Part 47: Disablement Hierarchy

Side Notes 06: Disablement Hierarchy

While this goes hand in hand with the Hexer class, due to their limited usefulness, binds and ailments aren't seen too much in this game. For one thing, hardly any conditionals require them, with no conditionals requiring any ailments, and secondly, due to the very fast paced nature of battles and emphasis on damage mitigation over everything, either the battle is over before an ailment is useful, or your party has much better things to do than use those skills.

Still, binds are very handy and the main reason to use a whip Dark Hunter, since you wouldn't use those weapons otherwise, while ailments do have their uses on occasion, especially Poison at the start of the game. Despite disabling certain skills, some enemies have AI that specifically go around that and don't waste time using bound skills, so it makes them less effective, but also makes the enemy incredibly predictable. But let's detail every little thing we know about these darn things, starting with binds.

Out of the three binds, Head and Arm are the most useful, since a lot of dangerous skills come from those parts, while Leg binds are serviceable when those skills pop up, but it's best to max out the first two first. For all disable skills, it's simply Base Chance of the skill multiplied by the resistance, which usually doesn't change. The only other thing that affects it is the Hexer passive Curses, nothing else can make your disables better at landing. If you land a disable skill, the enemy becomes 0.75x more resistant to that disable, while not landing it makes the enemy 1.25x less resistant to it. Regardless, the chance of binds landing is capped at 90%, while ailments are capped at 100%. All binds last 4-6 turns.

Head Bind: Prevents the use of Head skills, reduces Accuracy by 30%.

Arm Bind: Prevents the use of Arm skills, reduces STR by 30%.

Leg Bind: Prevents the use of Leg skills, reduces AGI by 30%, does not prevent fleeing.

So, for a general bind, Arm is the best one, since it's the most useful stat reduction. For a Dark Hunter, the chances for a bind cap out at 55%, or 67% when boosted, so they can be a pain to initially land, especially since bosses and FOEs have a 10%-50% resistance to them. Hexers, meanwhile, cap out at 70%, or 82% when boosted, BEFORE Curses is applied, which is a 130% boost at max level, therefore making it a 91% chance, or a 106% chance when boosted. Though since the cap is always 90%, boosting does nothing and missing won't increase your chances, unless the enemy has any resistance to them.

For the ailments, they're placed in a hierarchy, where ones higher up will replace ones below them, while the lower ones will never replace ones higher up. There's some aspects of ailments we're not 100% clear on, but one important note is all ailments have the same resistance chance for an enemy. Stun is a separate "ailment" that has a specific chance depending on the type of enemy, and Instant Death and Petrify have their own, same, chance separate from that. When an enemy is inflicted with Petrify, while it stays on the field, it cannot recover from it and is treated as dead.

Blind: Reduces accuracy by an unknown amount. Lasts 3-5 turns.

Paralysis: 50% chance to not act. Lasts 4-7 turns.

Confusion: 50% chance to attack either a random enemy or random party member with a regular attack. Lasts 3-5 turns.

Sleep: Skips turns for its duration, disables evasion and any single attack deals 50% more damage and removes the ailment. Always skips turn it wakes up. Lasts 4-7 turns.

Poison: Deals a set amount of damage at the end of the turn depending on the skill's Poison power and the Alchemist's Toxins passive. Lasts 4-7 turns.
Poison damage is determined by the skills Poison Power * 2 + 3, but Toxins is bugged and does literally nothing, and regardless of what skill you use, any Poison damage is capped at 255.

Curse: Deals 50% backlash damage, doing so after each individual hit. Lasts 3-5 turns.

Fear: 50% chance to not act. Lasts 4-7 turns.
Requires the Hexer skills of Paralyze, Betrayal or Suicide to not be an identical Paralysis.

Petrify: Sets all damage multipliers to 150%, disables evasion and keeps the enemy on the field. Uses the same resistances as Instant Death and is counted as such when all other non-petrified enemies are defeated. Impossible to recover from, though party members can be cured with a Theriaca B.

Instant Death: Deals damage equal to HP remaining.

Stun: Stuns the enemy for the remainder of the turn, skipping their turn if they have yet to act. Resistances based on enemy type.
Regular enemies have 100% resistance, Orange FOEs have 50% resistance, Red FOEs have 25% resistance, story bosses have 15% resistance, optional bosses and Etreant have 10% resistance.

And that's everything! For each of the turn variations, it's a specific chance of rolling that turn, with the infliction turn being turn 1. Skills are able to reduce or lengthen it and just flip the list in reverse to see the hierarchy.