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Those combos all make some weird choices, probably stemming from the idea that there is such a thing as a "support" role - there isn't. You don't need to compromise damage for utility in this game. Everything is a damage dealer, and you can simply mix and match whatever useful skills you want to go along with them.
For that reason, jobs like Knight or Monk are "wasted" on a pairing like Time Battlemage, because they don't get anything they want from it - for Knight that's mystic armor (to use White Robes with Excalibur), for Monk it's heavy armor/Genji Gear (to use Genji Gloves with Kanya). Not having those is a massive damage loss traded off for relatively little gain.
White Mage/Time Battlemage is especially egregious because it has a hard time dealing any kind of respectable damage, and really doesn't have anything going for it. It's effectively dead weight you lug around for no reason other than that you want to.
Now, if that's what you WANT, that's totally and 100% fine. You should always play what you enjoy and prefer over anything else. But in terms of objective performance (or as objective as you can evaluate it, anyway) there is no reason at all to have dead-weight combos when you can just have a team full of high performers instead without actually losing out on the useful stuff.
To that end, the usual top pick for Time Battlemage is Black Mage/Time Battlemage. The reason is simply that Black Mage is already the most autonomous job in the game, requiring practically nothing from a combo; while Time Battlemage is mostly held back by its low MAG and MP, both of which are fixed by the Black Mage's full array of Magick Lores and access to mystic armor. This gives you an A-tier damage dealer that can still use things like Haste(ga) or Float as needed, and even has decent healing thanks to high-MAG-boosted Cura via Adrammelech, which is often enough to sustain incidental damage even at endgame.
Time Battlemage is really the most replaceable, least useful job in the lot. Even Haste isn't actually as good as many people think, and Float is really not all that useful, either. There's enough incidental Float Motes around for the two or three areas where traps might be an issue. The rest of its toolkit is just entirely unimpressive.
Though, again, this is in terms of objective power - subjectively, people may choose to have all the fun they want with a Time Battlemage, and that's awesome if they do. But they should know what they're in for ;)
At endgame there is no doubt that knight/bushi with that setup is objectively the highest dps for sure (even not on holy weak enemies) however a firaga/ardor on an enemy that is oiled may produce a larger number on screen but you have to factor in how many hits would knight/bushi have got in while oil was bring casted. But oil is only a one time cast since its sticks on the enemy permanently iirc so if the blm does use some dps in that initial phase that is all it does lose.
I've never actually tested those two side by side tbh and it would have to be fair comparisons like normal enemies and then holy weak and fire weak enemies. I have a feeling that oil boosted fire attacks against fire weak enemies would produce the highest numbers on screen but not sure
I wouldn't necessary call monk/time knight/time and whm/time as weird "objectively bad" choices either as they are probably the best 3 offerings for an ultimate support character, it's just that their main usefulness is in the later parts of the game rendering all 3 average until then. For pure dps charcters early in the game I guess monk having access to heavy armour pushes it into first place. That being said another debate for which heavy armour class benefits a beserked pure dps monk the most is an interesting one
Early game you just pick whatever has the best weapons and/or spell damage. A team full of Shikaris and Black Mages (in any kind of combo almost), say, thanks to the Gladius/Platinum Dagger being available so early and thanks to AoE damage black magick spells being the best overall damage output. Or a Machinist to rush Arcturus/Mithuna and oneshot your way to Pharos. "Support" is even LESS relevant at that point, not more, because it all comes down to the weird imbalances in itemization.
Bushi is pretty trash until at least Masamune, but Knight has some very strong choices all throughout the game. It's not the absolute best in most brackets, but among the best. It all comes down to what items you can get when.
Oil is mostly garbage, as practically nothing is worth the time investment - rather than setting up some big hit, just blast things straight away. Almost nothing of any relevance is susceptible to Oil + Fire in any meaningful way. Similarly, Ardor is also massively overrated, as its long animation time means it often straight up loses in DPS to Firaga. There's situations where it's worth it, but it's far from the obvious winner many people think it is. Same with Scathe, and most of all Holy, which is basically never worth using ever, even when boosted against a holy-weak enemy.
There's some niche scenarios here and there that might give a slight advantage to strategies like that, but by and large just clobbering things mindlessly or using -ra/-ga spells (especially boosted and vs. weakness) is often simply the best option.
My point is that the very idea of a "support character" is already bad, because that means you're making compromises you don't have to make. You can just shuffle things around and get everything in ways that don't reduce your overall damage output. There is absolutely no upside to just "sacrificing" a character slot for some supposed "support" role when you can just have everyone be a top damage dealer that ALSO gets all the useful spells like Bravery or whatever.
What I'm trying to say is that if you have a party spread amongst all or most of the weapon choices you always have the best one available. For example uhlan/Archer and monk/bushi you always have the best spears bows poles and katanas.
I find when I unequipped the obvious cheese "cheat" weapon of karkata that its dps is a lot lower than poles spears and bows, but it gets swords with status ailments on them. Same with daggers. Although some of these barely ever proc like the assassin dagger. Ancient swords petrify effect...you probably kill the enemy before they get petrified. Silence on mage masher is good, and the blind/slow/poison weapons all seem to proc fairly regularly. Immobilise on the dagger doesn't seem that useful
(Removing karkata) out the doors the Archer/Uhlan was doing the most damage consistently, with monk/bushi in second place. Then when I got blm with fira it just skyrockets on things with oil on. It produces a far bigger number on screen once oil is on but as you said most of the time you don't need to cast it. The fira hit with no oil though is sometimes less damage than a melee weapon
Also when I was comparing Ninja Swords 1 vs the best dagger there was barely any difference in dps or speed of attacks, but one setup has a shield. Again it's hard to track properly because each weapon has a different attack stat so comparing an 80 dagger to a 70 ninja sword is hardly fair. This makes me think that when I respec the Shikari that I should take both koga and iga blade because whilst the Ninja Sword 1 category has status effects but most bosses are immune to status effects, and most regular enemies die in 1-2 hits unless I'm severely underlevelled. Having water and earth Ninja swords will help out with any bosses weak to those elements
So while it may well happen that you replace a pole with a katana and end up dealing more damage, that could just be a result of you happening to find a particularly good katana and not finding a comparable pole. That doesn't mean you couldn't have gotten one if you'd known where to look, though, and so other people might have a different or outright opposite experience based on THEIR game.
That's why it's difficult to make these kinds of recommendations, because not everyone knows how to get all the things, and even if they do, may simply not go and get them at the earliest time they could (or at all). But it doesn't change the fact that they COULD - and so all that you can do, really, is base recommendations around possibility, and leave it up to people to decide for themselves what possibilities to make use of or not.
The reason katana aren't great is their dual-stat scaling - they scale with both STR and MAG, which means you have two stats to worry about getting to a high level. And while you can combine jobs with both Magick and Battle Lores, it's difficult to find gear that has both +STR and +MAG on it - much more difficult than gear that only has either. Which is why, generally, weapons that only scale off of a single stat (like e.g. 1h/2h swords, poles, or spears) are preferable during the early game over weapons that scale off multiple stats (like e.g. katana, daggers, ninja swords) - even though at endgame that may turn out differently once you have all the necessary pieces to make things work.
While technically true, there's actually VERY few flying enemies in the game. Far fewer than people think. It's not an irrelevant point, but it's not nearly as big of a deal as to massively skew things, considering you can just swap party members as needed and are likely to have enough people who can easily hit fliers simply by virtue of e.g. spells.
The problem here is that not all weapons are created equal - neither in power (see above for the scaling problem) nor in availability. There are a number of outliers that are often massively ahead for when they can be acquired, vastly skewing optimization. Daggers for example aren't great weapons in general, but happen to have two examples of very high-damage items available very early (Gladius and Platinum Dagger). While some other weapons really don't ever take off or have incredibly narrow windows where they're good (bows for example).
In a "naive" playthrough with no meta information, you might think to recommend a spread of things so as to make use of whatever incidental item comes your way - but to me, that's a trap argument, because to people who don't know anything about the game you shouldn't be making these kinds of recommendations to begin with. You should just tell them to play what they enjoy and find cool, and try and discover that for themselves; because that's likely to be worth far more to them than doing 10% more damage for an hour because they happen to have a better weapon available.
IDK what you mean by that. If you get Karkata asap it will stomp any pole or spear available at the same time. And I'm not talking about sneaking it in via Trial Mode.
What was your methodology for measuring that damage? Archer especially. I'd be interesting in hearing that.
If all you're looking at is "big number on screen" then you'll get VERY inaccurate results. The way the game's mechanics work makes this a highly unreliable metric wildly skewed by certain effects - e.g. you could just have a critical hit with a bow or gun and it'd look absurd, but the actual average damage output over time could be FAR less than your other, ostensibly lower-damage weapons. Same thing with spells: they have big numbers, but the fact that they cause an unavoidable action delay that attacks do not suffer from often lowers their effective DPS considerably; and, similarly, the fact that they hit multiple enemies can also increase their effective DPS considerably without producing a bigger single number.
That's not surprising as they scale the same way, but shields barely matter. Almost all relevant enemies (especially later on) have the Ignore Evasion augment, meaning you can't block their attacks at all. No matter if you have a shield or not. It matters more during the early/midgame, but you have very few ninja swords available by then anyway so it's mostly a moot point.
There really aren't any bosses where this would be relevant, sadly. They mostly don't matter at all, and are basically outclassed already even by the time you get them.
Also, attack power is only a VERY rough metric to compare weapons by - scaling formulas change this significantly, as does combo rate. One of the reasons Kanya and Kumbha are so good is their combo rate, which vastly increases their damage output (particularly at low HP, as number of combo hits scales inversely with current HP).
Incidentally about "evasion" I'm sort of confused. So as far as I am aware evasion is when the word parry appears on screen and shield blocks are a different thing that you know happened because they say block. I rarely ever see the word parry on my character (although I have seen it sometimes on enemies when my Archer attacked). To do a little test I removed the shields and just equipped main gauche and jade collar, and just let a bunch of different enemies (all before stilshrine of miriam) hit me. I didn't see the word parry or miss once. I then equipped the shield and saw blocks many times so at least there is a visual queue to tell me something is working as intended. It was a shikari/Rdm with 70 evade. Main Gauche + Platinum Shield + Jade Collar. I doubt these enemies are considered late game or maybe I've just passed the point of where evasion is useful (and never saw it earlier because maybe I was just overlevelled by the time I got main gauche)
Evasion doesn't stack the way the game suggests (it tends to just display weapon and shield EVA additively), but is instead a succession of checks: shield block -> weapon block -> parry -> other which makes things a little more complicated. The "other" includes things like Darkness status or weather effects.
There's really only a single relevant endgame enemy (Pylraster) that DOESN'T have Ignore Evasion, so shields are virtually useless at endgame (their elemental effects aside, which can be nice to have).
During the midgame, evasion is still useful (you saw it yourself in your little Stillshrine thing) but midgame isn't particularly hard to begin with so blocking attacks also becomes less valuable (since you're rarely in any real danger anyway). It's still nice to have for areas like Nabudis etc. but it doesn't do anything at all against serious enemies that can actually kill you, like the ones in Great Crystal, Pharos/Subterra, or Henne Mines Deep, where most of the challenging endgame takes place.
Also in my "little stilshrine thing" I saw no evasion. Literally nothing happened there to tell me anything about evasion that's what I was saying and that's why I was (and still am) confused.
All I saw was "block" and that only happened when I equipped a shield. Thats a visual cue to tell me what is going on. Having main gauche equipped did nothing. Having jade collar equipped did nothing. So I have no clue what "evasion tanking" is. The "blocking" was good though and I think this is because of the 3 shield lores. Since that I have just never used main gauche or the jade collar and just used an actual dps weapon
Evasion is the umbrella term for all forms of block and parry. If you saw "block" that was evasion. There's no way to tell where it came from, whether it was from your shield or weapon - both just say "block" on the screen. There is no special message for "evasion" - it's only block, parry, and miss (usually only happens when you blind enemies). But those are all forms of evasion, that follow the evasion check list. Parry will not happen without Jade Collar, and because it's lower on the evasion check list, you'll see it less frequently (because any time you block you can't then also parry). Parry does NOT have anything to do with your weapon, strange as it sounds.
They really made that worthless. It works against normal enemies but most bosses can not be blocked/evaded at all. Not only that - the stat that is shown in the character-screen is FALSE:
If you have say 30% evasion on the weapon and 30% chance to block from a shield - the game shows 60% chance but in reality it is 51% only.
For character-combos:
1 - Black-mage + anything
2 - heal/buff + knight/monk/black
3 - knight/monk/black + somethingsomething.
Unless you go for specific challanges or speedruns this is a simple and very effective guideline. 2 black-mages will mostly obliterate anything rather quickly.
Ah - a LOVED oil+Adore and it was insanely good - back on the PS2 with the Effect-limit and you were fighting an enemy you knew relied on spells :P
Completely block the enemis ability to do anything while still dealing some decent damage :)
Flare/scathe/holy even more so. Great when everything moves fast but the enemy has to wait 10 second to do anything again :P
Also I noticed whilst scathe does do more damage than firaga, it's barely anything (11k vs 10k for isntance). Firaga casts much quicker so over time I think firaga would easily out dps it. This is no oil just flame staff boosted
Yet enemies can proc all 3 words when attacking me