Treharne's Assorted Guides

2016-12-13T17:44:03Z

Ruvelia:

After some inspiration from a couple of other people, I've decided to start writing some guides (or something hopefully amounting to them) to share what I know about the game. I'll be adding more as time goes on. Hopefully they'll be useful to someone. --Treharne/Ruvelia/Raika

= Combat =
== Build Advice ==
=== Three Tenets to Consider for All Builds ===
No matter what role you want your character to play in combat, there are three things that every role needs to take into account to some extent if they intend to pursue optimization. Some builds care a little less about certain tenets of the three than others, but that said, all builds should at least ''consider'' them. In no particular order...

* Uptime. Ideally, you want any statuses you throw out to be able to stay up constantly by way of reapplication by the time the original duration elapses. Not following this means that there's likely to be odd spots in your combat rhythm where you're missing some statuses and thus are inconsistently at your full power, which can in some cases create vulnerable spots in your rhythm where you can be KO'd where you wouldn't be otherwise. Most relevant on buffing and debuffing builds, but still applicable for any build that runs either of those effects in smaller quantities (self-buffing counts too), runs cover and/or taunts in order to be a tank, or runs a Repeats or Damage Over Time damage-dealer setup (though the damage-dealers care in a different manner). Big Hits damage dealers care the least about this, though they still need to be mindful of the uptime of their passive effects to some extent.
** Repeats and Damage Over Time differ in their caring in that it's a waste of damage to reapply the same attack to targets still suffering from it (with the potential exception of reapplying a Damage Over Time effect on an enemy that got a high deflection percent on the same one earlier in the hopes of getting less of a deflection percent this time), so ideally these two want to apply their damage to targets not currently suffering from the attack in question if they have one that becomes available for use again before its first use expires. Failing that, power is more important than duration with these two when it comes to clearing most fights quickly. It doesn't particularly matter if a Repeats or Damage Over Time effect has an enormous amount of damage over its full duration if you're fighting enemies that won't survive the full duration (unless you have Overkill, but that's another story and even then it's somewhat limited, more on that elsewhere), and even if the damage per use is enormous, a low-power, long-duration attack of these types won't contribute much to the ''damage per round'', which is generally more important than the ''damage per use'' when it comes to clearing fights quickly. As a result, both of these do quite nicely with low uptime but high intensity attacks, but do be mindful of how their ''damage per round'' matches up with their cooldown, because that's still relevant in terms of efficiency (especially when trying to gather EXP by doing lots of fights in rapid succession) even if the matter of overlapping or having downtime on the damage ticks is less of a concern.
* Energy management. If you have no EN left, you can't do anything meaningful until you recover some. It's no good having all your statuses up and plenty of options to use if you don't have the EN to use them. It's also worth noting that ENBreak and ENMod synergize with one another and the former makes the latter worth more than it appears. Debuffers and Big Hits damage dealers care the most about this, the former because many powerful debuffs are hideously expensive and the latter because as the only build type with one-and-done effects rather than lasting ones, it has nothing to offer if it stops being able to throw out new attacks. Other builds care to some extent for the general reason that they can't do anything meaningful if they run out of EN, though the lingering nature of Repeats and Damage Over Time attacks as well as buffs generally sticking better than debuffs (since you can trust your allies to be around longer than any particular enemy group will) means they can afford a little more downtime for energy recovery purposes without suffering too much in their main role. Tanks tend to vary somewhat in how much they care about this, with Cover tanks probably caring less than Aggro or Taunt tanks, though all three tend to have some energy problems, usually by way of running a ton of passives and toggles to boost their durability which leaves them a little short in terms of maximum EN, which also restricts their natural EN recovery rate somewhat.
* Rotation blank spots and/or overcrowding. Strike is ideally a last resort move that exists to fill any instances in which you have nothing better to use (or perhaps functioning as a minor energy restorative at the same time if upgraded as such). If you're using Strike more often than you need it as an energy management tool (if upgraded as such), you either need more active options to use, or to pack more Recharge so the active options you already have are available more often. At the same time, some builds, notably Big Hits damage dealing, suffer if you have too many options competing for the same usage turns, especially if some of those are outside the damage-dealing role itself, so be mindful that running too many active (and non-instant) buffs or debuffs on a Big Hits damage dealer competes with their damaging attacks and eats into their overall damage output.

=== Considerations for Level Grinding Via Combat ===
For people only planning to get to Level 60 and stay there, this section probably won't be very useful. It's reasonably easy to get to Level 60 in about a month even with little to no combat by way of Social Actions, and efficiency doesn't particularly matter for those only wanting to go around the leveling path once. For those who intend to do so more than once by way of remorting, by all means, read on...

* More enemies is generally better for EXP than stronger enemies. AOE effects like having lots of enemies around, and the increase in EXP from increasing the difficulty is rarely more than one would get from having an extra enemy in each fight. Having said that, once the Pheromones rating is maxed out and the limit on how many enemies can appear in one fight is reached, increasing the difficulty -- and thus the level gap -- still remains as an option, and since the increase applies on a per-enemy basis, it's a lot more noticeable with lots of enemies around.
** Additionally, it's also worth explaining how difficulty and the level gap works. Enemies will spawn at a level equal to your own plus the numerical value of the chosen difficulty as displayed on +haz (so DN+2, for instance, spawns enemies two levels above you). If this number would be lower than the area's minimum level or higher than the area's maximum level, however, it displays different behavior. If the number would be lower than the minimum, enemies simply spawn at the area's minimum level. If the number would be higher than the maximum, enemies simply spawn at the area's maximum level. This is important because it's the level gap, not the difficulty, that affects EXP (difficulty might affect EXP ''slightly'' through increasing the base numerical rank of the enemy, but it's much less of an impact than the level gap is), and as such, both the minimum and the maximum need to have their special behavior taken into account. In the case of the maximum, it means that EXP will go down somewhat once the numerical difficulty level is larger than the actual level difference allowed by the maximum. In the case of the minimum, it means that if you can survive an area in spite of being underleveled for even its minimum, the EXP payoff can increase drastically.
*** This behavior is also applicable to progress during daily missions for tokens, so in order to ensure getting to +400% (the maximum) within the 40 fights, it's best to go through the mission at least two levels ''under'' the area's maximum rather than trying to be overleveled for the area's maximum.
* Survivability is first priority when it comes to a grinding build, followed closely by clear speed. Survivability means you can reliably expect to not get defeated while auto-battling whatever you've chosen to fight for EXP and at whatever difficulty and pheromone settings you've chosen. Being defeated interrupts EXP grinding via auto-battle, and as such, is a point of inefficiency. Once you can be sure you won't be defeated, clear speed becomes the next concern, as the same amount of EXP in a smaller time period means more EXP per time unit. The more complex equation here would be checking your EXP against the time it takes for each battle to finish in case there's a longer fight that's actually more efficient, but clear speed is still generally an applicable concept.
** Keep in mind that once you start a fight, there's a 60-second accountwide cooldown across both Flexible Survival and Rusted Promises before you can start another fight on any character on either game on that same account. 60 seconds is effectively "maximum" clear speed. It's possible to go faster than that, but due to the cooldown it won't make your EXP-per-time-unit any higher, and may even be reason to consider looking into raising the difficulty/pheromones rating if you can survive the new setting and the new setting still comes reasonably close to 60 seconds per fight.
** Survivability also somewhat takes the form of ensuring you have enough resources to keep going fight after fight without stopping. If you run out of energy five fights in and have trouble regenerating it, there's a chance you might get defeated due to an inability to do anything in the sixth.
* Getting any sort of reasonable EXP payout from combat requires some source of damage output. This might seem like an obvious statement, but you can't actually defeat opponents and get EXP from them if you have no way to reduce their HP to 0. As such, you need some way to do this, whether doing it yourself, bringing along some pets, or getting another player to help. It's an obvious statement and yet it's important to remember because not all roles level by combat equally quickly, the reasons of which are explained to some extent above.
** Having said that, be mindful that on some level, partying with other players is inefficient for any given player EXP-wise. Compared to the EXP while solo, having extra party members reduces the EXP per person in two ways. One, while it's not quite a total split, having 2/3/4/5/6/7/8 players in a party reduces the EXP gain of each party member by 33%/45%/50%/54%/56%/58%/60%. While this adds up to the party as a whole gaining 134%/165%/200%/230%/264%/294%/320% of what would be generated solo, each player comes away with less per fight, so the question comes up of how the EXP would compare to everyone just going solo. Two, more players involved in the same fight means more processing time for each round in that fight because of the increased number of possible interactions between allies, enemies, and each other. This increased processing time means each fight takes longer, so not only do you get less EXP per fight while partying, each fight also takes longer. There are still some situations where partying is beneficial in terms of EXP to someone (typically an altruistic DPS-oriented soloist dragging one or two less solo-capable characters around), but for the most part it's actually a detriment to EXP gain. Looking into getting this fixed.
*** While pets increase the processing time for each round (as they are extra combatants), they're not players and thus don't eat into your EXP. They're about the only practical option for solo grinding for many low-damage-output builds, unfortunately.
*** For what it's worth, one of the two reductions can be mitigated or bypassed to some extent. KO'd players in a party still get their share of EXP when an opponent is defeated, so it's possible for the aforementioned altruistic DPS-oriented soloist to drag around a couple of ''unconscious'' people and still have them get EXP while also largely ignoring their impact on processing time as unconscious people are in most cases not valid targets for powers and in all cases can't take actions while unconscious.
* EXP multipliers are your friends. Each different source stacks multiplicatively with each other source, and there's at least a good six or so out there (the XPBonus status, the Experience Enhancer from the "list items" shop, token items, number of enemies, level gap, area reward percent as displayed in +haz), so pile them on!
** The Experience Enhancer works by taking a certain percent of your mako battery each hour while in combat and giving that same percent as a bonus to your combat EXP. It will eat any mako batteries you have if you have spares on you and it happens to reach an hour tick while not having enough left in your current battery meter to pay for the next one, but more importantly, it's really useful for people who ''don't'' have mako batteries lying around because of the often-overlooked fact that when you level up, you get a full refresh of your natural mako battery (the one that shows up on the right hand side of the web app), and any energy you had left over in that battery when you level is converted to Patrol Points at 1 PP per 10% battery remaining. This means that you get about three to four hours of "free" Experience Enhancer use per level (well, assuming you have nothing else you'd want to use mako battery energy on), and the matching ratio of mako battery percent consumed per hour to percent increase in EXP earned from combat means that each full mako battery meter of energy is worth an extra hour's worth of combat EXP. As such, if you can earn more EXP in an hour of combat than you would earn from one 10 PP social action, it is more efficient EXP-wise to use the Experience Enhancer than to simply allow the battery to convert to PP upon leveling.
** Area reward percent governs most things to do with payout for fighting in an area. It goes down when enemies are defeated, goes up if the area is left alone for a while, and can be forcibly restored through the "nanite restore" command for (500*area max level)mg of builder nanites per 10%, topping out at 130%. Since "most things" also includes EXP, it pays to keep this high if you plan on staying in one spot to gather EXP. You can check the area reward percent for your current area with +haz, or the percents for all the areas in your level range (along with other information) at the terminals on the second floor of the Zephyr and RSX headquarters buildings.
*** Area reward percent also governs daily mission progress, so remember to keep that area reward percent high if you're aiming to get the maximum of 20 tokens from a daily mission!
** There's a token shop item that's +50% EXP for a week for 100 tokens. Since you get 110 tokens from your first remort and it only goes up from there, if you can manage to refine your remorting process so that you can get back to Lv60 in a week (or even something like ten days without it), you can just use the tokens from starting the next remort to pay for the boost for that one, and so on down the road.

=== An Observation on Role Balance in Parties ===
Most of the content of this segment is derived from a combination of pieces of the segment on level-grinding and a long ramble I've done before on the topic.

While there are technically four different combat roles in the game (possibly more, depending on how much one wants to subdivide each one) and a variety of hybrid derivatives thereof, the possibilities can all be simplified down to two values ("force rating" and "force multiplier") and an axis ("offensive force" and "defensive force").

A "force rating" is a flat value that encompasses a character's (or party's!) general ability to deal and receive damage, the two most basic tenets of the combat system, and the ones that have to be taken into account because you win or lose a fight based on which side has all its members reduced to 0 HP first. A "force multiplier", on the other hand, is a multiplier that encompasses a character's ability to tilt the overall force rating comparison between their party and the enemy party more in their party's favor by way of non-damaging methods to increase the amount of damage their party deals or reducing the amount of damage their party takes, artificially extending their offensive and defensive capabilities.

Then comes the axis of "offensive force" and "defensive force". Perhaps fairly intuitively, offensive force pertains to a character or party's ability to deal damage or to increase that ability in some capacity, while defensive force pertains to a character or party's ability to safely take damage without being defeated ("survivability", if you will), or, again, to increase that ability in some capacity. It sounds simple enough, but the methods of doing these things can vary wildly. To break the values and axis down by role...

* DPSes (damage-dealers; perhaps DPR would be more appropriate as the game times combat by rounds rather than seconds but the generic term is DPSes in the role-playing game community) have a high force rating, perhaps the highest of the four main roles, but the lowest force multiplier. They are heavily on the offensive force side of the axis, as the point of their role is to pour out a constant stream of damage in order to do the grunt work of bringing the enemy party's HP to 0. They rarely have much to contribute to empowering the rest of the party, hence why their force multiplier is so low. Still, their high base force rating and offensive focus makes them an excellent recipient for the benefits of offensive force multipliers.
** There's a DPS variant that might be best called the Soloist that takes the high force rating and low force multiplier to the extreme. Their offensive/defensive force axis is much more balanced toward the center than a normal DPS, as they have to be capable of surviving on their own without outside help, but this entirely selfish focus means they generally have little to nothing to offer in the way of force multipliers to help anyone else with. At best, they might have a few debuffs and the occasional splash from a self-buff. Still, incredibly high force rating, basically no force multiplier is an entirely valid strategy when there's nobody around to multiply you anyway.
* Tanks have a decent force rating, though it's mostly on the defensive force side of the axis, and a decent force multiplier (also largely defensive!) to go with it. They're typically incredibly durable, laughing at hits that would seriously hurt the other roles, and tend to artificially extend the durability of their allies by pulling damage to themselves in at least one of three ways: taking a larger piece of the enemy aggression roulette for themselves (in an attempt at getting enemies to focus attacks on the tank), ''forcing'' enemies to focus attacks on the tank for a little while via taunts (and penalizing the damage dealt to anyone not the taunter), or just straight up stealing a certain percent of incoming damage from allies and taking that chunk instead of the ally doing so. These methods tend to be referred to as Aggro, Taunt, and Cover. All of these mean that less damage is going to targets that aren't quite as capable of taking the damage as the tank, thus artificially extending the rest of the tank's party's ability to survive damage.
** Aggro Tanks tend to have slightly more offensive force (and to an extent, a higher base force rating as well) than the other two types at the expense of a lower defensive force multiplier because while the roulette is unreliable compared to the other two methods, it still can cripple the enemy's offensive force to an extent by way of Front Row shrinking enemy area-of-effect sizes while the Aggro Tank has the largest slice of the roulette, and the fact that aggro is based to a good extent on ''damage output'' also means that the Aggro Tank tends to pack more damaging attacks than its counterparts.
* Supports, the combination of healer and buffer (as it's rare to need twelve different heals in this game, so healers usually want to run something else for when they don't need to be healing, and seeing as two useful healing tools in Regen and HPBuffer are technically buffs, it makes sense to pair the two into one larger role), have only a modest force rating, the vast majority of it defensive in nature, but a fantastic force multiplier, especially on the defensive force side of the axis. On top of artificially extending allies' health pools by way of passive and active healing and granting ablative health pools that take damage so the recipient doesn't have to, supports can just straight-up improve the raw stats of their allies, often their entire party at once (or close to it). Their offensive/defensive axis can swing to some extent based on what stats they choose to improve -- a support packing increases to DamageBuff and Haste is a completely different beast from one packing Defense and MaxHP -- so it's a bit more unpredictable as to which type of force multiplier any given support is favoring. Still, their healer side gives them a defensive base to start from, so that part can at last be relied on to some extent.
* Debuffers are the last of the four main roles, and in the pure form of their role fall into a similar force rating and force multiplier to Supports (though some hybrid a little with DPS, as Tactician improves Damage Over Time effects in addition to debuffs). Strictly speaking, they don't improve the party's force rating so much as cripple the enemy party's, but the contribution to the general ratio between the two makes it largely a moot distinction. They have a few complications to deal with that Supports don't -- the inability to pre-debuff, deflection messing with the magnitudes of their debuffs (though thankfully at only half the listed deflection percent and ''after'' the flat reductions against high rank enemies), the aforementioned flat reduction against high rank enemies making it hard for small debuffs to stick on those enemies, the fact that enemies generally are less permanent than allies so debuffs need to be reapplied with each new fight, and so on -- so they're less common than Supports... but if used right, they're still ''incredibly'' important, as they can do things that supports can't on account of being strangled by hardcaps on stats, or even tag-team with a support to create a larger swing across mirrored statuses (for instance, Accuracy/DefenseDebuff, Defense/AccuracyDebuff, or DamageResist/DamageBuffDebuff) than either would be able to do alone. A support and a debuffer combining their force multipliers can be ''hideously'' effective. They're admittedly even more unpredictable on the offensive/defensive axis than supports are due to not having a healer core to fall back on, so which side of that axis they fall on depends largely on which side of the axis they choose to cripple in their enemies, with a debuffer crippling enemy defenses favoring the offensive axis and vice versa.

== Combat Mechanics ==
=== Useful Notes on Statuses ===
While the Statuses page on this very wiki gives some information on how the various statuses in the game work, there are still some specific insights and calculations to be gleaned from them. Some of what's stated here might be repeated elsewhere on the wiki, but it's good to have particularly relevant parts consolidated in one place.

Bit of terminology for the unfamiliar: Softcaps are values at which each extra point in a status is worth less than the ones that led up to the softcap. You can go beyond them, but it becomes increasingly inefficient, hence ''soft'' cap. Here on Flexible Survival, the softcap-related value drop is a cumulative halving in value for each softcap passed, so points beyond the first softcap take two points to have the same effect as one did before, points beyond the second softcap take four to have the same effect as one did before any softcaps, and so on. The softcaps are also based on ''effective'' rating rather than ''listed'' rating, so something with softcaps at 50 and 100 would take 150 listed points in that status before the second softcap applies, because 50 + (100/2) = 100. There are also hardcaps, which cannot be surpassed, period.

* Accuracy as a status hard-caps, positively or negatively, at one third of the base Accuracy rating of the attack being used (so for instance, attacks with a listed accuracy of 75% cannot benefit from more than 25 Accuracy status nor suffer from more than -25 of it, the latter likely by way of AccuracyDebuff). Going over this limit still has some use in making sure it's harder to pull back below this limit by its opposite, but it won't improve (or ruin) the accuracy of the attack any further.
** Accuracy also ''has'' softcaps, but as it would take an attack with over 150% base listed accuracy for them to even come into play, there's maybe one attack in the game that would even be affected by that, and it's the side effect of a revive rather than meant as a practical attack.
** The Accuracy ''combat skill'', however, is ''not'' related to the Accuracy status; rather, its stated improvement in accuracy manifests in the form of a -5 penalty to the effective Defense of all enemies when calculating it against your attacks. This is important for reasons I will explain in the Defense section.
* Attack level-scales (so its listed value in the rpinfo for a power or item will be multiplied by your level scaling value), adds damage to attacks 1:1 after all other multipliers, and caps at one third of the damage the attack would otherwise do without it, after all other multipliers. As a result, other damage modifiers don't improve its effectiveness any, but they do increase the hard cap on how many points worth of Attack can actually apply to a given attack.
* Cascading is separate from Flurry though they functionally work the same way in terms of improving what percent of the initial hit damage a repeat attack's repeats will each do. As a result, the Flurry bonus does not count toward the Cascade soft or hard caps, and reaching just the first Cascading softcap alongside Flurry 3 makes for 67.5% of the initial hit damage per repeat, which is a 35% step up in per-repeat damage from the baseline of 50% of the initial hit.
* Confused only functions against AOE moves, but it screws with them pretty heavily, both inflicting a chance of targeting the wrong side (which can get really unpleasant when you accidentally throw a huge buff on an already powerful enemy like a Prime) and adding some extra deflection percent to all of the targets of the AOE if the AOE doesn't already miss hard enough to be over 50% deflection for a given target. It also adds this extra deflection ''after'' any deflection reduction from the attacker's class skills, so it becomes impossible for a Confused attacker to score a deflection percent of less than their Confused magnitude with an AOE attack.
* Cover does not allow you to benefit from a deflection chance on the damage you cover from someone else, so Defense won't help you any in taking less damage from your Cover. Also, like any attack, the incoming damage from Cover cannot be reduced by more than 80% through means that directly reduce the amount of damage taken (DamageResist, possibly DamageImmunity, Durability, Avoidance, deflection but that's not relevant to Cover).
** It's also not particularly advised to run more Cover than your damage mitigation options are capable of reducing down to about 20-25% of the pre-mitigation amount of damage you take for the other person, because once you start taking more than about that much, you're mostly just moving damage around rather than actively reducing it, and pulling too much damage from too many people at once can get a tank KO'd. There's a readout of what the pre-mitigation and post-mitigation damage amounts were when you cover someone, so it's pretty easy to calculate based off that.
** Incidentally, this also means it's theoretically possible for builds not intended as pure tanks to run a limited amount of Cover to spread the damage around and apply multiple peoples' mitigation options to any given attack's damage, as long as they're mindful of the 20-25% limit. This isn't a terrible idea in parties with healers, as AOE healing and regeneration becomes more efficient when multiple people actually need a little bit of it each, and the Cover network makes the party a little less like a bunch of separate health bars and a little more like one large health bar that benefits disproportionately from AOE healing and regeneration.
* DamageBuff has an invisible falloff with level (the details of which are explained on the Statuses page), but it's somewhat hard to notice since the 1.07x level-scaling per level means it's unlikely to result in ''less'' damage being dealt than the level before. It's also worth being mindful of the fact that most things that improve damage by some percent (DamageBuff being one of them) stack multiplicatively with one another, which can result in some terrifyingly large amounts of damage being dealt if piled up properly.
* Defense (and its debuff counterpart) soft-caps but does not hard-cap normally, unlike Accuracy, and it applies after Accuracy does rather than as a simultaneous counterbalance. As a result, something like a base 75% accuracy with 35 Accuracy status against 45 Defense status results in an adjusted accuracy of 55% (75 + 25 due to the one-third cap, -45) rather than the 65% one might expect (75 + 35 - 45). It could be said to have a hard-cap of sorts in the minimum chances of passing each accuracy roll (5%/10%/15% respectively, with each one failed before passing one or just failing all three resulting in a cumulative 25% deflection), but that's not quite the same as the sort of hard-caps that most statuses have.
** Additionally, the stuttered application of Accuracy and Defense means that applying one as a debuff while packing the buff version of the other on oneself makes for much larger shifts in the chance to hit cleanly or to not be hit cleanly than one could do alone. Accuracy paired with DefenseDebuff augments the already good accuracy of the attack with negative Defense on the enemy's part, making the final effective accuracy higher than the cap on Accuracy adjustment would seem to indicate is possible; likewise, Defense paired with AccuracyDebuff forces enemies to start at a lower accuracy value before Defense comes into play, making it much easier for Defense to drag the success chances on the accuracy rolls down to absolutely pathetic values.
** Also, level difference between attacker and defender matters some. There's a roughly 10-point effective Defense shift per level in favor of whichever of the two is higher leveled. This is part of why trying to punch above your level can be so difficult sometimes.
* EnergyBreak is one of a small handful of statuses that actually gets ''more'' powerful with each new point you add. 100 EN with 0 ENBreak is effectively 100 EN, and thus each point of EN restored can power 1 EN worth of actions. 10 ENBreak means that 100 EN is functionally 111 EN, and thus each point of EN restored can power 1.11 EN worth of actions. 20 ENBreak ups this to being functionally 125 EN and each point powering 1.25 EN worth of actions, 30 ENBreak makes it 143 EN and 1.43 effective EN per actual point of EN, 40 ENBreak makes it 167 EN and 1.67 effective per actual, and the cap at 50 ENBreak makes that 100 EN effectively function as if it were 200, and each point of EN restored functions as two. Notice that despite these intervals being 10 ENBreak apart each time, the amount of extra effective EN each one grants (as well as the value of any EN regeneration that happens) gets larger and larger with each interval up until it hits the hardcap.
** As a result, this increased effective value of EN regeneration means that EnergyBreak increases the effective value of EnergyMod, giving the two some powerful synergy for solving energy maintenance problems. However, EnergyBreak also affects items that have negative EN costs -- ones that thus are instant EN restoratives rather than ticking at the start of each round -- but the effective value means that at worst it just breaks even on those so they're no more or less effective at any given value of EnergyBreak.
* EnergyMod is a slight oddball in terms of statuses because it cares about magnitude and duration as a pair rather than looking for one and just hoping for "enough" of the other. Many people like "fast" EN restoratives, ones that restore a decent chunk of energy in a short period of time (generally two rounds or less) as time spent at low EN is time where big important active abilities can't be used, but there's also some value to "slow" EN restoratives, as they can keep their restoration running for long periods of time to help prevent or at least slow the onset of low EN in the first place. The latter especially likes EnergyBreak, as it makes one's effective passive EN regeneration much better than the norm.
* Haste functions interestingly as of a relatively recent change in its function, but also importantly has a fairly close relationship with the Speed combat skill. Notably, the concept of 'turn charge'. After an action is declared, the higher of either the action's adjusted charge time or this 'turn charge' value is used to determine when your next turn comes. The catch is that as of the change, Haste affects turn charge as if you had half as much Haste as you actually do, as opposed to the charge for an action, which still uses full Haste. The base turn charge timer is 1000 ATB units, though each point of Speed shaves off 100 from this. As ATB is only counted in 200-unit blocks, however, this creates certain breakpoints that generate a lower turn charge speed. Additionally, as long as you're careful about using anything with a particularly long charge time, this governs your number of turns per round (so the base 1000 timer is effectively one turn per round).
** Before getting into the breakpoints, it's worth noting that actives with negative charge times apply that negative value to the base turn charge before Haste adjustment, so things with negative charge fire instantly and cause your next turn to come sooner. Things with -1000 charge don't even end the turn you're already taking.
** The first breakpoint is when the turn charge timer hits 800, resulting in 1.25 turns per round. Speed 2 and 3 reach this automatically, while Speed 1 requires 25 Haste and Speed 0 requires 50.
** The second breakpoint at a turn charge timer of 600 results in 1.666etc turns per round. Speed 3 needs 34 Haste, Speed 2 needs 67, Speed 1 needs 100, and Speed 0 needs 134.
** The third breakpoint brings the turn charge timer to 400, which means 2.5 turns per round (and that's one hell of a jump). It's probably the last remotely practical breakpoint even for the higher Speed values, needing 150 Haste for Speed 3, 200 for Speed 2, 250 for Speed 1, and 300 for Speed 0.
** There's also a hypothetical fourth breakpoint with a turn charge timer of 200 and as a result 5 turns per round, but not only would that play havoc with one's ability to actually have enough to use with all those turns, but the Haste requirements are insane even on the fastest of classes, requiring 500 Haste for Speed 3 and an extra 100 Haste for every point of Speed by which the class falls short.
** From this, you can kind of see that Speed 0 has a hard time keeping up in terms of reaching the turn charge timer breakpoints. That's why most damage classes (and in fact the majority of classes in general) tend to be Speed 2 or higher.
* HPBuffers don't count against the 80% mitigation limit when it comes to ways to reduce the damage you take because it's classed as moving the damage around (to a phantom HP pool with no life it needs to maintain) rather than actively reducing the damage you take once it's hit. Cover also falls under this 'moving' classification, for what it's worth, and things that reduce the enemy's damage output in the first place such as DamageBuffDebuff or taunts also don't count against that 80% because that's modifying how much damage they're putting out, not how much damage you shave off of it with your own resistances.
** Additionally, while HPBuffers can be penetrated to some extent by combat skills, there are very few situations in which they can be ''completely'' penetrated. While they won't totally shield you from damage against particularly strong opponents, they can still shave off a noticeable portion of the incoming damage, and that's still valuable, especially due to not being part of the 80% mitigation restriction. Multiplicative layering works defensively too!
* InstantCooldown is a little strange as it's sort of a lesser alternate version of Recharge, applying only to the thing with the highest cooldown presently remaining. Having said that, it's still useful in terms of peeling some time off the cooldown of especially high cooldown actives.
* Recharge shaves off one fifth (20%) of the base cooldown time at 25 Recharge, one fourth (25%) at 33, one third (33%) at 50, two fifths (40%) at 90, and one half (50%) if you're crazy enough to go all the way to 150. It does softcap every effective 50, but even 50 points of it means all your actives are usable one and a half times as often as they would be otherwise, and that can make a huge difference in the effectiveness of many actives.
* Regen is affected by Healing and HealGain.

[[Category:Guides]]

Treharne's Assorted Guides

2016-12-13T17:20:33Z

Ruvelia:

After some inspiration from a couple of other people, I've decided to start writing some guides (or something hopefully amounting to them) to share what I know about the game. I'll be adding more as time goes on. Hopefully they'll be useful to someone. --Treharne/Ruvelia/Raika

= Combat =
== Build Advice ==
=== Three Tenets to Consider for All Builds ===
No matter what role you want your character to play in combat, there are three things that every role needs to take into account to some extent if they intend to pursue optimization. Some builds care a little less about certain tenets of the three than others, but that said, all builds should at least ''consider'' them. In no particular order...

* Uptime. Ideally, you want any statuses you throw out to be able to stay up constantly by way of reapplication by the time the original duration elapses. Not following this means that there's likely to be odd spots in your combat rhythm where you're missing some statuses and thus are inconsistently at your full power, which can in some cases create vulnerable spots in your rhythm where you can be KO'd where you wouldn't be otherwise. Most relevant on buffing and debuffing builds, but still applicable for any build that runs either of those effects in smaller quantities (self-buffing counts too), runs cover and/or taunts in order to be a tank, or runs a Repeats or Damage Over Time damage-dealer setup (though the damage-dealers care in a different manner). Big Hits damage dealers care the least about this, though they still need to be mindful of the uptime of their passive effects to some extent.
** Repeats and Damage Over Time differ in their caring in that it's a waste of damage to reapply the same attack to targets still suffering from it (with the potential exception of reapplying a Damage Over Time effect on an enemy that got a high deflection percent on the same one earlier in the hopes of getting less of a deflection percent this time), so ideally these two want to apply their damage to targets not currently suffering from the attack in question if they have one that becomes available for use again before its first use expires. Failing that, power is more important than duration with these two when it comes to clearing most fights quickly. It doesn't particularly matter if a Repeats or Damage Over Time effect has an enormous amount of damage over its full duration if you're fighting enemies that won't survive the full duration (unless you have Overkill, but that's another story and even then it's somewhat limited, more on that elsewhere), and even if the damage per use is enormous, a low-power, long-duration attack of these types won't contribute much to the ''damage per round'', which is generally more important than the ''damage per use'' when it comes to clearing fights quickly. As a result, both of these do quite nicely with low uptime but high intensity attacks, but do be mindful of how their ''damage per round'' matches up with their cooldown, because that's still relevant in terms of efficiency (especially when trying to gather EXP by doing lots of fights in rapid succession) even if the matter of overlapping or having downtime on the damage ticks is less of a concern.
* Energy management. If you have no EN left, you can't do anything meaningful until you recover some. It's no good having all your statuses up and plenty of options to use if you don't have the EN to use them. It's also worth noting that ENBreak and ENMod synergize with one another and the former makes the latter worth more than it appears. Debuffers and Big Hits damage dealers care the most about this, the former because many powerful debuffs are hideously expensive and the latter because as the only build type with one-and-done effects rather than lasting ones, it has nothing to offer if it stops being able to throw out new attacks. Other builds care to some extent for the general reason that they can't do anything meaningful if they run out of EN, though the lingering nature of Repeats and Damage Over Time attacks as well as buffs generally sticking better than debuffs (since you can trust your allies to be around longer than any particular enemy group will) means they can afford a little more downtime for energy recovery purposes without suffering too much in their main role. Tanks tend to vary somewhat in how much they care about this, with Cover tanks probably caring less than Aggro or Taunt tanks, though all three tend to have some energy problems, usually by way of running a ton of passives and toggles to boost their durability which leaves them a little short in terms of maximum EN, which also restricts their natural EN recovery rate somewhat.
* Rotation blank spots and/or overcrowding. Strike is ideally a last resort move that exists to fill any instances in which you have nothing better to use (or perhaps functioning as a minor energy restorative at the same time if upgraded as such). If you're using Strike more often than you need it as an energy management tool (if upgraded as such), you either need more active options to use, or to pack more Recharge so the active options you already have are available more often. At the same time, some builds, notably Big Hits damage dealing, suffer if you have too many options competing for the same usage turns, especially if some of those are outside the damage-dealing role itself, so be mindful that running too many active (and non-instant) buffs or debuffs on a Big Hits damage dealer competes with their damaging attacks and eats into their overall damage output.

=== Considerations for Level Grinding Via Combat ===
For people only planning to get to Level 60 and stay there, this section probably won't be very useful. It's reasonably easy to get to Level 60 in about a month even with little to no combat by way of Social Actions, and efficiency doesn't particularly matter for those only wanting to go around the leveling path once. For those who intend to do so more than once by way of remorting, by all means, read on...

* More enemies is generally better for EXP than stronger enemies. AOE effects like having lots of enemies around, and the increase in EXP from increasing the difficulty is rarely more than one would get from having an extra enemy in each fight. Having said that, once the Pheromones rating is maxed out and the limit on how many enemies can appear in one fight is reached, increasing the difficulty -- and thus the level gap -- still remains as an option, and since the increase applies on a per-enemy basis, it's a lot more noticeable with lots of enemies around.
** Additionally, it's also worth explaining how difficulty and the level gap works. Enemies will spawn at a level equal to your own plus the numerical value of the chosen difficulty as displayed on +haz (so DN+2, for instance, spawns enemies two levels above you). If this number would be lower than the area's minimum level or higher than the area's maximum level, however, it displays different behavior. If the number would be lower than the minimum, enemies simply spawn at the area's minimum level. If the number would be higher than the maximum, enemies simply spawn at the area's maximum level. This is important because it's the level gap, not the difficulty, that affects EXP (difficulty might affect EXP ''slightly'' through increasing the base numerical rank of the enemy, but it's much less of an impact than the level gap is), and as such, both the minimum and the maximum need to have their special behavior taken into account. In the case of the maximum, it means that EXP will go down somewhat once the numerical difficulty level is larger than the actual level difference allowed by the maximum. In the case of the minimum, it means that if you can survive an area in spite of being underleveled for even its minimum, the EXP payoff can increase drastically.
*** This behavior is also applicable to progress during daily missions for tokens, so in order to ensure getting to +400% (the maximum) within the 40 fights, it's best to go through the mission at least two levels ''under'' the area's maximum rather than trying to be overleveled for the area's maximum.
* Survivability is first priority when it comes to a grinding build, followed closely by clear speed. Survivability means you can reliably expect to not get defeated while auto-battling whatever you've chosen to fight for EXP and at whatever difficulty and pheromone settings you've chosen. Being defeated interrupts EXP grinding via auto-battle, and as such, is a point of inefficiency. Once you can be sure you won't be defeated, clear speed becomes the next concern, as the same amount of EXP in a smaller time period means more EXP per time unit. The more complex equation here would be checking your EXP against the time it takes for each battle to finish in case there's a longer fight that's actually more efficient, but clear speed is still generally an applicable concept.
** Keep in mind that once you start a fight, there's a 60-second accountwide cooldown across both Flexible Survival and Rusted Promises before you can start another fight on any character on either game on that same account. 60 seconds is effectively "maximum" clear speed. It's possible to go faster than that, but due to the cooldown it won't make your EXP-per-time-unit any higher, and may even be reason to consider looking into raising the difficulty/pheromones rating if you can survive the new setting and the new setting still comes reasonably close to 60 seconds per fight.
** Survivability also somewhat takes the form of ensuring you have enough resources to keep going fight after fight without stopping. If you run out of energy five fights in and have trouble regenerating it, there's a chance you might get defeated due to an inability to do anything in the sixth.
* Getting any sort of reasonable EXP payout from combat requires some source of damage output. This might seem like an obvious statement, but you can't actually defeat opponents and get EXP from them if you have no way to reduce their HP to 0. As such, you need some way to do this, whether doing it yourself, bringing along some pets, or getting another player to help. It's an obvious statement and yet it's important to remember because not all roles level by combat equally quickly, the reasons of which are explained to some extent above.
** Having said that, be mindful that on some level, partying with other players is inefficient for any given player EXP-wise. Compared to the EXP while solo, having extra party members reduces the EXP per person in two ways. One, while it's not quite a total split, having 2/3/4/5/6/7/8 players in a party reduces the EXP gain of each party member by 33%/45%/50%/54%/56%/58%/60%. While this adds up to the party as a whole gaining 134%/165%/200%/230%/264%/294%/320% of what would be generated solo, each player comes away with less per fight, so the question comes up of how the EXP would compare to everyone just going solo. Two, more players involved in the same fight means more processing time for each round in that fight because of the increased number of possible interactions between allies, enemies, and each other. This increased processing time means each fight takes longer, so not only do you get less EXP per fight while partying, each fight also takes longer. There are still some situations where partying is beneficial in terms of EXP to someone (typically an altruistic DPS-oriented soloist dragging one or two less solo-capable characters around), but for the most part it's actually a detriment to EXP gain. Looking into getting this fixed.
*** While pets increase the processing time for each round (as they are extra combatants), they're not players and thus don't eat into your EXP. They're about the only practical option for solo grinding for many low-damage-output builds, unfortunately.
*** For what it's worth, one of the two reductions can be mitigated or bypassed to some extent. KO'd players in a party still get their share of EXP when an opponent is defeated, so it's possible for the aforementioned altruistic DPS-oriented soloist to drag around a couple of ''unconscious'' people and still have them get EXP while also largely ignoring their impact on processing time as unconscious people are in most cases not valid targets for powers and in all cases can't take actions while unconscious.
* EXP multipliers are your friends. Each different source stacks multiplicatively with each other source, and there's at least a good six or so out there (the XPBonus status, the Experience Enhancer from the "list items" shop, token items, number of enemies, level gap, area reward percent as displayed in +haz), so pile them on!
** The Experience Enhancer works by taking a certain percent of your mako battery each hour while in combat and giving that same percent as a bonus to your combat EXP. It will eat any mako batteries you have if you have spares on you and it happens to reach an hour tick while not having enough left in your current battery meter to pay for the next one, but more importantly, it's really useful for people who ''don't'' have mako batteries lying around because of the often-overlooked fact that when you level up, you get a full refresh of your natural mako battery (the one that shows up on the right hand side of the web app), and any energy you had left over in that battery when you level is converted to Patrol Points at 1 PP per 10% battery remaining. This means that you get about three to four hours of "free" Experience Enhancer use per level (well, assuming you have nothing else you'd want to use mako battery energy on), and the matching ratio of mako battery percent consumed per hour to percent increase in EXP earned from combat means that each full mako battery meter of energy is worth an extra hour's worth of combat EXP. As such, if you can earn more EXP in an hour of combat than you would earn from one 10 PP social action, it is more efficient EXP-wise to use the Experience Enhancer than to simply allow the battery to convert to PP upon leveling.
** Area reward percent governs most things to do with payout for fighting in an area. It goes down when enemies are defeated, goes up if the area is left alone for a while, and can be forcibly restored through the "nanite restore" command for (500*area max level)mg of builder nanites per 10%, topping out at 130%. Since "most things" also includes EXP, it pays to keep this high if you plan on staying in one spot to gather EXP. You can check the area reward percent for your current area with +haz, or the percents for all the areas in your level range (along with other information) at the terminals on the second floor of the Zephyr and RSX headquarters buildings.
*** Area reward percent also governs daily mission progress, so remember to keep that area reward percent high if you're aiming to get the maximum of 20 tokens from a daily mission!
** There's a token shop item that's +50% EXP for a week for 100 tokens. Since you get 110 tokens from your first remort and it only goes up from there, if you can manage to refine your remorting process so that you can get back to Lv60 in a week (or even something like ten days without it), you can just use the tokens from starting the next remort to pay for the boost for that one, and so on down the road.

=== An Observation on Role Balance in Parties ===
Most of the content of this segment is derived from a combination of pieces of the segment on level-grinding and a long ramble I've done before on the topic.

While there are technically four different combat roles in the game (possibly more, depending on how much one wants to subdivide each one) and a variety of hybrid derivatives thereof, the possibilities can all be simplified down to two values ("force rating" and "force multiplier") and an axis ("offensive force" and "defensive force").

A "force rating" is a flat value that encompasses a character's (or party's!) general ability to deal and receive damage, the two most basic tenets of the combat system, and the ones that have to be taken into account because you win or lose a fight based on which side has all its members reduced to 0 HP first. A "force multiplier", on the other hand, is a multiplier that encompasses a character's ability to tilt the overall force rating comparison between their party and the enemy party more in their party's favor by way of non-damaging methods to increase the amount of damage their party deals or reducing the amount of damage their party takes, artificially extending their offensive and defensive capabilities.

Then comes the axis of "offensive force" and "defensive force". Perhaps fairly intuitively, offensive force pertains to a character or party's ability to deal damage or to increase that ability in some capacity, while defensive force pertains to a character or party's ability to safely take damage without being defeated ("survivability", if you will), or, again, to increase that ability in some capacity. It sounds simple enough, but the methods of doing these things can vary wildly. To break the values and axis down by role...

* DPSes (damage-dealers; perhaps DPR would be more appropriate as the game times combat by rounds rather than seconds but the generic term is DPSes in the role-playing game community) have a high force rating, perhaps the highest of the four main roles, but the lowest force multiplier. They are heavily on the offensive force side of the axis, as the point of their role is to pour out a constant stream of damage in order to do the grunt work of bringing the enemy party's HP to 0. They rarely have much to contribute to empowering the rest of the party, hence why their force multiplier is so low. Still, their high base force rating and offensive focus makes them an excellent recipient for the benefits of offensive force multipliers.
** There's a DPS variant that might be best called the Soloist that takes the high force rating and low force multiplier to the extreme. Their offensive/defensive force axis is much more balanced toward the center than a normal DPS, as they have to be capable of surviving on their own without outside help, but this entirely selfish focus means they generally have little to nothing to offer in the way of force multipliers to help anyone else with. At best, they might have a few debuffs and the occasional splash from a self-buff. Still, incredibly high force rating, basically no force multiplier is an entirely valid strategy when there's nobody around to multiply you anyway.
* Tanks have a decent force rating, though it's mostly on the defensive force side of the axis, and a decent force multiplier (also largely defensive!) to go with it. They're typically incredibly durable, laughing at hits that would seriously hurt the other roles, and tend to artificially extend the durability of their allies by pulling damage to themselves in at least one of three ways: taking a larger piece of the enemy aggression roulette for themselves (in an attempt at getting enemies to focus attacks on the tank), ''forcing'' enemies to focus attacks on the tank for a little while via taunts (and penalizing the damage dealt to anyone not the taunter), or just straight up stealing a certain percent of incoming damage from allies and taking that chunk instead of the ally doing so. These methods tend to be referred to as Aggro, Taunt, and Cover. All of these mean that less damage is going to targets that aren't quite as capable of taking the damage as the tank, thus artificially extending the rest of the tank's party's ability to survive damage.
** Aggro Tanks tend to have slightly more offensive force (and to an extent, a higher base force rating as well) than the other two types at the expense of a lower defensive force multiplier because while the roulette is unreliable compared to the other two methods, it still can cripple the enemy's offensive force to an extent by way of Front Row shrinking enemy area-of-effect sizes while the Aggro Tank has the largest slice of the roulette, and the fact that aggro is based to a good extent on ''damage output'' also means that the Aggro Tank tends to pack more damaging attacks than its counterparts.

== Combat Mechanics ==
=== Useful Notes on Statuses ===
While the Statuses page on this very wiki gives some information on how the various statuses in the game work, there are still some specific insights and calculations to be gleaned from them. Some of what's stated here might be repeated elsewhere on the wiki, but it's good to have particularly relevant parts consolidated in one place.

Bit of terminology for the unfamiliar: Softcaps are values at which each extra point in a status is worth less than the ones that led up to the softcap. You can go beyond them, but it becomes increasingly inefficient, hence ''soft'' cap. Here on Flexible Survival, the softcap-related value drop is a cumulative halving in value for each softcap passed, so points beyond the first softcap take two points to have the same effect as one did before, points beyond the second softcap take four to have the same effect as one did before any softcaps, and so on. The softcaps are also based on ''effective'' rating rather than ''listed'' rating, so something with softcaps at 50 and 100 would take 150 listed points in that status before the second softcap applies, because 50 + (100/2) = 100. There are also hardcaps, which cannot be surpassed, period.

* Accuracy as a status hard-caps, positively or negatively, at one third of the base Accuracy rating of the attack being used (so for instance, attacks with a listed accuracy of 75% cannot benefit from more than 25 Accuracy status nor suffer from more than -25 of it, the latter likely by way of AccuracyDebuff). Going over this limit still has some use in making sure it's harder to pull back below this limit by its opposite, but it won't improve (or ruin) the accuracy of the attack any further.
** Accuracy also ''has'' softcaps, but as it would take an attack with over 150% base listed accuracy for them to even come into play, there's maybe one attack in the game that would even be affected by that, and it's the side effect of a revive rather than meant as a practical attack.
** The Accuracy ''combat skill'', however, is ''not'' related to the Accuracy status; rather, its stated improvement in accuracy manifests in the form of a -5 penalty to the effective Defense of all enemies when calculating it against your attacks. This is important for reasons I will explain in the Defense section.
* Attack level-scales (so its listed value in the rpinfo for a power or item will be multiplied by your level scaling value), adds damage to attacks 1:1 after all other multipliers, and caps at one third of the damage the attack would otherwise do without it, after all other multipliers. As a result, other damage modifiers don't improve its effectiveness any, but they do increase the hard cap on how many points worth of Attack can actually apply to a given attack.
* Cascading is separate from Flurry though they functionally work the same way in terms of improving what percent of the initial hit damage a repeat attack's repeats will each do. As a result, the Flurry bonus does not count toward the Cascade soft or hard caps, and reaching just the first Cascading softcap alongside Flurry 3 makes for 67.5% of the initial hit damage per repeat, which is a 35% step up in per-repeat damage from the baseline of 50% of the initial hit.
* Confused only functions against AOE moves, but it screws with them pretty heavily, both inflicting a chance of targeting the wrong side (which can get really unpleasant when you accidentally throw a huge buff on an already powerful enemy like a Prime) and adding some extra deflection percent to all of the targets of the AOE if the AOE doesn't already miss hard enough to be over 50% deflection for a given target. It also adds this extra deflection ''after'' any deflection reduction from the attacker's class skills, so it becomes impossible for a Confused attacker to score a deflection percent of less than their Confused magnitude with an AOE attack.
* Cover does not allow you to benefit from a deflection chance on the damage you cover from someone else, so Defense won't help you any in taking less damage from your Cover. Also, like any attack, the incoming damage from Cover cannot be reduced by more than 80% through means that directly reduce the amount of damage taken (DamageResist, possibly DamageImmunity, Durability, Avoidance, deflection but that's not relevant to Cover).
** It's also not particularly advised to run more Cover than your damage mitigation options are capable of reducing down to about 20-25% of the pre-mitigation amount of damage you take for the other person, because once you start taking more than about that much, you're mostly just moving damage around rather than actively reducing it, and pulling too much damage from too many people at once can get a tank KO'd. There's a readout of what the pre-mitigation and post-mitigation damage amounts were when you cover someone, so it's pretty easy to calculate based off that.
** Incidentally, this also means it's theoretically possible for builds not intended as pure tanks to run a limited amount of Cover to spread the damage around and apply multiple peoples' mitigation options to any given attack's damage, as long as they're mindful of the 20-25% limit. This isn't a terrible idea in parties with healers, as AOE healing and regeneration becomes more efficient when multiple people actually need a little bit of it each, and the Cover network makes the party a little less like a bunch of separate health bars and a little more like one large health bar that benefits disproportionately from AOE healing and regeneration.
* DamageBuff has an invisible falloff with level (the details of which are explained on the Statuses page), but it's somewhat hard to notice since the 1.07x level-scaling per level means it's unlikely to result in ''less'' damage being dealt than the level before. It's also worth being mindful of the fact that most things that improve damage by some percent (DamageBuff being one of them) stack multiplicatively with one another, which can result in some terrifyingly large amounts of damage being dealt if piled up properly.
* Defense (and its debuff counterpart) soft-caps but does not hard-cap normally, unlike Accuracy, and it applies after Accuracy does rather than as a simultaneous counterbalance. As a result, something like a base 75% accuracy with 35 Accuracy status against 45 Defense status results in an adjusted accuracy of 55% (75 + 25 due to the one-third cap, -45) rather than the 65% one might expect (75 + 35 - 45). It could be said to have a hard-cap of sorts in the minimum chances of passing each accuracy roll (5%/10%/15% respectively, with each one failed before passing one or just failing all three resulting in a cumulative 25% deflection), but that's not quite the same as the sort of hard-caps that most statuses have.
** Additionally, the stuttered application of Accuracy and Defense means that applying one as a debuff while packing the buff version of the other on oneself makes for much larger shifts in the chance to hit cleanly or to not be hit cleanly than one could do alone. Accuracy paired with DefenseDebuff augments the already good accuracy of the attack with negative Defense on the enemy's part, making the final effective accuracy higher than the cap on Accuracy adjustment would seem to indicate is possible; likewise, Defense paired with AccuracyDebuff forces enemies to start at a lower accuracy value before Defense comes into play, making it much easier for Defense to drag the success chances on the accuracy rolls down to absolutely pathetic values.
** Also, level difference between attacker and defender matters some. There's a roughly 10-point effective Defense shift per level in favor of whichever of the two is higher leveled. This is part of why trying to punch above your level can be so difficult sometimes.
* EnergyBreak is one of a small handful of statuses that actually gets ''more'' powerful with each new point you add. 100 EN with 0 ENBreak is effectively 100 EN, and thus each point of EN restored can power 1 EN worth of actions. 10 ENBreak means that 100 EN is functionally 111 EN, and thus each point of EN restored can power 1.11 EN worth of actions. 20 ENBreak ups this to being functionally 125 EN and each point powering 1.25 EN worth of actions, 30 ENBreak makes it 143 EN and 1.43 effective EN per actual point of EN, 40 ENBreak makes it 167 EN and 1.67 effective per actual, and the cap at 50 ENBreak makes that 100 EN effectively function as if it were 200, and each point of EN restored functions as two. Notice that despite these intervals being 10 ENBreak apart each time, the amount of extra effective EN each one grants (as well as the value of any EN regeneration that happens) gets larger and larger with each interval up until it hits the hardcap.
** As a result, this increased effective value of EN regeneration means that EnergyBreak increases the effective value of EnergyMod, giving the two some powerful synergy for solving energy maintenance problems. However, EnergyBreak also affects items that have negative EN costs -- ones that thus are instant EN restoratives rather than ticking at the start of each round -- but the effective value means that at worst it just breaks even on those so they're no more or less effective at any given value of EnergyBreak.
* EnergyMod is a slight oddball in terms of statuses because it cares about magnitude and duration as a pair rather than looking for one and just hoping for "enough" of the other. Many people like "fast" EN restoratives, ones that restore a decent chunk of energy in a short period of time (generally two rounds or less) as time spent at low EN is time where big important active abilities can't be used, but there's also some value to "slow" EN restoratives, as they can keep their restoration running for long periods of time to help prevent or at least slow the onset of low EN in the first place. The latter especially likes EnergyBreak, as it makes one's effective passive EN regeneration much better than the norm.
* Haste functions interestingly as of a relatively recent change in its function, but also importantly has a fairly close relationship with the Speed combat skill. Notably, the concept of 'turn charge'. After an action is declared, the higher of either the action's adjusted charge time or this 'turn charge' value is used to determine when your next turn comes. The catch is that as of the change, Haste affects turn charge as if you had half as much Haste as you actually do, as opposed to the charge for an action, which still uses full Haste. The base turn charge timer is 1000 ATB units, though each point of Speed shaves off 100 from this. As ATB is only counted in 200-unit blocks, however, this creates certain breakpoints that generate a lower turn charge speed. Additionally, as long as you're careful about using anything with a particularly long charge time, this governs your number of turns per round (so the base 1000 timer is effectively one turn per round).
** Before getting into the breakpoints, it's worth noting that actives with negative charge times apply that negative value to the base turn charge before Haste adjustment, so things with negative charge fire instantly and cause your next turn to come sooner. Things with -1000 charge don't even end the turn you're already taking.
** The first breakpoint is when the turn charge timer hits 800, resulting in 1.25 turns per round. Speed 2 and 3 reach this automatically, while Speed 1 requires 25 Haste and Speed 0 requires 50.
** The second breakpoint at a turn charge timer of 600 results in 1.666etc turns per round. Speed 3 needs 34 Haste, Speed 2 needs 67, Speed 1 needs 100, and Speed 0 needs 134.
** The third breakpoint brings the turn charge timer to 400, which means 2.5 turns per round (and that's one hell of a jump). It's probably the last remotely practical breakpoint even for the higher Speed values, needing 150 Haste for Speed 3, 200 for Speed 2, 250 for Speed 1, and 300 for Speed 0.
** There's also a hypothetical fourth breakpoint with a turn charge timer of 200 and as a result 5 turns per round, but not only would that play havoc with one's ability to actually have enough to use with all those turns, but the Haste requirements are insane even on the fastest of classes, requiring 500 Haste for Speed 3 and an extra 100 Haste for every point of Speed by which the class falls short.
** From this, you can kind of see that Speed 0 has a hard time keeping up in terms of reaching the turn charge timer breakpoints. That's why most damage classes (and in fact the majority of classes in general) tend to be Speed 2 or higher.
* HPBuffers don't count against the 80% mitigation limit when it comes to ways to reduce the damage you take because it's classed as moving the damage around (to a phantom HP pool with no life it needs to maintain) rather than actively reducing the damage you take once it's hit. Cover also falls under this 'moving' classification, for what it's worth, and things that reduce the enemy's damage output in the first place such as DamageBuffDebuff or taunts also don't count against that 80% because that's modifying how much damage they're putting out, not how much damage you shave off of it with your own resistances.
** Additionally, while HPBuffers can be penetrated to some extent by combat skills, there are very few situations in which they can be ''completely'' penetrated. While they won't totally shield you from damage against particularly strong opponents, they can still shave off a noticeable portion of the incoming damage, and that's still valuable, especially due to not being part of the 80% mitigation restriction. Multiplicative layering works defensively too!
* InstantCooldown is a little strange as it's sort of a lesser alternate version of Recharge, applying only to the thing with the highest cooldown presently remaining. Having said that, it's still useful in terms of peeling some time off the cooldown of especially high cooldown actives.
* Recharge shaves off one fifth (20%) of the base cooldown time at 25 Recharge, one fourth (25%) at 33, one third (33%) at 50, two fifths (40%) at 90, and one half (50%) if you're crazy enough to go all the way to 150. It does softcap every effective 50, but even 50 points of it means all your actives are usable one and a half times as often as they would be otherwise, and that can make a huge difference in the effectiveness of many actives.
* Regen is affected by Healing and HealGain.

[[Category:Guides]]

2016-12-03T20:18:49Z

Ruvelia:

User:Ruvelia

2016-12-03T19:43:44Z

Ruvelia:

= TVTropes-ing My Characters =
All pictures are of the respective agent in her base form.
== [http://i851.photobucket.com/albums/ab80/SirDurant/Odd%20Collection/128764188349.jpg Ruvelia] ==
A self-admitted computer nerd and general nobody before the events of P-Day, Ruvelia ended up signing on with Zephyr Inc more out of a peer pressure decision than anything else. That said, she hasn't exactly regretted the decision, and has made use of their resources to take up tinkering. She became pregnant very early in her time working as a Zephyr agent, and over the course of that pregnancy managed to make great strides in personal growth, the extent of which is noted in the tropes section. Somewhat more unexpectedly, she ''liked'' the sensation, even if the nanites insisted on making her pregnancies abnormally large; if asked about it, she's still uncertain whether it's something to blame the nanites for or whether it's just a kink she never knew she had until she had the chance to try it.

*Faction: Zephyr Inc
*Mutation Type: Standard
*Role: Buffer primary, Healer distant secondary. Buffs have an emphasis on energy management, though contain a smattering of everything.
*Favorite Class Combinations: Nurturer/Strategist, Den Keeper/Strategist, more recently Pack Rat/Strategist.
*Trivia: Ruvelia has recently been showing a little too much perverse glee regarding a not-yet-made design of hers she's dubbed the Gravidy Cannon.

Tropes that apply to Ruvelia:
*Big Eater: She's been shown to be capable of eating or drinking quite a lot on multiple occasions, from having one of everything in the Zephyr coffee lounge to drinking people dry of milk on request. The fact that she's usually eating for two might help with this somewhat.
*Bunny Ears Lawyer: Eccentric tinkerer who enjoys being far more heavily pregnant than is probably healthy far more than is probably healthy. Impressively multi-talented ex-computer nerd. One of the most powerful (arguably ''the'' most powerful at the time of writing this) buffer-type agents in any of the three major factions.
*Pregnant Badass: Being a core member of the first team (a four-person team, for that matter) to ever take down a Prime from the Wax Museum: Afterlife zone (the highest level zone at the time, capping out at Lv72 when agents cap out at Lv60) while less than a day from full term and being the kind of woman whose pregnancies are far from small and dainty probably qualifies her for this.
=== Minions - The Ruvelian Army ===
==== Drones - Ruvelian Archer, Ruvelian Knight, Ruvelian Priest ====
==== Mutant Companion - Ruvelian Hunter (AKA Kaiya) ====
==== Personal Minion - Ruvelian Butler ====
=== Children ===
==== Drake ====
==== ????? ====
== [http://danbooru.donmai.us/data/sample/sample-86d4ef965c6c4b74b207999a76620509.jpg Meredith] ==
A stock market speculator, entrepreneur, and constant heavy drinker, it's rare to see Meredith ''not'' at least a little sloshed. It doesn't seem to get in the way of her doing what she does best, though; if anything, it might be why she's able to loosen up enough to cut deals well. A relative noncombatant, Meredith spends most of her time on civil engineering problems instead, keeping an eye on the condition of the bubble-cities and ensuring that any trouble that comes up within them is swiftly resolved. May be just a little personally greedy.

*Faction: RSX Solutions
*Mutation Type: Kemonomimi, Advanced Inoculation
*Role: In flux combat-wise. Her business skills are significantly more important than her combat skills.
*Favorite Class Combinations: Defaults to Tormentor on the rare occasions she does fight.
*Trivia: Meredith is the only one of the five that the nanites permit to be a hermaphrodite.
== [http://danbooru.donmai.us/data/1d2b6005efda679b0fea09bb4330080a.jpg Shurelia] ==
A relatively ordinary girl that got caught up in the mess that is post-P-Day life, Shurelia didn't come to terms with her first mutation very well and needed some help from the Prometheans to stop freaking out about it so much. Their help seems to have worked well enough, as she's not only no longer unnerved by such things but is actually relatively comfortable making use of the fact that she can (albeit now with much more control over when as well as with an ability to reset to human if she gets a little too weirded out) in order to help people.

As an agent, her stamina is exceptional, aided by both a fair bit of chubbiness cushioning the hits she takes from ferals and the fact that the nanites support her weight much better than she used to be able to do alone so she won't tire so easily from that either. She may be a bit self-sacrificing to some folks, but she just doesn't like seeing people get hurt for no reason, and occasionally makes a habit of feeding and providing basic medical treatment for folks... even ferals, in the hopes her Promethean comrades can do something to bring them back to sanity when they're a little less starving and bleeding.

*Faction: Prometheans
*Mutation Type: Advanced Inoculation
*Role: Tanking, with some mild area damage for solo purposes.
*Favorite Class Combinations: Point Man when tanking, Berserker when solo.
*Trivia: Shurelia's feral-feeding may be slightly self-serving, since spending so long living the Cow Girl life makes for milky breasts even when she's never been pregnant, and there's not always a convenient milker at hand.
== [http://i851.photobucket.com/albums/ab80/SirDurant/Odd%20Collection/Plump%20Tewi_zpssyfewd75.jpg Nyssa] ==
[http://i851.photobucket.com/albums/ab80/SirDurant/Odd%20Collection/49737448_p3_master1200_zpsfbkwrdou.jpg Another pic of her.]

A girl born relatively recently to feral parents, Nyssa might have been just another feral if not for the Prometheans catching her relatively early in her life and slowly converting her back toward a more civilized mindset. Walking that thin line between the feral mindset and a still-sane one gives her some insight into the way they think, but at the same time she's not exactly a paragon of Promethean discipline, indulging herself in normally feral pleasures a bit much (though not before smacking the victim-to-be around more than a little in many cases). She may be self-loathing and taking that anger out on ferals, or she may be trying to get them to kneel by force, or maybe she's even just coming to terms with what her early life actually was like and is attempting to punish the instigators for it. Either way, she has an unusually strong appetite, both for food and... more perverse things.

Lately she's started work on the Glenstock restoration project. She's supposed to be a mentor to help teach the children there the construction skills they need to know, but she has admitted that while she knows some about computers, she only really got sent out there because of the 'big three' caring more about sending someone with some knowledge than committing an expert to another city. Still, she feels somewhat at home, given certain locals...

*Faction: Prometheans
*Mutation Type: Kemonomimi
*Role: Area damage through large single attacks.
*Favorite Class Combinations: Monstrosity.
*Trivia: Nyssa has been attempting to channel her urges into more constructive uses, and has lately taken up massage in the city of Eureka.

Tropes that apply to Nyssa:
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AnythingThatMoves Anything That Moves]: Having been skirting the edge of a feral mindset for the majority of her (admittedly short so far) life has kinda done this to her.
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DeepSouth Deep South]: Seems to have this sort of accent to her speech. Most likely due to her parents or the Promethean who took her in having it.
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PintsizedPowerhouse Pintsized Powerhouse]: Despite standing at a mere 4'6" in her base form, the shortest of the five by a significant margin, her class of choice is ''Monstrosity''.
== [http://danbooru.donmai.us/data/cf3928b33172c07cd4c781d29832ddf0.png Raika] ==
[http://danbooru.donmai.us/data/81f24957b1a7d08d36ab7d173825f052.png Sometimes keeping her supplier happy can go to some weird places. Third time around, she's attempting to develop her combat skills nekomata-style.]

A girl born relatively recently to a couple of RSX agents, Raika was born with what might be considered a disability in this world of nanites and crazy mutant powers. Unable to harness the latter in the slightest, she instead took to training and designing so as not to be a disappointment to her parents. She's received a couple gifts of equipment from a mysterious benefactor, and while they're quite useful, she does occasionally get exasperated when said benefactor sends her something that, while useful, is a little more perverse than might be necessary.

Over time, she's grown stronger and stronger and is a force to be reckoned with, only particularly fearing the Devils of the Wax Museum, but as her gear largely comes from this mysterious benefactor of hers, their demands on her have grown as well... and not always in the way she's happy doing. She still complies begrudgingly, though, even if it's embarrassing sometimes.

*Faction: RSX Solutions
*Mutation Type: Human (shifted to Kemonomimi after her second remort), Advanced Inoculation
*Role: Eventually, adaptability. Presently, several flavors of harsh damage output paired with a surprising amount of durability. Also has an improvised healer-tank plus boss-hunter support fire setup.
*Favorite Class Combinations: Has gear setups for single-target DPS of all three types (as well as AOE Repeats DPS), along with a few scattered pieces for an AOE Healer and an improvised Healer-Tank. Tested Sniper/Strategist for remorts 0 and 1, Two-Tailed Wizard/Strategist for remort 2, Monster Monarch/Strategist for remort 3, Brawler/Blood Warrior along with a shift to repeats gear for remort 4, Regen Scrapper/Blood Warrior for remort 5, Plague Doctor/Strategist as the shift to DoT gear for remort 6, Den Keeper/Strategist for remort 7, shifted to AOE with Determinator/Blood Warrior for remorts 8-23, and currently trying that same AOE gear set with Blood Warrior/Strategist for remorts 24-43.
*Trivia: Raika keeps being subjected to embarrassing situations. A bra that pumps a faux-Lactaid effect through her whenever she gets hurt, a serum that overwhelms her body with so much energy that her body takes on a pregnant-looking appearance just to have a chance at venting at least some of the energy safely, and getting stuck in various kitty-related forms... she never takes them very well, but she's improving.

Tropes that apply to Raika:
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AnimalMotifs Animal Motifs]: As of her twenty-fourth remort, Raika seems to be taking on a cat motif. Given the form she ended up getting stuck in, "cute and cuddly, but also a predator" describes her fairly well. She managed to get unstuck a dozen remorts later, but the motif still fits.
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BalloonBelly Balloon Belly]: During her fifteenth remort, courtesy of the Supermom Serum. Any feral that mistakes it for one of their ilk having gotten the best of her is in for a nasty surprise. Revisited at the tail end of her thirty-third with a gear refinement that substitutes her Padded Armor for the Perfected Supermom Serum, which has a much lower but safer energy output and reinforces her belly to the point that it may as well be considered an armored location... and later refined once more at the tail end of her forty-second remort to the point that standing behind her is a fairly safe place to be in the wake of most wide-area attacks (as of the shift in how Height and Mass impact health was changed to be entirely dependent on Height, the old Weight Gaining modifier she used to have on the Perfected Supermom Serum was tagged out for Blocking).
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BladeOnAStick Blade On A Stick]: Her strongest weapon and the one she's usually seen carrying is a halberd she refers to as Brachion. It's exactly as effective as halberds have been shown to be historically. The much more defensively oriented Resurgam, a monk's spade, also qualifies as this.
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BloodKnight Blood Knight]: One possible interpretation of her workaholic tendencies when her work involves copious amounts of combat. Assuming the cred energy meters represent a work quota that agents are expected to fill, after which anything else is overtime that pays progressively less as a 'you can stop now' sort of thing, she keeps on going anyway, well beyond any point of reasonable returns for work still being acquired. From roughly her fortieth remort onward, she's been using these habits more as a way to hone her skills than with the intent of being paid, especially as cred energy has been decaying as of late.
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CompetitiveBalance Competitive Balance]: More marked for the archetypes since she's been so many before and because Flexible Survival is not PvP-balanced anyway.
**[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CloseRangeCombatant Close Range Combatant]: From an RP perspective, her typical combat loadout while in the process of remorting counts as this. Packing light on weaponry, with little more than a halberd and a pair of injector dart pistols offensively, she doesn't carry any big guns that would afford her a longer range. She's used them in the past, but they've slowly been falling out of use in her arsenal in favor of defensive and augmentative equipment. Up close, however, she's an absolute ''monster'', possessing incredible combat instincts, a powerful and versatile melee weapon in her halberd, the ability to ruin enemy movements and strategic reasoning with her injector dart pistols, physical abilities ''far'' above the human average thanks to various augmentative equipment, a hideously powerful barrier field in the Juggernaut Harness, and two layers of regeneration -- one working to heal her body whenever it gets damaged, one tearing nanites off her opponents to heal her injuries -- to quickly mend any injuries she does suffer without ever having to stop and apply first aid manually.
**[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GlassCannon Glass Cannon]: For her initial leveling path and first remort as a Sniper/Strategist. Could put out impressive amounts of damage in a short span of time, but couldn't survive well enough even with regeneration to make an effective soloist. Revisited this for her twenty-fourth remort with the incredibly risky Blood Warrior/Strategist just to see if she could handle it, but given all the survivability improvements she's made over all those remorts...
**[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StoneWall Stone Wall]: Her second remort as a Two-Tailed Wizard/Strategist drastically improved her survivability but also slowed down her damage output significantly. Her fifth remort as a Regen Scrapper/Blood Warrior also qualifies, as it had massive amounts of survivability but its lack of Overkill or general damage skills limited its clear speed. Revisited this at the tail end of her thirty-second remort with Wasteland Paladin/Point Man, though as a test rather than actually trying it for a remort, with an improvised tanking setup that could withstand ''hideous'' amounts of punishment even without a proper healing AI and would likely be damn near totally invulnerable with one.
**[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MightyGlacier Mighty Glacier]: Her third remort as a Monster Monarch/Strategist brought back a fair bit of her damage output as well as offering more survivability, but slowed down her actual clear speed until later in the level path when an effectively 90%+ Overkill rate turned fights into one giant health bar instead of a bunch of little ones. Was tested again briefly nearly forty remorts later, but the slowness of the class and its focus on the one damage type that can't afford to be that slow (not to mention an increase in the number of active gear options she was packing compared to the last time she tried) made it less efficient than other options she'd developed by then.
**[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MagicallyIneptFighter Magically Inept Fighter]: Has always been this if one counts mutant powers as magic for this purpose. Has become increasingly this from an RP perspective as time goes on.
**[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GradualGrinder Gradual Grinder]: Her sixth remort as a Plague Doctor/Strategist counts as this due to the nature of damage-over-time effects and the immense Vampiric healing they generate.
**[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PuppetFighter Puppet Fighter]: Her seventh remort as a Den Keeper/Strategist counts as this on account of packing relatively little herself aside from a couple buffs, a couple heals, and her Tranquilizer pistol from her time as a Plague Doctor.
**[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LightningBruiser Lightning Bruiser]: Her fourth and to a much greater extent eighth through twenty-third remorts as a Brawler/Blood Warrior and Determinator/Blood Warrior respectively have been this. Her damage output in either case is enormous, both pack some regeneration to help them stay alive, and the Determinator in particular has Durability and Vampiric to increase its sustain further. Determinator has a balancing factor in its energy inefficiency, which she is compensating by way of using relatively few attacks in her rotation, which leaves plenty of open space for energy recovery. This downtime weakness is then compensated with plenty of Recharge as well as making use of Blood Warrior as a secondary to provide InstantCooldown every five turns as well as when a new fight starts to get her stronger weapons available again faster.
*** Blood Warrior/Strategist from her twenty-fourth remort onwards has ended up being this due to her arsenal containing significantly more armor, deflection aids, barrier projection, and regeneration than actual weapons. Combine the Blood Warrior's raw damage output with her having as much health as (and quickly developing into more than) most tanks, and that's what she's become.
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CursedWithAwesome Cursed With Awesome]: Somewhat debatable on whether it's technically a curse as nobody's actually sure of its source, but Raika's unnamed disability could qualify as this. Her inability to use mutant powers due to her personal nanite field being locked to its basic body maintenance functions means that if the field gets stronger or denser for whatever reason -- a possible explanation for remorts, perhaps -- all that extra power is going right back into basic body augmentation, meaning that she doesn't ''need'' any fancy mutant powers when she can just outclass most foes by way of raw martial skill and physical capabilities. The fact that her gear is both exceptionally well modified and works with this augmentation by packing its own nanite fields rather than working against it by drawing against her personal pool only reinforces how useful this 'disability' can be with the right adjustments.
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CuteBruiser Cute Bruiser]: Look at her. Then look at her fighting style, and the sheer amount of damage and survivability she packs.
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DidYouJustPunchOutCthulhu Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?]: Successfully hunted multiple Primes solo at the tail end of her eleventh remort, and has continued to do so at the tail end of most of the remorts that followed. So far the list includes Termite Drone, Termite Warrior, Nanite Sorceress, Nanite Wizard, Perfect Soldier...
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DisabilitySuperpower Disability Superpower]: Raika's presently nameless disability (the RP explanation for her All Natural status, among other things) means that she's unable to manifest mutant powers, perhaps in part due to a naturally weak constitution that means her personal nanites are almost all concentrating on their basic body maintenance functions rather than trying to divert any to power manifestation. Gear uses its own reserve of nanites if any at all, though, rather than drawing from her personal pool, and on account of her disability, she trains incredibly hard to overcome her own weakness. ''In spite of'' this disability, she is arguably the single most powerful PC agent in any of the three factions.
**Alternatively, it could be that her constitution is fine, but something about her (likely something related to being a child of RSX operatives) causes nanites to have a rather hard time gripping her system, and as such her personal nanite field is smaller or thinner than most. This still produces the same end result of having all her personal nanites devoted to basic body maintenance functions with none to spare for power manifestation.
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheJuggernaut The Juggernaut]: As a Wasteland Paladin/Point Man. While her damage output wasn't great, nothing short of ''some of the most powerful Boss-ranked mob types in the game including at least one each of the Shock Trooper, Bloodletter, and Diseased templates on absolute maximum difficulty and pheromones ratings'' could bring her down, and that was with a ''faulty to nonfunctional healing AI''.
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NewGamePlus New Game Plus]: Currently has done the most of these out of anyone by a long shot. Never stop learning!
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NoSocialSkills No Social Skills]: A perpetual weak spot of hers. For all her competence in other areas, she has ''nothing'' in any of what could be considered the social proficiencies, and is likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future. This makes it a bit awkward for her to be a squad leader, because while she understands it on a technical level, it's something she still has to get used to on an emotional level. Given how she's been fighting ferals for most of the time she's been alive, this makes sense.
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TemporaryBulkChange Temporary Bulk Change]: Got stuck in the kemonomimi form of Plump Tigress shortly before beginning her twenty-fourth remort, and stayed stuck until her thirty-sixth. While she's as embarrassed about it as she was the Nekomata remort (#3) and the Supermom Serum remort (#15), she's taken it as a sign to try something new rather than fall into the general complacent routine she's been doing for the last sixteen remorts, and is taking it remarkably in stride in spite of her embarrassment, especially with the Perfected Supermom Serum becoming a core part of her arsenal as of her thirty-third remort.
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WellDoneSonGuy "Well Done, Daughter!" Girl]: Given that her parents are RSX agents -- heroic and ''insanely'' powerful ones -- Raika has a rather warped sense of reasonable expectations for herself. She's not actually sure what they think of her, since she spends way too much time on the job and not seeing much of her parents, but there's a strange dichotomy between what most may see as the ludicrously powerful Prime-slayer and most likely single most powerful PC agent in Flexible Survival... and her own perception of herself, as a child with a disability she has to compensate for and that she's just barely a seventh of the way to reaching her parents' levels of competence. The fact that she's well aware of the less-than-pleasant designs of some of her weapons doesn't help her in feeling like she's anywhere near living up to her parents' standards, though she's been making less of those lately and her standard arsenal is surprisingly tame compared to those that some others have been seen packing.
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Workaholic Workaholic]: Others call her overzealous. She calls them lazy. It's very rare for her to be doing much other than clearing out ferals and other manners of beasts to keep the streets safe, and she tends to get grumpy when people waste her time while she's working, which ties into her general lack of social skills and care for social niceties.
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/YoungerThanTheyLook Younger Than They Look]: Standard for children these days due to the nanites. Looks to be an adult or at least in her late teens, was born in early 2016.

=== Minions - The Lightning Crusher Squadron ===
Remort 7 brings recognition of Raika's dedication to suppressing the feral menace, and as such, she's been assigned a handful of lesser operatives in the hopes that she can make something of them. (Due to their stackableness, normal Mechanical Drones might be 'generic' RSX Troopers.)

==== [http://danbooru.donmai.us/data/--original-drawn-by-drcockula--aecda83a924ed7a7cea59dec5b5612fc.png Monica] ====
A laid-back, somewhat lazy agent that nonetheless has been something of a cool big sister to the much younger Raika, Monica's usually been responsible for Raika's medical treatment on those occasions where Raika gets the crap beaten out of her while out feral-hunting. She was assigned to Raika's new squadron in the hopes that she'd actually go out and do some work. She still isn't much for actually fighting, but as the only one of the girls to be something other than fully human, she's not afraid to make use of that distinction to serve as the group's medic.

Her 'modification' (Wild, Potent, Overcharged, Overwhelming, Ruggedized) comes in the form of running afoul of Raika's own mysterious benefactor and scoring some effective albeit slightly perverse equipment. Unlike Raika, however, she's much more okay with the strangeness of the gear.
==== [http://danbooru.donmai.us/data/--original-drawn-by-kichin-yarou--fc534316ca96270702537b90f516d203.jpg Celica] ====
The most serious of the squad members, Celica lost an arm during a Feral attack some time ago, which has thankfully been replaced with a size-shifting (or possibly just multi-layered and removable) prosthetic since then. She serves as the group's tank, making use of the most oversized and shield-like of the sizes/layers both to stand out for attention-drawing purposes and to block the resulting fire as it comes in.

Her 'modification' (Improved, Overcharged, Attention Grabbing, Sticky, Ruggedized) largely consists of a couple tweaks to the largest form of her prosthetic arm, purging unnecessary components and re-balancing its weight so as to be less unwieldy than it appears while still packing a fairly nasty punch. The portions of the 'modification' that this alteration does not encompass come as social lessons from Clardona on how to make her a bit less of a stoic wallflower and as some lessons on medical treatment from both Clardona and Monica.
==== [http://danbooru.donmai.us/data/--psychic-hearts-drawn-by-dennryuurai--8a3c3d506c9e295950f6c3b8b3572118.jpg Clardona] ====
A relatively inexperienced but nonetheless eager agent, Clardona was assigned to Raika's squadron mostly just so she has a mentor figure to learn from. She packs a fairly basic new-agent loadout, something which causes her to be a bit envious of her squad leader's heavily modded gear, but she nonetheless has the combat instincts and fervor to do well at her job.

As Clardona's mentor figure, Raika has been watching how she fights, and noting that Clardona tends to go a little too all-out, tiring herself quickly. As such, she's training the girl in pacing herself a bit better, as well as general combat arts and an improved gear requisition. This is the manifestation of her 'modification' (Optimized, Overcharged, Stabilizing, Extra Lethal, Ruggedized).
==== [http://danbooru.donmai.us/data/sample/--original-drawn-by-kaimantokage--sample-79607b6de1ffa41427fd989851acb803.jpg Rosetta] ====
A short young woman that joined up later, Rosetta is a bit on the cute-but-clumsy side. Luckily, she hasn't actually hurt any of her squadmates through her clumsiness. Like all members of the squad, she knows at least a little healing, though she (not entirely by choice) tends to follow Monica's way of doing it through milk heals due to the nanites having blessed (or cursed, depending on one's point of view) her with quite the ample bosom, especially given her otherwise small size. The 'not entirely by choice' bit may have something to do with Monica's influence and Clardona's general envious tendencies.

= Guides =
== Build Advice ==
No matter what role you want your character to play in combat, there are three things that every role needs to take into account to some extent if they intend to pursue optimization. Some builds care a little less about certain tenets of the three than others, but that said, all builds should at least ''consider'' them. In no particular order...

* Uptime. Ideally, you want any statuses you throw out to be able to stay up constantly by way of reapplication by the time the original duration elapses. Not following this means that there's likely to be odd spots in your combat rhythm where you're missing some statuses and thus are inconsistently at your full power, which can in some cases create vulnerable spots in your rhythm where you can be KO'd where you wouldn't be otherwise. Most relevant on buffing and debuffing builds, but still applicable for any build that runs either of those effects in smaller quantities (self-buffing counts too), runs cover and/or taunts in order to be a tank, or runs a Repeats or Damage Over Time damage-dealer setup (though the damage-dealers care in a different manner). Big Hits damage dealers care the least about this, though they still need to be mindful of the uptime of their passive effects to some extent.
** Repeats and Damage Over Time differ in their caring in that it's a waste of damage to reapply the same attack to targets still suffering from it (with the potential exception of reapplying a Damage Over Time effect on an enemy that got a high deflection percent on the same one earlier in the hopes of getting less of a deflection percent this time), so ideally these two want to apply their damage to targets not currently suffering from the attack in question if they have one that becomes available for use again before its first use expires. Failing that, power is more important than duration with these two when it comes to clearing most fights quickly. It doesn't particularly matter if a Repeats or Damage Over Time effect has an enormous amount of damage over its full duration if you're fighting enemies that won't survive the full duration (unless you have Overkill, but that's another story and even then it's somewhat limited, more on that elsewhere), and even if the damage per use is enormous, a low-power, long-duration attack of these types won't contribute much to the ''damage per round'', which is generally more important than the ''damage per use'' when it comes to clearing fights quickly. As a result, both of these do quite nicely with low uptime but high intensity attacks, but do be mindful of how their ''damage per round'' matches up with their cooldown, because that's still relevant in terms of efficiency (especially when trying to gather EXP by doing lots of fights in rapid succession) even if the matter of overlapping or having downtime on the damage ticks is less of a concern.
* Energy management. If you have no EN left, you can't do anything meaningful until you recover some. It's no good having all your statuses up and plenty of options to use if you don't have the EN to use them. It's also worth noting that ENBreak and ENMod synergize with one another and the former makes the latter worth more than it appears. Debuffers and Big Hits damage dealers care the most about this, the former because many powerful debuffs are hideously expensive and the latter because as the only build type with one-and-done effects rather than lasting ones, it has nothing to offer if it stops being able to throw out new attacks. Other builds care to some extent for the general reason that they can't do anything meaningful if they run out of EN, though the lingering nature of Repeats and Damage Over Time attacks as well as buffs generally sticking better than debuffs (since you can trust your allies to be around longer than any particular enemy group will) means they can afford a little more downtime for energy recovery purposes without suffering too much in their main role. Tanks tend to vary somewhat in how much they care about this, with Cover tanks probably caring less than Aggro or Taunt tanks, though all three tend to have some energy problems, usually by way of running a ton of passives and toggles to boost their durability which leaves them a little short in terms of maximum EN, which also restricts their natural EN recovery rate somewhat.
* Rotation blank spots and/or overcrowding. Strike is ideally a last resort move that exists to fill any instances in which you have nothing better to use (or perhaps functioning as a minor energy restorative at the same time if upgraded as such). If you're using Strike more often than you need it as an energy management tool (if upgraded as such), you either need more active options to use, or to pack more Recharge so the active options you already have are available more often. At the same time, some builds, notably Big Hits damage dealing, suffer if you have too many options competing for the same usage turns, especially if some of those are outside the damage-dealing role itself, so be mindful that running too many active (and non-instant) buffs or debuffs on a Big Hits damage dealer competes with their damaging attacks and eats into their overall damage output.

User:Ruvelia

2016-11-20T18:30:30Z

Ruvelia: Created page with "After some inspiration from a couple of other people, I've decided to start writing some guides (or something hopefully amounting to them) to share what I know about the game...."

After some inspiration from a couple of other people, I've decided to start writing some guides (or something hopefully amounting to them) to share what I know about the game. Hopefully they'll be useful to someone. --Treharne/Ruvelia/Raika

= Combat =
== Build Advice ==
=== Three Tenets to Consider for All Builds ===
No matter what role you want your character to play in combat, there are three things that every role needs to take into account to some extent if they intend to pursue optimization. Some builds care a little less about certain tenets of the three than others, but that said, all builds should at least ''consider'' them. In no particular order...

* Uptime. Ideally, you want any statuses you throw out to be able to stay up constantly by way of reapplication by the time the original duration elapses. Not following this means that there's likely to be odd spots in your combat rhythm where you're missing some statuses and thus are inconsistently at your full power, which can in some cases create vulnerable spots in your rhythm where you can be KO'd where you wouldn't be otherwise. Most relevant on buffing and debuffing builds, but still applicable for any build that runs either of those effects in smaller quantities (self-buffing counts too), runs cover and/or taunts in order to be a tank, or runs a Repeats or Damage Over Time damage-dealer setup (though the damage-dealers care in a different manner). Big Hits damage dealers care the least about this, though they still need to be mindful of the uptime of their passive effects to some extent.
** Repeats and Damage Over Time differ in their caring in that it's a waste of damage to reapply the same attack to targets still suffering from it (with the potential exception of reapplying a Damage Over Time effect on an enemy that got a high deflection percent on the same one earlier in the hopes of getting less of a deflection percent this time), so ideally these two want to apply their damage to targets not currently suffering from the attack in question if they have one that becomes available for use again before its first use expires. Failing that, power is more important than duration with these two when it comes to clearing most fights quickly. It doesn't particularly matter if a Repeats or Damage Over Time effect has an enormous amount of damage over its full duration if you're fighting enemies that won't survive the full duration (unless you have Overkill, but that's another story and even then it's somewhat limited, more on that elsewhere), and even if the damage per use is enormous, a low-power, long-duration attack of these types won't contribute much to the ''damage per round'', which is generally more important than the ''damage per use'' when it comes to clearing fights quickly. As a result, both of these do quite nicely with low uptime but high intensity attacks, but do be mindful of how their ''damage per round'' matches up with their cooldown, because that's still relevant in terms of efficiency (especially when trying to gather EXP by doing lots of fights in rapid succession) even if the matter of overlapping or having downtime on the damage ticks is less of a concern.
* Energy management. If you have no EN left, you can't do anything meaningful until you recover some. It's no good having all your statuses up and plenty of options to use if you don't have the EN to use them. It's also worth noting that ENBreak and ENMod synergize with one another and the former makes the latter worth more than it appears. Debuffers and Big Hits damage dealers care the most about this, the former because many powerful debuffs are hideously expensive and the latter because as the only build type with one-and-done effects rather than lasting ones, it has nothing to offer if it stops being able to throw out new attacks. Other builds care to some extent for the general reason that they can't do anything meaningful if they run out of EN, though the lingering nature of Repeats and Damage Over Time attacks as well as buffs generally sticking better than debuffs (since you can trust your allies to be around longer than any particular enemy group will) means they can afford a little more downtime for energy recovery purposes without suffering too much in their main role. Tanks tend to vary somewhat in how much they care about this, with Cover tanks probably caring less than Aggro or Taunt tanks, though all three tend to have some energy problems, usually by way of running a ton of passives and toggles to boost their durability which leaves them a little short in terms of maximum EN, which also restricts their natural EN recovery rate somewhat.
* Rotation blank spots and/or overcrowding. Strike is ideally a last resort move that exists to fill any instances in which you have nothing better to use (or perhaps functioning as a minor energy restorative at the same time if upgraded as such). If you're using Strike more often than you need it as an energy management tool (if upgraded as such), you either need more active options to use, or to pack more Recharge so the active options you already have are available more often. At the same time, some builds, notably Big Hits damage dealing, suffer if you have too many options competing for the same usage turns, especially if some of those are outside the damage-dealing role itself, so be mindful that running too many active (and non-instant) buffs or debuffs on a Big Hits damage dealer competes with their damaging attacks and eats into their overall damage output.

[[Category:Guides]]

User:Ruvelia

2016-11-20T17:49:01Z

Ruvelia:

= TVTropes-ing My Characters =
All pictures are of the respective agent in her base form.
== [http://i851.photobucket.com/albums/ab80/SirDurant/Odd%20Collection/128764188349.jpg Ruvelia] ==
A self-admitted computer nerd and general nobody before the events of P-Day, Ruvelia ended up signing on with Zephyr Inc more out of a peer pressure decision than anything else. That said, she hasn't exactly regretted the decision, and has made use of their resources to take up tinkering. She became pregnant very early in her time working as a Zephyr agent, and over the course of that pregnancy managed to make great strides in personal growth, the extent of which is noted in the tropes section. Somewhat more unexpectedly, she ''liked'' the sensation, even if the nanites insisted on making her pregnancies abnormally large; if asked about it, she's still uncertain whether it's something to blame the nanites for or whether it's just a kink she never knew she had until she had the chance to try it.

*Faction: Zephyr Inc
*Mutation Type: Standard
*Role: Buffer primary, Healer distant secondary. Buffs have an emphasis on energy management, though contain a smattering of everything.
*Favorite Class Combinations: Nurturer/Strategist, Den Keeper/Strategist, more recently Pack Rat/Strategist.
*Trivia: Ruvelia has recently been showing a little too much perverse glee regarding a not-yet-made design of hers she's dubbed the Gravidy Cannon.

Tropes that apply to Ruvelia:
*Big Eater: She's been shown to be capable of eating or drinking quite a lot on multiple occasions, from having one of everything in the Zephyr coffee lounge to drinking people dry of milk on request. The fact that she's usually eating for two might help with this somewhat.
*Bunny Ears Lawyer: Eccentric tinkerer who enjoys being far more heavily pregnant than is probably healthy far more than is probably healthy. Impressively multi-talented ex-computer nerd. One of the most powerful (arguably ''the'' most powerful at the time of writing this) buffer-type agents in any of the three major factions.
*Pregnant Badass: Being a core member of the first team (a four-person team, for that matter) to ever take down a Prime from the Wax Museum: Afterlife zone (the highest level zone at the time, capping out at Lv72 when agents cap out at Lv60) while less than a day from full term and being the kind of woman whose pregnancies are far from small and dainty probably qualifies her for this.
=== Minions - The Ruvelian Army ===
==== Drones - Ruvelian Archer, Ruvelian Knight, Ruvelian Priest ====
==== Mutant Companion - Ruvelian Hunter (AKA Kaiya) ====
==== Personal Minion - Ruvelian Butler ====
=== Children ===
==== Drake ====
==== ????? ====
== [http://danbooru.donmai.us/data/sample/sample-86d4ef965c6c4b74b207999a76620509.jpg Meredith] ==
A stock market speculator, entrepreneur, and constant heavy drinker, it's rare to see Meredith ''not'' at least a little sloshed. It doesn't seem to get in the way of her doing what she does best, though; if anything, it might be why she's able to loosen up enough to cut deals well. A relative noncombatant, Meredith spends most of her time on civil engineering problems instead, keeping an eye on the condition of the bubble-cities and ensuring that any trouble that comes up within them is swiftly resolved. May be just a little personally greedy.

*Faction: RSX Solutions
*Mutation Type: Kemonomimi, Advanced Inoculation
*Role: In flux combat-wise. Her business skills are significantly more important than her combat skills.
*Favorite Class Combinations: Defaults to Tormentor on the rare occasions she does fight.
*Trivia: Meredith is the only one of the five that the nanites permit to be a hermaphrodite.
== [http://danbooru.donmai.us/data/1d2b6005efda679b0fea09bb4330080a.jpg Shurelia] ==
A relatively ordinary girl that got caught up in the mess that is post-P-Day life, Shurelia didn't come to terms with her first mutation very well and needed some help from the Prometheans to stop freaking out about it so much. Their help seems to have worked well enough, as she's not only no longer unnerved by such things but is actually relatively comfortable making use of the fact that she can (albeit now with much more control over when as well as with an ability to reset to human if she gets a little too weirded out) in order to help people.

As an agent, her stamina is exceptional, aided by both a fair bit of chubbiness cushioning the hits she takes from ferals and the fact that the nanites support her weight much better than she used to be able to do alone so she won't tire so easily from that either. She may be a bit self-sacrificing to some folks, but she just doesn't like seeing people get hurt for no reason, and occasionally makes a habit of feeding and providing basic medical treatment for folks... even ferals, in the hopes her Promethean comrades can do something to bring them back to sanity when they're a little less starving and bleeding.

*Faction: Prometheans
*Mutation Type: Advanced Inoculation
*Role: Tanking, with some mild area damage for solo purposes.
*Favorite Class Combinations: Point Man when tanking, Berserker when solo.
*Trivia: Shurelia's feral-feeding may be slightly self-serving, since spending so long living the Cow Girl life makes for milky breasts even when she's never been pregnant, and there's not always a convenient milker at hand.
== [http://i851.photobucket.com/albums/ab80/SirDurant/Odd%20Collection/Plump%20Tewi_zpssyfewd75.jpg Nyssa] ==
[http://i851.photobucket.com/albums/ab80/SirDurant/Odd%20Collection/49737448_p3_master1200_zpsfbkwrdou.jpg Another pic of her.]

A girl born relatively recently to feral parents, Nyssa might have been just another feral if not for the Prometheans catching her relatively early in her life and slowly converting her back toward a more civilized mindset. Walking that thin line between the feral mindset and a still-sane one gives her some insight into the way they think, but at the same time she's not exactly a paragon of Promethean discipline, indulging herself in normally feral pleasures a bit much (though not before smacking the victim-to-be around more than a little in many cases). She may be self-loathing and taking that anger out on ferals, or she may be trying to get them to kneel by force, or maybe she's even just coming to terms with what her early life actually was like and is attempting to punish the instigators for it. Either way, she has an unusually strong appetite, both for food and... more perverse things.

Lately she's started work on the Glenstock restoration project. She's supposed to be a mentor to help teach the children there the construction skills they need to know, but she has admitted that while she knows some about computers, she only really got sent out there because of the 'big three' caring more about sending someone with some knowledge than committing an expert to another city. Still, she feels somewhat at home, given certain locals...

*Faction: Prometheans
*Mutation Type: Kemonomimi
*Role: Area damage through large single attacks.
*Favorite Class Combinations: Monstrosity.
*Trivia: Nyssa has been attempting to channel her urges into more constructive uses, and has lately taken up massage in the city of Eureka.

Tropes that apply to Nyssa:
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AnythingThatMoves Anything That Moves]: Having been skirting the edge of a feral mindset for the majority of her (admittedly short so far) life has kinda done this to her.
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DeepSouth Deep South]: Seems to have this sort of accent to her speech. Most likely due to her parents or the Promethean who took her in having it.
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PintsizedPowerhouse Pintsized Powerhouse]: Despite standing at a mere 4'6" in her base form, the shortest of the five by a significant margin, her class of choice is ''Monstrosity''.
== [http://danbooru.donmai.us/data/cf3928b33172c07cd4c781d29832ddf0.png Raika] ==
[http://danbooru.donmai.us/data/81f24957b1a7d08d36ab7d173825f052.png Sometimes keeping her supplier happy can go to some weird places. Third time around, she's attempting to develop her combat skills nekomata-style.]

A girl born relatively recently to a couple of RSX agents, Raika was born with what might be considered a disability in this world of nanites and crazy mutant powers. Unable to harness the latter in the slightest, she instead took to training and designing so as not to be a disappointment to her parents. She's received a couple gifts of equipment from a mysterious benefactor, and while they're quite useful, she does occasionally get exasperated when said benefactor sends her something that, while useful, is a little more perverse than might be necessary.

Over time, she's grown stronger and stronger and is a force to be reckoned with, only particularly fearing the Devils of the Wax Museum, but as her gear largely comes from this mysterious benefactor of hers, their demands on her have grown as well... and not always in the way she's happy doing. She still complies begrudgingly, though, even if it's embarrassing sometimes.

*Faction: RSX Solutions
*Mutation Type: Human (shifted to Kemonomimi after her second remort), Advanced Inoculation
*Role: Eventually, adaptability. Presently, several flavors of harsh damage output paired with a surprising amount of durability. Also has an improvised healer-tank plus boss-hunter support fire setup.
*Favorite Class Combinations: Has gear setups for single-target DPS of all three types (as well as AOE Repeats DPS), along with a few scattered pieces for an AOE Healer and an improvised Healer-Tank. Tested Sniper/Strategist for remorts 0 and 1, Two-Tailed Wizard/Strategist for remort 2, Monster Monarch/Strategist for remort 3, Brawler/Blood Warrior along with a shift to repeats gear for remort 4, Regen Scrapper/Blood Warrior for remort 5, Plague Doctor/Strategist as the shift to DoT gear for remort 6, Den Keeper/Strategist for remort 7, shifted to AOE with Determinator/Blood Warrior for remorts 8-23, and currently trying that same AOE gear set with Blood Warrior/Strategist for remorts 24-38.
*Trivia: Raika keeps being subjected to embarrassing situations. A bra that pumps a faux-Lactaid effect through her whenever she gets hurt, a serum that overwhelms her body with so much energy that her body takes on a pregnant-looking appearance just to have a chance at venting at least some of the energy safely, and getting stuck in various kitty-related forms... she never takes them very well, but she's improving.

Tropes that apply to Raika:
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AnimalMotifs Animal Motifs]: As of her twenty-fourth remort, Raika seems to be taking on a cat motif. Given the form she ended up getting stuck in, "cute and cuddly, but also a predator" describes her fairly well. She managed to get unstuck a dozen remorts later, but the motif still fits.
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BalloonBelly Balloon Belly]: During her fifteenth remort, courtesy of the Supermom Serum. Any feral that mistakes it for one of their ilk having gotten the best of her is in for a nasty surprise. Revisited at the tail end of her thirty-third with a gear refinement that substitutes her Padded Armor for the Perfected Supermom Serum, which has a much lower but safer energy output and reinforces her belly to the point that it may as well be considered an armored location.
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BladeOnAStick Blade On A Stick]: Her strongest weapon and the one she's usually seen carrying is a halberd she refers to as Brachion. It's exactly as effective as halberds have been shown to be historically. The much more defensively oriented Resurgam, a monk's spade, also qualifies as this.
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BloodKnight Blood Knight]: One possible interpretation of her workaholic tendencies when her work involves copious amounts of combat. Assuming the cred energy meters represent a work quota that agents are expected to fill, after which anything else is overtime that pays progressively less as a 'you can stop now' sort of thing, she keeps on going anyway, well beyond any point of reasonable returns for work still being acquired.
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CompetitiveBalance Competitive Balance]: More marked for the archetypes since she's been so many before and because Flexible Survival is not PvP-balanced anyway.
**[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GlassCannon Glass Cannon]: For her initial leveling path and first remort as a Sniper/Strategist. Could put out impressive amounts of damage in a short span of time, but couldn't survive well enough even with regeneration to make an effective soloist. Revisited this for her twenty-fourth remort with the incredibly risky Blood Warrior/Strategist just to see if she could handle it, but given all the survivability improvements she's made over all those remorts...
**[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StoneWall Stone Wall]: Her second remort as a Two-Tailed Wizard/Strategist drastically improved her survivability but also slowed down her damage output significantly. Her fifth remort as a Regen Scrapper/Blood Warrior also qualifies, as it had massive amounts of survivability but its lack of Overkill or general damage skills limited its clear speed. Revisited this at the tail end of her thirty-second remort with Wasteland Paladin/Point Man, though as a test rather than actually trying it for a remort, with an improvised tanking setup that could withstand ''hideous'' amounts of punishment even without a proper healing AI and would likely be damn near totally invulnerable with one.
**[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MightyGlacier Mighty Glacier]: Her third remort as a Monster Monarch/Strategist brought back a fair bit of her damage output as well as offering more survivability, but slowed down her actual clear speed until later in the level path when an effectively 90%+ Overkill rate turned fights into one giant health bar instead of a bunch of little ones.
**[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MagicallyIneptFighter Magically Inept Fighter]: Has always been this if one counts mutant powers as magic for this purpose.
**[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GradualGrinder Gradual Grinder]: Her sixth remort as a Plague Doctor/Strategist counts as this due to the nature of damage-over-time effects and the immense Vampiric healing they generate.
**[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PuppetFighter Puppet Fighter]: Her seventh remort as a Den Keeper/Strategist counts as this on account of packing relatively little herself aside from a couple buffs, a couple heals, and her Tranquilizer pistol from her time as a Plague Doctor.
**[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LightningBruiser Lightning Bruiser]: Her fourth and to a much greater extent eighth through twenty-third remorts as a Brawler/Blood Warrior and Determinator/Blood Warrior respectively have been this. Her damage output in either case is enormous, both pack some regeneration to help them stay alive, and the Determinator in particular has Durability and Vampiric to increase its sustain further. Determinator has a balancing factor in its energy inefficiency, which she is compensating by way of using relatively few attacks in her rotation, which leaves plenty of open space for energy recovery. This downtime weakness is then compensated with plenty of Recharge as well as making use of Blood Warrior as a secondary to provide InstantCooldown every five turns as well as when a new fight starts to get her stronger weapons available again faster.
*** Blood Warrior/Strategist from her twenty-fourth remort onwards has ended up being this due to her arsenal containing significantly more armor, deflection aids, barrier projection, and regeneration than actual weapons. Combine the Blood Warrior's raw damage output with her having as much health as most tanks, and that's what she's become.
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CursedWithAwesome Cursed With Awesome]: Somewhat debatable on whether it's technically a curse as nobody's actually sure of its source, but Raika's unnamed disability could qualify as this. Her inability to use mutant powers due to her personal nanite field being locked to its basic body maintenance functions means that if the field gets stronger or denser for whatever reason -- a possible explanation for remorts, perhaps -- all that extra power is going right back into basic body augmentation, meaning that she doesn't ''need'' any fancy mutant powers when she can just outclass most foes by way of raw martial skill and physical capabilities. The fact that her gear is both exceptionally well modified and works with this augmentation by packing its own nanite fields rather than working against it by drawing against her personal pool only reinforces how useful this 'disability' can be with the right adjustments.
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CuteBruiser Cute Bruiser]: Look at her. Then look at her fighting style, and the sheer amount of damage and survivability she packs.
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DidYouJustPunchOutCthulhu Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?]: Successfully hunted multiple Primes solo at the tail end of her eleventh remort, and has continued to do so at the tail end of most of the remorts that followed. So far the list includes Termite Drone, Termite Warrior, Nanite Sorceress, Nanite Wizard, Perfect Soldier...
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DisabilitySuperpower Disability Superpower]: Raika's presently nameless disability (the RP explanation for her All Natural status, among other things) means that she's unable to manifest mutant powers, perhaps in part due to a naturally weak constitution that means her personal nanites are almost all concentrating on their basic body maintenance functions rather than trying to divert any to power manifestation. Gear uses its own reserve of nanites if any at all, though, rather than drawing from her personal pool, and on account of her disability, she trains incredibly hard to overcome her own weakness. ''In spite of'' this disability, she is arguably the single most powerful PC agent in any of the three factions.
**Alternatively, it could be that her constitution is fine, but something about her (likely something related to being a child of RSX operatives) causes nanites to have a rather hard time gripping her system, and as such her personal nanite field is smaller or thinner than most. This still produces the same end result of having all her personal nanites devoted to basic body maintenance functions with none to spare for power manifestation.
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheJuggernaut The Juggernaut]: As a Wasteland Paladin/Point Man. While her damage output wasn't great, nothing short of ''some of the most powerful Boss-ranked mob types in the game including at least one each of the Shock Trooper, Bloodletter, and Diseased templates on absolute maximum difficulty and pheromones ratings'' could bring her down, and that was with a ''faulty to nonfunctional healing AI''.
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NewGamePlus New Game Plus]: Currently has done the most of these out of anyone by a long shot. Never stop learning!
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NoSocialSkills No Social Skills]: A perpetual weak spot of hers. For all her competence in other areas, she has ''nothing'' in any of what could be considered the social proficiencies, and is likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future. This makes it a bit awkward for her to be a squad leader, because while she understands it on a technical level, it's something she still has to get used to on an emotional level. Given how she's been fighting ferals for most of the time she's been alive, this makes sense.
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TemporaryBulkChange Temporary Bulk Change]: Got stuck in the kemonomimi form of Plump Tigress shortly before beginning her twenty-fourth remort, and stayed stuck until her thirty-sixth. While she's as embarrassed about it as she was the Nekomata remort (#3) and the Supermom Serum remort (#15), she's taken it as a sign to try something new rather than fall into the general complacent routine she's been doing for the last sixteen remorts, and is taking it remarkably in stride in spite of her embarrassment, especially with the Perfected Supermom Serum becoming a core part of her arsenal as of her thirty-third remort.
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WellDoneSonGuy "Well Done, Daughter!" Girl]: Given that her parents are RSX agents -- heroic and ''insanely'' powerful ones -- Raika has a rather warped sense of reasonable expectations for herself. She's not actually sure what they think of her, since she spends way too much time on the job and not seeing much of her parents, but there's a strange dichotomy between what most may see as the ludicrously powerful Prime-slayer and most likely single most powerful PC agent in Flexible Survival... and her own perception of herself, as a child with a disability she has to compensate for and that she's just barely an eighth of the way to reaching her parents' levels of competence. The fact that she's well aware of the less-than-pleasant designs of some of her weapons doesn't help her in feeling like she's anywhere near living up to her parents' standards.
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Workaholic Workaholic]: Others call her overzealous. She calls them lazy. It's very rare for her to be doing much other than clearing out ferals and other manners of beasts to keep the streets safe, and she tends to get grumpy when people waste her time while she's working, which ties into her general lack of social skills and care for social niceties.
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/YoungerThanTheyLook Younger Than They Look]: Standard for children these days due to the nanites. Looks to be an adult or at least in her late teens, was born in early 2016.

=== Minions - The Lightning Crusher Squadron ===
Remort 7 brings recognition of Raika's dedication to suppressing the feral menace, and as such, she's been assigned a handful of lesser operatives in the hopes that she can make something of them. (Due to their stackableness, normal Mechanical Drones might be 'generic' RSX Troopers.)

==== [http://danbooru.donmai.us/data/--original-drawn-by-drcockula--aecda83a924ed7a7cea59dec5b5612fc.png Monica] ====
A laid-back, somewhat lazy agent that nonetheless has been something of a cool big sister to the much younger Raika, Monica's usually been responsible for Raika's medical treatment on those occasions where Raika gets the crap beaten out of her while out feral-hunting. She was assigned to Raika's new squadron in the hopes that she'd actually go out and do some work. She still isn't much for actually fighting, but as the only one of the girls to be something other than fully human, she's not afraid to make use of that distinction to serve as the group's medic.

Her 'modification' (Wild, Potent, Overcharged, Overwhelming, Ruggedized) comes in the form of running afoul of Raika's own mysterious benefactor and scoring some effective albeit slightly perverse equipment. Unlike Raika, however, she's much more okay with the strangeness of the gear.
==== [http://danbooru.donmai.us/data/--original-drawn-by-kichin-yarou--fc534316ca96270702537b90f516d203.jpg Celica] ====
The most serious of the squad members, Celica lost an arm during a Feral attack some time ago, which has thankfully been replaced with a size-shifting (or possibly just multi-layered and removable) prosthetic since then. She serves as the group's tank, making use of the most oversized and shield-like of the sizes/layers both to stand out for attention-drawing purposes and to block the resulting fire as it comes in.

Her 'modification' (Improved, Overcharged, Attention Grabbing, Sticky, Ruggedized) largely consists of a couple tweaks to the largest form of her prosthetic arm, purging unnecessary components and re-balancing its weight so as to be less unwieldy than it appears while still packing a fairly nasty punch. The portions of the 'modification' that this alteration does not encompass come as social lessons from Clardona on how to make her a bit less of a stoic wallflower and as some lessons on medical treatment from both Clardona and Monica.
==== [http://danbooru.donmai.us/data/--psychic-hearts-drawn-by-dennryuurai--8a3c3d506c9e295950f6c3b8b3572118.jpg Clardona] ====
A relatively inexperienced but nonetheless eager agent, Clardona was assigned to Raika's squadron mostly just so she has a mentor figure to learn from. She packs a fairly basic new-agent loadout, something which causes her to be a bit envious of her squad leader's heavily modded gear, but she nonetheless has the combat instincts and fervor to do well at her job.

As Clardona's mentor figure, Raika has been watching how she fights, and noting that Clardona tends to go a little too all-out, tiring herself quickly. As such, she's training the girl in pacing herself a bit better, as well as general combat arts and an improved gear requisition. This is the manifestation of her 'modification' (Optimized, Overcharged, Stabilizing, Extra Lethal, Ruggedized).
==== [http://danbooru.donmai.us/data/sample/--original-drawn-by-kaimantokage--sample-79607b6de1ffa41427fd989851acb803.jpg Rosetta] ====
A short young woman that joined up later, Rosetta is a bit on the cute-but-clumsy side. Luckily, she hasn't actually hurt any of her squadmates through her clumsiness. Like all members of the squad, she knows at least a little healing, though she (not entirely by choice) tends to follow Monica's way of doing it through milk heals due to the nanites having blessed (or cursed, depending on one's point of view) her with quite the ample bosom, especially given her otherwise small size. The 'not entirely by choice' bit may have something to do with Monica's influence and Clardona's general envious tendencies.

= Guides =
== Build Advice ==
No matter what role you want your character to play in combat, there are three things that every role needs to take into account to some extent if they intend to pursue optimization. Some builds care a little less about certain tenets of the three than others, but that said, all builds should at least ''consider'' them. In no particular order...

* Uptime. Ideally, you want any statuses you throw out to be able to stay up constantly by way of reapplication by the time the original duration elapses. Not following this means that there's likely to be odd spots in your combat rhythm where you're missing some statuses and thus are inconsistently at your full power, which can in some cases create vulnerable spots in your rhythm where you can be KO'd where you wouldn't be otherwise. Most relevant on buffing and debuffing builds, but still applicable for any build that runs either of those effects in smaller quantities (self-buffing counts too), runs cover and/or taunts in order to be a tank, or runs a Repeats or Damage Over Time damage-dealer setup (though the damage-dealers care in a different manner). Big Hits damage dealers care the least about this, though they still need to be mindful of the uptime of their passive effects to some extent.
** Repeats and Damage Over Time differ in their caring in that it's a waste of damage to reapply the same attack to targets still suffering from it (with the potential exception of reapplying a Damage Over Time effect on an enemy that got a high deflection percent on the same one earlier in the hopes of getting less of a deflection percent this time), so ideally these two want to apply their damage to targets not currently suffering from the attack in question if they have one that becomes available for use again before its first use expires. Failing that, power is more important than duration with these two when it comes to clearing most fights quickly. It doesn't particularly matter if a Repeats or Damage Over Time effect has an enormous amount of damage over its full duration if you're fighting enemies that won't survive the full duration (unless you have Overkill, but that's another story and even then it's somewhat limited, more on that elsewhere), and even if the damage per use is enormous, a low-power, long-duration attack of these types won't contribute much to the ''damage per round'', which is generally more important than the ''damage per use'' when it comes to clearing fights quickly. As a result, both of these do quite nicely with low uptime but high intensity attacks, but do be mindful of how their ''damage per round'' matches up with their cooldown, because that's still relevant in terms of efficiency (especially when trying to gather EXP by doing lots of fights in rapid succession) even if the matter of overlapping or having downtime on the damage ticks is less of a concern.
* Energy management. If you have no EN left, you can't do anything meaningful until you recover some. It's no good having all your statuses up and plenty of options to use if you don't have the EN to use them. It's also worth noting that ENBreak and ENMod synergize with one another and the former makes the latter worth more than it appears. Debuffers and Big Hits damage dealers care the most about this, the former because many powerful debuffs are hideously expensive and the latter because as the only build type with one-and-done effects rather than lasting ones, it has nothing to offer if it stops being able to throw out new attacks. Other builds care to some extent for the general reason that they can't do anything meaningful if they run out of EN, though the lingering nature of Repeats and Damage Over Time attacks as well as buffs generally sticking better than debuffs (since you can trust your allies to be around longer than any particular enemy group will) means they can afford a little more downtime for energy recovery purposes without suffering too much in their main role. Tanks tend to vary somewhat in how much they care about this, with Cover tanks probably caring less than Aggro or Taunt tanks, though all three tend to have some energy problems, usually by way of running a ton of passives and toggles to boost their durability which leaves them a little short in terms of maximum EN, which also restricts their natural EN recovery rate somewhat.
* Rotation blank spots and/or overcrowding. Strike is ideally a last resort move that exists to fill any instances in which you have nothing better to use (or perhaps functioning as a minor energy restorative at the same time if upgraded as such). If you're using Strike more often than you need it as an energy management tool (if upgraded as such), you either need more active options to use, or to pack more Recharge so the active options you already have are available more often. At the same time, some builds, notably Big Hits damage dealing, suffer if you have too many options competing for the same usage turns, especially if some of those are outside the damage-dealing role itself, so be mindful that running too many active (and non-instant) buffs or debuffs on a Big Hits damage dealer competes with their damaging attacks and eats into their overall damage output.

User:Ruvelia

2016-11-20T17:09:17Z

Ruvelia:

= TVTropes-ing My Characters =
All pictures are of the respective agent in her base form.
== [http://i851.photobucket.com/albums/ab80/SirDurant/Odd%20Collection/128764188349.jpg Ruvelia] ==
A self-admitted computer nerd and general nobody before the events of P-Day, Ruvelia ended up signing on with Zephyr Inc more out of a peer pressure decision than anything else. That said, she hasn't exactly regretted the decision, and has made use of their resources to take up tinkering. She became pregnant very early in her time working as a Zephyr agent, and over the course of that pregnancy managed to make great strides in personal growth, the extent of which is noted in the tropes section. Somewhat more unexpectedly, she ''liked'' the sensation, even if the nanites insisted on making her pregnancies abnormally large; if asked about it, she's still uncertain whether it's something to blame the nanites for or whether it's just a kink she never knew she had until she had the chance to try it.

*Faction: Zephyr Inc
*Mutation Type: Standard
*Role: Buffer primary, Healer distant secondary. Buffs have an emphasis on energy management, though contain a smattering of everything.
*Favorite Class Combinations: Nurturer/Strategist, Den Keeper/Strategist, more recently Pack Rat/Strategist.
*Trivia: Ruvelia has recently been showing a little too much perverse glee regarding a not-yet-made design of hers she's dubbed the Gravidy Cannon.

Tropes that apply to Ruvelia:
*Big Eater: She's been shown to be capable of eating or drinking quite a lot on multiple occasions, from having one of everything in the Zephyr coffee lounge to drinking people dry of milk on request. The fact that she's usually eating for two might help with this somewhat.
*Bunny Ears Lawyer: Eccentric tinkerer who enjoys being far more heavily pregnant than is probably healthy far more than is probably healthy. Impressively multi-talented ex-computer nerd. One of the most powerful (arguably ''the'' most powerful at the time of writing this) buffer-type agents in any of the three major factions.
*Pregnant Badass: Being a core member of the first team (a four-person team, for that matter) to ever take down a Prime from the Wax Museum: Afterlife zone (the highest level zone at the time, capping out at Lv72 when agents cap out at Lv60) while less than a day from full term and being the kind of woman whose pregnancies are far from small and dainty probably qualifies her for this.
=== Minions - The Ruvelian Army ===
==== Drones - Ruvelian Archer, Ruvelian Knight, Ruvelian Priest ====
==== Mutant Companion - Ruvelian Hunter (AKA Kaiya) ====
==== Personal Minion - Ruvelian Butler ====
=== Children ===
==== Drake ====
==== ????? ====
== [http://danbooru.donmai.us/data/sample/sample-86d4ef965c6c4b74b207999a76620509.jpg Meredith] ==
A stock market speculator, entrepreneur, and constant heavy drinker, it's rare to see Meredith ''not'' at least a little sloshed. It doesn't seem to get in the way of her doing what she does best, though; if anything, it might be why she's able to loosen up enough to cut deals well. A relative noncombatant, Meredith spends most of her time on civil engineering problems instead, keeping an eye on the condition of the bubble-cities and ensuring that any trouble that comes up within them is swiftly resolved. May be just a little personally greedy.

*Faction: RSX Solutions
*Mutation Type: Kemonomimi, Advanced Inoculation
*Role: In flux combat-wise. Her business skills are significantly more important than her combat skills.
*Favorite Class Combinations: Defaults to Tormentor on the rare occasions she does fight.
*Trivia: Meredith is the only one of the five that the nanites permit to be a hermaphrodite.
== [http://danbooru.donmai.us/data/1d2b6005efda679b0fea09bb4330080a.jpg Shurelia] ==
A relatively ordinary girl that got caught up in the mess that is post-P-Day life, Shurelia didn't come to terms with her first mutation very well and needed some help from the Prometheans to stop freaking out about it so much. Their help seems to have worked well enough, as she's not only no longer unnerved by such things but is actually relatively comfortable making use of the fact that she can (albeit now with much more control over when as well as with an ability to reset to human if she gets a little too weirded out) in order to help people.

As an agent, her stamina is exceptional, aided by both a fair bit of chubbiness cushioning the hits she takes from ferals and the fact that the nanites support her weight much better than she used to be able to do alone so she won't tire so easily from that either. She may be a bit self-sacrificing to some folks, but she just doesn't like seeing people get hurt for no reason, and occasionally makes a habit of feeding and providing basic medical treatment for folks... even ferals, in the hopes her Promethean comrades can do something to bring them back to sanity when they're a little less starving and bleeding.

*Faction: Prometheans
*Mutation Type: Advanced Inoculation
*Role: Tanking, with some mild area damage for solo purposes.
*Favorite Class Combinations: Point Man when tanking, Berserker when solo.
*Trivia: Shurelia's feral-feeding may be slightly self-serving, since spending so long living the Cow Girl life makes for milky breasts even when she's never been pregnant, and there's not always a convenient milker at hand.
== [http://i851.photobucket.com/albums/ab80/SirDurant/Odd%20Collection/Plump%20Tewi_zpssyfewd75.jpg Nyssa] ==
[http://i851.photobucket.com/albums/ab80/SirDurant/Odd%20Collection/49737448_p3_master1200_zpsfbkwrdou.jpg Another pic of her.]

A girl born relatively recently to feral parents, Nyssa might have been just another feral if not for the Prometheans catching her relatively early in her life and slowly converting her back toward a more civilized mindset. Walking that thin line between the feral mindset and a still-sane one gives her some insight into the way they think, but at the same time she's not exactly a paragon of Promethean discipline, indulging herself in normally feral pleasures a bit much (though not before smacking the victim-to-be around more than a little in many cases). She may be self-loathing and taking that anger out on ferals, or she may be trying to get them to kneel by force, or maybe she's even just coming to terms with what her early life actually was like and is attempting to punish the instigators for it. Either way, she has an unusually strong appetite, both for food and... more perverse things.

Lately she's started work on the Glenstock restoration project. She's supposed to be a mentor to help teach the children there the construction skills they need to know, but she has admitted that while she knows some about computers, she only really got sent out there because of the 'big three' caring more about sending someone with some knowledge than committing an expert to another city. Still, she feels somewhat at home, given certain locals...

*Faction: Prometheans
*Mutation Type: Kemonomimi
*Role: Area damage through large single attacks.
*Favorite Class Combinations: Monstrosity.
*Trivia: Nyssa has been attempting to channel her urges into more constructive uses, and has lately taken up massage in the city of Eureka.

Tropes that apply to Nyssa:
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AnythingThatMoves Anything That Moves]: Having been skirting the edge of a feral mindset for the majority of her (admittedly short so far) life has kinda done this to her.
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DeepSouth Deep South]: Seems to have this sort of accent to her speech. Most likely due to her parents or the Promethean who took her in having it.
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PintsizedPowerhouse Pintsized Powerhouse]: Despite standing at a mere 4'6" in her base form, the shortest of the five by a significant margin, her class of choice is ''Monstrosity''.
== [http://danbooru.donmai.us/data/cf3928b33172c07cd4c781d29832ddf0.png Raika] ==
[http://danbooru.donmai.us/data/81f24957b1a7d08d36ab7d173825f052.png Sometimes keeping her supplier happy can go to some weird places. Third time around, she's attempting to develop her combat skills nekomata-style.]

A girl born relatively recently to a couple of RSX agents, Raika was born with what might be considered a disability in this world of nanites and crazy mutant powers. Unable to harness the latter in the slightest, she instead took to training and designing so as not to be a disappointment to her parents. She's received a couple gifts of equipment from a mysterious benefactor, and while they're quite useful, she does occasionally get exasperated when said benefactor sends her something that, while useful, is a little more perverse than might be necessary.

Over time, she's grown stronger and stronger and is a force to be reckoned with, only particularly fearing the Devils of the Wax Museum, but as her gear largely comes from this mysterious benefactor of hers, their demands on her have grown as well... and not always in the way she's happy doing. She still complies begrudgingly, though, even if it's embarrassing sometimes.

*Faction: RSX Solutions
*Mutation Type: Human (shifted to Kemonomimi after her second remort), Advanced Inoculation
*Role: Eventually, adaptability. Presently, several flavors of harsh damage output paired with a surprising amount of durability. Also has an improvised healer-tank plus boss-hunter support fire setup.
*Favorite Class Combinations: Has gear setups for single-target DPS of all three types (as well as AOE Repeats DPS), along with a few scattered pieces for an AOE Healer and an improvised Healer-Tank. Tested Sniper/Strategist for remorts 0 and 1, Two-Tailed Wizard/Strategist for remort 2, Monster Monarch/Strategist for remort 3, Brawler/Blood Warrior along with a shift to repeats gear for remort 4, Regen Scrapper/Blood Warrior for remort 5, Plague Doctor/Strategist as the shift to DoT gear for remort 6, Den Keeper/Strategist for remort 7, shifted to AOE with Determinator/Blood Warrior for remorts 8-23, and currently trying that same AOE gear set with Blood Warrior/Strategist for remorts 24-38.
*Trivia: Raika keeps being subjected to embarrassing situations. A bra that pumps a faux-Lactaid effect through her whenever she gets hurt, a serum that overwhelms her body with so much energy that her body takes on a pregnant-looking appearance just to have a chance at venting at least some of the energy safely, and getting stuck in various kitty-related forms... she never takes them very well, but she's improving.

Tropes that apply to Raika:
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AnimalMotifs Animal Motifs]: As of her twenty-fourth remort, Raika seems to be taking on a cat motif. Given the form she ended up getting stuck in, "cute and cuddly, but also a predator" describes her fairly well. She managed to get unstuck a dozen remorts later, but the motif still fits.
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BalloonBelly Balloon Belly]: During her fifteenth remort, courtesy of the Supermom Serum. Any feral that mistakes it for one of their ilk having gotten the best of her is in for a nasty surprise. Revisited at the tail end of her thirty-third with a gear refinement that substitutes her Padded Armor for the Perfected Supermom Serum, which has a much lower but safer energy output and reinforces her belly to the point that it may as well be considered an armored location.
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BladeOnAStick Blade On A Stick]: Her strongest weapon and the one she's usually seen carrying is a halberd she refers to as Brachion. It's exactly as effective as halberds have been shown to be historically. The much more defensively oriented Resurgam, a monk's spade, also qualifies as this.
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BloodKnight Blood Knight]: One possible interpretation of her workaholic tendencies when her work involves copious amounts of combat. Assuming the cred energy meters represent a work quota that agents are expected to fill, after which anything else is overtime that pays progressively less as a 'you can stop now' sort of thing, she keeps on going anyway, well beyond any point of reasonable returns for work still being acquired.
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CompetitiveBalance Competitive Balance]: More marked for the archetypes since she's been so many before and because Flexible Survival is not PvP-balanced anyway.
**[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GlassCannon Glass Cannon]: For her initial leveling path and first remort as a Sniper/Strategist. Could put out impressive amounts of damage in a short span of time, but couldn't survive well enough even with regeneration to make an effective soloist. Revisited this for her twenty-fourth remort with the incredibly risky Blood Warrior/Strategist just to see if she could handle it, but given all the survivability improvements she's made over all those remorts...
**[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StoneWall Stone Wall]: Her second remort as a Two-Tailed Wizard/Strategist drastically improved her survivability but also slowed down her damage output significantly. Her fifth remort as a Regen Scrapper/Blood Warrior also qualifies, as it had massive amounts of survivability but its lack of Overkill or general damage skills limited its clear speed. Revisited this at the tail end of her thirty-second remort with Wasteland Paladin/Point Man, though as a test rather than actually trying it for a remort, with an improvised tanking setup that could withstand ''hideous'' amounts of punishment even without a proper healing AI and would likely be damn near totally invulnerable with one.
**[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MightyGlacier Mighty Glacier]: Her third remort as a Monster Monarch/Strategist brought back a fair bit of her damage output as well as offering more survivability, but slowed down her actual clear speed until later in the level path when an effectively 90%+ Overkill rate turned fights into one giant health bar instead of a bunch of little ones.
**[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MagicallyIneptFighter Magically Inept Fighter]: Has always been this if one counts mutant powers as magic for this purpose.
**[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GradualGrinder Gradual Grinder]: Her sixth remort as a Plague Doctor/Strategist counts as this due to the nature of damage-over-time effects and the immense Vampiric healing they generate.
**[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PuppetFighter Puppet Fighter]: Her seventh remort as a Den Keeper/Strategist counts as this on account of packing relatively little herself aside from a couple buffs, a couple heals, and her Tranquilizer pistol from her time as a Plague Doctor.
**[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LightningBruiser Lightning Bruiser]: Her fourth and to a much greater extent eighth through twenty-third remorts as a Brawler/Blood Warrior and Determinator/Blood Warrior respectively have been this. Her damage output in either case is enormous, both pack some regeneration to help them stay alive, and the Determinator in particular has Durability and Vampiric to increase its sustain further. Determinator has a balancing factor in its energy inefficiency, which she is compensating by way of using relatively few attacks in her rotation, which leaves plenty of open space for energy recovery. This downtime weakness is then compensated with plenty of Recharge as well as making use of Blood Warrior as a secondary to provide InstantCooldown every five turns as well as when a new fight starts to get her stronger weapons available again faster.
*** Blood Warrior/Strategist from her twenty-fourth remort onwards has ended up being this due to her arsenal containing significantly more armor, deflection aids, barrier projection, and regeneration than actual weapons. Combine the Blood Warrior's raw damage output with her having as much health as most tanks, and that's what she's become.
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CursedWithAwesome Cursed With Awesome]: Somewhat debatable on whether it's technically a curse as nobody's actually sure of its source, but Raika's unnamed disability could qualify as this. Her inability to use mutant powers due to her personal nanite field being locked to its basic body maintenance functions means that if the field gets stronger or denser for whatever reason -- a possible explanation for remorts, perhaps -- all that extra power is going right back into basic body augmentation, meaning that she doesn't ''need'' any fancy mutant powers when she can just outclass most foes by way of raw martial skill and physical capabilities. The fact that her gear is both exceptionally well modified and works with this augmentation by packing its own nanite fields rather than working against it by drawing against her personal pool only reinforces how useful this 'disability' can be with the right adjustments.
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CuteBruiser Cute Bruiser]: Look at her. Then look at her fighting style, and the sheer amount of damage and survivability she packs.
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DidYouJustPunchOutCthulhu Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?]: Successfully hunted multiple Primes solo at the tail end of her eleventh remort, and has continued to do so at the tail end of most of the remorts that followed. So far the list includes Termite Drone, Termite Warrior, Nanite Sorceress, Nanite Wizard, Perfect Soldier...
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DisabilitySuperpower Disability Superpower]: Raika's presently nameless disability (the RP explanation for her All Natural status, among other things) means that she's unable to manifest mutant powers, perhaps in part due to a naturally weak constitution that means her personal nanites are almost all concentrating on their basic body maintenance functions rather than trying to divert any to power manifestation. Gear uses its own reserve of nanites if any at all, though, rather than drawing from her personal pool, and on account of her disability, she trains incredibly hard to overcome her own weakness. ''In spite of'' this disability, she is arguably the single most powerful PC agent in any of the three factions.
**Alternatively, it could be that her constitution is fine, but something about her (likely something related to being a child of RSX operatives) causes nanites to have a rather hard time gripping her system, and as such her personal nanite field is smaller or thinner than most. This still produces the same end result of having all her personal nanites devoted to basic body maintenance functions with none to spare for power manifestation.
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheJuggernaut The Juggernaut]: As a Wasteland Paladin/Point Man. While her damage output wasn't great, nothing short of ''some of the most powerful Boss-ranked mob types in the game including at least one each of the Shock Trooper, Bloodletter, and Diseased templates on absolute maximum difficulty and pheromones ratings'' could bring her down, and that was with a ''faulty to nonfunctional healing AI''.
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NewGamePlus New Game Plus]: Currently has done the most of these out of anyone by a long shot. Never stop learning!
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NoSocialSkills No Social Skills]: A perpetual weak spot of hers. For all her competence in other areas, she has ''nothing'' in any of what could be considered the social proficiencies, and is likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future. This makes it a bit awkward for her to be a squad leader, because while she understands it on a technical level, it's something she still has to get used to on an emotional level. Given how she's been fighting ferals for most of the time she's been alive, this makes sense.
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TemporaryBulkChange Temporary Bulk Change]: Got stuck in the kemonomimi form of Plump Tigress shortly before beginning her twenty-fourth remort, and stayed stuck until her thirty-sixth. While she's as embarrassed about it as she was the Nekomata remort (#3) and the Supermom Serum remort (#15), she's taken it as a sign to try something new rather than fall into the general complacent routine she's been doing for the last sixteen remorts, and is taking it remarkably in stride in spite of her embarrassment, especially with the Perfected Supermom Serum becoming a core part of her arsenal as of her thirty-third remort.
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WellDoneSonGuy "Well Done, Daughter!" Girl]: Given that her parents are RSX agents -- heroic and ''insanely'' powerful ones -- Raika has a rather warped sense of reasonable expectations for herself. She's not actually sure what they think of her, since she spends way too much time on the job and not seeing much of her parents, but there's a strange dichotomy between what most may see as the ludicrously powerful Prime-slayer and most likely single most powerful PC agent in Flexible Survival... and her own perception of herself, as a child with a disability she has to compensate for and that she's just barely an eighth of the way to reaching her parents' levels of competence. The fact that she's well aware of the less-than-pleasant designs of some of her weapons doesn't help her in feeling like she's anywhere near living up to her parents' standards.
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Workaholic Workaholic]: Others call her overzealous. She calls them lazy. It's very rare for her to be doing much other than clearing out ferals and other manners of beasts to keep the streets safe, and she tends to get grumpy when people waste her time while she's working, which ties into her general lack of social skills and care for social niceties.
*[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/YoungerThanTheyLook Younger Than They Look]: Standard for children these days due to the nanites. Looks to be an adult or at least in her late teens, was born in early 2016.

=== Minions - The Lightning Crusher Squadron ===
Remort 7 brings recognition of Raika's dedication to suppressing the feral menace, and as such, she's been assigned a handful of lesser operatives in the hopes that she can make something of them. (Due to their stackableness, normal Mechanical Drones might be 'generic' RSX Troopers.)

==== [http://danbooru.donmai.us/data/--original-drawn-by-drcockula--aecda83a924ed7a7cea59dec5b5612fc.png Monica] ====
A laid-back, somewhat lazy agent that nonetheless has been something of a cool big sister to the much younger Raika, Monica's usually been responsible for Raika's medical treatment on those occasions where Raika gets the crap beaten out of her while out feral-hunting. She was assigned to Raika's new squadron in the hopes that she'd actually go out and do some work. She still isn't much for actually fighting, but as the only one of the girls to be something other than fully human, she's not afraid to make use of that distinction to serve as the group's medic.

Her 'modification' (Wild, Potent, Overcharged, Overwhelming, Ruggedized) comes in the form of running afoul of Raika's own mysterious benefactor and scoring some effective albeit slightly perverse equipment. Unlike Raika, however, she's much more okay with the strangeness of the gear.
==== [http://danbooru.donmai.us/data/--original-drawn-by-kichin-yarou--fc534316ca96270702537b90f516d203.jpg Celica] ====
The most serious of the squad members, Celica lost an arm during a Feral attack some time ago, which has thankfully been replaced with a size-shifting (or possibly just multi-layered and removable) prosthetic since then. She serves as the group's tank, making use of the most oversized and shield-like of the sizes/layers both to stand out for attention-drawing purposes and to block the resulting fire as it comes in.

Her 'modification' (Improved, Overcharged, Attention Grabbing, Sticky, Ruggedized) largely consists of a couple tweaks to the largest form of her prosthetic arm, purging unnecessary components and re-balancing its weight so as to be less unwieldy than it appears while still packing a fairly nasty punch. The portions of the 'modification' that this alteration does not encompass come as social lessons from Clardona on how to make her a bit less of a stoic wallflower and as some lessons on medical treatment from both Clardona and Monica.
==== [http://danbooru.donmai.us/data/--psychic-hearts-drawn-by-dennryuurai--8a3c3d506c9e295950f6c3b8b3572118.jpg Clardona] ====
A relatively inexperienced but nonetheless eager agent, Clardona was assigned to Raika's squadron mostly just so she has a mentor figure to learn from. She packs a fairly basic new-agent loadout, something which causes her to be a bit envious of her squad leader's heavily modded gear, but she nonetheless has the combat instincts and fervor to do well at her job.

As Clardona's mentor figure, Raika has been watching how she fights, and noting that Clardona tends to go a little too all-out, tiring herself quickly. As such, she's training the girl in pacing herself a bit better, as well as general combat arts and an improved gear requisition. This is the manifestation of her 'modification' (Optimized, Overcharged, Stabilizing, Extra Lethal, Ruggedized).
==== [http://danbooru.donmai.us/data/sample/--original-drawn-by-kaimantokage--sample-79607b6de1ffa41427fd989851acb803.jpg Rosetta] ====
A short young woman that joined up later, Rosetta is a bit on the cute-but-clumsy side. Luckily, she hasn't actually hurt any of her squadmates through her clumsiness. Like all members of the squad, she knows at least a little healing, though she (not entirely by choice) tends to follow Monica's way of doing it through milk heals due to the nanites having blessed (or cursed, depending on one's point of view) her with quite the ample bosom, especially given her otherwise small size. The 'not entirely by choice' bit may have something to do with Monica's influence and Clardona's general envious tendencies.

= Guides =
== Build Advice ==
No matter what role you want your character to play in combat, there are three things that every role needs to take into account to some extent if they intend to pursue optimization. Some builds care a little less about certain tenets of the three than others, but that said...

* Uptime. Ideally, you want any statuses you throw out to be able to stay up constantly by way of reapplication by the time the original duration elapses. Not following this means that there's likely to be odd spots in your combat rhythm where you're missing some statuses and thus are inconsistently at your full power, which can in some cases create vulnerable spots in your rhythm where you can be KO'd where you wouldn't be otherwise. Most relevant on buffing and debuffing builds, but still applicable for any build that runs either of those effects in smaller quantities (self-buffing counts too), runs cover and/or taunts in order to be a tank, or runs a Repeats or Damage Over Time damage-dealer setup (though the damage-dealers care in a different manner). Big Hits damage dealers care the least about this, though they still need to be mindful of the uptime of their passive effects to some extent.
* Energy management.
* Rotation blank spots.

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2016-10-26T01:12:05Z

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2016-10-19T06:36:37Z

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2016-10-09T02:18:04Z

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2016-10-05T08:52:17Z

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2016-09-20T22:55:20Z

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