Personal Ability

The Personal Ability System (パーソナルアビリティシステム) is a new mechanic for NPC characters introduced in God Eater 2 Rage Burst. The system is also used in God Eater Resurrection and allows the player to select additional skills for NPC characters for them to utilize in gameplay.

• Field members have access to a level 10 Support Skill by default, while the Back-up members have a level 5 Support Skill for them as a default and a compound Support Skill that will enable them to maximize their initial Support Skill and grant one more at level 10.
• Each member starts with 100 AP in the beginning.
• Field members start with a number of prelearned skills equipped to them, these can be expensive and higher leveled skills which you could not teach them at the moment and even up to 3 can be at the start.
• Field members also start with a list of Compound skill, where 2 of them belong to their choice weapon (named God Eater in both case) and their personal style of combat (named after their names in both case, though the latter might be literally empty in certain cases or it's simple a single skill)
• Characters can have easier time in learning Personal Abilities of a certain kind, thus netting them a 75% discount regarding such skills. They are often useful for them so learning such skills is not a bad idea.
• Personal Abilities are not completely available from the start, however after completing a mission of the 4th, 7th and 10th difficulty an increase in selection will happen.

Mutsumi's Personal Ability Page. Mutsumi is one of the selectable backup characters.

Mission Rewards Screen.

Party & backup Member Selection Screen.

How the system works

By selecting characters to participate in battle in-field or as backup, they will gain AP (Ability Points) which can be used to purchase new individual Personal Abilities. Different characters have different sets of Personal Abilities to learn.

Another type of AP called GAP (Global Ability Points) are earned on a per-mission basis, normally only after completing a mission for the first time. As their name indicates, they are shared among all NPCs and are generally used to unlock more expensive and powerful Personal Abilities.

Backup (non-party) characters have skill sets that let them equip different Support Skills. These Abilities can trigger after a mission and have effects ranging from increasing the number of Abandoned God Arcs found to increasing the rate at which Blood Art Awakening Chance increases. The higher the level of these skills, the more often they will appear.

God Eater NPCs have skills that affect how they fight in game, with certain skills enabling item usage or changing the way their AI works, whereas others provide Skills like the ones players can get.

There are certain character-specific Personal Abilities, which are are gold colored and are easily recognizable as they are at the bottom of the list of Personal Abilities. These skills generally activate multiple Skill effects, and in most cases can only be unlocked after a certain point of the Story or after completion of the Character Episodes of the character in question.

Trivia

• While characters will always win AP if brought to a mission, regardless of whether their Support Skills trigger or not, picking their Support Skills allows them to earn much more AP than they normally would. The number of AP won depends on the number of ◆ shown at the top right corner of the character's portrait. 
• One icon is a 10% boost to the AP win; two icons means a 25% boost; and three icons is a 100% boost. A ★ icon is a 50% boost, but they only appear on the final mission of a Survival Mission chain and unlike the Support Skills of other missions, the ★ rank Skill always show up..
• Certain Support Skills cannot be accessed on the final mission of a Survival Mission chain and the characters instead gain a skill named "Individual AP up."
• Normally, only one Skill on the Rewards screen can be selected per mission, but certain Skills can be picked to either get two uses instead of one or to redraw the available Skills, additionally it is possible to pick up multiple Skills of the same type if the conditions allow it.
• By general each mission grants 5 AP per difficulty level, however if a completed missions difficulty is lower than the unlocked highest difficulty a penalty will be incurred. The larger the difference the more AP will be lost in compensation.
• Bond Break Reward skills count all Aragami that have appeared on the mission that have breakable parts. Therefore it is possible to earn rewards from non-mission target Aragami. It is not required to break a part to get rewards from it and this skill will randomly chose Aragami and what parts to treat as broken for the reward.
• Get Consumable Item skills activate even if they are not selected. This applies to when they are rerolled with Support Redraw skill. Having them appear in multiple rerolls will not increase the rewards, unless multiple characters have this skill trigger.
• It is possible to trigger the same skill multiple times, therefore player Avatar Cards that equip Support Redraw, Support Skill Uses+1 and other desired skills can net high number of rewards at the cost of performance (since the skills focus on Support Skills mostly). Though it is possible that the number of Support Skill chances will exceed the number of available skills, because they are still chance based to appear.
• Some characters can have a special Support Skill temporarily assigned due to Story related content, they are usually negative and penalise such characters.
• ALT characters have different basic (God Eater and "named") skills, in Resurrection they have different weapon set and thus possibly different set of abilities to learn. Because they are different from their regular counterparts, the skills that are unlocked by doing Character episodes in God Eater 2 : Rage Burst naturally do not apply to them. In Resurrection, they do not have access to the high end Compound Skills.
• In God Eater 2 : Rage Burst, it is possible to change the God Arc type of the NPCs if you bring only one to the Swamps of Lerna mission and manage to defeat the Crimson Orochi. However, despite the ability to change their weapon to a different type, this will not allow them to adapt and learn new Personal Abilities and can even hinder them since their preferred weapon might not be the same.