is it a mistake to make weapons too strong?

[GJS85]

So I am a first time player, currently I'm in chapter 3, and have some fairly strong weapons thanks to playing around with fusion. It's a bit annoying, but recently when playing story missions I sometimes lose due to the monsters using my own weapons against me.

Just now I played a mission with little confine items, so I just summoned a mage and a valkyrie (and Marona deals good dmg herself too). I walked around the map getting rid of some monsters and destroying the "keepout coloured square" items, then after a couple of turns my valkyrie time ran out (remove 0) so she got removed, her spear was dropped and immediately got picked up by an enemy monster who used it to oneshotkill marona. Still had 2 teammates left at that point, but with only a few turns to go there were too many enemies, so I forfeitted.

This happened to me a couple of times now; enemy stealing/picking up my strong weapons and using them against me. Especially when they manage to kill Marona, things can take a turn for the worst fast, even when up to that point the enemy was easily beaten.

So my question is: Is it a mistake to make weapons too powerful? Even if I try and throw them away when confine time runs out, there are plenty of enemy monsters who have high steal chance and the only way to avoid steal is to not equip strong weapons.

[Albcatmastercat]

No, it's not a mistake. That problem does happen, though. You can spend the last turn throwing the weapon out of bounds so they can't pick it up. There's not much you can do to avoid those rabbits, though.

[Fel]

Well, if you have enough powerful weapons, it's not a mistake at all, but you first have to ensure that at least Marona's weapon is more potent, preferably in all stats including def and res so that she can resist pretty well even when under assault by one of your powerful weapons.

Steal is usually a non-issue, because most of it is determined by the levels, and the ones that have good chances of stealing from you probably already have enough power to be a threat without any weapon anyway.

What you actually want to do is to try and end their last turn further away from the front line, or to make sure that Marona will act before any of the nearby enemies so that she can summon something from said weapon (it gives really low exp to that phantom, but it's better than being killed by your own equipment).

To be fair, I usually mostly power up only Marona's weapon (a vase in most cases), fusing things into it to augment the equip % as much as possible for def, res and spd (the rest is not bad but optionnal given that the vase is mostly res-based).
The rest of my team gets upgrades every now and then, but they lag behind by a huge margin in both gear and levels at least until levels start to reach the thousands.

Of course, it still gets hairy when Marona gets her vase stolen, but if you use good titles it also becomes less and less of a problem.

[GJS85]

First off thank you both for your replies. Meanwhile I've fused Marona's weapon with some high level rock items, doubling her defense stat and getting a bit more of other stats too. This should up her survivability.

Having one or two spirits die due to enemy taking a strong weapon isn't a big deal, I can always summon new ones. Only Marona is irreplaceble. So I guess I should pay a lot of attention to her defensive stats, and also try to keep her out of the firezone a bit more.

Only giving Marona an uber weapon might be a good idea strategywise, but at the same time it would make the game boring I fear. I usually train too much characters when the ammount of characters is optional. For instance I had over twice the ammount of characters usuable in a map in Disgaea2, it's just fun to have a lot of characters. I guess I have pokemon syndrome? Usually halfway through a game I regret doing this, due to all the work training. But seriously, only 1 trained character is boring.

Anyway, time to continue PB. Thanks again for the advice.

[Racaholic]

Make sure when you end your turn, don't stand directly next to any enemies. If you end turn directly next to them and they don't have anything equipped they'll try to steal your weapon 90% of the time with a pretty high success rate. Hope this isn't too basic of advice, but you can move after attacking if you have movement left. If they enemy does have to move to steal your item, much of the time they'll use up their remaining movement and be unable to act if they do succeed in stealing.