Buffs, Debuffs, and Damaging Effects

Status changes play a major role in combat. Debuffs applied to your team can become problematic if left untreated. Enemy buffs can also hinder your team’s damage output. The proper balance of buffing your allies, healing, and dispelling enemy buffs are necessary to secure victory especially in advanced battles. During battle, you can see what buffs/debuffs/damaging effects are currently applied to your characters or to the enemy team by tapping the icons under their health bars as shown below. Take note that all these effects can be stacked over several layers as long as they’re not removed.

In this page, we will be discussing how the buffs, debuffs, and damaging effects can affect your battles and how you can address them.

Buffs

These are beneficial effects applied to characters. Both your allies and the enemy team can use buffs to reinforce their characters. Since both negative and positive effects stack, it will be problematic if you let the enemy keep their buffs. Here are some examples:

* Mend: Restore HP every round

* Shield: Absorbs part of the damage taken

* Aegis: Survives a fatal hit once per battle.

* Increase the team’s attack

* Reduce incoming damage

Buffs can be removed by Dispel or Purify skills. Dispel skills come in single-target or AoE varieties. Purify skills are so powerful and useful that they’re not that common. Here are some examples of such skills.

There are buffs that can’t be removed by dispels. Such buffs are usually applied by special skills, exclusive talents, stage buffs (such as meeting the requirements for Apex Challenge floors), or the enemy buffs in Curio Hunts V and above. For these battles, you’ll have to break through enemy buffs through your own debuffs or damaging effects to mitigate their buffs.

Debuffs

These are effects that don’t directly damage your characters but will affect them negatively in many ways. Here are some examples:

* Preventing your unit from taking action

* Decreased amount of healing received

* Decreased amount of damage dealt

* Increased amount of damage received

Debuffs like this can be removed by Expel or Purify skills. Heal skills alone won’t be able to remove them. Here are some examples of such skills:

Damaging Effects

These are effects that cause damage to your characters during their turn by a set amount, bypassing their defense rating. Damaging Effects won’t kill your characters. Instead, 1 HP will be left if the damaging effect’s damage exceeds the character’s current HP. Here are some examples:

* (Bleed) Deals damage to the inflicted character at the start of the round.

* (Recoil) Deals damage to the inflicted character after using skills.

Damaging effects can be removed by Heal or Purify skills. Expel skills won’t be able to remove these statuses. Here are some examples of such skills: