Since Persona 5 Strikers is not your typical JRPG anymore, fans of the series will need to learn to adapt to a new system called bonds.

These bond skills aim to synergize with your characters and playstyle – but not every bond is equal.

This guide will teach you the best bond skills in Persona 5 Strikers and will explain why they are the best options.

Bondmaker

Bondmaker

The Bondmaker is the number one priority. Every time an upgrade is available for the Bondmaker, you should upgrade it immediately. It gives you a ton of extra bond experience in the long run and once you reach Mariko Hyodo’s jail, it would have already paid off. This is assuming that you are doing everything that can increase your bond level otherwise, it might take longer.

Avenger

Avenger Grants Skill 1

Avenger is the best bond skill for improving your combat capabilities. It relies heavily on dodges as it gives you a chance to counter after a successful dodge. Upgrading this bond skill further will make the counter activate every time. Getting Avenger to level 3 will take around 40 pts but it will be worth it.

You can learn more about this in our dodging guide as there are many combinations you can do with Avenger. For example, adding more Agi from your bond skills and buffing Sukukaja can increase your evasion and crit.

Spirit Striker

Spirit Stalker Bond Skill

Spirit Striker is the best sustain bond skill you need to have in Persona 5 Strikers. If you are doing your combo’s right, “1 More” attacks will often happen and it replenishes your character’s SP. All-out attacks also restore your party SP. While it does not recovery HP, most of your characters have healing spells and SP is more efficient to recover than HP.

Oracle Recovery

Bond Skill Oracle Recovery

Oracle Recovery will be your main way of sustaining your group’s HP and SP throughout your infiltrations. This bond skill already costs 15 bond points but it is worth it especially if you are the lazy type. Since social links are not a big factor in this Persona 5 Strikers game, there is not much you can do outside the jail other than buying items and talking to your confidants.

If you are lazy to go in and out of the jail to replenish your HP and SP, you should get this bond skill immediately. If you want to min/max everything, you can omit to get this bond skill in exchange for more combat-oriented bond skills.

Stat Boosts

Agility Boost Bond Skill

Stat boosts are cheap and it is an underrated bond skill. These are strong if you have a strategy in mind. Here are some builds you can do that greatly help the synergies among these bond skills.

Evasion and counter build

This will use the Avenger bond skill as the foundation of the build. Every time you dodge, you will perform a counter with a spell cast. Not only do you avoid taking damage, you do damage in the form of a free spell cast.

Combine this with the Agility Boost and it helps trigger the auto-evades more frequently. Add more items with Agi and have Yusuke on your team to do his combo with the free buff, you are going to be stacking heavy Agi for auto-evades.

Based on experience from finishing the game, I probably dodge 70-80% of the time near the end of my playthrough just because I have maxed Agi out on all the possible buffs I can get. What can improve this build more? Add more magical damage bonuses so that your counter can be stronger.

Magic and SP build

This build will be good only for bosses and mini-bosses. Since they do not stagger enough during combos, casting spells with your Persona is always the best strategy. If you do that, you are burning your SP rapidly while alternating spell casts and doing “1 More” combos in-between.

To maximize efficiency, you need to increase your magic damage as there are two bond skills that increase it. They are cheap and you can get a few more bond skills to complement your build.

Extortionist

Bond Extortionist

Extortionist might not look like a combat upgrade but you will see its value paying off in the last boss fight. If you are able to get as much money as possible through your playthrough, you should be buying everything in the game such as recipes, ingredients, food, drinks, and medicine.

For weapons and armor, you can upgrade your weapons on the characters you will use in the particular jail. This saves you a ton of money if you only upgrade 4 weapons at a time and the same goes for armor. This is described more in detail in our Persona 5 Strikers beginner guide.

The last boss is the most difficult boss by far in this game. Shocking right? You will encounter numerous problems during that encounter (no spoilers are coming). You will need to have a good chunk of recovery items during this fight and if you are constantly using them on other boss fights, you will wind up lacking consumables for the second boss.

Conclusion

I am not here to tell you how to play the game so feel free to spend your bond points how you wish.

This guide only shows what I believe are the best skills. Some are fairly mandatory (Bondmaker) but it all depends on your playstyle.

The combat is addicting and with a bigger cast of characters, it might take a while to find the playstyle that fits you.