P5X Combat Guide: 1 More, All-Out Attack & Highlights

Every enemy has an elemental profile: Weak to certain damage types, Resist or Null against others, and sometimes Repel (bounces the attack back at you) or Absorb (heals the enemy instead of hurting it). Before a fight starts, check the enemy's weakness icon and bring characters or Personas that cover it — matching elements is the single fastest way to shorten any encounter.

Landing a hit on a confirmed weakness (or scoring a critical hit) triggers 1 More: that character immediately gets another action, at no cost, without ending the turn. Chain 1 More off of 1 More across your whole party and you can knock every enemy down before the enemy side ever moves. Once every enemy on the field is downed, the party can unleash an All-Out Attack, a free multi-hit finisher that deals heavy damage to the whole group.

Hitting an enemy's Resist or Null element wastes the turn for no bonus, and hitting a Repel or Absorb element actively hurts you — so scouting weaknesses before you commit to a rotation matters more than raw damage numbers.

Tougher enemies, especially bosses, don't go down from a single weakness hit. Instead they carry a shield icon showing their Down Points — the number of weakness hits or crits needed before that enemy actually gets knocked down. Chip away at the shield with each successful weakness hit; once it hits zero, the enemy drops and stops acting for the rest of that round.

You don't always need to find a weakness, either. Gun down lets you knock an enemy over just by dealing enough Gun damage in one hit, no weakness required — useful when an enemy resists or nulls every element your party carries. The tradeoff is ammo: Gun attacks draw from a limited bullet pool, so save your shots for enemies you genuinely can't exploit any other way.

Guard is your defensive option when you'd rather not risk hitting a resisted or unknown element: it reduces incoming damage that turn and restores some SP, which matters because skills draw from a shared SP pool that doesn't refill for free otherwise. Guarding an untested enemy on turn one is often safer than gambling on a random element.

Each character also has a Highlight skill — a powerful move fueled by a separate charge gauge that fills up as the fight goes on. Highlights hit hard, but they cannot land a critical hit and are locked behind a 4-turn cooldown once used, so treat them as an occasional finisher rather than a spam button, especially against enemies where you've already run out of exploitable weaknesses.

Finally, Turn Order in P5X runs on each unit's Speed stat rather than a fixed player-then-enemy pattern — high-Speed party members and Personas act more often, and certain skills or debuffs can push an enemy's turn back or pull one of your allies' turns forward. Keeping an eye on the turn order bar lets you plan 1 More chains around who actually moves next, instead of guessing.

1 More is often described as a "free turn," but it's really a bonus attack, not an extra Baton Pass like in Persona 5 Royal. Each character can only trigger 1 More once per round — you can't use items or healing skills during that bonus action, there's no Baton Pass-style buff attached to it, and if you're playing Wonder, you can't swap your equipped Persona in the middle of a 1 More chain.

Critical hits come in two colors that matter. The default rate is 5% Crit Rate for +50% Crit Damage, but only a critical hit landed with a Physical or Gun attack (shown in red text) knocks an enemy down. A critical hit from an elemental/magic attack (shown in blue text) still deals bonus damage, but it will not trigger a knockdown.

Gun ammo doesn't reload mid-fight — your bullet count refills only at the start of the next battle. Each bullet lands as its own separate hit, so effects that proc per-hit trigger once per bullet. Kitasato Meira (北里基良)'s synergy rank 5 is the one exception: once unlocked, it restores her ammo automatically 2 turns after she runs dry. And unlike Persona 5 Royal, gunning down every enemy on the field doesn't force you straight into an All-Out Attack — you can keep firing instead.

Down Points do more than break a shield once. An enemy with innate Down Points has its shield refill once it recovers from being knocked down, so you'll need to break it all over again. Using Guard grants your own character +1 Down Point as well. A multi-hit skill only removes 1 Down Point no matter how many hits land, and attacking an enemy that's still knocked down adds a flat +10% to your final damage.

SP also regenerates on its own: every character automatically recovers 10 SP each time their action comes up, and any % SP Recovery from Revelation cards adds on top of that, rounded up rather than down.

Filling the Highlight gauge is also pickier than it looks. Hitting a weakness fills it faster than a neutral hit, but passive counters and retaliation procs that fire outside your own turn do not fill the gauge at all — except for Joker's own bonus-action attacks, which do. Highlight damage cannot pierce Null, Repel, or Absorb resistances. The gauge itself carries over between battles, but its cooldown resets to zero once a battle ends, and for Wonder specifically, the cooldown is tracked separately per equipped Persona — so swapping Persona is a way to sidestep an individual Persona's cooldown.

These details come from community testing (Japanese wiki and community guides) and may change between patches.