So...laggy convinced me to do a challenge run.
The rules are as follows
1. No buying equipment from stores ever. Only fixed battle drops and equipment that guests leave behind.
2. Among guest drops, Excalibur is banned.
3. No picking up equipment from chests (if I get gear from chests accidentally, I am required to sell it).
4. No excessive grinding (skipping all green dots).
5. No special characters.
6. No propositions (maybe? Don't think we had a firm decision on that one).
We might be more lenient on some of these if the challenge just hits a hard roadblock somewhere (unban propositions, or allow some grinding from randoms or something).
So...my plan so far was to spread out across multiple jobs, since equipment will come for lots of different jobs. Also get classes that can survive on low equipment, so like Mime, Monk. I have two mages at the moment (both bouncing between summoner/black mage) One monk, one useless character that has been trying to unlock Mime (Chemist is a terrible class cause I can't buy items. Squire is pretty meh too right now). And one vaguely undetermined character with some plans of "IDK maybe this character will go to Ninja or something" but they're probably just going to end up being Knight Party Tank or something.
So...first to note, HP and MP values spent a long time being very, very low due to only having hats and clothes. Another, which is relevant due to how low HP values have been, is that revival has been a problem (obviously phoenix down is off the table, can't buy more, and raise is 10 MP and only 89% hitrate on neutral compat. Eventually I will get revive on Monk, but other stuff has taken priority. Ramza used guts for a while, but it's hard to cut black magic for Guts).
Magic City Gariland: 0 resets. Fairly straightforward, the only thing to note is that I manually controlled all characters instead of the usual autobattle since I didn't want to waste the precious 5 potions you start with.
Mandalia Plains: 1 reset cause someone died early and crystallized, but really the difficulty hasn't kicked in yet.
Sweegy woods: 0 resets. had three people with black magic for this fight (one of them a squire working towards Mime, but still).
Dorter Trade City: 4ish resets. This is the fight where the plan was to dump potions cause otherwise whoever the longbow archer hits gets 2HKO'd due to having terrible equipment. Still had lots of issues; I have a mostly high faith party cause I'm anticipating needing to lean on Raise later in the game, and basically no gear yet, so wizards threaten to OHKO. Anyone getting damaged at all needs to be scared of being finished off by just about any unit (barring the unarmed archer). Doable, but really requires not messing up and getting hit by any wizard spells or getting hit by much other than the longbow archer in general (crossbow archer can 2HKO people).
Sand Rat Cellar. 2ish resets? Something like that? So...had two people with black magic, who kept people poisoned and stalled. One chemist, who ended up using a few more precious potions. And...a Monk with accumulate, who sat still and accumulated while poison stalling was happening. Ended up with 13 PA, which hits for about 171 damage on neutral, and was used to clean up three or four characters. In general I'm harsh on accumulate--if you have a 10 WP weapon, it's basically a ranged attack that deals +10 damage to everyone you hit later. But with unarmed punches, because of the quadratic formula, it's more like +20 damage per attack. And the fight dragged on long enough for the monk to punch like three people, so each accumulate was like "deal 20 damage to 3 targets at range with no MP cost". You know what, for this fight, that's actually quite good, that's like having someone with a longer range version of black magic that doesn't cost MP. My usual opinion of accumulate is that for most fights it's worse than charge (and not the buffed LFT charge, but vanilla trashy charge). But for this one fight that lends itself very hard to stalling? Actually very solid. Hasn't really gotten this level of value in any subsequent fight, although talk to me again after we do Zirekile Falls I guess.
Miluda 1: 2ish resets. Lots of enemies that can one shot me due to low HP, but I have repeating fist, and eventually just highroll with it.
Miluda 2: 3ish resets. Stuff can happen here like enemy wizards instant killing the summoner before she gets a turn. But...the summoner also has Ifrit, and thanks to the Linen Robe, enough MP to cast Ifrit. So eventually most of the mages bunch up and die, and then a repeating fist highroll kills Miluda.
Wiegraf 1: 0 resets. Bait Wiegraf forward with the mime-in-training who is on a chemist. He happily one-shots. Repeating Fist from the front, get through front evade and highroll on the damage. Drop two more spells. No resets, lol.
Fort Zeakdon: 10-15 resets. So this was a nightmare. Wizards can always OHKO, so Ramza is on Time Mage with Reflect learned, and typically uses Reflect every round (and needs to stay perfectly CT synced with the mages. BTW Reflect costs 12 MP, he has 36 MP, so not cheap). Speed is a problem--If the summoner is on summoner, they're slow and can't poison algus on round 1. If the summoner is on black mage, they're 6 speed and can poison algus before he moves, but then they can't land an Ifrit on Algus until the third turn. Three setups I messed with on Delita--giving him battle boots makes him hit Algus turn 1, but then Algus runs away and that's bad. Giving him black magic makes him run a bit more forward to catch as many people as possible in poison, and then Algus attacks and runs away, and that's bad. So we ended up just leaving him with no battle boots. I basically have three relevant characters (monk, Ramza with black/time magic, and the summoner with black magic). The fourth character is a mime in training, or...the fifth character; ended up going with the fifth character on Knight. Naked Knight to be clear, no armour drops have shown up yet; one shield. General job of this character was to pull a few enemies to the right. Anyway, did a lot of lowrolling on auto potion luck (my best damaging spell is Ifrit and deals 42 damage, most of my attacks if they hit and auto-potion triggers net heal Algus). Also did some lowrolling on repeating fist (it was rare to successfuly get in range for repeating fist at all, but when I did, several fights in a row it rolled below expectations).
Dorter 2: 4ish resets, but the first few tries I was not taking it seriously (bringing in my weak untrained characters). So...tried to get away with bringing bad characters. Ended up needing like...change the monk to a Knight with Punch Art as a chakra battery to keep people alive from archers, and Chemist with raise as a backup plan (who spent most of the fight getting chakrad by the knight since he only had MP for one raise). Used that duo to stall while Agrias and Gafgarion soloed the rest. We get Rad Alicia and Lavian gear now, so that's a huge upgrade--chain vest, red hood, and a bunch of armour.
Also may have inadvertently discovered a dupe glitch--if guests pick up a treasure box, seems like they get two copies of the treasure? Somehow ended up with two headgears and two additional chain vests after the fight which didn't show up as war trophies, so I assume some kind of dupe glitch happened. (We only got one green beret, but a non-guest picked that treasure chest up). Anyway, we assumed the additional headgear and chain vest were a glitch so we sold them along with all the other stuff picked up from treasure boxes.
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Getting close to Mime being unlocked, which is nice. Have equip armour on the monk now, which I suspect is just going to be their support for the rest of the game--like...agrias and gafgarion give good armour, and orlandu's going to upgrade armour. Rafa/malak will get me some robes and mage gear. But I'm not aware of any source of clothes coming up soon; maybe a war trophy somewhere? So probably both my Monk and...whatever my fifth character is (Knight? Ninja?) will want equip armour.
