Claw

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

Claw is the sixth Mercury Djinni in Dark Dawn.

Basic description
When Set, Claw increases base HP by 8, base Psynergy Points by 2, base Attack by 3, and base Agility by 2.

When Claw is unleashed in battle, the user deals a Mercury-based attack equal in power to the user's normal physical attack multiplied by 1.5x. Then there is a chance the target's Resistances will be lowered by 40 ("two stages", the same amount as the Weaken Psynergy. The most Resistances can be lowered down by is 80, as in "four stages".)

In Dark Dawn, Claw's unleash animation visually resembles the user leaping through the air to perform a physical attack, and while in midair the motion is turned to slow-motion while light blue energy orbs gather into the user's weapon. The user strikes the target at the same time the 3D model of Claw appears behind the user briefly, and for around two thirds of a second the ground underneath and behind the target glows with fire colored blue.

Damage calculation
Elemental physical attacks such as Claw 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

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


 * ''final damage = (base damage * 1.5) * (1 + (Attacker's Mercury Power - Target's Mercury. Resistance) / 400)

To word this in prose, Claw takes the base damage of the user's normal physical attack, multiplies it by 1.5, 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 Claw's damage is multiplied by.

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


 * damage = ((Attack - Defense) / 2 * 1.5) * (1 + (Power - Resistance) / 400)
 * damage = ((100 - 40) / 2 * 1.5) * (1 + (120 - 70) / 400)
 * damage = ( / 2 * 1.5) * (1 + / 400
 * damage = ( * 1.5) * (1 + )
 * damage = *
 * damage = 50

Therefore, if Claw were to be unleashed under these circumstances it would deal 50 points of damage.

Location
Golden Sun: Dark Dawn: Claw is one of the three Mercury Djinn that Amiti carries along with him when he permanently joins the party following the completion of Barai Temple and when going out of Ayuthay's underground region. The other two are Mist and Mellow.

Analysis
General: Claw is a good attacking Mercury Djinni because it has a moderately strong damage multiplier of x1.5, which means it is likely to produce satisfactory damage results when Unleashed by an Adept with a high attack rating. Mercury Djinn do not get higher damage multipliers, so Claw will only become more usefully damaging as the game progresses all the way up to its end. Claw has a relevantly beneficial side effect to boot; its chance to lower the target's Resistances will increase all damage the target will take from any subsequent attacks that are aligned with any of the element, therefore making the enemy fall faster, even though the difference the resistance drop makes probably isn't all that high. It has an identical counterpart in the Mercury Djinni Sour in Golden Sun: The Lost Age.

By game
Golden Sun: Dark Dawn: Claw is the one attacking Mercury Djinni with a damage multiplier instead of a set damage bonus. This gives it a valuable niche that manifests late in the game, when party attack ratings make the damage they deal with normal physical attacks high, and therefore good for the damage multiplier to work off of. However, as it is available for the party to use throughout most of the game, other attacking Mercury Djinn will give it very stiff competition. The first Djinni in the game, Chill, adds a set bonus damage of 40, which early in the game is much stronger than any amount of bonus damage that Claw's damage multiplier can manage to result in, at least for a while. Likely the best attacking Mercury Djinni in the game, Serac, is gotten only a little later, and its 70 set bonus damage makes Claw hard-pressed to match that amount of bonus damage for much of the game. Even if at the end of the game you have Claw Set onto a warrior Adept with a very high and optimized attack rating, Serac will still be useful for adding a consistent 70 damage and having an excellent side effect, a chance to instantly fell the target. Therefore, you should always consider buffing the user's Attack statistic with the Impact Psynergy or Djinn like Forge before the user unleashes Claw; the difference in damage will be meaningfully significant.