CRYSTALGATE'S PROFILE

Once the game is released and I've beaten it, I think I'll make a new class guide. My current one is rather outdated.

Did the Shaman replace the Alchemist? I could have sworn there was once 9 classes.

The role reversal is definitely not complete. Soren is the one who wants to leave the village to become better while Antheia prefers to stay. A quick scan trough my memory says that it's typically male characters who dream about leaving and become stronger, while the female characters are more fond of simple staying and ends up leaving because of other circumstances, so in that aspect they don't derivate from the norm. It's good though since 100% role reversals are no more fun than 100% stereotypes.

Overall, I have a very good feel about these characters. There's small details about them that tells me you put a lot of thought into them (or you simple has a good sense for what makes a good character.)

If you want a skill to be 30% faster, the cost should be 70%, not -30%. By default, all skills have 100% cost, not 0%. -30% has no effect since the game considers that a bogus value. If it did work though, you would have gained infinite turns with that skill.

I think it's best I go trough CTB cost and CTB change since they have different systems.

CTB cost decides how long it takes for the user to act again after taking their action. 100% is the default. Anything higher means the skill is slower, anything lower means the skill is faster.

CTB change determines how the target's progression towards getting a turn is altered. The default is 0%. A positive value means the target will get it's turn earlier and a negative value means the target will get it's turn later.

In general: The first goal is to be able to two shot enemies. In some circumstances, you may be able to one shot them, but usually, you can't unless you're over-leveled. So, aim for two shotting them instead. Further, it's better to remove 60% of an enemy's lifebar and survive two attacks than to remove 90% of it's life, but only survive one attack. In both cases, you will need two attacks to kill it, but in the former scenario, you will survive longer. So, once you have enough attack to two shot enemies, it's better to increase your defenses than to further increase offense. Finally, it helps if you're faster than the enemy.

With a strong build, you're more or less safe against getting a game over from random encounters, but you can still have characters KO'ed. Spells are nasty if you aren't a Magus or Cleric and there are other unfortunate circumstances that allows enemies to KO even well-prepared characters.

Warrior: The Warrior has great defenses, good skills, but suffers a bit both in terms of attack and agility.

At the beginning, the only real way the Warrior has to increase agility is to equip a spear, so do that. This will bring attack down further since spear weapons are weaker than sword weapons, but you can take care of that problem by equipping two Offense Rings. The Warrior has high hitpoints and defense and doesn't need any defensive accessories. Further, it's Double Strike skill is cheap enough to be spammed, so use it instead of attacking if attacking isn't strong enough.

This gives you a character who's very fast, can two shot randoms and is very durable.

Once you get the Swift Shoes, you can give the Warrior a sword instead of spear and switch one Offense Ring for the Swift Shoes instead. Also, you may at some point steal an axe that's really powerful. If you do so, combine the axe with the Swift Shoes.

The First Aid skill is also great for healing early on. It has a set power though, so the healing will become less and less impressive as the game goes on. However, if you don't have a Cleric, First Aid is the cheapest after battle healing there is. Finally, use first aid if someone suffers from defense down, getting attacked with a defense down debuff will usually result in a KO.

Sharpen is useless against randoms and only useful against bosses if you're confident that the Warrior will be able to keep attacking. Counter Attack sounds like it would be great if you combine it with increasing the Warrior's agro, but counter attacking seems to crash the game whenever it kills something. Save first if you want to try it out.

The Warrior is flexible as is and currently doesn't need any sub class.

Rogue: The Rogue has a very high attack, it will two shot most randoms without aid of Offense Rings. If you give it a sub class, you want to give it two Shield Earrings. Without a sub class, it only needs one and you can use the other accessory slot for whatever. The Rogue is also fast and should go before enemies without further aid.

Against randoms, the Rogue's most common role is to attack and steal. For safety reasons, you may want to kill one enemy before you start stealing. However, the Rogue is very fast, it will probably be one of the first two characters to act, so it's first turn may already be used up once you kill an enemy. It's a risk vs reward decision whether you use it's first turn to steal or to attack. As a rule though, if you start running low on Angel's Tears, it's time for less stealing and more killing.

Don't bother with status effects on randoms.

Steal from bosses until you cleaned them out, a lot of them have multiple great items. Status effects can also be useful as long as the boss is vulnerable against it. You can try speed up, but remember that you use up a turn to cast it in order to gain turns. For it to really pay of, you need to stack two of them and then recast it as soon as it's about to wear of. If you don't feel like counting your turns, don't bother.

Gunner: The Gunner has some great skills, but it's attack is to low to two shoot randoms, even with two Offense Rings. You can try giving another character extra high offense so it and the Gunner can together two shot randoms, but that strategy is unreliable for various reasons. Ideally you want any combinations of two characters to be able to kill one enemy with one action each.

My solution is to make a Rogue/Gunner instead of a pure Gunner. Rogues have high attack, but almost all of it comes from equipment and the sub class penalty is based on the base value, so the Rogue takes almost no attack hit at all from getting a sub class. A sub classed Rogue has durability issues though, but two Shield Earrings more or less fixes that problem. Finally, having two characters who can steal is convenient for random encounters.

The Gunner should use Study Enemies on each enemy type once. I've experienced a bug that causes the scan to fail when it shouldn't, but try scanning until/unless you consistently fail. Critical Shot and Debilitating Shot is not worth it against randoms.

Bullet Time an expensive, but useful skill, as long as at least three enemies are left. It has accuracy issues and one enemy may very well be deal already when the Gunner's turn comes up though.

Silver Bullet's use is obvious.

Against bosses, the Gunner should first fire Debilitating Shots until it hits twice. This will greatly slow the boss down. Occasionally use a new Debilitating Shot to reset the duration. Next you may want to fire Critical Shot's to bring it's defense down as well. This will make the boss take slightly higher damage (defense down has a much lower impact on enemies than on characters) from physical attacks which isn't that great, but it will add up over multiple attacks.

Magus: The Magus is frail against physical attacks, but can easily two-shot randoms even without augmenting it's intellect with accessories, so two defensive accessories are recommended. The Magus is however almost immune against magic, so Shoulder Pads is better for it than Shield Earrings.

It's also easy to figure out what skill to use, just use whatever the enemy is weakest against. Human enemies however don't tend to have weaknesses, so the Magus is not very good against them.

Cleric: Don't use a pure Cleric, you lose way to much damage output that way. Use a Magus/Cleric or a Cleric/Magus instead. You can make an exception if all enemies in an area are weak against Crumble though. Either way, the Cleric want the same accessories as the Magus.

The Cleric heals and has some buffs that aren't very useful. Healing Light is however the only practically limitless source of full healing once First Aid starts to fall behind. It also saves money over throwing salves, but eventually (next update probably) the cost of salves becomes obsolete.

Generally, you want to use the offensive skills of the Magus unless you want to heal. That's all there is to this class right now.

Yeah, there's 72 class permutations (why did I call it combinations before?) so that's a lot of options.

In theory, the first Legionwood had far more options than that. In practice however, all options save a few were more or less intentionally gimping your character. For example, if you make a black mage, there's no practical reason whatsoever not to give the character healing magic as well. Concepts like black mage and white mage were therefore meaningless. So, this game may actually turn out to be more flexible in practice (although hardly all 72 permutations will be viable.) Sometimes less is more. It remains to see if the classes are properly balanced though.