Party Construction
No matter how many great adventurers you have, whether they are the absolute best Legendary adventurers or your favorite General (or Anonymous) adventurers, you will struggle through content if your party isn't cohesive. Success in this game, like many RPGs, comes down to how successful your party is as a whole. Throwing a party together of your favorite Legendary adventurers alone is not a guarantee that you will be able to clear all content. A party of 6 Fighters, for example, is going to struggle with survival in a dungeon, while a party of 6 Priests is going to struggle killing things quickly.
TheAxolotl's Approach
There's not a single "best" way to build a party, and there are many factors that can contribute to how someone approaches it, ranging from the available adventurers in your roster to how you've inherited skills to your adventurers. Three of the biggest things I consider when building a party are Role Compression, Role Mastery, and Turn Economy. What do I mean by these? Well, I'm glad you asked - before I get into those, though, I'll cover the main roles within my parties.
Party Roles
Damage Dealers
This one is pretty obvious, but these are the adventurers that let you kill things. Fighters, Ninjas, Samurai, and conditionally Mages are the big contributors here.
Support/Utility
These are the adventurers that provide utility to help control the flow of battle, reduce incoming damage, increase outgoing damage, and provide additional utility through passive or active effects and damage boosts. Almost every class has some supportive element, with the main exception being Samurai, which is a completely selfish class. While it does have some self-preservation elements, nothing in the Samurai kit provides support in some way to other adventurers.
Healing
Also self-explanatory. You need to live through fights! I consider this more as a subset of Support/Utility. You won't always need to heal every turn, but you will always need to heal at some point. Priests are the main one here, although other classes might have some self-restoration elements to lessen the burden on the priests.
Role Compression
Simply put, this is how many different roles a single adventurer can fill effectively within a party. The key word here is effectively. Out of our standard Legendary pool, Lanavaille probably has the single best role compression out of any legendary in this game. Through her Fighter class, she can be a primary Damage Dealer, gain some Support/Utility functionality through her Knight class and her passive damage boost, and provide some post-battle healing through her passive. This combination easily makes her one of the best adventurers you can run for a large majority of teams and throughout all content.
Other more generic examples of this could be class combinations such as Fighter/Priest, Mage/Priest, Ninja/Thief, and even Fighter/Mage. These class combinations are focused around providing additional supportive functionality to the primary class through the secondary class.
Role Mastery
Unlike Role Compression, this one is focused on excelling in one role and not worrying about doing other things. Samurai, Fighter/Thief, Ninja/Thief, and Priest/Mage are big examples of this. Samurai does one thing and that's be a powerhouse single target damage dealer. While there is some element of role compression with Fighter/Thief and Priest/Mage, these class combinations are more geared toward improving the ability to perform a single role (Fighter/Thief boosts Fighter damage, Ninja/Thief boosts Ninja damage, while Priest/Mage boosts Priests support). You might have also noticed that a couple of these class combinations appear in both the Role Compression and Role Mastery groupings. This makes those class combinations especially powerful since it provides utility while also increasing primary role capabilities.
Turn Economy
This one is a bit more complex. Turn Economy is essentially a way of evaluating the value of an action taken during a turn. For example, a non-Alice priest has buffs that last for 3 turns, while Alice, due to her inheritable passive, has buffs that last for 4 turns at skill level 1. This gives Alice better Turn Economy than other priests since she can ultimately take more actions before having to reapply her buffs. It's also what makes her inheritable skill so strong - inheriting her skill to any adventurer with a buff or debuff will extend that duration by 1, giving the target adventurer better overall Turn Economy.
Similarly, one of the big reasons Full-Power Strike is such a good attack is because of its efficiency and its turn economy. For example, you can have a Fighter use FPS on the first turn and have two turns of buffs be applied to that Fighter by a faster Priest before the FPS attack actually happens. This means you don't have to wait a turn for your Fighter to be fully buffed before attacking. Similarly, if you get hit by the Gatekeeper's Roar, you can have the Fighter use FPS while they're in the back row, then have the adventurer in front of them swap positions before the Fighter actually attacks.
Party Formation
With these concepts in mind, how do you use them to make a powerful party? Again, there's no one way to go about this, but I generally aim to have every party I run contain the following:
- 1-2 Primary Damage Dealers
- 2-3 Secondary Damage Dealers
- 2-3 Support/Utility
- 1-2 Healers
Without any Role Compression, you'd need 6-10 adventurers to have all that covered, but including Role Compression allows us to reach the higher end of those counts.
Synergies
Synergy skills are passive bonuses that apply while in combat, and are generally focused on providing boosts to adventurers of a particular personality or type in a specific position within your party. These are important elements to consider when deciding which adventurers to use. Unfortunately, the effectiveness is difficult to measure due to the inability to see stat values in combat.
| Adventurer | Condition |
|---|---|
| Alice | All Evil/Neutral in same row, regardless of position |
| Elise | Self and Neutral ally if the Neutral ally is in front/behind her |
| Lanavaille | All Good/Neutral in same row, regardless of position |
| Milana | Self and Evil ally if the Evil Ally is in front/behind her |
| Adventurer | Condition |
|---|---|
| Alex | If between 2 Fire, boost damage to Air enemies for Self and Adjacent Allies |
| Flut | If between 2 Water, boost damage to Fire enemies for Self and Adjacent Allies |
| Jarmil | If between 2 Air, boost damage to Earth enemies for Self and Adjacent Allies |
| Jean | If between 2 Earth, boost damage to Water enemies for Self and Adjacent Allies |
| Adventurer | Condition |
|---|---|
| Rinne | Increases Surety for Self and all Adjacent Evil Allies |
| Arboris | Increases Evasion and Action Speed for user and all adjacent evil and neutral allies |
| Adventurer | Condition |
|---|---|
| Asha | Increases Tolerance of Poison, Paralysis and Stone for Self and Adjacent Good Allies |
| Clarissa | Increases Tolerance of Confusion, Charm and Fear for Self and Adjacent Neutral Allies |
| Eldorado | Increases Tolerance of Sleep and Stun for Self and Adjacent Good Allies |
| Galina | Increases Tolerance of Critical, and Insta-Kill for Self and Adjacent Evil Allies |
| Olive | Increases Tolerance of Curse, Skill-Binding and Fear for Self and Adjacent Good Allies |
| Red Beard | Increases Tolerance of Insta-Kill, Skill-Binding and Spell-binding for Self and Adjacent Dark Allies |
| Adventurer | Condition |
|---|---|
| Amelia | Reduces Air-Type damage to Beastfolk in same row |
| Bakesh | Reduces Earth-Type damage to Dwarves in same row |
| Daniel | Reduces Water-Type damage to Humans in the same row |
| Elda | Reduces Dark-Type damage to Elves in same row |
| Emil | Reduces Light-Type damage to Elves in same row |
| Eulalia | Reduces Fire-Type damage to Elves in same row |
Sample Parties
These are some parties I have personally and successfully used to clear progression content within the game:
First Clear of The Beginning Abyss and First Melgina and Octo Kills
- Front Row
- Lanavaille (Knight)
- MC (Wanderer, Fighter)
- Debra (Thief)
- Back Row
- Adam (Mage)
- Yekaterina (Mage)
- Alice (Priest)
Additional Octo Kills
- Front Row
- Lanavaille (Knight)
- Debra (Thief)
- MC (Fighter, Thief)
- Back Row
- Alice (Mage/Priest)
- Yekaterina (Mage/Priest)
- Elise (Fighter)
First Several Gatekeeper Kills
-
Party 1
- Front Row
- Lanavaille (Fighter/Knight)
- MC (Fighter)
- Abenius (Fighter/Priest)
- Back Row
- Alice (Priest/Mage)
- Elise (Fighter)
- Rinne (Ninja)
- Front Row
-
Party 2
- Front Row
- Lanavaille (Fighter/Knight)
- MC (Fighter)
- Abenius (Fighter/Priest)
- Back Row
- Alice (Priest/Mage)
- Yekaterina (Priest/Mage)
- Rinne (Ninja)
- Front Row
-
Party 3
- Front Row
- Lanavaille (Fighter/Knight)
- MC (Knight)
- Abenius (Fighter/Priest)
- Back Row:
- Alice (Priest/Mage)
- Rinne (Ninja)
- Shelirionach (Mage)
- Front Row
-
Party 4
- Front Row
- Lanavaille (Fighter/Knight)
- MC (Priest)
- Debra (Knight/Thief)
- Back Row
- Alice (Priest/Mage)
- Rinne (Ninja)
- Shelirionach (Mage)
- Front Row
Current Party as of Samurai Release
- Front Row
- Lanavaille (Fighter/Knight)
- MC (Ninja)
- Shiou (Samurai)
- Back Row
- Alice (Priest/Mage)
- Rinne (Ninja/Thief)
- Shelirionach (Mage)
Additional Considerations
Now that you've decided on your party formation, there are two other major components. Equipment and Skill Inheritance.
Equipment
As with many things in this game, there's no right or wrong way to approach your equipment, but there are some things to keep in mind:
- At lower attack power levels, 2h weapons can often lead to higher damage than multi-hit weapons due to having an easier time overcoming enemy defense.
- At higher attack power levels, multi-hit weapons will likely deal more damage than single hit weapons.
- There is very little benefit to Heavy Armor - the defense increase over Light Armor is often not worth the penalties to Accuracy and Action Speed that you'll see. There are a few exceptions, of course.
Regarding weapon types, some people will avoid specific types. I generally don't recommend this. Instead, I recommend folks use the best equipment they have regardless of type, as for the majority of players, the actual in-combat difference when solely looking at weapon type or armor type will be pretty small. For more on weapon types, check out the Weapon Types page
Regarding blessings, some folks like to prioritize Evasion to certain levels. Again, I'm not one of those. For any physical damage dealers, my priority is almost always Surety > Attack Power > Accuracy > Action Speed > Anything Else. For magical damage dealers, I tend to prioritize Magic Power > Action Speed > Surety > Anything Else. For pure support, I prioritize Action Speed > Anything Else. Regarding the Action Speed priority, I don't worry so much about my party always going before enemies - I'm much more concerned with making sure my party members go in a specific turn order relative to each other.
When it comes to flat blessings vs percentage blessings, there's some nuanced math to this, but use whichever you get - flat tends to be slightly better through level 60, but you'll rarely be in a situation where you have to choose between the two unless you're farming a ton of equipment.
Skill Inheritance
Skill Inheritance is an extremely powerful way to supplement your strongest or favorite adventurers with additional functionality, and making the right choices here can turn a good party into a great party. Below are a few very notable inheritance choices you can make. Note that these are not comprehensive - there are many other options out there!
- Inheriting Debra to any physical damage dealer can greatly improve their longevity within a dungeon
- Inheriting Alice to ANY adventurer that has a party or self buff can greatly improve turn economy
- Inheriting Adam to physical damage dealers with elemental type weapons or skills will prevent their attacks from seeing reduced damage in unfavorable match-ups
- Inheriting Counterattack and Follow-Up Attack can help provide additional damage to physical damage dealers when they use basic attacks. For ninjas, it can provide additional attacks which leads to more chances to get criticals
- Inheriting various passive skills of one class to other adventurers of a different class can help provide some additional survivability to classes that don't normally get those skills
For a comprehensive list of skills, their descriptions, and who to inherit them from, check out the Skills page.