Your Account
    Log into your account here:
       Forgot Password

    Not registered? Sign Up for free
    Registration allows you to keep track of all your content and comments, save bookmarks, and post in all our forums.

Affinity Guide

by Kazamu

                =======================================

                     C L A S S   O F   H E R O E S
                           Affinity Guide

                             Version 1.0
                              By Kazamu

                     Last Updated on June 12, 2009

                =======================================


1. TABLE OF CONTENTS [TOC]
===============================================================================

To quickly jump to a section, perform a search (Ctrl + F in most browsers and
text editors) with the Section Code.

    Section Title                            Section Code
1.  Table of Contents                        [TOC]
2.  Version History                          [VER]
3.  Introductory Notes                       [INT]
4.  What is Affinity?                        [WAI]
5.  What is Affinity not?                    [WAN]
6.  Base Affinity -- Races                   [BAR]
7.  Base Affinity -- Character Alignment     [BAA]
8.  Modifying Affinity --  Gambits           [MAG]
9.  Modifying Stats -- Satori                [MSS]
10. Credits and Thanks                       [CRE]
11. Contact Info                             [CON]



2. VERSION HISTORY [VER]
===============================================================================

Version 1.0 (June 12, 2009)
---------------------------
- This guide was started



3. INTRODUCTORY NOTES [INT]
===============================================================================

This guide is dedicated to all Class of Heroes players. I hope that it will
enlighten players to get a better understanding of the affinity system and how
to use it to their advantage.

On another note, I remember reading a post on GameSpot about people choosing
a Drake first and basing their team around that. Personally, I chose 2 Drakes
at the start because they greatly resemble the 2 main characters in a story
I've been writing (and drawing the characters for). So, that's my reason.



4. WHAT IS AFFINITY? [WAI]
===============================================================================

Affinity is a system in Class of Heroes that governs how "well" characters in a
party can work together on the field of battle in a few different ways.

Firstly, affinity affects the stats of your party members. The higher a
character's affinity, the more their stats are amplified (to a maximum of
200% of the character's base stats as far as I am aware, i.e. the stats they
started with, plus any additional bonus points you distributed, plus/minus any
stat fluctuations). However, having affinity lower than 100% does not mean a
degrade in your stats. So don't worry about have sub-standard stats when you
start off with members below 100%.

Secondly, affinity affects the size of your Tension Gauge. The Tension Gauge is
a bar for special attacks called Gambits. These Gambits are key to increasing
affinity. Affinity levels less than 100% will have no effect on the length of
the Tension Gauge, but levels higher than 100% will cause an increase in the
length of the bar, allowing your party the capacity to perform more Gambits.

Thirdly, affinity affects how much your Tension Gauge increases when actions
are performed in battle.

There are several factors that can change affinity amongst party members.
Characters races and alignments play the biggest initial role, while the use of
Gambits plays the largest role of all.



5. WHAT IS AFFINITY NOT? [WAN]
===============================================================================

Affinity was once rumoured, or hoped, to affect actions off the battle field,
such as interactions between characters, choices that could be made, etc.
Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, for some people), this is not the case.

Affinity only truly affects character stats and the length of the Tension
Gauge.

As far as I am aware, affinity does not affect the random fluctuations in stats
when a character levels up. Despite having a very high affinity level,
characters were still sometimes reporting stat losses when they leveled up. So
I believe it's more of a separate system and not so much one controlled by
affinity, if at all.



6. BASE AFFINITY -- RACES [BAR]
===============================================================================

Creating a party that can work well together starts with the choices of races
and alignments. Some races can naturally work well with one another, while
others simply hate one another's guts, and yet others are indifferent.

Below is a chart of the different races and how they view characters based on
race.

           Hum  Elf  Dwa  Erd  Hal  Spr  Fel  Dra  Dia  Cel
Human       0   -2   -2   +4   +2   +2    0   -3   -3   +2
Elf        -2    0   -5   +4   +4   -3   -1    0   -5   +1
Dwarf      -2   -6   +2   +4   +4   -5   -3    0   -3   +2
Erdgeist   +2   +2   +2   +4    0    0   +2   +2    0   +2
Halfling   +2   +2   +2    0   +4    0   -3   -1   -5   +2
Sprite     +5   -3   -3    0    0   -4   +1   -4   -1   +1
Felpier    +1   -1   -5   +4   -1    0   +4    0   -3   +1
Drake      -5    0    0   +2    0   -5    0   +1   -1    0
Diablon    -3   -5   -3    0   -3   -1   -3   -1   -1   -6
Celestian  +2    0   +2   +4   +2   +1   +1    0   -5    0

If you examine the chart carefully, you'll notice that there is no pattern to
it. You cannot simply take one half of the chart and mirror it to get the
values on the other half.

In order to understand this chart, you need to look at each character
individually. The character you want to know the effect on the affinity level
with is the one along the left side. Those you plan to place (or have placed)
in your party are along the top.

Let's say you chose 2 Drakes, a Felpier, Halfling, Elf and a Celestian. The
"Base" will always be 100, as you start at 100%. Races in the party effect
this base amount by adding or subtracting from it.

Drake1     Base + (Drake2 + Felpier + Halfling + Elf + Celestian)
Drake2     Base + (Drake1 + Felpier + Halfling + Elf + Celestian)
Felpier    Base + (Drake1 + Drake2 + Halfling + Elf + Celestian)
Halfling   Base + (Drake1 + Drake2 + Felpier + Elf + Celestian)
Elf        Base + (Drake1 + Drake2 + Felpier + Halfling + Celestian)
Celestian  Base + (Drake1 + Drake2 + Felpier + Halfling + Elf)

Now to substitute with the effects

Drake1     100 + (1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0)    = 101
Drake2     100 + (1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0)    = 101
Felpier    100 + (0 + 0 + -1 + -1 + 1)  =  99
Halfling   100 + (-1 + -1 + -3 + 2 + 2) =  99
Elf        100 + (0 + 0 + -1 + 4 + 1)   = 104
Celestian  100 + (0 + 0 + 1 + 2 + 0)    = 103

At first glance, this doesn't look like a very good party. 2 characters are
below 100%. Let's move on to character alignments now to see how it can change
things.



7. BASE AFFINITY -- CHARACTER ALIGNMENT [BAA]
===============================================================================

Similar to the real world, people looking to do good, like priests, can't get
along well with people looking to do evil, like serial killers. It's pretty
much the same principals here. Luckily, in Class of Heroes, we have mediators
as well, otherwise known as the "Neutral" category.

         Good  Neut  Evil
Good      0    +2    -8
Neutral  +2     0    +2
Evil     -8    +2     0

This chart, unlike the previous, can be read in any way you want to, because
they are symmetric.

Continuing on from the previous example, the 2 Drakes and the Celestian are
Good and the others are Neutral. Here, the "Modified Base" is the value that
we calculated previously.

Drake1     Modified Base + (Drake2 + Felpier + Halfling + Elf + Celestian)
Drake2     Modified Base + (Drake1 + Felpier + Halfling + Elf + Celestian)
Felpier    Modified Base + (Drake1 + Drake2 + Halfling + Elf + Celestian)
Halfling   Modified Base + (Drake1 + Drake2 + Felpier + Elf + Celestian)
Elf        Modified Base + (Drake1 + Drake2 + Felpier + Halfling + Celestian)
Celestian  Modified Base + (Drake1 + Drake2 + Felpier + Halfling + Elf)

Now to substitute with the effects

Drake1     101 + (0 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 0) = 107
Drake2     101 + (0 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 0) = 107
Felpier     99 + (2 + 2 + 0 + 0 + 2) = 105
Halfling    99 + (2 + 2 + 0 + 0 + 2) = 105
Elf        104 + (2 + 2 + 0 + 0 + 2) = 110
Celestian  103 + (0 + 0 + 2 + 2 + 2) = 109

As you can now see, we were able to redeem everyone of sub-100% affinity levels
simply by varying their alignments between Good (or Evil) and Neutral.

This does not mean that you cannot have a party with at least one Good and one
Evil character and expect to always get sub-100% affinity levels though. If you
make one character Good and one character Evil, they subtract 8 from one
another. However, if the other 4 characters are made Neutral, they can make up
the 8% lost, resulting in no change in affinity.

Of course, to do this and expect to still have 100%+ affinity, the races in the
party need to do the bulk of the work in keeping it above 100%.

Any more than 1 Good and Evil in a party (e.g. 2 Good, 1 Evil) will definitely
lead to disastrous effects on affinity.



8. MODIFYING AFFINITY -- GAMBITS [MAG]
===============================================================================

Once you've created your party, do not be afraid that you may be stuck with any
sub-100% affinity levels that may exist in your party. With continued playing,
and the vast use of Gambits, the affinity levels of characters in any party
will ultimately rise.

There exists a hidden system in Class of Heroes that cannot be viewed. That is,
aside from the already mostly-hidden affinity system (Yes, you can see a
percentage on each character's Status page, but it's limited to showing you
percentages UP TO 100%, meaning that you can't actually see if you've got 101%
or 102%, or higher, for that matter).

In the Japanese version of the game (Ken to Mahou to Gakuen mono), this hidden
system that I am now mentioning was called "Con EXP" in the debug menu and
below it was a value called "Congenial", which showed a crude calculation of
the current affinity rating.

"Con EXP" is a special type of experience that can only increase through the
use of Gambits. Gambits use up a certain amount of Tension each time they are
performed. This amount is the number of "Con EXP" awarded to the characters
involved in the Gambit (some Gambits can be performed between as few as 2
characters, i.e. casters, but all others require the whole party).

Like any type of level in an RPG, the "Con EXP" required to add an additional
percentage towards a character's affinity level increases. Even with 77,890
"Con EXP", I've only gained 71%.



9. MODIFYING STATS -- SATORI [MSS]
===============================================================================

For those looking to spend hours and hours of button mashing and roaming
through the dungeons, Class of Heroes features an additional way to increase
the stats of your characters.

The Satori ability is an ability learned very late in the development of every
major, so it is available to everyone. What is does, basically, is reset a
character to level 1, meaning that they also lose their current Max HP.
However, everything else is kept. Their affinity levels, "Con EXP", stats, etc.
all stay as they were before using the ability.

Now, what good is Satori? I haven't even mentioned it yet.

Satori not only resets your level, it also adds a total of 3 stat points to any
number of stat categories (i.e. STR, VIT, AGI, etc. etc.). These stat point
gains are completely random and cannot be controlled in any way, other than
perhaps reloading and trying again.

You can gain a maximum of 10 points to each and every stat category, just like
with bonus points during character creation. What this means is that after 20
uses of Satori (i.e. leveling up to the high-80s to 99, using Satori and doing
the process all over again), the benefits of using it stop.

You can use Satori up to 24 times, but you will not gain any more stat points
during the last 4 uses. Rather, the character's Evade rating will increase by
3 during the 21st to 24th reincarnation.


                            *** SPOILER WARNING ***


Note that Satori is not a skill that can be used in battle. It can only be used
at one location, the floating island of Zeifair. In order to get to Zeiphair,
you must first complete the main story ("Into the Labyrinths", and "Defeat
Demoria!" are the last 2 story quests). After you complete the "Defeat
Demoria!" quest, you will return to Particus automatically and Nina will tell
everyone that she's started her own school on the floating island which will
open up the quest "To Zeifair". Once you get this quest, the way to Zeifair
will be open. To get there, return to Sky Gate and go the long trek (11 floors)
to Zeifair.

The option of "Reincarnate" will be available at the Infirmary in Zeifair. Note
that this option is ONLY available here. No other Infirmary has this
capability. They also have the Donate option for some quick leveling to get
your team back up on their feet.

After using the "Reincarnate" option for the first time, you may notice that
the character will have an "a" by their race. This is the Greek letter "alpha".
As I said earlier, you can perform reincarnation for any character up to 24
times, which basically goes through the Greek alphabet.



10. CREDITS AND THANKS [CRE]
===============================================================================

Big thanks goes to Atlus, Acquire and ZeroDiv for making this game, and making
it available to English players in a form that the greater population ENJOYS
Japanese games (i.e. English text, original Japanese voices), unlike MANY OTHER
localization companies... <_<

Thanks goes to the Japanese code wizards for giving me access to the debug
menu in the Japanese version of the game (Ken to Mahou to Gakuen mono).
Hopefully someone can figure out how to access it in the English version too.

Thanks to CWCheat for creating such a wonderful tool that I could use in order
to activate the debug menu in the first place.

Thanks to the Japanese wiki for this game for the initial insights into the
affinity system.

This guide was written by yours truly (Kazamu).



11. CONTACT INFO [CON]
===============================================================================

You can contact me by sending a message to Kazamu on GameSpot, or sending an
e-mail to [email protected]