Astria Ascending guide: Focus Points and enemy weaknesses

Astria Ascending‘s core gameplay mechanics rely heavily on knowing the weaknesses of your foes. Guess right and you can earn more Focus Points to bolster your attacks. Guess wrong and you’ll get penalized. Here’s our Astria Ascending guide to help you gain more Focus Points and learn about enemy weaknesses.

Note: For more information, check out our Astria Ascending guides and features hub.

Astria Ascending guide: Using Focus points and knowing enemy weaknesses

The first thing you’ll want to remember when playing Astria Ascending is that there are nine kinds of resistances (i.e., fire, ice, water, lightning, earth, air, wind, light, dark, and physical). A vast majority of enemies that you face, including most bosses, will be weak to at least one type of damage that you can deal. However, this means that they can also resist, nullify, or absorb other types of damage.

As for Focus points, simply take a look at the upper-right corner of your screen to see a diamond-shaped symbol with several pips. This represents how many Focus Points you’ve acquired. You’ll always have a single point at the start of each battle. As the fight progresses, you can gain or lose points:

• +2 Focus Points for each enemy you hit with its weakness.
• -1 Focus Point for each enemy that resists an element.
• -2 Focus Points if the attack is nullified.
• -3 Focus Points if the attack is absorbed.

Checking out elemental weaknesses and resistances

Because battles often have multiple enemies, and each enemy has its own weaknesses/resistances, it can be a little risky if you cast a multi-target spell. Some foes might be weak against it, but the rest could resist, nullify, or absorb it.

Another thing you can do if you want to learn about enemy weaknesses in Astria Ascending is cast the Scan ability (Ulan – Captain). Additionally, you can open the menu and look at the Journal. If you check each monster, you’ll see its stats and defenses. Lastly, to make things significantly easier, you can look at the Battle Settings screen. If you enable Weakness Indicator Display, this ensures that you see how a type of damage will fare against a mob.

What are those Focus points for?

Focus Points are primarily used to boost the damage of your abilities and spells. You can increase or decrease how many will be used before casting by pressing the shoulder buttons. It’s possible to gain a maximum of +200% damage, enough to annihilate most hostiles. This is actually ideal for characters like Dagmar, Eko, or Kaydin.

Focus Points are also used by Astrae Summons. The summon will be able to use more abilities before it despawns from the field.

Astria Ascending is available via Steam. For more information, check out our guides and features hub.