[PS2] Final Fantasy XII

Originally Posted by Spatula

That reminds me of Bad Breath from the Great Malboro in FFX.

At any rate, let's just say I'm not READY to take on any level 5 marks yet. Holy shit, I was like..oh the trickster hunt, what can that stupid little chocobo do.

1600 dmg per hit, OH SHI~. That so far is how can we say, something you should run away from, very fast.

Maybe I am just overpowered but he doesn't seem to have that much health. If your lucky that clan guy takes all the damage. He did for me anyway, sure he died but it gave me enough time to keep spamming Bio. It does around 1600 a hit, and as I recall he didn't have that much health, maybe 30k?

Now this Antlion...he you SHOULD stay away for a while from. He's in Lhusu mines. It could be because he like canabalized 5 of those mantis enemies that made it hard for me, but he was just annoying the hell out of me.

He kept using a AOE attack that did 1200 every 3 seconds, so I ran out of mana extremely fast simply because of the Cura spammage. I did kill him eventually, but it was because of a extremely lucky quickening at the end. Now I really dislike using quickenings, because they are stupid and take all the challenge out of it, but my guys were out of mana and I just couldn't keep up with the AOEs, I mean seriously I was using Cura only for like 3 minutes, and he was stuck at 10% health for over 5 minutes, so it wasn't going anywhere. That and I hadn't saved for over 2 hours.

That reminds me...are espers useful in any way? they seem EXTREMELY useless to me. I mean for starters the other party members don't seem to get any experience, and perhaps LP, but not sure about that, and they don't seem great in any way. Seems to me that they didn't think much about espers and quickenings.

Another thing...you know Barheim passage right? well, when I got there the first time, I didn't really check the bestiary much, and needless to say, I am missing 3 "Specter" type enemies for the completeness feeling. I got the key after 60 hours, but the mimics don't seem to drain the power anymore, hell there don't seem to be any mimics at all, so basically how do I get the specters to show up again? because they only showed up if the power levels went to low and the lights turned off. =/

How ya doing, buddy?

Originally Posted by Metal Sphere

If you have the key, go back into Barheim. At the split, take the left path and follow it all the way. I described it earlier in the thread, but Specters, Bombs and DeadBones abound in there. Great leveling place, especially the second half with its ridiculospawn. Oh, and if you're interested in a new esper and a timed battle, go all the way to the end of the passage. Be sure to save though.

Sweet. I was worried there for a sec.

I am also looking for the rank 5 mark called Bloodwing, is he around there as well? I couldn't really explore much yesterday.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Jesus that makes me wonder what I've been doing for so long. I'm over 90 hours and around level 60, but it didn't feel like I was leveling or grinding that much for items. I haven't even reached Archadia yet.

Guess it's the combined effort of filling the bestiary, mark hunts and the damn licence board.

You don't need that high a rank to get Bubble to appear. I think it's 2 or 3 ranks below that. Riskbreaker I believe.

How ya doing, buddy?

There's really no reason to level up the characters you don't plan on using. I didn't and I am 150 hours in the game without ever having a situation where everyone died and had to use the backups.

I guess if you do have situations where your entire main group dies it helps to have high level backups, but from my experience this never happend, and I really don't feel like leveling them to 99 just so I have a strong backup team which most likely never gets any action. Level 40ish with some shields and measures should be enough I'd say.

How ya doing, buddy?

Originally Posted by Metal Sphere

If you don't level up your reserve team and you go to fight Zodiark, you're going to get owned. They have to be at least level 40 to survive long enough to revive your main team. Darkja will wipe them all out at least once during that fight. There's several other battles where having the other guys close to or at least somewhat leveled is good insurance policy against losing.

Hmm...no.

That is very much like ozma from FFIX you are either lucky or not. if he keeps using darkja it will constantly kill your main, you ress them with your backups, they die, etc. Hate that fight.

However if your lucky you can kill him fast enough before that chain can start. The levels of your backups won't really make a difference in that fight.

I was speaking idiomatically.

My party was level 99. backups were 40, I certainly didn't notice a difference they died just as easily. The reason they died was because of darkja ofcourse, and since there's nothing you can do about it it makes no difference what level the backups are.

All you need is 2 seconds for them to use a phoenix down then it's away with them. Usually your stuck in a endless cycle of ressing, but sometimes luck is on your side and he does something other then darkja.

Looking back now, I'd say the most annoying thing wasn't the boss, it was the fact that if you went game over, you had to walk that long way up to the boss again, and you can't just leg it and ignore the enemies on the way either, since those bastards kept teleporting and very easily killing you if you didn't fight back.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

It's not necessarily levels that you need, though 17 does seem a bit low. More then anything you should spent a lot of hours chaining to get LP. Unlock the necessarily stuff, like more HP, and while I'm not a huge fan of it, quickenings.

Quickenings are pretty good early on in the game, with the right quickening you can get a boss down easily, so if you haven't got it already, try to unlock some quickenings for the characters that you use. I didn't like it personally, because early on it made things too easy, and later on it became completely useless.

Most amazing jew boots

Early one they could make a big difference, but in the end they were utterly useless. The Espers are useless the moment you got them. Forgot about the MP boost, yes. As I recall it doubled what you had with each quickening.

I'm sure you figured it out by now, but quickening slots can only be gotten by one character, so don't take the same path which each character. I made that mistake with my first quickening.

How ya doing, buddy?

Quickenings when done right will remove all challenges for the first lets say 50 hours or so, but after that they won't make a big impact anymore. but like I said, WHEN done right...they are so damn unpredictable. You can be lucky and get all the right quickenings in a row, or sometimes get unlucky and get none until the timer runs out.

The espers are without a doubt even worse then quickenings. I can't imagine a single scenario where they'd be usefull. To me, it just felt like they put them in just because FF games need summons.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Wasn't that healing supposed to happen? Every time you kill the little bombs? I believe it stopped after the 3rd wave. It wasn't that big of a deal.

Also, thank god for charge. That's one of the first gambits I set up. MP <10% = charge. Don't leave home without it. <3.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Meh, just don't bother with espers, they are not worth it. I don't care how good they are, it's not worth sacrificing the other two characters. But really, even if your characters didn't go away, they'd still not be worth it. Especially end-game.

If they had some sort of Overdrive like the summons in FFX had, that you could activate at will, then maybe...

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.