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General
#28475

okay so

here’s the breakdown of damage you take, damage you do, and XP and Money you gain in vanilla, non-Royal Persona 5

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Merciless here was genuinely kind of a middle finger to the player’s time - combat itself was exactly as hard as hard mode, but you just got to grind a ton more because you only earned 40% the XP and money of any other standard difficulty. Most people who aren’t JRPG masochists didn’t really like this, and I think for good reason.

Well, ATLUS uh, mega over-corrected. Here’s that same chart for Persona 5 Royal:

image

Note that you now gain more XP and more money from battling than in Hard mode. This actually makes it quite easy to become over-leveled and over-equipped, which can make fights feel quite trivial. On paper, and from this image alone, it looks like that’s a trade-off for dropping from dealing only 80% of the damage you would deal on easier difficulties down to dealing only 65% of the damage you should be dealing, which to be honest would still probably be easier on the whole than Hard - but it gets worse!

Merciless in Royal also has one additional gamerule that matters a lot:

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This works both ways - if you get hit for critical/technical/super-effective damage, you take triple damage, but you also deal triple damage when you hit a weakness, critical hit, or technical. Additionally, technicals in particular are way easier to actually inflict intentionally compared to vanilla Persona 5, and so in practice, since you’re almost always hitting a weakness and can pretty easily build for technicals or crits when you can’t, you’re actually dealing more like x1.95 damage and getting x1.2 XP and money for it.

This makes Merciless trivially easy - enemies basically melt as soon as you hit a weakness, and you level up way too fast to ever be in real danger past like the first miniboss of the game (and the first boss if you don’t get Media on Morgana beforehand). After that, the game is trivially easy on this difficulty, and you’d be better off just playing on Hard.

There are a few edge cases where Merciless is better later on, but on the whole Hard provides far and away the most well-balanced experience for people not new to JRPGs.

2 Likes
#28476

Royal also has the issue of building onto P5 Vanilla

like P5 Vanilla was set up to be a certain level of difficult

and then Royal pops in and gives you like a bajillion new tools to use in combat

but the game isn’t really made much harder for all of these extra new tools

so it can get very easy very quickly if you minmax things like fusion alarms and exploit all of the new confidant abilities to their fullest

1 Like
#28477

like royal is still a good game, don’t get me wrong, but if P5 was already not a super difficult game then P5R is very easy to make a trivially easy one

1 Like
#28478

yeah i needed to change the post to reflect that p5 is ~decent balance wise
p5r is basically broken in half by strength 5

2 Likes
#28479

i don’t know what they were cooking on this

Strength 5 P5R

Allows you to pay to create Personas of a higher level.

1 Like
#28480

P5R is broken in half by a lot of things tbh

lots of these new features and buffs are cool and flashy and fun and all but when you give the player so many highly-effective tools without massively upping the difficulty you’re going to make the game very very easy if the player takes true advantage of them

2 Likes
#28481

I mean the real thing is getting it at rank 5

in base P5 it was a rank 10 ability which is much less destructive to your overall power scaling curve if it only comes at the part where the player is already fusing Satan lmao

2 Likes
#28482

yep
getting it much earlier means you get it at checks notes about level 26

2 Likes
#28483

Which is basically around Palace 3/4.

1 Like
#28484

still not as good as kaiwan in p4g maybe tho lmaooooooo

#28485

like getting repel phys and victory cry at level 24 might actually be the game balance oversight of all time

#28486

early victory cry right?
yeah it’s pretty crazy
I don’t think it helps you against the gamer boss

#28487

you can also get null phys really early by using magician cards

#28488

I do think you can just end turn with ice immunity + repel phys against boss 3 though so lol

#28489

victory cry doesn’t help you directly against any boss but it completely trivializes dungeon exploration lol

#28490

so you can just

win at everything else hard enough to not have to care about the boss

#28491

at the end of the day in a JRPG if your numbers are big enough nothing else really matters all that much

#28492

shoutout Tevin btw, dude got level 99 in the first palace in P5R lmao

took him a year

2 Likes
#28493

i think the level 99 in ff7 first reactor is more impressive but this is still crazy

3 Likes
#28494

gamers