Experimenting with Bond Level Gain per actions in battle.

[DefyingFates]

I was curious how Bond EXP worked so I've been experimenting in my last few battles. Hopefully this is new information, unlike my take on Supports a while back. I couldn't find anything online or in SF's wiki, for what that's worth.

Anyway, Bond Levels are only gained from actions in the Player Phase, so any Enemy Phase strategies like tanking or vantage-wrath sweeping won't do anything. Everything other than using items grants Bond EXP, but the amount varies based on actions and here's how the EXP gained breaks down (check the attached images for examples). For this example I used Alear equipped with Sigurd, performed an action to see how much EXP was granted, then rewound and did another. In order of effectiveness, here's how much EXP each action granted. Unfortunately I don't have any raw numbers.

1. Using an Engage attack (e.g. Override): fills 40~50% of the bar from Lv 18 to 19.
2. A regular attack while Engaged (I assume this is what Celica's Echo counts as, but don't hold me to that).
3. A regular attack while NOT Engaged.
4. Some sort of assist action (I used Reposition here, but this would likely include Assign Decoy and Dragon Veins).

While the amount of EXP granted only goes down a small amount between the first three, there's a larger gap between #3 and #4, though I probably should have tried using Reposition while Engaged. If anyone's tried using a staff while Engaged, I'd love to know which category that fits in on this scale too (i.e. does healing count as #4 and offensive staff use #2 or 3).

The main story teaches you to use Engages and Engage Attacks freely and I clearly forgot about that, so... if you want to build up your Bond Levels faster, spam your Engage modes and attacks!

I hope this was helpful, and I'd love to see what you come up with if anyone's inclined to do any experimentation of their own!

Edited March 4, 2023 by DefyingFates