Xenoblade Chronicles 2: that waifu that you do

Here’s a good chart

Uh, that looks helpful. What am I looking at?

-Tom

It’s all the Blade combos, laid out in two different ways.

On the left is how it appears in-game (grouped by the starting special). On the right is grouped by the end result that gets applied to the enemy.

It was in reply to the post above about viewing elemental chains.

I guess I’m confused because there aren’t four outcomes. Have I just been imagining all along that the opening attack can split one of two ways, each of which then splits one of two ways?

Also, I had no idea about the effects. Reinforcements? Stench? Self-destruct? What are all those? When was that stuff ever explained?

-Tom

Also which one of those triggers the power of friendship.

There aren’t always 4 options, Tom. Here’s an example from mere seconds ago. image

Fire has four outcomes, but the rest don’t. Fire is a pretty common special to start with for much of the early game so I guess you just notice four much more than you notice three for the other elements.

In-game they are actually all preceeded by ‘Seal’, as in ‘Seal Blowdown’. They stop the enemy from performing those moves. So ‘Seal Shackle Driver’ stops the enemy from using Shackle Driver on you. ‘Seal Reinforcements’ stops the enemy from summoning reinforcements.

I don’t recall if there’s particular mention of those anywhere or not, I think there may have been something when an enemy uses an effect like that on you? It was all so many hours ago… :)
(edit: one of the Info Items you get from Informants is about Sealing)

‘Seal Affinity Down’, obviously! ;)

Ah, right, I did know that. I knew something was sealed, but honestly, I couldn’t care less whether an enemy can cast, say, a shackle blade effect or affinity down debuff. But that chart made it look like it was stuff I could apply!

-Tom

Yeah, same. I got a good chuckle out of this.

This is super helpful. Thank you!

I dunno, there’s nothing worse than an enemy hitting you with a blowdown when you’re fighting precariously close to an edge! And the shackle abilities are annoying enough that I tend to try take those down too.

But yeah it’s mainly fumbling about trying to get whatever three different coloured orbs you can before hitting a chain attack. :)

Can someone explain chain attacks to me, christ.

I was fighting an enemy and below their health bar were three large orbs, wind, water, earth (in that order). I attacked with a wind blade and it did 1 damage to the water orb instead of the wind orb…

You want to attack with powers that are the OPPOSITE of the orbs.

So for electicity, you’d want to hit with earth, for wind, you’d want to hit with ice, etc.

You don’t need to, but it’ll do much more damage.

Ultimately, what you want is to destroy the orbs. If you destroy an orb, then you will get an additional round in the chain attack (all your guys will get to attack again). So if you destroy an orb every round, you can do insane amounts of damage in a multi-round chain attack.

Spit out my coffee a bit because of this one.

Oh woops, totally misremembered that tutorial bit thanks.

If you are fighting an enemy by steadily draining its health from 100-0% you are doing it wrong. For the first half of the fight you want to do elemental chains and vary up the last element. Each chain gives the enemy an orb matching the color of the last element in the chain.

When the enemy is somewhere from 40-50% health you press the start button with the goal of killing it with your chain attack, essentially bypassing the entire second half of the fight when most monsters are enraged. During a chain attack you want to break the orbs you’ve created by using attacks of the opposite element (elements are in pairs: water/fire, ice/wind, earth/elec, light/dark) to extend your chain.

Protip: instead of standing in place as Rex give the left control stick a slight nudge just after your auto attack hits. It will reset and attack again immediately. You’ll give up some of that extra damage from the auto attack chain but you will charge your arts much faster. This may only apply to the Pyra sword, not other blades.

Well then, apparently I’ve been making life more difficult than I needed to by not using chain attacks. I was using them a bit but apparently completely misunderstood them.

Thanks,

I haven’t gotten to the chain attack tutorial yet (I’m close) but even up to now it was clear that what you want to do is use every skill and combo possible to make as much damage as possible as fast as possible. It’s a little different than other JRPGs as there is often more waiting around even during active time battle systems previous to Xenoblade. This game wants you to get after it and not let up.

It’s like min-maxing only in real time and with character movement included.

Keep in mind, however, that using up all 3 blips of your bar on a chain attack that doesn’t actually finish the enemy may make you vulnerable to a party wipe if you’re fighting a tough opponent.

Ok, mom.