Pouch Item

Pouch Items (also sometimes written uncapitalized as "pouch items") are a type of consumable item in Xenoblade Chronicles 2 and Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna ~ The Golden Country. They can be used to temporarily strengthen a Driver and in combat.

Mechanics
Up to 10, or in some cases 3, of a given pouch item may be held at any time. This amount can be increased by 30 by purchasing the Nopox Deeds, Placks Deeds, and Praximo Deeds.

Pouch Items can be used from the Pouch Setup menu. Initially only one pouch item can be used at a time per Driver, however through the use of a Pouch Expansion Kit, a second pouch item slot can be acquired on the Driver which the Pouch Expansion Kit is used on. This allows said Driver to use two pouch items at the same time; these two items must be different, although they may have the same effects. Having two pouch items on the same Driver with the same effect simultaneously results in the effects stacking.

When an item is put into a character's pouch it will provide up to three buffs for a certain amount of time, as well as increasing the Trust of all Blades currently engaged by the Driver. The amount of time a pouch item lasts for will only decrease while the player is outside of menus. Upon expiring, if the player has another copy of the expired item, it will be automatically used to refill the pouch.

In Xenoblade Chronicles 2

 * Purchasing them from s
 * Crafting them through s
 * Completing s
 * Completing Merc Missions

In Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna ~ The Golden Country

 * Purchasing them from s
 * Completing s
 * Crafting at a Campsite

In Xenoblade Chronicles 2

 * Art
 * Board Games
 * Cosmetics
 * Drinks
 * Desserts
 * Instruments
 * Literature
 * Meats
 * Seafood
 * Staple Foods
 * Textiles
 * Veggies

In Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna ~ The Golden Country

 * Charms
 * Desserts
 * Fragrances
 * Meats
 * Scripts
 * Seafood
 * Staple Foods
 * s
 * Veggies

Pouch Item Effects
There are 12 different types of passive effects granted from Pouch Items, each corresponding to a different category of pouch item. While a single pouch item can grant up to three different effects, it will always provide the primary effect of its item type.


 * Art: Boosts the amount of Affinity gained by any means. (Max: +50%)
 * Board Games: Boosts the power of Blade Arts. Has no effect on Nullify Reaction or Debuff Cancel. (Max: +100%)
 * Cosmetics/Fragrances: Boosts Affinity at the start of battle. (Max: +300)
 * Drinks/Charms: Boosts the amount of Party Gauge gained by any means. (Max: +50%)
 * Desserts: Passively recharges all Arts every second. (Max: +1 per second)
 * Instruments/Talismans: Passively recharges the Special Gauge every second. (Max: +8 per second)
 * Literature/Scripts: Boosts the damage dealt by Specials. (Max: +100%)
 * Meats: Boosts the Driver's physical defense. (Max: +30%)
 * Seafood: Boosts the Driver's ether defense. (Max: +30%)
 * Staple Foods: Grants the Driver a temporary Damage Barrier, nullifying a certain amount of damage based on a percentage of the Driver's maximum HP. (Max: 50% Max HP)
 * Textiles: Reduces the Affinity lost by any means. (Max: -50%)
 * Veggies: Boosts HP restored to the Driver by any means. (Max: +50%)

Favorite Pouch Items
Every Driver and Blade has up to two favorite types of pouch items, as well as two specific favorite items. All Drivers, Rare Blades, and Legendary Blades will have two predetermined favorite pouch item types, and two predetermined favorite items. Common Blades will have at least one favorite item type, but may not have any favorite items.

Favorite Items are hidden, and only revealed upon using a favorite pouch item, or an item belonging to a favorite type, for the first time.

Favorite Pouch Item Bonuses
Depending on how much a Driver or Blade likes a Pouch Item, its effect may be enhanced.
 * If a pouch item belongs to a character's favorite category, then its effects are boosted by 20%.
 * If a pouch item is one of a character's favorites, then its effects are boosted by 50%.

If a character's favorite item belongs to a favorite category, then only the favorite item bonus is applied.

If a pouch item is liked by both a Driver and Blade, then the bonus will stack multiplicatively.

Pouch Item glitch
When a Driver has two pouches due to them having used a Pouch Expansion Kit, the two pouches interact slightly differently with characters' favourite Pouch Items. Specifically, the item in the left pouch not only receives a bonus if it is a favourite (and/or of the favourite category) of the Driver or equipped Blade; it also receives a bonus if the item in the right pouch is a favourite/in the favourite category. This stacks multiplicatively with boosts from the item in the left pouch itself being favoured. (None of this affects the effects of the item in the right pouch; the item in the right pouch is boosted if and only if it itself is favoured.)

The upshot is that, if two Pouch Items are being equipped to the same Driver and only one of them is favoured, that one should go in the Driver's right pouch; doing so will provide a boost to the effects of both items, whereas if it is placed in the left pouch then only the favoured item would be boosted (as would be expected). Alternatively, if both items are favoured but one of them has better effects, the item with better effects should go in the Driver's left pouch; this will make it so that the item with better effects is boosted twice, whereas the item in the right pouch will only be boosted once.

Strategy
Pouch items are often overlooked by new players, but when used properly, they are one of if not the most critical part of out-of-combat setup in Xenoblade Chronicles 2 and Torna ~ The Golden Country, and the best ones are essentially always worth any money needed to acquire them.

Useful effects to focus on
The most important (and, in many setups, necessary) use for pouch items is to speed up the rate at which Driver Arts and s can be used, allowing for more Driver Combos, Blade Combos, and higher combat elements such as s and Fusion Combos. Driver Arts are made more available with effects which passively recharge Arts a certain amount every second (the main effect of Desserts). Specials can be directly made more available through effects that passively recharge the Special gauge every second (the main effect of Instruments), but in practice (usually — see below) it is more effective to stack as much Arts recharge as possible and build up the Special gauge faster through using more Driver Arts. This makes Arts recharge by far the most important effect to focus on when choosing Pouch Items to use in all stages of play.

Another very practical (albeit secondary) effect to focus on is party gauge gain increase (the main effect of Drinks and Charms). This is particularly useful if one's party members are frequently becoming Incapacitated. It is also handy in -focused strategies as well as those that focus on quickly building up for relatively small s. It is less useful for strategies that focus on building up many orbs for a large Chain Attack, as the party gauge will ideally have filled up anyway when the time comes to use it (although the benefit of it being easier to revive fallen party members remains if that is a concern). Importantly, it is often all but necessary in Bringer of Chaos difficulty, where party gauge gain is much lower by default.

Increasing the damage dealt by s (the main effect of Literature and Scripts) is always a major boon. Blade Combos, Chain Attacks, and Fusion Combos are the player's three main bread-and-butter sources of damage, and in all cases the damage they deal is directly proportional to the Specials used in them. Therefore, increasing Special damage is an excellent way to increase the player's overall damage in the few situations where Arts recharge does not have as great an effect.

Other effects have varying levels of practicality. is crucial in combat, but unless it is constantly being lost midway through combat (which is often but not always partially avoidable), it is usually more effective to keep it at maximum via Hunter's Chemistry Aux Cores than through Pouch Item effects (although the two may be used in conjunction if the former is not sufficient). Additional physical and/or ether defense can be handy, especially early on, but its practicality is very strategy-dependent (for example, it becomes accordingly less useful in parties with high ). Likewise, boosting HP recovery is useful early on, but in the lategame and postgame, sources of healing (when they are necessary at all) are already typically strong enough to near-fully heal the Driver all at once. s, when brought about by Pouch Items, are typically single-use per battle, making them suboptimal. Some Blade Arts have useful effects, but (especially because arguably the two most useful Blade Arts are unaffected by Pouch Items) it is almost always better to focus on other combat elements.

Early-game strategy
In Xenoblade Chronicles 2, the dessert Narcipear Jelly is available for purchase at Honeycomb Sweets in Argentum from the start of the game. It provides 0.4 Arts recharge per second (as strong as the effect gets among easily-obtainable items) alongside substantial defensive bonuses, making it one of the best pouch items in the game. A simple but very effective strategy early on is to buy as many of these as possible and use them on every Driver; doing so makes all Drivers much more capable and speeds up combat substantially in the early game.

At the end of, the player obtains a Pouch Expansion Kit. (The most effective use of this by far is on whatever Driver the player most often controls.) However, maxing out Arts recharge with two Pouch Items at this stage, while possible (if one exploits favourite pouch items - see above), is not as optimal as one might think. The reason for this is that the player will almost certainly not have access to Arts Chain, and will therefore need to cancel s to build up the Special gauge most efficiently; therefore, the player will be auto-attacking regardless of whether or not it is needed to recharge Driver Arts, and so these auto-attacks may as well be used for that purpose. It is still ideal to avoid auto-attacking any more than what is necessary for Driver Art cancelling, so the 0.4 Arts recharge per second from Narcipear Jelly remains valuable, but the second pouch item may be best used for other effects, chiefly Special recharge (from Instruments).

Midgame and lategame strategy
The picture changes drastically when the player gets access to Arts Chain (and its equivalents on other Drivers), typically around for  and. By this point, auto-attacking is no longer necessary except for recharging Driver Arts; therefore, bypassing the slow process of auto-attacking as much as possible becomes central to one's setup. The main goal is to stack as much Arts recharge as possible; a quick and dirty way to do this is to simply put a strong Dessert in each pouch, e.g. Narcipear Jelly and Sparklesugar. The benefits of doing so are great, and while more optimal setups exist, they have diminishing returns on the effort required.

Aforementioned more optimal setups make use of favourite Pouch Items (see above) to boost the effects achieved. In this way, a pouch item with a weaker Arts recharge effect as written may in practice turn out to be stronger if it is also the favourite type or item of the Driver or Blade in question. This is especially useful if the pouch item's other effects are desirable. Finding Pouch Items which have good Arts recharge, good additional effects, and which may be the favourite item of a character in use often requires completing Merc Missions which give Contracts as a reward. Some good items are also made available through Crafting by completing the Blade Quests of various s: Gorg's are the best for most purposes, yielding strong Desserts (including the Lovemerry Cake, which has the single strongest Arts recharge effect in the game), but Dahlia's and Vale's crafted items may also be useful in certain circumstances. Note, however, that crafting takes substantial player effort - much more than that required to acquire purchasable pouch items. It should by no means be seen as a necessity; the benefits of an easy-but-suboptimal setup with lots of Arts recharge over no pouch items are far and away greater than the benefits of an optimal setup over a suboptimal one.

Postgame strategy
For difficult postgame content, especially and playing at higher difficulty levels, the benefits of optimal Pouch Item setups become more relevant. At these stages, reaching the cap of 1 Arts recharge per second becomes more desirable and, if the player has been completing Merc Missions, more achievable. This cap cannot be reached without exploiting characters' favourite pouch items. A sample setup for each Driver which provides 1 Arts recharge per second, regardless of equipped s, is as follows: (For Nia, any of the two options in either the left or the right pouch may be used.) Note the specification on which item goes in which pouch; this is due to the Pouch Item glitch (see above). Swapping the order of which item goes in which pouch may not result in the effects being of the same strength.

The above table is only an example of a -independent setup which allows for 1 Arts recharge per second on each Driver. When using a Blade who likes Desserts (e.g. or ), it may be better to focus on those instead (ensuring that a Dessert is placed in the rightmost pouch of the relevant Driver), specifically using Desserts with beneficial additional effects (e.g. Hot Ruby Steamed Buns).

Non–Arts recharge setups
Specials and/or Driver Arts are always necessary in combat, so having a good way to recharge Driver Arts quickly is paramount. But if this can be done using methods other than Pouch Items (discounting auto-attacking which is essentially never optimal), it may free up Pouch Items to fulfil other uses. There are two main methods of doing this: crit recharge and Blade/Vanguard switching.

Several weapon classes (most notably Greataxes and ) possess Driver Arts that partially recharge if one of their hits is a ('crit'). If these are levelled up to level 5 (or to level 4 and used at maximum ), the partial recharge becomes a full recharge, allowing them to be used instantly again — including (assuming Arts Chain or equivalent has been acquired) being able to cancel the Art into itself. ('s also has this effect.) If this can be done consistently, it makes Arts recharge pouch items redundant while allowing for extremely fast Special gauge buildup. For these setups, a good effect to focus on is Special damage (from Literature and Scripts) to maximise damage output. However, crit recharge can seldom be relied upon to work all the time (the exceptions being if or  are being used). If the player's crit rate is below 100%, it is advisable to keep a lower level of Arts recharge active from Pouch Items (around 0.3-0.7 per second, depending on crit rate, is a reasonable amount) to recharge the Driver's other Arts for use when the crit recharge fails and to only partially focus on Special damage (and/or other effects).

All Driver Arts are fully recharged upon a Blade Switch (in the Xenoblade Chronicles 2 main game) or Vanguard Switch (in Torna ~ The Golden Country). A strategy which makes constant use of this may not need to use Pouch Items to recharge Arts, especially if only one or two Arts will be used between switches. An example of such a strategy is Driver Combo locking, in which the player constantly cycles between different characters in order to use Driver Combo Driver Arts and/or Switch Arts. Here, only one Art is necessary to use between switches, and so such an Art will necessarily be off cooldown when it is needed. This makes Arts Recharge unnecessary. Which Pouch Item effects to focus on in Arts Recharge's place vary depending upon specifics. However, as such strategies necessarily require managing the of two or three Blades as opposed to only focusing on one, Affinity-increasing effects (primarily from Art, Cosmetics, and Fragrances) may be useful. Such strategies are also often used in Bringer of Chaos difficulty in combination with ; in these cases, Party Gauge gain is very worthwhile to focus on. On the other hand, while a Special is necessary to begin the damage-over-time effect, it is only this Special that leads to the bulk of the damage throughout the fight; therefore, Special-damage-increasing Pouch Items are useful on the character that performs the Special in question, but may be forgone on everyone else.