My brother and I are interested in running Mutation. It was the first game we owned in the series and so it's always been our favorite. But before we devote our time to it we're wondering what experienced players think of a NG+ category for the game. Meaning ANYTHING you wish to do in the infection game before transferring is allowed including leveling, armors/weapons, charms, potions, cores, party members.
There's a drawback in that you can't level too much that you'll kill everything in the third server as you'll need new cores but maybe a low level weapon equip could fix this?
Anyway, I can see a lot of strategy going in to the game transfer and routing but I'm only a noob .Hack runner. Is this a good idea to try or is the transferring items gonna make it cheap compared to the RNG collecting in infection?
So I'll be more specific with some questions.
Has anyone attempted routing this before? Would I be replacing everything from Infection in the early game anyway? I know weapon levels are a lot higher straight away in mutation but perhaps lower level weapons can allow data drains at higher levels? then you could play through until Trades. Not sure how it might work if you level up alot. Would the level up only save farming in the early game anyway since you need to be similar level to enemies to get cores. I'm currently running through Mutation and routing but can't try this out until the huge chore of leveling in infection has been done so any testing from anyone else would be great.
Even still, NG+ should save time in the early game over starting fresh even if you only start at 35-40.
Hey there! Sorry for the late reply, the mods over at //infection don't get notifications for this forum and Maxylobes doesn't actually run these games.
NG+ for Mutation is something that we considered but were only really interested in for doing full series runs. While spending a boat load of time in Infection could get you level 99, NG+ doesn't change the route a whole lot. It just makes things easier in terms of kill speed, infection rating, and money management.
The highest tier of armor that you can bring into Mutation is the thunder set, which can be replaced right away in the Lambda Server shop by the Bone/Darkness set. The best (read: highest physical attack) weapon for Kite in Infection, Hell's Gate, can also be bought at the Lambda Server shop.
In the route that we (being Hachrt and me) have now for Mutation, we already get to level 40-42 just after the first dungeon with Elk and Mia.
In short, we don't think of Mutation NG+ as anything more than a fun run. However, don't let that stop you from running it if that's what you want to do! We'd be more than happy to help you set up a speedrun.com page for it and route things out. We also have a discord where we talk about mostly Infection but it includes all of the .hack games https://discord.gg/DMh4Cv7 hop in and say hi!
I've been strongly considering running this series. Is there anything I should really know or should I just join the discord?
