I feel your pain with the lock system in Sea of Stars. Sometimes you can only get it 80% power and just take the damage. There was a point early in the game where I was low on items and HP. I knew I would die in the next regular fight. I died and backtracked to craft more healing items from fish to get me over the hump.
If you try to break locks, to usually have to save your abilities/empowered attacks to be able to do that in the number of turns provided. Enemies also take reduced damage while channeling locked abilities (60% reduced in my game). So you’re encouraged to save all your strongest damaging abilities for when enemies take the least damage, making fights a slow awful grind.
Alternatively, ignore breaking locks, and save abilities for when enemies aren’t locked. Finish fights way faster, but the lock abilities are really strong and punishing.
Enemy locks aren’t staggered, multiple enemies will use lock abilities at the same time, making breaking them impossible and sometimes leading to impossible fights due to RNG.
Enemy locks sometimes require damage types that haven’t been unlocked yet (ie requiring poison before you get a poison character).
Just overall the lock system is supposed to add carefuld decision making to combat about what abilities to use and who to prioritize, but I feel like it almost never works out that way, and instead just makes combat really slow and unfun.
I feel your pain with the lock system in Sea of Stars. Sometimes you can only get it 80% power and just take the damage. There was a point early in the game where I was low on items and HP. I knew I would die in the next regular fight. I died and backtracked to craft more healing items from fish to get me over the hump.
I have a lot of issues with it.
If you try to break locks, to usually have to save your abilities/empowered attacks to be able to do that in the number of turns provided. Enemies also take reduced damage while channeling locked abilities (60% reduced in my game). So you’re encouraged to save all your strongest damaging abilities for when enemies take the least damage, making fights a slow awful grind.
Alternatively, ignore breaking locks, and save abilities for when enemies aren’t locked. Finish fights way faster, but the lock abilities are really strong and punishing.
Enemy locks aren’t staggered, multiple enemies will use lock abilities at the same time, making breaking them impossible and sometimes leading to impossible fights due to RNG.
Enemy locks sometimes require damage types that haven’t been unlocked yet (ie requiring poison before you get a poison character).
Just overall the lock system is supposed to add carefuld decision making to combat about what abilities to use and who to prioritize, but I feel like it almost never works out that way, and instead just makes combat really slow and unfun.