tales tales tales

Since I doubt there are very many people left who would be interested in playing Tales of the Abyss but haven't yet, I'll go ahead and just mention spoilers.  So if you're in that exact situation I just ruled to be statistically not important (and you care about story spoilers), read no further.

Natalia finally levelled to 54 and I got Revive.  I tossed it onto my d-pad (I now only have two attack artes, lol) since we saved in the Absorption Gate literally just before the boss fight with Master Van.  I'll be tossing Revive onto Anise right at the beginning of the fight since she dies pretty quickly (I don't think Honya blocks much).  Just so my immediate TP cost at the beginning of the fight will be 128, I'll probably toss it onto our other melee character (either Luke or Guy, probably Luke so we can have master vs. disciple (and party) showdown) as well.  Then it'll be Sharpness for Anise/Other Melee and Scare Shot for Master Van.  That equals a lot of TP at the beginning of the fight.  Maybe I'll save Sharpness for later, since lowering his defenses is a little more important.

I'll have to arrowspam like crazy in the fight to make up for the immense TP usage.  Man, auto-resurrect status is expensive.  Also I'll have to take healing into account.  Hopefully it'll just be Master Van with nobody supporting him (I haven't bothered to read an FAQ to check).  If it really is just him, I won't have to heal nearly as often as the fight with Largo, Legretta, and Arietta where I was basically casting Heal again as soon as I recovered from the previous cast.  And we had to repeat the fight once because Honya wanted to steal an item off of Arietta and we didn't get it the first time.

Also I finally got a fucking capacity core that will let me get some enhance.  I don't remember the name, but it has physical attack and agility +2 and enhance +1.  My old one had physical attack and agility +3 (and that's it).  I kind of wish we could grind for a while so I could raise my stats up a bit and get one or two more of the AD skills that I really need (like reduced casting time or Spell Keep so if I get interrupted I won't have to do the entire spell cast all over again, which is rather important considering I'm a healer).

Then after the fight with Van I get to not do anything for a while since the party splits up and it takes a while before we get Natalia back.  Then we walk around for a bit and eventually I'll get my last arte, Healing Force.  I'll probably equip it, I dunno.  I'm still entirely unsure of how much health Heal gives an ally.  The game only uses vague terms, but I see several thousand health going onto the health bar with each cast.

Oh I know, I should overlimit right away (assuming I have the gauge for it) when we fight Van.  Since one of the properties of overlimit is decreased casting/recovery times, it'll help me get auto-res onto Anise and Luke, Scare Shot onto Van, and then I can follow up with Gallant Barrage->Astral Rain (mystic arte) for some damage.  Then I'll go into my usual routine of staying on the opposite side of the screen while filling Van with arrows and healing/removing status ailments periodically, trying all the while to get the last hit just so I can say "oh my, is it over already?" after the fight.