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Sunday, May 08, 2011

Final Fantasy II: Skill Thresholds

I cleared out the first dungeon today, getting the 'mithril' key item. I had two people wielding double shields, one with sword and shield, and one with a staff. (He's the temp character who will be leaving soon. I don't care about leveling any of his stats.) I figured I'd have two people attacking which would kill all the fights pretty quickly and still level up shields on my two casters.

Unfortunately the game is designed such that as you get higher level in a weapon it becomes harder to gain more of that weapon. Now there are ways to do this that would make sense. Less xp per action or needing more xp to gain a level. No, what they did was added a threshold. If you have sword skill 5 then the first 4 times in a fight you attack with a sword nothing happens. Then each attack afterwards is worth standard sword xp. This means if you do it all in one fight you need to attack, say 23 times to level up. Or you could spend 19 fights attacking 5 times each for 95 actions instead of 23. And if you don't get to fight 5 times in a fight? You'll never level up at all. Short fights mean you're guaranteed to stagnate. My first character who had shield skill 5 going into the dungeon didn't gain a single shield experience. I eventually just unequipped one of the shield to level his hand to hand skill.

It's now clear I need to do skill up fights and story fights and I have to set up differently for each one. So I need to either bring weapons for my mages or build up their mana enough that they can cast attack spells every fight.



BMI: 21.82 (+.14)
Wii Fit Age: 28 (+1)

2 comments:

  1. Building up mana was the most tedious thing in the game. I essentially just gave up on mana and beat everything up until I got the mana drain spell, at which point upping mana became a lot easier and also not necessary.

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  2. The random dude filling the 4th slot in my party actually has a mana burn spell. So I can screw around for a few rounds in a fight and have him burn away everyone else's mana giving them a decent shot at a mana-up. The only problem is staying in the inn costs proportional to the amount of hp/mp restored so it's getting really expensive.

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