Skills and How They Work

## WIP

Skills can be tricky or simple to understand. Most of the basic monsters have skills that are fairly straightforward. They reduce haki, or they seal a monster. Things get more complex as you start introducing other concepts such as immune to seal, or uncleansable debuff. So this guide is meant to resolve some of those questions by dividing skills up into different categories. Now it is very important to know that this is merely how I would categorize the skills, and not how the game defines them.

I've broken down skills into two categories, these two categories are based on if the skill can be sealed and/or cleansed.

1. Active Skills
2. Passive Skills

Additionally, I'll cover some of the interesting mechanics behind different skills such as preventing death vs upon death.

## Active Skills

I define active skills with the following traits:

1. Can be sealed
2. Cleansable if it is a buff

There may be some exceptions, but these are what I would consider active skills.

## Passive Skills

Following the definition of active skills, the following traits are how I define passive skills:

1. Cannot be sealed
2. Naturally uncleansable (There is no specific statement in the skill description saying it is uncleansable)

In the passive case, it may or may not have a condition attached.

Key phrases in the skill descriptors that indicate a passive skill:

1. When HP < x%
2. When X is alive

## Cleansing Buffs/Debuffs

Cleansing a buff or debuff, is essentially removing the debuff/buff from existence. Commonly, if a buff/debuff is uncleansable it will be explicitly stated in the skill description. However, there are some skills as mentioned in the passive skills section that don't explicitly mention being uncleansable but are uncleansable. Please see the Passive skills section for more on implicitly uncleansable skills.

Now one common question is what about skills that trigger immunity to debuffs, how does that work?

One might assume that immunity would imply becoming immune to the effects of the uncleanseable debuff, however that is not the case in this game. Immunity merely provides a check for future debuffs to determine if it should be applied. Immunity does not remove the effects of existing debuffs, only cleansing does that. Immunity is a prevention measure, not a recovery measure.

TL;DR Cleansing removes the buff/debuff. Immunity prevents the application of a buff/debuff. Immunity DOES NOT remove existing buffs/debuffs.

## Buff/Debuff

A buff is any skill that ends up triggering a blue icon to show up underneath your monster. Note some icons are partially red/blue to indicate a skill is causing both a debuff/buff on a monster. These are always what the game considers to be positive effects.

A debuff is any skill that triggers a red icon to appear beneath your monster's icon in battle. These are always what the game considers negative effects.

## Upon Death and Prevent Death

The difference between these two concepts are key to quite a few different monster's skills such as Scarlet, Kara, and Wingman. Additionally, it plays a role in how berserk is triggered as well, so it is important to understand the difference between the two.

Upon Death is a trigger that occurs once a unit has died. As in it has lost all its hp and would normally vanish from the battlefield. Dying also triggers berserk.

Prevent Death are skills like Kara and Wingman. The reason why there skills are confusing is because they act almost like revives, where a unit seemingly dies and comes back. This is NOT the case. They act more like skills akin to Allura's death prevention, or Suzaku, where the unit is immortal for one hit, and recovers HP.

So, Kara and Wingman's skills DO NOT trigger berserk. If Kara is on Wingman, Triggering Wingman's skill, does not cause Kara like revive does. Since Wingman didn't actually die when his skill is activated. Kara and Awakened Exuviae only die if the unit they are bound to dies. So any death prevention would not trigger there "Death" since the unit they are bound to also never "Died".

Another frequent question is what about trigger order? Well I have tested it and can put the question to rest. When Kara is on a Wingman with revive, the order of triggers is as follows:

1. Kara's death prevention skill
2. Wingman's death prevention skill
3. Revive

At the final point is when Kara dies.