Ace - Finisher Support Build by Kataikou

Introduction
So you just pulled an Ace and spent the entire evening wondering which Eldrich Demigod you angered to deserve this. For months, Ace has been panned as a very mediocre Magic Damage unit, and even after his enhancements Ace has been mostly benched as a good-but-not-great support. However, many people have been discovering Ace's true potential as both a very competent source of damage and sustain as both a support unit and a chain finisher, finding a very solid place on their teams.

Ace's primary issues involve the obscure mechanics behind the nature of his skills. His true potential becomes much clearer once you understand how his abilities interact with abilities like Dual Wield and Killer passives. With this build, you should be able to do the following:


 * Recovery MP for the entire party (Average 65mp/turn, minimum 45mp)
 * Increase your entire party's Light/Lightning/Fire damage with a 75% element resist debuff
 * Chain Finisher with a typical 14.35x Magic Attack after his own modifiers (higher with Killer passives).

Spirit Hand
Ace's bread and butter as a support unit, Spirit Hand is often placed as the team's primary source of MP recovery. When fully enhanced, Spirit Hand will recover a solid 45mp a turn for your entire party, with a small chance of recovering 100mp (20% chance) or 140mp (10% chance) on occasion.

For most teams, this is the primary reason to have an Ace in your party, as you will most likely never have to worry about MP ever again. The downside is that Ace must recast Spirit Hand every turn to get it's benefits. In some cases, Ace may spend the entire battle doing nothing but recovering MP.

Tri-beam Laser
Tri-beam Laser is one of Ace's many damage abilities, though it's primary use is its 75% Elemental Resist debuff to Lightning, Light, and Fire. This is a simple 75% increase to your party's damage as long as they use one of those three elements. The debuff will override weaker debuffs, so your party will have improved damage even if they are already applying element resist debuffs. Debuffs above 50% are very rare, others being Mercedes's Sea King's Chop+2 (75% Water), Tidus's Blitz Ace (100% Water), and Fohlen's Speedster (75% Wind).

Applying Tri-beam Laser's debuff opens up a lot more options for your party. With the debuff alone, you can:
 * Increase damage for units who do not have elemental debuffs at all (e.g. Emperor, Vargas) or simply have weaker debuffs.
 * Eliminate the need for a setup turn for many damage dealers who do not have a debuff on their primary damage ability (e.g. Olive, Reberta)
 * Allow non-element locked damage units to use other elements without giving up damage (e.g. Orlandu, Aileen with Fire Element)
 * Allow the first attack in a chain to take advantage of the elemental debuff. The damage of an ability is typically calculated BEFORE the debuff is applied, so it will do significantly less damage than the attacks that come after.

As a bonus, Tri-beam laser also does a non-trivial amount of damage. However, the damage comes with a catch. When you cast Tri-beam Laser, you get one of 4 effects:

A 30x multiplier is insane, but also very unlikely. In practice, this comes out to an average of an 8.0x attack, with most cases being lower than average. Tri-beam Laser is also a Magic Type attack, so it will NOT interact with Dual Wield, your Weapon's element, or non-magical killer passives. This means it can't even make use of its own 75% elemental resist debuff.

In most cases, you will be using Tri-beam Laser to apply the element resist debuff to boost your party's overall damage. Your other skills will be better for damage (literally) 90% of the time.

Wild Card
Wild Card is a Global Exclusive ability that has a very bizarre set of mechanics. The ability does Magic Damage, and scales off of Ace's MAG stat. However, it is also considered a Physical Type ability, which means it will benefit from the effects of Dual Wield, passive killers, and your weapon's element. However, it will NOT interact with Magic Killers such as Dracoslayer.

All of this increases Wild Card's damage potential significantly. Dual Wield doubles his damage from a 2.5x to a 5.0x multiplier. Taking advantage of Tri-beam Laser's elemental resist debuff with an elemental rod increases that damage to an 8.75x multiplier. A single +50% killer effect on top of that to a 13.1x multiplier.

As another caveat for being a mixed type ability, the damage will be calculated using your whole MAG stat, rather than having a per-hand deduction like normal physical abilities. For example, an Orlandu with 900 ATK with two 100 ATK weapons will use 800 ATK with the first attack and 800 ATK with the second attack, while an Ace with 900 MAG will use 900 MAG for both attacks.

Dual Wield will also stack Wild Card's secondary effect: Negate 2 physical attacks for 2 turns to caster. This means Ace can dodge 4 physical attacks every turn when using Wild Card (sometimes more as the dodge stacks carry over for an additional turn). This gives Ace a rather significant boost in survivability as he can simply ignore physical or hybrid type attacks.

Jackpot Shot
Jackpot Shot is Ace's limit burst and shares a lot of similarities to Wild Card. Again, the ability does Magic Damage, but has Physical Properties. This means it will take advantage of your weapon's element and your passive physical killer effects. HOWEVER, it will NOT take advantage of Dual Wield (aside from the stat increase), as Limit Bursts cannot be doubled.

Maxed out, the Limit Burst will have an incredible 8.2x base multiplier. With an elemental rod and Tri-beam Laser's debuff, this becomes a 14.35x ability on its own. A +50% physical killer brings this up to an incredible 21.5x damage. If you plan on using Ace for damage at all, be sure to level up his Limit Burst and enhance Devotion to +2 for the passive LB gain and the +40% MAG. With Ace's Passive, you should have Jackpot Shot ready to cast almost every turn.

Comparing Damage Skills
Ace has options, and that can be a confusing without doing some number crunching to figure out which ability is optimal. Here's a rundown of each of the abilities and their potential damage. (Remember that only Physical Killers will work for Wild Card and Jackpot Shot, and only Magical Killers will work for Tri-Beam Laser)

Tri-beam Laser can hit a nice 30x multiplier (45% if you have rare magical killers), but that only occurs 10% of the time. The average damage ends up so much lower that you're better off using Wild Card or Jackpot Shot UNLESS you are refreshing the 75% Elemental Debuff. Also, Wild Card and Jackpot Shot rely heavily on the elemental debuff to do damage, so Tri-beam laser is your go to damage if the Debuff wears off OR you can't use light/lightning/fire weapons.


 * Does the enemy have the elemental debuff?
 * NO: Use Tri-beam Laser
 * YES: Are you using a Light/Lightning/Fire Weapon (and the enemy isn't resistant)?
 * NO: Use Tri-beam Laser
 * YES: Is your Limit Burst Up?
 * NO: Use Wild Card
 * YES: Use Jackpot Shot

Of course there will be situations where you may want to use Wild Card for the extra dodges, or you might want to use Tri-beam Laser early to refresh the buff.