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Ah, skill trees. What's an RPG without a skill tree? These days, they're everywhere, and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Star Ocean: The Divine Force is no exception. Thankfully, it's in-depth enough to fascinate, but not so complicated as to overwhelm. Even so, with multiple categories of learnable content, keeping track of everything can be a bit much.
Not to worry. 𝔉Our Star Ocean: The Divine Force Skill Tree Guide will clarify what it all means, as well as how it all clicks togethe🌊r, so that you can focus on spending that hard-earned SP and building a battle-ready party ready and able to save the galaxy.
Combat Skills
These are the bread and butter of Star Ocean: The Divine Force's battle system. It's imperative that you learn them, because they can make or break your success in fights. You do start off with a couple of winners, but they've got nothing on later-game unlocks. The speed at which you unlock many of the more powerful Combat Skills is entirely up to you, as the skill tree lets you chart your course as desired.
Simply having your characters learn a Combat Skill won't be enough to compel the one you control to actually use it, and even the AI for your party partners isn't fantastic in this regard. In our findings, other characters will tap into a multitude of their Combat Skills, but they seem prone to focus more on the ones you specifically assign them in the Combo Chain tab of the menu screen. (If your experience has been otherwise, do let us know — we're still testing.)
That brings us to the importance of setting up your Combo Chains. Not only does it impact the up to three fellow party members you'll have with you at any given time, but it's the system used in determining your own attacks. Use the trio of assignable face buttons (or keys/mouse buttons on PC, of course) to chain these together and your active combatant will string the Combat Skills they've learned as befits your lineup.
Active Skills
Yeah, we're sticking with Elena for all these screenshots. We just like the shape her skill tree makes, if we're being honest.
Combat Skills aren't the only thing you can assign to your Combo Chains. There are also items, which we suggest mapping to the 'Hold' keys as quick shortcuts for healing; more to the point of this guide, you can also add Active Skills. Star Ocean: The Divine Force isn't just about its offense; defense can prove just as vital, and Active Skills serve as buffs of varying sorts, as you can see above.
Knowing when, where, and why to deploy these can be critical to your success. Albaird, for example, has an Active Skill called 'Spring of Wisdom' that drains his Guts stat in favor of his Intelligencไe stat when triggered.
That's great when you need an extra kick of firepower through his Semiomantic spells, but if you're fighting a ton of smaller enemies and they gang up on him to an irksome degree, a reduction in Guts — a stat that strongly contributes to a character's odds of being inflicted with a debuff — may spell poor Albaird's doom.
Passive Skills
Passive Skills, as their name implies, are constantly in effect once equipped. But that's a pivotal caveat. You have three slots for Passive Skills in Star Ocean: The Divine Force. Unless you have equipped a Passive Skill, it will not be enabled. This is for the best to some extent. We spoke earlier about 'Spring of Wisdom', but Laeticia's 'Determined Princess' is another good example of the sort of trade-off skill that's fairly situational.
Unlike 'Spring of Wisdom', 'Determined Princess' is a Passive Skill. Laeticia's defenses are hindered significantly, while the amount of experience points the party gains after fights is amped up accordingly. This is a fantastic way to grind some levels out when combat encounters aren't especially difficult, but perhaps not the best idea in bigger battles.
Stat Skills
Technically speaking, this last category of skill tree unlocks doesn't have a name. Rather, you can identify what we're calling 'Stat Skills' by their sword, key, shield, forearm, and heart icons. Each of these pertains to a core stat.
- Sword Stat Skills elevate your character's Strength, necessary to increase the damage you inflict with physical strikes.
- Key Stat Skills increase your character's Intelligence, good for casting Semiomantic spells, be they offensive or defensive.
- Shield Stat Skills improve your character's Defense, mandatory for lowering the damage caused by enemy attacks.
- Forearm Stat Skills are for your character's Guts, which are vital to reducing the odds of debuffs, improving critical hit rate, and how well Semiomancy healing spells work on you.
- Heart Stat Skills concern your character's HP. The higher, the better; like most RPGs, when a character's health falls to zero, they are incapacitated.
In some ways, you can view Stat Skills as the roadblocks en route to more interesting stuff on the skill tree. But they really do pay off over time. A three percent hike in someone's HP isn't going to raise the roof with praise, but combined with all those other HP boosts on the skill tree, you're looking at quite the uptick by game's end.
We'd go as far as to say that, if you tap into Stat Skills as minimally as possible, your party's stats will be dwarfed relative to someone else's who hasn't avoided them. Some Star Ocean: The Divine Force foes, particularly later on, don't mess around with their attacks, and having an extra few hundred HP, or Defense, or Guts, will mean the difference between winning and losing. (Strength and Intelligence will hasten how quickly you bonk them on the head, of course.)
Resistance Skills
Last and possibly least, though still well worth investing in, are the eye-catchingly orange Resistance Skills. Each character's skill tree has them, though some seem to have more than others; this helps to differentiate their traits. As you can see, Elena has a good number of them.
Some Resistance Skills increase defense against elemental damage, such as the 'Wind Resistance Up' seen above. Others do the same thing, but against stat inflictions. A plus-ten on Wind Resistance isn't all that mighty on its own, but — you guessed it — it builds. Between the requisite skill tree nodes, and the equipment you've got them wearing, you could hypothetically grant them a 100 percent resistance to Wind, or any other element or debuff. Situational? Sure. But there will be situations.