There are 5 classes: Warrior, Knight, Mage, Ranger, and Priest.

All classes are capable of doing Magic damage, only Warriors/Knights/Rangers can do Physical damage, which isn't affected by affinities.

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With access to Taunt, Warriors are capable of tanking, but are considered the more offensive of the two tank classes. They specialise in AoE melee damage and are a "selfish" class in that their recovery is limited to themselves only. However, they are easily able to achieve permanent lifesteal/leech later on. They have somewhat poor mobility with long cooldowns. Warrior is heavily skewed towards Fire and ATK scaling, only a few of their attacks use MAG.

Main Elements: Fire/Earth/Dark
Minor Elements: Wind/Thunder/Water/Holy
Elemental Resonance access: Scorching/Cooling/Muddy/Flowing/Electric

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Knights are designed to be the main tanking class. They have fewer elements to choose from, unlike Warriors, but have multiple ways to mitigate damage and can support the party with healing magic, buffs, and debuffs. This doesn't mean they cannot do damage well, however. A properly geared Knight can still compare to a Warrior. However, their coverage is extremely skewed towards Thunder. The elemental component of Knight damage is usually MAG based, but the physical component is heavily reliant on ATK. Knight is also one of the best stat debuffers in the game and has the best mobility skill in the entire game, which can give you ridiculous amounts of invulnerability if spammed.

Main Elements: Thunder/Holy
Minor Elements: Earth/Fire/Dark
Elemental Resonance access: Muddy/Electric

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Mage is the main Magic attacker class, having no ATK to speak of. It has full elemental coverage of every element in the game, so you can easily change up your spells to match the enemy you are farming. Mage is a lot less impressive if you aren't exploiting elements and resonances, so it is a class which rewards synergy and planning. Using Resonance is a key feature of Mage, allowing it to crowd control or debuff enemies into oblivion.

The in-game explanation is a bit lacking, so here's how it works.:

1) Hitting an enemy with any resonance skill will apply a resonance debuff on the enemy.

2) If two resonance debuffs which form a combo are applied, both debuffs are removed and the combo effect is immediately applied to the enemy, with the strength of the debuff being determined by the user of the latter skill. Multiple resonances cannot be removed at the same time, only one combo will form, which seems to have a priority order.

The combos are as follows:



Realistically speaking, the best of the lot is Evaporation, and Burn is so bad at a total of 80% MAG + 350 Fire damage that it may as well not exist. I get the feeling the developer missed a 0 somewhere, or Flowing should have had more than one combo.

Main Elements: All (Heavily biased towards Water, then Dark and Fire)
Minor Elements: All (Holy and Wind have significantly less support than other elements)
Elemental Resonance access: All

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Ranger is a hybrid damage dealing class which deals both Physical and Magic damage. Unlike mage, it has quite poor elemental coverage and extremely limited resonance. However, it is much simpler to use and can deal overwhelming damage by endgame. It has several debuffs, but its best debuff move puts it into melee range and is therefore extremely dangerous. It also has extremely limited ways of recovering its own HP, so it often needs to be babysat. The class has decent mobility too.

When compared to Mages, Rangers tend to suffer more in the early game, but grossly outdamage Mages by the endgame, due to a number of factors: Warrior has a partywide ATK buff, and Ranger has a LOT of incredibly badly balanced skills, the biggest culprit being Rage Barrage, a multi-hit skill which casually crits for 6 digit figure damage multiple times and has a stupidly short cooldown. Mages get a really huge damage staff very early on, but rangers don't get significantly powerful weapons until later. (Remember: Rangers use both ATK and MAG on their weapons)

Currently, I am pretty sure no class does as much damage as Ranger in endgame given equal stats and it isn't a remotely close contest. unless you have very specific min-maxed setups or use certain overpowered Warrior abilities.

Main Elements: Wind
Minor Elements: Fire
Elemental Resonance access: Flowing/Scorching

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Your main support class, with heals and buffs and cleanses galore. Has extremely limited offensive options, most of which are basic and unlocked at level 1. You'll probably need at least one in the party. There's not much to write because they have very few skills and are very straightforward.

Main Elements: Holy
Minor Elements: None
Elemental Resonance access: None

Firstly, your character is NOT truly random. They are generated by a seed based on your character's name, which determines their appearance. The traits they have will have based on Name, Gender and Class, so try using your own name for fun. This can be very significant - it can result in a massive 0.4 base enmity modifier or 0.5 Crit Multiplier difference just from name alone!

Additionally, your name determines your growth attributes - Knights usually have 135 hp per level, but depending on your name, this can go up to 162, which is larger than any Party Member. In other words, how strong or weak your character becomes HEAVILY depends on your name. Important stats to look for are:

• HAT: Determines enmity multiplier. Can make characters unusable, like a Knight.
  
• CRIM: Crit multiplier. Criticals are weak in the early game because your usual crit chance is 0%, but they become more useful in the endgame when you can enchant gear for CRI.
  
• SPR: MP regen per second. Has large variance. Knights can get 4, 5.5 or 7 MP per second, for example.
  
• Growth Attributes: Most stats are useful. I've seen massive outliers, like 17 RST per level or 18 AVD.

Feel free to notify me of any really good names you find and I can put them in the guide. Please use this format e.g.:

Name: Daral - male Warrior. ARP: 7/s and 174 HP/level growth, 1% Crit (Enchantress), 10% Crit bonus. (Rager), Born Protagonist (HP 300, SP 100)

Suggested:
Name: Val - female Knight. ARP: 4/s and 162HP/level growth, Born Protagonist (HP 300, SP 100), Annihilation Engine (1,2 HAT 10%AVD) Aquatic Body (2% Water) with 11RDM/lv


This game has a NG+ system which encourages you to repeat it over and over .

Based on how many times you finish the game, you can inherit 1 item from your previous playthrough and receive more points on character creation in the next cycle.

You start with 6 points on the first playthrough, and this changes to 18, 30, then 42 in the next 3 cycles. I'm not sure if you get more beyond that.

Update as of 11/6/2024: According to the developer, the point increase per playthrough was increased recently. I don't know the new values, but I would assume they are larger.

I have posted a table of all abilities at the bottom of this guide since this is more a NG+ concern.

In your first run, I personally recommend the following 2 options:

• Guardian Angel + 2 Points of abilitles
  - I recommend Shadow Assassin myself or Bullet Deflector if playing a ranged character.
  
• Time Traveler + Undying Warrior
  - QoL for the first run

On your second run, just pick "Heavens are envious yada yada". It's very very good.

I thought this was needed since the game doesn't do this well in the help menu.


Status immunities are a direct % chance to avoid a specific status.
Elemental affinity is covered below in its own section.

Another thing to note which is not covered in the Help menu: The game is similar to a MMORPG in that there is very extreme level scaling. Consider anything 5 levels or more above you as basically impossible, regardless of your offensive stats. Even if you have 1000 ATK over the enemy's RDM, you will do single digit damage or miss all the time.

The minimum level for doing any content is +4 of your current level.

I estimate damage reduction as follows.
+6: 99.99% damage reduction
+5: 99.9% damage reduction.
+4: No damage reduction.

This was done in NG+ by trying to fight a level 10 enemy at level 4 with an overpowered weapon and slowly gaining levels. At level 4, it was impossible, but at level 6, I basically did 1000 times the damage of level 4.

This system has recently been revised in an update so that damage reduction scaling should be hard capped at 50% damage instead of 99.99%

If you cannot progress in the game due to enemy levels being too high, look for level appropriate content to farm.

Note that Skills have ranks to them, getting stronger and decreased cooldowns/SP cost, but do not level naturally unless you have the Ability for it. The feature to rank up skills is unlocked approximately halfway through the game. Ranking up skills will generally INCREASE their overall SP consumption because of the reduction in their cooldown times.

Elegy of Fate's elemental affinity system is not particularly well explained and can be a bit counter-intuitive due to a misleading diagram in the tutorial, so I'll attempt to re-explain it here.

There's an affinity chart in the game showing Fire<>Water Light<>Dark and the Triangle for Wind>Earth>Thunder, however that just refers to the way the artifacts are paired. If a unit has high Water affinity, attacking it with Fire elemental skills will NOT do more damage.

The only thing you need to pay attention to is here:


You can think of affinity, represented by the numbers under the coloured balls, as "Resistances/Damage Multiplers", such as in Diablo 2 or other such ARPGs. In the picture, 0.33 FIRE translates to roughly around 33% of FIRE damage being resisted entirely.

When affinity hits 1, all damage of that element is nullified. If the resistance exceeds 1, for example - if you have 1.5 WATER affinity, you will start to heal damage taken. 1.5 WATER affinity would heal the character for half the raw damage.

This also applies to damage dealt from that element. 0.33 FIRE affinity means fire spells do approximately 33% more damage.

Negative affinities will multiply damage taken from that element as well as reduce damage of that element which you deal. This is why wearing Urandia on a Holy damage attacker is a bad idea.

Paying attention to elements and changing them is key to making your life a lot easier on harder difficulties. With proper elemental abuse, some bosses can be rendered entirely impotent, making them a cake walk.

This is a short cheat sheet of artifacts you should use to counter elemental affinities:

Remember that attacks also often have a physical component, which is unaffected by affinities.

Here is the list of Runes and some farming locations:


This is a more colour-coded table including the runewords for your reference:

There are a few things to note about runes:

• All runes give +1 DAMD, so it is recommended to fill out your rune board ASAP.
  
• The order of runes does not matter for runewords.
  
• Runewords can be made vertically as well as horizontally.
  
• There are three multiplier runes:
  ᛟ (Othala), ᛗ (Mannaz) and ᛞ (Dagaz).
  When placed on the rune board, they buff certain adjacent runes and themselves by multiplying their effects.
  
  ᛟ (Othala) gives +1 to effects vertically and ᛗ (Mannaz gives it horizontally, ᛞ (Dagaz) Gives +0.5 to all adjacent runes.
  
  This means ᛗ (Mannaz) should ALWAYS be placed in the middle of the rune board whenever possible in a runeword, so that it can buff adjacent runes.

Here is an example of an optimised rune board for farming:


It has 50% to all stats for 30 seconds, 30% Attack increase and a 100% HP shield to stop unfortunate K.O.s at the start of battle.

I encourage you to develop your own rune boards, even if options are currently a bit limited.

This section of the guide covers the NPCs available in each region and helps you determine which you should choose. Usually, if an area has multiple NPCs listed, you may only recruit one, chosen at random, so if you don't get the one you want, make sure to reload your game. I consider accessibility and Unique skills when rating a character.

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• Vera (Knight) - Family Heirloom Hat (380 HP, RDM 3%, RST 3%)
  Rating: ★★☆☆☆
  Skill: Life Redemption (Single-Target HoT and ATK buff, triggers 4x over 20 sec)
  
  Vera's heal is useful early on before you get your first Priest if you have no other way of healing, but its single-target nature and long CD leave much to be desired. She has slightly better offensive stat growth than Marxin.
  
  
• Marxin (Knight) - Brown Enchantress (35% HP)
  Rating: ★★★☆☆
  Skill: Regroup (AoE Damage shield + RDM/RST buff, Taunt + massive DAMD/HAT buff for 15s)
  
  Marxin's trait scales better than Vera as the game goes on and Regroup is a very good skill which can replace Taunt. Her attack growth is awful, however, being the weakest ATK knight.

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• Eva (Priest) - Compassionate Healer (150 SP, ARP: 2/s, CURE: 0.08)
  Rating: ★★☆☆☆
  Skill: Fruit of Healing (3s cd 15% Heal, buffs HEAL of target)
  
  Eva's Fruit of Healing is bugged and does not increase the target's HEAL at all, so she is a bad choice since there are much better heals. I've changed her rating especially after I found Natali's skill is much much better than advertised. Pick Natali instead.
  
  
• Natali (Priest) - Energy Flow (300 SP, ARP: 3/s )
  Rating: ★★★★★
  Skill: Soul Concentration - 20 CD Shield Skill + % small SP restore. Triggers 10x over 10 sec.
  
  Natali has a pretty amazing skill which might not look great at the start, but gets really good once you are able to rank up skills and halve the cooldown. It costs next to no SP and restores 1% of ALL party members' SP ten times, allowing her to be a SP battery. It also stacks a shield on them 10 times, far stronger than the low level barrier skills. Shield skills have no actual duration for the amount of protected HP, so this is useful at keeping everyone fully barriered against accidents.
  
  
• Melody (Priest) - Divine Chanting (MOV 0.2, CURE 0.15)
  Rating: ★★☆☆☆
  Skill: Mental Focus (45s CD AoE Group Teleport to self + Heal)
  
  Melody's unique skill is used to drag allies out of danger zones. However, it is bugged to only drag a single target, there's already a Noble Phantasm artifact which does the group teleport thing and in most cases, teleporting your melee units on top of her will be incredibly annoying if not disabled in the AI. Her trait makes her heal 15% more hp, but she has low SP regeneration.

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• Alicia (Ranger) - Princess (3% ATK, 8% HIT) Wind Fairy (SPD 0.1, WIND 8%)
  Rating: ★★★★☆
  Skill: Wind Fairy (45s CD AoE Heal +MOV/SPD 30%HIT/AVD buff for 20s)
  
  A fairly decent ranger with a small amount of ATK and HIT buffs, but as a mere dabbler in both, she isn't anything to write home about. Her Unique Skill - Wind Fairy is a really useful party buff, especially once upgraded, when it has nearly full uptime. It's a massive DPS and survivability increase.
  
  
• Olivia (Mage) - Lightning Surge (100 SP, ARP: 2/s Thunder 5%)
  Rating: ★★★☆☆
  Skill: Arcane Nova (50s CD AoE Water attack - 80% HIT debuff)
  
  Olivia is a decent starter mage with minor SP regeneration. Arcane Nova inflicts Evaporation, which is a massive HIT debuff, directly, so you don't need to use a Water+Fire combo. However, her only damage buff is a 5% Thunder affinity, so she drops off pretty fast.

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• Abigail (Warrior) - Blood Sword (ATK 60, ATK 10%, SPD 0.1, Lifesteal 12%)
  Rating: ★★★☆☆
  Skill: Blood Sword Dash (35s CD 5x autohit dash with 3s of Invincibility built in.)
  
  Abigail is pretty good at this point in the game because she covers her own healing, which is convenient when your healer has long cooldowns because skills cannot be upgraded yet. You don't really get a choice anyway. All warriors can get Perma-lifedrain later on.

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• Angela (Mage) - Core of Thunder (MAG 12%, Thunder 18%)
  Rating: ★★☆☆☆
  Skill: Thunderous Strike (68s CD Large AoE Lightning Attack)
  
  Mostly notable because she's one of the first mages you have access to. Her skill is rather bad and at this point of the game, she runs out of SP easily because she has no ARP recovery trait. She has decent offensive stats, however.
  
  
• Cassandra (Ranger) - Nightingale's Eye (HIT 35% CRI 5%)
  Rating: ★★☆☆☆
  Skill: Immobilizing Arrows (45 CD Phys AoE with a 5-8 second Root/Snare)
  
  5% Crit is pretty large, but crit builds aren't particularly strong early on because the base Crit rate is 0% and is very difficult to stack. Her skill is forgettable, but can be useful when kiting. She has the highest ATK growth of the early Rangers.

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• Stephanie (Warrior) - Heaven is envious of talent (Level Up Bonus: HP 20/.SP 8/ATK 7/MAG 7,HIT 5, RDM 4, RST 4, AVD 5, SPD 0.01)
  Rating: ★★★★☆
  Skill: Rage of the Rose (30s CD 5 hit Hybrid Dark Mag/Phy Atk dash attack)
  
  Stephanie has one of the strongest basic traits in the game - Other than HP, it nearly doubles her stat gain on level up. Sadly, the game is full of broken warriors with better traits and stats later on. Her trait is retroactive, so you don't need to worry about getting her late. Rage of the Rose is decent if you need a Darkness attack.
  
  
• Yegis (Ranger) - Cross (HIT 100, HIT: 45%, MOV 0.25)
  Rating: ★★★☆☆
  Skill: Cross (60s CD Autohit single target Wind phys attack)
  
  Yegis only really has two things going for him: 1) He's one of the few rare male party members and 2) He has the highest HIT rate of all rangers. This lets him apply debuffs pretty consistently. He has low ATK/MAG stats and very high HIT growth (9 per level compared to the usual 5-7).

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• Eleanor (Ranger) - Shadowmoon Wolf (ATK/MAG/HIT 8%, SPD 0.05, 0.02 SPD/lv)
  Rating: ★★★★☆
  Skill: Moonlight Meteor (25s CD, High Phys/Mag damage AoE)
  
  Eleanor is a ranger with great attack speed thanks to her passive. Moonlight Meteor is a good attack skill for Rangers, but there is no shortage of better ones later on. Has incredible damage potential, due to attack speed affecting skill animation speed.
  
  
• Mia (Mage) -
  Charming Songstress(SP 220, ARP 3/s, HP 20%, HAT - 0.5 Recovers 5% of a teammate's SP every 10s) Heavenly Tune (MAG 15%)
  Rating: ★★★★★
  Skill: Otherworldly Sound (120s CD, 20s CD reduction buff to group)
  
  Mia is a fantastic mage, and is endgame-worthy. She has a unique SP recovery trait and the only drawbacks to her are her somewhat low HP growth, bad unique skill and average HIT rating.

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• Philomena (Knight) - Rotating Sword Case (58 ATK, 5% ATK, 10% Chance to shoot swords on attack skill usage)
  Rating: ★☆☆☆☆
  Skill: Amethyst Wall (75s CD, AoE Phys Charge attack, 5s Knockback + Stun on enemies, 10s Group Heal + RDM/RST buff )
  
  Attack focused Knight with bad defensive stat growth and HP. Tanks as well as you would expect. About as useful as a chocolate teapot.
  
  
• Tasha (Warrior) - Flame Inheritor (HP 800, CRI 2%, CRIM 0.05, FIRE 8%)
  Inexplicable (Level up bonus: ATK 5, RDM 4, RST 5)
  Rating: ★★★☆☆
  Skill: Unparalleled Overlord's Blade (60s CD, Phys AoE + 3s Stun)
  
  Tasha is okay, if not actually pretty good, but outshadowed by Stephanie early on. Her main appeal is that she isn't Philomena. Take her if you didn't get Stephanie.

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• Roxanne(Warrior) - (Water Ripple 1.5/s ARP 15% WATER, 10% chance of giving Water affinity buff (30s) to allies on attacks equal to a 26.75% Water Potion)
  Rating: ★☆☆☆☆
  Skill: Heart of Crystal (80s CD 120 MP, Buffs all Element Affinities by 15%+, Rapidly heal the target for a very large amount over 5 seconds, Applies Frozen to target.)
  
  Roxanne has incredibly bad ATK growth, which puts her on par with Abigail for the lowest ATK stat, except Abigail has a trait which increases her ATK and Roxanne does not. She has low HP growth and the worst RDM, so she cannot tank either. She even has the worst MP regen in the game. I'm not sure what purpose she serves except to be good at using powerful Water elemental attacks... which Warrior doesn't have. She is undoubtedly the worst character in the game.
  
  
• Elisa(Ranger) - (Master of Sacred Feathers 3% ATK 5% AVD 0.1 SPD 10% SPD 3% WIND)
  Rating: ★★★★☆
  Skill: Exclusive Performance (225 CD 90 MP, 1.35 SPD/MOV 500 AVD buff for 15s )
  Elisa's skill says it reduces Cooldowns, but doesn't appear to. Self-only buff, with absolutely terrible uptime. She has above-average growth stats for a ranger and 6 base ARP. Usable, even if her skill is awful.

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• Scarlett (Ranger) - Deceptive Eye (AVD 80, AVD 20%, Level up bonus: AVD 3 )
  Rating: ★☆☆☆☆
  Skill: Void Shadow(150s CD, Self buff 8% Crit 0.5 Crit Multiplier )
  
  Gimmick Ranger who specialises in AVD. Not really useful unless you plan to have her tanking.Her unique skill is uniquely terrible due to it being self-only and having an incredibly low uptime. Use Elisa instead or Eleanor. Strong MAG, bad ATK growth.
  
  
• Perand (Knight) - Soul Tremor (RST 10% AVD 15% Recover 15% life every 15s)
  Rating: ★★★☆☆
  Skill: High-Speed Spiral (100s CD, Thunder PBAoE + Bleed)
  
  Rare Male NPC, Has a pretty good passive considering Knights tend to suffer when it comes to Magic damage. Also has surprisingly high ATK growth at 9/level when the usual Knight ATK growth is 4-5. Counterbalanced by his abysmal MAG growth, which at 3/level is the lowest of all Knights. The true offensive Knight compared to Philomena, because he can actually tank.

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• Meredith (Mage) - (Sacred Faith 3/s ARP 20 RDM/RST 80 AVD 15% AVD 10% HOLY, Every 60 seconds, gain 30s Holy 26.75% Element.)
  Rating: ★★★☆☆
  Skill: Fusion Magic - (9s CD 120 MP, deal 200% +200 Fire/Water/Earth/Thunder/Wind damage)
  
  Meredith comes with an extremely powerful spell, if a little costly in terms of MP. Sadly, she doesn't have the traits to make use of that spell because she's Holy aligned. She also has extremely bad stat growth and the low HP of a beginner-tier Mage, so you would just take her for her skill and never actually use her in battle.
  
  
• Gwendolyn (Knight) - (Double-Edged Knight Every 30s, cleanse all negative debuffs on all teammates)
  Rating: ★★★☆☆
  Skill: White Cross Sword (40 CD 120 MP, Huge Holy/Physical multihit AoE)
  
  Gwendolyn herself is nothing special, but her unique skill is one of the most damaging Knight Skills in the game. Unfortunately, it has stiff competition from the other two Unique skills and probably does the least damage of the three.
  
  
• Virginia (Ranger) - (Swift Arrows - 100 HIT, 35% chance for normal attacks to fire another arrow )
  Rating: ★★★★☆
  Skill: Holy Bullets (60s CD 100 MP, Shoots an arrow rain which lasts for ~14s dealing 300%+550 ATK Holy damage per arrow which hits.)
  
  Virginia has the worst Magic growth of any ranger, but that doesn't matter because her unique skill is one of the strongest Ranger skills in the game. Holy Bullets can be buffed to a 27.6s CD and its hit count depends on how many arrows collide with the hurtbox of an enemy. On large enemies, this does obscene amounts of damage, and the rate of falling arrows scales with Speed, meaning you get more arrows the more speed you have. This makes it do absolutely amazing damage on Eleanor assuming she's fighting Fatty McFat hurtbox.

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• Beirut(Knight) - (Immune to all poisons 8% HP 100% Poison/ Paralysis /Petrification /Frailty /Bleeding Resistance)
  Rating: ★★★☆☆
  Skill: Death Call (160s CD Apply instant death to single target. If target survives, gain a large ATK/MAG/RST/RDM buff for 20s, heal it for 45% and give it 12% DAMD)
  
  Death Call does not resurrect teammates, like the description would suggest. It is a single target and is bad due to terrible uptime, even after being patched so that it can be resisted by Death resistance.
  
  Beirut himself has a useful tanking passive, but you can get status immunity from other sources. Enemy DoTs are deadly.
  
  
• Ingrid(Warrior) - Immune to Control (20% HP 100% Paralysis/Freeze/Petrification/Silence Res)
  Rating: ★★★☆☆
  Skill: Dark Scythe (10s CD 150 MP 7-fold AoE ATK sweep, adds minor Fire DoT)
  
  Ingrid has a nice set of immunities, but is not a very good Warrior because she has extremely bad ATK growth and bad growth all around which makes her unsuited for tanking. Her skill, Dark Scythe, is very good, especially if you're wearing Urandia, but is extremely expensive on the MP.

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• Ivythys(Mage) - Dark Dominator (120 MAG 8% MAG 10% Dark 20% chance to release dark sword on spell use)
  Rating: ★★★☆☆
  Skill: Chaos Cage (Dark Magic AoE, does one large hit, not Continuous damage)
  
  Ivythys is the worst of the 3 Dark mages, however, this is kind of a niche build. She can be fun, though. Chaos Cage's main problem is that it only does one hit and loses out to Ranger skills.

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• Carmen(Knight) - Silver Hand (800 HP 20% RDM/RST 0.5 HAT 0.3 HEAL/CURE)
  Rating: ★★★★☆
  Skill: Like a Mountain (80s CD (36.8s at Max), 15s Self buff + Minor Threat, 6000 RST/RDM, -12 SPD/MOV, 50% DAMD, 1000 Mass)
  
  Carmen is the tankiest main game Knight, hands down. Her trait, Silver Hand, gives just about every stat a Knight could want. Additionally, she has superlative HP, RES and RST growth. Her only drawback is her average ATK growth of 5, but if you want someone to tank through the endgame, Carmen can do it easily.
  
  Her Skill gives a ludicrous amount of damage reduction for 15s.
  
  
• Ada(Ranger) - Shadowmoon Wolf (0.35 SPD 15% SPD)
  Rating: ★★★★☆
  Skill: Steel Forge (Magic 50s CD, 120 MP, AoE Fire damage, debuff ATK and MAG 20% for 10 sec)
  Max rank: 23CD. -32.6% ATK/MAG 163% + 358 Fire Magic damage.
  
  Ada's trait is simple and buffs SPD. She has quite mediocre stat growth with the exception of MAG, which is the highest amongst Rangers. This is probably because her unique Skill is a damaging debuff spell, which is an incredibly rare ATK/MAG debuff. It isn't quite as strong as the Noble Phantasm Cracked Landzatus, but ATK/MAG debuffs are quite useful for keeping your party alive.

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• Gerald(Mage) - (Legendary Mage 200 SP 4/s ARP 15% MAG/HIT)
  Rating: ★★★★★
  Skill: Meteorite Protection (30s CD, large Holy damage nuke)
  
  Mainly for people who didn't get Mia. Gerald has incredibly good stat growth for a mage and is only slightly inferior to Mia in that he doesn't have a 20% HP innate and the 5% MP recovery proc. He has slightly higher MAG and much better HIT due to a 15% HIT buff to compensate. Both are contenders for the best endgame non-Babel mage. TLDR: Mia has slightly better survivability and a MP proc and Gerald has slightly better damage. MP becomes less of a problem in endgame, especially once you learn Holy Hymn on your Priest.
  
  Note: Meteorite Protection can be annoying because the effect looks like dangerous ground AoE markers.

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• Xiang Lan - (Exotic Constitution 5% ATK/MAG/HIT 0.05 HEAL/CURE)
  Rating: ★★☆☆☆
  Skill: Sun God Sword (5 large AoE slashes. 45cd 140 MP MAG 200% + 420 ATK 200% Fire + 450 Physical)
  
  Xiang Lan is not very good because she has early-game-tier stat growth and simply cannot compete with any of the other endgame warriors.
  
  
• Sheryl (Mage) - High Priest of the Temple of Water(3/s ARP 10% MAG 100 HIT 8% Water)
  Rating: ★★★☆☆
  Skill: Queen of the Sea(Multihit Laser Beam Dealing MAG 135% + 180 Water damage + Water Elemental Potion for 30s. Does approx 15 hits?)
  
  Sheryl is grossly inferior to Gerald and Mia, so you take her for two reasons: 1) She isn't Xiang Lan and 2) Her unique Skill, if maxed and used in combination with a water artifact, can let you repeatedly farm Anlabeert with terrible gear because Anlabeert only does Water damage. This is another good spot to lock EXP and grind out Soul Crystals.
  
  
• Taurissa (Warrior) - God of War's Weapon (1000HP, 15%HP, 20%ATK, 2%CRIT, 0.2CRIM, FIRE 5%)
  Rating: ★★★☆☆
  Skill: Flame Meteor Shatter (Max stats 13.8s CD, 88MP, applies Scorching. Spin and shoot out 6 long range energy slashes repeatedly. Can shotgun at point blank.)
  
  Please note that Taurissa cannot be gotten through the random recruitment panel. You get her by re-forging the Flame Rose sword.
  
  Taurissa is the second strongest of the three endgame Warriors. She is much stronger than Horus offensively, but slightly weaker defensively. The big problem is that by the time you can get her, you can probably get the strongest warrior in the game.

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• Vinicxina(Priest) - (100 SP 4/s ARP 5% MAG All allies gain a shield equal to 10% Max HP every 10s )
  Rating: ★★★★★
  Skill: Entia’s Guardian (100s CD 200 MP, Instant heal, Heal over 10s, 50% Dam reduction, gives a shield and 50% DAMD)
  
  Best Priest in the normal game, and it's not even a close comparison because you only really get 1 other priest unless your main character was one. Priest feels like an undeveloped class alongside Knight given how few skills both have. Her skill wastes a lot of text instead of just telling you the character is practically invincible for the next 10 seconds, but its cooldown limits it from being useful.

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For some reason, this place has 2 recruitables right before the end of the game. Even stranger, both of them are male in a game full of AI-generated booby women.

• Morlong (Mage) - (Erosion Magic Eye AVD 200 15% chance to release dark magic explosion on spell use)
  Rating: ★★★☆☆
  Skill: Painful Light (Max stats: 18.4sCD 146 MP, Large Magic AoE dealing 6 slow ticks of 163% MAG +1059 DARK damage, ending in a large burst dealing 1630% MAG + 1630 DARK damage)
  
  Morlong has very good stat growth, but lacks a significantly useful trait to back it up. I'm not sure why he even has 200 AVD. As a result, he'll fall behind the other endgame mages pretty easily.
  
  
• Alanmelon (Knight) - (Lurant's Pillar 1500 HP, 10% RDM, 10% RST, 50% chance to survive when fatally wounded)
  Rating: ★★★★★ (More like 4.5)
  Skill: Flash of Destruction (13.8s CD 88 MP, Autohit, deals 815% ATK + 1304 damage 10 times)
  
  Alanmelon is a decent tank, but he doesn't do anything Carmen cannot. Carmen has better defensive stats, but he has a 50% chance to resist any fatal damage, so there's that - but you can get that from a Runeword, so it is by no means unique to him. Flash of Destruction is a very long ranged line attack which does a truckload of damage.

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• Asnida (Warrior) - Black Bloodsucker (3000 HP 25% HP 120 ATK 125 MAG 150 HIT 0.3 CRIM 12% DARK Skill damage increases 1% per 1% reduction in health.)
  Rating: ★★★★★★★★★★
  This is the strongest warrior in the game and her stat growth is extremely high, gaining 30 more HP per level than the second highest level warrior. Her HP is abnormally high so that she can make use of her Black Bloodsucker trait, which wants her to be at not-full HP. Achieving this may be more difficult than it sounds because lifesteal tends to be extremely strong.
  
  Recruit her by repeatedly letting your Shelter run out until she challenges you. Do this on a map with lots of artifacts to debuff her and buff yourself and it is an easy victory.
  
  Her skill is just ridiculous to the point where I don't have much to say about it. You've already beat the game at this point. May as well trivialise Knights.

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There are a horrendous 7 possible recruits here and you can only pick one. They come with two skills each. Good luck.


There is at least one more hero in the game, but you have to loop the game twice and finish Metrati to get her. Spoilers will follow:

Melodia (Knight) - (Chaos Goddess - ARP: 9/s WIND/FIRE/THUNDER/EARTH/WATER:8% HOLY: -100% DARK:50%)

Rating: ★★★★★★★★★★
Skills: She has 4 of them, 3 of them (Nibelungen's Verdict, Chaos Whirlwind and Dimensional Cutter Upgrade) from the tutorial and the only non-unique one being Wind Cutter Upgrade, which Tiamat also has. All of them do absurd amounts of DARK damage because
Melodia starts the game with insane stats and has crazy stat growth. In addition, they are not class locked, so Warriors can use them too.

To wit: Here are her base stats at level 1:

HP: 30000, SP: 650, ATK: 400, RDM: 650 MAG:500 RST: 450 HIT: 300 AVD:400 ARP 22/S.

She also gains 20-30 in every stat except speed and 200 HP whenever she levels up. Using her will make the game a cake walk, even on the hardest difficulty. I assume if you have her, you don't really need a guide nor other party members for that matter.

This section is data-oriented, for the comparison of different units in case you want to min-max a final party. Skills are not considered.

Warning: Excel tables are included. Click on the image to see the table. Babylon units are coloured red for your convenience.


Top Tier Endgame:
Asnida, Taurissa, Horus

Mid-game Recommended:
Stephanie, Tasha

Early-game Recommended:
Abigail (drop at midgame once you get lifesteal, has very bad growth)

Hot Garbage:
Roxanne. Don't use her, she is amazingly bad.


Solos the entire game and makes this guide redundant:
Melodia

Top Tier Endgame:
Tiamat (Defensive) Colariness (Offensive)

Mid-game Recommended:
Carmen (Defensive) Beirut (Defensive) Perand (Offensive)

Early-game Recommended:
Marxin (Vera is ok)


Top Tier Endgame:
Mia/Gerald/Any Babylon Mage

Mid-game Recommended:
Mia/Gerald

Early-game Recommended:
Olivia


Top Tier Endgame:
Meti, Eleanor/Elisa

Mid-game Recommended:
Anyone, Rangers don't have very large stat variance. Elisa or Cassandra are best if you have MP problems.

Early-game Recommended:


Top Tier Endgame:
There is no real choice, just use Vinicxina.

Mid-game Recommended:
You don't have a choice.

Early-game Recommended:
Natali or Eva. You can pick Melody if you want, but you miss having a useful Unique skill and Priests don't get many skills in the first place.

You can ignore this section - it's full of soft spoilers for the early-mid game which I'm only putting here in case I expand the guide later on.

Use Artifacts Ragnar + Pennyros on the altars to open the secret section.

Dwarf

Do not believe

• Small Item - Excellent Skill Book (Other classes)/SR Card Scroll
  
• Medium Item - Necklace
  
• Large Item - Weapons

Believe

• Wealthier - 30000 gold
  
• Healthier - Shelter Pts
  
• Smarter - 1500 Soul Fragments

Ball guy:
1 - Take off your clothes
1 - Hold the basketball and make a welcoming gesture
2 - Switch hands and clap the basketball
2 - Stop the ball with your feet for half a minute
1 - Rotate the basketball in your arms
1 - Spin the basketball with your right hand
1 - Do several forceful right-shoulder passes from the back
2 - Drop the basketball
1 - You rotate sideways for a flying motion
1 - You raise both hands and make a X-shaped split
2 - You flash a charming smile while half-squatting and making a polishing motion with your hand

Go back to the monument in the middle of Valanbel Lake after chaos dragon. > Unreadable Scroll > Book of the Dead (Legendary Tier enchantments, can NOT be carried over in NG+ on your item!)

-Visit Tiamat for Earth Guard.
-Give Meti the bouquet of flowers for Tornado Targeting (Extremely strong Ranger skill, recommended).

Skills on Return from Ognar:
-Tiamat (Knight - Earth Guard)
-Horus (Warrior - Flame Waltz)
-Coloriness (Mage - Darkling Doom, Dash forward > DARK element large slow moving AoE)
-Meti (Ranger - Tornado Sniper Shot)
-Lulu (Mage - Light of the Sun WATER element large AoE nuke + Stun + Evaporate)

Music Puzzle Solution (From left) > 123124

Goddess Statue results (random):
Wrath of Bahamut - 8% ATK/MAG 12% HIT/AVD
Leviathan's Heart - 7/s ARP
Hide of Yemengade - 3% All Elements, 100% Petrification/Silence RES, 0.2 HEAL/CURE, 10% DAMD
Bone Cleansing Art - 35% HP

Don't forget to come back here after crafting Flame Rose and getting the 8 other treasures to get the last Holy Sword.

- Very good place to farm Soul Crystals with the "Greedy for Gold" artifact to disable EXP gain after handing the sword to Chelna (Lose the ability to do this once boss is defeated). NPC Chelna can oneshot enemies because despite the advice that dragons are weak to wind, they are even more incredibly weak to Holy/Dark.

Hidden area and Vinicxina are in an area locked off by a quest for Bram's Axe from Marina in Anholt.

Steam Guides are terrible at posting tables, so this is a truncated version. I felt the need to make this table because many skill descriptions are outright wrong or confusing. All skill data below are shown at Rank 9- skills may be less useful at lower ranks.

Many Priest skills focus around a buff called "Light's Echo", which applies a very large HEAL and CURE bonus to the target for 10 seconds. This means your priest themself needs the buff to benefit from the CURE portion.

Mage skills are a bit counterintuitive because many of the skills are bugged or have weird discrepancies.

Additionally, generally speaking, if your character spends any time with skills consistently off-cooldown, you should be picking higher burst damage skills instead of high DPS ones. Speed will help your casting animations and increase the smoothness of your rotation. This is mostly important with regard to choosing between Tier 3 and Tier 2 bolts early on - Tier 3 bolts will actually do less DPS than Tier 2 bolts if you consistently cast all skills when off cooldown.

Note that DPS calculations also do not factor in Resonance. Choosing the Tri-Resonance builds (Scorching+Damp+Electric) will increase your DPS significantly since any 2 of those elements will result in a damage-inflicting resonance effect.

Unlike Priest skills, I've added a few popular main-game Legendary Mage skills to this table so you can see how their DPS compares. I realise I forgot to include Blizzard, but it is a very bad spell which does terrible DPS, so you should not be using it anyway.

Early game (Tier 2 Bolts):
Resonance build: Water Ball, Aqua Blade, Flames, Thunder Lance, Fireball

Tier 5 Skills:
Inferno Burst, Icicle, Toxic Vines, Huge Stone, Light of the Sun

Water Endgame Build:
Queen of the Sea, Icicle, Zero-degree Nova, Fusion Magic, Icy Spikes OR Light of the Sun OR Deep-Sea Impact.


Additional note: non-permanent CD reduction skills in this game are quite horrible because when the buff expires, all current cooldowns are re-calculated and increased proportionally. Most CD reduction buffs have a duration of 20 seconds. This means if your skill has a cooldown above 20 seconds, the skill will go back to its original cooldown when the buff expires, making your buff completely useless.

It's probably a waste of time going through skills for Warrior, Ranger or Knight. They have very straightforward optimal builds. If you absolutely need suggestions, here they are:

Warrior:

Early Game:
Sword of Doom, Power of Tyranny, Tooth of Heaven, Blood Sword Dash, Skill of choice.

War Song is good too.

Just rotate out the last 3 skills as you progress through the game until you get Stare and then whatever skills you use don't matter.

Knight:

Mandatory (tanking):
Taunt, Defensive Formation, Moon Crescent, Wind Cut, Skill of Choice.

Moon Crescent and Wind Cut are such strong debuffs that you want them up until endgame, when you can drop them and add a bunch of fast cooldown lightning skills to do damage instead.

Ranger:
Early Game until Valanbel:
Hawk's Eye, Wind Fairy (L), Spiral Fire, 2 skills of choice.

Valanbel onwards:

Hawk's Eye, Wind Fairy, Tornado Targeting, 2 skills of choice (whatever your SP can sustain)
Optional: Tornado Strike (can get Ranger killed, but is very strong.)

Endgame:
Rage Barrage, Wind Fairy, Hawk's Eye, Tornado Targeting, 1 skill that won't kill your SP.,

You'll have massive SP problems at this point, so pick a nice long cooldown skill or a buff.