Persona 5 Tactica

• Elemental magic serves a different purpose here than it does in the mainline games. There's no concept of weakness or resistance here; rather, the elements are differentiated by the status ailments they inflict. The purpose of attack magic in this game is to a) neutralize enemy cover (Curse, Wind, Fire, Psychic, and Nuclear), b) mitigate incoming damage on the enemy turn (Forget, Elec, Ice, Bless, and Sleep), and c) hit enemies that are out of line-of-sight from your guns, more or less in that order. As such it is not as important to have diverse elemental coverage in this game as it is in the other Persona/Megaten games. Instead, focus on the actual effects you need.

• In general, strong passives are more valuable to fuse for than skills or magic. Keep an eye out for anything that improves your resource gathering (Treasure Hunter, Keen Eye), anything that increases your damage (Mighty Warrior, Trigger Happy), or anything that increases your mobility or range (Hawkeye, Auto-Sukukaja).

• Active healing (Dia, etc) isn't very useful in this game. The game favors an aggressive, proactive offense, and your characters frequently end up far away from each other, so they won't be able to heal each other even if they do end up hurt. Passive healing like Renegerate, Futaba's Moral Support, and the skill that heals your team after a Triple Threat are fine, but don't waste your time or skill points trying to keep yourself topped off with spells.

• Triple Threats are where the majority of damage in this game comes from, so train yourself to look for opportunities to use it. They will kill even the toughest basic enemies in two hits even on the hardest difficulty. The basic strategy is to use Character A to knock nearby enemies out of cover, letting B and C get One Mores to move further along in the map and expand the size of the Triple Threat, then trigger a Triple Threat that cripples the enemy strength and lets you pick off stragglers at your leisure.

• Characters' positions are not locked until they take an action that does not result in a One More. They can and should move freely until that point. It's often a good idea to move a character into an exposed position just long enough to trigger a Follow Up, set up an ideal Triple Threat area, or move out of the range of friendly fire, then have them move back into cover afterwards.

• Friendly characters can't move through each other's spaces in this game. Be careful when moving your team through narrow corridors so that they don't block each other off.

• It is often better to have your characters wait behind cover rather than take a potshot at an enemy behind cover for chip damage. The bonus effects characters can get from Charging is frequently more valuable than knocking off 25% of the health of some chump who was probably going to die in a big Triple Threat next turn anyway.

• As is usual for tactics games, the most important stat is movement. This means Yusuke is a god in this game, as he has high movement natively, the longest gun range, and can learn Auto-Masukukaja to give his teammates more move as well.

• You can freely respec your characters' skill trees at any point that you are not literally in the middle of a fight. That means there's no point in going into a fight with skill points unspent -- even if you've got your eye on a more expensive skill further down the tree, buy less-expensive skills to use in the meantime then refund them once you've got enough for the skill you actually want.

• About halfway through the game, you'll be able to create weapons by sacrificing sub-Personas. These are generally much stronger than the weapons you can buy in the shop, but also much more expensive, since they usually require buying Personas out of the Compendium. Also, all of the weapons you can make in this way have added elemental effects that trigger randomly at about a 20% chance, and some of them can screw you over if they trigger at the wrong time, such as a Psychic-elemental weapon accidentally pulling towards you an enemy you were hoping to keep at arm's length. (Also, Futaba will whine about friendly fire even when a weapon's added effect could cause it, rather than when it will cause it.) They're still generally worth it, but just be aware of this frustration factor and either be quick with the Undo button or focus only on the elements that can't potentially backfire in this way (Curse, Elec, Ice, Bless, Forget, and Sleep).

• If you bought the DLC, to use Crow and Violet in the main campaign, you have to beat both the main campaign and the DLC campaign, then start a new game plus. They'll show up once you can start picking your own teams. Yes, it's stupid, but that's the way it works. Oh, and nothing is locked behind NG+ either, it's just an opportunity to play a harder difficulty and use those characters if you want.