Meliadoul/Orlandu ignore evade, have more range, and deal damage while they break stuff. Despite this, Meliadoul isn't even considered a particularly great character.
Well yes generics lose vs. uniques. Meliadoul is fine, I certainly used her, the main complaint against her is that you get her so late she's annoying to level and she's easily compared to Orlandu. Also, to some degree I'm referring to characters at their best. Sure, Breaks aren't great vs. monsters, but that's just the way it works. Making them completely awesome vs. humans is eh, since that encourages Weapon Break abuse even more when you know you're fighting humans. It sounds like you can, if knowing a mostly/100% human battle is coming up, just cheerfully stick Break skills on your Chemist or whatever and easily render the fight a laugher by shooting up all their weapons before they even close. This is acceptable when you're assuming the fight is a laugher because it's Chapter 4 and you have awesome unqiues, but it means you get to do that the whole game now.
If you have two swords already, can't you just kill Gafgarion instead?
Not really? Gafgarion is tanky and draining, while Ramza might be doing damage Ramza tends to die before finishing the job is my recollection (since Gaf is still solidly 3HKOing). I never understood the Gafgarion disrespect elsewhere; I wonder if mine is ubered. Sure, at the Execution site you can just rush him with a bunch of characters. As for the duel, when I beat games on later playthroughs with fewer skills, I generally beat him via healing and running to open the gate so my buddies could help out, then having a 5-on-1 lynch mob. I consider myself pretty good at FFT too; haven't done the more insane challenges, but I did do semi-reasonable challenges like going through with one fewer character than the max in all battles and rushing to the end in the minimum number of days.
This was actually part of the argument--encouraging the player to use the Maintenance support ability (which doesn't get much love as-is).
Maybe, but enemy breaks aren't much fun. I realize this is subjective, but having to run back to the store and re-buy equipment is annoying. It's even worse if the knights before Velius now get to break your stuff and you don't have spares in the inventory since you can't run back and rebuy equipment. Finger Guard doesn't get much love either, but ubering Talk Skill to make it worthwhile seems counterproductive.
I know you're a Magic fan, so think of this way: "nobody is using this anti-coin flipping card enough, so let's make coin-flipping tournament level and everywhere." Bad plan.
The new Wizard's Death takes two full rounds to cast (18 CTR). This design would not work well at all with range 4.
Ah, okay, I see. Weird, but works, I suppose.
The problem with the breaks is that they take too long to really reach a meaningful effect, so you could've just killed the enemy instead unless your skill setups totally suck.
I generally agree about Speed Break, but it could theoretically have its moments, which is why I support knocking the ability breaks up to 100%. As it stands, I think the main use of Speed Break is to do something like Slow Elmdor down so you can steal his stuff. It might have a use if there was a tremendously tanky and damaging yet already slow monster in the game, such that it only took two Speed Breaks to cripple his speed. But yeah, in general, if you want to slow down enemies, Dancer's Slow Dance is the way to do it. That's pretty decent in the Deep Dungeon, where you have plenty of time to mess with the enemies from afar before closing.
