Greetings everyone!
Last week week we talked about the story and outgame of Lost Eidolons. For this feature spotlight we’ll be discussing how you can customize units in your army!
Before we get into that though, we want to make it clear that customization in Lost Eidolons refers to how you set up each character for battle, and what the composition of your battle force will consist of. It does not refer to a character creator of any sort. Each of the units that you can recruit have a preset look and backstory specific to them. The greatest degree of change you can make to these characters’ appearance is by changing their class which will accordingly change their visual armor.
As always, the contents of the blog are early development and aren’t representative of the final product. We’ll keep improving and polishing things as time goes on!
To understand the extent in which you can customize the units, we’ll overview the following mechanics and user interfaces:
- Status Window
- Equipment Window
- Skills & Magic Spellbook
- Job Changing/Unity Ceremony
Status Window: Understanding Your Units
From here, we can get an overview of a unit’s general characteristics.
First, let’s get a basic understanding of the unit information or status window. This menu will detail important attributes of each individual in your army to understand what they excel in. Most changes that you make to a unit will be reflected in this UI.
Information in the status window includes the unit’s name, level, class, class mastery, individual stats, and proficiency. Proficiency refers to their level with types of weapons, armors, and magic, a necessary component of advancing to new classes. Different classes specialize in specific proficiencies and gain bonuses in them.
Equipment: Tools of the Trade
A unit’s equipment is their backbone! Make sure their gear is suitable and up-to-date.
Also in this menu is a unit’s equipment displayed on the right of their 3D model. Configuring these options will show changes in their unit’s stats in real time on the status window on the left. Selecting one of the equipment slots opens a sub window which allows you to make changes to what kind of gear the unit has equipped. Units have a primary weapon, a secondary weapon, back-up weapons, a spellbook, armor, an accessory, a mount, and up to 3 consumables that can be brought into battle with them.
It’s an axe… made an iron. Legendary iron. What did you expect from the name?
Going further in-depth by looking at an item’s tooltip we can see what kind of stats it confers to the player, what skill it has automatically (or magic), the conditions to equip it, item description, sell price, and any other useful information (whether or not it can be sold, etcetera).
New equipment can be obtained from merchants, quests, and from clearing battle scenarios.
Skills: With Great Power…
Equipped skills, character skills, and class skills. Put together your ideal team.
Next we have skills. From the skill menu you can see what types of skills a unit has by default (character skills), what types of skills they have related to their current class (class skills), and what other learned skills they want to bring into battle with them (custom skills). Skills are broken down into active skills (limited number of use per combat) and passive skills (persistent effects on the unit).
When equipping a skill we can see it’s name, the element and type, class and weapon restrictions, a preview of the skill, a skill description, how strong it is, and how many times you can use it in a given fight. Active skills and magic (described in the next section) have a limited number of uses per fight, so you must use them wisely.
Magic: Elemental, Light, and Dark Arts
An early look at the spellbook UI. Not only does it have passive abilities, but you can record skills of your choosing into one as well.
Magic can be utilized by units whose classes specialize in magic arts or hybridize into them. Magic can be incanted by having a spellbook equipped which serves as a catalyst with the spells recorded in it.
Spells are divided into elemental, light, and dark magic arts. Spellbooks have innate abilities recorded in them (such as Counterspell when struck), but also have room in the pages to record additional spells that the mage wishes to bring into combat with them. You can hover over available spells to record for more information similar to skills. Spellbooks can also have jewels embedded in them to improve their traits.
Unity Ceremony: A New You
Yep we blurred the list. We’ll reveal all the classes later!
Lastly and arguably one of the most important matters of customization is the concept of jobs or classes. Units are able to advance through a tree of classes that employ different types of skills or magic to leverage victory in battle. Early on you won’t have access to many jobs but as you improve your proficiencies you’ll gain access to a more diverse pool of jobs to destroy your enemies with. Classes are mainly divided into physical, magic, and defensive jobs, with some jobs also hybridizing into multiple roles.
In order to change a unit to a job that they haven’t yet occupied however, you will have to wait for the Unity Ceremony at the camp, an important commemoration event which distinguishes a unit’s prowess and offers them a chance to change their class to an equal, lower, or higher one for the first time. Once a unit has learned that job once though they can freely change into it at any time without waiting for the Unity Ceremony.
As we explained in the outgame feature spotlight, the Unity Ceremony does not occur in every episode early on in the campaign, so it’s important to take care of all matters related to it whenever it is available. Later on within the campaign, the ceremony becomes more accessible so as to allow the player more opportunities to refine their strategy.
—
The challenges ahead of you can be daunting and some encounters might end up being particularly tricky. Changing your strategy by switching up your gear, skills, and team composition can be all that you need to give your party the edge needed to prevail.
Check back on Friday for the last feature blog covering the Combat/Gameplay in Lost Eidolons!
