A few months ago, we surveyed our beta players on improvements that they would most like to see in Grifford Academy. The winning choice was the ability to adapt the affinity of each character’s primary weapon to reflect changes in item Affinity Point spend.

For those who have not yet played Grifford Academy, each of our main characters previously had a personal item/weapon with a fixed affinity assigned to it; either physique, intellect or spirit.

Take Erika for example. She starts as a physique-based character with a physique-based hockey stick. But what happens if you wanted to respec for into a Spirit based player? She’s stuck with the same weapon, thats no longer as effective.

We saw this problem as an amazing opportunity. What if we didn’t just change the affinity of the hockey stick, but its resulting action as well! The hockey stick in its default physique form does “Slam” doing damage and a handy stagger effect. But that didn’t feel right for a Spirit-based hockey stick, or an Intellect-based one. So we set about designing two new abilities for each of the four personal weapons: Erika’s Hockey Stick, Viva’s Journal, Cap’s Replica sword, and Jinnie’s favourite Guitar (I’m sure she has more than one).

Each character will have a dominant Item affinity, and the corresponding Action for their personal weapon will queue off that. So if Erika has more points in Spirit than Physique or Intellect, then Spirit will be her dominant Item affinity, and her hockey stick will now have the “Sneaky Strike” Action.

It’s important to note that if you increase or reduce multiple item affinities to the same value, then the dominant Item Affinity will be preserved as much as possible.

For example: if Erika has two ranks of physique and one each of Spirit and intellect, and we add one point of Spirit, then the dominant Item affinity will remain as Physique. If you add another point of Spirit raising it to rank three, then the dominant Item affinity will shift to Spirit and the Action will change to “Sneaky Strike”. If we then reduce Spirit back down to rank two, it’s once again equal to Physique, but the dominant Item affinity will be preserved and remain as Spirit. In this way, it’s easy enough for you to get the right mix of ranks and right Action for your needs.

Here’s what we came up with:

Let’s look at each of the new abilities in a little more detail.

Erika’s Hockey Stick

Erika and Jinnie both joined the Grifford Hockey team together several years ago, though Erika was the only one that persisted with it. Erika doesn’t usually socialise with the other students that much, but she does enjoy a good hockey game.

We’ve added Sneaky Strike, and Tactical Strike as alternative actions for the hockey stick. “Sneaky Strike” hides you after the attack, but be aware it will mean your friends get targeted more. “Tactical Strike” adds retaliation which can be helpful, especially as retaliation ignores enemy taunting effects.

Viva’s Journal

Viva is seen as pleasant but shy, as well as being extremely thoughtful and clever. A lot of these traits are reflected by the writings in her Journal.

Here we added Swot, to throw a little confusion at your target, and Study to stop the target benefitting from positive status effects of healing.

Cap’s Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi Replica Sword

The Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi (草薙の剣) is a legendary Japanese sword. Its name translates as the “Grass-Cutting Sword”, and in folklore, the sword represents the virtue of valor. Cap’s is a replica of the sword as featured in the Monster Hunting game he spends much of his time playing, and one of his most prized possessions.

Cap’s sword can now add poison to an attack if Physique is the leading item affinity, or if it’s Spirit the sword can give the Cap a little welcome regeneration over the next round.

Jinnie’s Favourite Guitar

Jinnie has many guitars, but this one matches her favourite Jacket perfectly. Music is a big part of her life, though less for the artistry of it, and more for the raw emotion and expressiveness it brings out in her. Not that she’s unpracticed, in fact, she’s working on an original song for a certain young fellow she’s got her eye on.

In addition to Wham, Jinnie now has access to Riff which gives her deathguard, or “Lead Break” which gives her a moment of immunity from negative status effects.

We hope with these new changes, players find themselves able to experiment more openly with their character’s affinities and the new Personal Weapon actions.

The Affinty Update is available now.

Other Fixes and Improvements:

- Fixed user error reporting not able to upload to cloud after clicking Submit.

- Fixed item in slots goes missing after changing affinity.

- Fixed moving item not working when dragging and dropping item on the same item slot index in different character using mouse.

- Enhanced Jinnie + Cap's victory/confident poses.