Game Breaker / Etrian Odyssey

While the Etrian Odyssey games are Atlus titles, with the player-breaking difficulty that entails, that doesn't mean there aren't ways for the players to break the games right back.

Series-Wide

• Party builds that specialize in burst damage are a consistent Game-Breaker across the main series games. By carefully managing buffs, maxing the right skills, and timing your charge and damage boosting skills properly, it's possible to blow up bosses in a few turns after setting up, bypassing a good chunk of the fight. These kinds of teams would often use Status Infliction Attack based classes to disable its victim, or the right amount of Damage Reduction from classes such as the Protector to keep the party safe while setting up and executing the strategy. Since specifics of these kinds of teams would cover a wide range of skills in the series, a lot of entries on this page involve some of the best skills or classes used in such parties.
• You'll notice that buff-based classes show up in this section a lot. That's because buffs are a straight-up force multiplier that become handy in speeding up boss fights or other difficult encounters. Stacking buffs is the bread-and-butter for many a burst party, which came to a head in The Drowned City since you can stack your offensive buffs for a compounding effect (for instance, Berserker Vow (1.9x damage) with Attack Order (1.45x damage) results in an overall 2.75x multiplier!). Later entries have attempted to mitigate this by reducing the effectiveness of stacking buffs, but there's often a workaround.
• Some attack skills, such as the Masurao's and (in Nexus only) Ronin's Helm Splitter, are extra-powerful attacks with low accuracy. However, if your party has a skill that can reliably inflict Panic/Confusion, Blind, or Leg Bind, all of which prevent the victim from dodging — there's plenty of skills that can inflict at least one of these — you can spam those attacks without worry of missing the target for a few turns.^note Paralysis can also work but only if the victim is prevented from moving for the turn. Sleep also works too, but hitting a sleeping target will wake them up. Petrification also works, but raises the victim's physical defense dramatically, making it less viable for strategies with non-elemental attacks. Stun also works but wears off at the end of the current turn.
• Panic is easily one of the strongest ailments in the series — not only does it cause the enemy to randomly perform normal attacks, it keeps them from using their more dangerous skills and makes them unable to dodge. Landing panic on a boss with a predictable pattern at the right time buys you a few free turns to not worry about defense, on top of letting you freely wail on them with normally Powerful, but Inaccurate skills. There's little wonder that most skills that inflict panic have lower success rates and/or higher TP costs than with other ailments.
• In the older games which use TEC for magic damage and magic defense, one very easy way to make the most of your mages is to stack TEC-increasing equipment (paying little heed to armor or weaponry which has little impact on this) on top of landing a head bind on your target (which halves its TEC). This is what made mages ridiculously strong in the earlier stages of the game, provided their TP reserves can last. Legends of the Titan watered down the strength of this with how the Runemaster worked. Later games eventually split TEC into INT and WIS while also giving individual weapons and armor influence over magic attack and defense, making your equipment matter almost as much as your units' stats in combat and erasing this strategy's influence.
• Some of the later entries in the series include the means to conveniently increase the experience gain, so you can be a few levels ahead of what the game expects you to be at and have a much easier time against challenging elements. Admittedly, some sources of this easy experience are DLC quests, manifesting as a form of Bribing Your Way to Victory. Some players simply choose not to use them to outgrind the opposition, instead using the easy EXP as a way to offset the level cost of Resting so they can experiment with different builds.
  • A few classes in the later games have skills that work like an Experience Booster, either passively or as a temporary augment that combines Encounter Bait. Some also throw in a raised ability to encounter Rare Breeds with a much larger experience yield. Combine all of the above and you can ease the level grind for a better time, but at the cost of needing to dedicate some skill points to those skills instead of other combat-relevant ones.

Etrian Odyssey

• The original version's and Origins Collection remaster's Medic is easily one of the most overpowered classes in the game, and perhaps the most powerful healer class across the series:
  • The Medic's Immunize is a powerful resistance buff that reduces all damage by up to 60% at max level. If a max-level Immunize is boosted this damage reduction jumps to 85%, letting your whole team survive otherwise lethal damage and take Scratch Damage from almost everything else. This game and the HD remake are the only entries that use this incredibly powerful version of Immunize; The Millennium Girl toned down Immunize's numbers and forced it to only reduce incoming fire/ice/volt damage, and Immunize outright doesn't reappear on the Medic's skill list in other games.
  • A Combat Medic build is most effective in this game, because their own ATK Up passive is much stronger than other classes'. Usually, a level 10 ATK Up offers a 1.3x damage multiplier. For the Medic? The 1.3x mark is at level 3, and full investment is a 3x multiplier. This makes the Medic hit about as hard as your actual frontliners, especially with a maxed-out Caduceus skill. Later games standardized the way passives scale between all classes, and the Medic's physical damage output took a big Nerf and never fully recovered.
  • The Origins Collection version of the game brings back what made EO1 Medic so good after later games and the Untold remake toned the class down, and even buffs some of their abilities. Take Healing Touch, for example. In the original DS version, it requires so much investment for relatively so little gain, only healing up to each combatant's max HP times 40% at level 10. In the Origins version, it becomes a full party heal at level 3 for a mere 3 TP, and at level 5, its new maximum, it does the same effect but at 1 TP, basically giving you a free heal after each fight and allowing for much longer labyrinth expeditions than usual.
• Once you get to the 5th Stratum, money is no longer a problem, as just close by the Warp pole is a mining point that can be mined without fear of being attacked and making thousands of En per run with a team of Survivalists with maxed out mining. Future games nerfed the gathering skills to prevent this from happening again, on top of introducing the risk of an ambush during the gathering process to punish gathering-specialized parties. The Millennium Girl rebalanced resource-gathering by adopting the system from the fourth game (one-use gather spots that restock on midnight) on top of repositioning the same gathering spot.
• Due to how the game triggers an ambush, it checks to see if character 1 triggers it, then character 2 and so forth, This means that a full team of survivalists with maxed out Ambush skill, will ambush 'everything' in the game, that includes the final boss and bonus bosses, and because Survivalists have multi-hit, that can hit 3 times at max level, you would often get down 3 hits per character x 5 characters x 2 full turns of combat for a total of 30 attacks, before the enemies or bosses could hit you even once. this build is a glass cannon though and takes some grinding.
• Survivalists are not just handy for navigation and gathering — they make for great DPS classes due to how strong Bow Attack Up, Apollyon, and Multihit are. Unlike most offensively oriented class, Survivalists only have a single attack up skills that boosts the power of Bow weapons but it scales up to 150% at level 10, outclassing STR-affecting skills and offering great returns for maxing just one skill. Multihit gets a third hit at max level with no strings attached, greatly improving the DPS at that point and Apollyon is extremely powerful. Combined, Survivalist damage output is staggeringly high, being significantly more powerful than every other class bar Ronin. As with most of the powerful classes in 1, the Survivalist would suffer a heavy nerf coming into Heroes of Lagaard, neutering its damage output while also removing the third hit of Multihit. Survivalist would then suffer from an identity crisis in terms of its roles until its return to form in The Fafnir Knight.

Heroes of Lagaard

• When the developers were rebalancing things for HoL, they boosted some previously-useless skills - a bit too much, in some cases.
  • The Hexer skill Revenge was boosted to deal 255% of the damage the Hexer had taken for only 19 TP once mastered, which means a Hexer with items to boost max HP, 1 HP left, and enough AGI to move first can be devastating. This is especially due to the absence of Health/Damage Asymmetry in HoL; When enemies and bosses rarely have more than 5000 HP, dealing over 2000 damage per Revenge drastically shortens fights with incredibly little investment.
  • While not as conveninent, a Hexer with Evil Eye and Suicide can command the enemy to attack itself instead of the party, allowing the player to attack an enemy without worry of being hit. There's also Betrayal, which forces all terrified enemies to attack each other. Adding in Relapse, it's possible to cripple an enemy for the rest of the battle.
  • The Dark Hunter's Climax was similarly buffed up. Once mastered, it kills any enemy vulnerable to instant death with less than 55% of its HP (previously, it only had a 20% chance of working, even when mastered). Most bosses are immune to Climax, but F.O.E.s aren't; having Climax mastered essentially halves the duration of any F.O.E. encounter. Even better, one of the bosses is vulnerable to instant death. Guess what its conditional (and therefore worth 10k en) drop requires.
• A War Magus' Cursecut can drain TP from an enemy that's been cursed (best done with a Hexer, which, as mentioned above, is a Game Breaker in and of itself). War Magi can also transfer their TP to other characters by the use of their Transfer skill. With this combo, you have potentially limitless TP. A shame that this is pretty much all that a War Magus is good for...
• Force skills, being the game's resident Limit Break, are really powerful when you find the resources to optimize their use. The Gunner's guarantees that you'll stun an enemy for that turn and the Protector's negates all damage and status effects for one turn, for example. The Dark Hunter's is guaranteed to go last in the turn, but will bind any enemy, including bosses, preventing them from using their skills (though some exceptions exist). That enemy can waste a turn trying to use a skill that requires the bound limb. At the end of the game, it's possible to use them every turn by dedicating two characters to feeding the Force skill users Axcelas. However, not only do they cost a lot, but also require plenty of materials in order to buy them.
• Dampen, which is another Hexer skill, applies a debuff that neutralizes the target's resistances and immunities even at its lowest rank. Depending on the target or the party build, applying this can pretty much double your party's damage output. Further investment will begin to force the target to take increased damage from everything they're not already weak to. The drawbacks are that it doesn't stack with Frailty, a stronger defense debuff for amplifying neutral hits, it has a terrible speed modifier, and certain bosses react adversely to its effects, but other than that it becomes very handy in attaining conditional drops.
• Nectalls and Nectall IIs act as party-wide Nectars, with the latter reviving the whole party with full health all on their own. They are hard to get until very, very late in the game (Nectall IIs in particular need a drop from Colossus to be restocked in addition to a post-game gathering material), but keeping a healthy supply of them renders party wipes a non-issue unless everyone dies at once. Needless to say, Nectalls were one-shot items, with party-wide revives in the future being restricted to skills with high costs and chances of failure.

The Drowned City

• There exist ways to manipulate the game's RNG. This helps influence the AI of certain Sea Quest Bosses and/or your AI companions on such quests. One infamous method involves influencing the RNG such that your AI companion Wildling summons a tiger that has a guaranteed instant kill on the Scylla, which is perfect for power-leveling.
• The infamous Warrior Might team, which uses a Gladiator/Shogun and two Shogun/Buccaneers. The Gladiator's class ability and self-buff skills give it some of the highest damage output in the game, and its Shogun subclass lets it use Warrior Might, a chaser skill that makes it follow up every party member's attack with one of its own. This would normally be balanced by the party limit of five (six with a Ninja's Bunshin), especially since some members will be too busy healing, guarding other members, or maintaining buffs to attack. However, the Shoguns' class ability, Second Sword, lets them dual wield weapons, and their Buccaneer subclass gives them Swashbuckling, which lets them attack 2-4 times per weapon when using normal attacks—and Warrior Might treats every single normal attack as a separate attack and has no upper limit on how many times it can chase attacks. Throw in a bunch of offensive buffs and defensive debuffs from your other party members, and you can perform 8-16 chase attacks to inflict as much as 40,000 HP of damage on the final boss in one turn.
  
  When Warrior Might returned in Etrian Odyssey Nexus, it got tagged with a huge nerf where every chase causes the Shogun to lose HP, and the HP loss capable of killing its user. Combined with the general Power Creep on active skills that happened to that point, Warrior's Might is no longer the standout skill it used to be in 3.
• The Ninja/Zodiac TP battery. The Ninja's class ability, Keburi no Sue, reduces the TP costs of all their skills by up to 9 points. Subclass to Zodiac and you can use the Dark Ether skill to allow a row of characters to use skills at no TP cost—this would normally cost 10 TP, but with Keburi no Sue, this goes down to the minimum of 1 TP. Now you can spam your party's strongest skills constantly at a cost of just 1 TP per turn. Want to have a pair of Zodiacs nuke the enemy with 60 TP Meteors every turn? Want your Gladiator to use the above Warrior's Might combo every random battle? Now you can! This applies mostly to the main game, though; once Amrita IIIs can be farmed in the sixth stratum, they end up being more efficient for long fights over dedicating a character to using Dark Ether and nothing else.
• Gladiators have Berserker Vow and Charge. The former sacrifices a huge portion of HP for up to 90% damage boost, and the later allows them to do 260% extra damage next turn. Between these two skills, the Gladiator straight-up becomes the best class in the game for physical DPS, and is a staple subclass for anyone needing physical offense. No wonder Charge skills in subsequent games don't reach similar damage multipliers outside Beyond the Myth.
• The Hoplite is as important to defense as a Protector would be, but what pushes them into power is the abundance of elemental attacks in this game. Their anti-element skills providing full immunity to an element of your choice pretty much gives you free turns to do potentially risky things like set up Berserker Vow without worrying about the Gladiator dying. A Hoplite/Ninja is also very effective when you use Bunshin, as you can guard two allies at the same time or throw up two anti-element walls if you don't want to guess the incoming attack. There's little wonder why future iterations of elemental negation skills either worked for only the first hit, or could not stack.
• Swashbuckling. At first, it appears Awesome, but Impractical due to requiring eight points in both Rapier and Gun Mastery, but the surprisingly very high activation rate makes it worth it, even without Warrior's Might. Once you have it, any skill that doesn't have some form of utility or overwhelming power like Meteor or Nine Smash automatically becomes a waste of skill points and TP.
  • A Shogun/Buccaneer combining Swashbuckling with their Dual Wielding class skill can get up to nine attacks in a single command! Not only can you get lots of opportunities to proc your weapon forges, if you combine this with the Buccaneer's Limit Boost passive you get an astounding amount of Limit charge in one fell swoop. Most classes would need seven to ten turns to fully charge a Limit Break; this skill combination gets you full charge in as low as two.
• Aegis Shield is a Limit Skill unlocked after you first defeat the King Penguin in a Tower of Victory Sea Quest. This can be acquired by the time you've reached the fourth stratum if you plan your sea routes correctly, and the King Penguin is a rather easy Sea Quest boss too. Aegis Shield functions just like Painless from the second game, giving your party one turn of complete invulnerability, letting you get away with normally risky maneuvers without worrying about defense. The only drawback is that it's a 4-man Limit, restricting the Limit Skill combinations you can deploy with it, but it's well worth the cost. Uroboros Guard is an even stronger version of this skill as it converts all incoming damage into healing, but it's deep in the postgame and is less accessible compared to Aegis Shield.
• The Slice, Pierce, and Crush Amulets, unlocked from drops earned in the fifth stratum, each bestow their wielder with a 50% resistance to one of the three physical damage types. Stack two of them and the user takes negligible damage from that type. This lets the player effectively nullify a problematic physical move if they know what damage type it is. It comes at the cost of an armor slot, but the damage reduction far outweighs any armor. The potency of stacking accessories resulted in a Nerf in subsequent games to the equipment system, only allowing a party member to equip one accessory at a time.
• Formaldehydes are an extremely useful item for drop farming balanced out by how exceedingly rare and expensive they are to acquire. The Drowned City shows what would happen if this weren't the case via the Lucky Hammer Limit skill, a weak attack that only needs one character to execute, goes at the end of the turn, and forces an enemy to drop all its spoils if it deals the killing blow. The weak power of the attack doesn't matter when there's so many ways to buff the user's attack plus Charge to push it higher, making it an infinite Formaldehyde for getting as many rare drops as needed. Add in that there's many FOEs in this game with very low chances to drop stat books, and it's trivial to bust the game wide open with some patience. The only downside is that it's locked behind Leviathan, a oceanic quest boss scaled for the postgame, but it's telling that some players choose to RNG manipulate instant death on Leviathan to obtain the skill as early as possible.

Legends of the Titan

• The Dancer's bottommost dancing skills — Fan Dance, Sword Dance, and Mist Dance. These passive skills give an increased dodge chance, the ability to hit multiple times in a single attack, and the chance to stun an enemy upon connecting with a normal attack. It only takes three skill points to unlock Sword Dance, compared to the sixteen (at least eight of which are dumped in a useless skill regardless of what weapon you use) it took to unlock its predecessor Swashbuckling in The Drowned City. Dancers are also able to use a different skill to make allies in the same line follow up on their attacks, meaning it's possible to have your entire front line attack multiple times per turn.
  • Want to crank the fun up to eleven? Give them the Nightseeker subclass and make them Dual Wield. The multiple attacking can trigger both weapons individually. If you have Sword Dance maxed, your Dancer can potentially attack eight times per turn. By the way, did we mention that the Dancer is both a buffer and healer?
  • Flip it around and it's still very potent. The maximum number of hits are not as high due to the lower skill point cap on Sword Dance, but each secondary hit can do more damage due to the higher Blade Flurry cap. If the primary weapon can also inflict ailments on normal attacks, all the better, as the Nightseeker passives will proceed to at least double the damage of all subsequent hits once an ailment lands!
• The secret class Imperials are capable of dealing thousands of damage without attack buffs. To balance the class, they're given a few cooldown turns until they're allowed to use it again, and their signature BFS weapon also prevents use of a sub-weapon. However, they can use two skills to cool down their weapon (which deals damage as well) and then use an attack that charges up their next turn's attack power (which more than doubles their power even without the skill maxed), which happens to be the same turn they're allowed to use the powerful skills again. If an enemy somehow manages to survive a few of those attacks, there's even a skill that removes the cooldown time for three turns and immediately cools down their weapon after a certain amount of overheats occur in a battle, allowing the character to deal massive damage without any drawback for three turns.
  • Want to jack up the damage even more? Give them a Runemaster subclass. Elemental Runes can actually create weaknesses in enemies that otherwise take neutral damage, and Runic Flare raises damage when you strike a weakness. The result: an incredibly powerful elemental Drive attack.
• Once a Nightseeker hits high enough level to be able to use Venom Throw, maxing it out allows them to inflict a poison status that does a fixed 700 damage every turn for several turns, enough to make a large dent in even most bosses' HP. Combine this with Spread Throw and Auto-Spread which allows them to hit every enemy with the next 2 throw skills and a chance to use said skill for free at the beginning of the battle, and they can take out most random encounters in a single turn with very little TP used. If you then give them Arcanist as a subclass, you can not only use one of their passive abilities to increase the chance of landing the poison status on even strongest enemies, but also gain back any TP you spend to use the move if the poison sticks on at least a single enemy thanks to their TP Return.
• Succeeding the Gladiators in the "staple subclass for damage" role is the Bushi, as their damage bonuses are very effective for minimal skill point investment. With a single skill point, their Blood Surge gives a long-lasting buff that doesn't consume a buff slot, drains miniscule amounts of HP and TP per turn, and gives a 45% universal damage bonus. Unlike Berserker Vow, Blood Surge affects all damage so even elemental Runemasters can benefit from it!
• The Sniper's Squall Volley, at max level, can hit anywhere from 6-16 times but has low accuracy to offset it. However, if an enemy is inflicted with Paralyze, Blind, Panic, or Leg Bind, their evasion rate basically turns off. Snipers have easy access to leg bind with their natural skill set, along with the ability to inflict critical hits and raised critical chance against enemies with binds. What this amounts to is a ridiculous number of hits on the enemy, at least half of them being criticals. Oh, and all this can proc more follow-ups with a Landsknecht's Link skills.

The Millennium Girl

• Hexers break the game again with Stoning Curse, an extremely reliable petrification spell (which instantly kills the target) against normal enemies with a low TP cost. Unless there's a massive group of enemies that require Evil Eye, Stoning Curse is all a Hexer needs to use outside of F.O.E. fights and boss battles.
  • Speaking of Evil Eye, it got buffed from its previous incarnations. Instead of just targeting one enemy at a time, it targets a row of them. Curse Mastery increasing ailment chance makes it more reliable as well, so Hexers become even more powerful than they were before.
• Dark Hunter is, for the most part bar none the strongest offensive class in the game.
  • Viper covers their early game. At level 10, and boosted, almost everything is vulnerable to the poison effect, and it's easy to apply to anything, even bosses, and it does absurd damage due to its insane multiplier, almost dealing 4 digits of damage when the other potential party member struggles to be half as powerful. And due to Good Bad Bug, Viper could bypass Golem's self reviving effect, significantly reducing the duration of the fight.
  • Ecstasy, the Signature Move of the Whip skillset is obscenely effective. At level 10, an Ecstasy with no bound parts is just as powerful as 1 bound parts, and it just becomes much stronger with 2 or 3 bound parts. Used alone, Ecstasy is already one of the most powerful physical offensive skill in the game. At its maximum potential, its far and away the strongest offensive skill in the game with the possible exception of Land Slash.
  • Wrath Might increases your offensive power by 40% whenever the Dark Hunter is low on HP and this can be stacked further with the Grimoire mechanic. At max level the threshold for this boost is as high as 50% HP. All of this combined result in Dark Hunter being by far the strongest damage dealer in early, mid, and late game.
• The Gunner skill Action Boost. It allows you to take any action twice (three times if you level it up enough) for your next turn, but Action Boosted skills still require TP for each use. The game breaker is, provided the skill that triggers it is increased by Boost, all attacks in that chain are boosted. This allows you to fire off multiple powerful, Boosted skills (such as Ricochet) without any drawback, as long as you have enough TP. With some manipulation, you can easily get Ricky buffed, then have her unload multiple successive skills at once.
• Mastery of the Grimoire system (most likely via the item duplication glitch to spam Hunting Horns) will significantly augment any party's power. For instance, spreading the Alchemist's Formula Mastery around can boost elemental damage for other members of the party. Most notable use? Giving the above-mentioned Action Boost to all your offensive party members.
  • If a character equips a Grimoire that bestows a passive that they already have invested in, the game compounds the bonus offered by the highest level among both skills. This means that a character with a level 10 Mastery skill equipping a level 1 Mastery Grimoire stone will have a little over double the boost from a level 10 Mastery skill alone. This passive stacking ability is most noticeable with Weapon Mastery skills (except Sword), and results in a potent increase in combat performance once exploited.
  • A number of the King Grimoire skills (Grimoires dropped from certain bosses, with unique skills). The most obvious is Phoenix Wings from Iwaoropenelep, which allows the entire party to move before all enemies; combined with stuns or other status effects, it can lock down enemies before they can even attack. Wolf Pack from Fenrir is also great, giving a massive damage boost on the turn it's used, and Yggdra Vaccine protects the party from ailments — great for negating That One Attack when it's being telegraphed. The only counterbalancing factor is the sheer luck or effort needed to attain these skills due to the process being a Guide Dang It!, but when you get one, its power can trivialize most of the game.
  • With proper knowledge of the mechanic, and a little bit of luck, it is possible to get a number of powerful skills from bosses that will make subsequent difficult segments of the labyrinth a lot easier. Some notable examples are Hurricane Punch, and Flood for early parts of the game, and Burning Ray, and Tendril Thrash for late game. In the postgame you can access the extremely powerful Elemental Torrents as well. The catch about these moves are, by knowing how the boss pattern works, you can consistently get them on your grimoire at an acceptable level.
• Efficiency, available on Survivalists, passively doubles the strength of all HP and TP restoration items at max level. Combined with the Survivalists' high innate speed and they can easily be better healers than Medics as long as inventory space permits it. Somaprimes heal the party for 320 HP, Hamaoprimes restore 400 HP and 80 TP, and Amrita IIs restore a whopping 200 TP. Get it on a Grimoire and you can enjoy boosted item healing regardless of who's doing it. It's so strong that subsequent games nerfed this (and similar) skill's efficiency, with The Fafnir Knight changing it to a buff and watering down its strength, and Beyond the Myth only having it affect HP restoration aspects of items.

The Fafnir Knight

• The cafe option added to the game in terms of money grinding. Tired of waiting for your spoils as you keep doing stuff at the labyrinth? Go find a room with no encounters, place an auto-walk path, and leave it there for 12 hours or so. Your money earnings will amass quickly.
• The Dark Hunter returns as one of the most absurd offensive class in the game. As per usual their Ecstasy skill is their finisher, and while it no longer deals good damage to unbound enemies unlike in Untold, the scaling per bind makes it worth the investment. On top of that, their Force Boost, Trance, doubles damage done to bound and ailing enemies, which leads to ridiculous damage numbers when combined with Ecstasy on a triple-bound enemy. It really says a lot that Dark Hunter's Force Break, Rose Prison is largely considered nearly worthless despite the fact that its quite an absurd Force Break in its own rights offering complete binds and poison damage.
• The titular Fafnir Knight, due to his transformations. It's saying something when a common complaint about him is that he's so powerful that the other party members are completely overshadowed in the offense department that they aren't even needed as attackers at all. And if that doesn't explain how powerful he is, he can kill the superboss in one turn.
  • Accelerate is a charge skill that gives the transformed Fafnir the ability to fire off three attacks in rapid succession the next turn. There are many, many ways to exploit this to ruin your enemies with ease, and is the sole reason why the Fafnir is so strong. While you can only use this skill once per Transformation session, if you use Force Reset to cancel your transformation and get enough Force Gauge to reactivate your Force boost, you get to use it again. And yes, this stacks beautifully with the Gunner Skill Grimoire for Double Action.
  • Careful usage of Limit Break, Force Reset, and Extend can allow a Fafnir to cheerfully get Accelerate off, hit thrice, then Extend his Force boost for more attacks, before Force Resetting to cancel his transformation and saving his Force Boost gauge. With proper Force management and the (ab)use of Fafnir Grimoires, it is possible, with extremely-minmaxed Limit Break and Force Reset, to get off three consecutive Transforms off a 200% force gauge during a long fight, although in most cases the enemy will be annihilated before you even need to Force Reset even once. Want to take this even further? Your Fafnir can use elemental attacks that will happily set off Element Chaser Landsknechts and Link Order Sovereigns, so Accelerating at the right moment can mean extra Chasing hits from your Landsknecht.
  • The Fafnir's Force Break, Akashic Nova, scales with the user's experience level and can be made even more powerful by the Compression skill from an Alchemist due to its elemental nature. Want to see you Fafnir happily hit five-digit damage? It is easy.
• The War Magus received some great overhauls to their skill set. Their War Edge skills are now a lot less picky about what ailment the target is suffering from, and their personal healing skills have Action Initiative to save lives in a pinch. Two skills in their tree, though, are incredibly effective:
  • Ailing Slash deals an obscene amount of damage at high levels and ignores resistances, so it's a viable skill in nearly every situation. This also fits in neatly with their Vampire passive that heals the row when attacking an enemy with an ailment, letting the War Magus deliver great damage and healing all at once.
  • Their Barrier skill becomes a defensive staple. It functions similarly to Yggdra Vaccine^note 1-turn immunity to ailments, a Purposely Overpowered King Grimoire skill in The Millennium Girl, only stronger, though counterbalanced with an activation limit and middling trigger chance at lower levels. But once you push it to max level and support it with max War Lore Mastery, your entire party effectively becomes immune to the first ailments, binds and debuffs for a turn, and its failure rate becomes almost negligible. It is not uncommon to see a single party member constantly throwing up Barrier when they don't need to use any support skills. Even better: if you double up on Barrier with a Grimoire and push it to Level 20, it becomes very reliable with a base 85% success rate, which is easily raised to 100 with a maxed War Lore Mastery. The skill was so strong that its parallels in Beyond the Myth have conditions that prevent them from being so easily spammable.
    
    When the War Magi return for Etrian Odyssey Nexus, Barrier took a severe nerf to its activation limits, preventing it from ever being able to protect the whole party.
• Troubadours in general in this game are pretty overwhelming. The game imposes a much more punishing form of Diminishing Returns for Balance to prevent the player from exploiting buff-stacking for ludicrous amounts of damage. However, it classes the Troubadours' Fantasia skills as an elemental resistance modifier, different from attack or defense buffs and Prelude as a generic damage boost. This means they don't get gimped when combined with other buffs, allowing elemental damage to reach new heights.
  • Crusade, being a Force Break, is classed as a separate modifier from the other buffs and debuffs. When you have a 1.5x multiplier on top of everything else the Troubadour has applied, you can deliver outstanding burst damage in a single turn.
• The Sovereign's elemental Circles work akin to Fantasias (raising the party's resistance to an element while weakening the enemy's to the same element), do not occupy a buff slot, but only last a turn. In the Japanese version of the game, if multiple party members use it, the effects stack, and this tactic, in addition to the above, is what allows the Fafnir Knight to take down the Superboss in one turn. The stacking does not apply in non-Japanese releases, though.
• Hexers still break the game with their crippling status ailments. Only this time, they have their Force Boost — Creeping Curse — which triples their ailment/bind accuracy. This effectively gives them a near-guaranteed ability to inflict any ailment or bind they can get their hands on, on top of their absurd Luck growth and innate ailment accuracy boosting from Curse Mastery and Curb ATK Up. This crazy ailment accuracy gets insane with the following skills...
  • Venom Curse alongside the food that doubles poison damage dealt. Firstly, the curse is a line spell, which allows it to hit multiple targets. Second, the damage is fairly large at higher levels, while the TP cost is actually fairly low. Third, it's surprisingly extremely accurate without investing any points into Curb Attack Up or Curse mastery^note Both of them improve your success rate of making binds and statuses stick due to a lot of enemies - bosses even - being weak to Poison, while their Force Boost (or the Highlander skill, Blood Fortune) is enough to make it work reliably even on things that resist it. The only thing that prevents it from ripping the game in half similar to Revenge in the original is that everything is a Damage Sponge. For perspective, at the regular Level 10 skillcap Venom Curse has about 60 base accuracy, which shoots up to 85 at level 20, with the help of a Level 10 grimoire in Venom Curse. With a Hexer's naturally high Luck and the copious use of Grimoires to push Curse Mastery and Curb Attack Up past level 10, you can easily make Venom Curse (and other status/bind curses) terrifyingly reliable with a base damage of 310 that is doubled by the food buff that increases poison damage to 620, certainly enough to kill or severely weaken enemies in the first 4 stratums easily while taking large chunks out of FOEs and Bosses and enemies that aren't immune from the later stratums.
  • Stigmata is a Highlander skill that attempts to bind parts of the user's body before replicating the same binds on an enemy. On a Highlander, it's useless due to their terrible Luck stat. When given to a Hexer via a Grimoire Stone, you can fully bind bosses with ease, especially if this is backed up with the Creeping Curse. If it fails, just try again — Stigmata requires no unbound body parts to execute! And because you've fully bound a boss, a Dark Hunter using Ecstasy while under their Force Boost can deal tens of thousands of damage!
• Rare Grimoires can have powerful secondary passives that contribute to your staying power in battle or make you more effective. Status/Bind Chance Up attributes stack beautifully on Hexers, Survivalists, and Dark Hunters, TP recovery skills add more staying power to your ability to keep spamming attacks, and Elemental Damage Up (Fire/Ice/Volt/Slash/Pierce/Bash) attributes help you minmax your strength to new levels. Even though the bonus is miniscule (6% at best for damage/ailment bonuses) they are additive if combined, resulting in an impressive 36% passive bonus that isn't impeded by diminishing returns for buffs.
  • Grimoire Stones from visiting legendary adventurers have additional effects that are unavailable anywhere else. TP Cost Recovery gives a 25% chance of fully regaining TP expended for a skill, replicating Recharge from the first Untold game and extending battle stamina for your party. Auto-Heal gives the user a chance to heal half their max HP when taking a hit, allowing great sustainability for a Beast who's Taking the Bullet. Pair that up with Heal Amp that boosts the amount of healing one receives, and a Beast can turn Nigh-Invulnerable by effortlessly healing off whatever damage they're taking.
• In a similar vein to Action Boost from The Millennium Girl, Gunners now have a passive skill, Double Action, which gives the character a chance to use their attacking skills twice in a row. This stacks with the Gunner's own Action Boost (which is now their Force Boost), letting them fire off an attack skill 3 times. But the fun doesn't stop there - Double Action can be passed around through Grimoire Stones, and if it triggers on a skill boosted by a charge skill (which nearly every class learns in one form or another), that second skill also gets that attack boost. Give it to the Fafnir Knight, whose damage output is already ludicrous on his own, and watch him heavily dent bosses with a bit of luck.
• Alchemists learn Compression, which temporarily makes their multi-targeting elemental attacks become single-target only in exchange for making them hit harder. Compression works with the Elemental Attack Jars, consumable battle items. Elemental Attack Jars have a specific Forest Cuisine meal from Regina's cafe that increases their damage even more. With Level 20 Compression, a compressed Flame/Frost/Volt Jar (The tier 2 elemental jars that attack all enemies when used) hits harder than any elemental attack in the game (except a compressed Akashic Nova, but then that is a Force Break), even the mighty Flame/Frost/Volt breath Monster skill Grimoires.

Beyond the Myth

• Hell Slash is essentially a stronger Warrior Might, but much more Difficult, but Awesome. It has numerous drawbacks — the initiator has to abandon all armour for maximum damage output, the number of chases is capped, and it can chase enemy attacks, and you need to understand which skills synergize with it for maximum damage. One of the most convenient ways to maximize it is to combine Grave with Fierce Shield off two Necromancers get the Wraiths to tank for the party, counterattack three times for each hit, and get the Masurao to pile on for each counterattack, and the result is a total of 2400% damage from the physically strongest class and race, before accounting for any buffs or debuffs.
• Spirit Broker Necromancers can learn Zombie Powder, which instantly kills an enemy and summons a Wraith with health equal to that enemy's HP, capped at 9999. Normally this wouldn't break anything, since wraith-using skills are the same strength regardless of their health, except the Spirit Broker also has Fair Trade, that deals damage equals to a wraith's remaining HP. And it just so happens that the 4th stratum has an FOE with over 10,000 HP that is also weak to instant death, making it very easy to summon Wraiths at the health cap. This makes it possible for a Necromancer to do just shy of 30,000 damage to any one enemy over three turns, which dramatically shortens boss fights and can even allow parties to defeat bosses way earlier than they are expected to. In normal dungeon crawl sessions, the high-health Wraith also makes for a nigh-impenetrable wall when used with Fierce Shield. The drawback, though, is actually walking all the way to the boss in question, since there is no Floor Jump to shorten the journey and returning to town causes Wraiths to disappear.
  • Is the 4th stratum too far away for the deeper reaches of the labyrinth? Did you run out of fodder there? The 6th stratum has a FOE that creates clones of itself, and it has no instant death resistance. As long as the original FOE is not defeated, it will keep spawning clones which you can constantly fight for a large amount of experience, as opposed to needing to wait several in-game days for the usual FOE respawn. Also, its drops (which you'll have plenty of, no doubt) sell for a pretty penny, and can even be used to forge a katana that recycles into Gold Shards. Happy farming!
• Spirit Evokers gain Tombstone Vice, a skill that sacrifices all Wraiths to petrify a single target. What looks to be a clunky Awesome, but Impractical skill turns out to be an extreme Game-Breaker on analysis: Tombstone Vice's affliction rate is tied to the amount of Wraiths that is sacrificed at the time of casting, going up to a massive 160% chance with 3 Wraiths at level 10. With further support from skills such as Wilting Miasma, and the union skill Black Mist, Tombstone Vice can turn into a practically guaranteed petrification on even the toughest of bosses, and bear in mind that very few enemies are outright immune to the ailment. In the right team, Tombstone Vice is able to trivialize every single boss fight in the game right from the moment it become available for use.
• Shamans are really slow in gaining power since their early options are very limited and their Prayer buffs are costly. Once you gain enough points, they can easily prove to be the best support class in the game, especially if you take the Divine Herald Mastery. Building powerful buffs, consistent party wide healing, and the ability to nearly nullify binds and ailments in later stages, the Shaman has the easiest time supporting the party.
  • If the passive healing proves to be too weak for one's tastes, the Shamans are Brouni by default, and they have the Herbology passive skill, which increases the HP restoration of healing items by 50%. Soma is fairly easy to obtain, so they can keep healing the party for 120 HP as long as inventory space permits it. If the party they support has sufficient damage output, Split Spirits allows them to effectively refill their own HP for as little as 3 TP and only for a couple of skill points once the skill itself is unlocked.
  • Dance Oracle is a Basic skill for Shamans, meaning they can access it regardless of their specialization, and it dispels an elemental buff from the Shaman to deal damage of the matching element, while reducing enemies' resistance against said element for the turn. The damage is unimpressive, but the element resistance reduction is the most important aspect of this skill, bypassing the usual Diminishing Returns for Balance limitations on buffs and debuffs and can result in incredible elemental burst damage.
• Pugilists are one of the strongest classes in the game. Their access to binding skills can save the party's life from time to time, but their other skills can do incredible damage. When they returned in Nexus, they ate a huge Nerf that tuned down a lot of their damage numbers, and Cestus went from being the second strongest weapon type in the game with the second strongest ultimate weapon, to one of the weakest.
  • Overexertion is easily one of the strongest buffs in the game. Sure, it only affects a single party member and they lose health on taking any action (up to 50% of their current HP at max level), but when maxed out, it doubles that party member's attack. Stack on something like Power Charge — a skill available on a katana which is, again, a weapon restricted to the Masurao — and you can easily reach ludicrous numbers, be it through Hell Slash or Sword God's critical hits.
  • Death's Edge is essentially a revised Revenge Curse. It gets a damage multiplier depending on how low each surviving party member's HP is, which can stack with Fortitude, a passive skill which boosts damage done while HP is under a certain threshold, and the aforementioned Overexertion. Careful utilization of damage tiles (which can never kill, only leaving members at 1HP) can result in damage that can one-shot the Superboss! The issue is keeping a party of One Hit Point Wonders together until they can get there, but the result is high-risk, immense-reward.
  • For the risk-averse, Titan Killer still offers very good damage output provided the user is at a lower HP percentage than the target. With Overexertion constantly draining the user of half their current HP for each action, it's almost guaranteed that Titan Killer will hit for maximum damage whenever it's used, taking out large chunks of HP and shortening boss battles dramatically.
  • Thunder Fist from the base Pugilist tree is a Disc-One Nuke to the extreme. It's a composite Bash and Volt which lets the Pugilist exploit Volt weaknesses; against most other enemies it's harder to find one that resists both Bash and Volt at the same time. At max power it has a ridiculous 450% damage modifier, offset by recoil should the skill fail to kill. Against random encounters, sheer damage ensures the Pugilist scores the killing blow without any recoil; against bosses, wise use of defensive measures can mitigate this drawback. Thunder Fist stays relevant all the way until the end of the game, since its damage modifier actually stacks up fairly well compared to Mastery skills, and can even surpass them with the right preparation. When the Pugilists returned in Nexus, Thunder Fist got Kicked Upstairs into Master-tier skills only available at level 40 and higher, preventing players from exploiting it early on.
  • Heavenly Aid is a charge skill with a rather complex mechanic - at the turn where it is used, Heavenly Aid would keep track of the percentage of HP the user had, and after healing is applied to the user, apply a damage multiplier based on the percentage difference between the two, applied every time the user is healed for the turn. When used at 1 HP, Heavenly Aid with full HP healing multiplies damage by around 4 times. This can be taken further when used with Overheal, since the increased HP cap of overheal is treated as an extra percentage towards the calculation, treating it as if the target can reach 133% HP allowing as much as 5 times damage modifier with Heavenly Aid. In theory, Heavenly Aid have near infinite potential to apply several instances of damage multipliers, only capped by the amount of healing applied to the user of the skill, and the damage taken prior to the healing being done. The user can then unleash a heavily boosted Titan Killer, Thunder Fist, or better yet, a well prepared Death's Edge to deal extreme damage to the target, sometimes able to even One-Hit Kill outright. The power behind Heavenly Aid is such that a well optimized Pugilist is able to one shot everything in the game, even the Superboss.
• Chain Duelist Fencers have Chain Killer, a Chain skill that chases the affliction of Status ailments and binds. Since it is not always easy to apply mass binds/ailments (on top of Chain Killer triggering just once if you bind multiple parts in a single move e.g. Clinch), Chain Killer hits about 4 times as hard and is guaranteed to activate without any diminishing chances compared to Elemental Chains. With application of a Harbinger's Wilting Miasma and the Black Mist Union, as well as setting up the Chain Duelist with Chain Plus/Chain All and maybe some extra buffs, you can then unload status/bind jars on enemy formations to exploit Chain Killer to its fullest. Coupled with passives that let Chain activations hit twice, as well as follow-up on enemies and get stronger with every successive hit/activation, it is entirely possible to kill even superbosses with a Chain Duelist quickly.
• Cannon Bearer Dragoons may not have the defensive capability of their Shield Bearer counterparts, but they more than make up for it with impressive firepower:
  • Their strongest skill is Buster Cannon, which takes a turn to prepare but delivers an astounding combination of bash and fire damage. The skill, being both elemental and physical, is compatible with most types of offense buffs including the aforementioned Overexertion and Dance Oracle, and Prep Artillery can bestow another 2.5x damage multiplier. Put it all together, and you get burst damage capable of destroying F.O.E.s or bosses, provided the rest of the team can hold out during the Dragoon's long prep time.
  • Rapid Cannon is a simple skill — it inflicts damage with a tremendous speed bonus, capable of even outpacing Rare Breed enemies. At max level it does a respectable 400% damage, letting the Cannon Bearer snipe troublesome targets before they get to move.
  • Hypno Cannon is among the best sources of Sleep in this game, with a very high infliction rate aided by an Earthlain's impressive Luck stat. The best part is that this skill works best in conjunction with the Dragoon's low innate speed — it is very likely to go last in the turn, meaning your other attackers are less likely to disrupt it. This lets you take the time to set up a single high damage hit, or just instakill the target with the Harbinger's Fatal Reap.
• Union skills are powerful skills that can be initiated by any one party member with a full gauge, requiring the cooperation of any number of other allies. Only the party member initiating the Union skill requires the full gauge, but everyone involved with the Union skill will have their gauge emptied. Stronger skills require more members to execute, and incapacitated party members cannot participate, putting a limit on how often they can be used. On top of that, you can use a Union skill on top of your party's normal actions, and it will always take effect at the start of the turn. While the basic Union skills have Boring, but Practical effects like an Enemy Scan or a guaranteed escape, some of them can become very potent:
  • Double Attack causes 2 party members to each perform a strong weapon based attack. Double Attack has a fairly good damage modifier, and can be modified to carry elemental traits when buffed with Shaman's Elemental Prayer skills. This Union skill is available to every race at the very start of the game. One very Boring, but Practical way to take full advantage of this Union Skill is by using 1 extensively buffed Therian as a secondary initiator, allowing more mileage out of your best physical damage dealer over 4 turns.
  • Brouni's Guard Order needs 2 party members but halves all incoming damage for the turn. It's a simple low-cost Union skill that can turn into a lifesaver and does wonders for a party's longevity.
  • Earthlain's Tri-Shield requires 3 party members, nullifying the first 3 attacks. Used against attacks that only hit up to three times, its basically a free turn. Used against skills that targets the entire team, it ensures the frontline to not get hit, giving you a much easier time to defend against dangerous teamwide attacks. On top of that, the requirement makes it much more spammable than higher tier skills.
  • Earthlain's Black Mist requires 4 party members and doubles the success rate of the party's ailment and bind skills for the turn. Notably, Earthlain members have the highest LUC among the four races, so this skill off a designated ailment-infliction class lets you reliably disable anything, even on resistant enemies.
  • Celestrian's Chain Blast requires 5 party members, for a teamwide 150% bind to all body parts. On top of this, Chain Blast uses an exclusive infliction formula of 2x INT + 1x LUC which works well with Celestrian's high INT stats and naturally acceptable LUC stats. This is without a doubt, the single most overpowered Union Skill in the game, being able to triple bind almost every enemy in the game just for including a Celestrian Race into the team.
• Rover's Wing Thrash is a ranged priority move that snipe a single target with an arrow, followed by a powerful row hitting attack by the Hawk. Hawk naturally have high Strength stats, and grows independent to the owner's stats except for level and the skill have a pretty high damage modifier with the Hawk getting around triple the damage modifier of the owner's arrow shot. In essence its a priority row hitting stats independent skill which is just as ridiculous as it sounds, and the damage distribution allows high TP races such as Brouni and Celestrian to use and spam them effectively. The skill is such an extreme Disc-One Nuke that with minimal skill point investment, its able to wipe out every early random ecounter formation all by themselves.

Etrian Mystery Dungeon

• The Sovereign Class' skills will add +3 Strength to a character that their Arms skills are used on before subtracting that amount when the skill wears off. However, due to an oversight in coding, this does not apply to stacked casts. If a Sovereign were to cast Fire Arms 10 times on a character, for instance, the game would add +30 to that character's strength before taking away 3. This would cause that character's Strength to be permanently raised by 27. And this can be exploited as much as you want.
• Provoke. Enemies will unconditionally go after the Protector when this skill is activated, even if they can't reach said character. This can lead to situations where a frail Runemaster and Hexer are standing between a DOE and the Protector, murdering it, while the monster itself is just standing there and trying to get past the two squishy characters without attacking.
  • The Protector class itself counts as this, because their defense amplified by certain skills can easily become high enough to effectively nullify most monsters' attacks while taking them all for the team. Theoretically, this would be counterbalanced by their low TP, but for only 3 skill points of investment, they can heal 5 TP with every hit they receive, making even that disadvantage moot.

Etrian Odyssey Nexus

• The Hero is the game's unique class and it's one of the best in the game thanks to a good spread of offensive and passive skills.
  • Their primary gimmick is to create an afterimage. It spawns with a fraction of their HP and TP at the time (until their Afterimage passive is maxed, which spawns them as an exact copy of the Hero) and are programmed to repeatedly use the same skill that spawned them. This also provides additional triggers of Encourage, which passively heals the party after the Hero or their afterimage(s) attack, reducing the need for a dedicated healer. Heroes also have an extremely potent Force Boost that gives a x2.3 multiplier to their afterimage damage, and they have some astoundingly powerful offensive skills. You can also subclass a character of another class into Hero, allowing them to repeat extremely potent attacks and serve as decoys for single- and random-target attacks.
  • A trend noticeable in Hero's skillset is a frontloaded value point of their skills that scales worse as it goes on, making it a potent, SP efficient Disc-One Nuke. Wide Bravery, for instance, hits harder than most other area-of-effect skills at a mere level 1, and the only condition needed to fulfill is for the Hero to hit an enemy before they act which they can easily achieve through Heroic Bonds.
  • Another skill that warrants specific mention is Spark Blade, a single-target cut attack followed by a hit-all volt attack with the special property of being stronger the more resistant the initial target is to cut attacks. Overall, it's generally rather situational, but often there are some enemy formations that simply got destroyed by a single use of Spark Blade due to having Cut resistance and Elemental Weakness, and if you bring along a party member who can inflict petrification, you can turn nearly any target of your choosing into a punching bag to fry the enemy. But the most significant aspect of the skill is due to its very unique property as a Physical Attack with Elemental Attack follow-up. This broke the pattern of many counter based enemy skills, which is very noticable when fighting against Golem.
  • Regiment Rave at max level is already very strong, hitting for 400% damage on its own. However, it strengthens as your party piles on damage to the same target, hitting a maximum potential of 1000% if your party has enough damage. This amount of DPS can easily decimate bosses, especially if that boss is also weak to fire. If you triggered an afterimage in the process, you can potentially do that much damage the next turn, and more if you have the Force Boost enabled.
• Gunners join Heroes as one of the strongest classes in the game. Though their initial skills are a little lacking, their potential grows in the later levels.
  • Their Force skills are already a very powerful asset. Double Action lets their gun skills activate twice, with the drawback of the second activation having a damage penalty. But this essentially means the Gunner gets a sizeable 40% damage boost, and additional tries in inflicting binds with their Snipe skills. Riot Gun also inflicts guaranteed stun on a target that isn't immune, buying the team an extra turn in a pinch.
  • The Gunner's Snipes have a reasonable infliction rate, and this is made much more effective with the Gunner's high Strength and Luck stats. Though they cannot fully bind an enemy in one go like a Pugilist can, knowing which parts to snipe can prevent an enemy from mauling the normally squishy character.
  • Their most consistent and strongest skills are Charge Shot and its elemental derivatives, though they come with a drawback of very low turn speed and a heavy defense penalty when charging. For the risk-averse, though, the Gunner also comes with Act Quick, a charge skill that temporarily raises their action speed and deducts TP costs, greatly mitigating the Charge skills' downsides.
  • Multi-Shot is one of their most potent passives, giving their attack skills a small chance trigger an additional time. This stacks with Double Action, so it's not unusual to see a Gunner use their Charge shot up to three times in a row to deal a boatload of damage, or roll for a bind three times with their Snipes.
  • To tie it all off, the Gunner holds the distinction of being the strongest backline physical DPS character, in a game where a majority of your damage dealers work best on the front line. Having a Gunner in your party makes for a less crowded frontline, especially if you're running a Hero and want the the afterimage being spawned in the free spot at the front.
• Sovereigns are an easy staple for a Nexus party, and it's mainly due to the strength of the buffs they bestow.
  • Attack Order, their basic skill, grants a solid 35% damage boost to a line at max level, allowing for a Sovereign to greatly support the frontline. One Sovereign in the back aiding three frontline DPS classes goes a very long way in this game.
  • Reinforce and Royal Veil are healing passives. The former lets their Orders restore HP and the latter heals the party if the Sovereign ends the turn at full health. While not as strong as a Medic's healing skills, these passives are usually enough to keep a party topped up in-battle, especially if aided by a Hero.
  • Prevent Order doesn't have a guaranteed prevention rate, but now can protect against ailments and binds at the same time. When defending against a party-wide ailment/bind skill, it's very rare to see a max-level Prevent Order fail to defend more than two party members at once, making it a reliable safety net in boss fights.
  • Negotiation may seem counter-intuitive, until you realize that the healing scales with level. Remove a debuff and buff using a level 99 Sovereign? Say hello to a full heal and 48TP! This is particularly helpful against bosses and FOEs who punish too many buffs.
  • Clearance may be hard to set up, but it's draw is not how it heals, but how it gets rid of everything. Boss buffs itself while de-buffing your party to heck? Thanks for the party wide heal and TP recovery!
  • Final Decree requires the Sovereign to dispel three buffs from themselves, but in exchange it provides a sizeable damage boost that isn't limited by the game's own buff counterbalancing system. This lets you create some very big burst damage turns, like with Crusade from The Fafnir Knight. With Renew in play, the Sovereign stands a chance of retaining their buffs so that they can use Final Decree again without spending time to set it up.
• Shogun have two very effective basic skills: Great Warrior and Front Command.
  • Great Warrior is a single target buff that offers 60% Physical Attack buff when maxed along with increased target focus. This is the single most powerful attack buff in the entire game, for a small cost of 6 skill points, with the caveat of being incompatible with Sovereign's Force Break due to being classified as a draw rate buff. On the other hand, Great Warrior also will not be cancelled by enemy attack debuffs. While the downside might seem risky, it serves as a way to fuel Shogun's Command skills.
  • Front Command causes the whole frontline to counter-attack with their equipped weapons whenever a chosen ally is attacked during the turn it's used, with a 200% damage modifier at max level. It's the most basic of the command skills, and arguably the best. Getting it to trigger consistently will require the use of Draw Aggro abilities, but no setup is needed against a party-hitting attack. It also triggers even if the attack misses or is nullified, so a blinded enemy makes for risk-free damage. Knowing when to use it gets you a consistent 600% damage off your strong frontline for a relatively low cost. It's also compatible with the Sovereign's elemental Arms skills if you want to strike an elemental weakness.
• Venom Throw returns as the Nightseeker's final Throw skill and the best source of poison damage. Although it no longer deals a static 700-or-so damage like it did in its source game, at max skill level and around level 40 the poison ticks for a whopping 350 each turn, which can almost immediately kill most random encounters at that stage. Poison damage also scales with the level of its caster, meaning its damage will remain relevant through most of the game, and even surpass the 700 mark towards the endgame. On top of that, Spread Throw now also raises the Nightseeker's infliction rate, and an Auto-Spread triggering lets the Nightseeker spread this powerful poison across the enemy ranks with a very good success rate. This means you can end most random encounters in just 1 to 2 turns for a very low TP cost.
• Not every Force Boost is made equal. Of particular note is the Arcanist's Force Boost- it locks the existing circle in place for three turns, meaning that for those three turns you can spam the very powerful dismissal spells for a lot of damage. Later, if you get points Dismissal Boost, even low level dismissal spells will do significant amounts of damage.
• While the Landsknecht's Force Boost, Trinity, is strong but still fairly balanced for it's damage, accuracy and speed boosts, it's the Force Break, Full Charge, that is on an entirely different level. Sure, this requires the Landsknecht to break their Force gauge and be unable to use Trinity for the rest of the battle (or a labyrinth trip if not returning to home), but the fact that Full Charge boosts the damage they deal by more than triple the damage while also gaining a huge speed boost that virtually guarantees the Landsknecht to go first (and not to mention the force break stacks with conventional attack buffs), which allows bursting down FOEs and bosses - sometimes in just as short as 2 turns, or from full HP to 0. Subclasses can further tune up the deadly effectiveness of Full Charge:
  • Landsknecht + Ronin gets more stacked passive speed and damage boosts through Upper Stance, Phys ATK Up, Duel and Full Proficiency. In addition, the regular force boost already grants enough accuracy to offset the normal drawback of Helm Splitter, a powerful attack that ignores resistance to cut damage, should the Landsknecht decides to equip a katana.
  • Landsknecht + Imperialist, on the other hand, grants two new options when investing skill points on the Imperial subclass. The first is to simply stack on Elemental Attack Up, which can grant more damage to links. The other? Investing on Single Devotion (which significantly boosts damage from single-type attacks) along with Assault Drive can do enormous amount of damage, which escalates even more with Full Charge, since it already has a high damage power to begin with.
• Once a Farmer hits Level 40 to learn their Master rank skills, getting money becomes all but trivial thanks to the combination of Nature's Blessing and Double Crop. The former gives you extra chances to gather rare materials from gather points. The latter gives a chance of you getting two gather triggers in succession, which also means Nature's Blessing can trigger again. Its entirely possible to completely fill an empty inventory from 2 gathering spots. Simply make 4 level 40 Farmers, and support with a single Survivalist for the ability to negate enemy ambushes (including gathering ambushes) and the ability to expand inventory capacity (up to 80, or a 33% boost). This in turn makes getting the strongest weapons rather easy, considering that in later labyrinths, it’s entirely possible to make 100k off a single gathering trip. Don't have the time to level a bunch of characters? No problem! Just grab some Guild Cards with level 40 gathering-optimized Farmers and borrow them (easy enough since many online Etrian communities have a QR code sharing thread or two).
• Farmer + Arcanist as a class-subclass combination is highly effective if you want them to focus on inflicting ailments and binds. A Farmer’s naturally-high Luck more than makes up for not being able to reach max level in the Arcanist skills that are available, and practically guarantees that circles will work on anything that doesn’t at least resist the ailment you are trying to inflict.
• The Pain Shield becomes available once you have defeated the Dinotyrant, an overworld FOE that shows up after clearing the 11th dungeon. It is the designated Infinity +1 Sword for offensive Shield skills, boasting 100 defense, and a side effect of reducing bind and ailment resistance. Considering that shield attack skills use triple the DEF stat of a shield when calculating damage, it hits as hard as a weapon with 300 ATK, outclassing your actual ultimate weapons. With Pain Shield equipped, all offensive shield skills hit absurdly hard, and for less effort and money — the Pain Shield doesn't require any conditional drops and can be purchased for 180,000en, as opposed to at least 500,000en for the actual ultimate weaponry.
  • In particular, the Protector's Shield Flare becomes hilariously overpowered with Pain Shield, being a counter move that can trigger multiple times. When you pair it up with a Draw Aggro skill like the Protector's own Taunt, Survivalist's Scapegoat or a Shogun's Great Warrior, the Protector and any Protector subbed class can easily do absurd amounts of damage across the enemy ranks.
  • The same can also be said for Landsknecht's Full Break skill, which already does a decent amount of damage and gains a huge damage boost if the target is already under the effect of Power Break, Guard Break or Speed Break. To top this, it can stack with the Landsknecht's Force Break Full Charge, massively increasing the damage dealt!
• Imperials are back, ready to crack a new game wide open with their Drive Blades:
  • In particular their new choices of subclasses can help cover their weaknesses:
    • Imperial + Hero. Give them Afterimage and you can get a second Drive in at no additional cost. If a single- or multi-random-target attack hits and destroys the Afterimage, at least that's one less attack that could've seriously hurt or killed an actual party member.
    • Imperial + Gunner. Act Quick at max subclass level gives them a 40% discount and a faster turn speed, removing the key problem of Drive skills in that they are slow and the user's defense drops severely until activation and that they use obnoxious amounts of TP. Multi-Shot lets their attacks go again (similar to Afterimage, but right away) at no extra cost, even if it's a Drive skill, and if it triggers on Sharp Edge or Cool Edge you can take another turn off on the Overheat.
    • Imperial + Zodiac, if you are willing to pour the skill points in to their elemental Drive skills (24 total if you wanna max out all three of them, not counting prerequisite skills), lets you do even more damage when hitting an enemy's weakness through Singularity and learn TP Up, as Imperials naturally demand a lot of TP but don't have nearly enough of it for a sustained fight. Etheric Boon also offers fantastic synergy with their expensive Charge Edge, mixing multipliers together to deliver extremely powerful Drives. Throw in a max-level Natural Edge, a cheap non-Drive attack skill (only 7 TP at max level) they have access to from the get-go that can be imbued with elemental attack buffs or innate elements on some weapons, and an Imperial-Zodiac can still do lots of damage to enemies with elemental weaknesses when they're not firing off Drives.
  • The same game brings back Survivalists, who have Quick Step, which costs 15 TP at max level and which makes the targeted party member go before everyone else. Yes, this includes Imperials, who can now Drive enemies into oblivion with no risk to their health whatsoever.