Revision as of 19:48, 20 November 2016

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.

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.