Combat

Fighting in Final Fantasy: Brave Exvius
This page has all the information you will need in order to fight effectively throughout most of the story missions released so far, and to get along competently in Vortex quests up to the ADV/PRO levels, once your party is sufficiently powerful for those challenges.

'''This guide is not exhaustive. '''There is much more that goes into battle planning and execution for the very difficult challenges and optional boss fights you will start to tackle as you get closer to FFBE's end-game content. As always, the real Exvius Wiki is going to be your best resource when you start to reach that level of gameplay. For now, this will help you get a strong start and keep from being too frustrated as you advance.

High-Level Overview

 * 1) Select a command for each character.
 * 2) Tap characters to execute their commands.
 * 3) Once all characters have acted, enemies get to act.
 * 4) Once all enemies have acted, your next turn begins.
 * 5) If you defeat all enemies, the battle is won and you will get items, gil and EXP. If your party is wiped out, you get a game over.

General Advice
Below, we'll get into great detail about how battles work.
 * On the first turn of any difficult fight, apply any character buffs and/or enemy debuffs you have at your disposal. These typically last 3 turns before needing to be reapplied, and they can make a big difference in a tough fight.
 * After every enemy turn, if you have a healer, heal your party as best you can. Don't wait for damage to build up over multiple turns before healing.
 * Be aware of status ailments. Many enemies are susceptible to at least one or two, and your team may have abilities or equipment that can inflict them to your benefit. Likewise, make sure none of your characters are incapacitated by a status ailment, and try to cure them (with items or abilities) if they are.
 * Your characters' HP, MP, and status will all be recovered automatically after every mission. However, they will not automatically recover between each battle of a given mission.

Understanding the Battle Screen
When you are in combat, you will see a screen split roughly into two halves: The top half shows a visual representation of what's happening, plus a health meter for whichever monster is selected, and an Esper Summon meter to the right of it.

The bottom half shows your characters' names, HP and MP reserves, and Limit Burst levels. Each character also has a small sword icon above their portrait. This icon will change depending on what move you select for each of them.

At the very bottom are 4 buttons: Above these four bottom-of-screen buttons are the character panel buttons. These are where you choose the moves your units use each turn in combat.
 * Tapping Auto will cause all characters to execute the Attack command continuously until you tap it again and turn it off.
 * I recommend saving this for when you revisit old fights and find the enemies have now become much weaker than they originally seemed. For fights that are appropriately challenging for your party's current overall level, you will want to maintain better control over your turn-by-turn choices than what the Auto button provides.
 * Tapping Repeat won't normally do anything on the first turn, but on subsequent turns against the same enemy, it will repeat the actions your team took on the previous turn. Depending on your settings, it can repeat the moves of the party against their last enemy (even if you have switched from, say, the world map to the Vortex between then and now), but to tell the truth I'm not completely sure that this isn't a bug, because it didn't used to do that. Whatever the case, it's best to use Repeat with caution.
 * Tapping Reset will change any commands you have selected (but not yet executed) for this turn back to the default Attack command. You will basically never need or want to do this.
 * Tapping Menu brings up a basic Menu screen, setting the battle aside for a moment.
 * From here you can view your characters' stats, though you can't interact with them in any way.
 * More importantly, you can tap the Missions button in the upper left to see what your optional missions are, in case you forget. What's more, if you're totally outgunned and you want to give up and return to the Home screen, you can tap the Give Up button on the top of the screen, a little to the right. You can also view quick-help guides under the Help menu (with the Moogle icon), or change your user interface settings with the Options button in the upper right corner.
 * None of these options actually change anything about the battle you're fighting, except for the Give Up option, which ends the fight.

How to fight
To start with, choose a character. It can be any character. Tap and hold on that character's name for a moment and you will see a cross-shaped foursquare menu pop up. There are four options to choose from: You should know that once you are comfortable, you don't need to bring up the foursquare menu - you can simply swipe from the center of each character panel in the direction you wish to choose, and that option will be selected. This can save you time once battles start to become run-of-the-mill.
 * 1) The North button is Attack. This will also be automatically selected if you simply tap on the character panel and release. It executes a basic physical attack.
 * 2) The West button is Items. It shows your available items when selected. You can then pick one for that character to use.
 * 3) The South button is Guard. Guarding causes the character to take less damage from attacks on the enemy's next turn, at the expense of taking any other action this turn.
 * 4) The East button is Abilities. This is where all of your characters' combat spells and skills are stored. Each comes with a brief description and an associated MP cost.

However you choose to access your characters' battle commands, early in the game, it is likely you won't need to use Guard or Items very often - most of your battles will be fought with Attacks and Abilities. Each option has advantages and disadvantages, so let's examine them more closely.

Attacks: Abilities: Once you have decided what each character will do, you can tap their corresponding character buttons to execute your chosen actions. After a character performs an action, its button goes dark and it can no longer be interacted with.
 * Are relatively weak compared to abilities. Characters with higher STR (strength) stats do more damage when attacking, but compared to abilities, attacks still don't do as much damage.
 * Cost nothing. There is no MP or HP cost associated with attacking.
 * Generate the greatest amounts of Limit Burst Crystals (LB Crystals) and Summon Orbs. These are temporary resources that can be collected during a fight in order to unleash powerful special abilities. We will talk more about them later.
 * Are strong and versatile. Abilities include healing spells, buffs and debuffs, status ailment attacks and cures, magic damage spells, physical attack skills, and more. Generally speaking, everything that makes your characters unique, special, and fun to use in combat is found in their Abilities.
 * Have an associated MP cost. In rare cases, that cost might be 0 MP, but it is still always listed. As you unlock more and stronger abilities, managing your characters' MP becomes a matter of concern for longer fights.
 * Do not generate very many LB Crystals or Summon Orbs. If you need to conjure up Limit Bursts or Esper Summons quickly, you should use Attacks instead.
 * A common strategy is to Attack as much as possible versus regular enemies to save up summons and Limit Bursts, and then unleash them when you reach the boss fight/last fight of the mission.

Once all the characters in your party have performed an action, your turn ends and the enemy's turn begins. When the enemy has finished, your turn begins again. You can see how many turns have elapsed overall by looking at the turn counter in the upper right of the battle screen.

Limit Bursts and Esper Summons
As you fight, you will probably notice little items falling out of the enemies you hit. For the most part, these will be small red crystals; occasionally, a green orb with an orange flame inside it will also drop. These are Limit Burst crystals (LB crystals) and Esper Summon Orbs, respectively.

Limit Bursts
The red LB crystals that drop from the enemies you hit are used to fill the Limit Burst gauges of your various characters. Once a character's Limit Burst gauge is full, they can unleash their Limit Burst, a move with a powerful effect that costs no MP. Limit Burst skills are always found at the top left of the Abilities menu. They remain darkened until charged, whereupon they become usable.
 * Limit Burst gauges fill somewhat at random. Just because a given character's attack knocked some LB crystals loose doesn't mean that all, or any, of those crystals will necessarily go to that character. The crystals are a shared resource, and are distributed somewhat randomly among all active party members as they're earned.
 * Different characters have different LB fill rates, so some will seem to get Limit Bursts all the time, while others rarely will. It is possible to save up until multiple characters have full gauges, and unleash several Limit Burst moves at the same time.
 * Limit Bursts aren't always just attacks. They can also be support or healing skills, depending on the unit in question. Be sure to know what exactly a Limit Burst does before using it.
 * When a character's Limit Burst is ready to use, their LB gauge will glow brightly, so it's always easy to know who has one on deck.
 * LB crystals persist for the duration of each mission, including from fight to fight within a given mission, but they never carry over between missions. In other words, you don't have to use a Limit Burst as soon as you get it, but if you don't use it during the current mission, you won't be able to save it for the next mission.Screenshot 20170818-121815.png

Esper Summons
As you collect green Esper Summon Orbs, the gauge above your top-right character button will slowly fill. When it is totally full, it will glow brightly, indicating that you may summon one Esper and use its ability to aid you in battle. Esper summons are also found in the Abilities menu, at the upper right, and stay darkened until fully charged. A note regarding Espers: Esper summons will seem pretty powerful early in the game, but before long, they will start to feel underpowered. Rest assured, if you keep leveling your Espers up and strengthening them, they will become quite powerful again in the later game, so be patient and don't forget about them. See Espers for a more detailed explanation of how Espers work and how to get the most out of them.
 * The Esper Summon gauge usually takes longer to fill than individual Limit Burst gauges - typically at least 3 battles.
 * Unlike Limit Bursts, which each character can use once any time he or she fills an LB gauge, only one Esper at a time - period, across the entire party - can be summoned per charged Orb gauge. Thus, summoning one Esper resets the gauge, and summoning a second one (even from a different character) will require refilling it from empty again.
 * Similarly to Limit Burst gauges, Esper Summon gauge energy does not carry over between missions, just battles in the same mission.

General Strategy
It pays to know your characters before you fight. FFBE tries to make the roles of most units obvious from their character designs, but how you direct your team in combat will come down to knowing and understanding what each of their strengths and weaknesses are, which takes a little thought, a little practice, and sometimes a little research over at the main Exvius Wiki or on Google. To get an idea of where to start with your team, you can examine each member's basic stats.

Generally speaking, characters with a high ATK (Attack) should either Attack or use physical damage abilities. In most cases, the more expensive a physical ability, the more damage it will do. Also note that some abilities may hit all enemies, or random enemies, whereas others will only hit one enemy. Plain old regular Attacks will always hit just one enemy.

Characters with a high MAG (magic) stat are meant to cast damaging spells. These spells can often bypass high physical defenses, or exploit a monster's innate elemental weaknesses. The elements of most damaging spells are usually pretty obvious from their names and icons; spell descriptions also tell you what element, if any, will be used. All magic spells are found in the Abilities menu. Characters with a lot of magic spells tend to not be very strong with physical attacks. Characters with high HP and DEF (defense) stats may be tanks, a special class of character designed to take damage in place of other party members. Tanks are annoyingly rare, but fortunately, you will not need one for any of the story content. In general, tanks will start out attacking most of the time, but will eventually unlock abilities you can use to help them mitigate damage and draw attacks away from your other party members more efficiently.
 * Rain, the main character, is something of an exception - he has some magic spells, but is usually better suited to being a physical attacker.

Characters with high SPR (spirit) are often healers. You can access their healing and status-curing spells from the Abilities menu. Many healers also have a buff spell or two in their kits, for longer/tougher fights or turns when healing is not needed.

Finally, characters without a clearly dominant stat are often support characters, who provide a host of useful abilities in exchange for middling performance otherwise. Support characters offer things like elemental damage protection, physical damage mitigation, party or individual stat buffs, enemy stat debuffs, status ailment attacks, and more. Many of the best support units can also act as secondary healers, with a few skills for curing, reviving, or removing status ailments from your party members. This can be a great help, as you can use a support character to get your party back on its feet, and then use your healer to restore their HP in the same turn.

There are other types of unique characters as well, but in a broad sense, nearly every unit in FFBE falls into one or more of the above categories: physical damage, magical damage, healing, tanking, or supprt. Experiment with your units and research them on Exvius Wiki to learn which roles suit each of them best.

Enemy selection
During a battle with multiple foes, it's possible to select a particular monster to focus on. This can be handy if you know, for example, that one monster will give you more trouble than the others, or if you want to pursue a boss strategy of focusing on one enemy at a time in order to maximize your single-target damage output per turn. However, selecting an enemy to single out also has drawbacks.

To select a single enemy for your party to focus on, tap that enemy. A red arrow will appear over it, and its life bar will be the one displayed in the left-middle of the screen. To deselect and stop targeting one enemy in particular, tap that enemy again. The red arrow will disappear.

The main advantage of single targeting is getting all your characters to focus exclusively on one monster. This is also the chief drawback; normally, your party will split their targeting up as they see fit among all potential targets. Setting a single target often means the fight will last longer overall, as each enemy must be dealt with one at a time. It is important to get used to switching back and forth as needed between single and general targeting, so experiment with different approaches for each new type of enemy you meet, and make adjustments based on what you learn.

Note: Even if you select a single enemy target, abilities that hit all enemies, such as the fire-elemental damage spell Fira and the physical damage skill Bladeblitz, will still hit all enemies. The only things that change are single-target attacks.

Elemental damage
FFBE has 8 unique elements, plus non-elemental physical and magic damage. (The difference between physical damage and magic damage is whether ATK or MAG is used in calculating that damage, and whether DEF or SPR, respectively, is used in calculating any mitigation of that damage.) In many cases, both you and your enemies will have certain elemental strengths and/or weaknesses. By exploiting an enemy's elemental weakness, it often becomes easier to win the fight.

The 8 elements are: Elements are paired into 4 sets of enemies, generally based on common sense: Fire and Ice, Lightning and Water, Wind and Earth, and Light and Dark. If you can tell that an enemy looks fiery and is using fire-based skills, try hitting it with an ice spell or ability to do extra damage, and so on.
 * Fire
 * Ice
 * Lightning
 * Water
 * Wind
 * Earth
 * Light
 * Dark

Your units may also have innate or equipment-based elemental strengths and weaknesses. You can check this by going to the Units screen from the home page and viewing the character in question. Espers also grant their strengths and weaknesses in this regard to units that equip them. Be aware of your current party's elemental weaknesses, and if one character seems to keep taking more damage than the rest, you may be able to determine that its' the result of an elemental weakness, and compensate for it with different equipment or a different Esper.

Chaining
Chaining is an advanced strategy that's required to beat most of FFBE's elite optional bosses. The very basics of chaining are as follows: by causing attacks to occur in rapid succession, you can create a chain combo attack that grants an increasing damage multiplier to each subsequent strike in the chain. With good timing, it's possible to then "cap" such a chain with a powerful single-hit attack that snags the maximum damage multiplier from the chain, dealing massive damage.

Chaining strategies can get very technical, complex, and difficult to pull off; fortunately, chaining is not anything you have to worry about until you reach the end-game progression and are going after optional rewards to supercharge your team. If and when you want to learn more about it, search on Google for things like "FFBE chaining," to read people working out the math behind different types of chains (there are 3), demonstrating how different character rosters work together when building or capping a chain, and so forth. You can also visit the Unit Rankings page of the Exvius Wiki to get an idea of which characters are considered the best chain builders and cappers in the current game environment, if you like, but don't take the wiki's rankings as gospel.

Game Over
If you get a game over, there are no serious negative effects. You will simply have to try the fight again. (You will also lose any consumable items you used during the fight, of course.) However, in many cases, you can pay 100 Lapis to continue from where you fell instead, with full HP, MP, and LB gauges for your entire party. This is generally not worth it, but there may be exceptional cases where it makes sense. See Lapis for more information on the many uses of Lapis and what to consider before spending it on a continue.

If you consistently get game overs against a particular monster, you may need to go back to an easier fight and earn a few more experience levels for your units, or change their equipment and esper configurations to help them better withstand the foe's assault - or, in many cases, both.