Wait, didn't you say that getting items mattered more than equipment earlier? You'll need some money to get those accessories.
You get quite a few in chests actually. Quick glance through a FAQ... yeah, Spd+3, Spd+5, Spd+8, Spd+10... scattered throughout the game. They all looked "on route", nothing sidequesty.
(I will add that I didn't find speed as valuable as you, but I don't want to say anything definitive without more testing. If you say Aht's speed is that good, then to me it suffices to show that other PCs can match her if she's playing catch-up on HP.)
You might not always have Marco in your team, and using Eruca to trans-turn to Stocke so he can steal is just awful.
*shrug* Stocke is forced, which already covers your thieving duties most of the time. (I don't steal that much. Something to keep in mind when I say I didn't have money trouble... if there are lots of goodies from stealing that I missed, it must be even easier to afford good healing.) If you want a second thief, you have three choices - Marco, Aht, or Eruca. This doesn't seem like it's scoring any of them many points, seeing as there are three candidates for the role and it's not a great role to start with.
The main problem is that it's hard to get good, reliable status resistance with accessories. You can't just give Marco a ribbon and call it a day.
- First, those slots are used for speed boosting items if Marco wants to match Aht's speed. Let's not forget that!
- Second, there's like only one status resistance item that protects against every status, and it's late and weak (+2 against everything) Most other accessories only protect against one status. Restarting a battle just to switch accessories is a pain too, just use Solaris to make everything better.
- Third, I had everyone loaded with sleep resistance items against the optional boss and the status still had a crazy success rate (This might be because it's an optional boss, I'll give you that)
- Fourth, those accessories cost money. See my earlier point. Fully equipping your team AND buying speed boosting accessories AND buying a bunch of status resistance accessories AND buying a ton of items is starting to be a stretch.
re the points here:
1. This is pretty valid. Of course, Marco doesn't need durability (Gaia/Madre Blade) or offence (Trans-Turn). He can probably afford, say, two Sky Drops and the Spd+10 armlet if we're talking endgame.
2. I'm definitely going to reiterate that despite my eschewing of both Polaris (except for an experiment with it where it failed to block status <.<) and statusblockers on 2/3 of my PCs that I barely even noticed enemy status attacks until the final boss (Alistel arc boss has an okay one I guess but he's after Sky Drops anyway, which are chapter 5, actually not that late).
4. Sky Drops cost 4000. This is "might as well be free", way less than most endgame equipment. Most of the rest are even cheaper, if you care.
Now hold on a second. You're only comparing all of Aht's qualities to the best options available: Is her healing better than items? Is her damage always uber compared to Raynie? (at least you didn't say Eruca) Is Polaris as good as Marco's MT status healing?
Nah. I am comparing Aht to the Stocke/Marco/Raynie team at all times, except for "holy crap Gafka demolishes randoms with WGS even if underlevelled". If they happen to usually be the best options available then they're better PCs. If not I don't understand what you're getting at.
- Regenerate only works once a round (worthless if your team is fully healed, inferior if your team is hurt and you want to use a lot of healing in one turn), is weak and needs to be cast every few rounds. It just stops being useful after the earlygame.
Regenerate heals 40 HP per turn (for 6 turns, quite a good duration actually). This is enough to close the gap between 90/100 and 150 which you are so fond of (okay, there's still a tiny difference. This is more than made up for extra HP regen offers on turns where you don't need to MT heal but do have some residual missing HP). Basically it makes all your healing 40 points better (unless you're using multiple MT healing moves a round which is grossly inefficient), than heals an extra 40 to everyone who ISN'T healed, each round.
Did you know that Star Traps target two panels? So, either Aht gets an additional turn whenever she uses a star trap instead of a trap, or Stocke pushes his enemies into two traps at once for uber damage.
(I'm aware, yes.)
The problem is that the limiting factor on Aht damage isn't the number of panels she can trap or the number of turns she can get, it's the turns everyone ELSE gets to gather enemies and push them onto traps. Pushing things onto two star traps is just overkill, most will die to one. If this were a game like FFX with lots of big tough randoms star traps would be uber, but randoms instead look like "here are 4-6 enemies who are 2HKOed at best, just have enough HP to deal with weak MT options".
- Wind God Strike actually works well with traps. You CAN target the center... But you can also target one of the 3 of the squares surrounding the center and have Stocke push enemies into it in a single round.
That on the other hand I did not know. So the strategy is Stocke push enemy out of centre, trap a panel beside it (also traps centre), WGS? If I'm misunderstanding please clarify.
Still, it doesn't matter. Both strategies murder everything mobile in a single round (WGS->Air Assault->G-spell is so gross, like 600-700 damage or something even before the fourth attack; randoms don't have that much HP typically). The biggest threat to any Gafka-centred endgame sweeping team is immobile enemies, and Raynie is much better at picking them off than Aht is.
- Raynie gets G-Thunder kinda late, you want it against thaumachines.
In the first thaumachine fight, the real threat is the exploding guys who you can't trap. By the time you fight Thaumachines again (or Granorg armour dude), Raynie should have G-Thunder.
- We're not FAQing the game. We're real men (and women)
If we're not, then I start peppering any lategame Aht notes with "if you actually find her optional skills". Did I mention Marco/Raynie aren't reliant on optional skills to be badass?
Eruca is really made of tissue paper (she dies all the time), she only has one element and you can pretty much forget about fighting the final boss with her.
Yeah, I was thinking about this today, and I agree (although Aht is closer to Eruca durability than to anyone else... this doesn't matter if you think Eruca needs to twink speed to compete of course. I don't, you do, blah blah). I realise more and more I have some fondness for Eruca because I used her with Gafka for total destruction but now I realise that's way more about Gafka, and while Eruca makes the shiniest numbers they aren't necessary and now that I know she leaves I regret not letting Raynie get more exp during that time. So yeah, ready to admit I was wrong there.
Gafka's clearly worse too. He is extremely one dimensional, his one big damage move can often be hard to use (unless you have Aht!), Wind God Strike can't compare with all that Aht brings to the team.
WGS is better than anything Aht does, ever. It is better than anything ANY PC does, ever (in this game I mean). If he had it the whole game, or even half the game, we'd be talking Nina4/Ursula randomsweeping absurdity here. One-rounding all mobile enemies off 2-3 actions (and even softening the immobile ones!) is that good.
He doesn't have much else. However! When the best team is S/R/M, I nod to the fact that there is a point in the game where Gafka,
even if you haven't used him before or gotten any of his other skills, is -clearly- the optimum party choice. This never applies to Aht. Unfortunately for all but the best PCs, "I do a bunch of things decently" is not as good as "I do one thing really, really well" in a game like this. WGS, unlike most sidequest skills, is also really thrown in your face, IIRC.
I'm not really interested in a Gafka/Aht debate past that. I will freely acknowledge that if you're looking for someone you can use all game in your fixed party, Aht is a better choice than Gafka. But until you convince me that Aht > Raynie or Aht > Marco, we're stuck with a situation where Gafka is more useful in my eyes (and you should have little trouble seeing why even if you don't agree). So let's focus on those arguments.
To be fair, Marco's in most parties because he goes well with anything, with pushing skills, not awful durability and speed, and Trans-Turn.
Which is why he's the best. He steals everyone else's best attributes (which notably means all of Stocke's since he's forced) and has a few of his own (grapple, def/mag buffs... healing I guess!). It's like Gogo if Gogo had effectively great stats (since he can dump offence and not suffer) instead of game-worst. Even if there were some overcentralisingly good PC otherwise that would make Marco only a bit behind, since the optimum team would now be Stocke/Marco/Citan Uzuki or whatever (with a big gap between Marco and #3). Since there isn't, he's the man.
Whew, kept this post under 10k at least. <_<
