1. Learning About Skill Trees

  Firstly, skill trees in Phantasy Star Online 2 are essentially simplified versions of skills/abilities in most other MMO's. Take World of Warcraft for example, but everything is put into a tree on one thing instead. The trees serve as the main way to get your best buffs to push out major damage. Of course a +10'd Psycho Wand or Ely Sion is going to dominate in this way, but I am talking in a general sense here, and we will not get into grinding. 

  All seven classes can be interchanged whenever you want once unlocked. So you should want to build your skill trees to what you like and enjoy doing. Because as we all should know by now, a Skill Tree Reset Pass is rare from good ole' SEGA. Or you could just buy some AC for one. But regardless, skill trees should be made correctly for what you like. One important thing to note; anything from your subclass is carried over to your main class in matters of Stances, boosts and upgrades, you get 20% of your sub-classes stats to your main classes stats. You can use many different builds in conjunction to the main and sub-classes. But let us take a look at a FO/BR common build (Force / Braver - sub):

1st being Force, the second tree being Braver.

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  Overall, Force is a class that uses Technics to attack, it can use ALL elements in the game as a different attack. Let's take Braver's Weak Stance for example. It's description reads 'Stance Skill. Increases damage to weak points but decreases damage to all other targets.' Giving 135% more damage to a weak spot of the enemy you are attacking if that first one in the image below is given 10/10 skill points. Just further increasing this large damage boost as you get 'Weak Stance Boost' then 'Weak Stance Charge'. Getting the 'Weak Stance Critical' would be a waste of skill points in most peoples opinions because hitting a critical is not likely with the most of boosts, neither to they do very much more damage than normal. 

  With Weak Stance all the way up as a Force being your main class, sub classing Braver, you can just activate it during a hard enemy or boss and hit it's weak points to kill it off very easy. This set up is common in experienced players who enjoy killing fast. It's also common to have Average Stance up at least with 'Average Stance' then 'Average S Boost' 10/10. Because then you have a 20% damage boost to anything. However, you cannot use both stances at once. Even then, with both stances maxed without critical rate enhancements you will have more to spend on a katana upgrade(s) or bow upgrade(s) if you don't want to use Force anymore for a bit.

  Linked here is my own personal build I would use for FO/BR. But you may do whatever you would want with the remaining points or what situation you would want with them both.

  So overall, this section was just to explain basic in-and-outs of trees and how there can be tons of different options out there for what you want to do with the game. So let us continue to the next section to learn more in depth, common builds of all trees to do most damage while still getting personal touches.

2. Understanding Basic 'Damage-based' Skill Trees

  So to start off into the meat and beans of this guide so-to-speak, let's try to learn which trees do the most damage on all the seven classes. 

  First is Hunter (HU). Now with Hunter, for almost all situations, is a go-to subclass because of it's Fury Stance ability, JA (just attack) bonuses, and possible gears of weapons you enjoy using. With Fury Stance (shown below, the tab of it in the tree) is almost a no-brainer to 10/10 with all other bonuses except, critical, as we had discussed in section one. Click here to see the basic outline of a damage-based Hunter tree. Now, with the linked tree, there are obviously a lasting four SP (skill points) left. This could be spent on a number of things. Usually used on gears, such as Sword Gear, or Partisan, Wired Lance gears. However, to obtain the Sword Gear you'd have to take 1 SP off of the tree somewhere. Most likely the 30 s-atk from Rare Hunter Mastery. Because to get Sword Gear it would cost 5 SP. But with Partisan or WL gear, no. 

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  Continuing on, we have FI (Fighter). This class is a lightweight-specialized class that can deal massive damage but usually only on one main target, being inefficient in matters of mob slaughter for the most part. So, while Fighter's usually use Double Sabers, or Knuckles, they can still use a now good weapon for bosses and mob killing, Twin Daggers. Twin Daggers shouldn't be ignored even the slightest as they have a very good photon art called Bloody Sarabande. This has a 180 deg. radius to hit the enemies in the direction your character is facing, with a good enough amount of hits to kill your enemy if you have Fury Stance activated with Brave or Wise Stance. This should give you a fair 1k+ damage per hit if you are at least level 35+ and the stances have 10/10 for the most part. Click here to see a good demonstration of the photon art.

  To understand FI's efficiency you usually need to play with it for a good while. It has a few good boss killing photon arts that can be good to join with your gears if you choose to spend your SP on them. Go here to see the basic FI tree most people use regardless. It isn't mandatory to get S-Atk 1 all the way 10/10 as shown in that tree, but it helps do most damage overall. 

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