Friday, October 26, 2018
Sunday, October 21, 2018
Final Fantasy Tactics Strategies
Final Fantasy Tactics is the best tactics game I've ever played and even though I've played it ad nauseum and moved on, I still wake up some mornings thinking about it. This morning I woke up thinking about the absolute best Final Fantasty Tactics strats, bro! The best! You might not want to use these strats because you don't think they're cool, but If you really want to wreck some shit, these works. Disclaimer: These strats do not work against chocobos. Chocobos will kill you. Have a good day.
Handicaps
The best way to turn a fight around is to handicap your foes. You can control the pacing of a fight by lightly handicaping one or two enemies. The best way to do this is with either Break Skills or the Frog spell. All the magic options available such as Paralysis, Don't Act, Slow, etc., are temporary and buy you one or two rounds if they work. If they don't work, you've wasted a turn and if you waste too many turns, you're going to feel it. I want to say Sleep is useful because it lasts a very long time, but it's still temporary.
Break Skills + Dual Wield
Dual Wield takes a bit of time to get to, but once you get it, your favorite break skills become your favoriter. Dual wield + break skills increases the probability of one of your breaks landing. If the success rate of the skill is high enough, you will generally see one of them working and two-for-ones occur.
One unit suffering the effects of Speed Break x1 or x2 and Power Break x1 or x2 will show. Do this to two units and the weaker members of the enemy party will seem like their pulling their weight.
Break Skills + Range Weapons
Combine any break skills with a ranged weapon and you now have a recipe to perpetually keep your distance to avoid taking hits and avoid triggering any counter attacks until one or enough of your breaks land. This is an effective way to utilize break skills in the early game.
Frog + Chakra
If you have learned Chakra, you have a rare ability in RPGs that lets you heal MP for free. Have a character dedicated to spamming frog and have another character who can spam Chakra for infinite MP. I recommend two seperate units; One for frog and one for Chakra so you never miss a chance to use frog.
If you nail one unit with frog, any fight will turn around. If you nail two units with frog, the fight is over. It's not as cool as casting death, but Frogs' success rate is always 20% higher. Petrify is cool too; It provides slightly more range, but requires slightly more MP and is less useful.
Frog + Math Skills
If you want to talk about having spells that cost no MP, you'll want Math Skills. You can also increase the number of units you can target and render the range of the spell irrelevant. Math Skills come later and after much work though.
Buffs
The other strategies in Final Fantasy Tactics that work well are buffing your own units. Haste 1 or 2 is OK, but I want something more reliable and permanent.
Accumulate
This ability is underrated. You should have a dedicated powerhouse use this ability more than a couple times in a fight. Start a fight off by using it once or twice to take an early advantage. You will spend a few rounds of many fights moving but not doing anything. That's a perfect occasion to use this. You could also spend these rounds waiting in place, falling back, or regrouping and drawing the enemies out.
Cheer
The next most useful move is unique to Ramza and it's superb. Cheer improves speed by 1. Stack a single unit, such as your Healer or your DPS, with 3 of these to have more frequent turns and effectively have extra turns at intervals. You can use it to get the slowest party member to catch up or by giving everyone a slight boost, you'll guarantee that your party members will go before the enemies.
Speed Save, MA Save, PA Save
I accidentally discovered that Speed Save is the best way to passively break the game. The Speed/MA/PA saves fix any weaknesses in a unit. Now there are pros to taking hits.
The trick is to have low evasion and high brave. Characters with high evasion and shields and characters who frequent the back row will not get the advantages of these abilities. These reaction abilities are excellent for a front-line melee unit who wears medium armor and don't use shields like Squires, Monks, Thieves, and Ninjas. Units who do use shields can always just leave it at home.
General Abilities
Some general abilities to look for.
Samurai > Blade Grasp
This reaction ability is broken. According to its description, it's only supposed to be triggered when you're targeted by a melee weapon, but it is still triggered by bows, crossbows, and weapons thrown by using a ninjas Throw skill. This went overlooked in the War of the Lions version. Basically, it turns your brave stat into your evasion for 99% of the physical attacks in this game (yes, there are exceptions like cat-kick, repeating fist, and dash).
This is sheer defense and your unit becomes invincible against everything but magic. I recommend at least one front-line unit knows this.
Archer > Concentrate
This is one of the best support skills. All success rates improve or go up to 100.
Mediator > Equip Gun
If you're going to have anyone in the back, such as a magic class, give them a gun. Guns have a range of 8 and according to the Final Fantasy Tactics Battle Mechanics Guide, the magic guns bypass evasion.
Mediator > Invite
You turn an enemy into an ally. This skill is crazy good except for its success rate of 20%~30%. An enemy will become a guest character and there is the option to recruit them when the fight ends. This is equal to casting a version of confuse that doesn't wear off and stealing all their equipment in one turn.
Mediator > Threaten or Solution
A very high success rate of dropping an enemy's Brave stat by 20 or Faith stat by 20 each time you use it. Low brave means less reactions. Dropping the faith stat is reliable way to cripple a magic class. If you drop their brave to 10 or less, they transform into a chicken which effectively makes the useless. You can also reduce your own units Faith which means their magic will suck, their friends magic when used on them will suck, but enemy magic used against them will suck too.
Note: These abilities permanently reduce brave and faith stats by 4. Some strats involve using these abilities to effectively make magic useless and low brave means the move-find ability has a higher chance of working. You can build faith and brave back up with Preach and Praise (talk skills), Cheer Up (Ramza only), and Brave Up/Faith Up reaction abilities.
Math Skills
Magic sucks in this game. You have almost no MP. A wizard can reliably nail one, maybe two guys per fight before they're spent; then they're useless. If you're prepared to GRIND LIKE A BASTARD however, you can have 1 unit who has MOST of the games' magic in one list and can use it without MP. Math Skills can be tricky to use, but this skill is OP.
Ninja > Throw > Whatever
Throwing shit is actually not the most effective way to deal damage, but the range of Throw is equal to your Move speed, so if you have a move speed of 6, 7, or 8, then you'll be able to hit anyone from any part of the map and get the hell away. The damage of throw is based on your Speed stat and the Items' Attack stat. I usually just learn to throws Shurikens and Balls. The elemental balls are useful when you need melee fighters to do elemental damage.
Ninja > Dual Wield
This is definitely cool, but not constantly useful.
Monk > Chakra, Revive, Stigma
Punch arts have some skills that are like very handy alternative white magic that melee characters can use. Chakra restores HP and MP of the user and up to 4 unites. Stigma Magic has the same range and removes most status conditions, and Revive can bring a unit back from KO. These skills are more effective with high PA. Note: The Martial Arts support ability increases the effects of these abilities even if the user is not barehanded.
Monk > Martial Arts + Ninja
If you don't know this rule, than you're not a real Final Fantasy fan. I'm serious. Hang your head and weep for the loss of your status as a fan if you don't know punches do more damage than weapons in Final Fantasy. If you give a unit Martial Arts, they will basically do as much damage as a unit that is equipped with the best weapon available. Talk about saving money.
Now, if you give a ninja Martial Arts, you basically have 2 Punch Man. This is the most lethal melee combination for generic units. Combine that with Accumulate or Speed/PA Save and you have the Square Soft version of Goku.
Thief > Gil Taking or Mediator > Negotiate
If you don't want to grind money, skip this. The amount of Gil you steal is equal to Level * Speed. Here's the scenario: One enemy left is a Frog. Ramza is spamming Cheer on your designated thief who is fast enough to have 2 and 3 turns per round taking 300+ gil each turn. Hashtag not even five minutes.
Skills to Avoid
Archers
Archers are really fucking cool in this game, but there are better ways to do damage or fight from range. I really want to like Charge, but there's better ways to do damage.
Geomancy
I always wanted to use geomancy, but there's more effective ways to do damage. Geomancy is for crowd control, and in Final Fantasy Tactics, that means you can target 2 units at once after they set themselves up for it by attacking one of your units together. Geomancy relies on both MA and PA, and who has that? The chances of the status effect they produce are so low, that they're not the point of the skills but a benefit you see sometimes. I really want to like geomancy, but it's not up to par.
Geomancer > Attack Up
I like the idea of this ability but I don't know quite how it works. I haven't noticed any significant benefit and I think we can do better.
Monk > Counter & Hamedo
The counter skills is useful if you want to do attacks that don't get you EXP or JP. I have gotten by without ever using this. It's probably good, but I like to have control over where or not I retaliate and I usually don't want my characters counter attacking in this game. Hamedo is like Counter but you avoid taking the hit and counter attack. You also attack the enemy to their face, in other words, they get to use their full evasion. For defense, Blade Grasp is still better than Hamedo. I would take Blade Grasp over Counter or Hamedo any day!
Samurai
Samurai are interesting because their Draw Out skill is MA based, so you can have a sort of magic tank instead of a glass cannon. The problem is that Samurai swords, which can break, just aren't too readily available. You don't see any good ones until chapter 3 and they're expensive as a motherfucker. The best abilities are dependent on swords you only see one of.
Samurai > Two Hands
This is a cool idea, but it only works for the attack command.
Summoners
It's like a wizard that is extra specialized. You're even more of a glass cannon. One or two good spells per fight and you're done. You also want to wait for enemies to be set up. I think this class has nothing of use.
Dancers, Bards, Mimics
These classes seem cool, but I can't see a casual player discovering a mime much less figuring out how to use it. Bards and dancers just don't contribute as much as fast as and as reliably as other units. Unlock them for the abilities you want but don't use them.
Time Magic/Ying Yang Magic
As far as support magic goes, maybe. Too middle of the road for me. These classes are comparable to Bards and Dancers.
Cloud
You know they put Cloud in here because Cloud is cool, and his look contrasts the rest of the game so much that when Cloud is in your party, it's almost like having a glimpse into what a good Star Ocean Tactics game would be like. There are two problems with Cloud. One, you get him very late in the game and he starts out with nothing. You just wouldn't and shouldn't bother making him competitive. Two, Cloud sucks in this game. Let me explain. There are two types of characters you can use, generic ones and special one. The special characters have a unique job like Holy Knight or Dark Knight and it's sometimes pretty fucking powerful. Special characters also have above average stats. Cloud is a special character, but his unique job is all flash. His above average stats are just slight. The only advantage to using Cloud is that he is a boy unit who can use the girl items.
My Strat
Ramza as a Squire because that's awesome. A male ninja with Break Skills. A female mediator with Math Skills (With Cure 3, Life 2, Esuna, Holy, Haste, and Frog) a Magic Gun so she has something to do when she's not spamming the forces of life and death. After that, anything will do. I like the idea of using only 4 characters. A knight dual wielding knight swords or a second ninja are good choices. I think of character number four as a utility character to round out the party, provide more of what I want, or fill a role I need for a particular fight.
Handicaps
The best way to turn a fight around is to handicap your foes. You can control the pacing of a fight by lightly handicaping one or two enemies. The best way to do this is with either Break Skills or the Frog spell. All the magic options available such as Paralysis, Don't Act, Slow, etc., are temporary and buy you one or two rounds if they work. If they don't work, you've wasted a turn and if you waste too many turns, you're going to feel it. I want to say Sleep is useful because it lasts a very long time, but it's still temporary.
Break Skills + Dual Wield
Dual Wield takes a bit of time to get to, but once you get it, your favorite break skills become your favoriter. Dual wield + break skills increases the probability of one of your breaks landing. If the success rate of the skill is high enough, you will generally see one of them working and two-for-ones occur.
One unit suffering the effects of Speed Break x1 or x2 and Power Break x1 or x2 will show. Do this to two units and the weaker members of the enemy party will seem like their pulling their weight.
Break Skills + Range Weapons
Combine any break skills with a ranged weapon and you now have a recipe to perpetually keep your distance to avoid taking hits and avoid triggering any counter attacks until one or enough of your breaks land. This is an effective way to utilize break skills in the early game.
Frog + Chakra
If you have learned Chakra, you have a rare ability in RPGs that lets you heal MP for free. Have a character dedicated to spamming frog and have another character who can spam Chakra for infinite MP. I recommend two seperate units; One for frog and one for Chakra so you never miss a chance to use frog.
If you nail one unit with frog, any fight will turn around. If you nail two units with frog, the fight is over. It's not as cool as casting death, but Frogs' success rate is always 20% higher. Petrify is cool too; It provides slightly more range, but requires slightly more MP and is less useful.
Frog + Math Skills
If you want to talk about having spells that cost no MP, you'll want Math Skills. You can also increase the number of units you can target and render the range of the spell irrelevant. Math Skills come later and after much work though.
Buffs
The other strategies in Final Fantasy Tactics that work well are buffing your own units. Haste 1 or 2 is OK, but I want something more reliable and permanent.
Accumulate
This ability is underrated. You should have a dedicated powerhouse use this ability more than a couple times in a fight. Start a fight off by using it once or twice to take an early advantage. You will spend a few rounds of many fights moving but not doing anything. That's a perfect occasion to use this. You could also spend these rounds waiting in place, falling back, or regrouping and drawing the enemies out.
Cheer
The next most useful move is unique to Ramza and it's superb. Cheer improves speed by 1. Stack a single unit, such as your Healer or your DPS, with 3 of these to have more frequent turns and effectively have extra turns at intervals. You can use it to get the slowest party member to catch up or by giving everyone a slight boost, you'll guarantee that your party members will go before the enemies.
Speed Save, MA Save, PA Save
I accidentally discovered that Speed Save is the best way to passively break the game. The Speed/MA/PA saves fix any weaknesses in a unit. Now there are pros to taking hits.
The trick is to have low evasion and high brave. Characters with high evasion and shields and characters who frequent the back row will not get the advantages of these abilities. These reaction abilities are excellent for a front-line melee unit who wears medium armor and don't use shields like Squires, Monks, Thieves, and Ninjas. Units who do use shields can always just leave it at home.
General Abilities
Some general abilities to look for.
Samurai > Blade Grasp
This reaction ability is broken. According to its description, it's only supposed to be triggered when you're targeted by a melee weapon, but it is still triggered by bows, crossbows, and weapons thrown by using a ninjas Throw skill. This went overlooked in the War of the Lions version. Basically, it turns your brave stat into your evasion for 99% of the physical attacks in this game (yes, there are exceptions like cat-kick, repeating fist, and dash).
This is sheer defense and your unit becomes invincible against everything but magic. I recommend at least one front-line unit knows this.
Archer > Concentrate
This is one of the best support skills. All success rates improve or go up to 100.
Mediator > Equip Gun
If you're going to have anyone in the back, such as a magic class, give them a gun. Guns have a range of 8 and according to the Final Fantasy Tactics Battle Mechanics Guide, the magic guns bypass evasion.
Mediator > Invite
You turn an enemy into an ally. This skill is crazy good except for its success rate of 20%~30%. An enemy will become a guest character and there is the option to recruit them when the fight ends. This is equal to casting a version of confuse that doesn't wear off and stealing all their equipment in one turn.
Mediator > Threaten or Solution
A very high success rate of dropping an enemy's Brave stat by 20 or Faith stat by 20 each time you use it. Low brave means less reactions. Dropping the faith stat is reliable way to cripple a magic class. If you drop their brave to 10 or less, they transform into a chicken which effectively makes the useless. You can also reduce your own units Faith which means their magic will suck, their friends magic when used on them will suck, but enemy magic used against them will suck too.
Note: These abilities permanently reduce brave and faith stats by 4. Some strats involve using these abilities to effectively make magic useless and low brave means the move-find ability has a higher chance of working. You can build faith and brave back up with Preach and Praise (talk skills), Cheer Up (Ramza only), and Brave Up/Faith Up reaction abilities.
Math Skills
Magic sucks in this game. You have almost no MP. A wizard can reliably nail one, maybe two guys per fight before they're spent; then they're useless. If you're prepared to GRIND LIKE A BASTARD however, you can have 1 unit who has MOST of the games' magic in one list and can use it without MP. Math Skills can be tricky to use, but this skill is OP.
Ninja > Throw > Whatever
Throwing shit is actually not the most effective way to deal damage, but the range of Throw is equal to your Move speed, so if you have a move speed of 6, 7, or 8, then you'll be able to hit anyone from any part of the map and get the hell away. The damage of throw is based on your Speed stat and the Items' Attack stat. I usually just learn to throws Shurikens and Balls. The elemental balls are useful when you need melee fighters to do elemental damage.
Ninja > Dual Wield
This is definitely cool, but not constantly useful.
Monk > Chakra, Revive, Stigma
Punch arts have some skills that are like very handy alternative white magic that melee characters can use. Chakra restores HP and MP of the user and up to 4 unites. Stigma Magic has the same range and removes most status conditions, and Revive can bring a unit back from KO. These skills are more effective with high PA. Note: The Martial Arts support ability increases the effects of these abilities even if the user is not barehanded.
Monk > Martial Arts + Ninja
If you don't know this rule, than you're not a real Final Fantasy fan. I'm serious. Hang your head and weep for the loss of your status as a fan if you don't know punches do more damage than weapons in Final Fantasy. If you give a unit Martial Arts, they will basically do as much damage as a unit that is equipped with the best weapon available. Talk about saving money.
Now, if you give a ninja Martial Arts, you basically have 2 Punch Man. This is the most lethal melee combination for generic units. Combine that with Accumulate or Speed/PA Save and you have the Square Soft version of Goku.
Thief > Gil Taking or Mediator > Negotiate
If you don't want to grind money, skip this. The amount of Gil you steal is equal to Level * Speed. Here's the scenario: One enemy left is a Frog. Ramza is spamming Cheer on your designated thief who is fast enough to have 2 and 3 turns per round taking 300+ gil each turn. Hashtag not even five minutes.
Skills to Avoid
Archers
Archers are really fucking cool in this game, but there are better ways to do damage or fight from range. I really want to like Charge, but there's better ways to do damage.
Geomancy
I always wanted to use geomancy, but there's more effective ways to do damage. Geomancy is for crowd control, and in Final Fantasy Tactics, that means you can target 2 units at once after they set themselves up for it by attacking one of your units together. Geomancy relies on both MA and PA, and who has that? The chances of the status effect they produce are so low, that they're not the point of the skills but a benefit you see sometimes. I really want to like geomancy, but it's not up to par.
Geomancer > Attack Up
I like the idea of this ability but I don't know quite how it works. I haven't noticed any significant benefit and I think we can do better.
Monk > Counter & Hamedo
The counter skills is useful if you want to do attacks that don't get you EXP or JP. I have gotten by without ever using this. It's probably good, but I like to have control over where or not I retaliate and I usually don't want my characters counter attacking in this game. Hamedo is like Counter but you avoid taking the hit and counter attack. You also attack the enemy to their face, in other words, they get to use their full evasion. For defense, Blade Grasp is still better than Hamedo. I would take Blade Grasp over Counter or Hamedo any day!
Samurai
Samurai are interesting because their Draw Out skill is MA based, so you can have a sort of magic tank instead of a glass cannon. The problem is that Samurai swords, which can break, just aren't too readily available. You don't see any good ones until chapter 3 and they're expensive as a motherfucker. The best abilities are dependent on swords you only see one of.
Samurai > Two Hands
This is a cool idea, but it only works for the attack command.
Summoners
It's like a wizard that is extra specialized. You're even more of a glass cannon. One or two good spells per fight and you're done. You also want to wait for enemies to be set up. I think this class has nothing of use.
Dancers, Bards, Mimics
These classes seem cool, but I can't see a casual player discovering a mime much less figuring out how to use it. Bards and dancers just don't contribute as much as fast as and as reliably as other units. Unlock them for the abilities you want but don't use them.
Time Magic/Ying Yang Magic
As far as support magic goes, maybe. Too middle of the road for me. These classes are comparable to Bards and Dancers.
Cloud
You know they put Cloud in here because Cloud is cool, and his look contrasts the rest of the game so much that when Cloud is in your party, it's almost like having a glimpse into what a good Star Ocean Tactics game would be like. There are two problems with Cloud. One, you get him very late in the game and he starts out with nothing. You just wouldn't and shouldn't bother making him competitive. Two, Cloud sucks in this game. Let me explain. There are two types of characters you can use, generic ones and special one. The special characters have a unique job like Holy Knight or Dark Knight and it's sometimes pretty fucking powerful. Special characters also have above average stats. Cloud is a special character, but his unique job is all flash. His above average stats are just slight. The only advantage to using Cloud is that he is a boy unit who can use the girl items.
My Strat
Ramza as a Squire because that's awesome. A male ninja with Break Skills. A female mediator with Math Skills (With Cure 3, Life 2, Esuna, Holy, Haste, and Frog) a Magic Gun so she has something to do when she's not spamming the forces of life and death. After that, anything will do. I like the idea of using only 4 characters. A knight dual wielding knight swords or a second ninja are good choices. I think of character number four as a utility character to round out the party, provide more of what I want, or fill a role I need for a particular fight.
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