[quote name='TctclMvPhase']Scratch damage is mainly inflicted by the machine guns. Some of the grenades will cause it as well, such as the molotov cocktails or poison grenades. Scratch damage shows up as blue on the health bars. It gradually recovers unless the character/enemy is hit with normal damage, which then converts all scratch damage to normal as well.
In order to recover from critical condition a few things need to happen. First, you need to make sure you have bezel shards. When youre in critical condition, these will be scattered about the battlefield and look like glowing crystals. You need to make sure you have at least one bezel on the gauge at the bottom of the screen not greyed out. Once that is done, you need to recover the Bezel and this is done by either killing an enemy, destroying a piece of their armor or gauge breaking. It is extremely difficult to recover, particularly early in the game when you only have a few bezels. The best bet for recovering is to use a pistolier, as their attacks wipe out armor fairly quickly and can inflict gauge breaks.
Also, for anybody who is just starting the game:
To do a bonus shot you need to do a hero run, while keeping your character on the ground. The key is to get the enemy airborne (with SMGs this tends to mean mid-length charges while pistols its short-length), then repeatedly do short-charged attacks to get the bonus gauge to show up. The higher the enemy is, the larger the bonus area of the bonus gauge will be and thus the easier it will be to get a bonus attack.
To do a smackdown, its best to start out by doing a hero run while keeping your character on the ground. Then, just like with the bonus shot, attack the enemy to get it airborne. As soon as the enemy is airborne, make your character jump and then repeatedly do short-charged attacks. Smackdowns work best when running directly through the enemy, so that when you jump and attack, you are pushing them straight into the ground.
Tri-attacks simply require the build up of resonance points, by always having your active character complete their hero attacks by running through the imaginary line drawn between your two other characters. Any time you have resonance points, all you have to do is hit triangle and you can perform a tri-attack. Hitting triangle again will reverse the direction the characters will run, while completing the tri attack. Hitting L1 or R1 will change who leads the triangle attack. Both options affect the ordering, which you can see on the character status cards in the bottom right of the screen, denoted by the numbers 1,2 and 3. Generally, you want to lead your tri attack with your scratchers (machine gunners).[/QUOTE]Thank you very much.