How imbuing works in Luminous Arc

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I am playing Luminous Arc for quite some time now and have access to Vitae identification (expensive as hell!) and imbuing. Now, I know that there are some specific formulas that give you some new rare/powerful item so it is quite potent in this case, but I wondered is it worth to imbue Vitae just to improve stats? Most equipment get replaced after few battles anyway.

One thing I don't understand is that always two Vitae are required to perform imbue, but only single bonus is applied to an item – the second one is always lost, so it makes sense to combine very powerful Vitae with a low-level/filler one. Is there a way to make both Vitae bonus work on an item?

I also noticed upon imbue item gets elemental property, but again I don't fully understand how this works – sometimes when I apply two Wind Vitae, the element added is other than Wind. Any observations?

Best Answer

Is it worthwile

Definitely expensive, imbuing is sadly a needless extra for the majority of the game. As you said, equipment is quickly replaced so upgrading equipment is largely a waste of effort. You can get through the entire game without it.

Needless, but not altogether useless, imbuing simply expands your available options. Considering the cost of imbuing, you have only so many strategic approaches that you can take:

  1. Don't imbue.
  2. Grind like a loon and imbue everything.
  3. Wait until just before big fights to imbue.
  4. Imbue for special items and then rely on those for their special properties.
  5. Imbue current items and then ignore replacement equipment until it is closer in power to your imbued item which you will replace with the new equipment that you imbue.

Imbuing is more meaningful to generate special accessories, but for other items, while useful, can be pretty much ignored. It is certainly much more meaningful when creating builds for online play.

Mechanics

Because imbuing is pricey and largely needless, information is scarce on precise mechanics. There are 54 Vitae x 54 vitae x 173 items x 2 imbuers = 1008936 possible combinations and simply testing a decent subset of the over 1 million possibilities and then analyzing the results is time consuming so nobody has documented an answer to how this works. For a feature that most players rightly dismiss altogether, that kind of detailed effort is likely not going to happen for a game this old since it hasn't already.

There are lists of all the vitae and lists of special combinations which clearly detail those specific items.

I do not know the precise mechanics and can find no existing documentation on them.

For more precise workings of combinations simply to improve a given item, I can find no details, but I can at least put forth the experiment necessary to discern these details:

  1. Gather some of as many items as possible as well as 2 of each vitae and a copious amount of currency.
  2. Save your game and try as many different combinations as you can afford, documenting the results.
  3. Re-load your game and return to the previous step using different combinations and continue until all combinations have been tried or a pattern discerned.
  4. Try to discern general patterns so that you can end your tests early.

I doubt that every combination is unique simply because programming that would be a nightmare so I have some suspicions about some patterns that might exist:

  • Each pairing of vitae meanings always yields specific results regardless of equipment. Try the same pairing across different items and look for a similar trend.
  • Specific pieces of equipment affect the combinations in a consistent way. Try different combinations with the same piece of equipment and look for a similar trend.
  • Each imbuer applies a specific effect to the combination. Try several of the same combinations with both imbuers.

These results should explain the nature of stat and elemental effect gains. Once the patterns are discerned, it is simply a matter of testing to determine the values needed to make use of the pattern.

I don't have the ability to conduct this experiment myself at the moment so I leave this experiment here in place of the complete details it would provide so that someone may take on this experiment if I don't get to it first.

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