Xenoblade Chronicles 2

Utnayan said:

Holy shit thanks for this. I had NO idea that I could judge the level of the other abilities I see pop up with how many dots are in the circle.

So, in that example up above lets say I just start off with the dark ability from a party member. It fires up that screen on the upper right. Once I see it I want to seal Reinforcements. So in this instance I either need to wait for a level 2 dark special from a party member, or I can switch to a blade with a dark energy special and wait until it has "II" to the right, then hit that button, and it will chain to level 3. I then can either wait for a level 3 party of dark energy, or wait until I get level 3 on my own dark energy special. With that said though, in that instance above, once the timer runs out, the window vanishes correct?

Basically I just need to switch blades based on what I want to seal. So Do the seals Stack? Meaning if I stack 2, and fire off a chain attack, will I get 3 chain attacks in a row?

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Yep, what you have there will work.

Orbs will stack; you will see them visually circling an enemy. And yeah, during a Chain attack if you keep bursting orbs you can keep the round going. Btw orbs have 3 "health"; an attack that is strong against an element(say Using a Fire attack against a Water orb) counts as 2 "damage"; any other attack will do 1 damage. Once you do 3 damage to an orb it will burst and you will get another chance at doing another round of attacks if you hit the QTE.

Some of the later bosses, including the last boss plus post-game bosses, require doing a chain attack with 3-5+ orbs. Which means lots of switching blades, and having good setups.

They require it because they have crazy enrage abilities once they get lower life so you need to chain attack kill them in one go before they get there.

you can get one of the aux cores (blade gem equip) that is an "orb ender" which can break an orb in 1 hit for the opposite element. Smashing 4-5 orbs will trigger a "full break" that is mega damage (millions).

keep in mind only 1 "seal" effect is in play at a time, just whatever the last elemental combo you did was.

when you swap blades you keep your "stacks" of affinity, so I like to build on Rex's main blade and then swap out to his other blades for the combo and then swap back to his main blade to finish.

ideally you want your party to have at least 6+ elements available, with 8 being the best but can be harder to pull off given some of the mandatory blades you have to equip and what you have bonded.

Im not sure what they ar officially called but affinity stacks is what i call them. Thats the little white orbs that circle yours and the other 2 portraits. You get them by landing abilities and properly pressing the b button right as the attack lands to get that extra blue circle to show up

It can be seen as roman numerals on the right (3 oclock) little square in the bottom left corner. This constitutes the orbs around your portrait. You need at least 1 to start an element combo, but you could have 3 stacks and still start the combo (it will be just a higher damage / version) of the rank 1.

Each blade has special names for their rank 1,2 and 3 specials. These are often needed to be done X times to unlock on the blade affinity page. For Pyra you can do her rank 3 special to start off a combo as long as you have ranked up your affinity to 3. The blades will often say the name of what they are doing to help you out, or in the blade info page you can cycle through each blade by pressing r1 and get to the page that shows their rank 1, 2 and 3 specials names

Some blades with slower weapons (ie zenobia) or blades you dont have weapon skills leveled up for can take a while to build up the affinity stacks cause the abilities dont cycle as often or have longer cooldowns so its often faster to switch back to mythra and build on her and then switch to the blade you need on rex for the nexr element in the combo as opposted to staying on the other blade the entire time. Mythras Recharge passive, when it triggers, can literally put you at rank 2-3 in a few seconds.

The orbs spinning around just correlate with the arte level in the bottom right - it's just the easiest way they could show you your team mates arte level since it's not visible to you during battle otherwise. There is a 4th level but that doesn't matter for the combos.

The arte/skill combos have 3 levels, and you need at least the same level arte for each step - but you could use a level 4 arte to move the combo from level 2 to 3.

yup once you understand the combat its pretty fun and your damage gets really really high

until you figure out the combat system its really hard to take on enemies the same level as you, once you get that down pat then taking on something 20-30 levels higher isn't horrible with proper planning and gear choices. Monolith is notorious for the crappy explanations though, I'm not sure if they don't know a majority of their customers don't grasp it right away (compared to other games its not a standard concept) or if they think its fun to uncover it on your own...either way the game gets way better when you don't have to slug your way through trash fights for 5+ mins.

when I played Xenoblade Chronicles 1 I had no idea there was a chain attack until I was really far in the game I don't know what I missed about it, but I made it most of the way without it.

the nice thing about the combat system in XC2 is, once you figure it out it makes sense and is pretty easy to remember, its logical when you know its there. Getting to that leap of faith might be pretty tedious but once you understand whats going on and how you can control it, its really fun and keeps you involved enough. I am sure there are combat systems that I might have liked better, but I don't think I was more comfortable with any of them when compared to this one in XC2 at the end of the game. The amount of control and customization you can get with it is pretty nice between blades / roles / accessories / aux cores / elements / driver abilities.

but people are 100% correct, they don't go into too much depth about how the combat system works, and it would probably be better off if they did. The sheer amount of information that the screen displays (I think the UI is very good considering all they have on there) is crazy, they just have very little information telling you what it all is.

Combat didn't really click for me until the fight at the end of chapter 3. But that was mostly because stuff died pretty fast before then plus not having access to the break/topple/launch stuff yet.

Omayga said:

ideally you want your party to have at least 6+ elements available, with 8 being the best but can be harder to pull off given some of the mandatory blades you have to equip and what you have bonded.

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Pyra and Poppi are really the only mandatory blades after a certain point.

yup, just have to move them out of the top slot on their driver to pull them

I was able to get trust ranks up past S on a few of the main blades, Pyra got to like S3 by the time I was done cause she was never out of the lineup. A few of the other main blades got to S2. Not sure how deep the rabbit hole goes on that but it took a lot of time inbetween.

This is my main complaint with the game, is the battle system is so piss poorly explained. Primarily because they throw all the information to you while you are in a big battle and you are just trying to survive and you can't go back and review. The above just helped me understand it even more as that was the lone thing I couldn't understand: the list to the right of the mob health bar. Only other issue I have, is with battles taking so long, and some of them having called adds come in and join, the lack of a pause feature in battle really chaps my ass. Although my friend said to simply hit the home button, and that may be what they had in mind when they designed it.

So I picked this up a few weeks ago due after some consideration because I love my Switch's portability so much (Also ran out of stuff to do in Mario Odyssey after ~40 hours). I was hoping to get some questions answered here. I have only ever played final fantasy games as far as JRPG's go, and holy shit this seems way more complicated to me than final fantasy. My old ass mind can barely keep up with all of the noises, flashes, numbers, and buttons popping up on the screen. It's really quite comical. I do love the game though, even though I feel that some of it is way too over my head. Anyways, a few preliminary questions (I'm about 13 hours in, on chapter 3 so far).

1. So I enjoy grinding in these games, and generally do ok on that front, however it seems that mobs just randomly 'add' onto an encounter that I'm in the middle of. And the adds are usually 2-3 levels above my party and thus can really ruin an encounter for me. I'll be plugging away at an even level group of mobs, pretty much staying even with them, and then all of a sudden some huge ass bird will come out of nowhere and eventually overwhelm and kill my party. Is there any way to prevent adds? Should I be using the stone throw 'pulling' to get mobs off to the side of the map before killing them? Also is there a way to run away or is that not possible? My guy runs super slow with his blade out.

2. Is there a way to tell if a mob is going to aggro you or not when you run past them? I swear that some times they will aggro me whereas sometimes I can run right next to them and they won't.

3. I currently have Nia and the fat furry guy with the robot blade in my party. Nia is the only one that can have multiple drivers (currently locked at 2 but I see there eventually will be 3 slots total). Do your party member's blades automatically switch, etc. to build up their arts and blade special attack? From Rex's, I switch between pyra and my 2nd blade when stuff is on cooldown or to get a different blade element combo, but I wanted to know if my party will do the same (like I said this is Nia only at the moment because the furry guy only has robot blade only)

that's all I can think of for now, thanks for the help for this JRPG noob.

If it looks like it eats meat it will agro

If it looks like it eats plants it probably wont

If you are about 9ish levels higher than something that is a trash mob it wont agro on you at all with 2 exceptions: All the named "tyrants" will auto-agro at any level, and "storey / quest encounters will auto-agro at any level

Its a ton of info early on but once you get used to it the disply is actually really good, they do a poor job of explaining what all the stuff is thats being shown on the display but once you figure it out its really smooth.