Full transcript of “Expedition 33 Definitive Stat Explanation and Build Guide”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.
0:01 [Music] Hey guys, Raven here. Today I wanted to take a step back from our playthrough to talk about my findings when it comes to attributes, skill synergy, fight mechanics, and a build philosophy for Expedition 33. As a friendly warning, this video will get pretty in the weeds regarding optimization, going indepth on reasons why certain stats are useful, percentages, and yes, even graphs. If you want the TLDDR of this video, here it is. Speed is the most important stat, particularly in the early game. Therefore, agility and luck being the attributes that provide this stat are going to be the most important in defining early game success. Due to
0:47 stats soft cap break points, I recommend shooting for enough vitality that you can survive a few hits from most enemies, which has soft caps at 10, 16, and 28. Either 26 or 44 agility, and 10, 26, or 35 luck, roughly in that stat priority order. There are a few niche cases where priority may alter slightly, but I'll get into that as we further discuss the stats themselves. This should provide a quick reference guide for those that are wondering what they should aim for in allocating their stats in the early game. I'll also go ahead and place timestamps in the video so you can reference specific topics or skip to the parts that are useful for you. For everyone that wants to stick around for all the nerdy glory of optimization,
1:34 let's jump into a quick overview of the stats. As a disclaimer, I've been playing the game on expedition or difficulty. While the general ideals and stat progression that I'll present will hold regardless of difficulty level, you may find that certain stats may become more or less valuable as the difficulty changes. Vitality. While in theory, vitality is useful as a stat to survive enemy attacks, the simple truth is that this game was balanced around its dodge and parry mechanics. A dodge negates damage with relatively forgiving window of invulnerability. If you are able to parry the same timing window as a perfect dodge all of an enemy's attacks, you will negate damage as well as initiate a powerful counter in
2:20 retaliation and gain an action point for each parried attack for your trouble. In either of these cases, it does not matter if you have one hit point or 10,000. If you have experience with other RPGs, you may be tempted to build and maintain a tank character to absorb punishment for your other party members. Unfortunately, apart from Myel's Agid skill, there is no way to force damage onto one character. And if you go that route, you will not properly invest into her as the fantastic ramping damage dealer she is. Additionally, as you can see here in this clip, the game seems to have a slight preference towards targeting already damaged party members rather than spreading out their attacks. Therefore, unless you intend to use your
3:06 precious attribute points toward the survivability of the whole team, thus wasting these points on any party member who is not attacked, I cannot recommend vitality as an attribute to invest in. On the expeditioner difficulty without any investment into vitality against onlevel enemies, you can generally survive one to three hits before being knocked out. This in-built grace period should be more than enough to learn enemy attack patterns, particularly if you use the larger invulnerability window of the dodge reaction to avoid damage, at least until you know your foe well enough to parry. If you are playing on expert, it may be a good idea to infest a few points right off the bat to mimic this grace period that the easier difficulties provide. As you can see in
3:51 this chart, the amount of hit points you receive for each level invested in vitality is not static. And this is a common through line with all of the attributes. As we'll see, there is a general trend towards diminishing returns for most of the derived stats, such as hit points in this game. Based on the soft caps, or levels after which the amount of HP you receive per point invested diminishes, I would recommend either 10, 16, or 28 vitality, depending on your needs for your skill level in game difficulty. if you choose to invest in vitality at all, which again I do not generally recommend. Might. Might is honestly kind of a weird stat in Expedition 33. Might increases base attack power at a fairly linear rate. As you can see on the chart
4:37 here, generally the amount you receive for each point invested is pretty consistent, and there aren't any major points of diminishing returns that leap out like in some of the other attributes. There is something funky going on with the formula, though. Rather than merely increasing your character's base attack power value, it also seems to increase your weapon's attack power value as well. Though this increase is obviously expressed as a percentage of the base weapon's damage. You can see from this clip while I have a weapon equipped with only a base damage of 32, 51 points of my increase in the weapon's damage increase it only to 40. While with this weapon with a base damage of 398, it is increased all the way to 500. Expressed as a percent, the lower base
5:23 damage weapon increases attack power at roughly 1.5% per level over the first 50 levels, while the higher damage weapon increases at a rate of 1.005% per level. I imagine that this is merely just to give a sense of progression from might scaling at all and that with higher and higher base damage weapons, this percentage will drift down to 1%. But further testing is needed in order to support this hypothesis. I did try to express the total damage as a rate of increase, including both the base attack and modified weapon damage, but that didn't provide consistent results. Therefore, using the first 50 levels as a basis and making an educated guess, you gain approximately 1.88 base attack per level invested with minimal peaks and valleys
6:08 and approximately a 1% in weapon damage per level. All of this complicated math and number crunching to say that later game weapons scale better and make this attribute more attractive, particularly once core break points are met. Agility. Here's where we come to our bread and butter. The attribute that provides the most of the most important stat in the game. Speed. Speed. I am speed. Speed determines turn order for both the characters and enemies. Going first in combat essentially means you're given an extra turn every fight as enemies health is a constant, making this a zero sum game. Cutting out one of their attacks by being able to kill one turn sooner or before they're able to act at all makes you safer by subjecting
6:55 you to fewer attacks you must dodge or parry, giving this stat a quasi survivability advantage as well as the obvious damage implications. Speed is even better than that though, as if you have enough of it, you'll be able to act multiple times before the enemy can, furthering the advantages we've already discussed. These are full extra turns, mind, with all of the AP recovery and potential for buffing, setups, and recovery that you may want to do before an enemy can get a word in edgewise. So, by now, it's fully obvious how important this stat is, right? Wrong. Because in addition to all the benefits we've already discussed, there's a lurking danger for ignoring this stat. Enemies have it too, and it scales faster for them than your perle scaling. Particularly on bosses, this
7:42 means they can take multiple turns before you can act. In theory, if you're able to dodge and parry everything, this doesn't necessarily mean extra damage coming onto you. But enemies can buff as well, giving themselves shields, damage boosts, or even taking the extra turn to debuff your party. In the end, it's a numbers game. For as much as I will advise against the obvious survivability attributes, fights in this game are essentially a timer against yourself. And when you inevitably mist time a dodge or parry and get clocked by your foes, the more we can limit that, the better. As a little cherry on top, agility also provides defense, the stat, not the attribute. It's a whole thing. I'll go into it later. Though, these increases come at a fairly anemic gain per level. I wouldn't factor these
8:29 defense gains at all when looking at break points for the reasons that we'll go discuss more when we discuss the attribute. Looking at our handydandy graph, we can see the soft caps for speed from agility are at 10, 26, and 44. I would recommend beling to 44 agility on all party members as a general rule, but there are some niche considerations that I'll discuss in the general build guide section a little later. Defense. Okay, I'm going to start this section with a small gripe at how inconvenient it is that the developers decided to have an attribute and a derived stat of the same name. I'll do my best to delineate between them, but if this section is a little hard to navigate still, you have my sincere apology. Defense, the attribute, provides both defense, the stat, and
9:17 critical rate. If you watch the section on vitality, you'll know how I feel about investing in survivability in this game. But as a brief recap, enemies do too much damage, and there are too few skills to direct damage to make trying to tank attacks a viable strategy. Defense, the stat, is even worse in this regard than hit points. Since, as near as I can tell, defense, the stat, provides a percentage decrease in damage taken. This sounds great in theory since with big enemy damage numbers, you'll reduce more of it as a percentage than having more HP will, but the percent decrease per point invested starts too small to be of much use. You would want it in large quantities where you'll need to stack it to the exclusion of other attributes. Additionally, with the presence of mechanics like defenseless and mark, which provide percentage
10:03 decrease in defense, the stat, and massively increase damage for the enemy's next hit, respectively, it's hard to justify investing into defense, the attribute, for defense, the stat scaling at all. Your characters will have defense anyway if you follow my suggestion of leveling agility, and several strong slotted pictos will also provide passive defense, the stat. The other thing that defense the attribute provides is critical rate. That is a good stat, particularly with certain builds and skills. But unfortunately, the gains per level invested in defense the attribute are too low to justify investing in this over our last attribute. Which brings us to luck. The primary purpose of this attribute is to provide critical hit rate, which it does at a much faster
10:50 tempo and a higher overall ceiling than defense. The attribute does. All right, I'm done. And I swear critical hits are great in this game, offering a 50% damage increase over your base damage. Additionally, several skills such as Gustav's Lumiere Assault, Lun's lightning skills, and a few of CL's Foretell spenders all have additional effects when dealing a critical hit. Critical rate is both additive in that if you have 20% crit rate already and acquire 9% more say from this pictose you will have 29%. And it is also multiplicative as the value of critical hits increases with your damage. This effectively means that it is a scaler of any damage increase might weapon upgrades natural
11:37 base attack increases mark synergies etc. quite a useful and powerful stat, second only to speed, which luck also provides, albeit at a rate less than half of what you receive from agility. All in all, this makes luck a very attractive attribute to raise, particularly once you've hit a break point in your agility leveling. Speed, however, is good enough that receiving double the rate is worth trading the near useless defense stat gain from agility over the much more useful critical rate from luck. So, it is still a second priority. As we can see on the graph here, with both stats provided being useful, break points to consider are at 10, 26, and 35. If you're really focused into criticals, the attribute only really drops off at level 64,
12:24 leaving you with a very respectable 28% crit rate. The speed and crit rate gains after this point become slow, and investing elsewhere is probably more beneficial. Also, as a general note, you get no benefit from going over a 100% critical rate, and several potent pictos provide critical rate. I haven't gotten anywhere close in my testing, but as a precaution, adjust the numbers as is useful for you, favoring a lower soft cap for best efficiency. All right, now on to the general build guide. Unlike other RPGs of the genre, as a general rule, all party members benefit equally from stats. Action points are a general resource that are gained back automatically via normal actions. So there is no mana to worry about for your casters, for example. And speed to buff
13:10 allies is just as useful as speed to deal damage, perhaps even more so. The only role you could justify having less speed in is a healer to react to damage coming in. But your best healer is Lun, who is also one of your best damage dealers for hitting multiple targets. Also, with the plentiful healing through items, particularly useful between combats, your character should be in tip-top shape the majority of the time. This being the case, I will present two builds here. A general build that will work for every party member and a critical focus build for characters you are building around skills with improvements for critical hit. For the general build, I would recommend investing all points into agility until you have at least 26, but preferably 44
13:57 points invested. From here, investing at least 10 points into luck will continue scaling your speed as well as getting you a 6% critical rate. I'd probably grab 26 points here to grab get up to 14% crit. From there though, your options really open up. Though, I'd still advise against vitality or defense investment. You begin leveling might for consistent if somewhat low damage. Take luck up to the soft caps of 35 or even 64 or continue leveling agility to the soft caps of 55 or 73. Weapon considerations from the weapons that you've collected are a factor here. For a more critical focused approach for characters built around skills that gain extra benefits from critical hits, I'd still recommend investing your first 26 points into
14:43 agility for that sweet speed scaling. Though, you may be able to get away with only investing the first to the sock cap of 10. Then I would invest 35 points into luck and take agility the rest of the way to to 44. After that, you can continue leveling luck or might to a point that feels good to you. Keep in mind that pictos have stat buffs in addition to their passive effects where Lumina don't. While typically you equip the most expensive Pictose to free up Lumina reserves, it may be worth slotting a less expensive Pictose for a big critical rate or speed bump on a Pictose, particularly if you have the color of Luminina to increase your Luminina reserves on the character you're building into to get the best of both worlds. I hope you've enjoyed this deep dive
15:29 into the stats and mechanics of Expedition 33. If you'd like to see more videos like this in the future or have any questions about stats, builds, or the game in general, drop a comment and I'd be happy to reply. Have a great day and stay safe everyone for those that come after.
