DPS Guide to TD3 and AIS Pilot guide.

[Lyrise]

So since I got a lot of requests from the other scan thread and my PM inbox kinda exploded, I'm posting these scans from last month. This guide comes from a collaboration between the Dengeki staff, and Sega's Phantasy Star Crew. I'll highlight most things, but I'm not posting a full translation at the moment.

Edit: when I say DPS, I mean Dengeki Playstation, not Damage Per Second.

Same disclaimer applies: these scans are fairly large, people with not so good internet speeds beware.

Page 1+2 - Special Interview (including some of the motivations behind the design of TD3) and AIS Attacks.

Spoiler!

Page 3+4 - Attacks continued, data for Waves 1-7

Spoiler!

Pages 5+6 - Final Wave data, drop tables, and other tips. Also, left the preview for today's update intact (partially out of laziness).

Spoiler!

Page 2:

-Recommended AIS priorities (taking into account that there will be single players covering everything else)

1. Falz Hunar
2. Goldrahda, Solda Brahda (wizard)
3. Darker Particle Cannon
4. Infested VTOL
5. Darker Walls
6. Sub-bosses when they come in pairs.
7. Everything else

Tips with Solid Cannon: Nothing special to be said, 3 attack combo strings, but can be used to change the attack on the sword string (see below)

-Tips with Photon Saber: Every slash costs 15PP. But because the first 2 slashes do 1.54x damage (using a single Solid cannon bullet as the baseline), they're not good at all. The 3rd slash however, does 5.25x damage. Ideally what you want to do, is fire 2 rounds of the solid cannon, and then slash, for maximum output and flexibility.

-Photon Grenade (the missile): 55PP. Use this as much as you can when you are chasing down targets or engaging 1-2 enemies.

-Photon Rush (boost slash): 70PP, recommended for 3+ targets. Use in combination with 2 rounds of Solid Cannon, as the shots will recover enough PP to use Photon Rush. Also very effective against walls as 2 uses combined with Solid cannon will take down a wall.

-Not much to say about boosting and jumping, other than the fact that jumping costs nothing, multiple doublejumps are possible. Use it to clear walls in the corner when collecting crystals rather than breaking it down (unless someone is trapped).

Page 3+4:

-Covers the use of Photon Blaster and Photon Blizzard. Blaster... well you all know what to do with this. Blizzard, just remember that it's reloaded 35 seconds after use, so go ahead and use it on mobs whenever you can.

-Here's where the RNG begins. Airships in the entire EM are largely RNG controlled - a roll to determine when they show up will happen at fixed times, but will ALWAYS show up 30 secons into Wave 3, 10 seconds and 140 seconds into Final Wave. If you're really unlucky, the maximum number of airships you can see is 12.

-Warnings/Boosted waves, are completely RNG, not dependent on anything else you've done or crystals collected. You'll see the likelihood of a warning happening as well as it's type/severity.

-Enemy list - you can see here what enemies show up in every wave; note that some enemy types are random and may or may not show up at all in a certain wave. (Circle is guaranteed, triangle is random chance)

-The tables that you see in each wave description (except for w4) outline when and where a roll for a tower infestation (the giant darker core) will happen. In wave 1, the rolls will happen every 10 seconds, at 10% probability that the corresponding tower will be infested.

-In wave 3, as soon as you slaughter 10 darkers, Ringahda will show up.

-Starting wave 4, at fixed times the game will also roll for a wall to pop up in fixed position possibilities. Possibilities are "through the center" "corner" and "outside the tower perimeter". For example, in wave 4, at 5 seconds, 2 rolls will happen to determine if a wall will pop up somewhere on the tower perimeter. Also note that a corner wall and a perimeter wall is guaranteed to pop up.

-You generally want to have 1-2 AIS or Photon cannons out in the latter half of Wave 6.

-What they also recommend and what I personally find works best is to have 7000 points by w7, and 8k by wave 8. If you have 8k by wave 8, reaching 10k is very likely, and you can just faceroll the entire wave with AIS.

-The table on page 4 will summarize the following:

1. How many darker walls can be up at one time in a single wave,
2. How long a darker cannon can last in a single wave (yes even they have time limits in case you don't kill them off immediately)
3. How many darker cannons can be up at one time in a single wave (again, if you're in the unfortunate MPA that can't seem to off the towers in a timely fashion)
4. How many sockets will automatically infest at the start of a wave, numbers will also differ when a warning state happens.
5. How many darker cannons can show up right at the start of each wave, also affected by warning state.
6. The chance of an infested socket turning into a darker cannon, within 10 seconds of infestation.

Page 5:
-Final Wave: you know the drill, kill Hunar ASAP. Dark Vibras Yuga (and Dark Rinzes Yuga) can fire up to 3 bombs max.
-The drop table: Finishing with a certain rank will affect the number of drops you get from each table; this table only reflects the crystal, not what the Mooks have. Note that Table A can also draw from Table B.

Whew. That's it from me. At least I was listening to the Sen no Kiseki OST (second game out today!) while typing this out, so it wasn't a total bore at all. I may go back and revisit anything I didn't get the first time like the interview, but pretty unlikely. If anyone else wants to do it, by all means go for it.

[wefwq]

Sadly lots of AIS pilot i see will takes priority on trash mob instead of boss or darker particle canon.

Also, good music taste.

[Z-0]

Sadly lots of AIS pilot i see will takes priority on trash mob instead of boss or darker particle canon.

Also, good music taste.

Party composition and what your party is actually doing will determine your AIS role. For example, AIS is best to unload the photon cannon on Ringuarder in Wave 3, but in Wave 8, it's best to have 3 AIS at the 3 spawn points (west, east and north) mobbing, while the other 9 players focus entirely on Yuga, which has about 7mil HP, but of course, if the players are doing other things, you might be better just mobbing in Wave 3, and attacking Yuga in Wave 8.

The above is assuming 1 AIS per player, because if you're doing speedruns, you will not reach the 7,000 crystal points most likely. The spawns themselves in TD3 are not random, rather just picked from variations much like TD1 and 2, which means that it is entirely possible to focus on killing by learning spawns (although 100% of your attention cannot be on enemies, since walls, towers, cores and the pilot are a thing). Variations are not 100% predictable from the first spawn though, unlike TD1 and 2.

Anyway, thanks for this, it's going to clear up a lot of things about TD3. May or may not be easier for some plannings, who knows (not read it all just yet).

[oratank]

lol they said 3 ais on w5 bullshit 2 is enough
1st spawn is nothing to use ais at all only mass cluster at one side
1st ragne active 2ais 1st ais blast on trash mob 2nd ais get ragne attention and kill the wall
2nd ragne spawn 2nd blast on trash mob and repeat the loop and ais will got time to collect cystal after macth

and i feel 1 ais on w4 isn't enough if you got leveling mpa at least 2 ais

only problem of td 3 is one thing most people think is a good idea to save ais for 7-8 that's why will fail on 4-6


w7 use 8 ais wtf is this guide

they need 3-4 ais on they first 2 min and 2 ais after first ais group run out of time

[elryan]

Great insight. Thanks for the post.

I personally like the following AIS deployment:

1 AIS wave 2. Optional but good for speeding up the run!
2 AIS wave 3, 4. Both of these waves are very dangerous despite being early because of Wolga / Malluda / Ringhada / Turtle wrecking everything.
2 AIS wave 5, but delay deployment until Ragne appears.
3 AIS wave 6.

2 AIS wave 7 (so far 10 has been used), the rest of the MPA collect crystals / use photon particle cannons. If 7000 crystals quota has been reached, can deploy more AIS but is optional as Falz Arms are not difficult to deal with. Hopefully by the end of the wave you have reached 8000-9000 crystals.

12 AIS final wave, killing enemies and collecting crystals at the same time. Let's say you have 8000 crystals by the time final wave starts, 2000 / 40 = 50; 50 / 12 = 4, each person only needs to gather 2-4 crystals while riding to reach 10000. Deploy another 12 AIS to end the game.

[Aine]

Besides W8 you are always going to have more players on foot than AIS, and one AIS can deal with mobs faster than eleven people can deal with them. Conversely, eleven people can deal with bosses faster than one AIS can deal them.

Even with comp of mostly Forces you want to take advantage of the AIS mobility and have AIS deal with mobs on the outer rim, while people take care of bosses. The only time AIS should really be fighting bosses is W8.

TD3 mostly comes down to memorizing spawn patterns and how good you are at using AIS. Main things you need to know:

- The fastest way to take care of mobs is spamming Photon Rush at the spawn point. Recover PP with the Solid Vulcan, as soon as you build up 70PP use Rush again.
- The fastest way to take care of Yuga is the Vulcan→Vulcan→Saber loop on his butt. Saber slash on the third part of the combo should deal 550k damage with WB.
- You can recover PP quickly with Solid Vulcan by shooting the towers or mobs, so don't be afraid to use up all your PP dashing around the rim of the map.

As for patterns, these diagrams have been very useful. Not gonna bother translating, but stars are large bosses, circles are mid-bosses, diamonds are mobs, and it goes orange→green→blue→white→pink.

[Z-0]

I've been meaning to ask because you probably know, but has TD3 ever been done 3周 . 3.?

I hear a lot of "impossible", but for some reason I highly doubt it. I've not actually done TD3 very much in an organised group, since I got banned right after the DDoS and only came back about a month ago, so I'm still not 100% familiar with it.

[Aine]

Not that I know of, and there's no videos of anyone doing it either. The closest we've come is 16 minutes, but considering teleporter and looting times we'd need to shave off another two minutes which is IMO not only impossible (without some kind of trick like spawn killing), it's also not worth it.

Drops are worse than TD1/2, but on the other hand EXP is great so leveling return marathons are popular (field 4 AIS per wave until W3, rinse and repeat).

[Z-0]

Personally I'd say it's worth it just to say you did it at least once. Just the accomplishment itself would be enough for me. First time I did 4-run TD1 I was more pleased with the fact 4-run happened rather than the extra drops.

I'd like to try and attempt TD3 "properly" some day just to see if 3-run is possible, but we haven't gotten 5-run TD1 yet as 12 players who all know how the quest works and what to do is impossible to come by in the English community, so trying to learn TD3 and somehow adapt to its many variations and RNG gimmicks would be a effort in futility right now.

I should just transfer to Ship 4 and join くぉりー. . _. Not that I'd be good enough for Quadrillion anyway.

edit: If anyone would really want to know how TD1 works, I can post spawn maps and how it progresses. Only thing I am unaware of at the moment are the tells for Gwana in Wave 3. Only thing I know is that the lane which gets Dagans gets Gwana.

[un1t27]

I'd like to try and attempt TD3 "properly" some day just to see if 3-run is possible, but we haven't gotten 5-run TD1 yet as 12 players who all know how the quest works and what to do is impossible to come by in the English community, so trying to learn TD3 and somehow adapt to its many variations and RNG gimmicks would be a effort in futility right now.

You need more AIS son.