Elemental Damage

Learn how to exploit enemy elemental weaknesses and defend against elemental attacks in Bravely Default. Boost your damage and survivability!

Alright, let's talk about elemental damage in Bravely Default. It's a pretty core mechanic, so understanding it will seriously up your game. There are seven elements in total: Fire, Water, Lightning, Wind, Earth, Light, and Dark. You can use these elements yourself through magic spells or by equipping elemental weapons, and guess what? Enemies use them too!

The coolest part is that enemies often have specific elemental weaknesses. If you hit them with an attack of their weak element, you'll deal a whopping 1.5 times more damage! That's huge for taking down tough foes faster. To find out what an enemy is weak against, your best bet is to use the Freelancer's Examine ability. Keep in mind, though, some enemies might be totally immune to certain elements, or even worse, they might absorb them and heal themselves when you hit them with that element. If you're fighting a Fire-based enemy, for instance, don't expect your Fire spells to do much.

Now, on the flip side, your characters don't have any inherent elemental weaknesses, which is a nice bit of good news. However, enemies *will* use elemental attacks against you. The good news here is that you can totally boost your resistances to these elements. This means you'll take less damage, making those elemental-heavy enemies much more manageable.

You can increase your elemental resistances in a few ways:

• Equip gear that offers elemental resistance.
• Use specific job abilities. For example, the Spiritmaster job has tons of abilities to make elements harmless.
• As a Salve-Maker, you can craft special compounds to negate elemental damage for a few turns. Check out the Compounding chapter for the exact recipes!

Here's a quick rundown of how you can protect yourself: