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Caves of Narshe Forums > Final Fantasy Tactics > Anybody wanna chat FFT with me?

Posted by: Billdolfski 22nd June 2016 17:59

I've been around here for a while... I'm just not posty and the wealth of information is at my fingertips but I thought somebody here might want to discuss it a little.

First off... I just want a little advice/direction with what to do with my beginning characters to make them effective ASAP so I can start having dead weight characters that I am just developing.

I've actually beaten the PSX version before but it's been some time and I remember having these same struggles in the beginning until I got the hang of it.

Posted by: Rangers51 22nd June 2016 21:17

I'm in the same boat currently, actually. It's been years since I played the game from scratch, for real, and a few weeks ago we started a weekly stream in which I play it on iOS and explain it to Death Penalty, who's never played it (if you're curious, the streams happen on https://twitch.tv/cavesofnarshe )

I have a tendency to keep people in their classes at the very beginning, particularly Ramza. Once I get to Move +1 on my squires, I move one of them to Knight and one of them to Archer. Once the Archer can learn Equip Crossbow, I equip that ability and move them back to Knight so they can be a tank with a bowgun. The other Knight I earn Equip Heavy Armor, and then move that character into something else that can be a tank with some other ability, like a Thief. The Chemists I let earn lots of JP as Chemists, and try to get them to earn some abilities through crystals so I can save JP elsewhere. By the time I hit the Brigand's Den, I like to have Ramza as a Monk, possibly with a stopover in Knight to get him some heavy armor too.

That's a random collection of thoughts. And is probably garbage. Whatevs!

Posted by: Spooniest 23rd June 2016 16:54

Spend some time in the Mandalia Plains grinding, basically. You don't want to even go into Sweegy Woods (Siege Weald) without having at least one trained Knight, preferably a trained Monk, too, if you can swing it.

You don't want to underestimate the things FFT will do, cuz the scars of your love remind it of you and keep it thinking that you could have had it all...it's a difficult game.

Posted by: DragonKnight Zero 2nd July 2016 04:11

Higher Faith (60 is OK, 65+ is better) female Wizards rip through the first chapter for low JP investment. Recommended to spend some time in Priest to pick up Cure and Raise. Bolt with Thunder Rods dominates this early. Knight and Archer are my go-to physical classes for the first chapter.

The only Squire and Chemist skills worth my time in the first chapter are Throw Stone, Gained JP up, maybe Move +1, Potion, and Phoenix Down.

What are your goals for the first chapter? Blaze through fast? Stall for crystals? Looking to steal some equipment? I have a lot of thoughts; most are probably not relevant to your playstyle. I fight about a dozen fights at Mandalia mostly for money, do some class unlocking, pick up a few skills, start hoarding JP for stuff I want later but that's me. That's generally enough to get me through the rest of the chapter without stopping to grind, only fighting randoms as I move through the map.

Posted by: No-Name 3rd July 2016 03:42

got back into fft a few weeks ago. Saw rangers' stream and thought "l really gotta play this again" so l have and am through with it. the game is very addictive.

Posted by: Dynamic Threads 17th July 2016 00:33

My best advice is to Master Ramza's Squire in every chapter. His Guts ability is very useful. Then, learn him some Chemist stuff because you'll have a lot of battles where he's on his own. Potion, Hi-Potion, etc... Just for back-up.

I personally like to Master Geomancer with Ramza. Now, I know a lot of people think Geomancer sucks, but their special ability becomes very useful later in the game as a secondary job ability. So, learn all of the Geomancer elemental attacks and then Master him as a Monk. A Monk + Element can be a tank. Especially since Geomancer abilities have secondary effects.

I know it sounds obscure, but I cleaned up with those abilities and Jobs.

You will want to Master a Chemist as soon as possible, maybe even two of them. Then take one to Black Mage and the other to White Mage and have Use as their secondary ability. From there, take the Black Mage to Summoner and the White Mage to Time Mage with their Magic as a secondary ability. Master both of those jobs. You can swap the two and have a Black Mage/Time Mage and a White Mage/Summoner, but I like to keep an attacker as an attacker and a support as a support in these cases.

Master another Squire and take it to Knight and Archer for a few levels, then Monk and Thief for a few levels and unlock any move abilities such as Jump+1 or Move+1, as well as Counter, Arrow Guard, etc... You should by this point be on your way to unlocking Lancers, Ninjas and Samurais and Lancers can be very useful, while Ninjas are fast and Samurais are great attackers.

A Master Archer/Thief/Ninja is a great combo while a Master Lancer/Geomancer/Samurai can be a tank in the later chapters.

As soon as you get a Chocobo, start hatching those eggs and try to get a Red Chocobo or Black Chocobo. They can prove useful in non-story battles against other monsters (especially other Chocobos with Monster Ability) and your units can ride them as well. With Monster ability, they can use ChocoCure so it makes regular Chocobos useless at some point.

As far as story characters, Agrias is a beast and you can really take her anywhere as long as it isn't toward magic-based jobs. Mustadio you should IMMEDIATELY Master as a Chemist, but only after you master his special job or at least learn all of his Snipe abilities.

I personally only like to recruit the two of them. Rafa and Malak suck, IMO and Orlando is way too OP. Other than that, once you get anyone else, it's your preference. I like to Master my own recruits, personally.

And make absolutely sure you hire soldiers with multiple Astrology symbols. You don't want a bunch of Cancers, for example, because the signs have strengths and weaknesses to each other. If you reject soldiers enough instead of just hiring what the guy throws at you, you can sometimes find soldiers with 70 Faith and 70 Brave, at least 65/65 and depending on what direction you want to take them, you can get some 70/45 or 45/65 type of soldiers to send down a specific job path.

One of the few games where grinding is an absolute blast, so just have fun with it and don't rush into story battles.

Posted by: Magitek_slayer 18th July 2016 08:37

wait but ranger isnt the archer terrible? i heard some also say this too:dont use the archer too much because he's pretty bad.

Posted by: Dynamic Threads 18th July 2016 20:57

Quote (Magitek_slayer @ 18th July 2016 03:37)

wait but ranger isnt the archer terrible? i heard some also say this too:dont use the archer too much because he's pretty bad.

I'm not sure he was suggesting they weren't.

I actually really like his suggestion, which was to have an Archer learn equip crossbow and then move them to a Knight to tank out.

My personal opinion is that Archer and Knight as a stand alone job both kind of underwhelm. But combining the abilities from Archers and Knights together or with other Jobs (such as his Knight/Heavy Armor to Monk) is when they become useful. A Knight with charge can do some damage, especially with a Time Mage to slow down your targets.

Posted by: Blinge Odonata 19th July 2016 08:09

Should I try war of the lions ,or the psx original?

Posted by: Rangers51 19th July 2016 14:12

Quote (Blinge Odonata @ 19th July 2016 02:09)

Should I try war of the lions ,or the psx original?

Here's what I said about it a few years back:

http://www.cavesofnarshe.com/forums/ipb/in...ndpost&p=206617

Not sure where you'd be playing it, but if you can deal with the touch interface and have a tablet to play it on (not a phone, IMO) then WotL is by far the best option. If the Vita version also has the fix for the framerate problems, that's also a good option. Honestly, and especially if they ever port it to Windows, there is no reason IMO to ever play the original again unless you're going to emulate it and play it at super speed.

Posted by: Glenn Magus Harvey 1st August 2016 15:30

Quote (Rangers51 @ 19th July 2016 09:12)

Quote (Blinge Odonata @ 19th July 2016 02:09)

Should I try war of the lions ,or the psx original?

Seems like I'm on track to sit on my PS1 copy of FFT until it becomes fully obsoleted by a future Windows version.

Posted by: TrueBOSS 6th August 2016 04:15

I haven't played all the versions but I have beaten both the psx and tWoTL. They both have their plus's and minus's. They changed the dialogue in tWoTL which bothered me because some of the characters said some pretty cool things in the PSX version. The new dialogue did start getting old as i got further in the game with the tWoTL. Keep in mind this is just my opinion guys. tWoTL has some extra content. (Like Balthier from 12 and extra story segments about Delita's part of the story) But nothing huge like the challenging super boss I was hoping for

. I you find the time. I'd say try both. I personally recommend tWoTL though. I never noticed anything really bad about the game past the dialogue change.

Posted by: Mister Beoulve 7th January 2017 21:28

Hey guys, I just got this game a couple months ago. I beat FFTA on Game boy when I was younger and it was great, if not dumbed down a little comparatively. I play it at work mostly so I'm making sort of sluggish progress as I can only really fight about 3 fights a day. I'm starting it over again today (3rd attempt) because I was grinding too much with too many characters/classes and spreading myself too thin. This time I'm going to focus on fewer people. I dismissed my chemist already for very poor brave/faith, (They really try to make you feel bad when you dismiss them!) I don't know all the guest/story/errand characters so I'll ignore them in this synopsis completely. (I just got Mustadio before I restarted, so I haven't really gotten very far in the game.)

I have 5 squires (until I get JP Boost for everybody), Ramza, and my buds Delita and Argath. My endgame plan for a team generics-wise + Ramza goes as follows:

- Ramza Dark Knight. (Ugh)
- 1 generic dedicated thief specifically for stealing story mission items.
- 1 generic Ninja or possibly Monk.
- 1 generic Chemist with a gun. (Possibly white mage secondary.)
- 1 generic Black Mage. (Not sure what secondary skill to pair him up with. Maybe summons? Suggestions?)

Now I already have one guy that I have no idea what to do with, and at the beginning of chapter 2, I get another 3 guys. (2 of which I believe are required to initiate a special cutscene involvong a birthday or something..?) They might just end up being secretaries until that happens. Except Ladd. He's cool I guess. I might try to make him a second Dark Knight but I don't know if that's the best sort of balancing act to perform on my first complete playthrough.

I'm going to use a job chart and grab specific indispensable skills. Not much else to it. For some reason it's very oddly satisfying to grind in this game. I want to avoid it where I can so I'll be min/maxing Dark Souls style and putting JP and Job Levels into my soldiers as sparingly as possible.

Suggestions?

Posted by: Billdolfski 12th February 2018 14:06

So I ended up not getting back into this game and here I am, trying to do it again.

Luckily, I still have my save. I'm not far at all, all I did before was try to grind so I've got Ramza and 4 others with some levels and JP, unfortunately I spent most of my JP and it probably wasn't on the best skills... Still, better than completely starting over.

Anyway, I'm just to Zeklaus Desert (WotL) and what I'm most curious about do I need to keep grinding in this area or do I need to push ahead so I can get to a new town so I can actually buy some equipment?

EDIT: Also, any advice on how to most efficiently grind would be really helpful too because I'm sure I'm doing it wrong.

Posted by: Rangers51 12th February 2018 22:40

I note that DP totally failed to keep up on his part of the streaming not long after my first posts in this thread.

If you've reached the Sand Rat's Sietch, I don't think you should expect much, if any, more equipment to unlock for the rest of the chapter, so you needn't push hard to get back to a town unless you're planning on changing jobs up before the end of the chapter.

One thing that I didn't mention in previous posts is that it's a good plan to get some Chemists with access to Hi-Potion and Auto-Potion before you get too late into Chapter 1, even better if you can get Auto-Potion also on some of your melee classes too. The ability to save turns by auto-healing can be huge in the last couple battles of the chapter.

In terms of grinding, it really is what it is. You can grind a little faster for JP by having multiple party members in the same job class, as they can give each other small JP bonuses with each action (this happens if they're not in the same classes, too, but having more of the same class can help it be more noticeable. You can also extend your grinding some by prolonging battles and taking more actions that won't end the battle - heal your enemies, use low-damage attacks against them, hit your own party, etc.

Posted by: Billdolfski 13th February 2018 12:42

Yeah, I figured out healing enemies, prolonging their suffering and hitting my own team. It's made getting JP a lot less painless.

Right now I'm just working on the basics. Most of my units now have Move +1 and JP Up, I'm still working on one unit for that... I didn't get her until I started playing again. I only had one unit with the faith to be a dedicated magic user so I picked up another. Well, that's not entirely true. Ole' Davyd has 76 Brave and 72 Faith and I had been training him in a little of everything (I seemed to have been doing it with everyone) but I decided to find another female with good faith.

For now I'm going to go with two dedicated magic users... both a white and black mage which I'm going to switch to time mage and summoner, respectively, as per suggested in this post. I also like the idea of the crossbow and knight for now, so I'm definitely doing that and I think I'll go monk for now with my other melee.

Now that I'm talking about it, I don't even have a short term goal for Ramza, lol. Anyway, I'm glad that the grinding is frustrating anymore and I'm racking up JP and starting to accomplish some thing. I knew I'd enjoy it once I got over the hump.

Posted by: Sepirothx 19th June 2018 08:59

Are you still playing FFT?