Geyser

Geyser is a Mercury Djinni found in Golden Sun: Dark Dawn.

Geyser is the seventeenth Mercury Djinni in Dark Dawn.

Basic description
When Set, Geyser increases base HP by 10, base Attack by 3, and base Luck by 3.

When Geyser is unleashed in battle, the user deals a Mercury-based attack equal in power to the user's normal physical attack with an additional 50 damage points added to the result. If the target is not felled by the damage of this hit, there is a chance the target will be removed from the battle. It will not count as a felled enemy, so it will not give its experience, coin, and random drop rewards. The target will always gives its rewards like normal if Geyser does the sufficient damage necessary to reduce its HP to zero.

In Dark Dawn, Geyser's unleash animation visually resembles the user summoning the 3D model of Geyser in front of them, facing the target. Geyser briefly charges up a glowing white blue orb at its face, and then unleashes an intense white beam encased in a rotating, watery-white double helix that pierces through the target. The hit target vanishes into thin air if the chance to remove the enemy from the battle succeed.

Damage calculation
Elemental physical attacks such as Geyser 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

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


 * ''final damage = (base damage + 50) * (1 + (Attacker's Mercury Power - Target's Mercury Resistance) / 400)

To word this in prose, Geyser takes the base damage of the user's normal physical attack, adds 50 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 Geyser's damage is multiplied by.

For example, if an Adept with an Attack rating of 330 and a Mercury Power of 130 unleashes Geyser on a monster with a defense of 140 and a Mercury Resistance of 80:


 * damage = ((Attack - Defense) / 2 + 50) * (1 + (Power - Resistance) / 400)
 * damage = ((330 - 130) / 2 + 50) * (1 + (140 - 80) / 400)
 * damage = ( / 2 + 50) * (1 + / 400
 * damage = ( + 50) * (1 + )
 * damage = *
 * damage = 172

Therefore, if Geyser were to be unleashed under these circumstances it would deal 172 points of damage.

Location
Golden Sun: Dark Dawn: Geyser is located in the small Snowdrift Shrine dungeon that is one of the dungeons you need to explore late in the game in order to collect the Umbra Gear. When you enter the main lower exterior screen and climb up the right ladder to the main upper exterior screen, you are above a giant slide that you would need to slide down at several different places in order to reach all of the location's secrets. Geyser is at the top of the center of the slide, and when you approach it, it will slide down to a lone platform way down below. Your objective is to slide down after it and steer yourself so that you collide into it from behind, and a little reflex might be needed. When successfully crashed into, Geyser drops into the screen below, so hop off and climb down the nearby ladders to where Geyser is. Fight it to obtain it. After this, when you climb back up to use the giant slide again, know that there is no further use for the particular slide entrance that Geyser used. The same goes for the slide entrance to the right of that.

Analysis
General: Geyser is a rare effect that attempts to remove the enemy from the battle once the hit has been carried out. Removing the enemy is essentially the same as inflicting instant death on it, but with one critical flaw: the enemy's EXP, coin rewards, and droppable loot will not be awarded like when you fell an enemy normally. This generally makes Geyser a highly frowned-upon Djinni because unlike a Djinni or effect that inflicts instant death, Geyser is likely to deny you the rewards you would want for going through random battles. (Naturally this blowing-away won't work on bosses with their high Luck ratings.) Its set damage bonus isn't even all that great, at 50, and while it's true its blowing-away effect does not happen if the hit actually would KO an enemy anyway, generally one would want to rely on other attacking Djinn to avoid any risk of not getting the payoff of defeating a monster. In The Lost Age, the Jupiter Djinni Gale has the same "blowing away" chance.

By game
Golden Sun: Dark Dawn: Geyser should outright never be used as an attack option. The Mercury Djinni Serac not only has a higher set damage bonus, at a high 70, but its chance to instantly erase an enemy from battle is an actual instant-death effect, meaning that the enemy will yield experience, coin, and random drop rewards if the side-effect kicks in. Serac is one of the best attacking Mercury Djinn for those reasons anyway, and other offensive Mercury Djinn like Spout are far more useful then Geyser both for having usefully higher amounts of bonus power and for not having a side-effect that can, at worst, actually be considered a liability. When compared to its predecessor from The Lost Age, the Jupiter Djinni Gale, Geyser manages to be worse even than that; Geyser has 10 less set bonus damage, and more significantly, Dark Dawn does not feature a Battle Mode where battle rewards do not apply and pseudo-instant-death effects would actually be very useful against increasingly tough monsters.

Name Origin
A geyser is a hot, volcano-like spring that ejects water and steam at high pressure upon its eruption. Ironically, the previous games' Djinni Sleet German name was also Geyser/Geysir.