When it comes to efficient team building in [DISGAEA RPG], it’s pretty obvious that you should try to make a synergistic team, right?
If you want good DPS or survivability, it’s common sense to try and use a bunch of units who buff each other rather than brute-forcing everything. Throw Desco in a monster team, or Girl Laharl in a team with anything that can deal damage, and so on.
But when you actually ask people for suggestions, that’s where things get complicated.
It’s not widely understood how exactly the trillions of passives and buffs interact with each other, so you might end up being told assumptions as though they were facts. Others may tell you about diminishing returns, balancing stats, and several other things you won’t really understand that well but will still accept anyway because surely they must know what they’re talking about.
You might only figure out that maybe, just maybe, the team you built isn’t working properly when it’s already too late and you invested too much in the units.
To be fair, it’s not like these assumptions just pop up randomly. Maybe the person in question played a different mobage before and the logic certainly sounds right for this one, maybe they had a faulty theory that was seemingly confirmed by skewed numbers in a specific situation, or maybe it’s even a mainline Disgaea player making the admittedly safe bet that things work like in the source games.
Turns out most of these guesses end up being wrong. Because they’re just guesses.
With that in mind, I spent a couple hours resetting stages and combining buffs to figure out what’s up with this whole thing.
While I couldn’t erase every single assumption like I hoped to, and some details still rely on educated guesses with the data I did manage to gather, this is more or less everything I figured:
1) PASSIVE EVILITY BUFFS ARE ADDITIVE
This one might be a bit obvious to some readers, but let’s start from here.
To put it simply, imagine that you put Sicily and Desco in the same team as a random Monster unit. Sicily’s Evility gives everyone in the team +15% INT, while Desco’s Evility gives all monsters +11% of all stats except SPD.
Those numbers won’t be multiplying or overwriting each other; instead, while Sicily herself won’t be affected by Desco’s Evility (and so probably shouldn’t be paired with her), the random Monster unit besides them will receive:
+11% HP
+11% ATK
+11% DEF
+26% INT
+11% RES
One exception to this rule is when the passive buff simply doesn’t affect stats.
Some units have Evilities which buff healing bonus, elemental damage, any skill damage, or even all damage.
Since these buffs don’t affect stats, instead modifying the final damage directly, adding them to the stat buffs makes no sense. As such, DMG or Healing Bonus buffs like those become new multipliers instead.
As an example, imagine the following team:
NE7 Crimson Nine-Tails / Sicily / Desco
The Crimson (And Azure) Nine-Tails has a base Evility which grants her +12% Star DMG, while her NE7 Evility gives her +50% Star DMG.
Meanwhile, Sicily buffs INT by 15%, and Desco buffs INT by 11%, aside from all other stats except SPD.
By stacking the same kinds of buff additively, we get +26% INT and +62% Star DMG.
With those numbers, the following will happen when the Nine-Tails uses a skill, assuming no combat buffs like Magic Boost or Curry Power:
Total Star Spell damage = Base Star Spell damage x 1.26 (Passive INT buff) x 1.62 (Star DMG buff)
The same happens for Healing Bonus, becoming an extra multiplication at the end rather than being added to stat buffs. These seem to be the only multiplicative interactions between passives.
That said, I have absolutely no idea how an elemental damage buff and a global damage buff interact, as I couldn’t test it without an NE1 Usalia or the like.
At the moment, it’s up in the air whether someone with a +62% Star DMG buff and a +12% Skill DMG buff would have +74% or around +81% when using Star skills, but the amount of sources for this kind of buff is so small that the difference might not large enough to matter.
As an aside, I believe teamwide Evilities also affect the Evility’s owner, though I can’t be sure without a datamine, since I couldn’t simply deactivate Desco’s Evility. (EDIT: Confirmed by /u/Primantiss. I didn’t really think about just checking whether her HP changes in combat.)
Finally, there are also Evilities which passively debuff an enemy’s stats, and while I didn’t have units to test these properly either, they should also be additive like this.
2) COMBAT BUFFS ARE MULTIPLICATIVE
This is where things get fun.
Let’s use the Nekomata (Felynn) as an example. The Evility Wholeness Stance that she has at NE7 in two of her colors grants her a +10% ATK combat buff (as opposed to a passive buff) at the beginning of each turn, and it lasts 3 turns.
It’s not much, right? 10% is barely anything. After all, let’s assume you have +40% ATK buff and no DMG buff from all your team’s Evilities. +50% ATK isn’t much of a difference.
Except that’s not how it works.
It’s a combat buff applied mid-battle, and as such it’s not grouped with the passive buffs granted by units like Desco or Laharl. Instead, it multiplies everything that came before it.
In this case, the multiplier affecting the Nekomata’s ATK would instead be:
1.4 (Passive Evility Buffs) x 1.1 (Wholeness Stance) = 1.54
Not far enough from the original 40%? Then let’s add an unleveled Braveheart combat buff for a +20% ATK combat buff:
1.4 x 1.1 x 1.2 (Braveheart) = 1.848
While in the original games it wasn’t possible to stack the same buffs indefinitely, Disgaea RPG doesn’t care, so let’s use Braveheart again for an extra +20% ATK before it’s the Nekomata’s turn:
1.4 x 1.1 x 1.2 x 1.2 (2nd Braveheart) = 2.2176
As you can see, the two Braveheart spells didn’t stack additively. This is because any combat buff is used as an individual multiplier, regardless of who cast it or which skill they used.
That would be the biggest difference between combat buffs and the passive Evility buffs discussed previously.
That aside, +121% ATK is quite massive, isn’t it? The added +81% ATK is certainly quite a bit more than the +50% it would be if the two Braveheart’s and the Nekomata’s self buff were all additive instead.
Now let’s remove the Nekomata’s +10% ATK:
1.4 x 1.2 x 1.2 = 2.016
With this, we can see that two Bravehearts on a Nekomata with a base +40% ATK passive turned her small +10% self-buff into +20% post-calculation.
It gets even better by the Nekomata’s next action, as Wholeness Stance will apply another 3-turn stack of +10% ATK while the previous one hasn’t expired yet:
1.4 x 1.1 x 1.2 x 1.2 x 1.1 (2nd Wholeness Stance Stack) = 2.439
Depending on the amount of passive buffs and combat buffs provided by her teammates, the value of Wholeness Stance’s combat buff can only grow from there, much more than if it was a simple passive.
Long story short, the returns only grow with the number of buffs. Nothing diminishing here.
This is how all combat buffs are treated, whether they’re created by skills like Magic Boost or the several “buff unit at the beginning of each turn” Evilities. If you’re playing smart, this is also where the majority of your damage or tankiness will be coming from.
It bears mention that all combat buffs seem to last for only 3 actions of the buffed unit unless explicitly stated otherwise, and while that prevents mega-stacking, it still gives you plenty of time to stack or refresh buffs.
Considering that, units with skills like Santa Usalia’s cheap teamwide +20% INT/RES become much more valuable than they seemed at face value.
Perhaps you don’t have to be massively overleveled to clear stages that give you the opportunity to buff your team before the enemies attack?
Having said that, there’s also a good chance that debuffs interact in the same way, meaning that Mao’s Evility and two Armor Breaks would translate to 0.88 x 0.8 x 0.8 = 0.5632 / -43.68% DEF rather than an additive -12% – 20% – 20% = -52% DEF. This would mean debuffs actually do have diminishing returns, different from buffs, and are in fact worse than they seem at first. But bear in mind that this theory is untested, and even if true, you might still want debuffs anyway to get over an enemy with high enough ATK or INT to steamroll your party’s DEF or RES over time.
