[as soon as I re-recive my retrogame]
sorry for the bad tell…
DPosting this in here
Getting way into Felix’s Final Fantasy Tactics patch. I know exactly whats going on for once and the jokes are p good.
Im playing with a job guide for the first time and made a plan for what jobs to give who. This got way too excited about hitting my job goals and got way over leveled. I kind of want to complete all the bar jobs as well, So I might need to get some recruits to form more bar teams. Ive never made the game this easy before. Its kind of a trip. Im not using any of the unique characters because Im too dedicated to my little team.
I have Ramaz the ninja with 2 morning stars doing 150-200 damage a per attack. Hes a former lancer so he has jump, concentrate giving him 100% chance to hit, a full counter and ignore height.
I have a time mage with short charge and a few summons, with teleport.
I have a summoner with half mp usage and black magic.
My former chemist is now a negotiator with item throw, a gun and teleport.
I have an archer lying around that I can swap in whenever, also has teleport. (need that short charge).
I have my up and coming fighter who is just a low level lancer so far but whom I want to be a samurai.
This game really makes me want to build my own tactics game with way more jobs and job/skill interactions, weird statuses and effects. I just get too jazzed up about systems that modify other systems as part of a strat.
I really want one where you can set a character’s focus to either advancing towards new skills or strengthening existing abilities. Breadth Vs Depth. I kinda wanna de-level my characters now that they have the options I want.
Additional:
Turns out FFT save game editors exist (or existed)
https://www.cavesofnarshe.com/fft/downloads/
So I think I’m gonna see if I can reduce everyone’s levels and growth but keep all other numbers the same and see what happens. I dont know how Ill reverse calculate level up growth. Maybe I can compare numbers from another save, sadly I dont have an really old saves left on the (virtual) mem card.
5 Likes
how far along are you???
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Jeez this was 5 months ago? What have I been doing? I dont even know
Hi I have started this, i might need to get a more recent version since I think mine is from the first post.
Someone explain FFT to me. From the first battle I should be going into menus and changing classes? The tutorial is extensive but they did bury the menu system and it is aggravating to navigate. The world map is dangerous in that I don’t know if hitting circle will bring up the shop menu, start a fight or a cutscene.
Any advice on the internet is like “get in random battles and make a time mage/monk then you are on easy street.” Thanks internet. I think you skipped about 15 steps there.
Like my guys start as Squire and Chemist. Do i care about that? Switch out immediately? Can I switch out immediately? There seems to be a lot of information hidden. What towns have the shops with the supplies I want? Do all shops have the same supplies? Do they get supplies as I unlock classes? Am i unlocking classes?
Do I worry about guys dying? I have to learn how to use Phoenix Down? I have to learn and then equip Use Item for each asshole? Come on game meet me halfway. Then there is like 6 different ability menus that I have to individually set?
Maybe there is a reason I never played this game. I figured I could figure it out because everyone played it when they were 13 but actually it was because they were 13 and had time for infinite bullshit.
Anyways going to go read a scan of the manual now.
3 Likes
nah, squire and chemist are good. most of your jobs suck early and squire and chemist have good abilities to learn, so nothing wrong with them. being able to chuck potions at people is strong now and remains strong forever. monk probably is the best early game job, so if you wanna send a character or two in that direction I doubt you’ll regret it. if units die die they are gone forever unless they have plot armor, so it is worth your while to save them, though everyone you have is a generic unit and you start with a surplus of them, so it’s not the end of the world. you fight a hard battle very early in the slums of dorter, you can do some grinding before it if you want. losing that battle is A Thing. you’re gonna want people who can use items for that.
1 Like
you get in fights, you make your party land attacks/heal so you can get job points and experience points, you spend job points on abilities you like. experience points level your current job up and unlock new jobs. different combinations of levellled up jobs unlock even more jobs. you pick the jobs with skills that sound useful and switch to those jobs and level them up
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so like for example to begin you’re gonna wanna unlock your chemist’s ability to use items so you can heal people with em. it might already be unlocked. it’s been a bit since I started that game
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sorry for triple post. my bad habits are tulpas fault now. lots of people do a job point glitch so they dont have to grind out fights to earn job points and can just assign the skills as they choose. ive never done this because im a freak but i looked it up
Summary
To get 9999 points for learning skills follow these steps:
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On the overworld map hit start and go to formation.
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Choose the person that you want to give 9999 points for learning skills in a certain class.
3.Go into Ability and select Learn.
4.Select the class you want to get 9999 JP in.
5.Make sure the skills of this class are longer then the page (meaning you can scroll down).
6.Select a skill that you can learn and select it without learning it, instead hold down the square button and hit down.
7.If the skill you landed on cannot be learned (you don’t have enough points for it) make sure it says do you want to learn the move you picked in step 6 and hit yes.
8.Now you should have 0 points, hit X until you come back to the character’s info page.
9.Now go back to Ability and hit Learn again, that class should have 9999 JP.
You can’t do this for some classes like: Archer, Squire, etc. You also can’t do this for classes where everything is already learned.
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is the released version! Enjoy
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the best jobs for generic characters are (loosely):
Chemist
Wizard / Black Mage (all other mages have awful speed)
Thief
Monk
Ninja
Summoner, Time Mage, Lancer, and Samurai also have one or two extremely good abilities you can unlock to set as secondaries for other jobs but have pretty middling-to-bad stats and gear so I wouldn’t recommend trying to use those jobs long term. Squire is nothing special and you should advance your physical units to Knight and Archer after 1 or 2 battles. Faith affects your magic power a lot and it’s harder to raise than Brave so you should try to use your highest natural Faith units as eg Black Mages with a Summon secondary and leave your other Chemist as a Chemist with a Time Mage secondary. The auto best equipment selection will always prioritize HP when almost every other stat that gear can raise (Speed, Movement, physical or magical attack) is more important after the very early game; in the early game Knights are the only ones who can wear the heaviest HP boosting gear and that’s the only reason to use them.
good luck and have fun!!
5 Likes
you have to unlock the different classes for each character by levelling up jobs via job points, which are independent from character levels, which are gained via exp points (and are also not especially important imo). everyone starts with squire and chemist as the default classes.
levelling squire unlocks phsyical classes and levelling chemist unlocks magic classes
(boy characters have a physical bonus and girl characters have a magic bonus. we’re claiming ramza as a Child Of Gender bc he gets both. boys who level magic classes can become bards and girls who learn physical classes can become dancers, tho)
each character has 5 skill slots, 1 is occupied by the current job. 2 lets you equip the skills of another class. 3 is an automatic reaction skill to attacks. 4 is a passive skill, and 5 is a movement skill
some of my fav skills per early game classes:
potions and phoenix down from chemist, autopotion and throw item are great too (the chemist class can by default throw items but the only way to get other classes to throw items beyond the immediate 4 squares around them is by equipping throw item). autopotion is a reaction skill that triggers when a character is damaged a % of the time that is equal to the character’s brave stat (it consumes 1 of the lowest level potion you have in the inventory so this is something worth being aware of!)
(chemists can also get guns around the middle of the game, which are really strong)
accumulate from the generic squire class is cool and also a great way to grind job points (you can have characters spam it at no cost) not my fav class out there but ramza has a special squire class that learns some unique very good skills that become available each chapter (in chapter 2 he can learn a skill that has a 100% chance to permanently boost brave stats of who it’s cast on i think). job points up is a great skill too it makes developing characters a little faster (specifically it gives a 1.2x bonus to job points)
knights have really strong skills that allow them to break enemy equipment and debuff (an example would be hitting a boss enemy with “break speed” so many times that their turn economy is completely ruined (this was how i beat queklain / cuchulainn at level 1!)) their range is based on the range of the weapon they currently have equipped. so you can give knight skills to an archer for example and have them shoot weapons out of hands from across the map
archers have concentrate which is a good skill (makes skills such as “break weapon” have a higher hit chance and gives 100% hit chance to most attacks) and are the only class that can equip longbows, which are quite good
thieves learn steal heart which is a great skill for damaging the enemy’s turn economy by making them waste turns, in addition to stealing. anything that boosts your team’s turn economy or damages the enemy’s is especially good in fft.
(some ways to attack the enemy’s turn economy would include but are not limited to: outright killing enemies, giving them status ailments such as frog, sleep, charm, slow, or stop, or the break speed debuff)
for monks, chakra is a great heal / mp restore skill and it’s free! their base attacks also hit incredibly hard and scale remarkably well with accumulate from the squire class and higher brave stats
on the chemist side of things, wizard spells are really strong in terms of damage (especially with element boosting rods) and they can also learn frog which is a Great skill imho
also time mages learn haste which is such a good skill it’s worth casting on all your units all the time (it’s the easiest way to strengthen your team’s turn economy probably) imho. (also they can learn teleport which a movement skill that replaces your default move with teleportation! but that’s a more mid-later game skill)
like many 90s games it’s a little opaque in its systems but you can press the select button to get some tooltips and ui hints here and there. not really the kind of thing only 13 year olds enjoy as its continued popularity with adults on this webforum might suggest
sometime in chapter 2 the character agrias from the first battle joins your party permanently and she’s extremely overpowered (she has many of the same skills as cid, who joins near the end of the game, who is even more powerful)
the stores in each town have different equipment from each other. some have heavy armor for knight / samurai / dragoon classes, for example.
also everything might have a different name depending on which version of the game youre playing
here’s a classic gamefaq that explains basically All Of The Mechanics And Numbers in the entire game:
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ps/197339-final-fantasy-tactics/faqs/3876
(it might also be worthwhile to look up in here how the clock system and the evade system work)
if your units lose all their hp they become unconscious and a 3 turn countdown starts after which they die permamently, which is such a bad outcome it’s worth reloading a save usually, it’s much easier to keep your guys alive than in fire emblem for example tho. the phoenix down skill has a 100% chance to revive unconscious characters and casts instantly, which is not true of the priest / white mage class life ability (items are my go-to for healing usually fwiw)
10 Likes
There is one big question:
Auto potion or dont auto potion.
Giving everyone auto potion (its a chemist skill) lets you sort of easy mode the game a bit, you will just heal by the amount of your smallest potion size and just tank hits but I think makes the game less interesting.
One thing you should get right away for everyone is Gain Jp up. I wouldn’t use it in a big battle unless you dont have a better skill for the slot but for moving from town to town the skill is invaluable.
Id also gain moves units can do nearly every turn like yell or throw stone so that you can get some kind of JP even if you are just moving a unit. It really adds up. And like gain JP up it might take up a slot you want to use for something more practical or cool in harder battles.
I first played the game by looking through the job skills and being like “OOH that combo would be cool to have!” then making a plan to get there and write it down so you can keep on track. This mostly seem to yield fun results. Making sure you have a fun new skill to try out makes grinding for levels fun. You can also take into consideration class stat growth. I find the stat growths mostly intuitive, archers get more precise, mages get more faith, knights get stronger. Just think about how you want the unit to be and aim in that general direction.
I like to make up little stories for every unit in terms of what their ambitions and background are. Then as they grow its just make for some good brain candy.
A few of the hot options:
~ Guns let you project damage finitely in a straight line.
~ The Dragoon/Lancer Jump skill not only lets you do heavy physical damage prettty far from your standing position it also takes a character out of play, ie they cant be hit till they land turns later. This means those characters can run straight into what would be ambushes.
~ Stealing lets you not only gain potentially unique and powerful equipment it lets you disarm some incredibly strong opponents. Especially if the % is low the feeling of landing it rules.
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auto potion isn’t the single best reaction skill in the game (that’d be blade grasp, and hamedo and counter aren’t slouches, and even weapon guard can make some of your guys unhittable with late game +30% evade swords) but if you don’t keep any potions in stock and force it to use hi or x potions it is very very good. mostly it’s like a de facto great mid game strategy for when you have to do a couple of otherwise extremely tough solo battles (the Gil economy is preventative before that anyway).
FFT isn’t that badly balanced so much as it’s like BG3 – a half-dozen classes have extremely extremely powerful synergies that aren’t really called out at all if you’re playing blind
monk and chemist have the largest utility skillsets (and some of the best reactions) for physical and non physical units respectively, ninja and regular old wizard have the best stats/passives, and lots of other jobs (as mentioned, samurai, thief, summoner, time mage, and to a lesser degree knight and lancer) are good dips to pick up 1 or 2 overpowered attacks or reactions
5 Likes
and if you want my FULLY prescriptive way to play:
you basically have opportunity enough to raise 3 good generic units plus ramza, and you will use them for 2/3 of the game.
ramza eventually should unlock both samurai and ninja which means spending a fair amount of time in every physical job. of these, monk is the only one you actually want to learn more than a couple abilities from, but it’s also squishy in the early game, so don’t spend too much time as a monk before chapter 2. eventually, you want him as a ninja with punch art, martial arts, blade grasp, and move +2/3.
one of your units should be primarily a chemist with a time magic secondary. in practice, they never need to change jobs from chemist, because units gain passive JP from party members in other jobs, and your chemist will only need enough time mage JP to unlock the job class and learn haste (75% of the class’ utility), which will be more than covered by…
another of your units, a wizard with a summon secondary. again, they only need a single summon – shiva/ramuh/ifrit – which is brokenly powerful for the mid-game when you use magic-boosting equipment (ovelia comes with a full set when you get her before you can buy it). they will eventually have enough excess wizard JP to learn magic attack up and flare, so I basically wouldn’t recommend learning any mid-level magic; they just use regular ice/fire/bolt until they have one summon and then those two spells kill everything for a long time. for better or worse “don’t waste JP on mid-level abilities” is a huge FFT pro strat and it kind of narrows your focus so if it’s your first time playing take this with a grain of salt.
my third generic is the weirdest – I like to make them a knight in the early game for survivability, don’t learn any knight skills apart from saving up for equip armor, have them learn steal heart when ramza gets them enough passive JP to unlock thief, keep that as a secondary so they can charm whenever they’re out of melee range, then make them a summoner long enough to learn only golem (which works like it does in FF5, and will take an annoyingly long time because summoners are so slow – keep them hasted), and finally switch them back to thief for the long haul with summon and equip armor. steal heart + golem will keep your entire party alive through the hardest fights in ch2/3 and they will meanwhile get enough thief JP to steal one of a kind stuff (primarily the genji glove, so prioritize steal accessory) later in the game.
when you get agrias and mustadio, you’ll be able to regularly use 5 rather than 4 of your own units in a battle, and at this point I’d retire the chemist – mustadio is a natural chemist secondary and agrias can take over casting haste as her secondary. when you get the first of beowulf/orlandu, retire the thief (except for when you need to use them again in rare stealing opportunities), and when you get the other of them, retire the wizard (who has probably been responsible for 1/2 your total damage output so far). when you get meliadoul, give her a lancer secondary and retire agrias (with the super javelin and setiemson, she is insanely powerful). this is how I finish the whole game w/o grinding in like ~20 hours to test my patch and it produces pretty fun/powerful combos.
4 Likes
You have to experiment a bit to enjoy FFT IMO. Nothing better than to find your own favorite mid class (dancer for me) and elevate it to godhood
I disagree with everybody recommending Monk because I’m still mad at the 0 elevation revive skill 25 years later
The only advice I’d give is to keep one extra save before Riovannes castle in Chapter 2 (though you might want to quit alltogether if you get stuck rather than returning to that save)
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last time i played properly in 2010 or something i ended up running a couple of mediators because the concept tickles me
bring back mediators
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yeah i would recommend cycling thru save slots so you can go back to any one if needed
i did this on my most recent playthru i used mimic davaron a lot… secretly one of the Really Good Skills imo. maybe even the most important skill if you like stealing even idk.
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mediator is funny because the whole “white mage” job tree is largely useless (priest is straight worse than chemist in 95% of circumstances and oracle is just crappier beowulf) but then you get all the way to mediator and you can use a gun again
you do need a mediator at some point to get the bears that you have to breed for poaching if you want ribbons (but honestly meliadoul and cloud are better with twist headbands)
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criminal not to suggest calculator, which is both broken and hilarious. yes, it’s annoying to set up, but if you don’t want annoying to setup weirdo op units why are you playing a tactics game