In Monark, you will recruit seven units over the course of the game that aren’t your human companions. Instead, what you are told are “Legion,” generic soldiers of the Otherworld created by Monarks themselves. They’re called Fiends, and there’s one for each of the seven deadly sins.

The order in which you get these Fiends depends on your Ego levels. When it’s time to get a Fiend, the game will check the highest Ego for which you don’t already have a Fiend and then present you with one. Today, we’re looking at the spear-wielding Fiend of Pride and how it works in combat.

How To Use Pride

Monark Pride Fiend Combat Guide

When you first get Pride, it’s easy to think that it’s a bulky offensive fighter. Fighting enemy Pride Legion is a frustrating task with their tendency to heal themselves, after all. And while you can use Pride as a frontline fighter, they’re best used in a slightly different role.

Thanks to their skill kit, they make for a great paladin-type character. Sure, they can make a dent in enemies with powerful physical attacks, but they work best when you take advantage of their healing Authorities and even their status ailments.

Pride has few physical attacks, but those it does have are incredibly useful throughout the game. Full-Force Slash is likely to be one of their most-used skills.
Healing is Pride’s main strength. From the start, they have Healing Factor, and they can learn the higher-level supportive Authorities far earlier than Nozomi, the other main healer of the game, would be able to.
As far as statuses go, Pride uses Poison and Sleep. Sleep, in particular, is great as sleeping units take automatic critical hits when woken up by an attack. Pride can even learn Follow-up Poison which gives their assist attacks a chance of inflicting Poison.
Pride also has good buffing moves, but they’re risky to use since they’ll inflict themselves with Sleep when used. It’s best to use them only when you have an ally on standby to heal the status effect.

Monark seems to love frontline healers, as Pride’s best placement in battle is similar to Nozomi’s. With high HP and decent DEF, Pride is very good at taking hits, and with their self-healing capabilities, they make for a great tank. This is especially true for the game’s Acts where Nozomi is unavailable.

The problem with Pride is that they also have a very high ATK stat, so it’s very tempting just to use them as a physical bruiser. While this isn’t exactly a bad idea, trying your best to use their supportive capabilities is likely the best recipe for success, especially when fighting the more difficult fights of the game.

Notable Skills And Authorities

Monark Pride Fiend Combat Guide

Pride has precisely three Skills to use, and they all have their time and place.

Full-Force Slash is Pride’s bread and butter. It’s a simple, 170 percent potency attack when fully upgraded and has a decent range thanks to the long spear Pride wields. This will likely be your most-used attack, thanks to being the only one Pride has access to that triggers any assist attacks. To make matters even better, it’s a very cheap move in terms of HP cost.
Cleave and Whirlwind Slice are Pride’s AoE skills. Cleave is the basic attack and attacks the area in front of Pride, while Whirlwind Slice is circular. Since Cleave is a low potency move, it’s useful for wasting an enemy’s Transfer Damage status without too much risk.

When it comes to Authorities, it makes sense to look at the main feature of Pride’s kit: healing moves and support skills.

Healing Factor is Pride’s main tool for restoring HP until they get the upgraded version in Healing Factor+. Even then, Healing Factor has a much higher potency than the + version, so you’ll want to keep that in mind when you have an ally with seriously low health. Healing Factor+ is best to top off a group of injured units, but be wary of the high MAD cost.
Regeneration is a useful Authority to have when facing lots of enemies. It’ll add a passive healing effect to the target, boosting their HP a bit whenever they take an action. This is best used on units that will be the target of multiple deferrals since they’ll take more moves and heal more HP.
Once you unlock it, Regeneration+ will almost totally replace the vanilla version of the Authority. Applying the buff to multiple units for not that much extra MAD is a huge advantage.
Revival Agents are decently expensive in Monark, costing 2,000 Spirit a pop. Pride’s Revive is, therefore, an amazing skill to have despite how costly it is in terms of MAD. When upgraded, it’s even better thanks to the large amount of HP it’ll bring allies back with and solidifies Pride as an S-tier Fiend.
Rejuvenate and Total Restoration will remove stat debuffs and most status ailments, respectively. Still, they’re less useful overall thanks to the abundance of healing items you should be able to buy without much effort.
Banish Madness is a great get. It’s expensive and rather weak in comparison to Mental Stabilizers, but it’s very useful to have for emergencies.

Pride also has an affinity with two pretty good status ailments of their own.

Toxicology and Sleep Induction are both moves that inflict status ailments, but they don’t do any damage. This makes them pale compared to their bigger brothers on the skill tree. They also have Toxicology+ and Sleep Induction+, AoE versions with lower accuracy.
Poison Injection and Sleep Induction (yes, both Authorities have the same name for some reason) are powerful physical moves that have a chance of leaving the target with a status. This makes them infinitely better, with Sleep Induction being the winner, thanks to how useful Sleep is. The only times you would want to use Full-Force Slash over these Authorities is when you need to save Pride’s MAD gauge for healing purposes, and this will be more often than you’d think.

The final category of Authority moves that Pride has access to can be called “stat buffs with Sleep attached.”

There are three ADE Authorities that Pride can learn – they will raise a few of an ally’s stats before knocking Pride out – asleep, not dead. These are potent skills, but using them means you either have to spend another unit’s turn waking Pride up with an item or leaving Pride defenseless.
- Physical Booster increases ATK, DEF, and most notably, MOV.
- Cognitive Booster increases PSY and AGI.
- Universal Booster increases all stats but does cost a ton of MAD.

Physical Booster increases ATK, DEF, and most notably, MOV.
Cognitive Booster increases PSY and AGI.
Universal Booster increases all stats but does cost a ton of MAD.

Where To Spend Your Spirit

Thanks to how open Pride’s skill tree is, it’s best to have some forethought on where you want to spend your Spirit. Here’s one path you could take to ensure you get the best skills as early as possible.

Your first port of call should be Full-Force Slash. This is a workhorse skill that you won’t regret grabbing.
From here, you don’t need to spend too much to reach the physical attack version of Sleep Induction. It’s a brilliant physical option.
Your next targets will be Healing Factor+ and Revive, so make your way towards those Authorities, picking up the prerequisites as you go.
Now might be a good time to grab Whirlwind Slice and Follow-up Poison to get a bit more diversity in your attack options.
Regeneration+ should be your final goal, and from then on, it’s all leveling up and grabbing anything you missed.

There are some skills you should consider leaving until much later in Pride’s repertoire.

Banish Madness+ is potentially useful but has such a large MAD cost itself that it’s worth putting off. You’ll have better ways to manage MAD gauges when this skill is viable to learn.
Quell the Madness is an odd skill that lowers the enemy’s MAD gauge. Why you’d want to do that is anyone’s guess.
Sleep Induction+ is a trap – it has such a low success rate that it’s never worth using over the normal Sleep Induction attack.
Optimize Treatment is nice to pick up, but upgrading it is unnecessary.
Inhibit Immunity looks good, but it’s more effective to use status moves twice than to try and set up one big one.

Link Source : https://www.thegamer.com/monark-pride-fiend-combat-guide/

Archives

Categories