Using Fang, Lightning, and Hope - who should I choose as my leader

[oHAMBURGLARo]

I'm using Fang, Lightning, and Hope but don't know if I should make Fang or Lightning the leader. Which one should I choose as the leader and why?

[tiornys]

It depends on the enemies you're fighting, honestly. I'd control Fang if I needed to get a certain status ailment as quickly as possible or even if I just cared about which status ailments were inflicted first. I'd control Lightning if I wanted to leverage her AoE attacks at max efficiency. I'd control Hope if I wanted to control the sequence of SYN buffs or if I wanted to use his -ga spells to disrupt the enemy.

[oHAMBURGLARo]

I'm talking about just in general for gameplay. I don't want to keep switching the party leader.

[Scarlet Crusade]

Lightning is the most versatile and well-rounded, so for general purpose, let her lead.

[philosoraptorgames]

Making Fang the leader will suck if you ever want to use her as a sentinel and don't want to be micromanaging her actions too much. Sentinels seem to change their target at random and with a few exceptions (most notably the extra COMs in paradigms with more than one),the leader's target is everyone's target. This will lead to fighting very inefficiently, and any time I'm using a sentinel is a time I want the other two to be as effective as possible.

(This applies to any other SEN as well, but Fang is the only "natural" sentinel in your configuration. That and a few other things I say may be less applicable postgame.)

I wouldn't make Hope the leader because unlike in other FFs, leader dies = game over and Hope has like three hit points.

So your default choice seems to be Lightning.

I used Light, Fang, Vanille in almost all cases where I had a choice, which is similar to your configuration only the main caster packs marginally less oomph in exchange for being able to take some hits. The other difference is a second SAB instead of a SYN; the nice thing about your configuration is that all six roles are represented.

[Tales Delma]

Depens on enemy. In general the setup is only for bosses or rly hard monsters important, like long gui. Fang is in my opinion the best breaker because here ATK stats are the highest ingame. Lightning is a rly nice hybrid character and perfect for sentinel. i prefer most of the time Fang as leader

[tiornys]

When I use this party, I mostly swap between Fang and Hope lead. However, I don't use this party until quite a bit later in the game, and my reasons for which character I control really don't apply before chapter 12. I dislike this party for chapters 10 and 11 for a variety of reasons.

[Maechen]

Lightning till Fang gets some ravager spells. Fang is the best commando and also the only one with every commando ability. Lightning is decent as a chain builder but you have to control her for max efficiency.

It really doesn't matter who you control unless you're the min/max type.

[oHAMBURGLARo]

Well I discovered that if I use Fang as my leader and Hope dies, Lightning won't use Raise until everybody is basically at full health, even though reviving Hope and having an additional medic would heal the party much faster. Because of that reason alone, I think I might use Lightning because I can tell her to use Raise when my other medic dies.

[Scarlet Crusade]

If you use Fang to throw Phoenix Downs, you can still use Fang as a leader if you really want to.

[talgaby]

Usually people control Fang in that setup, requires the least micromanaging.
Although as it was mentioned above, despite how easy that party looks like, I wouldn't use them until late chapter 13 or post game. But, to be honest, I think all parts of the game from chapter 10 and on have better setups than that.

[Nyandragon]

i used this standard setting in the beginning but i switched it all up to light / hope / vanille wich gives me so much better results. also light feels like the strongest sentinel to me. equiped with the dodge boots you are just unhittable to all physical attacks. amazing as fck