....That's... helpful...
Whenever Sentient stops using grammar and capitalization, that's your cue to ignore him.
As far as I can tell, Basic Actions are treated exactly the same as Main Actions aside from three key rules:
- They must be related to their specific purpose. Simple enough, so Basic Attack has to be offensive, Basic Defense has to be defensive.
- They cannot be expressed in terms of themselves. Often you see Actions that are phrased as something such as "deals double damage" or "adds 150% of the net damage dealt as magical damage", those are implicitly saying "damage of a Basic Attack". Obviously you can't have Basic Actions that do that because that'd just be circular logic.
- They cannot be Locked. Locking Status Effects can disable various types of Main Actions, or just all Main Actions in general. Basic Actions can still be used while they are in effect, however.
So just treat it as another free slot for some sort of defensive Action. Or just remove
Counter and change Basic Defense into
Level 5 Basic Defense - Counter with the exact same effect by dumping the four freed Action Points into it. Don't let the "Basic" adjective fool you, they can be incredibly useful, such as Aesford's Level 2 Basic Defense,
Juke with adds 200% of his DEX to RES calculations and grants a 33% dodge chance for that turn. Or It That Embraces' Level 4 Basic Attack
Passion-Lip's Love: Soul-Crushing Ten-bladed Embrace which deals an extra SYN damage for each turn it is consecutively used, can split its damage across any number of targets, moves all the targets together making them vulnerable to an AoE followup, and has a 10% chance to cast one of her debuffing Main Actions.
And really, that's just the tip of the iceberg. If you have a few, what I like to call Overlaying Main Actions that are in terms of Basic Attack or Basic Defense (that is, they build upon it), you can raise the power of all such actions just by investing points into the Basic Action rather than the Overlaying Main Action.
For example, if Mio replaced
Godhand with a Level 1 Passive Action that boosts the power of her Basic Attack, turned her Basic Attack into
Godhand, and then brought it back up to full power through that Passive and reallocating the freed points into Basic Attack, almost every single one of her Main Actions would suddenly gain a considerable power boost.
Sanure! The OP says
"If the status effect paralyzes, petrifies, or otherwise prevents you from acting, Basic attacks can't be used until the effect is gone." Is that meant to say "Basic Actions"? Or can Basic Defense still be used even when Stunned/Paralyzed/Sleeping?