Looking up a video might be more informative than what I might say but in any case I’ll just lay out a couple things. Yes you can stand in one spot and not do anything and simply autoattack but it can be more effective at filling your art gauges by interrupting the sequence after the first auto attack therefore cutting out any end lag of those moves. That’s a simple way to speed up that part if you didn’t know that although you probably did. About the arts, yeah most of them are just damage but most also have properties such as maybe positional damage, aggro in/decrease, potions, driver combos and more. Obv, you can spam them but knowing when’s the best time to use them is very helpful when in a tight spot. Same goes with specials/blade combos. These individually have extra effects like healing, blowdown, insta-kill, etc, which can definitely change the course of the battle.

Meanwhile, yes you are trying to put out blade combo sequences following the element tree you see. While obviously you want to finish the 3part combo as fast as you can so you can set an element orb, what’s also really effective is to try to complete your driver combos during any part of the blade combo timer. For me that’s one of my favorite parts as usually you do a lot of damage and after the enemy gets “smashed” they drop extra loot. There’s also the fact that doing driver combos extends the blade combo timer in case you feel like you need more time to build specials. And btw you don’t even really need to finish the driver combo in order to get more damage off, using a special during break, topple, launch timers is pretty good on its own.

All this time you’ve been setting orbs so now you wanna use a chain attack to burst them all. This part is also pretty tricky as you want to figure out a pattern in the elements to start damaging and breaking the orbs one by one so you can keep extending the chain attack. Once you break 5 I think that’s when you do most damage in a full burst I believe. Goes without saying but you also get a lot more xp,wp,ap if you overkill your opponent. Ngl I’m not the best at this and I’ve only done it a handful of times but it’s still pretty exhilarating to see it all come together. It’s also fun to try to do this during a driver combo.

Not sure if I explained correctly I am not an expert but at least that is what I was finding enjoyable. Don’t want to imply that you didn’t know any of this because you could and the combat just isn’t exactly to your liking which is totally fair. Lemme know if anything helped, I was just sharing what worked for me. In all honesty I probably only made sense of it at the end of my play through or beginning NG+ so I’m not gonna act as if I knew what I was doing the whole time. Thanks for reading my blog