Combat Display

With a single glance at your combat display, you can see your character’s health, energy, Action Queue, and Active Stance. Become familiar with the icons and their functions, especially the health and energy bars—you’ll be checking your character’s status often.

Health represents your life in the game. As the green bar above your character portrait drops, you lose health. If your health reaches zero, your character is knocked out. If all characters in your party become knocked out, you lose. Armor improves your health score, and certain abilities increase your health regeneration, which can help in close fights. Keep in mind that it’s possible to sacrifice a party member for the greater good—say, to deal maximum damage to a target before falling in combat—but it’s only worth the risk if the rest of the party survives.

Energy

Energy represents your endurance in a fight and determines how many abilities you can activate during the battle. As you add abilities to your Action Queue, the yellow energy bar decreases; if you reach zero, you can’t add any more abilities to your queue. Certain abilities, however, will increase your energy regeneration, which allows you to get off more abilities in a fight. Also, you can gain energy back by executing a recover energy order during combat; it takes up a spot in your Action Queue, but it’s well worth it if you’re low on energy and aren’t desperate to swing your weapon.

Action Queue

You can give up to three actions to characters. As you order each action, it will slot to the right in the character’s Action Queue; they will activate in the order you execute them. Think about the battle and how your character’s abilities should execute—it takes planning. For example, you don’t want to activate your damage resistance as your final action after you’ve taken a beating. You may also want to set up combos, such as using a Bleeding attack first, followed by an attack that deals extra damage to Bleeding opponents.

Active Stance

Early in the game, you won’t have to worry about your Active Stance icon much; you only have one stance until Level 7. After you pick up your second stance, always check to make sure that your Active Stance is appropriate for the current battle tactics.