this document was originally written in somewhat broken markdown, and there's some conversion things we need to work out.

there's so many cool things we can do for presentation in this document now that we have access to CSS!

we cannot stop thinking about gwin doing the thumbs up emote when winning overdrive

until we make this document more accessible to navigate, here's some shortcuts to the most complete sections.

weapons shortcut

characters shortcut

things we would change

we've on;ly just realised (may 23 2022) that we've been reading fyre's name incorrectly this entire time (along with several other side characters!). we think this is cute and are gonna keep doing it.

stats

• potential manages TP art attack, healing amount

arts

• red are melee attack arts
• yellow are ranged attack arts
• green are buff arts
• purple are debuff arts
• blue are auras; very special buffs (only one aura can be active at a time)

arts are effectively "moves" in Xenoblade. they are actions we can use to do stuff! Arts have a cooldown, which is a period of time we need to wait for an art to charge before we can use it. Between arts, character will automatically do low damage attacks, and these attacks increase tension points; they're called auto attacks!

arts that you can choose from are based on your levels and ranks and the weapon you are carrying. Higher class ranks unlock more arts, and what can be learned and used is based on your equipped weapon type.

Every art can have a second and third cooldown, and these will increase some effectiveness. This is often damage up, or duration up, or you can use the art immediately afterwards instead of waiting for cooldown. These 2nd and 3rd cooldowns take less time than regular cooldowns.

Attacking arts have a scaling number listed as a percent. these are how much your attack stat is multiplied for the art's attack(s). most yellow and red arts use your range and melee attack stats respectively, unless they have "TP" on their icon, in which case their damage is based on the potential stat.

TP arts, including auras and buffs, all cost 1000 tension to use. by default, you can carry a maximum of 3000 tension at once.

Arts can be leveled up using battle points, and doing this will reduce its cooldown time, and, for most arts, improve the potency of its special effects and increase the damage scaling. Weapons section goes over how to get these points!

Overdrive

Overdrive is a special type of powered up state that every player character has access to. It can be activated with 3000 tension, and, once activated, overlays a counter over the activation icon, and gives you unique buffs.

The overdrive counter iterates by 1 every time an art's hit(s) land. The strength of Overdrive's buffs increases with overdrive count, and so does overdrive duration. By default, overdrive lasts for 10 seconds; this time can be refreshed, and increased, by activating overdrive again, during overdrive. This means we need to be able to get 3000 more tension in those ten seconds to keep the rhythmn going!

Overdrive reduces player art cooldowns and enemy resistances (find out if attribute res and/or status res), in addition to increasing damage. A lot of the game is designed around overdrive, and using it can feel awesome! It is okay if overdrive is overwhelming! whenever we feel like we want to know more or refresh our knowledge about something, we find looking at the included manual (on the HOME screen), youtube videos, and the wiki very very helpful (in that order; youtube videos are the most introductory resource and comprehensive and accesible resources)! We also think that, sticking to a few weapons and arts and then only adjusting your build slightly is good when you're first learning overdrive, since you know where all your arts are and what they do by heart, and can focus your energy on overdriving!

we likee calling overdrive a super or ex meter from a fighting game. we think its neat that the super meter in guilty gear is called tension and the supers are called overdrives, and they are represented with gear icons, and this is all true for xenoblade x as well.

colour stuff

green art -> red/yellow art = double the overdrive count per hit
purple art -> purple = TP bonus
green and blue arts increase overdrive duration.

Statuses

buffs

• Barrier creates a barrier that absorbs damage (similar to subsitute in pokémon)
• Supercharge doubles next hit damage
• Decoy gurantees a certain number of evades
• Critical Power doubles damage of crits
• Effect Stasis pauses the effect timer on buffs to make them last longer

battle probe

• All Attributes res up increeases res for all attributes
• Skell fuel recovery constantly recovers fuel
• Skell fuel recovery boosts the speed of parked fuel recovery

debuffs

• Control makes an enemy an ally
• Taunt is forced aggro
• Blackout reduces accuracy and evasion, and lowers ranged damage
• Virus blocks ranged weapon usage
• Fatigue lowers melee attack
• Blaze is thermal DoT
• Shock is electric DoT

movement

• stagger is break (does it interupt annimation?)
• topple is topple
• knockback pushes someone back (does it interupt annimation?)
• launch sends character flying away
• flinch stops all actions for some time
• Stun stops an enemy from doing anything. (the manual calls this "fainting," which is accurate, but somewhat confusing.)

Weapons and classes

Weapons in xenoblade x determine what arts you can use, similar to xenoblade 2. a major difference is that weapons belong to classes, two weapons per class. initially, classes determine what weapons you can use, and the arts and skills you can learn.

after mastering a class, which is done by fully ranking up the highest tier of the class, you can use the weapons that belong to it in any other class. In contrast, skills are class agnostic in all contexts, and can be used in any class as long as they have been learned.

sections

let's colour code the weapons and give them icons next to the links.

• duelist (longsword, assault rifle)
• full metal jaguar (dual swords, dual guns)
• bastion warrior (shield, gatling gun)
• astral crusader (javelin, sniper rifle)
• mastermind (knife, raygun)
• galactic knight (photon saber, psycho launchers)

leveling up arts and skills

arts and skills can be strenghtened by levelling them up, through battle points. levelled up skills and arts have stronger effects, lower cooldowns (arts only!), and cap at level 5.

battle points can be obtained from exploration and getting stronger:

• discoverying base camp (BC) landmarks
• doing field skills to get items
• registering all items in a specific category, and registering special items in the collectopedia

battle points are very precious resource, since they can make effective stats significantly higher, or give you enough time to use a strategy otherwise not possible, via level ups. playing the game normally, both online or offline, will give you and your party members a comfortable amount of battle points naturally for at least one class.

battle points are also a huge power limiter when you want to make a new build (end game is designed around higher level arts specifically). it is really hard to test new things when you aren't strong enough, and most of the renewable sources of battle points are not fun for us!!

we recommend doing squad missions as much as possible if available, because of battle points.

important information for the reader

Classes in xenoblade x are somewhat branching, and we found it difficult to properly communicate this in this document, since we prioritised displaying weapon information rather than class information.

The subheadings display the final weapon tiers that weapon pairs belong to, and within them we try to share where certain skills and arts are learned. this is messy for displaying things that are learned in classes preceding a branch in the class tree!

we didnt consider this when writing most of this section, and the current state of the document doesn't display things learned in the fork classes consistently.

Classes also provide stat bonuses when equipped, which are displayed in the menu. we haven't been able to locate anything that says the specific values they alter stats by, and do not have the means to investigate for ourselves.

Learned locations are displayed as, either of:

• (class, rank number)
• (signature art, character)

Duelist

Incredibly strong offensive class. It has the least skill slots of any other class in the game. It is almost purely dedicated to attacking, and has some arts with the highest attack ratios of all weapons. bonuses to hp and melee attack.

longsword

this is one of the most accessible weapons in the game. it focuses on having real high melee damage output, and can be used to help gain TP.

• Ultraslash is a backstab damage up art (signature art, gwin). it is very useful very early in the game!
• rising blade has okay damage and an incredibly short cooldown, very useful outside of overdrive for DPS (striker 1)
• Incendiary Edge is a thermal TP art with good damage (duelist 1)
• Tornado Blade increases TP during an aura (striker 4)

• True Stream Edge has higher damage than tornado blade, and is in a way a mastered version of it, instead relying on morale (1 morale bar needed, doesn't stack like decoy round) (signature art, nagi). both are AOE.

• auras

  • Offensive Stance increases melee attack and accuracy, and increases damage taken. dangerous, and strong!
  • Defensive Stance reduces damage taken, restores HP overtime slightly, and reduces melee attack. still good for ranged and potential offense!
  • Samurai Soul is interesting. AOE to melee auto attacks, and boosts their damage when you take damage. most importantly, it reduces secondary CD.

• Blossom Dance is a strong TP art (signature art, nagi)

  1. Guard annul (not good when enemy is weak to weapon attribute)
  2. Six hits
  3. Stagger on every hit
  4. 700% ratio.

assault rifle

the assault rifle has access to more support arts than the longsword, and, especially early on, helps provide some flexibility in tough situation.
it has the best topple art in the game.

• debuff arts
  • Infuriate is useful early on to grab aggro for rising blade damage bonus! (Drifter, 6)
  • flash grenade inclifts blackout (samurai gunner 3)
  • Decoy round forces aggro and gives you 300 tension multipled by morale level (samurai gunner 2)
  • assault breaker is a red art that inflicts stun on backstab (samurai gunner 6)
• Medic free is a survival aura like Jaws of Death and Last Stand, while also having debuff res up (samurai gunner 4)
• Furious Blast is a low damage 15 hit art that does much more damage in melee comboes and has TP bonuses on 2nd and 3rd CD. Incredibly good at TP building, run this with secondary CD reducer. also very good at overdrive count. somewhat long animation (Striker 6)

• Overclock is a survival aura that restores HP when using arts. It can also be good for adventuring, since it boosts fuel recovery of parked skells (signature art, Alexa)

the most important arts to assault rifle are burst grenade, gunforce, decoy round, assault hammer, and quick cannon.

support

• Decoy round builds tension
• Gunforce is an aura that increases crit chance and ranged attack, and reduces secondary CD (Duelist 2). decoy round has immediate reuse 2nd CD
• Power Dive grants supercharge and full evasion during the annimation. (striker 3) most attacking arts are multi hits with indivdually weak damage, so supercharge is not often used. for assault rifles, however...
• Assault hammer is the first art in the game. it forces topple, has immediate reuse, and a quick annimation. Long cooldown.

damage

• burst grenade is a single hit thermal damage with a gigantic 1350 ratio at level 5, and 300% bonus when enemies are toppled. TP art, inflicts Blaze (samurai gunner 1)
• Quick Cannon is a single hit thermal attack with a gigantic 1400 ratio at level 5, and does 150% more when in a melee combo. This is a rare high damage art that does not use potential stat for damage, inflicts Blaze (signature art)

skills

• flame trigger increases Blaze damage (striker 5)

full metal jaguar

full metal jaguar is incredibly good at managing TP, and it likes criticals and high potential, and long, infinite overdrives. it is very useful early game when you don't have access to many arts or skill, and when you first get overdrive!

it is themed after bloodlust and assassination, and has several of the most useful arts in the game, especially Dual Guns. The weapons and skills available can be combined well with almost anything!

dual swords

dual swords are support weapons with some strong damage output. they like staying behind the enemy and taking advantage of backstab benefits. it also has several arts designed around low HP!

• high tp damage arts
  • hundred shells is a ton of hits with backstab damage up (full metal jaguar, 8)
  • stream edge is good in ranged comboes. multi hit with good scaling (commando, 2)
• has access to several strong auras
  • Shadowrunner increases potential. when used from behind, disables enemy aggro (HUGE) and boosts backstab damage.
  • Killing Machine also increases potential, in addittion to melee attack and accuracy (winged viper 6)
  • Crisis Zone is an interesting self damage aura (signature art, Phog)
  • Thirsty Edge is the counterpart to crisis zone, restores HP when using Melee Attacks. We dont think this is interesting. (winged viper 2)
• Blood Sac halves hp for 1000 tp (winged viper 4)
• Seventh Edge increases TP in ranged comboes (signature art, murderess)
• Side Slash is a strong fatigue art with immediate reuse (winged viper 1)

dual guns

tons and tons of broken arts. this is probably the weapon we will need our notes the least for lol.
it can be easy to become reliant on dual guns because of how many amazing and build defining arts it has. This is okay! making builds is hard and takes a lot of time and a lot of mental energy, during the actual build process, and testing/practice phases!

• good at tp building
  • primer is eternal; it does crit chance up, +200tp, and has immediate reuse on 2nd and 3rd CD (winged viper 8)
  • sliding slinger increases tp per hit from the side, bonuses for secondary and tertiary CD (commando 2)
• amazing buff arts
  • ghostwalker is the only decoy art in the game (full metal jaguar 2) (with exception to Ghost Factory, a AoE version that costs tension)
  • combat limbo does effect stasis, good for aura based builds (full metal jaguar 6)
  • early bird auras raise crit tier (commando 1)
• zero zero is a 10 hits and high damage (signature art, celica). synergises well with green melee arts like blood sac
• sky high is a high damage ascending art (signature art, phog)
• executioner is a high hitting TP art with good damage, higher if it is used in a ranged combo (do it after zero zero!).
• upper hand buff raises critical power tier

skills

full metal jaguar skills focus mostly on ranged attacks, overdrive, and critical hits.

• gun skills
  • steady hand increases ranged accuracy (commando 3)
  • boosted bullets increases ranged attack (commando 4)
  • combo gunner boosts damage in ranged comboes (commando 7)
  • third eye boosts tp when using a ranged art, 2x when aura active (commando 8)
  • trigger happy reduces art cooldown in ranged comboes (winged viper 5)
• tp and overdrive skills
  • Mindscape increases max TP (winged viper 9) useful early game!
  • Hellhound extends overdrive (winged viper 10)
  • Red Zone boosts crit chance in overdrive (Full metal jaguar 5)
  • Phantom Counter is overdrive count up (full metal jaguar 10)
• aura extender is simialar to combat limbo, but weapon agnostic and weaker(?), and costs a skill slot instead of a art slot.

bastion warrior

this class is designed around support, and is a tanky class with high damage output.
it topples and manages TP well with Wild Down and Cool Off, and likes to inflict taunt and build TP with the AOE Trash Talk.
Has some affinity towards thermal attribute.

gatling guns

gatling guns have high ammo. combined with ranged tp gain up and magazine capacity up, its auto attack becomes formidably good at building tp, even on guns without super high default clip sizes. Broadly optimal in auto attack based builds for the same reason.

• lots of strong multi hits

  • thermal payload is a strong art (bastion warrior 4)
  • hellfire is better executioner (bastion warrior 1)
  • missile volley, thermal art, inflicts thermal res down (shield trooper 1)

  • fire carnival (signature art, Lin)

  • very good at TP building and staying alive

  • titan recharge is an aura that negates reflect, reduces secondary CD. When it expires, it heals a TON of HP (signature art, fyre)
  • cool off removes debuffs, and eats auras. refils 2000TP when at level 5. it's fucking sick. (bastion warrior 7) synergises incredibly well with titan recharge.
  • bullet storm is twelve hits, secondary CD makes each hit +25TP, tertiary +50 (shield trooper 7)
  • bullet twister is AOE 8 hits, increases TP by 60 at level 5 per hit when an aura is active (signature art, fyre)

shield

Standing still while holding a shield can be incredibly powerful with its dedicated defensive skills. The arts synergise well with this use case: lots of passive damage and support. very fun weapon

• very good at support

  • mindstorm: good healing art, grants potential up, all allies. (signature art, L)
  • trash talk: AOE version of decoy round
  • reality rift: slow arts debuff art
  • wild down: tp topple art

• wall

  • Shield Wall (so true) barrier AOE buff (bastion warrior 2)
  • Super Shield has physical reflect, as well as reducing damage taken, nullifies stun. Love taking this one online against plume and ygg zero! (Bastion warrior 8)
  • Iron prison aura does physical res up and starts a prox spike (shield trooper 3)
  • there a counter spike aura too but we cant remember lol
• Bombardier is pronounced differently from the train brand. thermal jumping attack that inflicts blaze! (bastion warrior 6)
• high damage
  • highest damage of all melee weapons by default
  • Drum Roll is a strong multi hitting TP art (signature art, Lin)
  • Atomic hit is a strong single hit appendage art (signature art, HB)

skills

very defensive, toppling, and wall focused. Several are shield specific, some DoT stuff. - wall - Thermal Shield increases thermal res when wielding a melee weapon (Shield Trooper 2) - Rising Renewal boosts hp recovery when being revived (Shield Trooper 5) - Shield Screen reduces damage when holding a shield. Up to 30% at level 5 (shield trooper 4) - Stand strong increase res to driver combo status debuffs by a lot when holding a shield (Shield Trooper 10) - Trauma Tension gives a chance to increase TP when taking damage (Shield Trooper 8)

• Topple,
  • Topple Toppler is topple res reducer (shield trooper 3)
  • Long Topple extends Topple duration by a lot (shield trooper 6)
  • Dirty fighter increases melee art damage to enemies inflicted with topple. funny word wrap oversight at level 5 (shield trooper 9)
• DoT
  • Heatseeker increases crit chance by a lot when attacking enemies inflicted with Blaze (Bastion Warrior 5)
  • Double Spike increases spike damage by a lot (bastion warrior 9)
  • Double reflect increases reflect damage by a lot (bastion warrior 10)
• machine gunner boosts ranged damage when fighting with adds (bastion warrior 2). neat skill

astral crusader

this class is not interested in maintaining long overdrives, and is likes doing support and absurd burst damage, especially through slayonet.
focus on critical and ranged attack up buffs.
building tp is challenging when you don't have access to Ghost sniper attack spam, and the class doesn't have any pure defensive tools.

javelin

• mostly designed around debuffs
  • stagger in balance breaker (signature art), fatigue in overwhelm (astral crusader 1), etc.
• arcing horn is so much better than spiral horn
• speed demon is super defensive, especially combined with the skill unstoppable (astral crusader 3)
• maximum voltage is incredibly interesting! at level 5, it is a 12 hit TP art that has a 250% hit ratio. it also deals 800% more if your skell is destroyed during the battle. that is sick. wonder if it works if the skell is destroyed in just that battle.

sniper rifle:

Sniper rifle is a weapon characterised by its strong burst damage, long range, and useful support options. It really loves overdrive count up, ranged attack up and ranged attack boost augments.
It relies on Ghost Sniper to build tension quickly through its strong critical hits.
Firing range is an interesting strength! we find it very helpful to be able to shoot flying enemies or enemies who have wedged us in a difficult to get out of spot! The sniper also has good long ranged arts, and the class comes with long shot skill.

sniper rifle is pretty fun to pair with dual swords and shield

• has some strong support options:
  
  • sidewinder is a strong long range single hit art that inflicts debuff res down, synergy with debuff weapons (astral crusader 3)
  • eagle eye ranged attack+accuracy up (partisan eagle 2)
  • ghost sniper aura increases crit chance, tp + when landing crits, ranged accuracy up (astral crusader 6)
  • hawkeye grants critical power
  • very good at damage output
  • slayonet is a multi hit with huge ratio, ranged attack
  • afterburner is a multi hit with big ratio, AOE TP art (signature art, -)

skill:

• likes electric attribute.
  • Electric Guard boosts electric res (partisan eagle 3)
  • Electric Boost increases elec damage (partisan eagle 5)
  • Knock 'n' Shock has a chance of inflicting shcok when using melee arts (partisan eagle, 7)
  • Increases electric damage by a lot to enemies inflicted with Shock (can this be used to inflict higher and higher levels of shock?) (Astral Crusader 7)
  • Electric Flesh gives chance of electric counter spike (Astral Crusader 9)
• Unstoppable is an interesting defensive skill. increases res to drive combo statuses while sprinting (Astral Crusader 3)
• tp overdrive (astral crusader 10)
• longshot. longshot :)
• good synergy with Ghost Sniper:
  • Killshot increases ranged auto attack crit chance (partisan eagle 2)
  • Quick Reload reduces ranged auto attack CD

Mastermind

Extremely support and debuff based. Attacks with Black Bane for one hit kills, and other damage with beam bomber and ether blast.

knife

the knife has a ton of arts, most of them are buffs or debuffs. it gets access to some of the strongest of these in the game, like smooth recovery, energy source, and screamer. they often come with melee attack boost, and the art black bane is often used for one hit kill builds.

• slit edge is a early game art to teach positioning (drifter 4)
• unique debuff arts
  • brainjack inflicts control for 1000 tension (psycorruptor 7)
  • servant sacrifice boosts HP and TP when control is active, and sometimes destroys the enemy regardless of level or health (Mastermind 3). useful early game
  • dispel removes one buff from the enemy (mastermind 1)
  • screamer does sleep! (psycorruptor 1)

• black bane does 300% more damage per debuff at level 5, and it is often used to one hit kill enemies due to the knife's extremely strong debuffs that give it time to setup (sleep) (signature art, celica)

  knife is good in many builds because of its buff arts

• Energy source is net 0 tp cost and boosts potential with immediate reuse (mastermind 4)
• smooth recovery is a good healing art and gives evasion up (signature art, -)
• Full specs aura increases potential, ranged attack, and ether res
• repair removes debuffs (enforcer 3)
• absorber skin grants barrier (psycorruptor 3)

raygun

has a topple art, and some more debuffs that knife doesn't have. it has weaker damage and support options than the knife, and is more well rounded.

• Master Gunner is an aura that boosts appendage damage, potential, and ranged attack (Signature art, yelv)
• debuffs
  • Subterfuge is a rare multi hitting zero damage art. Fan shaped AOE that inflicts debuff res down, long animation, we stim to subterfuge (psycorruptor 2)
  • Myopic Sceen inflicts Blackout over a fan shaped AOE. we thought it was myoptic scream until right now (enforcer 5)
  • Pathogen Blast is a fan AOE debuff that inflicts Virus (Mastermind 8)
  • Gravity blast is a gravity topple, a very rare topple art that doesn't cost TP. (Mastermind 1)
• gravity cloak is grav res up (Mastermind 2)
• clarity ray removes debuffs and does ether res up (signature art, mia)
• attacks
  • Ether blast has okay AOE damage, more with an aura. TP art (psycorruptor 5)
  • Beam Bomber is a fan shaped AOE that has a high multi hit damage, not a TP art. (signature art, Mia)

skills

very debuff and sleep and desfense oriented. maxing out sleep skills take some effort and a lot of battle points, and are unusally limitted to knife solo builds.

• sleep
  • beauty sleep extends sleep duration (psycorruptor 2)
  • gentle approach reduces chance to wake enemy when auto attacking (psycorruptor 4) (up to 100%)
  • feather touch reduces chance (up to 100% reduction!) of arts waking a sleeping enemy (psycorruptor 8)
  • unpleasant dream boosts damage to sleeping enemies (psycorruptor 9)
• defense
  • brain wall increases res to sleep control debuffs and slow arts debuff when an aura is active (psycorruptor 3)
  • extra armour increases barrier's absorption rate (psycorruptor 6)
  • ether guard increases ether res when using ranged weapon (mastermind 2)
  • Resistant Flesh boosts res to all debuffs (mastermind 6)

• debuffs

  • King's Decree reduces enemy control res and raises the debuff tier (psycorruptor 5)
  • King's Boon gives All Abilities Up to enemies under control (mastermind 9)
  • Tactical Analyst reduces enemy debuff res (mastermind 7)

• core crusher (psycorruptor 10)

• appendage erosion deal extra appendage damage for every debuff (mastermind 5)
• secondary accelerator lowers secondary CD (mastermind 10)

Galactic Knight

Gravity and red attack art based class. A ton of awesome auras and buff arts, some useful debuff arts, and really strong red arts.

Relies on Essence Exchange for TP almost entirely, and as such, very focused HP management as well!

has a lot of affinity towards gravity attribute, and some affinity to ether and beam.

oh my god i just realised its called Galactic Knight and the melee weapon is a laser sword

Photon Saber

Photon sabers have several low cooldown, low damage, multi hitting melee arts. These help it build overdrive count and keep up the pressure! In addition, galactic gataclysm is a high damage single hitting art!

outside of doing damage, photon saber has several interesting aura and buff arts, designed around keeping the party healthy.

• buffs
  • Essence Exchange swaps HP and TP. Immediate reuse 2nd and 3rd CD (signature art, Yelv)
  • Astral Purge removes debuffs on one ally (Galactic Knight 3)
  • Astral Heal restores a lot of HP or skell appendage HP to one ally (Galactic Knight 1)
• auras
  • Geolibrium increases beam res and gives immunity to terrain damage (and not weather damage), recovers HP over time (Blast Fencer 2)
  • Novalibrium enables counter spike and supercharge when getting hit, really cool. Huge effect duration up when 2nd and 3rd CD (Galactic Knight 4)
  • Astrolibrium reflects beam attacks and increases beam damage (Blast Fencer 6)
  • Astral Horizon makes Astral Heal and Astral Purge AOE, gives attacks that already have AOE bigger hitboxes. (galactic knight 7)
• attacking
  • Starfall Blade is a ultra short cooldown low damage melee combo art (Blast Fencer 1)
  • Starfall Rondo is Starfall Blade with slightly different stats (Blast Fencer 3). Combo each other.
  • Starfall Blossom increases TP when in the front. It is the only TP building art learned from the class itself (Galactic Knight 2)
  • Starlight Duster is a TP art with grav res down, higher melee combo damage. Hits a lot with a high hit scaling ratio (signature art, doug)
  • Galactic Cataclysm is a single hit TP beam art that does more damage under an aura, huge ratio (Galactic Knight 8). Cool annimation

Psycho Launchers

Has really good red arts. All of its yellow arts are dedicated to medium damage debuffs for multiple enemies in AOE range.
Strong offensive and defensive auras, both synergise well with Starfall art spam!
Shooting star ratio+DoT combined with Starlight Kick gives us very Melia vibes. Starlight Kick is a lot more elegant in Xenoblade X klsjdfhgk;df

• auras
  • Dual Dyanmo aura boosts melee and ranged attack, and potential (signature art, L)
  • Astral Protection boosts all attribute res and recovers HP when using arts (Galactic Knight 1)
• jetstream art inflicts stun, we also think its cool =^w^= (blast fencer 4)
• lighting cloak is electric res up aoe buff (blast fencer 2)
• red arts
  • Starlight Kick is a TP gravity topple art with a high single hit ratio. Immediate Reuse (Galactic Knight 6)
  • Gravity Lunge is a TP gravity topple art with a cool annimation. Much lower cooldown than starlight kick. Ten hits with 300% ratio at level 5, deals more damage in melee comboes. More of a DPS art than a topple art. (signature art, Murderess)
• yellow arts
  • Steller Ray is an AOE attack that gives Beam res down, probably synergises with some choatic high beam damage AOE out there. Somewhat long animation. medium damage, more if used during a aura (Blast Fencer 1)
  • Shooting star is an electric small AOE with a high single hit ratio, and inflicts shock (Blast Fencer 8)

Skills

• Inner search boosts potential, one of the most useful skills in the game. (Enforcer)
• aura assault boosts melee attack and accuracy when an aura is active (blast fencer 7)
• ether boost (blast fencer 2)
• knight's soul increases max tp (blast fencer 5)
• buff extender lengthens buff time (blast fencer 9)
• Supreme sword increases melee damage when doing melee comboes (blast fencer 10)
• fast forward reduces an art's cooldown when doing a melee combo (galactic knight 5)
• synchrony boosts all of your skell's attack stats, accuracy, and evasion (galactic knight 10)

Augments

Augments in Xenoblade X are items that can be attached to a piece of equipment, in order to add their effects to it. They are equivalent to gems in Xenoblade 1, and aux cores in Xenoblade 2. They can be things like stat increases, add healing effects, or make some things more likely to happen, for example.
Every piece of equipment found from treasure and enemies and quests has the ability to start with augments already attached, and a chance to have additional empty slots that you can add anything you want to. Weapons can have up to six augment slots! After completing some special quests, we unlock the ability to add empty slots to equipment that we want. we can add three to a weapon, and one to a armour.

Augments are distinguished between weapons, armour, skell frame, and skell weapons, and inventory augments can only fit on equipment they were made for. Augments attached to equipment when you got it can ignore this restriction! in addition, most augments have their highest level at 20 (listed as XX in game, they are roman numerals).

collecting augments

Augments can be crafted, and equipment comes with augments attached most often.
Some augments can only be crafted or found from enemy drops (research this). The crafting process for high level augments is very resource intensive, and so equiping multiple party members with equipment that has Treasure Sensor augments and focusing on breaking appendages in battles is very useful, even when playing normally! There is late game treasure sensor equipment from the shop that, if given to all party members, can max out the treasure sensor stat, so you don't need to craft the augments!

A lot of equipment dropped from enemies has good augments, and through normal progression it is likely you have some pretty good and unique equipment in your inventory! We find the process of using what we get through normal gameplay and making builds out of the equipment we get very fun, and augments are a big part of this.
You can upgrade augments attached to a piece of equipment from the AM terminal in Armorey Ally. These increase the level of an augment, and also takes resources. Equipment has a listed "upgrade" number on it, and this indicates how many times it has had an augment upgraded, and how many times it can be upgraded.

some pretty strong augments

We find ourselves always looking for a handful of specific augments when making builds, both augments attached to equipment and ones in our inventory!

Max tension/gear points up. This gives us the ability to handle tension arts and overdrive more flexibly, and we really like keeping our tension considerably above 3000 during overdrive!! max tension up 20 is one of the least expensive gems to craft, and we recommend it!

Overdrive count up is universally good whenever we want to enter overdrive. It works by giving us bonus overdrive count whenever we activate overdrive. If we have two overdrive count up worth 20, and 6000 tp at the start of battle, we can effectively start at 40 count! This is a fairly expensive augment to craft and somewhat rare to find attached to equipment. A little goes very far, and low level versions are still quite useful!

Any kind of damage up, really. Melee and ranged attack up, attack boost, and potential up and boost, the slayer augments, attribute damage up, etcetera. These are incredibly versatile and almost always something we want! Damage up is very important for defeating superbosses in particular quickly! In addition, augments are one of the only ways to actually alter your potential stat. This is really significant whener your main damage art is a TP art (there are a lot of strong TP damage arts!).
We find late game enemy drops often have some of these attached to them. Headgear often has a lot of potential up, weapons have ranged and melee and potential up, and armwear have ranged and melee up. These are the "ultra" equipment items, or their equivalent, and drop from a lot of level 50+ regular enemies and tyrants.

useful augments

When fighting superbosses, we need ways to make their high damage attacks a less scary. We need some way to heavily decrease damage, through things like reflect, decoy, or attribute res. Attribute res is very useful, because it works as a percentage. if any enemy only attacks in one or two attributes, we can probably combined armour stats with augments to give us high res! Over +100 res of anything acts the same as +100.

Skell

A little bit into the game, we get access to a mech called a Skell. Skells have ballooned stats compared to ground gear, equipment is usually bought or crafted, overdrive works differently, and arts available are based equipped to the skell as weapons instead of being techniques with a weapon. Skells are much bigger than humans, and move and jump faster and farther.

general characteristics

Skells have fuel, and using arts and flying deplete this. Fuel refills when parked. Skells also have appendages, like enemies, and when these are broken, you cannot use any arts attached to that appendage.
In combat, skells can inflict a debuff called "bind" under some scenarios. Bind locks the skell and the enemy from actions for several seconds if you can win QTE challenges repeatedly, and will refill your fuel. If your skell runs out of health, it will be wrecked and a button challenge will appear also, which determines what the repair will be like. skell have to be repaired from the hangar menu in the barracks.

skell weapons have long annimations compared to ground gear arts. They also cannot be upgraded like ground gear arts, and so they have very high cooldowns always! skell attacks also have their damage capped, and cannot exceed a certain value. Most skell builds also struggle building tension to get to overdrive!

overdrive works very differently from ground gear, and each skell frame model has different overdrives, with different use cases.

nagi

#

differences to xenogears

skells share a lot of characteristics to gears from xenogears, the first xeno game. for example, they are both used to platform in places the pilots couldn't reach!

skells are pretty much all purchased mass-market rather than every character coming with their own, unique gear. Gears fight without weapons, or with weapons similar to their pilot, and have special attacking actions they can take that skells don't Booster and special options just doesn't exist (perhaps booster should!).

We are rarely ever forced to use our skell, unlike xenogears, which has many sections that are gear-only. in addition, being reliant on the ballooned stats of gears is often more forced than relying on skell stats, in fact, skells feel like they are discouraged from participating in combat!

Skells can not participate in a fighting game, yet, also unlike gears.

In xenoblade X, skells recieve a flight mod at some point. in gears, gears recieve a underwater mod. Using gears underwater does not cost fuel, like flying does in X.

Characters

order based on skell registration order.
Affinity is built in combat by responding to soul voices.
Every character in the game does not get full access to arts and skills for their coresponding weapon. For example, Elma does not get access to Ghost Walker, and Gwin doesn't get access to Assault Hammer.

Elma

Lin

Irina

Gwin

cool dude, early game

combat

Samurai Gunner, signature arts are Grendade Blitz and Ultraslash

We think Gwin really loves shooting!! we play gwin by opening up with Gun Force to get some ranged attack up, and most importantly, secondary CD accel. Gwin's Furious Blast art gives them 500 TP when it has secondary cooldown, and we can also use Tornado Blade to get some more TP with the aura active! Our final way of building TP is with Decoy Round. If we want to rely on Decoy Round with high morale, we may use Defensive Stance aura instead, so that we have some safety on aggro.
We use TP max up and go into overdrive whenever we can! Overdrive reduces our cooldowns by a lot, and gives us more oppurtinities to get off 2nd and 3rd furious blast and decoy rounds. Low overdrive counts can be scary because we may have very little time to build up more TP to refresh overdrive in time. Gun force helps us out again because it lets us use decoy round especially a lot, and gives us torado blade for tension building as well.
we attack the enemy with range arts, Grenade Blitz, Burst Grenade, and sometimes Takedown shot. Grenade Blitz is high damage three hitting thermal art, and is incredibly threatening. Burst Grenade is a TP single hit that has a big ratio, and inflicts Blaze. We like to use Power Dive to get supercharge before firing off Burst Grenade to get a huge hit with huge damage over time through blaze. We will use any other attacking arts if we have time to while waiting for cooldown!

We like running ranged attack up, melee art heal, potential up, ranged apppendage up, and overdrive count up augments. Gwin's skills are mostly melee attack focused, which we don't take advantage of. We use the skills for thermal and blaze bonuses.

Doug

early game

combat

Blast Fencer+ (Raygun + Photon Saber), signature arts are Phenomenon and Starlight Duster.

Struggles to build and maintain TP because they lack arts, fast auto attacks, and skills to build TP with. Their most useful attacking and support arts are all TP arts! TP gain up augments are a must.
Likes gravity and ether attacks, high melee attack, and especially high potential.

L

Operates the augment slot shop when completing the corresponding quest.

combat

Shield Trooper+ (Psycho Launchers + Shield). Signature arts are Dual Dyanmo and Mindstorm.

Celica

if this was xenoblade 2 celica and rock would fight together im just saying what if. asbolutely not american. cat ears

combat

Psycorruptor+ (Dual Guns + Knife), signature arts are Black Bane and Zero Zero, holy shit!

Celica is pretty interesting: she focuses on attacking with dual guns, and her knife arts all work to expand this. we can use any knife art to combo into zero zero for a ton of TP gain! Absorber Skin, screamer, and repair all help her in survivability, in addition to ghost walker. We use our other TP building arts when we can, and combo a yellow art into Executioner after using Early Bird or Full specs for damage output!
Celica has a lot of flexibility in what kind of way she wants to use her arts, and her skills accentuate this! Three skill slots limits this slightly.

nagi

late game character

heart to hearts

1. Morning, at the same corner as the commercial transport pilot

   combat

   duelist+ class (Gatling Gun + Longsword). signature arts are True Stream Edge and Blossom Dance.

phog

combat

winged viper class. cruel joke that they use the self harm class. signature arts are crisis zone and sky high
has tp up per hit melee draw soul voice.

fyre

combat

their weapon class is samurai gunner+ (Gatling Gun + Longsword)

• very good auras and aura synergy
  
  • offensive and defensive stance, titan recharge.
  • cool off
  • bullet twister, tornado blade, hellfire

may like thermal weapons. definitely run max tp up augments. builds tp by TP arts when an aura is active, and then eating the aura with cool off. main damage output is hellfire, incendiary edge and the aura synergy arts are also okay. defensive stance is probably good to run in combo with either offensive stance or titan recharge. defensive stance is a must for survivability

Murderess

disapointing character. they are no where near as brutal or as bloodthirsty as we think they were supposed to be (using psycho launchers and not the death guns contribute to this!). like,, they didn't even have all that horrible mental health. like they DID, but, there just wasn't enough attention to detail and, this is a Xeno game! mental health is something they get right almost always, there are so many other characters that have more deep and relevant mental health histories in xenoblade X alone! murderess feels like an incomplete character, or one that was translated incorrectly.

combat

Winged Viper+ (Psycho Launchers + Dual Swords). Signature arts are Gravity Lunge and Seventh Edge.

Murderess has a lot of multi hitting and AOE arts, and these are really good for building tension and morale. The art Side Slash lets her deal some extra damage and give the enemy Fatigue, which makes them less dangerous to fight! Astral Protection's healing also help her stay alive, especially useful if she needs to wait for TP to build before Overdrive. in overdrive, she likes to be a Killing Machine, and uses its boosts to melee and potential for big DPS, she really likes this! Side slash helps her keep TP going and gives a lot more colour combo potential as well in overdrive.
Her two main attacking arts are Hundred Shells and Gravity Lunge. Both of them hit a ton of times, and can combo into each other due to Gravity Lunge's special effect for melee combo! gravity lunge also has gravity attribute, which many common enemies are weak to, and is a topple art!!

We like running TP max up to give her more freedom for using overdrive and Gravity lunge and Hundred shells. It also lets us start a battle with both an aura and overdrive! We also use Hellhound skill to help murderess out when she's just starting overdrive!

hope

religous, gets caught up in a death pact cult thing ???? all we remember is that hope's quests were unusually fucked up, even for Xenoblade X

combat

psycorruptor+ (Psycho Launcher + Knife), signature arts are Secondary Speed and Tacit Censure

mia

the last character. super!autistic, and had gay parents

combat

psycorruptor class, signature arts are clarity ray and beam bomber.

H.B.

dlc. one of the best characters.

combat

Shield Trooper+ (Assualt Rifle, Shield). Signature arts are Flamehand and Atomic Hit. all we can think of when reading flamehand is HB's signature art is zangief's green hand in street fighter 4

HB is designed very heavily around support, with a large variety of support arts. They like to topple and have aggro, and have several good TP gain arts and TP arts. Main attacking art is burst grenade

Yelv

DLC. J-body. also really good

combat

Blast Fencer+ (Raygun + Photon Saber). Signature arts are Master Gunner and Essence Exchange.

Yelv's signature art is essence exchange, which lets them swap HP and TP! this means that yelv has the ability to decide if they want to have max TP, since HP is usually more than TP! We combine Essence Exchance at the start of battle with a Geolibrium Aura, which restores our HP over time, and this does a lot to keep Yelv safe! Essence Exchange has a long recharge, so we go into overdrive to shorten our cooldowns!
Yelv likes overdrive count a lot, since it helps them get the bonuses for overdrive quickly, which means faster cooldowns! we like using the starfall attacks because they have short cooldowns and do multiple hits, or a overdrive count up augment. When Yelv has a high overdrive count, they can begin using Essence Exchange more freely, and they have basically free access to TP arts! Galactic Cataclysm synergises well with master gunner due its potential boost, It has a slightly short annimation, too, so its single hit and low cooldown make it work really well with essence exchange. Astral heal is a strong TP healing art, and this can be used for some added safety

Yelv has access to some generally strong skills that work well with this build. We really like Supreme Sword and Inner Search for both melee and TP art DPS, and either a max TP up skill or Secondary Accel

A fun way to use Essence Exchange is to put it on the computer controlled character. They will be able to combo overdrive with the player more consistently, and it will get them to low health and trigger their TP up per hit soul voices more often!

Bozé

DLC. appropriates and fetishises a foreign religion

combat

slayonet guy. Partisan Eagle. other signature art is Vortex.

Bozé is a regular Partisan Eagle class BLADE. this means that, they have access to the traditonal weapon combo of sniper rifle and javelin, and so they are an excellent way to learn about the class, since they can dedicate all their BP to their skills and arts.
The way we play Bozé is to start battles with Hawkeye, Ghost Sniper, and then eagle eye. The first two arts grant critical power and increase crit chance, and make it so all criticals increase our tension! Eagle eye increases our ranged accuracy and attack, and now we are ready to hit shit!
We combo either Overwhelm or Vortex into Slayonet, to get the combo bonus. this will do at least 6 hits, and give us a ton of TP! since we play bozé with only a single aura, we can dedicate it entirely to overdrive, and we like giving bozé overdrive count up augments!
After our slayonet, we can use sidewinder or shrapnel to do a strong single hit (sidewinder is also much longer range than the other arts we use). We use the stun in Intercept and Vortex to try and give us more time to live, and inflicting this is easier after we shoot sidewinder!
bozé does not have access to very many skills that can influence their build. We use Killshot and Quick Reload to build TP with auto attacks faster when out of range or waiting for cooldown. We also use TP overdrive!

even though we have a pretty defined playstyle for bozé, we feel that their other arts and skills seem way too good in his context to not also be awesome!

Alexa

dlc. Really likes Skells.

combat

partisan eagle+ (Assualt Rifle + Javelin). signature arts are maximum voltage and overclock.
due to how strong maximum voltage is, alexa always wants to play with a wrecked skell.

Side Characters

ask mathias in division drive west side about noctilum after retrieving their cat Aisha

World

NLA

• you can jump over roads

Progreession

Prologue

Skip character creator after starting the game for seamless start. Show later. Important to know that base selection determines available hairstyles

things we would change

tutorials

build loadouts

the game discourages experimentation with BP grinding, enemy drop grinding, and the inability to save different loudouts.
we would add a favourite button to equipment, the ability to swap into gear being used by other characters (ESPEPCIALLY ones not in your party), a way to save equipment+skills+arts settings at any time, without a hard restriction on the number of saved loudouts. we would also want to make all the build menus (skills, class, arts, equipment) accesible from the same submenu, and navigating between them quick and fast and shows overview information pinned on the current main screen.

aesthetics and gui

we would make the font and gui scale bigger, and make information more accesible to read on the equipment screen in particular. we would want skills and arts displayed on the equipment screen, and we want to be able to highlight anything on the screen to get a description of what it does, like in crosscode

We think that displaying more relevant information on the screen at once and in many places can make the game a lot more accessible! if comparing stats of multiple different things at once is possible, then people will be able to engage with the build system more easily. Icons would probably be useful to show next to augments to show either what it is or what type it is. The game should actually use visual information to convey concepts way more, it doesn't do this almost at all and it makes everything so much harder and more time consuming to parse. A visual language that communicates several pieces of information quickly would be so awesome, like more orange red arts are stronger than more red red arts, or easily readable icons associated with certain effects or stats.

Weapon fashion gear. We want more colour in the game and more lighting effects, the game appears slightly washed out and we think more involved lighting would make everything feel more real and lively. We also want this so that more playful character designs are more included.
Unique annimations for at least some of the party members, and being able to choose between these on the character make screen like in calico. Seeing HB and Fyre run the same way is fucked up. We also find a lot of the gameplay annimation unappealing and disinteresting, and could use some more life, and we think animations are big part of what Xeno characters have used to describe themselves. Like:

We would put more visual flare in the graphic art design. The dialogue boxes and menus are all blue and black, with very little visual things going on. These are both intensely streinuous on our eyes, and incredibly fucking boring. we think about XC2's main menu screen, which changes with the time of day in both colour pallete and geography and art. We think about Xenoblade DE's equipment screen, where everything is bright and easy to read and friendly looking.

we would make status icons into circles. circles effectively show percentage in a small visual form factor, and we want that to be used to show the current time remaining on buffs. we want buffs to be bigger and have several visible at once, and shown nearer to the art pallette, or other information heavy area.

we think if the colour palette of the game allowed for more bright colours, we would be happy. we do not think the game should be designed around vivid colours, and that doing that would be detrimental. we think that some things, like the grass in primordia, and the characters, should contrast more with their surroundings.

menuing + information

in game, accessing important information can be either impossible or take a long time. Some things like augments are difficult to find descriptions of, and when creating new augments or crafting new weapons or armour, are only available in NLA, and navigating the menus takes forever.

Locating heart to hearts is a pain, and understanding the location of them, and other things in frontiernav, is painful. there is rarely enough information and using the map is time consuming and inefficient.

Party members and skell customisation should be accessible everywhere, not just NLA.

we would expand the manual with more information and explained slightly better, and create good in-game tutorials that are easy to read and parse like Xenoblade 1 tutorials, and are reviewable like Torna tutorials. Brief tutorials could have links to the manual, where a certain concept is described in full detail (assuming that detail is outside the scope of that tutorial!) We would have information attached to an item that says what subregion/enemy you got it from, and make organising the enemy index easier and far more flexible and also put the game on a console that doesn't have really damn slow storage devices so that the enemy index's model loading in the background bug just disapears thanks to faster read speeds. We think a good word to describe what we want the enemy index to be is an encyclopedia, which makes a lot of sense in canon and from a gameplay perspective, because Xenoblade X has a lot of fucking information.

character creator

we want more vr room settings, to adjust lighting and where you are in the room. we want to have the buttons to swap menus and swap room presets swapped.

all hair styles available to all base characters (they should be presets instead!!), more hairstyle diversity and make hairstyles into parts. abolition of gender selection, there's a body submenu for a reason, use it. show previews of saved character settings when hovering over it in the load submenu. please add more voice variety, we dislike all the player character voices (to represent us with.).

more diverse colour selection for hair, skin tone, eye colour. why does the skell customisation menu get full hue saturation and contrast settings and not the character creator. why also does the skell customisation menu bother showing you the colour code and values if you can't adjust them manually or with precision. the options for hair in particular are disapointing, there are like no yellow or bright orange, no white, and the available shades of grey blue and red and green are disapointing, and all pretty dark and difficult to gauge in the limited lighting and clothes environment.
we think clothes should be changeable in the character creator, and that this should be convenient and well thought out. like, it is kinda unreal that you, can't, change clothes. presumabely they never thought about it, because the character creator is mostly a start of the game thing, and accessing it is pretty obscure after starting. we think you should have access to clothes with the same stats and choose which ones you want to start off with anyways. in general the game could use a larger variety of clothes, especially non-military armoured clothes. the ones that are available look pretty bad also. this is not to say that L Celica and Gwin do not have awesome fits, they absolutely do. we wish there were more clothes like those.

heavily expand face options. cheek stuff should be more diverse in settings, there should be more than just one setting for the area around the eyes. there is literally no eye shape setting ?? that one seems like an oversight. think also there is no face shape setting, which, we would be okay with if the game only had one face shape. but there are multiple, and they are attached by base characters, and not individually customisable settings.
Don't think there is any eyebrow option either. Heavily expand and diversify face paint, or recontextualise it as face bits.

a lot of our character customisation ideas are more related to gear, because, we think that the clothes we wear help express something about us, and this is especially important to us, because this changes with who we are and our feelings. More aesthetic gear, and improve the existing gear's designs.

bugs + oversights

when in the arts menu, scrolling up from Subterfuge gives clarity ray and gravity cloak a Hits=3 stat. this might be related to the fact that all three arts are non damaging arts, but Subterfuge DOES try to apply a debuff three times

clicking vehicular form and dismount skell buttons near simultaneously causes your skell to immediately dismount you, something not possible in humanoid form normally. there is another very very strange skell piloting bug we've encountered on our own, but its so much more uncommon and we can't remember it.

there is like a single polygon missing in the skell hanger that lets you see the ocean from inside the barracks

there are two(? possibly more) locations in xenoblade x you can clip through the floor. one of these locations is sylvalum (we believe there are two clips in sylvalum, with similar results), and the other is oblivia. the oblivia floor clip is significantly more useful, because you have access to your skell and can travel nearly anywhere in the world.
below the world, most locations are filled with water