I'm not too far into it, but I'm a bit puzzled by how all the combat numbers interact. Has anyone already experimented to figure out what they're doing? Here's what I think is going on; corrections are welcome.
So, obviously you attack with your melee weapon once per cooldown. Presumably your hit probability is something like Accuracy minus Evasion (where this goes up for attacks from the front). Damage dealt starts at total melee attack, is randomly adjusted by +-Stability, and is modified by enemy defense - is this just subtraction?
Ranged weapons are similar except they fire a number of shots equal to their ammo every time their cooldown is up. But each shot still does Total Ranged Attack damage, individually modified by enemy defense, I think - this is why ranged attack tends to be lower and why Elma is such a powerhouse early on.
Arts that do weapon damage have a number of hits and a hit scaling. They hit Number_of_Hits times where each hit does Total_[Melee/Ranged]_Attack * Hit_Scaling damage (probably adjusted for defense).
Okay, so if all that's true then it seems like ranged arts generally won't do great damage. Total Ranged Attack tends to be lower than Total Melee Attack to compensate for ranged weapons firing multiple shots, but ranged arts don't have lots more hits or much higher scaling than melee arts. Or am I missing something here?
Edit: Oh, and there are resistances, but I can only guess at what those are doing.
