Sleet

Sleet (ソルベ Sorbet) is a Mercury Djinni found throughout the Golden Sun series.

Sleet is the second Mercury Djinni in both the original Golden Sun and Golden Sun: Dark Dawn. Sleet is also acquired in Golden Sun: The Lost Age, and although it is not the party's second Mercury Djinni, Sleet is still ordered as the second Mercury Djinni when equipped to characters. Because it is not available until after most other Mercury Djinn can be found, however, the separate Djinn list viewable with the Select button from the status screen lists Sleet and all other Mercury Djinn from Golden Sun after all of the Djinn introduced in The Lost Age. According to this order, Sleet is the thirteenth Mercury Djinni in The Lost Age rather than the second, but this order has no influence elsewhere in the game.

Basic description
When Set, Sleet increases its Adept's base HP by 12, base Attack by 3, and base Luck by 1.

When Sleet is unleashed in battle, the user deals a Mercury-based attack equal in power to the user's normal physical attack with an additional 30 damage points added to the result. Then there is a chance that the target's Attack rating will be temporarily reduced by 25%.

In Golden Sun and The Lost Age, Sleet's unleash animation visually resembles the user summoning a glowing white image of a Mercury Djinni, which then shoots out a stream of ice particles at the target for a moment. In Dark Dawn, after the user summons the 3D model of Sleet, it floats in the airspace in front of the enemy as three separate clumps of ice particles fall from the sky and crash into the enemy diagonally one-at-a-time.

Damage calculation
Elemental physical attacks such as Sleet use the damage dealt by the attacker's standard physical attack as the base damage to be later modified. The total amount of damage dealt by a normal physical attack is half the difference between the attacker's Attack statistic and the target's Defense statistic, as this equation shows:


 * ''base damage = (Attacker's Attack - Target's Defense) / 2

Sleet's attack then takes this base damage value and uses it in the following equation:


 * ''final damage = (base damage + 30) * (1 + (Attacker's Mercury Power - Target's Mercury Resistance) / 400)

To word this in prose, Sleet takes the base damage of the user's normal physical attack, adds 30 to it, and then this result is modified by how much higher or lower the user's Mercury Power is than the target's Mercury Resistance. The difference between the user's Mercury Power and the target's Mercury Resistance is divided by 400, then 1 is added to this, resulting in what can be called the "elemental damage multiplier". This number is what Sleet's damage is multiplied by.

For example, if an Adept with an Attack rating of 100 and a Mercury Power of 120 unleashes Sleet on a monster with a defense of 20 and a Mercury Resistance of 70:


 * damage = ((Attack - Defense) / 2 + 30) * (1 + (Power - Resistance) / 400)
 * damage = ((100 - 20) / 2 + 30) * (1 + (120 - 70) / 400)
 * damage = ( / 2 + 30) * (1 + / 400
 * damage = ( + 30) * (1 + )
 * damage = *
 * damage = 78

Therefore, if Sleet were to be unleashed under these circumstances it would deal 78 points of damage.

Locations
Golden Sun: Sleet is located in a hidden room behind one of the many waterfall-walls in a hallway in Mercury Lighthouse, the hallway immediately following a room where a pipe spout pushes open a massive section of wall to the left to reveal a door; you must press up against the wall so that you enter the room as though you walked through a house's door. (The best way to find it, as well as various other secrets in Mercury Lighthouse, is to press up against each waterfall-wall you pass by in the entire dungeon.) It must be battled to be acquired. See here for enemy statistics.

Golden Sun: The Lost Age: Players can transfer data from Golden Sun to The Lost Age, but even if they don't, Sleet will be among the Djinn Isaac's party has with them when they join forces with Felix's party late in the game.

Golden Sun: Dark Dawn: Sleet is the one Mercury Djinni that Rief carries along with him when he permanently joins the party early in the game, outside the permanently-sealed exit from Konpa Cave. If Chill was missed earlier in Carver's Camp, this will be the party's first Mercury Djinni.

Analysis
General: Sleet is intended as a "basic" offensive Mercury Djinni whose 30 set damage bonus would be quite substantial early in the games it is naturally obtained in. Similar to the Mars Djinni Fever, Sleet becomes entirely obsolete when other attacking Mercury Djinn are obtained because its 30 set bonus damage is far overpowered by other Djinn that either have bigger set damage bonuses or have damage multipliers. It can drop an enemy's Attack rating by enough that any battle commands the enemy uses that involves physically attacking is sharply weakened, though it can be argued that it is more useful to pursue an effect that increases the amount of damage the enemy takes from your own actions.

By game
Golden Sun: Sleet is the weakest of the three available offensive Mercury Djinn from an endgame perspective; it only adds 30 damage points, compared to the 40 damage points of Hail and the 1.3x damage multiplier of Mist. But for when it is found somewhat early on in Mercury Lighthouse, 30 additional damage points is quite substantial, and it does more damage to the upcoming boss Saturos than most other offenses the party has available outside of summoning, even if it is used by Mia, who is supposed to be physically weak and more focused on party healing. The attack-lowering effect, since it only applies based on a chance and does not work on bosses, and does not lower the damage output of Psynergy spells, may hardly benefit the player's party in the long run at all. Sleet is a Djinni whose effect becomes less valuable over time when your focus is using only stronger Djinn to conduct and win battles with.

Golden Sun: The Lost Age: When Isaac's party joins Felix's party along with their returning Djinn, Sleet becomes all the more obsolete as a method of attack you would use if you want to make battles won easily, particularly because another Mercury Djinni exists, Gel from Kalt Island, that has the same attack-reduction effect but a far stronger 1.5x damage multiplier. Sleet and Gel are the only two Djinn in the GBA games to lower enemy attack ratings with.

Golden Sun: Dark Dawn: Sleet is the weakest offensive Mercury Djinni because it has the lowest added damage bonus (30) and the chance to inflict a statistic drop that isn't the most useful. What makes Sleet a particularly unusual case, though, is that while this is the game's second Mercury Djinni and found early in the game, the first Mercury Djinni found earlier is also an attacking Djinni - ordinarily, the games space apart attacking Djinni by putting Djinni of other battle functions in between them in their acquisition order. This first Mercury Djinni is Chill, which actually has a higher set damage bonus of 40 and an arguably more relevant bonus effect - lowering the target's Defense by 25%. It can be guessed that Sleet was included as a second, weaker attacking Mercury Djinni immediately after the first in case players missed the permanently missable Chill. In this scenario, Sleet would be useful as the one attacking Mercury Djinni the party has up until Amiti joins the party later, but if the player finds Chill in Carver's Camp, it can be said that this Djinni becomes obsoleted even before it is acquired.

Name Origin
Sleet is wet snow and ice that falls from the sky. A sorbet is a frozen desert similar to ice cream, but without dairy products and usually with fruit.