As described before, equipment comes with skills that can increase certain stats, give you certain immunities, and much more. However, to fully take advantage of what these skills can grant you, instead of focusing just on an individual equipment’s skills you should pay attention to how the skills of your equipment correlate with each other within the Skill Sheet. View the Skill Sheet in the Equipment section by pressing R2. Refer to "Skills" in the Data section for more information about specific skills.
Basic Skills
Appear as the white icons. There are 50 basic skills available that can be combined to create Bonus Skills. Each basic skills is represented by one normin.
Bonus Skills
Bonus skills appear as blue icons. Bonus skills are activated based on placement of basic skills on the grid, and there are three types:
Stack Skills
These are bonus skills activated by equipping multiple instances of the same basic skill. Stacking multiple bonus skills will give you a different skill at each stack level, and they are not all necessarily related. Here are the first six skills that can be unlocked through stacking:
- Stack 2: Anthemn - Stagger time lowered by 6%
- Stack 3: Blasst - Maximum BG +1
- Stack 4: Ekseed - No. of combos in normal state +1
- Stack 5: Aster - 2x damage on 10th, 20th, 30th (etc.) hit
- Stack 6: Aejis - Prevents Pertrify, your knockback chance halved
While stacks don't combine as you add more of the same skill, multiple instances of the same Stack skill will increase their effect. For example, if you have two Stack 3s, Blasst's ability will increase max BG by +2.
Try to stack as many skills as you can to see what you skills you can create!
G-Union Skills
G-Unions are bonus skills activated by vertically lining up all 5 skills from the same group. In general, this will result in a powerful effect relating to that skill group. For example, equipping all 5 Status skills will boost each of that character’s stats by 20. Of the bonus skills, this is the hardest to trigger, but worth the effort.
E-Union Skills
E-Unions are bonus skills activated by placing 2 or more bonus skills in a horizontal line. They can be useful for fighting a specific enemy, since skill effects will pertain to a certain element. Since E-Unions only trigger when directly next to each other, you might get a bonus skill for creating a row of 5 basic skills, or you could remove the middle one and have two pairs, doubling their bonus effect.