Gear Optimization

For more general information about gear and how to obtain it, see Gear. For general guidance on how to select gear for your unit, see below.

What Stats Does the Unit Need?
When selecting gear for a unit, the first thing you need to identify is what stats are valuable to that unit. Certain stats are generally useful to most units, such as HP and AGI. Others vary depending on the unit. The first step in determining what stats a unit values is to look at the unit skills on Alchemist Code Database and identify what stats are used in the ability formulas, and what type of attacks a unit has.

Ability Formula Stats
For example, you can look at the job+ details for the job "The Light Leading the World" for Zain. You can see that the formula for his basic attack is 0.9 * (PATK + MATK), which means that he uses an equal mix of PATK and MATK to calculate the damage for the ability. So he will benefit from both PATK and MATK on gear.

You can also check the individual abilities in his job and you will find that they all use the same formula as his basic attack. Some units use different formulas for certain attacks (for example Neun or Rebecca), but most units will use the same formula for all skills.

Crit
Crit related stats are generally only useful to units who have a lot of attacks that crit. Basic attacks can crit, but other attacks will only crit if the ability specifically mentions the ability to crit. You should check the skills on a unit to determine if they are likely to benefit from crit. If so, the CRIT base stat can be valuable to them, and they can also benefit from Crit Rate (which the CRIT stat gets converted to) and Critical Damage Rate (which increases the amount of bonus damage that critical attacks do).

Damage Modifiers
The icons also indicate that the ability is a slash attack, so he would benefit from any slash damage modifiers. Some units have different attack types (such as Martial Master) but all of Zain's abilities are slash. Note that the MATK Power modifier is better understood as Magic ATK Power, a modifier for magic type attacks.

He is also a light element unit, so he would also benefit from any light damage modifiers.

Some of his abilities also use specific elements. For example, Divine Saber and Ultimate Nova use light element, so those abilities would also benefit from strong vs dark. A strong vs element ability only gives the damage bonus against a unit of that element using an attack of the element that is strong against it (light is strong vs dark).

Other Stats
Some other stats you may want to consider on gear:

Auto Heal
Auto heal is useful to most units, although there are a few who have abilities which benefit from staying low on health (such as Diviner) which might prefer not to have auto heal on gear. There are only a few auto heal gear that all units can use, such as Moon Star Armor (which you can get 3 of for free), but there are a few gear that are limited to specific units that also provide auto heal. The units that benefit most from auto heal are usually ones with fairly high agility so that the heal will happen more often. Auto heal gear is also more valuable on longer stages where you don't have a source of healing.

Jewel Modifiers
The value of these varies a lot based on what type and duration of content you are doing and how good the unit's base jewel income is. On shorter stages, initial jewels can be particularly valuable for units that do not start at 100% jewels, or for cases where you need to open with a big ability right away. Max jewels can be of more value to units that start at full jewels (they will not benefit from initial jewels), especially for longer stages. Note that since they are 2 separate stats, you can actually stack them to gain more total jewels on units who don't already start at full jewels.

Jewels obtained can be of value for units that have weak jewel gain and do a lot of basic attacks.

Jewel auto charge is rare on gear, and can be extremely valuable to most units who have a gear available that provides it.

Resists
There are a variety of resist related stats that can be useful depending on circumstances, but are usually not a high priority for general content. You should look at the contents of the stage you are doing to determine which resistances may be of value.

Defense
Generally defensive stats such as PDEF and MDEF are not a priority on most units because the damage reduction they provide does not scale well. However there are a few units who have abilities that scale with PDEF such as Chloe, and on those units the stat may be worth considering. Evasion can be useful in some cases, but primarily on units that already have a lot of base evasion, as a small amount likely won't save you.

Status
Some gear provides status effect bonuses, such as Poison or Charm. These effects add the specified % chance to apply those effects to all attacks on the unit. Generally these are not high value stats as the chance is usually fairly low and most difficult content enemies have resists to most status effects, but there are situations where they can be useful.

Strong vs Type (Tokkou)
In addition to the strong vs element stats, there are also some gear with strong vs other types of enemies. Strong vs human for example would give bonus damage when attacking enemies which have a tag of human. This type of damage modifier is useful situationally depending on content.

What Content Are You Doing?
Although for most content you may wear the same gear on your units, for difficult content it is generally best to optimize gear to the stage. You should look at the quest in Alchemist Code Database to see what sort of enemies you may be dealing with, what their resists might be, and what they might be most vulnerable to. For example, using strong vs machine gear can be of value if the enemy has a machine tag. Strong vs element gear will only be effective if the enemies match that element.

Stacking Gear
When filling your gear slots, keep in mind that any specific stat on gear will not stack with that same stat. If you have 2 gear with the same stat, the higher number will be used. So you will want to configure each gear slot to cover stats not well covered already by the other gear you are wearing. In most cases you will want a gear with offensive stats, one with HP, and one that provides an additional valuable bonus such as AGI, initial jewels or damage modifiers (assuming you have unlocked all 3 gear slots). For support oriented units, gear which provides max jewels or other special useful abilities (such as Saint's Meteor) may make sense to use in place of an offensive stat.

Gear with Special Abilities
In some cases gear will provide particularly valuable special abilities to units. If you have a gear with a weapon ability (such as Dark Blade Grausam for Zahar) or passive buff (such as Dazzling Baubles for Sieba) designed for the unit, it may be worth prioritizing that gear for the unit.

Some gear with more general purpose special abilities to keep in mind:


 * Saint's Meteor - provides an activated ability with a cross shaped rate heal and max HP buff that any unit can use
 * Wonder Chronos - provides an activated ability which casts quicken on self and ally unit, which quite a few jobs can use
 * Legion-God Necklace - provides a passive ability which provides slash/strike resist for 3 turns after appearing on map that any unit can use
 * Wadatsumi Brush - provides a passive ability which provides missile/magic resist for 3 turns after appearing on map that any unit can use

For More Information

 * TAC Gear Recommendations (GoogleDoc)
 * Mechanics - includes information about what stats do, and an example of how damage is calculated