I don't understand how I should be building my covens.

[MarcosDGF]

I'm already at 50 hours in the game but I'm still not sure how I should be building my party. Like, should my covens be dedicated to each role? Should I have a coven composed of only tanks, another one only for melee dmg dealers, and so on?

I've been playing so far pretty much only by pressing auto-battle, without thinking much, but it's been getting harder and harder, I feel like I'm lacking damage, monsters won't target my tank. I can't find any info, except for very late game, on how I should be building my party.

My current party consists of:

* Coven 1, Witch Squad Pact: Aster Crow and Shinomashira in the front and a Famyu Seeker as support that does a bit of healing
* Coven 2, Black Sheep Pact: Shinomashira in the front and a Rapid Venator as a support that revives my Shinomashira when it dies (it happens a lot)
* Coven 3, Recon Pact: Shinomashira and a Theatrical Star in the front and a Famyu Seeker as support that does a bit of healing
* Coven 4, Witch Squad Pact: 2 Peer Fortresses in the front, and a Famyu Seeker as a support
* Coven 5, Witch Troop Pact: Magia Maid and Theatrical Star in the front, no support. (Even though I tried to put as much magic damage as I could, my Magia Maid deals pretty much no damage with their spells)

So, I'm wondering if anybody has any tips they could give me on how to build my party... any advice is much appreciated!

[Minneyar]

It's a good idea to have each coven dedicated to a specific purpose. There are a lot of reasons for this; for example, actions like Fortify Coven or Use Donum take the entire coven's turn, and you want to avoid wasting the actions of puppets who are better off attacking. Most of your active donum will also depend on the pact you have equipped, and specific pacts have stat bonuses that are obviously best for certain roles (for example, you want your mages to all be on a pact that has high DMP). In fact, an issue that your fifth coven is probably having is that your donum damage is decided by the average DMP of every attacker in that coven, so your Threatrical Star is probably dragging it down quite a bit.

In general, you want to at least have a dedicated tank coven and a donum coven; your tank coven should probably have all peer types, and the donum coven should have all magia types (or others who have high DMP like Asher Ashes). For pretty much the entire mid-to-late game, my donum coven was wiping most random encounters in one or two rounds; give them a pact that has the trio of flame/fog/mud attack spells, make sure you equip all of your best +DMP equipment and equip skills that boost DMP and reduce DP costs, and they'll just nuke everything.

You can be a bit more flexible with your other covens, but it can be useful to have a fast coven that is dedicated to stunning things, another coven that is focused on melee damage, and another one that is focused on ranged damage or support.

You're probably about at the point where you're ready to start soul transferring your puppets, if you haven't already, so keep an eye out for skills that would be useful for transferring. For example, Shinomashiras get skills that make them more likely to be targeted, so it's a good idea to get those on your tanks (but you might want to disable them on your Shinomashira if they're not tanking!), while Shinobushis get skills that make them less likely to be targeted, so those can be useful for everybody else. Don't forget that there are also donum like Gatekeeper's Proof or Protection that your tank coven can use to forcefully redirect attacks to them; you might not want to use them in easy fights, but always put those up immediately when fighting tougher enemies.

[MarcosDGF]

> In fact, an issue that your fifth coven is probably having is that your donum damage is decided by the average DMP of every attacker in that coven

Good Lord that makes so much sense, my thinking was: my maid is the caster so she's the one casting the spell. For some reason I completely forgot that it's the whole coven that casts the Donum, not a single character!

>You're probably about at the point where you're ready to start soul transferring your puppets, if you haven't already

Not sure what soul transfer is yet, I'd say I'm somewhere around 40% of the game, I just unlocked the ability to high-jump and gothic type.


Thanks for the tips, I'll work towards rearranging my party now!

[blizzcarsten]

If you have a Donum Coven then pls don't put it in the 5th Slot that wastes so much Time.

Everytime you want to use a Donum you must give manually Orders to all your other 4 Squads, which is terrible.

Donum Squad belongs to Coven 1, that way you can select a Donum and then just press V to let the other 4 Covens Autobattle.

[Minneyar]

Originally posted by blizzcarsten:

If you have a Donum Coven then pls don't put it in the 5th Slot that wastes so much Time.

Um... you don't have to do that. You can press left/right to switch between covens without giving them orders, and pressing left on your first coven will immediately switch to the fifth one. Putting your donum coven in the fifth slot takes a total of one extra button press if all you want to do is have them use donum and then everybody else autobattle.