Training at Aethia's Ability Academy
Introduction to Abilities
Faerie Ablities are special moves which can be used to offer a higher level of attack, defence or other unique ability. When used at the right time during combat these moves can turn the tide of battle. While sometimes earning abilities may be expensive, it often is worth the hassle. The Aethia's Ability Academy is the new way of training said abilities and this guide details the changes between the old and new system, how the training system works and how to use these abilities in combat.
Differences to Old Abilities
Up till the release of the new Battledome most abilities were rather useless with only a couple of them being considered as really needed skills. The old system allowed users to open a number of bottles to learn abilities in sequence up to a final more powerful skill. Opening bottles and blessing pets in this old setup rewarded the selected pet with a new skill as long as they had reached the level required (and still had abilities left to learn in that element). Besides this, the old system allowed the use of only two or three abilities per battle with a stamina bar for their use. Users could select up to seven of these known abilities regardless of their element or level for use in combat.
With the new abilities came new changes, a re-balance of the power of each ability, and most of the old ones replaced with newly named ones. The system of sorting abilities by element is removed and opening bottles now only provides the selected pet blessings (essentially a currency used at the Ability Academy), for the training academy rather then a direct ability. Instead of being limited by a stamina bar, abilities are limited by special aspects such as Once-Per-Battle, Multi-use and most notably Once-Per-Day. Choosing abilities sees users being able to pick up to ten abilities, however only one is allowed from each power level.
Faerie Bottles
One of the harder-to-ignore changes the new Ability Academy brings is the changed role of the humble Faerie Bottle. Mixing three of the old (now known as Fading Bottled Faeries) gets you a new random Weak Bottled Faerie as the older fading ones can no longer be used to give abilities.
While the abilities themselves do not directly relate to the Elements anymore, the Faerie bottles still carry the same elements of Dark, Light, Earth, Fire, Air and Water but also have the addition of a random bottle. While there are only the Weak Bottled Faeries now, we can assume more powerful levels of faeries are around the corner to offer a higher number of blessings for use in the Academy.
The Weak Bottled faeries provide up to two points of their respective blessings with the "Unidentifiable" bottle providing random blessing points. While there are no other higher levels of faerie, it can be assumed that soon there will be to provide more blessings.
Training Abilities
After obtaining and opening a Faerie Bottle (or many) and reaching the level required you may pick out which abilities you wish to learn at the Academy. To open a bottle, select it from your inventory and choose a pet to receive the points. The first tier of abilities is free, however the higher levels of abilities cost more blessings based on the power and elements of the move. Once you have all the required blessings, click on the abilities you wish to train in and click the "Train these Abilities" button down at the bottom, and confirm this choice. You may select up to one ability in each level tier, and change between them as needed by paying half blessing cost. Ability tiers you can train in will appear white, while tiers above your power level will remain gray. Abilities you wish to train into and select will have a red box around them, yellow if on a cooldown period (more on that in a moment) and green if selected and ready for use. Abilities cannot be changed during a battle or during a cooldown period.
Using your Abilities
When you start a battle you will notice three boxes: the first two are weapons, while the third with the small magic icon is abilities. Select the ability you want to use by clicking the square which represents it. Battle as normal, the icon fading means the ability can no longer be used. You can see the cooldown by looking at the number on top of a used ability, while others will disappear for the rest of the battle after one use.
Certain abilities have unique usage methods which we will document here as discovered. For example, the Ability Drizzle has a delayed attack, so when used it will damage the next turn before going to a cooldown period. This, when used in combination with a freezing item can increase the damage of a hit dramatically as they can not defend when frozen.
In Conclusion
Obtaining these new Faerie abilities will take time and neopoints, but by doing this you can greatly increase your battling power if used correctly. Be sure to read up on what each ability does as we find out here and keep on battling.
This article was written by: SirCabbage