Sharla/Gameplay (XC1)

Sharla is the third permanent party member in Xenoblade Chronicles and fifth overall. She is a dedicated support character, with a wide array of healing arts and defensive/supportive abilities. Her talent gauge operates differently than most characters - using arts heats up her rifle, which hurts her healing but amplifies her damage, and must eventually be cooled off. However, she has very few offensive skills, her stats are weak overall, and her rifle heat mechanic is more of a constant irritation than an interesting quirk.

Stats
Because Sharla's auto-attack range is so long, she has a unique advantage fighting enemies in the air or water. However, the auto-attack itself is very slow, despite the short delay between them.

Rifle heat
Sharla's talent gauge represents how much her rifle is overheating. It does not fill per auto-attack, but rather for every art she uses. The more heat is generated, the longer it takes to cool off back to zero; if it is allowed to reach 100%, she uses Cool Off automatically and it takes over twice as long to complete. Heat affects the damage and healing output of Sharla's arts (not her auto-attack); high heat amplifies damage and penalizes healing, while low heat does the opposite.
 * Arts damage: increased by  %
 * Arts healing: decreased by  %

As a result of this, Sharla is incentivized to take one of two playstyles:
 * Keep heat low at all times to prioritize healing throughtout the fight. This makes Sharla even more of a passive character, and will slow battles considerably as the party's damage output is limited, but it will make it much easier to avoid losing.
 * Allow heat to build up in order to deal higher damage and switch back to healing when necessary. This is the riskier approach, as being caught in a tough spot with high heat can mean either not enough healing can be made or Sharla is stuck cooling off while people get walloped, but it uses the mechanic to its fullest extent.

Despite Sharla's talent gauge essentially being "bad" to increase (in the sense that it's situational rather than universally good to do so), she still gains all the effects of gems, skills, and so on that build or drain talent gauge. There are however two exceptions: In addition, while Sharla is unlikely to want a Talent Boost gem, there is a gem exclusive to her known as Heat Sink, which decreases the amount of talent gauge generated.
 * When warned of a vision, Sharla's talent gauge is emptied, rather than filled. This could in theory be bad if the intended plan was "kill him with the free Head Shot", but it also means healing arts will be at peak efficiency, which is overall more useful.
 * Outside of battle, Sharla's talent gauge is emptied, rather than mantained.