I did my own testing, and yeah, seems silent selene hits mystic-neutral enemies for like. 15-20% more damage than magic missle. I guess I was mistaken since I wasn't factoring in the fact that marisa would always have better +mag buffs in battle thanks to concentration...still though, that is with equal levels, no equipment, a higher silent slene rank, and the fact hat patchy is way slower (so magic missle still probably does better dps if not higher numbers per burst), and way more squishy to anything with any physical attacks whatsoever. However that was still with equal level, which is an unfair advantage for patchy since she levels slower.
Yeah I know she can magic tank, she always could, I was qqing that it seems that every boss now has some kind of group physical attack, making her mincemeat to it, whereas before most did not. As for grand incantation, she's just too slow and too squishy now (now that every boss seems to smoke her with some kinda group physical if I leave her out) to utilize it.
And library stats aren't an argument. They increase stats by a %, so bad stats will be increased by less actual value...for more skillpoints I might add (generally, not always, but generally characters who are bad at a stat will have to pay more to raise it a rank in the library, speaking of which, marisa also needs less gold to increase her mag than patchy, it's very slight though, like 7% cheaper or something). You can, and should spend them on stats that ARE useable to get better returns for less. The amount of skillpoints needed to buff patchy's defense and hp to actually survive physical attacks that would kill her would quite simply debilitate your overall party growth too much, like buffing yuugi's mnd, or whatever.
Elemental resistances are slightly different since you get increased returns the lower the affinities are, so pouring lots of points into a really bad affinity will often result in huge differences.
As for first aid, that goes along the lines of skillpoint stats like hp up skill, and mag up skill. These are actually better on bad stats than good ones (unlike the library), because adding 1 to 5 is more significant than adding 1 to 20, it adds, doesn't use a %. Most of the items that do these things have penalties like -5mp or whatever though, which is obviously a major issue for early game, but is way more manageable later on. In addition, the benefits given via these items do NOT decrease in value later on.
Bottom line is I'm still convinced patchy isn't good this time around.. she isn't a glass cannon, she's glass meh. Slow, no hp, no utility (don't say subclass, anyone can have subclasses, and the ones that have utility generally don't benefit from sky-high mag), slow leveling, and I was comparing her to marisa's magic missle, which is HARDLY "cannon" tier nuke, it is in fact my DEFINITIVE "ok" tier nuke. AS for mnd tanking, yeah, I'm thinking of just replacing patchy with parsee in a future playthru, I'll play her to the end though just cuz I always used her in LoT1 and playing LoT2 without using her until the end would just be wron (same with remi, but I still haven't gotten her).
BTW, it seems that characters charge mp really really slow when they are in the reserve. Does this seem to speed up later on in the game? I can practically kill a half-dead boss and see someone in my reserve has the same mp as when I put them in the back (before boss half-dead). Kinda makes me value those "get x* skill level times more sp when charging" skills alot!
Also, Tenshi the 2nd was a brutal fight for me, by far the hardest...Actually the only fight that was remotely hard so far this playthru aside from the first time I had to kill that 9 eye'd horror or whatever it was called FOE on the 4th floor...
