to be in disguise. Spells do have trust requirements though.

The corruption condition is not having a nearby lightsource. Radiance turns Aura into a lightsource but casting fire on nearby torches also works.

The wiki has a page on the bomb. Or you could try Nephlune's bookstore.

The cheating console comes with the deluxe edition and offers pretty much everything a player would normally grind for. I suspect its retention isn't a question of necessity.

Hermann's house is North of the alchemist and south of the fountain.

Try talking with people at the pub.

What does your score look like in the clear gem room?

Are you playing on explorer difficulty by any chance? Explorer has a 0.2x multiplier

Yeah, it does feel wrong to just leave her . It used to have a use case on the old hard/now nightmare mode because resources are more important and human allies are less useful in combat. The addition of lake Roya's star metal deposit pretty much ruined the strategy though.

While I don't exactly disagree with your overall point, fire I vs light I is arguably one of the better balanced parts of new game+, with the former being cheaper to cast, having more base power, being useful out of combat, and being gated behind Charlotte not being in jail(+1 day, 400 gold,  lewds, or a 14 day wait) whereas deliver medicine is basically a freebie and light I is mostly useful for advantage.

Fire I also gates workshop level 5 if you have access to the refugee camp, which can translate to an extra ally level when clearing the Northern mine vault and festival of greed. This mostly impacts lower difficulties and early parts of the game where allies are quick to level.

More egregious are horror I and radiance I. The first only costs 10 points in new game+, is practically unobtainable during pure runs, and gives you a low-mana way to trip up enemy casters for defensive builds. The second costs 35 points, is pretty much unusable in chapter 1 due to its mana cost, and mainly serves to save(an admittedly large sum of) money unless you very specifically intend to chug another energy potion or two on Belphegor.

Another thing is the stat crystals having the same cost for all three stages. Changing something like a 5/5/5 cost of ATK/MATK to a 4/5/6 for +1/+2/+3 would increase the temptation for higher-score players to downgrade starting bonus stats for the sake of a skill pick, make the weaker tiers more accessible for low-score players who need that boost the most, and brings it more in line with the chapter 1 experience of escalating workshop prices.

There are player-written ones on the wiki:

https://wiki.starknightessaura.com/en/Guides/Walkthroughs

And in a similar vein to how you might miss a few things and fail at some stuff in Persona, a first-time player trying to go pure on normal difficulty will probably stumble through to the end with about 10-20 mental changes, a few points of lewdness, and having had to resort to the collar for the three demon generals because they failed the timer and/or killed the drug dealer. Or they ended up with soul break after using the collar like a crutch instead recognizing that the limit break ability is balanced by its limited use, similar to bombs in a danmaku game.

You seem to be conflating things like difficulty and complexity with poor balance. Like I said before, that's more of a "you" problem.

• #1. #9, and #11 are all knowledge checks, you get better at them as you refine your builds on subsequent playthroughs but your first run will hurt the most. #8 too to some extent, as getting tactical advantage is largely a matter of understanding mob patrol patterns and knowing what skills/items to get.
• Disagree on #2(and, on some level, #6), I'd say the game is still fine on normal. Then again, I may have played too many runs.
• #4 and #5 are arbitrary restrictions that you placed on yourself. And while a case can be made for not obligating players to use the collar, not wanting to rely on luck is akin to not wanting to use drugs or the slime. If you fail because you deliberately handicapped yourself? That's a you problem, not a game problem.
• While #7 somewhat ties into my point about the game having "correct"  routes, the fact that progress on the pink path tanks your victory score is a pretty big hint that you're not actually supposed to be carving your way through the pure paths while on a pink run. 
• Hermann and Roland basically excluding one another due to how their downsides interact can be pretty healthy for the game so long as  it doesn't require both to max out your defeat score. Pink having multiple routes increases replayability, and something like "mostly pure except Roland, and I used SKA on ABC bosses" is one of the more newb-friendly ways to get through the game.
• #10 is similar to #8 if you accept #1, #4, and #5 in the sense that the demon generals don't offer enough leeway for players to beat them without resorting to the collar unless they metagame and don't handicap themselves.

Personally, I think luck currently feels a little underpowered at either end of the graph compared to other non-agility stats. Buffing it to 3% per point of difference or having it cap out at a difference of 15 could be nice.

Basically, what I'm saying is that people with voting power have a blind spot with regards to how difficult the game might be for new players.

The game remains enjoyable without cheats.

But the game is becoming more about puzzling together the one "correct" way to play instead of trying to make fun builds work.

A bit late but it would be nice if the menu had a toggle to disable the following pop-up-

-for agility checks where Aura has enough agility. Because the popup feels clunky when running away from enemies and accidentally receiving +corruption or -health from a misclick feels bad.

On a related note, it would be nice if collar removal at this particular jump carried Aura all the way to the other side instead of potentially leaving her stranded in the middle with nothing to show for it.

While a preponderance of story/explorer/normal players is one explanation, I think the bar for nightmare might be something along the lines of "Auradev is able to clear this, so it's theoretically winnable." Which would explain why the game became harder after the turn orders lost randomness, why the festival purification strategy got nerfed after we started talking about it on the forum(I rather liked being greedy with that one but respect the position of it being an oversight), and why new (plunderable) additions to the game seem to come with a reduction in loot elsewhere.

It should also be noted that the deluxe edition has a built-in cheat console. This might be skewing the perception of some patreon players.

Spider queen quest would just need a blurb from the adventurer guild clerk. If a player knows how to enter the mine and kill the spider queen, they don't really need the bomb tutorial or spider queen weakness dialogue that the quest provides. 

If John/Charlotte/Paul have a later reference to them killing a spider queen, it can be inferred by the player that they took a similar quest without Aura at some point. No change needed unless said dialogue specifically mentions that Aura was with them(which wouldn't need to be said if Aura was there with them on account of her having been there).

Jacob? A pre-quest one-liner asking Aura to leave and a mention of his child being angry, mention of curse optional.

Riverrun and Nephlune would need their starting dialogues set to trigger the first time you enter after starting the sick workers quest/after defeating the festival respectively instead of after the first time you enter. In  terms of dialogue, only Nephlune has maybe the one slave trader line referencing Arwin that would need to be changed, everything else is either ambiguous or gated behind quest progression.

Similar story with the Northern mountains and mountain hermit where the quest/party dialogue can be skipped if Aura isn't on a quest, leaving just the hermit's introduction and offer to teach her in exchange for alternative modes of compensation.

Mountainreach is already stuck in a stable time loop but the npc dialogue seems fine so long as the day doesn't end, which Aura has no reason to do without the quest requiring her to witness the eternal repeat.

Overall, Roland seems to be the only major problem due to Aura not having a reason to distrust him prior to the festival.

Why not let Aura enter Riverflow on day 1 even though everybody is sick? The sick townsfolk don't actually offer anything. And Jacob's house could just have a bit where he's dealing with his daughter's tantrum and asking Aura to leave. Enabling these would just give players the option for a theft I edge case with the apples.

Northern mine could just be filled with spiders but no teammates, which would bring it in line with doing winged pig thief without Charlotte or killing various bosses before they become objectives(first goblin shaman, first ogre commander, second low demon, phantom lord..).

Nephlune day 1 could be balanced by having the vendor start with fewer restocks and the door to Lilliana's house locked(she's not home, which also means you can't unlock the Mary disguise), so it mostly just allows players to use the collar to win duels, rushing wind slime as a substitute for new game+, or to grab early books. Slave trading isn't available until vice gets unlocked anyway.

Bridge bandits being a multi-stage battle effectively blocks off the south unless Aura goes for a pink run, which would stack additional rewards onto said pink run. 

Belphegor is gated by needing to know open domain I and 100 mp to learn open domain II, mount Firestorm is gated by needing water skin II or excessive amounts of healing items.

Verdeaux might need some work, but the restocking vendor can start with less inventory, anything involving Roland and/or the princess can be gated behind the festival of greed, the cathedral is already gated behind Belphegor, and just about everything else is gated with gold.

 I can't remember if sequence-breaking Sathanas and Arwin would actually make the dialogue confusing, but if you somehow manage to sneak far enough into Draknor fortress with a blessed energy potion+ just to get a curse trap barrier before saving Edwin, you probably know exactly what you're doing and should be allowed to dodge the willpower hit.

Locking off the more high-level areas just means Aura is less likely to accidentally end the day early and denies players opportunities to get ahead by being trying to be clever, both of which would actually be rather on-theme for this game.

Pics so it did happen:

With the v0.32.0 update, it looks like mount Firestorm is to be a post-Winterfall area. The increased number of bosses also means more breathing room to new game+ air bubble I on pure nightmare runs. Between Winterfall gold and the golem quest, the gold issue is greatly ameliorated.

Coming back to the points, they're reaching a level where picking expensive skills just to save on gold later in the run is starting to become appealing. It could be good for build variety if the non-skill clear room gems had a +4 state and/or if there were gems for stuff like ally stats and starting blessed waters.