I played on very hard and unfortunately found most of my effective strategies to be quite basic. Heavy weapons are utterly trash. They take forever to swing and barely do more damage than fast weapons, but have much higher stamina costs, resulting in more dangerous play and far lower dps. They have better block and revenge healing mostly, but you can just dodge everything. Magic as well I unfortunately seems quite weak. The spells with cast times are often so slow that you'd do more damage just spamming attack, with less vulnerability. The strongest build I found was either the starting weapon for most of the game was just the starting weapon since it's stamina cost is so comparatively low. Later on a dex built with the base katanas or the rapier.
I know what you're talking about. Let me elaborate.
Heavy weapons really are particularly bad in this game, and even the part about healing isn't true when referring to
effective healing, which specifically means weapons that can actually access healing reliably enough to actually heal you. Hence why I recommended the Cross Yari, it's a dexterity weapon with high (but not max possible) heal rate, which also possesses good damage per hit, attack speed, and reach in such a combination that it simply is the best weapon for actually healing you.
Magic gets pretty strong with the right spells. Once you get Sword of Praise in the underground basilica you get a close-range spell that outperforms any weapon option in DPS, especially against enemies vulnerable to sacred art damage like endgame enemies and bosses. The lightning rod spell deals damage in such a way that it nukes most of your screen space. You charge it up by hitting the object with any source of shock damage (fast weapons ideally), and also itself so it chains into itself.
I played through the entire game flawlessly on Very Hard mode first before upgrading my difficulty via mods, first with BonedMod (and its infamous finisher-kill bosses), then I moved on to NoREroMod where I made stamina cost 100 points per dodge, upgraded enemies to move 30% faster and made enemies hit about twice as hard.
The cheapest good build is ascension path on the weathered sword, the best "melee" build is technically a sacred staff and spell combo, enabling me to cast a spell that hits for over 400 damage twice on top of a 3-spear volley (about 200 damage each IIRC) that hits simultaneously alongside the spell, hitting enemies a total of 5 times at once on the 2nd button press.
The spells you're referring to must be the ones you find early one like the storm (4 pulse shock), the basic lightning spell, the fireball, and maybe the fire ring. Those are heavily situational. For example the fireball is really bad most of the time except against the spider boss and final boss phase 2 because they have huge hitboxes and are weak to fire. The lightning bolt is niche, does well to nullify incoming projectiles suddenly but is really moreso meant to hit targets below you in an open area which is just too rare to justify. Then other spells like the fire ring are actually mostly useless. The cauldron is pretty good for healing and DPS as well as being the de-facto longest range projectile in the game due to how the projectile arcs with gravity.
The true best spells are Sword of Praise (basilica) and the lightning rod spell you find in the Elevated Path.
I found the katanas to be quite crappy considering my other options, but the rapier's moveset and scaling is nice. However ideally I wouldn't use it because the weathered sword is a rapier with sacred art damage and int scaling that combos well with my spellcasting focus and is overpowered against endgame. I'd even have it ascended before the Candore fight, but if you have the extra idea points to waste (not in my case since I downscale enemy point awards down to only 15% of their original value in NorEroMod), you can opt for the bone sword or rapier for an early weapon to decimate Candore with before having Vendetta reset your spent points if you're going for a different build after that fight. That was actually something to genuinely consider in BonedMod because you couldn't reliably escape from enemies with finisher kill grapple attacks and Candore was one of those. It's true to say that Candore is the hardest boss in the game before the final boss's 2nd phase.
Weird difficulty spike, not even the Succubus is that hard. The magic wall spell was meant to trivialize the succubus fight but spamming perfect blocks against the succubus's projectile storm is not only valid but extremely helpful, effectively making her battle the best fight to spam spells in because she grants you infinite magic refills if you bring a weapon that refills magic on perfect blocks. And of course, Sword of Praise slams her rapidly with good damage.
In a nutshell, Dex builds are nice via the Rapier and Cross Yari, but this game's best builds are really Int builds.
Does she has different costumes or only one yet?
Aradia can access 2 more costumes but they're just recolors and they're "illusory", which is a game-like way to warn you that scenes don't account for her costume at all.
