SEQUEL Thirst - Element Stacking

Following up on the previous video, let me demonstrate the potential of the mechanic I previously called "multi-enchanting" against the final base postgame boss. Honestly, this is an unintuitive and overcomplicated name, so from here on out, I'll refer to it as "element stacking". I'll briefly go over the highlights of each party member that make this strategy possible. For Nazuna, she's the physical DPS that gets a 20% damage bonus from Fire and Dark attacks. Thus, we give her the Fire Katana from one of the postgame bosses and a brand that adds the Dark element to her neutral attacks. Everything else is optimized towards damage, and she'll be spamming a 320 Power Physical attack along with her special skill: a 650 Power Physical attack that inflicts massive damage on the enemy. To kill the boss in the video's timeframe, we need her to crit with her special skill, or the boss will still survive with a sliver of HP. You may have also noticed that she's starting below 50% HP. This is intentional because she gets a passive that gives +50% to her critical rate as long as she's below half her max health. In other words, it's fairly easy to get the crit on the special skill with minimal issues. For Tsue, she has two roles to play: debuffer and damage support. Of course, she'll start by using her special skill that gives every character an extra action on the next turn. She'll lower the enemy's DEF and MDF with her first action, then attack with a weapon skill that increases the physical damage an enemy takes by 15% for the rest of the turn. For Outoku, she shows just how crazy the damage from element stacking can really get. She gets three passives from her skill tree to boost her Wind, Thunder, and Light damage by 20% for five turns at the start of the battle. Then, she'll equip the brands that grant Wind, Thunder, and Light elements to her Neutral attacks. That's easy enough, but what kind of attack will she use? Well, she has a very powerful Magical Neutral attack that starts out at 120 Power. To use it, she needs to have the Light element boost passive active, at minimum. However, if she has the two other element boost passives, the attack's Power is doubled per buff (only counting Wind and Thunder element boost passives and not Light), meaning the final base Power for the attack becomes 120 * 2 * 2 = 480 Power when all three passives are active. If we also factor the bonuses from element stacking, then the final result is this: Calculation: 480 * 1.2 * 1.2 * 1.2 = 829.44 Power With a weakness: 829.44 * 1.5 = 1244.16 Power !!! This is stronger than every special skill in the game, and it doesn't even suffer from any of the drawbacks! Usually, special skills are one-time use until you interact with a Transfer Sword, but this attack is spammable as long as you have the SP to offset its, granted, high cost. Finally, Outoku will use a skill that boosts her MAT stat by 15% instantly during the turn she chooses it, at the cost of increasing SP consumption by 30%. For Aroku, she's the second Magical DPS, but her role is simplified. All she needs to do is cast a special skill from the last Guardian's Soul Rope equipment to grant ATK+, MAT+, and AGI+ buffs on the entire party. Then, she'll use a 250 Power Neutral Magical attack twice to deal decent damage to the boss. She also has the 20% for Dark element attacks from the Guardian accessory and equips a brand to add Dark element to her attacks to reap the benefits. Also, all other party members aside from Nazuna have a certain armor equipped that eliminates enemy aggro. Essentially, this means Nazuna has an innate Incite buff from the start of the battle. This is useful on the second turn, since the boss will execute an single-target attack with splash damage on the second turn, and we want to prevent Outoku from dying to this attack. In the end, Magic has definitely proved itself to be the winner in terms of DPS this time, making a long-awaited comeback since Blight. It's interesting that both games let you stack a ton of buffs that uniquely benefit Magic; you can even get a pseudo-Joker build going with Tsue's special skill and weapon skills in this game with the multiple turns. Overall, it's pretty cool to see how the party members are in Thirst. Every single character is very good, and they feel as strong as the party in Colony altogether. P.S. The 600 Power Wind special skill from Outoku's skill tree is a trap skill. There's absolutely no reason to get this once you unlock the 120 Power Neutral Magical attack that stacks with the elemental buffs. This is really good for her because you can save 10 skill points by avoiding it and using them on other better skills.