Sword Art Online - Anime Spoilers & Speculation (for SAO Novel Readers only)

[Clarste]

Originally Posted by styr

4 minutes is assuming he is healing up from 1 hp, which isn't likely. I would assume that usually he only needs to heal up a bit after each fight, if at all. 4 minutes to heal his entire HP bar sounds like a long time until you realize that Kirito has probably grinded levels for thousands of hours. If it was such a bad skill why are Kirito/Asuna/Heathcliff using it, three of the best players in SAO and four if you include Cline..

Ok, 2 minutes to heal from half. Or he could just drink a potion (I forgot the numbers given for that). And even if it does make him grind slightly more efficiently it'd still be useless on bosses who basically one or two-shot people from what we've seen. And even if it does help slightly on bosses who only do chip damage when they're parried, it still wouldn't be "OP". Certainly not on the scale where the designers of ALO would feel obligated to remove it. Especially since ALO isn't SAO, and in ALO you do take lots of damage consistently with healers topping you off. And being topped off is the death knell for slow regeneration, since it means that it can't add up large amounts of time towards its effectiveness.

[Wild Goose]

I see the effectiveness of battle healing as somewhat similar to shield regen on Firebase White Geth Gold farming: not something you want to rely on alot.

There's fairly quick shield regen, but a solid hit from a Rocket Trooper or a geth Prime will wipe out your shields, and the next hit will kill you. Survival on FBWGG relies on cover and not getting.hit.

Your shields go up sooner or later, but not fast enough that you can tank, even if you're an N7 Paladin or Krogan Sentinel.

[styr]

Originally Posted by Clarste

Ok, 2 minutes to heal from half. Or he could just drink a potion (I forgot the numbers given for that). And even if it does make him grind slightly more efficiently it'd still be useless on bosses who basically one or two-shot people from what we've seen. And even if it does help slightly on bosses who only do chip damage when they're parried, it still wouldn't be "OP". Certainly not on the scale where the designers of ALO would feel obligated to remove it. Especially since ALO isn't SAO, and in ALO you do take lots of damage consistently with healers topping you off. And being topped off is the death knell for slow regeneration, since it means that it can't add up large amounts of time towards its effectiveness.

You do have a point. Battle healing would be at best redundant in ALO, which also gives a viable reason to delete it. It would be greatly underpowered compared to healing spells. I agree though that Battle Healing only has merit on grinding mobs for a long time and not so much for bosses (except that one boss they fought for 2 days which had very low damage). I still think that it would provide a big boost in SAO since it saves you time buying potions, using them, etc. Since Kirito was a Korean-level XP grinder I imagine the skill was useful for the purpose of gathering as much XP as possible. He probably used Battle Healing and potions to obtain a high healing rate that allowed him to grind amazingly fast or something, hard to say.

[Utsuro no Hako]

Originally Posted by styr

My apologies for all the posts, but he's another couple screencaps of the dual wielding axe thug:

pic 1 pic2

His axes also look... quite different in those pics to when he was just standing around... makes me think it was the animators fault after all! It also seems the weapons change shape between pic1 and pic2.

The axes even change shape between the two shots -- in one they're more like picks with two pointy ends, while in the other they're axes with cutting blades. There's another guy with a green pick that seems to remain constant, and he has a shield equipped to his other hand.

I'm going with "animator screw-up".

Originally Posted by Clarste

Ok, 2 minutes to heal from half. Or he could just drink a potion (I forgot the numbers given for that). And even if it does make him grind slightly more efficiently it'd still be useless on bosses who basically one or two-shot people from what we've seen. And even if it does help slightly on bosses who only do chip damage when they're parried, it still wouldn't be "OP". Certainly not on the scale where the designers of ALO would feel obligated to remove it. Especially since ALO isn't SAO, and in ALO you do take lots of damage consistently with healers topping you off. And being topped off is the death knell for slow regeneration, since it means that it can't add up large amounts of time towards its effectiveness.

If units switch out when half their members fall below 50% HP, and each unit can hang on for more than two minutes before needing to switch, then the healthiest members can rely on battle healing while those who've taken heavier damage use pots.

[Clarste]

Originally Posted by Utsuro no Hako

If units switch out when half their members fall below 50% HP, and each unit can hang on for more than two minutes before needing to switch, then the healthiest members can rely on battle healing while those who've taken heavier damage use pots.

Or they could both use pots. Pots are cheap. Invest that skill slot in something that can't be replaced by a cheap item. Perhaps something that makes you take less damage?

[Awrya]

Originally Posted by styr

My apologies for all the posts, but he's another couple screencaps of the dual wielding axe thug:

pic 1 pic2

His axes also look... quite different in those pics to when he was just standing around... makes me think it was the animators fault after all! It also seems the weapons change shape between pic1 and pic2.

The staff spent all their time on an incredible static background and our MC, grunts are grunts. This reminds me of battle scenes, which on frame to frame looked hilarious

About dual wielding, from Lizbeth story we know that equipping two weapons result in an error message, leaving the player unable to use a sword skill. The funny thing is that [Dual Blades] involves attacks from both weapons, while this one just uses one weapon, with his other being useless

[kyp275]

Originally Posted by styr

4 minutes is assuming he is healing up from 1 hp, which isn't likely. I would assume that usually he only needs to heal up a bit after each fight, if at all. 4 minutes to heal his entire HP bar sounds like a long time until you realize that Kirito has probably grinded levels for thousands of hours. If it was such a bad skill why are Kirito/Asuna/Heathcliff using it, three of the best players in SAO and four if you include Cline..

The battle-healing skill is very hard to skill up, as the only way to rank up that skill is to take large amounts of damage from monsters, which is a risky proposition in SAO.

[Dann of Thursday]

Originally Posted by Nightengale

It's surprising to me that we're discussing the total no. of Unique Skills put in place in the system.

Quoted from the man himself.

Spoiler for vol 1:

“…I had expected that you would be the player who would stand against me in the end. Out of the ten unique skills, «Dual Blades» is given to the player with the fastest reaction speed, who would then act out the hero's role against the final boss, regardless of whether he wins or loses. But you have shown me strength beyond my expectations, be it your speed or your insight. Well…I suppose that such unpredictable developments are part of the essence of online RPGs….”

The way he sentenced it also clearly implies to me that in his mind, he has made his 'Group of Ten' a highly exclusive group ( intended for teh JRPG drama), and highly unlikely that he set parameters that any random grunt could had obtained them.

Did we ever get explanations on the other skills? I assumed that no one ever obtained another one, though it is funny that Kirito got the skill that Heathcliff equated to the Hero of the whole drama.

Originally Posted by kyp275

The battle-healing skill is very hard to skill up, as the only way to rank up that skill is to take large amounts of damage from monsters, which is a risky proposition in SAO.

Makes sense it would be so effective then given the risk and work involved in it, though I seem to recall this story being the only time it was ever brought up. Then again, it was brought up in a side story after the first volume so it makes sense.

[lightbringer]

Originally Posted by Dann of Thursday

Did we ever get explanations on the other skills? I assumed that no one ever obtained another one, though it is funny that Kirito got the skill that Heathcliff equated to the Hero of the whole drama.

As far as I remember we never hear about the other skills. We know Heathcliff has one (I forgot the name though, something like "Holy Sword" or so). Klein also has a skill but it's a common one obtained through using his katana repeatedly, so it's not a unique skill. And all unique skills were wiped in ALO, even after New Aincard appears they are not usable anymore - now we got Original Sword Skills instead (volume 7) and Kirito develops an "outside the system" skill to chain together sword skills (as seen in volume 8). Because the author has this fixed idea that Kirito must always be super awesome to the extent that he even breaks the system limits.

Originally Posted by Dann of Thursday

Makes sense it would be so effective then given the risk and work involved in it, though I seem to recall this story being the only time it was ever brought up. Then again, it was brought up in a side story after the first volume so it makes sense.

It's basically only there for plot reasons in this side story. It's never mentioned again.

[Divini]

Originally Posted by lightbringer

As far as I remember we never hear about the other skills....

It's probably because the game was beaten when it was about 3/4 done. I'd probably assume that if it went all the way to the top floor, then more people would reach Kirito's level and some more would pop up.

It didn't matter anyway. As previously stated, he said that he wanted his <Holy Sword> up against <Dual Blades> as the final battle regardless.

It's basically only there for plot reasons in this side story. It's never mentioned again.

I actually remember Kirito mention it off-handedly once or twice when he was in the top level dungeons with the clearing group. However, he simply referred to it as "not being very useful when these monsters can hit you this hard".

[Dann of Thursday]

I wonder if Asuna would have ended up with one of them given that she seemed to be the fastest player from what I could recall. Just take her rescue of Kirito.

[Xacual]

Originally Posted by Dann of Thursday

I wonder if Asuna would have ended up with one of them given that she seemed to be the fastest player from what I could recall. Just take her rescue of Kirito.

Not fast as in character speed, fast as in reaction speed. And that was the requirement for Dual Blades, we never learned the requirement for any of the other unique skills. Apparently when the ALO team was using SAO's data they found 10 skills with weird, crazy, difficult requirements that made no sense so they got rid of them.

[Dann of Thursday]

Originally Posted by Xacual

Not fast as in character speed, fast as in reaction speed. And that was the requirement for Dual Blades, we never learned the requirement for any of the other unique skills. Apparently when the ALO team was using SAO's data they found 10 skills with weird, crazy, difficult requirements that made no sense so they got rid of them.

I meant character speed actually since I knew Kirito had the fastest reaction, which granted him Dual Blades. I was more speculating that she could have been a character who might have gotten one, though I suppose it's really impossible to ever know for sure.

[XaXa]

Aloha ~

I have a little argument with some people if Yui is a NPC or not. They all claim she is an AI - which I agree with. But does that mean she is not a NPC?

Originally Posted by Wikipedia

A non-player character (NPC), sometimes known as a non-person character or non-playable character, in a game is any character not controlled by a player. In electronic games, this usually means a character controlled by the computer through artificial intelligence.

I say:
She is not a Player so she is automatically a NPC.
They all think that there is an “in between”
Player – AI – NPC… NO?!

Character controlled by human = Player
Character controlled by script = NPC

Of course you can call her an AI – but that doesn't mean she is not a NPC.

Was Pinoccio a real boy because he could think and talk? no.. he was still a wooden puppet. The fairy had to make him into a real boy. ( sounds dirty :3 )

And I'm not saying it would be stupid to have an emotional connection to her because she is not a human. A cat is also no human - does that mean you shouldn't give a sh*t about cats? hell no!

They say:
Yui is not NPC final answer…. *YOU JUST WON A MILLION DOLLARS*

Originally Posted by Sinon

@XaXa Alright then tough guy, go to anumesuki forum and ask there whether Yui is AI or NPC [...] If you don't even dare to do that then your argument is just a blockhead-selfish reasoning [...]

... -.-


What do you think?

[kyp275]

As Yui is an AI construct that is not bound to a game, I fail to see how she can be classified as an NPC, which is strictly a game term.

[XaXa]

'cause she has a character in the game - but is not a player.
So she is a Non-Player Character.

[NoirX]

@XaXa Does that answer satisfy you? I'm the Sinon you quote by the way.

An AI as i said on other forum(you know where XaXa) NPC refers to those completely attached to the system, in this case Cardinal.

Also theres another significant difference between AI and NPC, AI have a connection to the Language Module while NPCs don't

[kyp275]

Originally Posted by XaXa

'cause she has a character in the game - but is not a player.
So she is a Non-Player Character.

So what game is Yui in when they're chilling and partying at Egil's real life cafe?

[NoirX]

Originally Posted by kyp275

So what game is Yui in when they're chilling and partying at Egil's real life cafe?

I think she's at Kirito's local network storage right?

[kyp275]

Indeed she was, though most likely on an actual pc. Doubt a NAS unit can support an AI.

And that was a rhetorical question for XaXa