Optimizing Battle Bonuses

[bladesoframen]

I just finished my 3rd plat run of the game, and as you might expect, I learned a fair bit more about the game. One of the major things I learned was about how to optimize battle bonuses. I haven't done full test yet, but to inspire those that are trying, here are some of the things I tried. (For those wondering, guide update will happen after a bit more testing)

 

tl;dr: Just see the last 2 pictures before the bonus section

 

For frame of reference, here are images from the original video I made. This picture was made on Floor 12, 1st room enemy with the 2 bosses and 5 mini monsters.

 

If you look at my guide, I also suggested a much higher combo focused method that I learned the 2nd time I played the game. I didn't know why at the time, but sometimes it gave me some larger bonuses at 720% or so, but usually I got the following:

 

So as you can tell, there is a huge jump in combo and in turn damage, but the losing the link bonus and some amount of simultaneous kills hurt my bonuses a lot. In my 3rd run, I thought, let's try some things out:

4 Fans + 1 Hammer on Otoha (Otoha also has  < 30% hp)

 

Turn 1:

• Harmonic Chain
• Cosmic Fan
• Ultimate Crush

Turn 2:

• Live Concert (level 2 with bonus set to "increase s skill dmg")
• Harmonic Chain
• Earth Assault x 5
• Condemnation x 5
• Cosmic Fan x 5
• Herd of Artemis x 4
• Light Crescent x 2
• Solitary Rhaphsody
• Prima Donna
• Ultimate Crush
• Shrine of Hope

 

 

Well I think the damage on that hit more than speaks for itself, despite this being 1 of the lower damage runs, but wow the bonus tanked.

 

So what can you take away from this:

1. Single Hit Damage does not equal Large Bonuses

2. More Damage in total, by itself does not equal Large Bonuses

 

So in those pictures, what actually generated large bonuses, Combo, Simultaneous Kill Bonus, and Link Bonus. Everything else pretty much didn't matter since they stayed constant between the pictures. Now, the question became, how do I optimize those?

 

So the first thing that needs to happen is to make sure everyone has 8 turns on T2, so everyone can pull a large and consistent combo. It turns out, that it is quite possible, mostly because I forgot something about chain skills, they only charge the wait time of the character who started the chain. As a result, the 2nd to 4th character can use skills as long as their wait time is lower than the chain skill, making your 1st turn look something like this:

 

Turn 1:

• Harmonic Chain
• Cosmic Fan
• Ultimate Crush
• 3x single hit move with wait < 50 (This can be an AOE move, but to avoid killing the tiny enemies, I hit the bosses with a single target move, or tried the 12 hit gun move to only hit the 2 bosses)

 

Now, there is 1 other fact about Chain skills, they do low damage. While Cosmic Fan generates an insane 10.5 combo a person when you have pursuit bonus, it does an incredibly low amount of damage per person. Instead, it might be worthwhile to not use Cosmic Fan too much to be able to do more damage per single hit. (You still need combo because damage is dependent on combo when you launch that final blow) Now wait, you might be asking why is this important. Didn't we establish earlier that Damage wasn't that important. Sort of right. In the earlier examples, damage was centered around extremely large combos creating extremely power EX attacks. Instead we want to focus on Greater Damage a hit, which is important for Simultaneous Kill Bonus, which as I understand, the amount of times a enemy died to an attack during your combo (not really sure here, so I'm keeping it a bit vague)

 

So what does the a sample combo look like:

 

4 Fans + 1 Hammer on Otoha (Otoha also has  < 30% hp)

 

Turn 1:

• Harmonic Chain
• Cosmic Fan
• Ultimate Crush
• Sacred Dance

 

Turn 2:

• Live Concert (level 2 with bonus set to "increase s skill dmg")
• Harmonic Chain
• Light Crescent x 4
• Herd of Artemis x 4
• Howling Earth
• Ultimate Crush
• Cosmic Fan x 3
• Flame typhoon -> Raging Vortex -> Aubade Crush -> Adagio Tempest x 3.75 (Make sure to keep link Bonus, and stop right before the user of the 1st Special)
• Solitary Rhaphsody
• Prima Donna
• Shrine of Hope

 

 

While the damage isn't impressive, the jump in Simultaneous Kills is pretty insane, and the jump in Link Bonus to what I had in the original video is a nice bonus. I'm still trying things out, but I do recommend trying to break away from too many Cosmic Fans and trying to see what you get.

 

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Some bonus pictures:

 

If you have a party where you can hit everyone with the small circle of Aubade Crush + get a bit lucky

 

6 mini enemies:

 

20 mil+ approval!!!!!!!

Edited August 12, 2018 by bladesoframen

[Walt the Dog]

Just a note on this, you shouldn't need to use Prima Donna in between the two AoE specials since with Aria's special having such a wide radius (never mind Otoha's is also pretty close), you can just have them target two different enemies in the middle and still have both of them hit the entire field, allowing you to fire them off in succession without triggering their Chain Skill. This allows you to fit in an extra E skill for the link bonus as well as set the Increase S Skill Dmg effect to the Level 3 Live Concert to make it work better, helping out with damage output.

 

EDIT: It's also possible to swap the E Skill spam and Mic Skill spam parts of this method around (A.K.A. do the Cosmic Fans and other elemental skills first, then do the mic skills) to maximize follow bonuses on the two special skills and get more damage out of them (use Solitary Rhapsody after using the two AoE fan moves with each fan user and then punch in Otoha's two AoE moves followed by Shrine of Hope). This makes it even more likely that you'll get Overkills due to the increased damage on your specials, allowing you to further maximize the bonus.

Edited March 3 by Walt the Dog