'Ultimate' magic and weapons

[KEV1N]

Why are they such complete garbage?

Ultima/Flare/Chill/Tornado/Surge do about 6000 - 10,000 damage with 5000 magic. Level 5 Fire is doing twice that on enemies that have normal resistance to fire and doesn't make Lightning a sitting duck.
Forcing the player to have low HP to make these spells do any real damage whilst leaving them defenceless as the spell's long animation plays makes them utterly useless.

Kikuichimonji is a tier 1 longsword. It's cheap and upgrades easily.
The Heaven's Cloud 'ultimate' longsword costs about 800,000 gil and has a the same maximum stats as the Kikuichimonji. The only difference is the number of components needed to upgrade.

What's the point?

[KarmaTheAlligator]

A lot of stuff in every RPG is completely obsolete except for maybe 1 or 2 situations (like challenge runs or something).

[Shin Dan]

Originally posted by KEV1N:

Why are they such complete garbage?

Ultima/Flare/Chill/Tornado/Surge do about 6000 - 10,000 damage with 5000 magic. Level 5 Fire is doing twice that on enemies that have normal resistance to fire and doesn't make Lightning a sitting duck.
Forcing the player to have low HP to make these spells do any real damage whilst leaving them defenceless as the spell's long animation plays makes them utterly useless.

Kikuichimonji is a tier 1 longsword. It's cheap and upgrades easily.
The Heaven's Cloud 'ultimate' longsword costs about 800,000 gil and has a the same maximum stats as the Kikuichimonji. The only difference is the number of components needed to upgrade.

What's the point?

In the ffxiii series ultimate magic and ultimate abilties have always had underwhelming damage because they're only supposed to be used on staggered foes.

a good example of this is vanille's "death" ability in 13
on a normal opponent, the spell hardly did anything and was basically useless, however if performed on a staggered enemy, it would do up to 900k damage and the chance of inflicting instant death would be much higher.

I.E.I. only use ultimate magic on staggered foes and save your good spells for those situations.
it's just not that useful in any other situation.

[ ZL|SirOO7 (Lv.99 Lightning)]

Originally posted by The Mysterious Wolf Ryu:

Originally posted by KEV1N:

Why are they such complete garbage?

Ultima/Flare/Chill/Tornado/Surge do about 6000 - 10,000 damage with 5000 magic. Level 5 Fire is doing twice that on enemies that have normal resistance to fire and doesn't make Lightning a sitting duck.
Forcing the player to have low HP to make these spells do any real damage whilst leaving them defenceless as the spell's long animation plays makes them utterly useless.

Kikuichimonji is a tier 1 longsword. It's cheap and upgrades easily.
The Heaven's Cloud 'ultimate' longsword costs about 800,000 gil and has a the same maximum stats as the Kikuichimonji. The only difference is the number of components needed to upgrade.

What's the point?

In the ffxiii series ultimate magic and ultimate abilties have always had underwhelming damage because they're only supposed to be used on staggered foes.

a good example of this is vanille's "death" ability in 13
on a normal opponent, the spell hardly did anything and was basically useless, however if performed on a staggered enemy, it would do up to 900k damage and the chance of inflicting instant death would be much higher.

I.E.I. only use ultimate magic on staggered foes and save your good spells for those situations.
it's just not that useful in any other situation.

Not really,

Ultima gets stronger the lower your health is. Same applies to Flare, Surge, Tornado, and Chill.

Try it right when you're hit with Heartless Angel, then Overclock and cast Ultima.- You'll see the real dmg it can do.

[Scarlet Crusade]

Vanille's Death %chance is only affected by the number of ailments on the target. 1% + 1% for every ailment. Stagger has nothing to do with that, only damage. And you only get real damage out of it if you use the Cerberus trick.

The ultimate spells in this game are pretty silly. It is possible for you to play with critical health on purpose throughout the game to get true use out of them, mastering perfect guard and/or defensive garbs so you never take damage, but then you have to deal with the annoying sound effect that plays as you run about with critical HP. Ultima in particular is odd because they changed how it worked from the previous two games, which was randodamage. Also, when enemies use the big four spells on you, they're generally not in critical HP and they still do good damage.

As far as weapons are concerned, that's a fashionable choice that's up to you. It's kind of silly, that the higher tier stuff is so much more expensive, but if it's something that you think looks better, it is also nice that mostly weapons all have the same end results, so if you really like the way the tier 2 sword looks you don't -have- to use the tier 5 sword.

[Red]

They're only really useful in NG+. It seems to be based on the number of health away from the max, rather than percent, so getting the highest hp possible is a must. Using the +10,000hp accessory and the +20,000hp shield (FF7 DLC fully upgraded) on low HP I can get about 150,000 damage from ultima.
Yeah, this is pretty situational, and requires a dedicated slot still, but it's still really useful. When on less than 1/4 hp I can easily one hit entire groups of weak enemies.
(Just realized this thread is years old but I found it from google so maybe someone else will as well)

[KEV1N]

It's been so long since I've played this game I don't even remember what the ♥♥♥♥ I'm talking about in the OP.

Lol.