- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Let's Play
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
...that is way more historically accurate than I would have expected from the game.
FunkyEntropy
Occasionally insightful, possibly grumpy
- Location
- Los Angeles
Out of curiosity, did you find that doublehand provided a significant boost in utility/killing potential? Mystic Knight damage potential is very high but it requires the stars aligning just right to get the most out of it. The weapon you're using has a huge impact on your final damage so try to stay on top of that, thankfully this is the portion of the game where you get tons of great weapons for them to use.
As a general rule of thumb you'll probably want to advance classes like your FF III playthrough: two physical classes, two magic classes. FF V has more flexibility since some of the physical classes have nice passives that you'll want for Freelancer (I'm thinking in particular of a class you haven't gotten yet with a very nice passive) but that's what my final party usually settles on.
Anyway, Ninja is awesome. Throw does tons of damage at the cost of expendible items, dual wield is part of the endgame doom combo. Elven Cloak + Main Gauche = dodge tank.
Geomancer is mostly MEH but situationally useful. There's a party cave which is 90% boring 10% pants wetting terror where their class ability will shine.
@illhousen already covered the uses of the beastmaster. Basically a physical Blue Mage - useful if you know the game really well, but otherwise gets overshadowed by more straightforward classes.
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Eyyyyy, an Omi update when I'm at home for once so I don't have to type everything on a little phone keyboard.
Problem is, the only classes that can equip them are Thief and Freelancer, so you need to have one of those in the party to actually make use of it. Of course, now that you have a Main Gauche a Thief becomes surprisingly durable with that block chance, especially stacked with the Elven Cloak...
Beastmaster is a niche class, though it's a powerful niche. The !Capture ability lets you play Pokemon with random enemies and often they'll have absolutely ridiculous abilities available. As in, I'm pretty sure now or just a bit later you can have Holy or Flare on demand from some of them. They also learn !Control which is one of the most important skills in the game for learning Blue Magics, but also is surprisingly good at completely shutting down some random encounters because you just nab the most annoying enemy and now it works for you. I actually had Lenna swapping into one or using !Control for a good while in the midgame.
Geomancer is Geomancer. It's got that free (if random) Geomancy power, and I guess being able to see and dodge pit traps is occasionally relevant? Honestly I wouldn't rate it much higher than Berserker myself, because every other class just offers so much more useful stuff.
Ninja? Ninja is very good. They actually don't get Katanas in FFV, but you get a number of useful abilities like !Smokescreen (Flee under a different name if you don't train a thief), !Image, and of course !Throw. In particular? Some shop or another will sell elemental scrolls soon, and they're extremely cheap to the point that if you plan to run a Ninja for a while, I highly recommend buying a ton of them. I've ended quite a few fights by just going "bored now, Ninja please AoE fire/water/thunder everything in sight", it's basically Ifrit/Shiva/Ramuh except with a slight Gil cost instead of MP. And of course that's not even getting into lategame damage output of chucking high level weapons.
And of course, Dual Wielding is a skill most any physical class is going to drool at.
Mystic Knight has a bit of a power curve going for it, honestly. The fact that they need a turn to enchant means that especially outside of boss battles, they aren't that good at this point in the game. However, once they have access to some other particular skills (like dual-wield, as you've already considered) and tier 3 magic, they do something like quadruple elemental damage if not auto-killing some enemies.
To my knowledge, ABP is mostly determined by the actual enemy formation you fight rather than the individual enemies. I'm pretty sure there's some groups you could access at this point that give 2-3 ABP a fight, but yes it's not until a bit later that you get access to the really good ABP grinding.
Heck, it's not like you have to leave Learn on if you're checking guides anyways; just slap it on whenever there's an encounter coming up you know has some Blue Magic to learn.
IIRC the gloves double your base steal chance, which is actually fairly significant.
Problem is, the only classes that can equip them are Thief and Freelancer, so you need to have one of those in the party to actually make use of it. Of course, now that you have a Main Gauche a Thief becomes surprisingly durable with that block chance, especially stacked with the Elven Cloak...
Fun fact: you can kill this guy so fast in his first phase, he doesn't get a chance to transform. On my most recent run this happened which was both annoying because I missed out on learning Death Claw, but also probably a good thing because I'd wasted so much time in the castle I had... maybe 30 seconds left on the clock.
So to go down each:
Beastmaster is a niche class, though it's a powerful niche. The !Capture ability lets you play Pokemon with random enemies and often they'll have absolutely ridiculous abilities available. As in, I'm pretty sure now or just a bit later you can have Holy or Flare on demand from some of them. They also learn !Control which is one of the most important skills in the game for learning Blue Magics, but also is surprisingly good at completely shutting down some random encounters because you just nab the most annoying enemy and now it works for you. I actually had Lenna swapping into one or using !Control for a good while in the midgame.
Geomancer is Geomancer. It's got that free (if random) Geomancy power, and I guess being able to see and dodge pit traps is occasionally relevant? Honestly I wouldn't rate it much higher than Berserker myself, because every other class just offers so much more useful stuff.
Ninja? Ninja is very good. They actually don't get Katanas in FFV, but you get a number of useful abilities like !Smokescreen (Flee under a different name if you don't train a thief), !Image, and of course !Throw. In particular? Some shop or another will sell elemental scrolls soon, and they're extremely cheap to the point that if you plan to run a Ninja for a while, I highly recommend buying a ton of them. I've ended quite a few fights by just going "bored now, Ninja please AoE fire/water/thunder everything in sight", it's basically Ifrit/Shiva/Ramuh except with a slight Gil cost instead of MP. And of course that's not even getting into lategame damage output of chucking high level weapons.
And of course, Dual Wielding is a skill most any physical class is going to drool at.
Yeah, overall FFV very much has a design philosophy of "make every class relevant and useful" compared to FIII having a lot of direct replacements. Not always successful, Berserker exists, but generally every class has its uses.
They can, it's a dagger class weapon. Heck I could have sworn most classes can equip it. I know at the least, it bounced between my Thief and Ninja a lot.
HolyDragoon
Call Gespenst!
- Location
- Portugal
No, I'm fairly sure it equips into the main hand. I'm not sure if it still works like that, but if you selected the weapon twice in the inventory it would give you a screen with the classes and which ones were able to equip it.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Two-Handing is kicking ass, yeah. Even without Spellblade, the normal damage from a normal attack at this level goes from 300-350 to 500-550, which is about a +66% increase in damage, and more importantly is the difference between OHKing tough random mobs and not doing so. Hard to tell how Spellblade interacts with these exact numbers since in fights where I use Spellblade I don't use unbuffed attacks so I don't have grounds for comparison, but given that it's a multiplicative modified I imagine the gap increases even further.
So, fun story: I know this because it happened to me repeatedly.
What happened was that, the first time I fought him, I killed him before he could Morph and never even found out he was meant to be a unique boss. Then I reloaded. Why did I reload?
In order to take the thousands of screenshots this LP has required, I use the "screenshot straight to folder" command, which is Windows+PrScr. However, my laptop is subject to frequent hiccups when using that function. When that happens, it's typically in the form of the laptop registering Windows without PrScr. That means that my laptop boots me out of the fullscreen mode back to desktop before opening the Windows menu box. Which is annoying but harmless, except that process, and pulling the FFV fullscreen up again, take a few seconds. In battle, that means several lost turns, which means taking a whole bunch of hits thanks to ATB - or, in narrative sequences, several dialogue boxes missed. And in Karnak specifically, that means losing a chunk of the timer. And it also means my screenshot never did get taken.
Long story short, I beat the Sergeant once too fast to reveal his true form, but I reloaded because the glitch happened so I didn't have any screenshots of it and the battle was messy and I lost half my remaining timer on it. Then I reloaded him again, this time he did reveal his true form, then the screenshot hiccupped again, so I had to reload. Then I thought, "hey, if I beat him fast enough, maybe I can do it with enough time on the clock to farm a couple more normal fights in the castle," so I reloaded again, and then I accidentally beat him too fast to reveal his Iron Claw form... So then I reloaded a fourth time to get him down 'properly.'
This is the kind of chaotic behind-the-scenes nonsense that I tend to skip in my updates because it just makes everything messy and annoying.
So I just tried it, and you can equip the Main Gauche in the left hand, but if you have a sword in the right hand it still just does one normal attack and doesn't increase damage.
- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
The damage spells work basically as elemental damage but in a favorable way if I'm not badly misremembering. Eg if you use fire-blade, you get double damage and ignore defense for, realistically, better than double damage, if hitting a fire weakness, but no effect if not... even if hitting eg an immunity. I might be misremembering, but my recollection is while the elemental blades are useless when not hitting a weakness, it's also not actively hurting you to still have it up.
Ra tier blades do triple instead of double, incidentally.
(this also means it's more effective against high defense enemies than low, of course, but that's true of picking on weaknesses in general)
- Location
- Somewhere on Earth
Y'know, if I wasn't like 60% sure the crystals would get fixed by the end of the game, I'd really be interested in seeing how the world would adapt to losing shit like wind and forged metals. These are fundamental pillars of reality they're breaking here! Their grandkids are gonna be told stories of the time their people could handle the winters without half of them freezing to death every year! And they're gonna respond 'being able to extract heat from things by just… waving more heat at them? Sounds fake.'
Connelly
As useless as a penguin with mittens
- Location
- Salamanca, Spain
Oh, another thing about ninja, one of their skills is to improve the chances of surprise attack for random battles. Which can range from "just eh to get one hit sooner" to "lifesaver when ieither I OHK them or they do me." If you can manage to fit it in along Thief's Vigilance to avoid ambushes, that helps to secure your ass in hard zones.
Also, I don't think most of us would mind seeing more "pause" text boxes in the screenshots if that helps you get a better control of what you're screenshooting.
Sounds like an issue. Maybe you could use a screenshot app to get around that? Although, while I'm pretty happy with Greenshot for small crap, I'm not sure if it would be enough for you.
Also, I don't think most of us would mind seeing more "pause" text boxes in the screenshots if that helps you get a better control of what you're screenshooting.
- Location
- Florida USA
Good, good. You continue on your way to acquire the means to annihilate the end-game bosses. When the time comes, you will have titans of magic who summon the Dragon God of Eidolons twice upon their foes while human blenders unleash constant strikes with the strongest blades in all of creation in each hand!
- Location
- Canada, probably
There are a bunch of things that are weird to me. I was totally sure that one of Liquid Flame's forms is immune to Ice, but I'm sure you would have noticed that. I was also certain that you never see Garula again after the tower sinks. And I don't remember the Main Gauche being equippable in the left hand (ironically). Not sure if it's the version you're using, my memory, or both.
New Jobs! Beastmaster is another weirdo like Blue Mage, where it's really powerful but really obscure and fiddly. I prefer Blue, since you only need to do the annoying thing once, but Beastmaster has some unique shenanigans it can pull.
Geomancer is like a lot like Thief, in that its passive are extremely useful, but its action command is very situational.
Ninja is crazy bananas. Throw can be expensive but is extremely powerful, and Dual-Wield is ridiculously strong. It combos especially well with Blue Mage thanks to how Goblin Punch works, but I don't know if that's something you'd rather discover yourself.
I never noticed that! That's super cool!
Dual-Wield annoys me. I really like Two-Handed, but it's pretty situational because you need to equip it. Meanwhile Dual-Wield is usually more powerful, and yet is innate. It's just plain unfair.
The most important? I don't remember Omicron picking up Goblin Punch yet, and I know [xyz] and [abc] aren't available yet. And "only useful in one place" means what, exac—oh. Oh right.
New Jobs! Beastmaster is another weirdo like Blue Mage, where it's really powerful but really obscure and fiddly. I prefer Blue, since you only need to do the annoying thing once, but Beastmaster has some unique shenanigans it can pull.
Geomancer is like a lot like Thief, in that its passive are extremely useful, but its action command is very situational.
Ninja is crazy bananas. Throw can be expensive but is extremely powerful, and Dual-Wield is ridiculously strong. It combos especially well with Blue Mage thanks to how Goblin Punch works, but I don't know if that's something you'd rather discover yourself.
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- Location
- Florida USA
It will also murderize Omi, most likely. He needs to level up a bit first.
- Location
- Columbus, OH
My mistake, this isn't a prototype for the future parts of Chrono Trigger, this is a prototype for Queen Zeal.
SolipsistSerpent
Endlessly Devouring
Maybe the hurricane form is in some versions? Omicron did say
Oh Ninja, how broken you are (almost as if this game is made by a Japanese company). Statistically it's excellent, with high Strength, amazing Agility (second only to Thief), and average Stamina. The only low stat is Magic, which actually matters as scrolls do scale off the Magic stat. While the Ninja's claim to fame is high physical damage augmented by Dual Wield, earlier in the game it's actually their scrolls that make them insane.
See, to make up for the low Magic stat Ninja's have, scrolls have an insane spell power of which puts them roughly halfway between -ara and -aga spells, and being inherently multi-target means they don't lose any power to hit all enemies like Black magic. Due to the high spell power, a Ninja throwing scrolls usually beats a Black Mage without an element boosting rod at this stage (although they fall behind when using the rods). Put Throw on said Black Mage though, and you trivialise a good part of the game.
For those that want the specific values (spoilers for the game's black magic and summons):
See, to make up for the low Magic stat Ninja's have, scrolls have an insane spell power of which puts them roughly halfway between -ara and -aga spells, and being inherently multi-target means they don't lose any power to hit all enemies like Black magic. Due to the high spell power, a Ninja throwing scrolls usually beats a Black Mage without an element boosting rod at this stage (although they fall behind when using the rods). Put Throw on said Black Mage though, and you trivialise a good part of the game.
For those that want the specific values (spoilers for the game's black magic and summons):
Note: Hitting an elemental weakness ignores M.Def
Level 1 Black Magic: 15
Chocobo: 30
Sylph: 30
Shiva: 38
Ifrit: 45
Level 2 Black Magic: 50
Ramuh: 53
Fat Chocobo (8% chance when casting Chocobo): 75
Bio: 105
Phoenix: 105
Titan: 110
Scrolls: 150
Syldra: 165
Level 3 Black Magic: 185
Leviathan: 195
Holy: 241
Bahamut : 250
Flare (calculates M.Def as 1/32 of actual value): 254
Odin (Gungnir): 255
Level 1 Black Magic: 15
Chocobo: 30
Sylph: 30
Shiva: 38
Ifrit: 45
Level 2 Black Magic: 50
Ramuh: 53
Fat Chocobo (8% chance when casting Chocobo): 75
Bio: 105
Phoenix: 105
Titan: 110
Scrolls: 150
Syldra: 165
Level 3 Black Magic: 185
Leviathan: 195
Holy: 241
Bahamut : 250
Flare (calculates M.Def as 1/32 of actual value): 254
Odin (Gungnir): 255
- Location
- Amman, Jordan
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
I think one of the more valuable Blue Magic spells one can learn with !Control is White Wind (not sure what it's original name is, I played the fan translation ROM). Basically a mid-tier all-team healing spell that's useful in a pinch. Sadly, it's still a ways off.
Also, Geomancer (or Ninja) can be very useful. Some enemies (like Skull Eater in the caves further ahead, as in quite a bit ahead) have such insane DEF and MDEF they take 0 damage from everything except at higher levels. Fortunately, they're in areas where Geomancer spells can summon some really good spells, like Stalagmite/Stalactite (forgot which one) which bypass DEF and MDEF, while Ninjas flat out ignore DEF with !Throw.
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cB557
voOOP
To be fair, plenty of american video games love them their ninjas too.
That is true, but the other Japanese inspired job (Samurai) is one of only two jobs that I'd say is better than Ninja thanks to Gil Toss having an absurd damage formula.
Good point. It'd probably be more efficient to train on normal battles.
Tbh Samurai doesn't even need Gil Toss to be OP. They've got an inate higher dodge chance with one passive, katanas for increased crits, heavy armor and shields for top durability and more dodge, and then the rest of their learned skills are things like "lockdown an enemy with stun" and "Literally Odin". Gil Toss is just the cherry on top.
It's interesting to see the origin of all these weird classes I eventually encountered in FFTA2. The SRPG formula makes differentiating them way easier, though. Geomancer's identity, for example, consists of literally going The Floor Is Lava to hit everyone, friend or foe, across the entire map. Which is useful because you are usually outnumbered and you can prep your party with resistance or even elemental absorption. Their thing here seems super silly in comparison.
- Location
- Florida USA
IIRC the earliest it becomes available is Ronka, the fan enemies.
It's still something of a niche job. But yeah.
- Location
- Lost in Hell
Huh. That's three crystals down…. I'm going to assume, like, 12-15 hours into the game?I don't think you've racked up over 20 hours grinding yet. I'm definitely expecting the next one to shatter too, just based on what I expect about the game's runtime, but… Are they going to bring back the Dark Crystals? Or introduce some to her means of gaining classes?
Either way 5 is the first game I've been tempted to try playing myself, though the timer is ticking down until I maybe have to try and give 7 a try again. Five's systems just seem so fun though.
For my own part I've been playing the shit out of Chained Echoes, the most refreshing RPG I've played in a long time.
Either way 5 is the first game I've been tempted to try playing myself, though the timer is ticking down until I maybe have to try and give 7 a try again. Five's systems just seem so fun though.
For my own part I've been playing the shit out of Chained Echoes, the most refreshing RPG I've played in a long time.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
i am death itself, the dhorme chimera is helpless against my muscle wizards