Final Fantasy II: A Revelation!

Last week I was playing some FFII before our D&D session and was talking with Sky about the mechanics of the game. I mentioned that I didn't quite understand how many times you needed to use an ability but that it seemed like I had to use it at least as many times as I had levels in the skill before I could start gaining any experience at all. Then yesterday I was doing some unrelated reading about what certain spells did and stumbled across the actual formula for how you earn experience.

xp = Rank + Uses + Modifier - Level

Uses is how many times you use the spell and level is your current level in the skill. So I was right that it got harder to gain experience as you got higher in level and that spamming the ability in a specific fight would increase how much you earned once you started learning. The other two parts are the really interesting ones. Modifier depends on the type of ability being used. Weapons get +1, spells get +3, evade chance gets -2, magic defense gets +5. Rank is where it gets really new to me. Each fight is assigned a rank based on the easiest monster in the fight.

This means it's actually easier to gain experience in skills if you're fighting harder monsters, so fighting imps outside the starting town isn't necessarily the best plan anymore. For the base stats (strength, intelligence, spirit, agility, endurance, magic, hp, mp) it doesn't matter. But if you're trying to skill up spells, weapons, or defense rolls it totally matters where you're fighting. A typical fight I'm running into now is rank 5 instead of rank 1, so if I cast my level 2 Esuna spell once I'll actually gain 7 experience as opposed to 3. And if I spam it I'm only adding on one more experience per cast. So what I should probably start doing, if I want to level up spells, is to just find the hardest zone I can find and cast spells exactly once.

I want to be able to remove stone from my party (I almost lost when I came up against some monsters that breathed stone and they took out 3 people) so I need to skill up Esuna. Knowing this I think I'm going to just start casting it once a fight and get it up in a shorter period of time than just spamming it constantly for one fight.