Battle - Beelzebub - SMT V Vengeance 

Idk I just had my protagonist soak up all the damage and it went fine first try.

@ils4844 Nice one! Must have been satisfying seeing him do nothing every turn. I always make the protagonist as weak as possible on my first run, so I had like 80 luck, 50 vit and agi and less than 40 str and mag, demons can't use items and I try not to use magatsuhi moves. Great fun, he wiped out every good attacker within about ten turns.

@@antlkth0n 80 luck is good, or at least investment in an actual good stat. Should've ran Poison proc on your protagonist since the damage poison has scales with the luck stat itself. Agility is really V's most truly useless stat honestly. Then again the devs did try to buff it so it's somewhere in an odd space between the stat being useless itself save for the game's new bootleg multistrike move which has an unspecified amount of multi hits going on with it.

@ils4844 Yeah I agree, Luck isn't a total dump stat like it was in IV lol. I didn't think about poison actually, that's a really cool idea I'll do next time. Agility is a really weird one though, does it influence anything besides your dodge % and hit %? To be fair, I didn't miss very often so it was good for that if nothing else. I think that the last line you said has always been a problem in SMT; I remember playing II when I was a kid and everything except Str was a total waste of time outside of about three situations each. It's cool that magic and strength are at least equally useful across any build in VV for once!

@@antlkth0n Luck wasn't a dump stat in IV either???? Crits and smirk rate are inherently tied to it, and with how the stats are all programmed in IV their rates at doing what they're supposed to do increases immensely when invested in properly (like 3-4 stat increase on levelup). Luck is incredibly busted because of this since your crit and smirk rate are incredibly constant, and if you're going for Luck over str or gun damage you can make random encounters your biach since those are susceptible to aliments and instakills. And from what I'm hearing yeah agility hasn't been modified much from base V either, so it's still essentially useless. Funnily enough regarding agility in the older titles it was actually incredibly useful since it basically allowed to do doding enemy attacks en masse without much need for buffs. Albeit in the early games it really was just equips are more important than stats so it's not like your investments made a huge deal save for select cases like stat checks. Another stat from the old games I think was actually worth the investment though was intelligence for sure. Increased magic resistance + better aliment hit chance (this carries over to swords and guns) and easier times with negotiations for the protagonist. Along with increased instakill hit rate on say your demons or Nemissas instakill spells in Soul Hackers. Soul Hackers was really the epitome of the old row based system honestly, a cut above the rest since everything actually functions not just as intended but functions good and positively as well. As opposed to the game that came after it: Nocturne, who's only functional stat 100% is vitality and it doesn't even cover defense, just HP increase. While all the other stats do nothing or are bogged down in ways that make them less useful than they really let on. Fun fact Nocturne was going to actually have an int stat, it was scrapped unfortunately. That does explain why instakills and aliments don't actually have any stat to scale with though. Anyways that's enough rambling from me ig.