What does the ATS stat do?

[dynastystar]

I'm gonna build a character to be as close to a mage as I can(giving them additional EP, reduction cost on spells, cast time reduction, giving them as much variety in spells as possible and such) but I'm not familiar with what ALL the stats do like ATS. If there is a guide that outlines what the stats do, I'd appreciate that too(I'm not finding one in the guides list).

[Berahlen]

Don't "build" a character to permanently be a particular role. Orbments are made to be switched around at will based on your immediate needs, and the game expects you to open all of Estelle and Joshua's slots over the course of the game. Some fights are casting heavy, a couple are physical heavy. Joshua is an all-around murder machine at pretty much all times, and Estelle is usually better as a support role (she gets beefier in the second game). But you're supposed to mix and match as needed.

ATS is magic attack. ADF is magic defense. AGL is for evasion, which is so undertuned in this game as to be basically useless. DEX is mostly chance to hit, and isn't all that great either. Most of the stat buffs from quartz are relatively insignificant because they're percent increases of fairly small numbers to begin with (again, more signficant in the second game where base numbers and multipliers start and grow much bigger). Action, Cast, EP, and EP Cut are the really critical ones, and the rest are mostly just there to unlock spells or rub an element against a monster that's weak to it.

[Dorin]

Originally posted by Waypoint:

Don't "build" a character to permanently be a particular role.

I've been switching orbs for everybody except for Joshua, once he got white gehenna, clock up ex and anti-sept all I've never had the need to change it again, time arts seem to be better than any other arts in this game because monsters don't seem to have resistances to it, except for some unique bosses.

[Berahlen]

Originally posted by Don:

I've been switching orbs for everybody except for Joshua, once he got white gehenna, clock up ex and anti-sept all I've never had the need to change it again, time arts seem to be better than any other arts in this game because monsters don't seem to have resistances to it, except for some unique bosses.

Yeah fair enough. By the end of Nightmare I was running pretty much the same loadout on the whole party, but Joshua had been using it for quite a while.

Originally posted by CatsPawNya:

Stat buffs from quartz are VERY significant. at some point +30 in Def and you take 80% less damage.

I can confirm at least that there's a very sudden threshold for taking extremely little damage, but it's rare to actually be near it even with quartz and Crest. I'll admit my perspective on this might be skewed because my last playthrough was on a difficulty where everything up to and including random fauna was a rampaging murderbeast that killed you in 2-3 hits anyway. However, a certain infamously hard boss is surprisingly close to that threshold on all but one of his attacks, and a single debuff from Kloe absolutely punks him even on the highest difficulty.

That's not to say you shouldn't use them for stats, just that compared to your spell loadout they're secondary at best.

Originally posted by CatsPawNya:

other quartz evaluation etc.

EP quartz aren't just good for the EP itself, mind. It's there to bolster time/space/mirage so you can get overpowered spells more easily, because the best spells are all time and mirage. Being able to use those things more without digging into inventory is a bonus. Also, on higher difficulties physical damage very quickly becomes near-useless outside of S-crafts. It's balanced better in SC.

Cast 1 is significant early on when your action speed is slow in general and you don't have additional party members to pick up slack, but it's usually the first one to cut if you absolutely need something else. Action is the most powerful quartz in the game by far. Action economy is the single biggest stranglehold monsters have against you, especially when your party is small. Even early on, just that one extra speed point means you have that much longer before a monster gets a double turn on you, and Clock Up is rarely worth casting until you get EX because of how buff duration works (especially at low levels with low speed).

Originally posted by CatsPawNya:

Estelle and Olivier

Unrepentant YES on Olivier. Estelle, meh, at least in this game. She has good flexibility but hits subpar damage, and her lines are too short to hit high-tier spells until endgame. Even once you do, Kloe will usually hit harder with Blue Impact than anything Estelle can do short of S-Craft.

Estelle definitely gets stronger in the second game though, and a lot of it is just that one extra slot on her second line. It's very subtle, but the jump from 4-3 to 4-4 is surprisingly significant.

[Berahlen]

Yeah. Again, since my most recent memory was on high difficulty, Estelle's physical AOE was...pretty awful. I think I used hurricane or comet maybe twice, when Joshua left a sliver on key enemies. In general, I'd be lucky to hit three digits per target, and since the name of the game is thinning out the crowd quickly and not necessarily killing it all at once...yeah.

RE: Blue Impact, I mostly used it for efficiency. Yes, time is stronger per hit, but you can get wiped out losing a key turn to eat an EP charge if you're not careful.

High dif is just a grindy survival fest.

I had fun with it in FC -- you don't actually need to grind at all. SC, yes it is. On a completely unrelated note, Kurt can go jump in a lava pit forever.