And within those classes, they all have separate skill trees which does all manner of passive things. After a certain point, you can pick a sub class which allows you to mix and match classes and weapon types. In addition, there's a bunch of other things - taking an Unknown item to a Tekker alá PSO now lets you select what element you want it to be, and choose a bonus passive (either a Meseta or EXP bonus mod). Charge it up, and there's boomerang wind blades all over the screen. Which are rather fancy, and in fact the first tech you get of that group labelled as Zan is very similar to Chiki Kyoren-Jin (a rather infamous Slicer Skill in PSU), in that it fires a massive blade of wind across the screen. Ground attacks from PSU has been dumped, and replaced with Wind techniques. There also seems to be changes to Dark and Light techs, which no longer cause instant death and instead do some new things. As a result, a lot of the Techniques we all know and love have been modified or exchanged for new Techs (such as Sazonde). A basic example would be Foie - Charging it lets it act a lot more like Rafoie, allowing it to explode and hit a small area of enemies instead of just one. While JAs pump up the damage output, Charging changes the properties of the attack itself. Instead of relying on Tech levels to get to certain stages, the game allows you to do two new things to forces - Just Attacking (No, really, they can now JA Techniques), and charging skills. Grabbing an enemy mid-air and slamming them is just too god-damned hype.įorces - This class has probably seen the most changes, and it shows, because they're very enjoyable to play now. I keep banging on about Heavenly Fall, and there's a good reason for that. This allows you to do all sorts of bullshit, including using Heavenly Fall in mid-air. You can engineer it so PAs can combo one after another, though.Īs for activation of PAs, this is a pretty big thing for Hunters now - all attacks can be activated in Mid-Air, and generally can be cancelled out with the dash. Heavenly Fall can be just used whenever (I'll get onto this), or as a Just Attack after the third standard hit as the stages reset. This set-up is mainly utility so I can follow up standard attacks with Just Attack PAs - Grapple Charge can be Just Attacked after the first hit, Other Spin on the second hit.
Wired Lance: Heavenly Fall > Grapple Charge > Other Spin. Instead of the last iteration's 'equip one PA, and you'll fucking like it' approach and hitting the button for up to three stages of the attack, PSO2 allows you to choose a PA for each 'stage'. Hunters - this class hasn't changed much from Ambition of the Illuminus, outside of how Photon Arts are activated and how they're set up. Which is pretty great, as it allows you to change up at a moment's notice, as well as employing Just Attack into each shot as needed. in place of bullets, you get PAs that simulate different firing modes (including shotgun fire, rocket-propelled grenade fire, and sniper fire).
But the biggest change going from PSU is that guns have gone the way of striking weapons - instead of bullets causing elemental damage, it's now based on the weapon itself. Rangers - as seen from the original promotional footage, going third-person shootbang is a rather good thing, as that allows you to focus down on weak points much easier.
Still trucking along with the game, and it's very enjoyable - the gameplay is very much placed firmly in between the PSO/PSU franchises, alongside some very neat additions (such as walking into an area that features Multi-Party play, only to see that there's two teams of four having a huge brawl with some massive fucking bastard of a dragon. Although given the patching servers, that would be about ten hours worth of updating!
Large Patch is out for the latest update (27th March), Which surprisingly isn't that large - something like 70MB in total.