Disgaea: Hour of Darkness Specific Guide: Pupil benefits v1.02 Copyright 2004 Alejandro Moreno Wednesday, July 21, 2004 Content ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Why this guide? What is master/pupil? Details about pupil benefit, formulae Formulae conclusions & examples "Character Chaining" tactics Guide version info Copyrights & contact info ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Why this guide? Well, many people say: why bothering about those damn master/pupil relationships? the increase for being a master is near useless. Even some of those hardcore players say the gains are useless!! Well, maybe they're not a great adition, but performing a full character chain strategy cost you ZERO extra work while playing the game. I didn´t see any guide that tell how does this weird relationship works, besides de magic learning matter. I am sure many people want to know all the details of this issue, and some of them (me, for example) want to optimize EVERY aspect of character leveling. In my opinion, this little guide is a great adition to Disgaea knowledge. At least it's original :) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- What is master/pupil? Tech explanation: When adressing the dark assembly with a character (1), and you create a new character (2), automatically character 1 becomes a master and character 2 becomes a pupil. A master can have as many pupils as you wish, but a pupil can only have one master. Beware of these two tricky names. Pupils don't acquire any benefit at all, but masters do. We can get three kind of rewards in our characters for being masters: 1. Pupils and masters have higher chances to perform team attacks. To try a team attack, use the attack option with the enemy and the pupil/master and optionally other characters in adyacent pannels to the one is making the action. 2. When a master and a pupil are on adyacent panels, the master get access to all the magic the pupil has previously learned. All these abilities are at level 0 if the master doesn't have them. When this spells reach level 1, that ability becomes permanent for the master. 3. Anytime any character levels up, grows by a percentage of his base stats. If this character is a pupil, his master may also receive a much smaller percentage of pupil's base stats. This gain is what I will refer to as "pupil benefit". ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Details about pupil benefit, formulae This may seem more complicated than you would think. First of all, lets say, upon leveling, a character gain a 45%/ 50% of his current base stats with the exception of HP that's four times this increase before level 200: 180%/ 200% (i'll asume you know what's a base stat). All characters have some kind of hidden stat counter for each stat (HP, SP, ATK ...) This counter allocate the effective value that could increase his master's matching stat (if he has any master). We will call this STATc1 Upon creating/ transmigrating a character, this counter resets to the 10% of the matching base stat. When leveling up, this counter increases barely a 4.5%/ 5% of the base stat for each level obtained. This happens even with HP, but that growth at a faster rate, with it's own rules. Now let's talk about the master. All characters also have ANOTHER hidden stat counter, but this one will be used to calculate that character's final stat value. This counter has an initial value of 0, and is reset to 0 when transmigrating. We will call this one STATc2. When any of that character's pupil gain a level, the game will check that pupil's STATc1 (the previous counter) with the master's STATc2, and the new value for master's STATc2 will be the higher of those values. Finally, the value shown anytime on our screens will be always the stat plus his matching STATc2. Pretty complicated, uh? A much, much simpler definition of this process is: "Each stat is the sum of his initial value and the 10% of the higher value of that stat on all his pupils". But this can't be applied to HP. Here's a set of formulae: Variable definitions: STATx = HP,SP,ATK,DEF,INT,RED,SPD or HIT BSTATx = STATx's base stat. STATxc1 = one STATx's counter STATxc2 = another STATx's counter FSTATx = final STATx value 1.-Upon creation (for each stat)- STATx = BSTATx *(90%/ 100%) STATxc1 = BSTATx *(9%/ 10%) STATxc2 = 0 2.-Upon leveling up (for each level gained/ each stat)- STATx = STATx + BSTATx *(45%/ 50%) STATxc1 = STATxc1 + BSTATx *(4.5%/ 5%) STATxc2 = STATxc2 (no change) 3.-Pupil leveling up (for each stat/ after leveling up)- If Master STATxc2 => Pupil STATxc1 Then Master STATxc2 = Master STATxc2 (no change) If Master STATxc2 < Pupil STATxc1 Then Master STATxc2 = Pupil STATxc1 4.-Always- FSTATx = STATx + STATxc2 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Furmulae conclusions & examples - When a master transmigrates, he loses the pupil benefit. - When you transmigrate a master, you only have to level one time a pupil to recover that pupil benefit. - When you transmigrate a pupil, you DON'T lose the previous pupil benefit, even if the newly transmigrate pupil levels up. For example: Master ATK = 1000 Pupil_1 ATK = 1500 Final Master ATK = 1150 -then- Master ATK = 1000 Transmigr Pupil_1 ATK = 60 Final Master ATK = 1150 - Having more that one pupil will not have cumulative effects but may result in a slightly better effect on the master. For example: Master ATK = 1000 Pupil_1 ATK = 1500 Pupil_2 ATK = 500 Master DEF = 1000 Pupil_1 DEF = 500 Pupil_2 DEF = 1000 Final Master ATK = 1150 (thanks to pupil 1) Final Master DEF = 1100 (thanks to pupil 2) - When you transmigrate a master, you only have to level the pupil one to recover the stat's boost. - The pupil benefit is totally independent on the master stat. For example: Master ATK = 1000 Pupil_1 ATK = 2000 Final Master ATK = 1200 -then- Master ATK = 4000 Pupil_1 ATK = 2000 Final Master ATK = 4200 - When you have three chained characters, and the last pupil levels, the first master is not affected. Reference (as a must): Character 1 <--> Character 2 <--> Character 3 -Then- Character 1 = Character 2's Master Character 2 = Character 3's Master Character 3 doesn't affect Character 1 - There's no difference between unique characters, humanoid characters and monster characters in terms of pupil benefit - I THINK (not proved) stat theft may affect pupil benefit, but I must verify ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Character Chaining" tactics What's character chaining? Very simple. Take characters with no pupils and create a new character from him. There are some basic strategies in terms of character chaining. 1. "I want as much attack power as posible" Then chain all the ATK-users alltogether (axes,swords,fist,spears,monsters) do the same with HIT-USERS (bows,guns) and INT-users (staff,seldom monsters) 2. "I want to balance stats as much as posible" Try to always have weaker characters as masters of the stronger chararacters. Also there's are some "combo chainings" that can help a lot in these regards. you can support such a unit's deficiencies with a bigger boost. Here are some notorious examples between humanoids at the game start. Thieves, Brawlers <-> Clerics, Mages/Skulls (SP,RES) Thieves, Mages/Skulls <--> Warrior (HP,DEF) The ultimate combo ^_^: Thieves <--> Cyclops (HP,DEF,RES). Example: Space pirate level 200 Argus level 200 (pupil) HP: 5200 DEF: 650 RES: 650 HP: 12000 DEF: 3000 RES: 3000 Space pirate level 200 with pupil benefit HP: 5500 DEF: 950 RES: 950 Here's a boost near a 50% in DEF/RES :) 3. "I want all kind of stat boosts but i don't want to think more than one second about this" If this is your case, then only concern yourself with chaining one character after another (those you will use, of course). If all your characters are chained one after another, then you will only have one character without pupil benefit. 4. "I use unique characters, but they are behind in stats" Why unique characters? two main reasons, special abilities (gordon blitz outpowers anything) or laharl/etna with high leveled techniques (it's a real pain to get a lvl 16 nightsever down from scratch) Thats totally true, far behind in stats (don't even look at those space pirates) near all ultimate forms of each class overcome in stat terms to laharl, etna, flonne, gordon, etc. Exceptions are, of course, Priere and Maryoly. To help building this characters I encourage to use two complementary characters as pupils of the same unique character, i would chain a brawler/ fighter and a mage/cleric. Another good idea late in the game is to chain a very powerful character (majin,cyclops,great wyrm comes into mind) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Guide version info v1.00 - Basic guide, 100% complete, no aditions planned. v1.01 - Corrected a few grammatical errors, corrected an example wrong allocated, added this section, updated guide version & guide date. v1.02 - Corrected LOTS of grammatical errors, sincerely thanks to Ragnarok500 that has taken the time to fully review the entire guide (I owe you one :)). Update guide version and date. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright & contact info Just to remember this guide is of my personal intellectual propriety. Yes, it's free, it is located on a public site but thanks to modern laws i automatically acquire all rights on the content of this document. If you would like to use this guide in a non-personal way, please contact me at ninakoru@hotmail.com I just wan't to have a control of where it will be published, with few small conditions on the content.