is there an actual use for chain crafts?

[i'm about it]

i mean, besides using it to proc fortune/septium vein. i mean how many times are you going to have 4 strength scaling characters in the same party, most of the time it's going to do pitiful damage in exchange for literally an s-crafts worth of combined cp. i guess the animations and voicework for it are pretty neat?

[GuppyForce]

Originally posted by fob life:

i mean, besides using it to proc fortune/septium vein. i mean how many times are you going to have 4 strength scaling characters in the same party, most of the time it's going to do pitiful damage in exchange for literally an s-crafts worth of combined cp. i guess the animations and voicework for it are pretty neat?

Julia hits every character twice and Mueller hits the center one twice or something like that, so they're good with chain crafts (Idk if any other characters have this effect). Usually I use chains when I have a good turn bonus or need to finish off a particular set of enemies

[Hat8]

Originally posted by fob life:

i mean, besides using it to proc fortune/septium vein. i mean how many times are you going to have 4 strength scaling characters in the same party, most of the time it's going to do pitiful damage in exchange for literally an s-crafts worth of combined cp. i guess the animations and voicework for it are pretty neat?

Good against mobs grouped together and finishing off bosses when you're in a bad spot.

[AnemoneMeer]

Amazing burst damage potential. Chain into S-Break spam is more damage than simply using more S-Breaks, especially with correct turn order stacking. If you can go through three characters actions, chain off the fourth, then S-Break for 4 more turns after that, you can put out some utterly disgusting levels of burst damage.

[Hat8]

Originally posted by AnemoneMeer:

Amazing burst damage potential. Chain into S-Break spam is more damage than simply using more S-Breaks, especially with correct turn order stacking. If you can go through three characters actions, chain off the fourth, then S-Break for 4 more turns after that, you can put out some utterly disgusting levels of burst damage.

Not the best idea unless you get those kills.

[asdf]

I think if you had multiple strength oriented characters it would be an 'okay' ability but.. personally I don't find that there's much incentive to have multiple strength oriented characters in the first place. Most boss fights are more about staying alive long enough to cast clock up EX, clock down and earth wall on everything, and once you've done that the rest doesn't actually matter very much, and arts users are usually better for setting that up. Having 1 strength attacker is okay I think, but multiple feels like you're giving up too much versatility.


If you were going to use it though, I'd recommend using it with Scherezard. On a characters turn before Scherazard you can use chain (with everyone other than Scherezard), then use all your S breaks, then use Scherezard's abiity to make them all move again instantly.

[AnemoneMeer]

Originally posted by Hat21:

Originally posted by AnemoneMeer:

Amazing burst damage potential. Chain into S-Break spam is more damage than simply using more S-Breaks, especially with correct turn order stacking. If you can go through three characters actions, chain off the fourth, then S-Break for 4 more turns after that, you can put out some utterly disgusting levels of burst damage.

Not the best idea unless you get those kills.

Burst, not sustained damage. The delay after that is liable to get you killed if you mess it up, but if buffs are up, you're also liable to take out whatever you point it at and cut a fight short.

[Iridium]

It can be useful if you really want to make sure an enemy is dead before a bad turn bonus (death, sometimes vanish, occasionally critical; mostly against enemies with large area-of-effect attacks) and one attack isn't enough to do the job. It's better than an S-Craft for this purpose because it generally uses less CP and what CP it uses is more evenly distributed and thus easier to recover (passively or with Sacrifice Arrow.) This is especially the case for parties containing Julia or Mueller who have special bonuses to chain attacks as detailed previously.

[Shylaar]

Only thing I ever use it for is when the sepith turn bonus comes up and I don't need that CP for anything else.

[Jindujun93]

Some spoilers for the Nightmare arena in this video, but this here should tell you all you need to know about Chain crafts, and why they are actually usable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8psX9s06yc

[i'm about it]

LOL. ok i can see the potential now. that's actually ridiculous. what is that, like 40 k per turn, plus scherazard's craft to deny enemy turns. i'm guessing the videomaker stacked strength and cp recovery on all party members?

[Iridium]

Well, consider me a believer now.

[asdf]

I don't think that would work nearly as well on higher difficulties where they have higher defense - regular attacks would never hit that hard on nightmare (nightmare arena is not the same thing as nightmare difficulty - the arena has 3 different stages to it from normal to nightmare regardless of what difficulty you're actually playing on, nightmare arena is just the one where you get that fight), since that defense would be reducing the damage you deal pretty substantially on every attack. By the looks of it that's probably only normal or maybe even easy difficulty - Cassius hit a lot harder than that in my hard playthrough.

[Colonel Sanders]

You don't need all characters to be strength scaling. It does more damage the farther in the chain they are, so put your strength characters at the end of the chain, prefereably with strength up. And it spreads the cp cost between everyone so nobody needs to be above 100 cp to use it. And yes it does a lot of damage.

[Jindujun93]

Originally posted by asdf:

I don't think that would work nearly as well on higher difficulties where they have higher defense - regular attacks would never hit that hard on nightmare (nightmare arena is not the same thing as nightmare difficulty - the arena has 3 different stages to it from normal to nightmare regardless of what difficulty you're actually playing on, nightmare arena is just the one where you get that fight), since that defense would be reducing the damage you deal pretty substantially on every attack. By the looks of it that's probably only normal or maybe even easy difficulty - Cassius hit a lot harder than that in my hard playthrough.

Yeah, that's on normal, the date on which the video was uploaded should make that very obvious (as when it was uploaded, only the original PC version was out in Japan, and that one didn't have any difficulty levels besides normal yet).

[Erpy]

Chain Crafts are generally useful whenever you land on a turn bonus because the bonus applies to all characters taking part in the chain craft. On Critical turns, this allows you to do sick amounts of damage.

Another, more obscure use of chain crafts is controlling the flow of turn bonusses.

Let's say your turn order is: Kevin - Ries - Tita - Enemy 1 - Enemy 2.

If the fourth slot has a Death turn bonus, the best way to avoid Enemy 1 from insta-killing one of your party members is to have Kevin cast a quick Tear spell, which inserts an additional turn into the queue and causes the Death bonus to stick to Tita's turn instead of the enemy's.

If, however, the fifth slot has a Death turn bonus, Kevin casting Tear would merely shift the bonus from Enemy 2 to Enemy 1. You could have Ries also cast Tear, but instead you could also have Kevin initiate a chain craft with either Ries, Tita or both. This causes Ries and/or Tita to immediately get plucked out of the queue causing the bonus to be given to whoever comes after Enemy 2. (which is probably Kevin again since initiating a chain craft doesn't have as much delay as participating in one)

Likewise, if the 3rd slot had a Guard bonus, which would waste Tita's turn, plucking Ries or Tita out of the queue by making Kevin initiate a chain craft with them causes the Guard bonus to land on either Enemy 1 or Enemy 2.