Level 28 and I have already unlocked all Artes?

[Roch Silverfang]

Seriously? I don't fight a lot, please believe me, I'm level 28 and most of my characters don't learn any artes!

This can't be serious... what is this ♥♥♥♥♥♥ system? In all Tales of, characters learn their artes depending of their level, but for Arise, it's just by using them! Alphen's "Sword Strike" type is already at 9999, so I can't learn any more artes... and I'm not fighting that much, killing only monsters on my way, avoiding the others. I didn't even finished the first story arc!

Why they did this? Learning artes by character's level is more intelligent.

[Doom_Cookies]

I doubt you have all the learnable artes. You don't learn them all just by raising one Arte Category. Many artes require some points in two Arte Categories to learn. Most guides will only list the major Arte Category required, but those guides are also wrong.

That said, story-locked and title-locked artes aside, you're probably pretty close to learning them all with Alphen. As someone who played exclusively as Alphen when possible, I know I had most of his learnable artes around that level. But most of the artes come from titles.

[CatPerson]

There are quite a few Titles that do not unlock/appear until you do certain sidequests, mainquests, some other things. What/which activities to unlock them depends on the character tho.

I guess it depends a bit on what you mean by artes. I still find that term a little confusing. If you mean attack abilities a chr. can use in combat tho, yeah ... many are in Titles and quite a few Titles don't even appear as blank circles until certain story points or something. I didn't notice that for a while myself.

[Xengre]

OP, no offense, but you literally left your game to AFK grind combat for over an hour this isn't the game's fault this is yours. I mean, your Alphen has 9999 uses at level 28? That isn't even feasible, legitimately, by beating the game normally (in fact you would probably have somewhere around only 5-7k for his moves if you mained him).

Using an afk uber farm trick with 1 dmg relics is your own fault.

The Tales of series has utilized the "learn artes by using certain artes X times" for a very long time so this isn't new to Tales of Arise and the system makes sense since it is intended to unlock artes oriented towards your playstyle/usage.

[Roch Silverfang]

Originally posted by Xengre:

OP, no offense, but you literally left your game to AFK grind combat for over an hour this isn't the game's fault this is yours. I mean, your Alphen has 9999 uses at level 28? That isn't even feasible, legitimately, by beating the game normally (in fact you would probably have somewhere around only 5-7k for his moves if you mained him).

Using an afk uber farm trick with 1 dmg relics is your own fault.

The Tales of series has utilized the "learn artes by using certain artes X times" for a very long time so this isn't new to Tales of Arise and the system makes sense since it is intended to unlock artes oriented towards your playstyle/usage.

I'm just playing on hard difficulty with the most basic weapons (except against bosses of course). As I said, I fight only monsters on my way, because I hate being overpowered. When you masterise the battle system, it's pretty easy to chain artes without any pause.

[Xengre]

Originally posted by Roch Silverfang:

Originally posted by Xengre:

OP, no offense, but you literally left your game to AFK grind combat for over an hour this isn't the game's fault this is yours. I mean, your Alphen has 9999 uses at level 28? That isn't even feasible, legitimately, by beating the game normally (in fact you would probably have somewhere around only 5-7k for his moves if you mained him).

Using an afk uber farm trick with 1 dmg relics is your own fault.

The Tales of series has utilized the "learn artes by using certain artes X times" for a very long time so this isn't new to Tales of Arise and the system makes sense since it is intended to unlock artes oriented towards your playstyle/usage.

I'm just playing on hard difficulty with the most basic weapons (except against bosses of course). As I said, I fight only monsters on my way, because I hate being overpowered. When you masterise the battle system, it's pretty easy to chain artes without any pause.

Yes, but you literally set the game's 1 Dmg artifact and went afk for at least around 1 hour (which causes a built up multiplier, for instance Law's steel arte can be spammed 150x and despite this being 150x spirit increase stat when you do this strat it multiplies it can can gain like +3000 spirit profiency) to max out all of your skills that would normally have taken NG and a NG+ to do.

That is like someone going into Final Fantasy IX in disc 1 at level 12 and killing the end game level 62 dragon a few times via one of the two trick strategies and complaining they are now level 48 and filthy rich.

[Doom_Cookies]

Originally posted by Xengre:

Yes, but you literally set the game's 1 Dmg artifact and went afk for at least around 1 hour (which causes a built up multiplier, for instance Law's steel arte can be spammed 150x and despite this being 150x spirit increase stat when you do this strat it multiplies it can can gain like +3000 spirit profiency) to max out all of your skills that would normally have taken NG and a NG+ to do.

Unless this is some feature of the 1 Dmg artifact, then this is the exact opposite of what happens. After certain time intervals in combat duration, the amount of Arte Category Proficiency gained dramatically decreases. You get more Arte Category Proficiency if you use an arte 9 times and win the battle in <30 seconds than you do if you spam the arte for 30 minutes.

I wrote a guide about it.

Also, if by "max out all of your skills" you mean learn all your artes, that can be done without any grinding whatsoever before you beat the main plot on NG.

[Tiasmoon]

Arte profiency is weird. While I havent done any testing myself, im certain its not actually 9999 uses required to hit 9999 profiency. It wouldnt surprise me if combat points or such increased your profiency gains.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2641118751

At that point I almost never manually used her either. I forgot at what point I got everyone at 9999 (except things like Dohalims Demon Strike, Law's Spirit, Alphen's Fire Strike) but it was relatively early on and quite a bit before the end of the game.

[Xengre]

Originally posted by Doom_Cookies:

Originally posted by Xengre:

Yes, but you literally set the game's 1 Dmg artifact and went afk for at least around 1 hour (which causes a built up multiplier, for instance Law's steel arte can be spammed 150x and despite this being 150x spirit increase stat when you do this strat it multiplies it can can gain like +3000 spirit profiency) to max out all of your skills that would normally have taken NG and a NG+ to do.

Unless this is some feature of the 1 Dmg artifact, then this is the exact opposite of what happens. After certain time intervals in combat duration, the amount of Arte Category Proficiency gained dramatically decreases. You get more Arte Category Proficiency if you use an arte 9 times and win the battle in <30 seconds than you do if you spam the arte for 30 minutes.

I wrote a guide about it.

Also, if by "max out all of your skills" you mean learn all your artes, that can be done without any grinding whatsoever before you beat the main plot on NG.

I'm not sure of the exact mechanics, myself, as I didn't test it in detail but when I decided to max out proficiency late game my Law did not know his healing spirit technique at the time (Inspiration iirc?) and he did not learn it in that battle, either, but after it in the following battle. I needed 200 uses of spirit proficiency category and had just under 100 already from using steel. I used it around 120-150x I'd estimate. I went afk for a bit over an hour with the AI all on auto and 1 dmg artifact and came back and triggered some boost strikes to finish off the battle. My post battle rewards were heavily inflated with high multipliers despite a massive battle duration and when I checked Law's artes to see if he learned inspiration (as that was one of the reasons I did that battle and manually cast steel so much before going afk) he had not yet learned it. I then double checked his proficiency wondering if I somehow actually didn't use enough spirit still and miscounted. What should have then been around 220~250 was over 3,000.

I then came to the same conclusion Tiasman did as well because them using 9999 actual artes (or up to 29,998 total) in such a short timeframe did seem very unlikely and suspect the inflated combat points act as a multiplier on it.

As for "max out all of your skills" I meant get 9999 proficiency, something OP explicitly confirmed doing in their OP, which cannot actually be done under normal expectation in a NG run, especially on some characters who are even less spammy like Kisara or Rinwell who has delays depending on playstyle and has to either mix up or focus on an element depending on person's choice/playstyle. 9,999-29,888 is a lot of casts, after all. To put that in perspective if you disabled all types of attacks except one (Leg for law, Power for Kisara) it could still take them 2-3 realms to get their required 600 uses form a base of 0 uses. You, yourself, might only get around 1,500-3,000 uses by end of game I'd estimate unless you grind a lot but then it wont be much more than 5,000 at the extreme end if gaining proficiency naturally.

This likely explains your initial assumptions where reward goes down due to CP multiplier decreasing over extended battle, but then when using 1 dmg artifact in an extended battle after either a long enough period of time, enough combos the AI builds up (I had law in those two battles I maxed prof), finishing with a boost strike to further push up the multiplier, or other conditions I'm not accounting for but CP explodes abnormally high (like 30-70+ CP, rather than decaying).

[Doom_Cookies]

Originally posted by Xengre:

As for "max out all of your skills" I meant get 9999 proficiency, something OP explicitly confirmed doing in their OP

OP only said that Alphen's Sword Strike Arte Category Proficiency was at 9999, no other. It is very easy to max that one out, lol. I had that maxed well before the end of the main story - very little grinding - despite having used mostly midair artes for most of of the game (Reigning Slash and...that earth one smashes the ground both changed that once I started using them). My midair was high as well by the end of the main story, but I don't recall the exact number. About 5k, maybe?

Originally posted by Xengre:

You, yourself, might only get around 1,500-3,000 uses by end of game I'd estimate unless you grind a lot but then it wont be much more than 5,000 at the extreme end if gaining proficiency naturally.

Most of my other characters had 5-7k in their most frequently used arte category by the end of the game, and all of them had 9999 in at least that by the end of the postgame dungeon.

I grinded to farm gald twice total throughout the game before postgame, both a single run through a current-level dungeon at about 25 minute time expenditure, both together amounting to under an hour of grinding. One was a circle around the field outside the city in which you get Doh, and the second was that mountain path out of the 5'th lord's territory's hidden beach village.

Originally posted by Xengre:

This likely explains your initial assumptions where reward goes down due to CP multiplier decreasing over extended battle [...]

It's not an assumption. Refer to the guide I linked. Combat Points and the multiplier it grants has no effect whatsoever on Arte Category Proficiency gains. I explicitly tested this exactly.

At exactly 30 seconds of fight duration (well, somewhere between 26 and 30, so logically it'd probably be exactly 30), your Arte Category Proficiency gains from that battle plummet dramatically due to some hidden time-limit penalty. This is repeatable. At 25 seconds, you get the same gains as you would as if the fight ended at 5 seconds. But the very second you hit 30 seconds, your gains are lowered significantly. I only know for sure that the 30 second penalty exists; I did not test for further penalties at other time intervals, but I am fairly sure they exist as well.

Originally posted by Xengre:

[...] but then when using 1 dmg artifact in an extended battle after either a long enough period of time, enough combos the AI builds up (I had law in those two battles I maxed prof), finishing with a boost strike to further push up the multiplier, or other conditions I'm not accounting for but CP explodes abnormally high (like 30-70+ CP, rather than decaying).

I'll reiterate once more just to be thorough: Combat Points and the multiplier it grants has absolutely zero effect on your Arte Category Proficiency gains after the fight. I did not test if using a Boost Strike/Mystic Arte to finish the fight altered the gains in any way, though. I rather doubt it, but I can't explicitly rule it out.

Originally posted by Xengre:

I went afk for a bit over an hour with the AI all on auto and 1 dmg artifact and came back and triggered some boost strikes to finish off the battle. My post battle rewards were heavily inflated with high multipliers despite a massive battle duration and when I checked Law's artes to see if he learned inspiration (as that was one of the reasons I did that battle and manually cast steel so much before going afk) he had not yet learned it. I then double checked his proficiency wondering if I somehow actually didn't use enough spirit still and miscounted. What should have then been around 220~250 was over 3,000.

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're telling the full and precise truth.

Was this against enemies of your level? Higher level? The level of enemies is one of the primary factors that determines how much Arte Category Proficiency per use you get in combat.

Did the battle include one shining enemy? Two, maybe? The presence of a shining enemy in battle acts as an absolutely absurd multiplier for Arte Category Proficiency gains. Something like 15x the gains, making one battle with a shining enemy worth roughly 15 battles without; for Arte Category Proficiency, at least.

The only way I could see your Category jumping up like that is if both of these cases were true, and only if the 30s time penalty is the only interval in which there is a penalty. Either that, or there's a really big contributing factor that my tests never revealed. Or some mix of all of them.

Did you finish the fight with a Boost Strike/Mystic Arte as mentioned before? As I said, I cant rule out that that's a contributing factor for the gains.

[Xengre]

I'm not going to argue the figures you throw out, especially since your first two paragraph reveals quite a bit of contradictions in its own right and what you are describing is unrealistically impossible for the average player... even in the most mathematically impossible perfect effort, even seeing the Law/Kisara example provided before as to why. (Even basic math results in countless hours, or if we throw math it in the form of "proficiency gained in one realm completion it would equal multiple NGs)

Regarding the issue you don't need to give me the benefit of the doubt as it is very easy to test as I've given you fairly solid details as to how.

When I tested it I did it just before going to Lenegis after beating all elemental shards from the wedge landing (dang bird at top of mage side quest towre pushed my low level up to 51/52 iirc) and I went back to the 5th realm's jungle and fought 3 wild boards with auto battle for both battles I did to increase proficiency. This puts me significantly above their level. I had no battle gauge built and no shining enemy. This was on hard difficulty.

I finished the fight with Boost Strike (mystic arte wont work because it still does 1 dmg, but boost strike instant kills). It was a bit over an hour into the first time and the second one (intended to max Rinwell's skills to learn her meteor/etc.) was shorter because I had realized I didn't need such an extreme number of casts but only a large enough number to go with the multiplier to push my proficiency up very high. Second fight was probably 40 minutes and it ended up true as my Rinwell had all proficiency below 2k and after 40 minutes she had 9999 in all 3 categories and there is no way she cast well over 24,000 times in 40 minutes. In addition, both my Steel/Inspiration casts, as well as Rinwells combined entire catalog of all artes didn't come even close to their proficiency.

If you want to analyze the specific to factor into your guide I suggest using either Law's method I used to accidentally discover it in a NG+ carry over test (what difficulty you use or you compare difficulties is up to your discretion) and disable inspiration (as he can auto use it) and manually cast like 100x and record the data or pick a different preferred proficiency and disable all skills of that proficiency but equip enough of others to properly combo (in case combo boosts this somehow since I saw the AI throwing some heavy combo counts at times when I would check, Law was in that team) and manually use the ability 100x and then AI will fight using unrelated still enabled proficiency artes until you are ready to close out the test battle. Record.

If you consider say... one fight had a CP multiplier in the low +30s at the end of battle and it was the one I had used Steel just a bit over 100x this equates to 3000 something spirit which matches with what I had seen, though it could be coincidence and CP might not be the factor at play. However, you can see between this and the other stuff is why we suspect CP is involved but, again, it could very well be coincidence and be something else.

[Doom_Cookies]

Originally posted by Xengre:

I'm not going to argue the figures you throw out, especially since your first two paragraph reveals quite a bit of contradictions in its own right and what you are describing is unrealistically impossible for the average player...

The information I gave you is correct and there are no contradictions, but think what you will.

I spent the vast majority of the game beating trash fights in under 30 seconds, so my Arte Category Proficiency gains were nearly 3x quicker than those who didn't.

Originally posted by Xengre:

Regarding the issue you don't need to give me the benefit of the doubt as it is very easy to test as I've given you fairly solid details as to how.

That's true, but I have no interest in directly testing this stuff more than I already have. I'm hoping whatever details you have might help me puzzle out the source of your immense gains.

Originally posted by Xengre:

When I tested it I did it just before going to Lenegis after beating all elemental shards from the wedge landing (dang bird at top of mage side quest towre pushed my low level up to 51/52 iirc) and I went back to the 5th realm's jungle and fought 3 wild boards with auto battle for both battles I did to increase proficiency. This puts me significantly above their level. I had no battle gauge built and no shining enemy. This was on hard difficulty.

To be clear, in my testing, the level gap between you and the enemies didn't seem to be what mattered, but just the raw level of the enemy - I didn't test for sure, though. Also, difficulty setting has no effect on the gains. Nor does Battle Gauge. Thank you for that level of detail, though.

No shining enemy is a surprise. I can't see how your gains could possibly be in the thousands without one.

To get about 3k Proficiency in about an hour, you're claiming to have gained about 50 Proficiency/minute. If we assume you were able to get off about 20 Steel per minute (which is pushing it with how inconsistent the AI is with spamming buff artes, but let's assume anyway), you'd need to have been getting 2.5 proficiency per use of Steel. Enemies of far higher level in the postgame dungeon were only giving about that much gain per Steel while similarly in packs of 3, and only before the 30 second mark, so the boars from the 5'th lord's zone should have been giving far less.

This means you were getting well over 3x the proficiency you should have gotten according to what I know of how this system works. That implies some factor that is yet unknown.

Originally posted by Xengre:

Second fight was probably 40 minutes and it ended up true as my Rinwell had all proficiency below 2k and after 40 minutes she had 9999 in all 3 categories [...]

That is an absolutely absurd level of gains. I never tested anything but Spirit Proficiency, so I don't know if the raw per-use values for gains might be higher for her casts or not.

That said, I'm extremely skeptical of this one. You'd need 600 Proficiency/minute to achieve this, and I don't believe that's possible even with a shining enemy in postgame.

Still, I can't rule out the possibility.

Originally posted by Xengre:

If you want to analyze the specific to factor into your guide I suggest using either Law's method I used to accidentally discover it in a NG+ carry over test [...]

This is some solid advice. More or less what I did when I tested it a while back.

I did consider combo, and I did test it with low combo numbers to absolutely no effect, but if there is a threshold where it suddenly multiplies like the time-limit penalty, then I would have missed that.

Originally posted by Xengre:

However, you can see between this and the other stuff is why we suspect CP is involved but, again, it could very well be coincidence and be something else.

It's definitely some other factor. I can say with 100% certainty that no level of CP has any effect at all on the Arte Category Proficiency gains. I tested this particularly extensively.

If there is a factor that we're missing, some solid leads would be: the use of Boost Strikes to finish the battle, high combo numbers increasing proficiency gain either during the combo (weaker effect) or at the end of combat (stronger effect), or some hidden feature of the 1 Damage artifact.

Unfortunately, that's not as solid a conclusion as I was hoping for. As said before, I have little desire to test Arte Category Proficiency gains more than I already have, so I have no intention of going out of my way to do so. If I ever play through NG+, I'll keep your claims in mind and maybe toy around with it to see if I can puzzle it out.

[Xengre]

Just to be clear the AI Law did not use Steel at all as, as far as I am aware, it is incapable of using the Steel arte on its own (or it is so rare we can assume to be the equivalent of incapable of using it). I had to manually use it as I needed to get the remaining spirit proficiency to 200 spirit. I started the fight, spammed it some 120+ times and then went afk for the remainder of the fight until I came back to finish it off with boost strikes a bit over an hour into the fight. So I was able to optimally spam it in the first few minutes and then go afk while they worked on their proficiency.

Yes, the gains are quite absurd. It is rather amazing it takes less than 2 hours to max every proficiency of every character in the game. It is too bad this doesn't translate to actual arte levels, too. Still, it is nice because spirit and flaming sword categories would otherwise be beyond tedious to max out so knowing there is a trick to it, even though we don't know the precise details, is nice. Of course, it could end up being some bizarre bug that isn't seen as a "feature" by Bandai and gets fixed later lol.

[Doom_Cookies]

Originally posted by Xengre:

Just to be clear the AI Law did not use Steel at all as, as far as I am aware, it is incapable of using the Steel arte on its own (or it is so rare we can assume to be the equivalent of incapable of using it). [...]

Oh, okay, so you didn't rely on the AI to spam it. It really is very bad at doing that, lol. Even when setting the Strategy to use Steel under any condition, Law just...doesn't. He ends up too busy trying to normal attack the mobs (because the AI is "smart" enough not to spam buffs it already has). That's why I also did it manually during postgame.

Just to be clear, after manually using it 140+ times, you just went entirely AFK, stopped manually using it, and let the AI do its thing until you came back to finish it? If so, that would probably rule out the "if used during a high combo" idea, as the high combos probably came after you stopped spamming Steel. In that case, a high combo might still grant some sort of multiplier for all uses within that battle, even if not used during the combo, though. But that narrows it down a bit.

Originally posted by Xengre:

Yes, the gains are quite absurd. It is rather amazing it takes less than 2 hours to max every proficiency of every character in the game. It is too bad this doesn't translate to actual arte levels, too. Still, it is nice because spirit and flaming sword categories would otherwise be beyond tedious to max out so knowing there is a trick to it, even though we don't know the precise details, is nice. Of course, it could end up being some bizarre bug that isn't seen as a "feature" by Bandai and gets fixed later lol.

Heck, I don't think I ever even bothered maxing every category. The third categories for most characters don't need to go above a few hundred to a thousand for any particular reason. I don't have the game installed right this second to check, but I'm pretty sure even my Alphen's Flaming Sword Proficiency is only in the low thousands.

It's not that tedious in postgame, btw. You can easily get significant amounts of proficiency in a type per battle if you spam artes of that category and end the fight in under 30s in the first area of the postgame dungeon - probably more against higher level enemies deeper in. And if you find a shining enemy there? Literal hundreds of proficiency in half a minute. It's actually a bit faster than the way you raised Law's proficiency, albeit you can't just AFK to do it this way.

Even if what you experience is a bug, I doubt Bandai would ever bother fixing it. :P

[Xengre]

I used it somewhere around 120 up to maybe 150 as an effort to overshoot times and then went afk for a bit over an hour. After I came back the only thing I did was wait for the AI to built up a boost strike and use it to finish the fight. Yeah, I thought the combo could be part of why the CP was so insanely inflated and possibly, if it was the cause, also had a multiplier applied to proficiency. The only other thing that I can guess aside from combo, and/or CP, was a bug with the timer after too much time passed. Perhaps there is some type of data type roll over causing enlarged values, but I only tested twice and the second battle was a bit shorter but had over 70 CP unlike the first battle which had only 30 something so time is a bit lower on my suspicions list.

Bandai best not or Alphen gonna cook somethin real spicy for Bandai.