Golgorand Execution Site
1 reset (only one?!)
The main challenge, as usual, is not surviving. No, I easily outgun the enemies. The trouble is taking care of them all before someone dies and crystallizes. That is... considerably more difficult. Everyone has in the neighborhood of 150 HP. Power Sleeves and Headgear and Lightning Bows.
Gafgarion dies first, clearly. 50+ guaranteed draining damage from anywhere on the map? No thank you. Bad enough that he hits me with it once before I can move, allowing him to do it again would be suicide. Fortunately he dies in three Charge +7s from the main group (who start as close to the bridge side as possible).
The Time Mages in both battles used relatively useless spells, thank god, and were easily OHKO'd or at least sent to critical by the two archers in the secondary group (start them forward so they can hop up to the bridge and the guillotine at the start).
Then it's just archers and knights, but in tricky positions. Ramza's taken a Night Sword right off the bat, one archer in the main group takes a knight hit, and the other will take a hit from the same knight on turn 2 as the main group retreats up the ramp.
Knights... have 4 move now, base. And mostly Battle Boots. So 5 move. This is a problem. The archers... have charge +3ish and can do the same height exploits I can. Arrow Guard helps against them, but only sometimes.
The first attempt went very poorly. An enemy archer got up on the guillotine before I did, since I didn't even think about it at first in my "MUST KILL TIME MAGES" rush, Arrow Guard failed no less than five times, and all the knights had Battle Boots and generally bad zodiac with the archers who needed to kill them.
Second attempt I ran Laggychan, Archer extraordinaire, onto the guillotine immediately, and was generally able to avoid damage better. At one point I had a knight chasing Ramza up the ramp, certain to kill him. Ramza had a big charge aimed at the knight's face, but my other archer on the ramp with him couldn't shoot the knight's current position. So I have him charge on the only square the knight can get to to kill Ramza. Either the knight goes there and kills Ramza, but then dies, or he doesn't move to that spot and therefore can't reach anyone to attack, but hangs around and will be easily shot down in short order. Right?
No, Lightning Bow's Bolt triggers from Ramza's shot and puts the knight in critical, so he runs away all the way to the corner. I get sliced up, Arrow Guard fails and one of the main group dies, and the last perfectly healthy knight chooses to hide in the other corner of the map and do absolutely nothing. Laggychan is the only one who can reach the corners, so he has to snipe off the critical knight, someone has to snipe the archers, and the knights have to be machinegunned down in the three turns before failure. I barely make it, killing the last knight by about 2 HP over his total, with 0 turns left on my dead man, and said knight 1 panel away from grabbing a time mages' crystal. Very intense fight.
Gate of Lionel
6 resets
First try, I discover to my dismay that you in fact cannot Ignore Height up to the battlements, two knights have Weapon Break, and the third knight has Kamaitachi and Don't Acts two people. Also Ramza loses the duel badly. Second try, I put Green Beret on Ramza. Doesn't help, Gaff has 8 speed, I can't get a Charge +10 off on him. Ramza dies and I can't mop up fast enough. Third try, I go for Power Wrist on Ramza. Still doesn't help.
Then I remember Ramza revives when Gaffy dies. Oops.
Then Gafgarion critical hits Ramza for the 2HKO.
Then all the knights have Weapon Break and Kamaitachi luck AGAIN.
Then the knights have Punch Art, including 100% Death Sentence Secret Fist, and Weapon Break, and Ramza and help still can't take down Gaffy.
FINALLY I get a run where the enemies don't have horribly destructive secondaries, and send three people back to help kill Gaff. Augh.
Queklain
8 resets.
As good as Archers may be at dealing damage, they aren't good enough to slaughter Quek due to the height and speed differences and restricted movement. The usual tactics just didn't work - I could deal about 300 to him, but was losing to Nightmare and physicals. After some fist shaking in Laggy's direction (and in that of the conventional "don't use Defense Rings" wisdom), I put on Defense Rings all around, and was made very glad I bought them when this resulted in Quek running downstairs and doing nothing but spam Bio 2 for ~30% odds of petrify.
This was much more conducive to me winning the fight, since Petrify doesn't impose a three turn failure countdown, wasn't 100% at disabling or killing people like everything else he does is, and in fact failed a lot. Green Beret is not the way to go here, Quek's occasional doubleturning just means I can get Charge +10 off with all the survivors. Still close, ended with one person alive, but not bad especially considering Ramza is Taurus and only one person had good compat to Scorpio.
Necessary formation for this:
+-++
+---
XXXR
Ramza starts one panel "ahead" of his default formation position, no matter where you place him, so I put him in one of the - and the rest on the + so Quek can only target two people with Bio 2. Bold is the guy with good compat, which means Quek will run downstairs to target the back two instead of one of the other groups of two.
That's all for tonight.
---------------------------------------------
As far as balance goes, archers are... actually managing to both impress and disappoint me. They have some big, uniquely useful strengths - good ranged physical damage and Ignore Height mainly - and some weaknesses, pretty frail, NOT good damage vs Knights, and you need both good positioning and good CT manipulation to use them.
For a normal game I think they definitely do have a place. One build that I think would be very viable is to have someone go Knight first, get one or two break skills, whichever ones you want to support your party, and then go Archer once Long Bows show up, use the breaks off your bow, and use your Archer JP to go straight to Concentrate and Charge +20. Don't even bother with the early charges, not enough JP, get Charge +20.
Yeah, I'm hyping Charge +20. At first it was a novelty but once you get into Chapter 2-ish and speeds standardize, if you're at the same speed as an enemy and they move and act, you can Charge +20 them for ridiculously awesome damage. It's solid 2HKO on Knights with bows. 150+ against non-Knights in Chapter 2. Think about that for a while. I'm not sure at exactly what speed +20 stops working now, but I think it may be possible to do things like, say, go to Thief with it and maybe even OHKO Gaffy and Queklain, or go back to Knight or some other physical class with it and have a 5 Move Concentrate or Ignore Height Knight dish it out. Substitute (or add) Charge +10 to keep it useful later into the game. The rest of the Charge skillset I wouldn't really hype as things you would use on other classes, it adds damage to your physical but not reaally that much... but +10 and +20 (early on) are very viable to target and absolutely destroy some chosen enemy that Must Die.
Alternatively, you can just go for the middle charges and keep an archer in your party for a while. +5/+7, or +3 or so on a midcharge shot are generally sufficient to OHKO enemy casters from a nice long range. Archer use is very map dependent, though. There are some maps you'll love them on and some you really won't.
With all of that said... 4 archer/1 Chemist or 3 archer/2 chemist, with the chemists getting Ignore Height from archer spillover and the archers getting some Item? That would obliterate the entire game to this point except for Dorter and maybe Queklain. A pack of ignore height ranged units is just terrifying. Battles tend to flow very smoothly in this, there's an opening game, midgame and cleanup, and if anyone dies before cleanup they're going to crystallize... but if I had any revival at all I could still easily outgun everything on the map with three or four healthy archers in good position. Of course this would still be mainly an Archer not-quite-SCC and I'm sure there are some better ways to go about doing things.
Arrow Guard is a bit similar. It's saving my bacon a lot right now, because I have it on everyone, but ONLY because I have it on everyone. Enemy archers generally have their choice of targets, so if you only have Arrow Guard on one or two people, they'll just shoot at the ones who don't have it. Still better than Speed Save, though. Remind me again why SS is still 400 JP in Archer?
