More Final Fantasy

[MJW (ya that one)]

I just cannot wait until you totally trash the Berserker. I'm guessing Sol Cannon for the "highlight" picture.

I'm pretty sure that Geomancer will be added to the insanity tier and the Ranger is in this tier but I don't know anything else. Hunter can BS it with animals until he gets a real weapon from the liquid flame. You wouldn't know that without the internet but that's not a problem. Ranger lacks protection but that really doesn't matter because it doesn't take long until you get lucky with x-fight. Because everyone other than the chemist and time mage gets pwned by ExDeath's condemn anyway eating a few more deaths is irrelevant.

[System Error]

Was 100% sure of Mystic Knight. : arrier/Magic Shell does need an enemy attack to hit to get into play, it pretty much takes max level optimization to use. It's not something that comes into play in normal battles, but you can set it up to trigger in boss fights by going in with certain amounts of HP.

Also welp, discovered something new about this game. It's part of my upcoming report, but I'll post the relevant part in here now. It's interesting to say the least.

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If you've read my solo Cannoneer, you might remember I was running into trobles with Omega's Rocket Punch...except sometimes I wasn't. Also how in vs. Gil Turtle where I mentioned I was running into trouble applying Regen with Bard? Well, both are because of this bug I finally understand. When you go into battle after changing equipment, it seems status immunities don't get properly updated until you complete that battle. Take a look at how statuses are represented in this game.



Add these values up in hex and you'll have your status immunities, as represented in hex.

 
Speaking in GBA's sense. There are two addresses that control status immunity, 0200DAFB and 0201EE3B for the first character. The former is used out of battle, the latter is used in-battle. 0200DAFB is added to 0201EE3B after battle begins, and 0200DAFB is updated with your current equipment only after a battle finishes. The problem is apparent enough, but what's more, 0201EE3B updates with your current equipment's immunities when battle begins as well. You can see that despite John Connor's equipment, he has a lot more status protection than he should (the first three numbers in the top left).

As an example, after a "refresh" my character goes into battle wearing only an Angel Ring. This causes his in-battle status immunity to be 02/80/00. After the battle ends, this also becomes out of battle immunity. I put on Hermes Sandals instead and start a new battle. Because of this bug, he gets the benefits of both accessories' immunities, and it becomes 02/E0/14. However after battle, his out of battle status immunities are properly adjusted to only be 00/60/14.

This also works even if you change classes. You can go into battle with Bone Mail, switch to a magical class, and receive all its myriad immunities...including Regen. Of course, going that far is in defiance of the spirit of solo characters, if that's what you're using it for.

What about if you shield swap? After you take your next turn, the new immunities are applied. They don't seem to come off from the data I'm looking at, either. For example I go into a fight with no curable status protection, so that's at 00. I swap in Aegis and take a turn, setting it to 40. I then swap in Genji Shield and take a turn. Instead of removing the Aegis' petrify immunity, it just applies Genji's mini protection over top, 50.


This isn't a GBA only thing, either. It works on SNES too. Not sure about iOS and its derivatives - those versions change around a lot of the coding as well as making other questionable changes, so it may or may not work there.

So yeah. Very interesting thing to take into account when playing. Any of you may have even been unintentionally employing it.

[T-hawk]

That's pretty wild! Tell me if I'm simplifying this correctly:

When you take off a piece of equipment, you still keep its status immunities until the next time a battle ends.

Happens for both out-of-battle equipment swaps and in-battle shield swaps. Stays in effect even if you change jobs and now can't use the old piece of equipment. Does it survive a save/reset/load cycle?

Does the out-of-battle immunity list ever matter? I can't think of many statuses inflicted outside of battle... one is walking over the poisoning flowers when Lenna collects them to heal the drake, but that doesn't check immunity status, does it?

[System Error]

When you take off a piece of equipment, you still keep its status immunities until the next time a battle ends.

Right. As long as you go into battle with said piece of equipment beforehand. Like you can't just put on the equipment in the menu and immediately take it off. But if you end a battle with the equipment on, you can take it off and keep its status immunities in the next battle.

Happens for both out-of-battle equipment swaps and in-battle shield swaps.  Stays in effect even if you change jobs and now can't use the old piece of equipment.  Does it survive a save/reset/load cycle?

Yes with the above, yes, yes...and checking quickly, yes it also survives save/reset/load, at least on GBA and so probably SNES too.

Does the out-of-battle immunity list ever matter?  I can't think of many statuses inflicted outside of battle... one is walking over the poisoning flowers when Lenna collects them to heal the drake, but that doesn't check immunity status, does it?

I think poison flowers are the only thing where it could come into play, and I believe they don't care if you're immune, yeah.

[Sullla]

That's a really fascinating bug System Error. It's probably a good thing that I didn't know about it since it would have been hard to avoid making use of it for extra status protection in some places. Anyway, here's our next class; kudos to Dp101 for being the only one to guess this.



Knight
Overall Ranking: 7/26 [Tier 2, Rank 4]
Innate Command: Guard
Stats: Strength +23, Agility +1, Vitality: +20, Magic Power -14
Equipment: Daggers, All Swords, Shields, Heavy Armor set
Abilities: Cover (10 ABP), !Guard (30 ABP), DoubleGrip (50 ABP), EquipShield (100 ABP), EquipArmor (150), EquipSword (350)
Total ABP to Master: 690 points

The Knight is one of the most basic classes in FF5, designed around pure melee fighting and nothing else. Fortunately for the Knight, the combination of powerful weapons, sturdy armor, and beefy HP growth is enough to add up to a strong overall package. The Knight's signature ability is Double Grip, which lets the class forgo using a shield to deal double damage (technically this doubles the multiplier M and not the attack value itself). Double Grip provides the Knight with powerful offense at essentially every stage of the game, and so long as the Knight can refrain from ever running away in battle, it opens up the use of the Brave Blade in the third world for truly disgusting endgame killing power, on the order of 7000-8000 damage per swing. Double Grip is also more versatile than it might appear at first glance, with the Knight able to equip or unequip a shield in mid-battle to gain or lose the extra damage. As long as Double Grip has been set as the extra class ability ahead of time, it will continue to function. This works particularly well for situations like the final boss, where the Knight can use the Aegis Shield against the Exdeath Tree form and then drop it for some Double Grip smashing against Neo Exdeath. There's no reason ever to pick another ability for this class.

The other great advantage of the Knight class lies in the equipment that they have available. As this game's version of the Fighter class from the original Final Fantasy, Knights get to employ all types of swords along with the standard daggers. The Knight-only swords are very powerful indeed, including elemental weapons like the Flame Tongue and Icebrand as well as Excaliber (with holy element property) among the legendary weapons. Many of the non-Knight swords have useful properties as well, like the Ancient Sword (Old status), Slumber Sword (sleep), and Coral Sword (lightning element). Perhaps the best of the lot is the Defender Sword, which casts Armor when used in battle and makes the Knight almost impervious to physical damage. Knights also have access to shields for further elemental absorb and physical evade properties (Aegis Shield Hype!), as well as the Heavy armor set. A solo Knight can even make use of serious self-healing once the Flame Tongue sword appears near the end of the second world, using either the Flame Ring or the Flame Shield to self-attack for huge life restoration. The Bone Mail causes no problems for this class since the Knight can swap in both a fire sword and a fire shield at any point in time, then swap them both back out again on the next turn.

Balancing things out somewhat, the non-Double Grip abilities of the Knight class are almost entirely useless. "Cover" protects other party members who are in near-death status, which is useless for a solo game. "Guard" gives up the Knight's turn to make him completely invincible against incoming physical attacks, all of them doing zero damage. Unfortunately, a solo character needs to be able to attack to deal damage, and that makes Guard pointless in nearly all situations. I did make use of it to stop certain telegraphed high damage attacks, with the best example being the Cleaver! move of the Tonberris in Istory Falls. All of the other learned abilities involve equipment that the Knight can already use as an innate part of the class, useless stuff that might as well not exist. As for the stats associated with the class, the Knight gets Strength and Vitality in spades, while suffering from lousy Agility and horrible Magic Power. This is a melee fighter where what you see is exactly what you get.

The biggest weakness of the Knight class is an inability to deal multitargeted damage. Knights do all of their damage via the Fight command, and that only hits one target at a time. This concentrated damage works great in most situations, but it causes the class to struggle against the Puroboros bombs and Hiryuu Plant flowers. The Knight's reliance on physical attack also makes the class susceptible to enemy buffing and debuffing spells that protect against melee fighting. Byblos in particular was a very difficult foe for my solo Knight, with the enemy casting Armor in response to physical strikes and combining that with Slow and Sonic Wave / Dischord debuffs. It's the classic trope of how to deal with beefy fighter types: use magic to take them down via indirect status effects and debuffs. The game's coding also has a number of places where monsters will have some kind of a nasty response to the use of the "Fight" command, with the best example being the Unknowns in the Great Trench dungeon. Since the Knight never uses anything other than the "Fight" command, this opens up the class for dangerous counterattacks in some places. It was bad enough that my solo Knight couldn't do that one dungeon at all, though T-Hawk later pointed out that I could have simply Phoenix Downed the undead enemies in there. Whoops, overlooked that solution.

The total result adds up to produce a simplistic job that nonetheless still excels at most of the game's challenges. Knights make a great addition to a normal party, and it turns out that they can solo the game just fine on their own too.

[System Error]

That's a really fascinating bug System Error. It's probably a good thing that I didn't know about it since it would have been hard to avoid making use of it for extra status protection in some places.

Yup. I know I'll find it hard to avoid in any future playthroughs, and in fact will be using/noting it where appropriate in vs. Omega. I might feel bad if it were anything else, even Shinryu, but it's Omega. Something as overdesigned as it deserves no mercy. And I already went insane getting Ranger through with Assassin's Dagger stabs

But anyway, huh. That ranking surprises me, for a few reasons, which is why I didn't guess it. I thought they would be juuuust enough to push it out of tier 2, or taking last place in it if there at all. Though like I said, thinking differently. :P

- In the conclusion of its report, you labeled Knight as "slightly harder than expected" and pre-Brave Blade as "a little on the tough side"
- Knight only gets its double M boost if it forgoes a shield. Swapping is on the table, but if you need it on all the time (even with the status bug you might want the evasion), its offense is weaker than it would be.
- The added challenge of not being able to run the whole game due to the Brave Blade. Some things the Knight will need to stay and fight, even if it's dangerous or annoying (double Bone Dragons, super evasive enemies). The difference between it and Excalibur is not insignificant either (1140 less on Tree Exdeath non double gripped at level 65), leaving aside how the latter's holy element occasionally makes it unusable.

[Sullla]

Those are certainly fair points, and I don't expect that everyone else doing this exercise would come up with the exact same list. One of things that I had to do while putting this list together was read through all 26 solo reports again, and I found that what I wrote at the end of each one didn't necessarily match up to how I ranked them in the end. What was thinking about that class seven or eight years ago might not be how I felt after doing all of the classes from the best to the worst. As for the Knight itself, I just didn't have a lot of problems when I played through the game with that class. When I went back and read the report, Byblos was the only genuinely difficult opponent. Double Grip along with the game's second-highest Strength value makes for a great offense, and Heavy armor + shields + very high Vitality takes care of the rest. I really valued the flexibility of being able to swap a shield in or out mid-battle, going for higher damage or more defensiveness whenever it was appropriate.

Also I should point out something about the Brave Blade: I view it as pretty much all positives to have a class that can use it. I almost never run from any combats with any of my characters; I've had Chicken Knife characters make the third world and grab the thing with a starting attack value of 2 or 3. For those who tend to skip more combats, I can see this being a bigger issue than it was for me.

One more class left in this tier. Feel free to take a guess at which one it will be before I do the next post tomorrow morning.

[Dp101]

Still convinced it’s time mage next in this tier. Smaller chance of Dragoon or Blue Mage.

[System Error]

Also I should point out something about the Brave Blade: I view it as pretty much all positives to have a class that can use it. I almost never run from any combats with any of my characters; I've had Chicken Knife characters make the third world and grab the thing with a starting attack value of 2 or 3. For those who tend to skip more combats, I can see this being a bigger issue than it was for me.

Fair way of looking at it. I personally see it as kind of an investment: if you put in all the work and effort in keeping it up, you get rewarded in turn. But you will have to suffer for it sometimes - exchanging dealing with/sometimes dying to those randoms any other class can just peace out of for much stronger power. Different playstyles too, I guess. Though it is definitely worth it, since bosses are the main threat in the game.

Next class...looking again, you said "the other physical heavy classes" in regards to the rest of the tier and that "almost all" can equip shields. Latter statement rules out Dragoon and Blue Mage. With this though, I'm not sure if you'd put Ranger or Monk in this spot. @_@ I'm leaning Ranger due to stronger endgame power. Time Mage as a dark horse.

[Azoth]

I'd probably go with Blue Mage. So much versatility: I don't think there's a single roadblock boss for the class? Early on you can level-target with Goblin Punch (Karbolos, Ifrit, Byblos, Sol Cannon) and lock out physical damage with Flash/Elf Cape/Shield (Forza, Garula, Adamantium). Then you have Fire Rod-powered Emission self-healing, so Bone Mail has little downside, and you can drain away MP with Magic Hammer (Gilgamesh) or exploit a lack of Heavy status with Missile (Enkidu, Hiryuu Plant). Atmos is handled with Dark Shock/Lvl5 Death, and second world Exdeath with Lvl2 Old. Late game, you have Aero 3, all the level spells, White Wind, Mighty Guard, Aegis Shield. Plus you can break rods anytime if you really want to. Hunter and Time Mage outscale the Blue Mage, but I think consistency from start to finish counts for more.