Maelle's Defense

[Hirasugi]

For the life of me my Maelle is a complete glass cannon that gets absolutely deleted anytime she gets hit despite having decent health and way above average defense. She has way more defense than some of her peers and still gets hit with attacks that do like twice to 3 times the damage. I thought at first it was the stance, but I'm currently using Virtuose which should be doing 200% offensive damage with no downside. I also checked her Pictos loadout and there shouldn't be anything there that boosts the amount of damage she receives. Anyone running into this same problem??

[Mauman]

Have you considered switching to shield based defenses (which work for 99.99%* of the enemies in this game)?

You can do so as early as the beginning of chapter 2. All you have to do get such a thing going is heading south to Dark Shores.

Just don't fight the enemies there. Use fight first on all three characters to guarantee running.

The pictos you'll want is called "In Media Res" and it's surrounded by 3 baddies (that you'll run from) in the back of the area. It'll give 3 shields to every character (at the cost of 50% max health, but as you mentioned that isn't helping). No matter how hard the hit, only 1 shield will be taken off. You can even translate this into an offensive bonus as now all of those "at death's door" pictos you might have lying around suddenly become VERY attractive as shield based defenses won't interfere with those.

*which admittedly makes that .01% a complete and total pain in the ass to deal with, but nothing's perfect, right?

[Hirasugi]

Nevermind I'm an idiot. I had Perilous Perry activated when I thought I disabled it. Disregard

[Mauman]

Originally posted by Hirasugi:

Nevermind I'm an idiot. I had Perilous Perry activated when I thought I disabled it. Disregard

Oh, I love that ability. It's so cheap for what it does and the downsides are meaningless if you go shield based.

[Tomatokek]

shield, shell etc. Also make use of her deaths with death pictos If you have them unlocked yet.

[Hirasugi]

Originally posted by Mauman:

Originally posted by Hirasugi:

Nevermind I'm an idiot. I had Perilous Perry activated when I thought I disabled it. Disregard

Oh, I love that ability. It's so cheap for what it does and the downsides are meaningless if you go shield based.

How much do shields mitigate in terms of damage? I've only been recently using them with Sciel and not Maelle

[Schalimah]

Originally posted by Hirasugi:

Originally posted by Mauman:

Oh, I love that ability. It's so cheap for what it does and the downsides are meaningless if you go shield based.

How much do shields mitigate in terms of damage? I've only been recently using them with Sciel and not Maelle

100% of damage
one shield per hit.

[winter]

Originally posted by Hirasugi:

Originally posted by Mauman:

Oh, I love that ability. It's so cheap for what it does and the downsides are meaningless if you go shield based.

How much do shields mitigate in terms of damage? I've only been recently using them with Sciel and not Maelle

They block one hit each, no matter how big it would have been. Also, regarding the "in medias res" picto, this one actually only reduces your starting health, so you can just heal up under your shields as well.