Weapon Level stuck at 8? (glitch?)

[uismeno]

I got Guy's barehanded up to level 8 and, though I might be mistaken, it appears all leveling in weapons is frozen for all characters. I was playing through the southern tropical island for about an hour and haven't seen any more progress -- Guy is still at level 8's beginning in barehanded, despite being my main combatant, and no characters appear to have made any progress since in weapons. Glitch or does the game come to a point where leveling spikes suddenly?

[Juwude]

if you're doing a lot of damage and 1hkoing enemies you wont get exp, even from the strongest enemies in the game..

try using protect and blink on an enemy a couple of times and beat them up with the weapon you want to level, you should do 0 damage and miss sometimes. That way even with 99 strength you'll get exp. This applies to offensive magic too, youll need to use shell/wall/barrier to get spells past like level 10/11 depending on how high your int is.

[Goilveig]

You're killing too quickly.

The basic formula is this (if the final result is 0 or less you get no weapon growth) :

[Weapon XP] = [Number of Attacks Made] + [Battle Rank] - [Weapon Level]

Battle ranks only go up to 7, and that's at the final dungeon. Tropical Island battle ranks are only 2-5 depending on the encounter. So at level 8, you need to do a minimum of 4 attacks on the same character (dual wielding does count as 2 attacks per round) just to gain anything at all. Levels beyond about 10 won't be achieved through normal gameplay because you will kill too fast to take enough swings in a single fight.

The best method to level up weapons is to equip the lowest gear you have (sleep sword is great to have on one character to prevent damage to the party) and put your fighter in the back row and just auto-attack for a long spell. I leveled Guy's axe skill to 16 just before the final dungeon, and I would just auto-attack and do something else until I heard the music announce that he either killed the enemy or the enemy fled, and I rinsed and repeated.

[Leviathan]

Originally posted by uismeno:

Guy is still at level 8's beginning in barehanded

Besides what people said, equip two shields to level up barehanded.

[uismeno]

Thanks for the help!

Limiting the attacking to one character with the rest either defending or doing something defensive helped. Very neat.

[Zsrai]

Besides grinding for the achievement, having weapon level about 8-10 is all you need to beat the same (there is a reason it naturally stops there). About level 6-8 for spells is the "natural resting point" too.

[Aros]

I got weapons/shields to 16 on the Dreadnought pretty easily. Weakest possible weapons, strongest armor, autoattack spamming fights against Captains which are infinitely triggerable. A couple thousand max HP and 40-60 strength should do it just fine. Theoretically doable before advancing the plot at all by triggering them in Fynn.

I'm not sure what strength stat you should do it before to max out hand, since that does a lot more breakthrough damage than weak weapons. So long as you don't do 0 damage every single time and can drop its HP so its killable and have enough max hp to not die in the fight, this is a decent semi-afk grind.