Deathless weapons

I'm working on a no-death playthrough and hope to test the deathless weapons. A couple questions about what actually counts as death in this case:

1) Are there any status alterations that count as death (the documentation indicates as much for petrify)?

2) Are there any deaths that do not count as death (deaths recovered by statues or inns, instant deaths, death by trap)?

Enjoying the eff out of your remake. Thanks as always!

1) Only when your HP drops to 0.
Petrify only counts as "death" for the sake of triggering game over.

2) No.

3) Traps from treasure chests also add death penalty on higher difficulties (tough, starting at Lv36).
This will ofc. also affect the "death" related items.

Gorva's Death Spell - Is there any way to avoid or resist this at this point in the game (Ghost Ship) apart from stacking Red Moon Horns?

1) overlevelling/compensating with Red Moon Horns [won't work too well against endgame bosses, final bosses are flat out too high for this]

2) undead armor you can buy on ghost ship, but then you'll have a problem with healing

3) Wishbone you'll be able to buy soon after

4) killing him before he uses it - kinda goes hand in hand with 1

Yeah, undead armor is not really useful here due to the length of the battle and need to heal. Unless you have both Angela and Carlie spamming Holy Ball, I think the only way to win this battle completely deathless at this point in the game is to stack Red Moon Horns until Death Spell doesn't work. Instead, I just re-fought the battle until Death Spell landed on Angela, who should benefit least often from the deathless weapon melee enhancement.

On a side note, I have come to appreciate my Chibikko bug. I happened to trigger it right before the boss fight, and I have to say, the psychedelic landscape of random flashing fluorescent characters made fighting a less challenging boss like Gorva much more exciting. It turns out that saving and resetting restores the game to normal, so as long as I'm willing to play with through the crazy visuals, I can keep my progress when it's important. In the future, I may use the Chibikko Hammer to intentionally trigger this effect during parts of the game that tend to drag. At some point I'll try to figure out how to record the effect so you can see exactly what I'm talking about.

Just an update here; on my current run, I managed to avoid Gorva casting Death Spell on me. The fight was definitely not any faster than my previous runs, so it had nothing to do with speed. I always thought that Death Spell was his desperation (1/4 HP?) move, but perhaps not. The major difference this time was that I forgot to equip anti-weakness armor before fighting him. I noticed that he was casting a lot more Evil Gates than in previous fights, hitting my weaknesses (dark Duran, light Angela). This leads me to believe that his AI may be able to sense my weakness, like the magician-class characters apparently can, leading him to prefer to hit me with spells that attack my weakness, decreasing his likelihood of casting Death Spell. Does any of this make sense?

No, Death Spell is just the last spell in his AI loop.
A couple of his spell slots are a 50:50 choice between Anti-Magic and Evil Gate.

Well, if you're certain that there is no way to skip that part of his loop, then perhaps the battle did go faster in terms of the number of spells he had a chance to cast. Equipping the matk armor to buff my Holy Ball instead of the anti-weakness armor might have made the difference; the battle may have just seemed longer because I was constantly using recovery items as a result.

Death Spell comes after Black Rain.

There's a little bit of randomness how fast AI can go through the script.
E.g. it can't advance to the next AI block when the game is too busy.

As I recall, Gorva cast Black Rain on me twice during the match. Neither was followed by Death Spell. The second Black Rain may have come just at the end so he may have not completed the second AI cycle, but he at least completed the first.

that's what his AI is supposed to do - but this is SD3, a game that does whatever the hell it wants

Indeed; this game keeps you on your toes. General question on what counts as a death: I've had instances where a character gets reduced to 0/1 HP, flickering between the two values, but I manage to exit the screen before they fall over. In some cases on entering the new screen I can see that their maximum HP hasn't decreased, i.e. a death penalty hasn't been applied. Would this count as a death (in terms of deathless weapons), or would the death counter only increase if a death penalty was applied? Is this flickering between 0 and 1 HP something that has to resolve itself prior to death?

I guess I'm asking if there is no death penalty, is there no death?

This 0/1 flicker is a shroedinger state.
The game knows you are dead but has yet to resolve certain actions that involve this character for which they need to be alive.

In vanilla it was possible to cheat this death by queuing a spellcast on the dead character and have someone else heal them - self heal was too slow most of the time, the 0/1 would be resolved to 0 before the heal is applied.

The death penalty is applied when the game would revive you back to 1 HP on victory or screen transition - though there are some cutscenes/events that trigger this "transition" in the middle of the map because it needs everyone alive to not crash.
Deathless weapons use the exact same value as the HP reduction, there is no extra flag.

Just a follow-up on this. In recent games I've been able to consistently beat Gorva before he reaches Black Rain and Death Spell, even under-levelled. The most important thing is to use a strong caster equipped for magic attack constantly casting her most damaging spell at the moment she recovers from her previous spell. This is not that hard to manage as Gorva wastes a lot of time between attacks, so your other (primary) character should be able to handle all of the recovery. It helps if they can throw in a powerful attack or two during her casting when convenient.

But there may also be ways to encourage Gorva to waste time. On my recent playthrough, it seemed that when he appeared close to the ship in range for a melee attack, if I attacked him as soon as he appeared, he sometimes disappeared again before moving or taking any action and reappeared somewhere else, causing him to waste more time before advancing his cycle. Is this part of his mechanic, or did I just get lucky?

Actually seeing this topic I'm interest in the opposite weapon the one that get stronger on Death, I assume it get stronger each you increase the Death penalty, but how much do you with each death ? Also does the bonus apply to only normal attacks or does it also include Techs and spells ?

5 hours ago, Nesouk said:

Actually seeing this topic I'm interest in the opposite weapon the one that get stronger on Death, I assume it get stronger each you increase the Death penalty, but how much do you with each death ?

I think it is +127 attack with maxed out penalty.

5 hours ago, Nesouk said:

Also does the bonus apply to only normal attacks or does it also include Techs and spells ?

Let me consult the holy book of armor_elements_stats.xls on that...
"attack and magic strengthened by death" - yes