Long Term Advise

[Ostarion]

Alright, having finally gone through the game thoroughly and testing various mechanics, here is some advice for the beginner to consider when building characters and progressing through the game.

Stat Gains Because stat gains are slow at the start and seem to slow down as you get further into the game, it is actually best that you specialize your permanent party members into a Weapon Specialist, Black mage, and White mage, so that each can specialize in the stats of Strength, Intellect, and Spirit. It is not likely that you will reach max without grinding so don't worry about it. Agility, Stamina and Magic are stats that everyone needs to have high amounts of, which means Evasion needs to be high, you need to get hit, and you need to reduce your mp respectively for all your characters. Defensive multipliers for Evasion and Magic Defense also need to be high, especially for the late game, as they will be the difference between winning and losing, they are THAT critical. All of this is a lot to take in, so let me break it down.

Weapon Specialist It is recommended that this be Firion, but anyone can work. The Weapon user should always use the strongest weapons available except for bows, and should always have a shield equipped, unless quickly trying to level up a weapon type. Switching weapon types is fine and is actually ideal since weapon experience is frequent and easy to obtain. Certain utility spells can be useful such as cure, teleport, warp, sap and the ultimate spell in the game.

Black mage It is recommended that this be Maria, but anyone can work. The Black mage should have all 4 damage elements of fire, lightning, ice, and scourge since the black mage can do the most damage in the game by targeting an elemental weakness given the same level of stat development. Other good long terms spells are curse, toad, berserk and stun. When using spells in battle, you should cycle through your spells if you can rather than focusing on casting only one spell in battle over and over again. This is because the first time you cast a spell, you get more experience then for each subsequent time, so overall you get more experience per cast by cycling. You should almost always be casting spells.

White Mage Anyone can be the white mage of the party. White mages should principally focus on defense spells such as blink, shell, protect, and barrier to name a few, they aren't as useful early game but can really save you in the late game due to the variety of special abilities and spells you will encounter. Fog is another way to counter many special abilities as well. Otherwise, cycle spells like the black mage, even if they are useless to get the most experience for your time.

Armor The various armor pieces of the game have positive and negative traits. The game shows you the positive traits quite easily, but doesn't explain any of the drawbacks, namely weight, and magic penalties. Weight reduces your evasion, which is bad. And Magic Penalty severely undercuts the effectiveness of your spell (for example shields have a -70 penalty on your intellect and spirit. Unless you can maintain max evasion with the heavy equipment, it is recommended that you do not wear it. For mages especially, stick with Cuirass armor, goldpins, power armlets, protect rings and ribbons as those pieces have low or no penalties at all. Empty slots are better than penalties.

Weapons Avoid bows, except if you want to have some levels on your weapons specialist, and even then it should wait until the end of the game if you want it. Weapons also have a magic penalty, so although your weapons specialist can use anything, your mages will want to stick with staves and knives. Ideally the black mage should have knives and the white mage staves, you can switch that around, but this arrangement is best for them. The mages will need to build some weapons levels for their weapon choice, but only for that weapon which should take very little of your time (8 levels is usually enough).

Shields Shields are the easiest way to get max evasion early in the game, but come with one of the heaviest magic penalties. Nevertheless I recommend you put a shield on all characters so that you can start getting agility for all of them. Agility is what governs your evasion as well as the preemptive strike and ambush rates on Firion. Make sure Firion gets to max evasion and stays there for the whole game. Early on you will get a Main Gauche which will allow you to dual wield knives while maintaining max evasion removing the magic penalty problem. The staff user will need to wait until their agility is high enough to dual wield staffs for max evasion. Since you have to make one mage suffer more than the other, the black mage should take priority where possible and the magic penalty on a white mage is less severe.

Evasion and Magic Defense Many enemies in the game have a a variety of special features and abilities and these two stats are what will allow you to survive. These stats are represented by a number and a percent (i.e. 1-15%) The number is the number of dodges or resists, the percent is the chance of success. Evasion should be increased to 99% as soon as possible. Magic defense is much harder to increase, but is governed by the stamina and magic stats. For your weapon specialist, you should still try to build your magic stat by hitting yourself with the sap spell occasionally, or else you'll find that your weapon user will have less magic defense than your mages. Increases the number of dodges and resists is probably the hardest stat to increase due to requiring a large number of hits of physical and magical damage. I recommend to prolong battles as often as your patience allows because the multipliers are perhaps even more important than the percentage.

Status Ailment There are three different vectors in which you can be affected by status ailments. Physical attacks, special abilities, and spells. Each of these can be stopped by certain defensive stats and sometimes equipment. Ribbons, White Robes, and Aegis Shields can reliably prevent elemental status effects from special abilities and spells but don't help against physical attacks and non elemental spells and special abilities. If you want reliable counters, blink and shell, and to a lesser extent barrier, are your best options. Physical attacks are guaranteed to affect you if they land, so blink and evasion are your only recourse. Special abilities can be countered with shell at a high level along with plenty of magic defense multipliers so that even the infamous Blaster X can't paralyze you. Barrier is able to cover all spells with the exception of stun if sufficiently high level, although shell works just as well here. Just make sure you level your defensive white magic, evasion, and magic defense, and you'll do fine.

I hope you found this advice helpful. If anyone wants to make additions or correct me, feel free to do so.

[Vambran]

Yeah shields are good till you start to max out agility 99 and Evade x 16. Slows down your STR growth but the trade off is worth it.

[Aren]

This is great, ty. I just got at Deist, and now I'm retooling my party to make Firion a RDM, Maria BlLK and Guy WHM.

The initial grind is a bit of a pita, but oh well..

[Kman]

Just curious where did you get this information on stats? How does a magic user say using a shield or heavier armor hurt them exactly? Does it reduce damage on spells? I don't notice this, or does it reduce chance of stat gains?

[Zsrai]

Originally posted by Kman:

Just curious where did you get this information on stats? How does a magic user say using a shield or heavier armor hurt them exactly? Does it reduce damage on spells? I don't notice this, or does it reduce chance of stat gains?

It reduces their stats, but doesn't show it on the character screen. Lower INT means less accuracy on your Black Magic spells, which means less hits (Fire 3 does up to 3 "hits", which is why it does more damage than Fire 1), which means less damage. The same goes for SPI with White Mages, but it doesn't seem to effect them nearly as strongly.

Knife and Staff are -5 (Mace types are -20 though!), while Unarmed is +/-0. Everything else, barring a few special cases (end game Swords), is -50 or worse.