Status weapon

[Shinigami Miroku]

I got a 4-slot weapon for Rikku with Silencestrike on it, and I was thinking of filling the other 3 slots with other status strikes, so I was wondering which ones (outside of Death, which I already have Lulu's Cait Sith for) would be best to go with it.

[Xengre]

To be honest? None. Just play going forward until you can either beat the game. Status effects aren't that useful against anything stronger like superbosses and core story enemies are a joke even when hyper under leveled. What is good is Quick attack abuse. Just spam quick attack. Depending on how you do your sphere grid you can get like 50+ turns to a boss' single turn spamming Quick Attack (might be Delay attack, honestly its been a long time since I played on PS2 lol)

[Casurin]

You are at what part of the progress? Is Rikku strong/fast enough in your team?
And why do you even want status-weapons?

The correct status-weapons certainly can be nice against specific enemies. Mostly you want the status to be there before the enemy can do anything, so first-strike and darkness.
Just don't waste too much effort on it as what Xengre said is correct - hardly any status-effects work on stronger enemies.

[Hinnyuu]

It's generally not worth the effort of customizing it onto weapons.

It's also generally not worth using status effects in the first place, as people have mentioned, however there's a few caveats:

Certain enemies can be dangerous to unsuspecting players, and can be very effectively shut down with statuses. This includes using silence on elementals (they won't be able to do anything at all, since they can't attack physically), or using blind on powerful hitters like bicorns.

But there's also some tricks with statuses that you can pull in specific situations. The guado guards during the Wendigo boss fight, for example, will not cast their special spells on death if they are killed via petrify. Malboro/Great Malboro will never use Bad Breath if you keep them in Provoke status. And some bosses are not immune to poison, and on a long fight with lots of actions that can add up to a lot of damage (for example Seymour Natus and Seymour Flux are both susceptible, though it may take some tries for it to stick). Some bosses can also be silenced (Seymour Flux again).

Those cases are so special and few and far between, though, that you really don't need a dedicated weapon for it. If you really want to use a status weapon on the regular, then Petrify or K.O. are the two effects that will be most useful for run-off-the-mill fighting because they can sometimes outright oneshot enemies; however, given how much time it would take to customize those effects onto weapons it's basically never worth it to do so.

[Shinigami Miroku]

At the time of writing I was around the point of the Wendigo fight; now I'm in Via Purifico.

It's unfortunate that status effects are generally designed to nerf the party, rather than helping them. Status effects are just such an interesting concept, and even today I daresay they're severely underutilized by RPG devs. Will definitely keep the bits for Malboro and those bosses in mind (I know who they are since I did play the game a LOOOOOOOOONG time ago); I absolutely hate Malboros no matter what FF they show up in...

[Casurin]

Originally posted by Shinigami Miroku:

It's unfortunate that status effects are generally designed to nerf the party, rather than helping them.

That is something i rather dislike in FF.
And .... we got Zombie that playes a role in basically 3 bossfights and 1 normal mob... and in most other situations you are better of not using it actively (having a zombie-weapon is ok - but dont craft one)

[Hinnyuu]

Originally posted by Shinigami Miroku:

It's unfortunate that status effects are generally designed to nerf the party, rather than helping them.

It's more the fact that fights are too easy. Status effects aren't useless. They do help you, a lot - in theory. In practice, however, so many regular enemies just die in so few hits that it's simply not worth it to use statuses on them.

If you play a mod like Sin Unleashed, for example, where enemies have significantly more health and stats, you'll find statuses QUITE useful. But even there it's usually status abilities/items rather than weapon customizations.

That being said, this mostly extends to manually customizing weapons for statuses. It's unfeasible because usually it takes so much time to gather the requisite materials - if you just happen to find those, or happen to find a weapon that already has statuses on it, it's totally fine to use it.

[Shinigami Miroku]

That's true, most normal enemies are pretty easy. Don't think I've come across many enemies outside of the likes of the giant in the Thunder Plains that doesn't take more than 2 hits to take out...

Honestly, I've never modded a game outside of KotOR2's TSLRCM, but I might look into that Sin Unleashed mod. I definitely wouldn't mind some extra challenge.

[Hinnyuu]

Originally posted by Shinigami Miroku:

Honestly, I've never modded a game outside of KotOR2's TSLRCM, but I might look into that Sin Unleashed mod. I definitely wouldn't mind some extra challenge.

It has its problems, but anything is better than vanilla difficulty ;)

The modding scene for FFX isn't exactly thriving, we'll take what we can get I suppose.

[Nezkeys]

All i used were status weapons they are way better than anything else you get during the story. Piercing is also very good early and mid game so just slap them on a piercing weapon until you start seeing equips with 3 or 4 blank slots. Of course deathstrike + stonestrike is the most op but a) you wont have the farplane winds for deathstrike until much later and b) they stop you from getting overkills. C) a lot like to use those to make deathproof armour on a certain story boss. Anyway...

Poisontouch
Darktouch
Silencetouch
Sleeptouch / Piercing

Will make an absolutely devastating weapon early/midgame as it will incapacitate almost everything in random battles during most of the story 50% of the time. A lot of bosses get hit by poison too. Of course you cant make a 4 slot early so just add what you can. once you get the mats for strike they always land but by that point you may be breaking 9999 damage so anything with BDL on is better (CW for example). Seeing magic enemies unable to do anything or physical enemies unable to hit you..while poisom wrecks them is hilarious.

If you want to though you can just have wakka be your sole statuser and use his buster attacks. That would free up some slots for things like alchemy (doubles healing of items).

[Casurin]

Originally posted by Nezkeys:

All i used were status weapons they are way better than anything else you get during the story.

Yeah, you can get some pretty decent status-weapons before even being able to modify equip your self, and with effects that you also do not have access to the items needed for them.

Using what you got during story - great.
Making those items - mediocre.

[Nezkeys]

Originally posted by Casurin:

Originally posted by Nezkeys:

All i used were status weapons they are way better than anything else you get during the story.

Yeah, you can get some pretty decent status-weapons before even being able to modify equip your self, and with effects that you also do not have access to the items needed for them.

Using what you got during story - great.
Making those items - mediocre.

story/npc equipment is terrible

[Hinnyuu]

Originally posted by Nezkeys:

story/npc equipment is terrible

It's far from optimal, but it's free.

In most cases investing time into dedicated farming for transitional equipment is just not worth the effort. This is one of the FF games where equipment has the least impact on performance, so optional content aside you could probably rip through the story with ease using blank weapons and armor if you really wanted to.

I've had it happen at least once that I replaced a character's starting armor with a 4-slot optimized endgame armor and never once equipped anything else on them during the story; not intentionally, I just forgot. And it wasn't noticeable enough to remember at any point (doesn't help that Kimahri is super forgettable in general...).

It really does come down to this:

Originally posted by Casurin:

Using what you got during story - great.
Making those items - mediocre.

Simply a matter of cost/benefit - anything that's incidental is fair game, but few things are really worth putting actual time and effort into.

[Nezkeys]

Originally posted by Hinnyuu:

Originally posted by Nezkeys:

story/npc equipment is terrible

It's far from optimal, but it's free.

In most cases investing time into dedicated farming for transitional equipment is just not worth the effort. This is one of the FF games where equipment has the least impact on performance, so optional content aside you could probably rip through the story with ease using blank weapons and armor if you really wanted to.

I've had it happen at least once that I replaced a character's starting armor with a 4-slot optimized endgame armor and never once equipped anything else on them during the story; not intentionally, I just forgot. And it wasn't noticeable enough to remember at any point (doesn't help that Kimahri is super forgettable in general...).

It really does come down to this:

Originally posted by Casurin:

Using what you got during story - great.
Making those items - mediocre.

Simply a matter of cost/benefit - anything that's incidental is fair game, but few things are really worth putting actual time and effort into.

all I see again is about how much effort you have to put in so you'd rather just settle for whatever. That's fine and your choice but there are lots of far better equips you can make for minimal effort during the story and anything that takes a bit more of an effort is generally worth it, kind of like anything in real life. If you prefer to use your waterstrike tidus wep against enemies that take half damage from water go ahead but I prefer not to. okay maybe that's a bit sarcastic but...lets take 5% strength weps...they are nowhere near as useful as a multi status weapon. that's not even opinion just purely factual unless the enemy is completely immune to all statuses. hitting a hard hitter with dark, or a caster with silence...especially while they are poisoned or asleep is FAR more useful than a tiny strength boost

[Nezkeys]

poisontouch
darktouch
silencetouch

this weapon for example is not hard to make at all and extremely helpful in practically every random battle and some boss battles (although you cab cast bio at that point if you want). you can argue that wakka has status attacks but a) it costs mp, and b) its only one person. everyone with that weapon is a free incapacitation every turn. later on you can get poison fangs, smoke grenades and silence grenades to upgrade the weapon to strike versions which destroys anything else. as soon as you get the airship though you can start acquiring celestial weapons and capturing for monster arena stat farming.if you don't care about overkills then deathstrike/stonestrike will make short work of the majority of battles too although deathstrike will come much later basically once you've got the 60 farplane winds. some use thes for deathproof against yunalesca. I didn't bother and just used death ward and raised people manually

[Hinnyuu]

Originally posted by Nezkeys:

anything that takes a bit more of an effort is generally worth it

That would need to be demonstrated first. For most options, you'd find it VERY hard to make up the time needed to create them. If you spend 30 minutes making an armor to protect against X, do you really think that protection is going to save you 30+ minutes of time overall?

Obviously, there's breakpoints where it IS worth it. Fluctuations based on drops etc. can change the equation. Evaluate on a case-by-case basis, but realistically, you need very little for most parts of the game. The only thing actually demanding gear is endgame content, and there you can streamline pretty much immediately given that you get access to the materials the same time you get access to the content itself.

Originally posted by Nezkeys:

If you prefer to use your waterstrike tidus wep against enemies that take half damage from water go ahead but I prefer not to. okay maybe that's a bit sarcastic but...lets take 5% strength weps...they are nowhere near as useful as a multi status weapon. that's not even opinion just purely factual unless the enemy is completely immune to all statuses. hitting a hard hitter with dark, or a caster with silence...especially while they are poisoned or asleep is FAR more useful than a tiny strength boost

You are, once again, missing the point entirely. Of course weapons with abilities are better than weapons without abilities; and weapons with stronger abilities are better than weapons with weaker abilities.

That's not the issue at stake.

The issue is GETTING those weapons.

You're effectively arguing "why isn't everyone flying first class, the service is so much better than in coach, and you get more leg room than even business class". Effect isn't the issue. Cost is.