

So, if you want a front-liner to have this skill to break concentration of casting enemies, they actually do need Intelligence to make it effective. Intelligence influences Mental damage, including the skill Skull Knocker.Keep this in mind when equipping them with weapons. So you actually do want your damage casters to beef up their Strength score. Strength helps with the damage of your non-mental damaging spells, like Warstrike.Due to the opportunity system it's ok to have specialist characters who do most of the damage and others who sit in reserve and support them. Emphasize strength over most other stats for physical damage characters, include mages.

Level 30 may be possible but I have yet to hear of anyone actually hitting it.

Think about which capstones skills you want to unlock and make sure you get the prerequisites before about level 15, so you can unlock the capstones as soon as the Review Board allows.Because you can only use four active skills at once, it makes sense to put most of your points in passive boosts, with only a few specific active abilities per character.A new character starts with three "Free" skills and three points to spend (Melody starts with those three points already spent) you can unlock the second tier at eight points spent, around level 6ish, and the third tier at 16 points spent or level 14ish. The little arcing bands on the screen tell you how many points you need to spend to unlock the next tier, which you do by going to the Review Board after spending that many points. Plot out your skill choices in advance, it will make the game a lot more manageable.If you can't get somewhere after digging around a bit, you probably don't have the tools to unlock it yet - move on to something else for a bit and you may find what you need. The game assumes you're going to do an immense amount of backtracking.Whoever you send, don't count on seeing them again. When given the choice of which party member to send off solo at the beginning, if you kept Melody as your primary, the smart strategic choice is probably to send the Green Lady away, as you get another mage character almost immediately afterwards it's a good idea to have at least one character of each archetype in the party.
