Game is fantastic, but I have one gripe...

[Baklavah]

The Ifrit Eikonic Abilities are REALLY bad... Will-o-Wykes and Ignition are just... absolute garbage. Whoever signed off on those doesn't understand their own game. Ignition should have been "Hell Flame" (yes I just made that name up), a derivative of Hellfire, letting Clive throw a big fireball that would not only do damage in an AoE, but set the ground ablaze for a short period to do a bit of damage over time as well. Will-o-Wykes could have been made more useful as well. Instead of "negating" attacks and dealing damage as long as there are fireballs, the skill could have been made into something like "Obliteration" (yes I just made that name up too), wherein activating it did the same effect, but instead the "fireballs" would be spent to power up magic burst attacks or charged up flame attacks like Burning Blade.

ANYTHING would have been better than whatever the current two abilities are. They are terrible. Not even remotely viable alternatives to the Phoenix skills.

[Scarlet Crusade]

The cooldown trinket for Judgment Bolt is in the Crystalline Dominion on your way to fight Bahamut, so yeah, there's a bit of a wait until you get it. But I very rarely used those, myself, because I was practically married to the trio of accessories that increase your EXP, AP, and Gil received for the vast majority of the game. Since the AP one didn't work on bosses or hunt marks, I'd swap out that one for something else, but usually a damage increaser of some sort, not a cooldown timer, since I didn't have them in rotation for general use, I learned to use the skills with their default cooldowns, so that's how I'm judging them.

The Ramuh trial gives the other Judgment Bolt trinket, the one that increases its damage, but the problem with that is that you can get the one for Gigaflare to increase its damage at the same progression point, and if you're like me, and you can only use one or the other, then the Gigaflare one always wins, since it deals far more damage comparatively speaking.

[iameatingjam]

Originally posted by Scarlet Crusade:

To me, Flames of Rebirth fell off hard when Ramuh entered the scene. I learned Judgment Bolt instead and never looked back. The healing effect isn't much needed for the same reason I don't feel like Will of the Wykes is needed. Offense is just better than defense in this game, and so the more firepower you get with each new Eikon, the better. Scarlet Cyclone similarly fell off compared to Thunderstorm.

I used judgment bolt a lot too. Don't think I tried thunderstorm. Flames of rebirth stayed pretty great when I wanted to vapourize an entire room of weak enemies. Though I admit when it came to pure 1vs1 damage dealing, judgment bolt and gigaflare did do better. Still, I had time to get off all 3 when an enemy was staggered... so I just stuck with it I guess. But there was a lot of spells I never even tried. At least half of them.

[Scarlet Crusade]

Windup is essentially Ignition but all its damage in one hit but you have to charge it up, and Raging Fists is the melee counter equivalent to Heatwave, so getting Titan was truly the death of the Phoenix/Ifrit Eikon for me, where I mastered Ignition and Heatwave and equipped it to other Eikons as needed. Titan got replaced by Bahamut similarly because Megaflare was a better innate ability, but Windup and Raging Fists lived on. Bahamut’s Gigaflare was the only ability that was worth keeping, but it’s a hell of a move, Shiva’s Frostbite is just too broken to not use, and then Odin’s Zantetsuken follows.

All that to me led to the ideal setup of Garuda (whose abilities are just not good by that point, but Deadly Embrace never stops delivering) as a container with two free slots, which I used for utility skills, Shiva for Diamond Dust and a free slot (usually Gigaflare), and Odin for Dancing Steel and another free slot, generally occupied by Lightning Rod because those abilities synchronize so perfectly. I’d change up the free slots based on what I was fighting, what things I needed at the time.