Musing on FF5 job balance

[Dark Holy Elf]

Tyrannosaur

He's undead, has 5000 HP, weak to fire/gravity. On his own turns he hits things modestly. He's all about counters, which he uses 1/3 of the time against physicals and just overkills single targets. He's totally non-threatening since you can just revive from that, and anyway mages don't face it at all while they blow him up with fire. Or you can just use Phoenix Downs on him, they'll hit around 2/3 of the time so you can expect to use 1.5 and win with ~1500 gil spent, FF5 enemies can't counter attacks which miss them so this is perfectly safe.

Honestly that leaves little to say. All physical jobs which do damage for free (i.e. not Samurai/Ninja) need at least 7 hits to beat him so they'll need to use at least two Phoenix Downs recovering from counters anyway, so they just toss Phoenix Downs on him. The only exception is Mystic Knight which 4HKOs so will only have to use one Phoenix Down on average and is thus slightly better!

Chemist can hit him with Berserk via Mix which shuts off his counters and lets them win with Heal Staff from there. His physicals get kinda legit from there especially if they used Blessed Kiss which hastes him, but Heal Staff + a speed shake on the Heal Staff user will keep up, hell they can use Iron Drafts too if they want, it still costs less than a Phoenix Down in total.

Mages meanwhile use Flame Thrower/Fira/Ifrit/Raise/Comet and kill him in a few attacks that don't trigger counters while being safe in the back row.

Berserker can't use Phoenix Downs and sucks as usual. Better unequip those Death Sickles because their random ID fully heals him! They'll provoke an average of 3 counters so they... probably win but it's not certain. Last place but even they're not TOO bad...

So overall this is mages > Chemist > Mystic Knight > other fighters > Berserker. I probably won't count this up for official ranking though because the spread is so low, oh no the worse jobs spend 1500 gil more than the better.

One interesting note about this fight is that in the Mobile/Steam version, Tyrannosaur got a buff: he now counters magic with Poison Breath, closing the hole he had there. (In SNES/PSX/GBA, he only countered earth/wind/poison/holy magic, which you weren't going to use anyway because he's weak to fire.) Poison Breath does heavilly random damage but averages around a low 3HKO to most mages, MT. White/Red Mage get around it by just casting Raise, which he doesn't counter. Time Mage gets around it by using Haste/Slow and healing it off with a Heal Staff as usual. Blue Mage, IF they have White Wind, can do something similar. Otherwise, Blue/Black/Summon will probably all just retreat to Phoenix Down tossing, so they'd fall back to the fighter pack.

I lied, I guess Red Mage is still #1.


Next up: another boss which I am debating whether I should count or not.


EDIT: is a blue magic spell which does damage equal to the caster's missing HP, it is three question marks, it shows up as an emoticon here and I'm going to leave it that way because it amuses me.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Abductor (Bal Castle)

He's technically a boss, but with 2500 HP and 0 in all defences/evasions he drops fast. 2/3 of the time he uses weak physicals. On odd-numbered turns he may use Hurricane (HP-1), on even-numbered turns he may use Vampire, which is the only scary thing about him. Vampire heals him to full via draining, killing someone if he's been hurt. He's above average speed, but the fastest jobs will go before him.

Broadly speaking, here are the strategies:

a) Kill him in one round: Knight, Monk, Berserker, Ninja, Black Mage, Time Mage, Summoner
b) Kill him in two rounds and outspeed: Thief*, Ranger, Mystic Knight
c) Wait for him to pass two turns, then kill him two rounds. If he he uses Hurricane round 1, use a Hi-Potion: Dragoon, Samurai, Blue Mage*, Red Mage (use Cura instead), Beastmaster, Chemist (use Heal Staff to heal, and speed shakes to enable a blitz), Geomancer, Dancer
d) Lock him down with Stop lol: Bard

*Blue Mage can try to save themselves a Hi-Potion by using Missile, it hits around 70% of the time and if it does in the first two tries they can one-round, otherwise no big. If they have 1000 Needles or White Wind (from other jobs' help) they win 100% with no expenditures too.

*Thief deserves special note here for a couple reasons. One, their two-round is reliant on the Dancing Dagger not fucking up and using Mystery Waltz (confuse is fine, since it hits Abductor!). Two, they have a big opportunity here which they may want to take: they can steal Twin Lances from randoms which can be fought in Bal Castle before the boss. This is a pain because it's a 3% chance to steal one, and most of the rest of the time they get a Hi-Potion instead. So getting one of these is a long, painful process, and they do want 4. This is a major grinding cost (it'll probably take about 16-20 encounters to safely get one, since they may wish to run from the 5-Objet D'Art fights so I will try to look at Thief both with and without it, from here on. The positive effect of this investment will last until after Melusine, though (~9 boss fights). I'll try to scale accordingly. Anyway it makes little difference against Abductor, because he sucks.

White Mage has the worst time here because they can't really avoid seeing Vampire, although they have tricks to reduce it: Shell halves its hit rate, and they can confuse/deconfuse Abductor: while confused he won't do anything and they can't damage him without breaking confuse. Confuse has about a 70% hit rate so over a long fight this could go wrong and if so they have to start again.


Anyway, to sum up: White Mage is the worst here (though still not terrible), while Dragoon/Samurai/Beastmaster/Geomancer/Dancer are the next worst... by which I mean they spend approximately 120 gil on average getting through this fight. I have a hard time caring. This is even worse than Tyrannosaur, honestly, so once again, no official ranking.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Dragon Pod

Dragon Pod does nothing but summon 3 to 5 Dragon Flowers, which in turn do nothing but use ITD/ITE physicals which add various status: old, blind, confuse, poison, and paralyse. The damage is weak but it can't be reduced by defence and adds up. The flowers, however, have incredibly bad durability, so it's easy to kill them with MT. About the only thing that doesn't is something you'd intuitively think would work well: MT Fira (as well as the rest of L1-3 black magic) doesn't break their decent MDef. The flowers also have decent MEvade, but no status resistances at all, while Dragon Pod has a few holes of its own.

If you have MT, you win. Even more easily than against the bombs.


Kick, strengthened MT Bio, Titan, and Aqua Breath all OHKO the flowers, so just use that. Monk, Black Mage, Summoner, and Blue Mage can meanwhile use their other turns to kill the boss. Any damage works fine, for Blue Mage the best tool is Missile, which they're nearly certain to have. Dragon Pod has no gravity resistance whatsoever and the first Missile will take off 9000 of its 12000 HP, haha. All of these jobs basically rule here.

For Knight, though, say, things are tougher. ... well somewhat. They can try to cut down the flowers, since on turn 1-3 it only summons three so you can kill them and still have an attack left over. On turn 4 it summons all five, so kill the most dangerous four (all but blind, probably). From there on Dragon Pod only summons every six turns, or if it's alone. So don't leave it alone and beat the crap out of it. You'll need to use a few Eye Drops but the damage is nothing so whatever, you win, and Eye Drops cost 20 gil each. One of them can also equip the Silver Specs and another the Bone Mail, to get two people immune to the status if you wish.

Thief has a similar battle plan, with about a third the offence. Unless they have Twin Lances, then they have closer to three quarters of the offence! That said. Lower offence means more time to screw things up when he resummons and more eye drops / Hi-Potions used but uh honestly it still won't be that many. They can use four sets of Silver Specs if they took the trouble to steal them back in W1, they're common steals from a common enemy, but at 40% I still can't consider this free. Not sure where to rank them.

Dragoon's jump shenanigans are useless here, they don't want to give the boss more time to summon. They have more damage than thieves, though less speed, but the comparison works out in their favour, excluding any Silver Spec considerations.

Ninja can pull the same game as Knight, except they also have Image, so any turns the poor little darkness flower sneaks in are useless anyway. They can also throw scrolls, although that means spending like... something approaching real gil in this fight. Maybe. They'll probably "need" 4 if they don't turtle behind Image.

Samurai can use Zeninage but it's a huge waste of money to clear out the flowers. If anything it's best used when all the flowers are dead, since then it 3HKOs the boss for only ~1200 gil a shot. But that's still too expensive for what a sap this guy is. Otherwise they do slightly more damage than Dragoon.

Berserker sucks because they can hit the wrong flowers if they are unlucky and paralyse/old/blind are both pretty annoying (they immune confuse). The Bone Mail can block everything except paralysis. The Death Sickle can ID the boss, sometimes, so that's nice, but isn't saving them from last.

Ranger has more offence than Samurai and their attacks have an 8% chance to ID the boss, which isn't high enough to really hype but helps them be better than Berserker at the one thing Berserker does well, and in the end that's kind of like winning. Speed's nice too.

Dancer can also be thrown in with the random fighters. They have a ribbon to immune a few statuses but otherwise don't compare very well with Dragoon. They can use Flirt for coinflip turn-cancel on the boss... actually this is much better than against Manticore, since flowers sneaking through isn't that bad, they just OHKO them and go back to flirting, or do the usual thing of leaving the blind one alive (which doesn't even prevent flirt). I think this tactic may push them past Dragoon at least.

Mystic Knight can use Drain Spellblade and thus never have to worry about damage ever. They'll probably want to leave the poison flower alive so they always hit, even though their damage is worse this way (the poison flower puts the boss in the back row), and then drain will heal off any damage they take. This is pretty weak offence but it's good enough and they can't die ever, just kill the non-poison flowers if the boss resummons them.

The Beastmaster release of choice here is Aquathorn, which gives a 70+% chance of death if the boss is the only target. Get one on your slowest character (with Kornago's Gourd, this is quite easy, only rating as a slight detour at most), and have the other three kill flowers, then give it a try. If it doesn't work, their offence sits around Dragoon/Samurai level. You can also pull some turn shenanigans to try to get other Aquathorn shots off if you want, but this is really getting into "more prep than this boss deserves" land.

White Mage, like Ninja, can basically shut down the flowers offensively with image. However, they're real bad at killing them (usually 2HKO, 70% accuracy). But wait! They don't have to! They can hit the flowers with Confuse and then Image (... yes) so they'll just waste turns attacking each other and failing. Reset Image every on a flower every time it goes away, then slowly beat down the boss. It's... annoying as hell because you have to keep track of enemy Images yourself and getting confuse to land in the first place is really annoying. This is honestly purely to save time, though, you could just keep Image up on your own PCs and win slowly that way, too.

Time Mage can also try to status out the flowers, but slow is their only permanent one and resetting Stop against the flowers' 30 MEvade is a bit dicy. But they can one-shot flowers with knives (or Comet 91% of the time if they don't want to buy knives), and have Haste to do so before they ever act. They have no reason not to leave the blind one alive if it comes to that, and can use Gravity on the boss to weaken him really fast compared to fighters. ... oh and they can stop the boss, who doesn't have MEvade or Heavy status to resist this. Yeaaah.

If Time Mage can do it, so can Bard! As an added bonus they will stop any flowers who sneak through with this sometimes, and whatever they can one-shot the flowers with even bard physicals anyway. Not as good as Time Mage because they can't Haste, and in theory they are a bit vulnerable to a run of bad luck though uh that just reduces them to the same situation as the vanilla fighters.

Red Mage is annoyed that its MT damage doesn't work, but they still have Sleep, the absolute best status to lock the flowers down with since it never wears off. When used MT, sleep will strike them a little under 30% of the time (double that for ST) so they'll get all the flowers locked down soon enough. A few may sneak in attacks this way although the most dangerous ones (old? confuse?) can always be one-shotted by physicals if sleep misses them. Like Bard they're a bit vulnerable to setting this up, and of course they can't stop the boss from summoning.

Chemist can Death Potion the boss for an instant win. Of course this boss sucks far too much for that (Death Potion requires a Dark Matter, which you only have one of so far unless you fought Prototypes, a W1 super-random). They can haste up and knife down any flowers who sneak through, though, similar to Time Mage without the whole "stop the boss" thing. Honestly this is probably the way to go, no need to waste resources or ingredients here beyond the small amount of gil on Speed Shakes.

Finally, Geomancer. Gaia is pretty good here! They have about a 40% chance to proc Earthquake, which MT OHKOs the flowers and does solid damage to the boss. They also have a 20% chance of Cave-In, which does Meteor-ish damage to 4 random targets (almost always OHKOing any flowers hit). The other 40% is a wasted turn. Still, that's pretty good, even once the boss starts summoning 5 per turn they are virtually certain (over 90%) to keep any flowers from getting turns while simultaneously outputting decent damage against the boss. And if they get the flowers dead and draw Cave-In against the boss, that 3HKOs him.


1t. Monk, Black Mage, Summoner, Blue Mage
5. Time Mage
6. Ninja
7. Mystic Knight
8. Geomancer
9. Chemist
10. Bard
11. Red Mage
12. Knight
13. Thief
14. Ranger
15. Beastmaster
16. Samurai
17. Dancer
18. Dragoon
19. White Mage
20. Berserker

[VySaika]

I did not know that specific flowers did specific status. Huh.

[Grefter]

Well yeah because normally the fight is

Dragon Pod does nothing but summon 3 to 5 Dragon Flowers, which in turn do nothing

[Dark Holy Elf]

Gilgamesh & Enkidu

The first competent boss since... the last time you fought Gilgamesh. Not bad for a comic relief villain.

He'll use physicals and the odd ST gravity move (Missile or Death Claw, which also paralyses). The scary part of the battle comes once he loess a third of his HP: he'll summon Enkidu who immediately heals him to (probably) full. Enkidu only has 4000 HP, which is rahter paltry, but hides in the back row and has a bunch of annoying or dangerous moves: White Wind (potentially huge healing), Vampire (huge self-healing which OHKOs), and Wind Slash (2-3HKO MT). He also has Web (slow), Missile, Dischord, and Aera. Both are quite speedy, and both act basically randomly, though no one non-physical move can be spammed. Once Enkidu is down you're basically set.


Knight can probably two-round Enkidu... I say probably because they need 6-7 hits depending on level and he has 20% evade, so it's a bit dicy. If they screw up they might see Vampire/Wind Slash and things can get hairy. They can mostly neuter Gilgamesh by once again hitting him with the Ancient Sword's old (he'll still be able to land gravity moves, but their hit rate drops).

Monk is weaker. A lot weaker, three-rounding may be hard, even. (A little easier with Focus.) Otherwise the same set of concerns apply, and they can't use Old. They do have high HP so that Wind Slash is relatively not very good against them. This is probably the first fight where Chakra just can't keep up at all.

Thief, predictably, is bad, even though they can steal a Genji Glove here!!1 The one thing they have going for him is that their two Moonring Blades are back-row OK, unfortunately it'll take like 20 attacks from that to kill, and more from anything else except Twin Lances, which will need closer to 13-14 or so (so only somewhat worse than Monk!). As usual they have good speed for a fighter, but way less HP, and this overall doesn't work out in their favour, as even one Wind Slash puts them in huge trouble.

Dragon has Jump which ignores row and evade, both useful here. In fact, one round of Jumps will kill Enkidu, if you stocked up on Heavy Lances from Suragte. That's pretty good, since again the rest of the fight is easy.

Ninja gonna throw stuff. Two rounds of scrolls for around 1400 gil is the cheapest still-safe option. Their physicals aren't too bad here (especially the Moonring Blade user) so they can mix in some of those and save a little more money. They'll want to. Before Enkidu shows up they can set up Image to feel safer if they wish. Past that, it's interesting to compare them with, say, Dragoon. Their offence is higher so they'll use less Hi-Potions, but it relies on scrolls so they don't really end up any better on cash, and in fact probably worse, considering Dragoon does have an HP lead. Close though. Obviously both do fine.

Samurai will want to throw money when Enkidu shows up. That's roughly 2500 gil down the hole, but it one-shots him (and does a bunch to Gilgamesh besides). Beyond that their physicals will suffice the rest of the way. I'm not sure how I feel about them vs Knight, who spends less money on average but lacks this bailout option and COULD get into trouble if they have bad luck. Mm, safety is good I think.

Berserker can't decide who to hit, but this is still one of their better fights, as both Gilgamesh and Enkidu can be IDed, and IDing Gilgamesh before Enkidu shows up is a great way to win. It's still RNG and requires farming rare drops, so there are limits to how much I want to hype this. At best, four Death Sickles from the back row gives them a ~97% chance to kill Gilgamesh before he can summon, with only a slim chance he'll pull a gravity-KO on anyone before then. Fewer Death Sickles... actually isn't too bad, they just unequip everyone else to do as little damage as possible. Compared to Thief, Death Sickles are faster to get than Twin Lances and win this fight more effectively. Compared to Monk, they actually win more safely, unless they have zero Death Sickles in which case they're much worse. But it's not too hard to get at least one and the impact is spread over many fights, so... sure.

Ranger having a back-row ITE weapon is great, they two-round Enkidu safely. Even better, their attacks have 8% ID, and well, see above. Animal spam can save a little money on items but they shouldn't bother while Enkidu is around, much too risky. They're similar overall to Dragoon but the perks push them over the top, I think speed/healing/ID trumps HP/shields.

Mystic Knight, like Knight, can try to drop Old on Gilgamesh early in the fight. Besides that, though, they should set Drain Spellblade and hack away. This... generally works for surviving (the evade rate both have puts a damper on it), but Vampire can eat them alive still, and their damage is sub-Monk so seeing it is a risk. This is a rare case where a class may want to just attack Gilgamesh even after Enkidu appears so Vampire isn't a thing, they recover from everything else pretty well. Prepare to curse at White Wind though, and various things do poke holes in this a bit (a bad run of missing, doubleturns from the bosses, Death Claw/Thread/Dischord).

Beastmaster is once again best-off throwing Aquathorns at Gilgamesh, each has a 72% chance to land ID, so throwing 3-4 almost always works. Aquathorns are a 100% encounter on the map and you have Kornago's Gourd now, so this actually isn't too much prep... but Samurai can still likely claim their own money represents less of an investment.

White Mage hates Vampire so much, erasing all their progress with OHKO damage. It's used on average every 7.5 turns, and even with Shell to half its hit rate that's really bad when WM has an effective 75HKO. They could get lucky? Going after Gilgamesh doesn't work either since White Wind will heal Gilgamesh for 4000, it's used half as often but always works, and Gilgamesh's defence is higher. So here's what they're gonna do: cast Protect/Shell/Image, and wait for Enkidu to run out of his 1000 MP. This only takes... *calcs* a little over 300 rounds. ... During that time they can expect to be hit by about 43 gravity attacks, about 40 Wind Slashes, and see 350 physicals head their way (Elf Mantles will help, but this still means recasting Image about 130 times). Most of the rest they can hopefully use a Heal Staff to recover from, but they may need to occasionally pull out Cura (if say two gravity attacks hit at once), and anyway even using Image that many times will require an Elixir or two.

Black Mage uses Bio and easily one-rounds Enkidu (probably 3HKOs). Oh yeah and then they two-round Gilgamesh after that anyway. God I don't even think of their offence as THAT special at this point but no it's really dumb.

Summoner would be just as dumb, except that Titan only hits Gilgamesh, not Enkidu. Unfortunate! They can still two-round Enkidu with Ramuh if they play their cards right... still requires some effort. No more than Ranger, I suppose, so they trade Ranger's random ID and healing along with some stats for the ability to kill Gilgamesh way faster after? Mmm, actually I think that's a loss. Compared to Dragoon... yeah again killing Gilgamesh faster just isn't worth that much, since Enkidu is the threat. Weird.

Time Mage can hit either boss with Slow, or thanks to Haste they blitz Enkidu super-well with a Comet barrage (kill in 4-5 hits but with haste that's a simple one-round) so no need to even bother there. Compared to Black Mage... it's basically a tie, but yeah the ability to heal an injured TM after a Death Claw/Missile with a Heal Staff wards off the small chance Black Mage has of needing to use a Hi-Potion or Phoenix Down, which is all the tiebreak I need for these two OP picks for this fight. Top!

Blue Mage... depends on spells available. The best way, if they have it, is Dark Spark -> Level 5 Death on Gilgamesh, no limit 4 u. If they don't have that, 1000 Needles is an instant one-round on Enkidu. If they don't have that, Missile shaves off 75% of Enkidu's HP with 55-60 accuracy, and until it hits he can't use fatal Vampires, and then once it does two Aqua Breaths/Flame Throwers will kill him. Meanwhile they can use Vampire themselves if they get hurt. Ha-HA! This feels better than all but the two "our effective offence is so high we win instantly" mages, since the best-case scenario is uber and the worst-case is still pretty good.

Red Mage is starting to feel their lack of L4 spells. Still, they do barely two-round Enkidu, and Cura/Heal Staff/Protect/Ancient Sword are all nice utility options here. So... obviously better than Knight, probably everything up to at least Ninja as well. Versus Summoner, they have less offence (even L2s vs Ramuh), but they do have a few extra tricks... I don't think the tricks are good enough but it's close.

Chemist... mm. No, they really want Enkidu dead, the slow turtle option does not work well as White Mage showed. They can Death Potion him or even Gilgamesh, instantly winning the fight but costing the only pre-Atomos Dark Matter... still, hard to argue this isn't the best use (the main competition is the second seal guardian). Or they can use three Turtle Shells to kill Enkidu with Succubus Kiss, then cruise the rest of the way with Heal Staff / maaaybe the occasional Hi-Potion to ward off anything Gilgamesh does. As far as resources go, you can debate them vs. Samurai, but I'll tiebreak for 'em for now since they have both options. If it turns out that they really want two Dark Matters for the seal guardians I'll move them down one, maybe. If I remember.

Geomancer... hm. Gaia gives them around 40% weak MT, 40% HP-1 (only works on Enkidu, targets him 50% of the time and misses 25%), 20% pretty good MT. That's not really very reliable for not just running headlong into Vampire, but the alternative is knives against the back row, ew. So... all told they kill in around 2-3 rounds on average (relying on a lucky Whirlpool HP-1 mostly, though damage may work too). Compared to Monk they probably kill slightly faster on average, but have less HP... on the other hand thier gameplan isn't screwed up by Vampire as bad (since they can still fish for HP-1). So sure, better than Monk.

Bard... neither status is useful. Same problem White Mage has. Yes, like the previous Gilgamesh they can hide and then go away until Enkidu runs out of MP and... okay this is obviously better than what White Mage does during this time at least, and Enkidu does run out 4x faster than Gilgamesh 2 did. That said since even Thief can beat this fight with decent reliability if they spam Hi-Potions / Phoenix Downs until Enkidu doesn't use Vampire, so it's hard to argue that Bard isn't second worst.

Lastly, Dancer. Flirt hits Enkidu, so that can lock him down mostly while the other dancers fish for Sword Dance/Jitterbug on him. Even if that happens their offence still beats Thief. With that strategy... mph. The problem is Gilgamesh will wail on them during this time and they're fragile enough that's a problem, so I think Monk looks better.

Yaaay first boss meriting actual interesting analysis in a while.


1. Time Mage
2. Black Mage
3. Blue Mage
4. Ranger
5. Dragoon
6. Summoner
7. Red Mage
8. Ninja
9. Chemist
10. Samurai
11. Beastmaster
12. Knight
13. Mystic Knight
14. Berserker
15. Geomancer
16. Monk
17. Dancer
18. Thief
19. Bard
20. White Mage

Next up: a boss who sucks. And if you don't have sleep, makes it suck to be you.

[hinode]

A few days ago I stumbled upon this post about Berserkers in SCC conditions. Apparantly the mobile/steam ports made zerks always target whatever the cursor defaults to instead of random enemies, which makes Sandworm a lot less painful (worm counting as frontrow instead of back also helps). On the other hand, Necrophobe becomes a lot worse, since they won't target the two back barriers and you have to resort to the ultra roundabout strategy of zombie Berserkers with Death Sickles equipped + Reflect Rings on your living party members to bounce the random Deaths.

[jsh357]

A few days ago I stumbled upon this post about Berserkers in SCC conditions. Apparantly the mobile/steam ports made zerks always target whatever the cursor defaults to instead of random enemies, which makes Sandworm a lot less painful (worm counting as frontrow instead of back also helps). On the other hand, Necrophobe becomes a lot worse, since they won't target the two back barriers and you have to resort to the ultra roundabout strategy of zombie Berserkers with Death Sickles equipped + Reflect Rings on your living party members to bounce the random Deaths.

Yeah, and in theory, Neo Ex-Death is a lot easier too since the problem there is often getting the Berserkers to focus on one target. You do need Zombified Berserkers to survive the long haul, but at least this is more consistent.

[Dark Holy Elf]

On the other hand they're guaranteed to leave the last target alive for a long, long time which is bad. It'll certainly be easier than SNES/PSX with its dummy targets, but I dunno about GBA.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Atomos

Atomos is one of FF5's more bizarre boss ideas. While all PCs are alive, he is an offensive god, casting Comet 0-2 (1.33 on average) times per turn, at something like 225% average speed. Comet is random but each has a reasonable chance at a OHKO depending on the target's HP. Once anyone is dead, he'll instead pull them towards him. After a certain number of pulls he will eat them, removing from the battlefield, and thus reactivating his "all PCs are alive" AI. Very rarely he'll mix in other actions with Pull, of which the only really dangerous one is a 1/3 chance of Slowga on the fourth turn someone is dead.

Anyway the core strategies for Atomos are one of the following:

1. Put him to sleep. An unintuitive weakness but by far the most valuable for stopping his game.
2. Revive people periodically while unloading damage as fast as possible. He can eat someone after five pulls in GBA but round-robin revival can still fend him off somewhat, and making him pull someone else for a few turns gives you some grace period to finish him off. Sadly he's quite bulky for an FF5 boss (respectable defences and 20k HP).
3. Cry a lot. If your offence is bad and you can't inflict sleep, you're gonna have a bad time.


Let's break this down into a few groups:

A. Sleep-inducers: Knight, Mystic Knight, Black Mage, Blue Mage, Red Mage

Red Mage and Black Mage cast Sleep at about 60% accuracy, then pelt him to death with magic. Red Mage even has Raise to recover from the people he killed, while Black Mage has far more damage, so aren't in danger of running out of MP. (SCC-style Red Mage probably isn't either, but since this isn't a pure SCC analysis I'll note that on fiestas this is definitely an issue.) Mystic Knight can use Sleep Spellblade. It's not a total lock if you aren't careful, since sleep spellblade actually toggles sleep in practice, but as long as you know this there's no issue, since it's 100% accurate and sleep resets the turn gauge (Atomos has no evade).

Knight and Blue Mage need to rely on the Sleep Blade, which has about a 30% chance to inflict it. Once this is done, Blue Mage can toss magic at him until he dies (Flame Thrower, while the same strength as Fira, is much cheaper, and Blue Mage has more MP). Blue Mage also has access to Dark Spark + Level 5 Death for a quick kill, if they have those (Dark Spark is about 40% accurate). Knight's the worst because their only way to damage him involves waking him up, but they do hit hard at least. They're still pretty much better than anyone who lacks the status, as a result.


B. (Situationally) high-offence jobs: Ninja, Samurai, Time Mage, Summoner, Beastmaster, Chemist

Samurai's Zeninage is one of the traditional recommended ways to get past this roadblock. Atomos' sturdy defence keeps it from wrecking him entirely, but he's still going down in about 6 shots and 8000 gil or so. Of course you can mix in some physicals, but not too many, as Phoenix Downs cost almost as much as a Zeninage so you don't want to get trapped into spamming those.

Ninja can throw around 12 shuriken which costs 30000 gil, ugh. They can retreat to physicals and they do have good speed and base physical damage so this isn't awful, but still like a 28HKO. With wise revival use they should still be able to get through the fight this way, but it'll need a whole bunch of Phoenix Downs, the exact number is hard to predict but could get up to around 10. The risk factor makes me put them slightly below Samurai.

For Beastmaster, sadly there is no release which inflicts sleep at this point. What there is are Yellow Dragons, which when released do 25% of the target's max HP. Four of them exist in this tower, in the form of two monster-in-a-box fights with two yellows each, although each box has a 50% chance to have a red dragon instead (you can run from the fight in order to re-roll to get the yellows). Yellow Dragons are actually very easy to catch as they can be controlled and use Hurricance (HP-1) which they're vulnerable to, and you want to fight these box monsters anyway so the only real downside is the loss of time from running and the lost exp/gil/chance of Coral Ring drops. The average amount of money lost alone (assuming the sell price of Coral Rings) actually probably exceeds what Samurai would spend, though.

Time Mage can haste up and then pelt Atomos with Comets. They also have Return for those rare times where Atomos kills two people with his opening turn, and can recast Haste to remove Slowga, both nice perks other classes lack. Anyway this kills considerably faster than Ninja, though not as fast as Samurai/Beastmaster, but of course doesn't require the setup or money they do. I think the perks add up.

Chemist can also haste up and use pretty good offence, in the form of Succubus Kiss. They can expect to blow around 13 Turtle Shells on this, as well as the Speed Shakes and a few Phoenix Downs as usual. Less safe than Samurai/Beastmaster, though, and requires at least as large an investment, but still notably safer than Ninja so their placement is obvious.

Finally, Summoner. Nothing exciting here, their damage is similar to Turtle Shell!Chemist but no haste and no resources lost, which... honestly works out in their favour, they're still in the same zone of "one revival is good enough" like Time Mage, but without TM's perks. I have a hard time saying where they go compared to Samurai and Beastmaster so I'll split the difference and put them in the middle.


C. Uh oh.

To be honest on fiestas you rely heavilly on jobs from the above two categories. Past here, things get bad. Of the remaining jobs, Monk has the best offence, especially with Focus. It's pretty similar to Ninja outside of the fact that they're slower... but some of that is offset by good HP often buying them an extra turn here or there. Of course they can't retreat to throwing things if they need an extra offensive push, so they are worse.

From there on, we can kinda count down the offence. Everyone from here on has serious trouble outracing Atomos eating the entire party. It's not impossible depending on his move choice and how well Comet kills people but it'll need some luck. Dragoon does around 473 (Jump is useless), Ranger around 418, Thief does 700 with Twin Lances and 232 otherwise, Geomancer around 380 (randomised due to Gaia luck), Dancer around 400 (randomised). Some of these figures rise a bit with the one Dancing Dagger, I'm not mathing that.

Ranger notes that it can grind for Rapidfire to more than double its damage (getting it out of this hellhole), Thief notes that its offence with Twin Lances is reasonable enough and this actually takes less grinding than getting Rapidfire this early. Dancer notes that if you get a Lamia's Tiara via a rare steal their offence goes a lot, but Thief laughs at the idea of raising them up for that compared to them.

Berserkers do more damage than this group pre-twinking (but less than Twin Lance Thief, Monk, etc.). However, they can't revive to stall Atomos' game, so in practice yeah they suck and will probably lose at this level. That speed is awful too, even though the HP may make up for it a... little? Nah probably not.

Bards have worse offence still, but they CAN Hide until Atomos runs out of MP casting Comet. He only needs to cast it 1428 times! This will probably take a few hours. During this time most of the other classes can grind a bunch and/or reroll for the 1/8 Dancing Dagger Sword Dance a few times.

Finally there's White Mage! They have Shell. This reduces Comet to merely 440 damage, which one Heal Staff can mostly offset. Atomos still averages around 3 Comets per round so uh yeah this is ugly but... they can stall somewhat! Since they kill in 350-400 attacks or so they'll have to. The good news is they have and can cast Cura over 100 times before needing an Elixir, each of which grants them around 20 or 40 more Curas. The bad news is that sometimes Atomos will cast over 4 Comets a round (if he gets a tripleturn and some luck) and more often he will doublecast Comet on one character, which will kill them more often than not (11% chance for this focused doublecast, total chance of death probably slightly lower). So that draws a Phoenix Down or pricy Raise. He'll run himself out of Comets in slighlty more time than it takes to kill him, probably, but it's close. Of course this means that once again, White Mage sadly just has a worse version of the Bard strategy. Oh well. Last battle where White Mage is this offensively inept, I promise!

1. Mystic Knight
2. Black Mage
3. Blue Mage
4. Red Mage
5. Knight
6. Time Mage
7. Samurai
8. Summoner
9. Beastmaster
10. Chemist
11. Ninja
12. Monk
13. Thief
14. Ranger
15. Dragoon
16. Dancer
17. Geomancer
18. Berserker
19. Bard
20. White Mage

[Dark Holy Elf]

Seal Guardians

There are four of them, each with 7777 HP. At first they use nothing but weak physicals (though they are quite fast, ranging from 115 to 145% speed or so), but if you knock one below 3000 HP, it starts spamming a powerful MT magic attack of its element (wind, water, earth, fire... although water's Aqua Breath is technically non-elemental since FF5 is drunk). Even one of them using a MT attack while the other three use physicals is scary; two or more using them at once is bad news indeed and should be avoided. 3000 HP isn't that hard to dodge if you count carefully, but not trivial either.

It's worth noting that each one absorbs one of fire/earth/water/wind while reacting to the others normally, while the other four elements are all nulled.

Reflect Rings (1/16 drop in Barrier Tower) can block the fire/wind attacks, Flame Shield (one optionally available in this dungeon, but it means no Aegis Shield) or Flame Rings (super expensive in W1) can absorb fire and somewhat trivialize the fight.


Knights hit hard, which is helpful. In fact, they should be able to two-round a crystal, with the first round not dropping them into a limit, so if they sync up and smash they can avoid any problems. They might need to throw in a Hi-Potion or two but this should work, though it might not at somewhat higher or lower levels.

Monks don't hit as hard, but Focus dodges limits really well. They have to be a little careful about Counter and criticals triggering the limit too soon, but they should manage well enough. More HP to count though.

Thief can't dodge limits very well even with Twin Lances, and is hopeless without them. So they'll have to withstand at least one MT attack, possibly two in a row, as they blitz the enemies down. Two in a row is a huge problem. Reflect Rings can help a bit but ugh.

Dragoons can store up a lot of damage at once and kill with a round of Jumps to avoid limits. They can also hang in the back row and keep shields (more def actually help a lot in this fight because the guardians are high-multiplier but low-atk), so they... actually outperform Knight? Yeah, speed ices it. Strange.

Ninja does similar damage to Knight, again might need to do some annoying HP counting. Faster, less HP. But they also have Image (can mostly shut down the guardians outside their dodgeable limits), or Throw if they'd like a little extra push e.g. at lower levels.

Samurai can throw money, and at Level 26-31 (which is very likely) they two-shot the guardians with no limit triggered. Boom. This costs 11-12k gil, though, which is rather steep. Otherwise their physicals suck, better than no-Twin Lance thief but that's about it. It's good enough that if they count HP well they'll only need to see one limit turn in a row, and they do have more HP than thief, and potentially a Flame Shield. I'm not really sure how to rate this, somewhere between Knight and Berserker.

Berserker once again wants to hide in the back row and pull out any Death Sickles they have. It will proc around 8% of the time which is pretty bad, there's a real risk that even in the back row they'll knock a crystal into its limit first, since they do around 8% of a crystal's non-limit-phase HP per swing even in the back. Reflect Rings do help but overall their odds suck.

Ranger has the Killer Bow to do the ID thing, and this time they get to choose who they're hitting and hey it's even just as accurate. It's still shoddy odds to ID one this way, so they have a few options: they can toss Hi-Potions to heal the enemy crystal (... yeah), switch to another target and try to ID that one, or just go for a blitz, but uh they're bad at that (similar to Samurai). They do have Dark Bows to blind the crystals, and can try to use Animals for healing, although it can also throw out some random damage so it makes HP counting a pain.

Mystic Knight has Drain Spellblade to heal off any physicals they deal with, and even can probably slug through a MT attack with it, especially the weaker ones and especially since they have so much def. Fire crystal's a touch scary even so, but as long as they leave it for second to last (air's in the back row) they should have no issues. No counting shenanigans needed.

Beastmaster... Aquathorn ID still exists, but it's no longer very accurate (27% or so). Alternatively they can catch Ironbacks, which hit incredibly hard (6k) so they can just weaken the four crystals a bit then throw out four of those. Boom, dead. The problem is that Ironbacks are a pain to catch with their high def; it's possible via controlling them, but it's a slog. Other releases... well, they can try to catch Kuza Beasts instead (easier, but only do about 2400 or so), get the crystals all to just over 3000, then release one and followup on the target with finisher physicals. This is ugly. I feel confident in saying they're below Samurai and above Berserker.

White Mage finally, finally has a damage upgrade! Sure, it's just one Morning Star, but it does real damage. Protect + back row reduces the seal guardian damage to just plain pathetic, Heal Staff probably keeps up just fine. Shell makes the MT attacks not too bad, two Curas at most will keep up with them while you kill. Reflect's also a fun option for fire/wind since they can kill their buddies for you. All things considered this is... pretty good! Not having to worry about counting HP, lots of options, it's slow but you win easily.

Black Mage has -aga spells, bow before your new god. Firaga literally one-rounds a crystal, except fire. Sadly the fire crystal is a huge problem for them, they'll just have to pull out Air Knives and hit it to death. It's quite sad how they just get wrekced by Firaga, but short of grinding for a Flame Ring they can't really avoid seeing at least two in a row and that's very difficult to deal with. Strange with how well they kill three of 'em, but the last one just presents too big a wall.

Time Mage has both Hastega and Slowga which work here. They can fish with Graviga to lower a crystal to near death then finish with Comets, or just try their luck busting through with random damage. Graviga is probably the way to go but it doesn't matter much, haste/slow tilts this ridiculously in their favour compared to almost any other job. Oh yeah and of course they can heal.

Summoner, unlike black mage, does in fact have multiple elements which work here, and Titan is great as always. There is still HP counting because if you screw up you'll see three limits at once but it's extremely easy not to since they hit harder than even Knight (never mind the number of targets). They can cast Golem to protect themselves in the meantime, and then deal with the earth crystal. Which is actually kinda annoying, they can either use Ifrit and count HP carefully (they'll still see one Earth Shaker) or break a couple Flame Rods (first serious use for rod breaking in a while!).

Blue Mage... well, they can use Death Claw, which is super-inaccurate but as soon as it hits one more poke kills. Alternatively they can get Aeroga (it's a pain to get before this fight, though easy to get from this fight! ... which doesn't help) which horribly blitzes down all but the air crystal, who can be finished either safely with Flame Rod breaks or 1000 Needles or in more risky fashion with Flame Thrower. If they have neither of those, or want to kill the air crystal after using Aeroga, 1000 Needles of course works well if they have it. Flame Thrower or breaking fire rods can finish the air crystal, though you'll take a bunch of damage doing it. Weird case where the best-case scenario is pretty good but their worst-case is fairly low. Still, honestly, they probably have Death Claw by now (so many places to learn it).

Red Mage is like White Mage... without Shell or Reflect. They have more damage but it's no longer much more, and no Shell makes them significantly worse. They really need to spam Cura (at least three) to keep up with a MT attack, more for the fire crystal, and that's not terribly acceptable with the speed split.

Chemist can buff with various drinks. Mix Levisalve will make a mockery of the earth crystal, Resist Fire (requires an ether for each) means you win because of fire absorption and the fire crystal being the strongest; costs over 6000 gil though. Lower-cost efforts exist with drinks + Hi-Potions + air knife beatdown (use the Dark Matter from Atomos to kill off the wind crystal if you want). Also probably in that "hard to say but probably worse than Knight due to the extra effort/cost" group, but likely the best of the bunch?

Geomancer... Gaia is kinda okay damage but can't blitz down any crystal worth a damn (and backfires against air, which is a double penalty since of course air knives do too), so yeah it's all about killing with physicals. Uh this is strictly worse than Red Mage, and could well compete with Berserker for ineptitude. They'll want to resort to grinding for reflect rings maybe but that has its own host of problems like making it hard to finish off the last crystal because it will start healing itself. Somehow this seems more annoying than resetting until Berserker procs ID enough.

Bard can buff speed like crazy while the crystals are using weak physicals, which helps their blitzing power later in the fight. They can get up to over 3x average speed which actually lets them blitz pretty well! They'll need to use various Hi-Potions while setting this up but it works.

And Dancer... well, they can try to use Flirt to lock down whichever crystal they're in the process of blitzing, though the speed makes that kinda scary. Otherwise they're a frail front-row job, ew, so yeah even the physicals add up. They blitz better than Geomancer at least? Significantly at that.

1. Time Mage
2. Mystic Knight
3. White Mage
4. Blue Mage
5. Summoner
6. Ninja
7. Dragoon
8. Knight
9. Chemist
10. Monk
11. Samurai
12. Bard
13. Ranger
14. Beastmaster
15. Black Mage
16. Thief
17. Red Mage
18. Dancer
19. Berserker
20. Geomancer

[Dark Holy Elf]

Exdeath

Exdeath is your everyday major boss. All of his stats are solid, and he has a big varied skillset which can do plenty of stuff. Above half HP he runs a ten-turn cycle which includes Doom (kills in 6.5 Exdeath turns) on turn 1, Reverse Polarity (switches rows, MEvade-subject) on turn 2, Earth Shaker on turn 5, Hurricane (ST HP-1) on turn 7, and the most dangerous, Zombie Breath on turn 8, which is highly random but averages out to a low 2HKO MT (and can OHKO lower HP) and changes people into zombies. Finaly on turn 10 he can fire off Level 3 Flare which is brutal if your level is divisible by 3. All of these moves have a 2/3 chance of happening, otherwise he'll mix in basic physicals and Vacuum Wave, the latter of which is borderline OHKO to the front row.

Below half HP he just doubleacts using only physicals, Vacuum Wave, and -aga spells, which are solid 2HKO to one target if not resisted (there is an Ice Shield and optional Flame Shield for absorption, and various diamond gear which halves lightning). At all times in the battle, he has a 1/3 chance to counter with Dispel on a random target. He doesn't counter magic in this way. You can grind for Reflect Rings in Barrier Tower (rare drops) which go a long way to crippling the second phase, but it's generally not necessary.


Knight needs about 16 hits to hack through the first phase. They'll burn plenty of Hi-Potions doing this, and being front-row + no shield isn't great (although they can do shenanigans involving a mix of back row healers with shields and front row 2H attackers) though the HP to tank Vacuum Wave is nice. I feel fairly confident that that'll usually win but they'll need to burn plenty of Hi-Potions and Phoenix Downs.

Monk does significantly less damage and has no shield option, though Counter does add up. Thief is faster but much more fragile and less damaging than even Monk even with those Twin Lances (without, lol. At least they have one for sure now, there's a chest in this dungeon with one).

Dragoon can dodge a few of the key bad moves (Earth Shaker, Zombie Breath) with Jump, and hang out in the back row with shields which is nice. Their offence is super-awful however.

Ninja finally has a Twin Lance of their own, so they can hit pretty hard with that. They also have Image which goes a long way in surviving Exdeath's physical game which is far scarier than that of most bosses, but its utility is weakened by the random Dispel counters (which Ninja triggers twice per attack. Like Knight they'll probably want to use a mix of rows, with at least one dedicated attacker with the Twin Lance and Image in the front. They can also throw things for an extra offensive push, as always.

Samurai can spend about 20k gil throwing money at Exdeath, and obviously it gives them a relatively safe and easy win, as with back row + shields they'll only need to use a relatively small number of items on top of this. They suck if they try to fight this with basic physicals, though. Compared to Dragoon they're certainly much simpler but they do spend a lot of money, a lot more than Dragoon if they know which turns to dodge. Could go either way there.

Berserker sucks. This is a long fight where healing with Hi-Potions/Phoenix Downs gets you through. Meanwhile they need 40 attacks to kill and probably aren't living that long, though with Reflect Rings they and some RNG luck I'll acknowledge they have a chance.

Ranger can toss out evade-ignoring attacks from the back row, though only the Hayate Bow user does worthwhile damage so everyone else will probably just take up Hi-Potion duty or maybe even fish for Nightingale. They can also grind for Rapid Fire which will give them extremely good offence. It's no longer especially far out of reach since Exdeath Castle pays out so much ABP.

If in the front row, Mystic Knight can heal slightly less than a Hi-Potion with their physicals, which is neat. Though they do miss 10% of the time, and honestly this really only offsets how much harder some of the other jobs can hit. They are pretty fast at least to cut down on those doubleturns.

Beastmaster... well, Yellow Dragons are back as a random. Release four and you win. They're still really easy to catch (control, use HP-1), and two of them are a 35% encounter on the upper floors. As far as kill buttons go this is both faster and easier to set up than Samurai's, and honestly probably beats out every other physical job too.

White Mage has a whole bunch of stuff which shuts Exdeath down: Protect, Blink, Shell. Once he's below half HP they can also set up Reflect and watch Exdeath kill himself. They can also take advantage of his "Level 3 Flare every 10 turns 2/3 of the time" and nuke him for 4000 damage (since yes, L3 Flare is reflectable and his level is 66). Otherwise the only thing he has that poses a remote threat to White Mages is Doom which forces them to revive every so often. They can attack him if they want, but the Dispel counters may make those not worth it. They can also grind for rare drop Judgement Staves and break those but this is annoying; still, those will hit very hard. So the reflect strat is the way to go, if they know his AI well enough to know when to do it.

Black Mage just hits like a truck, three-rounding Exdeath (if you have Reflect Rings, they two-round instead). This is a ball lightning fight and you can get into some trouble despite this, although if you slow down a little to heal or recover from Reverse Polarity before triggering the limit you should cruise, as Exdeath does nothing in his first four turns above half HP which is that scary.

Hastega slants things incredibly in Time Mage's direction, and their offence doesn't trigger Dispel, so even though it's not super-awesome it cuts through Exdeath really well. They may need to use a few Hi-Potions, as eell as a Phoenix Down to recover from Doom (or possibly a focused doublecast below half health), but this is still better than the various fighters.

Summoner for once is a defensive class, as Golem/Carbuncle makes a mockery of pretty much this entire fight. Earth Shaker is the one big thing which goes through this that they're likely to see, and one attack just isn't enough. Might need to use a Phoenix Down on Doom, though. Although Exdeath doesn't give ABP so uh maybe don't even bother...? Yeah whatever, the ease of use puts them above anyone else so far. Only thing you can hold against them is that they have to fight Carbuncle. (Although honestly they can survive with just Golem if they really wanted, just burns more Hi-Potions.)

Blue Mage has some decent offence here in the form of Aeroga, behind only Black Mage. They have all the perks of fighter jobs otherwise (shields + lightning resistance). White Wind, if they snagged it via the Dancing Dagger in this dungeon, works well at repairing damage and saves them on Hi-Potions as well as turns, while Level 2 Old (used once every 12 turns by a common random here) wrecks Exdeath's speed and physical damage (his magic is still fine though, so White Wind is more important). For extra silly bonus points Level 2 Old and Level 5 Death can be comboed into an instant kill. It takes some timing but with four blue mages to do it you can just brute force said timing. Anyway, White Wind alone probably propels them into the top spot, and that's easier to get than Carbuncle honestly, never mind what the rest of their tricks do.

Red Mage damage here remains just sad. Good news is it's magical so it doesn't trigger counters which would remove their Protect, which is a nice thing they have that, say, Thief, doesn't. And there is still Cura, or rod breaking (although the latter does trigger Dispel, and isn't that much stronger than say, a Knight physical, at this point, though it is evade/row-ignoring). I'm inclined to put them below all the (non-berserker) shield users, although their various utility probably does beat out Ranger and those below.

Chemist can haste up and double their HP, and Hi-Potions still heal 1000. Their preferred method of offence would be to farm a bunch of Dragon Fangs for Holy Breath which will probably 8-9HKO him or so. If they want to go more slowly, they can, but again either way the annoying thing is Dispel removing Haste (and Protect if they get hit by that) so honestly Dragon Fangs are the way to go. This is probably less resource intensive than Samurai's strategy, and safer too, but it's still pretty darn costly, and it is more resource-intensive than catching four Yellow Dragons.

Geomancer does less damage than Thief with less speed and no lightning resistance. They can do full damage from the back row at least but I don't think that makes up for it.

Bard can go for maximum speed again, which helps their healing game, but this time they don't have a limit boss to stall against, so they'll need to heal a lot, and with their low HP they're extre vulnerable to things like high-variance zombie breath. So... once they have their speed buffed, they have an easier time surviving than many other jobs, but until then the awful HP really hurts and with their law offence I doubt they end up saving much in terms of healing items.

Dancer has even less HP than Bard, and no healing beyond unreliable Jitterbugs which suffer against Exdeath's mdef. They're still better than Berserker but only because everyone is.

Mage domination is go.

1. Blue Mage
2. Summoner
3. Black Mage
4. White Mage
5. Time Mage
6. Beastmaster
7. Chemist
8. Ninja
9. Knight
10. Samurai
11. Mystic Knight
12. Dragoon
13. Red Mage
14. Ranger
15. Monk
16. Thief
17. Geomancer
18. Bard
19. Dancer
20. Berserker

[Dark Holy Elf]

Antlion

Another scrub boss. Antlion can be annoying with Dischord, which halves your level, but aside from that its best damage is around 300-350 with a front-row physical, less than half that to back row targets. It can also occasionally use a really weak ITD magic attack which sets Sap for a while. He's kinda fast and has a little evade I guess? You fight him with only two PCs, Bartz and Krile.


Knights take Antlion out in probably four rounds or so, maybe five. There's a slim chance they'll need to use a single Hi-Potion if he focuses on one person and hits every time, and/or the knights run into some bad accuracy luck. They can also try to hit him with the Sleep Blade, this probably isn't worth it but the option is there.

Monks need a few more hits and Dischord hits them harder, although Counter is neat and helps a bit. Three rounds of Focus will probably do it (i.e. 4.5 rounds or so), which actually isn't too different from Knight aside from the extra Dischord vulnerability.

Thief is ensured to have at least 50% of their party with Twin Lances, that's something. Still has notably lower offence/durability than Monk.

Dragoon has back row and shields, Dischord may slow their offence but their durability is very good, Antlion probably like 9HKOs them on a good day. Compared to Knight, they're pretty similar overall if you don't hype Jump avoiding entire ST turns, but quite a bit better if you do, and the later you get in the game the more having Jump on your entire team is reasonable, especially against this two-person boss.

Ninja has Image which shuts down Antlion utterly beyond the weak Digestive Acid every four turns. They can also use Water Scrolls, which he's weak to, but honestly why spend the money when physicals work just fine?

Three shots of Zeninage send Antlion running. They can also just chip away at him slowly. Having shields and Shiradori makes Antlion particularly inept at killing them, but the offence is too low and front-row only to impress on a level of Dragoon or Knight.

Berserker hits... hardish, with shields and all that fun stuff. Better than Samurai since this fight is so damn simple. They still don't hit as hard as Knight, though, and having shields is offset by worse speed and lack of ability to heal if somehow anything DOES go wrong.

Ranger has reasonable back-row offence, especially with the one Hayate Bow and its 25% chance of Rapidfire. They're Dragoons but with more offence and less durability. Less offence if Jump is hyped as total invinicibility though.

Mystic Knight has Sleep Spellblade. Uhhh the 10% evade means that Antlion might occasionally do something useful? Yeah not really, not win Drain Spellblade is also a thing in this fight.

Beastmaster isn't getting any hype for Release here with how easily everyone wins, fortunately they have back-row offence. It kinda sucks though. Probably puts them a little ahead of Thief? If Thief goes back row then Beastmaster is better in every way, front row Thief has more offence by quite a lot but a lot more fragile and I don't think the speed difference quite makes up for this.

White Mage uses Berserk + Blink, collects victory. Next.
Black Mage 3HKOs. Oh yeah and they have sleep if they want to use it.
Time Mage can use Hastega/Slow/Old, but hey if all the status misses they might... yeah no, this is still silly easy.

Summoner shuts down the fight outside of Digestive Acid with Golem, but their offence is poor because Antlion nulls earth. Ramuh's decent enough offence, kills in 7-8 rounds so uh they'll only see two Digestive Acids so uh they win 100% of the time too.

Blue Mage as always depends what they have, but Aeroga is basically a guarantee and that puts them into "haha blow you up with too much offence" tier along with Black Mage, though slightly weaker. I should also mention Time Slip (sleep + old) wrecks this guy if they have it.

Red Mage has sleep then can cast weak -ara spells, they'll need close to 20 but that's not an issue. Sleep can miss of course but it only needs to land once.

Chemist doesn't really have any specifically great options here unless they want to waste rare things (and they don't). But Heal Staff hits offset Antlion offence pretty well and their own Air Knives get the job done. Worse than those who have Image or other lockdown moves but better than the rest due to saving a small amount of money.

Geomancer has back-row offence with Gaia which is actually pretty solid, Ignus Fatuus sucks but the other two things (Stalactite and Wind Slash) hit for low four-digit damage, and they can do this from the back row. THis ends up pretty similar to Ranger, but I think the worse speed pushes them just behind.

Bard offence is very bad so Antlion can slowly grind them down. Their Regen does put a dent in his offence at least! They'll win this with no trouble and they're still probably the worst job here, which says everything you need to know about Antlion.

Dancer has a lot more offence than Bard but less than Thief, not much to say past that.


Here's the list I came up with, which is more than I bothered to do for Abductor. That said, I wouldn't really put too much stock in this ranking, because this fight is so easy. Like Tyrannosaur/Abductor, everyone wins and we're just quibbling over what small amount of money or time is spend on winning.

1. Black Mage
2. Blue Mage
3. White Mage
4. Summoner
5. Time Mage
6. Red Mage
7. Mystic Knight
8. Ninja
9. Chemist
10. Dragoon
11. Ranger
12. Geomancer
13. Knight
14. Berserker
15. Samurai
16. Monk
17. Beastmaster
18. Thief
19. Dancer
20. Bard

[Dark Holy Elf]

Gargoyles

They're like a crappy version of the Purabolos from two worlds ago. There are two of them, and if one ever gets a turn while the other is dead, it will revive it to full. Otherwise they use physical attacks similar to Antlion's (but at least there are two of them?) and each one is about half as durable as Antlion. Uh huh. 1/3 of the time every 5 rounds a gargoyle may use Transfusion to fully heal the other and sacrifice itself, of course hopint to be revived a moment later. They have a lot of status holes even by FF5 boss standards, though decent MEvade protects them a little. One Gargoyle is in the back row, which trolls physical fighters somewhat. (Of course that means its own physicals suck that much more.)


Knights drop them in four hits, or roughly twice that many to the back row one. So that's four rounds if two hit the back one and one hits the front one, though 10% evasion can mess with your plans, as can Transfusion if that comes out. If you have the Brave Blade (which is a detour at this point) then that can really wreck a Gargoyle, 2HKOing the front one and 3HKOing the back, though you'll still need to be careful to kill them both at once. In four rounds the gargoyles could scare the Knights a bit, but only if they hit a lot and focus somewhat.

Monk is similar only Counter is better than before due to all the physicals which get thrown your way. Criticals are actually a bad thing here, and the lower offence means you're more likely to see Transfusion. Thief has lower offence still, as well as lower durability meaning it's more likely they'll need to heal.

Dragoon offence remains bad and Jump increases the chance you see Transfusion. They remain very tanky, though (if less so than against Antlion, since Gargoyles have higher attack but a lower multiplier), so they can afford that to happen a time or two.

Ninja's Image totally shuts down the Gargoyles once again. Throw is a reliable finisher if they need it. Still, this is very safe and easy.

Samurai 2HKOs here for 6000 gil. Or they slug away with physicals slowly, but they do have loads of evade so they'll probably be fine.

Berserker, after a decent showing against Antlion, is back to being terrible here since of course they can't reliably kill one Gargoyle over the other. They pretty much just have to get lucky with Death procs, but against their MEvade the chances are poor. They could lose! A bad thing to say about a job in this fight.

Ranger has ITE and can ignore row so that's pretty nice, although their damage is flaky with the random procs off their weapons. Should be fine, just put the Hayate Bow on the fastest so the other two can finish. They... probably win before Transfusion has any chance to be used, unless they get quite unlucky or they get a weird badly-timed Rapidfire or crit. Even if it does happen they're in the back row so quite safe.

Mystic Knight uses Sleep Spellblade, puts both to sleep, and does that fun sleep-toggling thing until they win. 10% evade COULD screw this up but it's pretty unlikely.

Beastmaster can catch a couple Triffids, lower each Gargoyle to about half HP, and release 'em. Or they can just whip the gargoyles to death; as a bonus, they can be paralysed! Doesn't last long but it helps. They'll want to alternate hits of course.

White Mage has a few strategies, but the most fun is to turtle behind Blink until one uses Transfusion, then immediately Berserk the other, preventing it from using revival. If they don't want to wait for that they can always berserk both and start hacking away, but this feels like the fastest. Compared to Ninja they are pretty similar but having a guaranteed way past the revival at the end puts them slightly ahead.

Black Mage can use MT aga spells which 4HKO both, so uh they get hit by a few physicals? Nothing that can kill them even fully focused though. Summoner is similar, Titan works fine here so kaboom. Blue Mage splits Aeroga but basically accomplishes the same thing, still depending on level they might fail to two-round with bad luck. They have loads of other options like Level 3 Flare (if they got it), Time Slip, White Wind to survive a few extra rounds while killing more slowly... yeah whatever they're also on the top tier.

Time Mage can slow them down with Slowga or Old and of course Haste up themselves then barrage them with Comets, just hitting whichever one has taken less damage. They have it tougher than the above, but it's still pretty easy, 12 Comets still does it on average and Hastega gives them loads of time.

Red Mage puts both to sleep then hits them with spells until they die, like Mystic Knight without the toggling thing. Sleep's accuracy leaves something to be desired (50-60%) but that's good enough.

Chemist can also wait for Transfusion then use Berserk, although their berserk-inducing either needs a Turtle Shell or also sets Haste. Still, a hasted healer of their own takes care of that if they go that route.

The only useful thing Geomancer gets out of Gaia here is Poison Mist, which can poison them both... admittedly that's not a bad idea. But their offence is pretty bad even with that considered and they have no way to stop Transfusion.

Bard can inflict Romeo's Ballad to stop them, although it wears off fast and fails around 35-40% of the time so it's best viewed as a way to mess with their offence. Still, it buys them more time for regen, and they can buff speed too if they wish. They probably should, because the faster they get the easier it will be to lock one of them down after a Transfusion or when trying to finish.

Dancer has their tricks nulled so they're not going to be very scary here. If they go grab the Chicken Knife and it's reasonably powered up then it has a pretty potent Dance, so that's something.


This fight is more of a real one than the previous so is probably more worth counting, but is still pretty easy.

1t. Black Mage, Summoner, Blue Mage
4. Time Mage
5. Red Mage
6. Mystic Knight
7. White Mage
8. Ninja
9. Ranger
10. Chemist
11. Knight
12. Samurai
13. Bard
14. Monk
15. Dragoon
16. Beastmaster
17. Thief
18. Dancer
19. Geomancer
20. Berserker

[Dark Holy Elf]

I'll be getting back to this soon, but for now, here are some stats! Essentially, I tried to figure out the average performance of each job, by assigning each job a score out of 100 for each boss and averaging all the scores each job got over the course of each world. This method is far from perfect, even if you assume the rankings so far are 100% accurate (which they aren't, as per previous discussion), because boiling everything down to ranking ignores that (a) some bosses are more challenging / more important than others, and (b) all gaps are not created equal. So don't put too much stock in this. However, I thought the trends were interesting to see.

Methodology for anyone who cares:
When 20 jobs are present, I assigned last place 5 points, then 5 more points for every rank above that.
With 16 or 14 jobs, I did the same, except that last place started with 15 and 20 points respectively, thus keeping the average the same, i.e. 52.2.
With 11 jobs, I assigned last place 23 points, then 6 more points for every rank above that, so the average is still 53.
With 6 jobs, I assigned last place 38 points, then 10 more points for every rank above that, so the average is still 53.

Anyway, have some numbers~

World 1 (15 bosses)

1. Red Mage, 82.1
2. Summoner, 77.3
3. Black Mage, 71.9
(Samurai, 71.7)
4. Ninja, 70.5
5. Blue Mage, 69.0
6. Time Mage, 65.2
(Dragoon, 56.7)
7. Monk, 55.1
8. Ranger, 51.9
9. Beastmaster, 51.5
10. Knight, 50.5
11. Bard, 46.9
12. Mystic Knight, 42.8
13. White Mage, 38.9
14. Geomancer, 35.0
(Chemist, 26.7)
15. Thief, 22.7
16. Berserker, 21.6
(Dancer, 16.7)

The earth crystal jobs are only around for 3 bosses, hence them being in parentheses.


World 2 (6 bosses, Tyrannosaur/Abductor excluded)

1. Time Mage, 88.3
2. Blue Mage, 87.0
3. Summoner, 80.4
4. Black Mage, 76.2
5. Ninja, 70.0
6. Chemist, 64.1
7. Mystic Knight, 63.3
8. Red Mage, 60.8
9. Knight, 56.6
10. Samurai, 54.1
11. Monk, 51.2
12. Beastmaster, 50.0
13. White Mage, 46.6
14t. Dragoon, 45.0
14t. Ranger, 45.0
16. Geomancer, 29.1
17. Thief, 27.5
18. Bard, 23.3
19. Dancer, 16.6
20. Berserker, 14.1

Y'know, people often talk about how Red Mage and Monk get really bad in World 2, but that seems somewhat exaggerated...?


Everything so far (23 bosses)

1. Summoner, 79.6
2. Blue Mage, 76.0
3. Black Mage, 75.2
4. Red Mage, 74.9
5. Time Mage, 74.3
6. Ninja, 69.7
7. Samurai, 55.9
8. Chemist, 52.7
9. Ranger, 52.4
10. Monk, 51.9
11. Knight, 51.6
12. Ranger, 49.7
13. Beastmaster, 47.8
14. Dragoon, 47.7
15. White Mage, 44.5
16. Bard, 35.0
17. Geomancer, 32.2
18. Thief, 23.5
19. Berserker, 19.1
20. Dancer, 15.9

I wouldn't take Berserker > Dancer too seriously; the way I drew up these scores makes it so that being near the bottom among 11-16 jobs isn't as bad as being near the bottom when there are 20, so Berserker benefitted a bit from that. Both suck.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Melusine

Melusine is a barrier-change boss: she is weak to one of fire/ice/lightning and nulls or absorbs every other element while having super-high defence. She can also shift to being weak to physicals, where she now blocks every element and has super-high MDef/MEvade. She'll shift on her own turn in addition to another action: her actions include weak physicals and stronger -aga spells. Interestingly she'll never use the damage type she's currently weak to. She also uses Charm the turn she shifts away from the physical form but that's easily dealt with by a team. She's fast (the last boss I will praise for this unless I cover the superbosses) but skips turns sometimes.

Her game would is pretty neat but it would be a lot more effective if she didn't always start in the fire-weak form and if she couldn't be put to sleep.


The sleep-inducers get top billing here once again. Sleep from Red/Black Magic will land over 80% of the time, and her fire weakness means Fira will defeat her relatively easily, let alone Firaga which is a high 4HKO. (She'll never use Barrier Change in her first three turns.) Mystic Knight also has a reliable sleep, but taking advantage of it is annoying. Firaga Spellblade will let them hit hard, though, so they can mix up Firaga and Sleep to largely perfect her, though her 10% evade may make a slight mess of things.

Knight and Blue Mage inflict sleep via the Sleep Blade which isn't nearly as effective (it lands about 38% of the time). Knight will want to set up with two of those and one Flametongue, which admittedly hits like a truck (6HKO the boss). It's a little unreliable but it should get the job done, and if she does switch to another form, well, swords have all her weaknesses covered. Blue Mage is better off since once they do land sleep, they win, via Flame Thrower at worst.

Onto jobs which don't have sleep, starting with the fighters. If you rely on non-elemental physicals, well, you pretty much have to wait for her to go to a physical-weak form. Melusine will enter her physical-weak form 1/3 of the time when she switches, and on average uses just over two spells and just under 2 physicals before then, so triple those numbers on average before she switches. Melusine won't OHKO typically, but the spells do merit 1-2 Hi-Potions and the physicals may merit 1 as well.

Monk will need six rounds of physicals to win, or three rounds of Focus (4.5 rounds total), once she adopts the physical-weak form. That's disregarding any healing they will need to do in the middle. She'll often switch away before this occurs, so this pretty much doubles the healing they need to do from the above.

Thief hits almost as hard with a Twin Lance as Monk physicals do, needing 6-7 rounds. If they have a Chicken Knife and have run away at least ~115 times it does similar damage with Mug, so potentially much more if you've really grinded up your escapes. For any people who don't have these, they'll be quite a bit weaker, as Air Knives aren't an option here and Orichalcum Knives hit about a third as hard as a Twin Lance. One neat perk they do have is the ability to use the Mage Masher while she's immune to physicals, though: it has a ~23% chance of silencing her for about half a round, so can ward off some of her better damage; better than sitting around doing nothing. Still, I don't think this offsets Monk's advantages of not needing to grind and much more HP.

Dragoon has access to elemental shields, now, which takes a bite out of Melusine's offence. They also have Lance! This hithereto worthless ability does some very modest magical damage, but it's way better than doing nothing while waiting the ~18 rounds it typically takes. It even drains so can remove the need for healing. Once she does go physical-weak they can hit her... less hard than Monk does, but certainly all their other advantages more than offset that.

Ninja can throw Flame Scrolls, needing 5-6 rounds of these to win. She may shift forms before this, at which point some experimentation is needed; they can try physicals, then try a thunder scroll, then cry at their lack of ice damage and wait. Of course they can also just wait for the physical-weak form and attack a bunch; the person with the Twin Lance will hit really hard and everyone else is similar enough to Monk offensively. They'll spend more money than Dragoon regardless of their strategy, though.

Samurai can do like Dragoon and use shields, but they lacks Lance. Once she goes physical-weak they can use Zeninage 3 times and then toss in a few finisher physicals; 3 Zeninages costs slightly more than just surviving a cycle of form-shifting but is safer, and anyway Samurai takes less damage than non-shield users in the meantime.

Berserker, surprisingly, can actually break Melusine's defence, since axes are piercing. They still need 12 rounds to win on average (a bit less if she goes physical-weak), and can't heal, though having shields is nice for just surviving. It's a bit sketchy, though, and usually one PC will die before they can kill, which of course can enter into a vicious spiral until they lose.

If Ranger kept a full complement of Flame, Frost, and Lightning Bows from world 1, those will pay dividends here, since they can destroy any form that Melusine may turn to. Seven rounds of offence or so will take her down, though obviously they'll need to stop and heal a bunch. If they have Rapidfire by now they can totally wreck her, since that doubles their offence compared to Aim. For my sanity I'm going to ignore both Rapidfire and the annoyance of keeping 9 W1 bows around and assume those cancel out. Compared to ninja they take slightly longer but can't be walled by the ice-weak form, which strikes me as a winning trade.

White Mage can turtle with Protect/Shell... there's Reflect but it heals Melusine (she'll never use a spell she's weak to) so nah. She can be confused but this is pointless since she'll either tink or heal herself... but fortunately Morning Star deals damage at all times since it pierces defence, and after Shell, Healing Staff can patch up any one of her attacks, leaving only her doubleturns as a concern, and they don't come often enough to offset her skipped turns and the fact that the WMs can always break out Cura if they want. This probably beats out Knight which can get into trouble with a run of bad luck more easily than them, but not the other sleep-inducers.

Time Mage can inflict both Slow along with their usual Hastega (last time Hastega is getting hype). They'll need to reapply Slow whenever she shifts but this isn't a big deal especially since Comet works on all her forms except physical-weak. So they'll very likely kill her before the first shift, have the Healing Staff to repair any damage she does, and really only the physical-weak form is annoying for them and even then it's not that bad.

Summoner has all three relevant elements here, although they're weak at this point... five rounds of offence will suffice, unless she goes physical-weak (even then, Chocobo still manages okay). They can also cast Golem/Carbuncle; she'll heal herself via Reflect but Summoners outpace that and now they will just never take damage, ever.

Beastmaster can release some Triffids for some bonus damage, but nothing really more potent than that? They also have a sleep release but no way to exploit it. Otherwise they play the "wait for physical-weak form". It'll take 10-11 rounds in that form along, which is bad, but they can also hurt the lightning-weak form if it shows up with the Blitz Whip, and they do have some bonus damage with Releases... still, this certainly plays as far worse than Monk, and probably worse than Thief too honestly, who has speed + the Twin Lance to offset any Release hype.

Chemist can win with Succubus Kisses, but again it takes a lot of Turtle Shells do that. They can also dig in with a Hasted Heal Staff user, and have a Morning Star to do damage at all points. They're similar to White Mage. Comparing them... they have Haste but no Shell, which are of roughly comparable value. Chemist does have better speed/durability and lightning resistance, though, so they're probably ahead.

Geomancer's Gaia here is a mix of wind damage (nulled, though it inflicts blind which is a nice perk) and physical damage, one weak and one strong. The strong one actually does damage to all forms, and quite good damage to the physical-weak, but not enough to make the overall offence of this move that great. They're certainly worse than Monk overall, and don't have the lightning resistance of Thief/Beastmaster, but they do hit harder than Beastmaster at all times outside of Releases which meh aren't decisive enough to offset blind.

Both of Bard's status effects work, but neither as well as they'd like; Stop wears off fast and confuse can't lead to any self-damage (and can lead to Melusine healing). However, they buy time for something important: Speed Song! With two bards trying to just tie up Melusine as best they can, one can run Speed Song until the bards are super-fast. They'll still need to stall through all her turns until she goes physical-weak, but once she does they'll... actually their offence still sucks even with all that speed. Oh well.

And finally, Dancer. Lamia's Tiaras are 1/16 drops from Lamias in the previous dungeon. Unfortunately non-elemental knives still suck at this point (barring a powered-up Chicken Knife). A 50% Swords Dance from the Dancing Dagger will certainly be solid enough offence once she drops her defence (and can even do a little, sometimes draining, the rest of the time). But this is more annoying to get than Twin Lances. They do drain 25% of the time, at least, and confuse isn't totally a waste if they don't have Lamia's Tiaras.

1. Black Mage
2. Red Mage
3. Summoner
4. Mystic Knight
5. Blue Mage
6. Time Mage
7. Chemist
8. White Mage
9. Knight
10. Dragoon
11. Ranger
12. Ninja
13. Samurai
14. Monk
15. Thief
16. Dancer
17. Geomancer
18. Beastmaster
19. Bard
20. Berserker

Next up: Legendary weapons, Level 6 spells, and Hermes Sandals, oh my!

[Dark Holy Elf]

Melusine is the last boss who absolutely must be fought before going to the final dungeon. Everything else in World 3 is optional. However, despite my earlier comment about skipping optional bosses, I am going to do three more before the final dungeon: the bosses of the Island Shrine and Fork Tower. My reasoning, if you're curious, is that while these bosses are optional, there is a lot of useful stuff they guard: the Defender, Wonder Wand, Titan's Axe, Aegis Shield, Artemis Bow, and the spells Flare, Holy, and Meteor, among others. So... most playthroughs have a reason to at least be tempted by this. To say nothing of non-challenge runs where you'll want more legendary weapons and Mime, again unlocked by getting through Fork Tower.

Every other World 3 boss offers far less reason to fight them: Odin, Leviathan, and Bahamut are only of interest to Summoners, so will be skipped just as Catoblepas and Carbuncle were; the boss of the Great Trench is similarly only of interest to Time Mages (and those who insist on getting all twelve legendary weapons).

Anyway, a lot of new stuff is available now. The most important is the Hermes Sandals, which grant Auto-Haste, a huge power boost to the party. Level 6 spells (except Flare/Holy/Meteor) are also available now. Also storebought are Elixirs, though they're pricy certainly. The party can grab three legendary weapons, too. On a fiesta, you'll pretty much always get all the ones you really need right away (barring a very weird team like Knight/Dragoon/Samurai/Berserker I guess), since you don't need the Sage Staff until the second set and the Magus Rod, while convenient, doesn't really do anything that other rods + Air Knife don't. You can also pick up the Magic Lamp, which allows any job to cast each summon once each against a boss (although you must return to the world map to "recharge" it, so this is of limited utility in the final dungeon), and the Mirage Vest, which blocks one physical attack per battle. There's a bug which makes the Mirage Vest really powerful (you can reset the image by changing your weapon) and I probably won't be considering it, but I feel that it is worth noting. Finally, there's the Thief Knife, which gives every job (except monk and white mage) access to stealing.


On with the show!

Wendigo

The fourth boss in a row vulnerable to sleep. Seriously, FF5, you're drunk.

Anyway if you don't have sleep he's a weird gimmick. There are four of him, and every time you damage him, he'll body jump; three of the targets will be immune to all damage, while a random fourth is vulnerable (they share on HP pool). On average you'll take 2.5 tries to hit the right one each time, which essentially boosts his effective HP from 20000 (not too great) to 50000 (reasonably solid). Multitarget, you say? It works, but it will trigger three Frost counters which do around 750 damage total, MT. That won't generally one-round, but ouch!

On his own turns, Wendigo only has a 1/3 chance of using an attack... but there are four of them, so that means 0 to 4 attacks, average of 1.33. He'll use weak physicals, a weak Mind Blast (which would paralyse, but Hermes Sandals say lol), Confuse (the more magey jobs can block this with a storebought Lamia's Tiara), and Hurricane (HP-1). His status attacks are inaccurate because of his low level. Pretty wussy all told, but it's a bit unpredictable and spiky.


Knight hits damn hard now. They have Excalibur, potentially a Brave Blade, and potentially an Enhancer from a dip into the final dungeon if you really want. Excalibur kills in 6 successful hits, so about 15 on average. Since Wendigo's first three turns can't realistically kill (unless he gets super-lucky with focusing a bunch of attacks) this is pretty damn good. They can also fish for Sleep with the Sleep Blade but by this point this is too weak to be worth it.

Monk has at last fallen off in damage as most other physical jobs get cool weapons and they don't. They need around 20 successful hits, or about 54 attempts. Ew. They can do a bit better with Focus/Counter as always but this is still bad, so they'll need to break out some Hi-Potions, especially after Hurricanes. They also don't have a good way to heal themselves of Confuse (they can hit each other, but will do seriously nasty damage with a critical), nor a way to block it (beyond Bone Mail which is unacceptable).

Thief... also doesn't have a weapon upgrade, beyond the fact that Twin Lances are now storebought, so any small penalty they may have taken for that is gone! It's their best against all but the highest-Def enemies, which Wendigo isn't. They hit slightly less hard than Monks and have much less durability... but they can deconfuse more easily and are faster. Honestly I suspect confuse is just too annoying for monks, Thief wins this.

Dragoon's Jump hits almost as hard as a Knight's two-hand attack, though unlike Knight they have only one really good weapon and there's a large dropoff after that. So they're less good offensively, though they do have access to the back row... Hurricane's still the biggest thing making them heal, though, so I doubt it makes much difference.

Storebought Twin Lances help Ninja a lot, since they hit damn hard with those. They'll kill in about eight attacks, or about 22 on average. More than Knight, certainly. They can also use Image to protect themselves but this is double-edged since it makes it hard to heal confuse, so it probably isn't worth it. They're notably more fragile than Knight/Dragoon too.

Samurai can win this by the comedy option of equipping Ice Shields on two people and spamming Zeninage, letting the other two die to the Frost counters. That said due to there being four targets this is very expensive, and inelegant, but it is funny. Otherwise they can slug it out. Masamune's a pretty powerful weapon and the storebought Kikuichimonji isn't too bad either. They hit harder than Monk, now, and have shields/durability/etc. They need about 16 hits, or 43 on average.

Berserker can use a mix of their new axes and knives. They kill in about 14-15 successful hits... and since they target randomly, this means they hit 25% of the time instead of learning from their misses, and thus need around 55 hits or so. So... a similar length of time to Monk, but no Focus/HP-boosters and slower. Shields are nice, but not really enough. They're immune to confuse but Hurricane suuucks for them.

Ranger has the Yoichi's Bow which is pretty great, and can common-steal Aevis Killers in this dungeon which are a decent backup. They'll need around 18 hits, but are ITE, so this is around 43.5 in practice. So they're like Thieves, except they can hang out in the back row and have more offence anyway. They could also have Rapid Fire now, especially if they've done Phoenix Tower, but due to its random targetting it doesn't actually help much in this fight.

Mystic Knight can put all four Wendigos to sleep. They'll have to wake them up by attacking them, and this will trigger a body-swap counter, but they can reapply sleep immediately barring bad luck with evasion, and hunt for the target that way. Very safe. Their best weapon at this point is an Enhancer from the final dungeon, otherwise it's an Assassin Dagger, Thief Knife, and Great Sword, which isn't too hot a mix (their damage is actually one of the worst now, sub-Thief). But it doesn't matter much here, the sleep strategy is quite effective.

The final fighter job is Beastmaster. Their shiny new top is the Fire Lash, which has a 33% chance to toss a Firaga in after its attack. Otherwise they'll use various knives. So their overall physical game is rather similar to Mystic Knight's, i.e. not very good. Their saving grace here, though, is that the first attack of the battle will always hit the real Wendigo (it's weird plotwise, but mechanically the whole gimmick is based off counters and thus doesn't kick in until after the first attack) so they should make that one count! A single Shadow Dancer caught in this very dungeon is just the ticket, doing well over 5000 damage, a quarter of your work done immediately! If you want you can take a trip over to Phoenix Tower and grab a Cherie instead, which will do over 7000, but this is out of the way certainly. Further damage releases aren't worth it because they have only a 1/4 chance to strike their target. Anyway, it'll take around 17 successful hits after the opening Shadow Dancer, or 41 overall. Similar to Ranger, but Rangers can hang in the back row and are faster.

White Mage can block confuse, and Protect/Shell makes all the damage rather mockable and Hurricane won't hit too often (and it doesn't really matter if it does). Their attacks are weak (using either the Sage's Staff or storebought Morning Stars, the damage is about equal) and it'll take something like 160-170 attack attempts to win, but they're in zero danager and won't run out of resources (hell, they'll barely spend MP at all most likely).

Black Mage and Red Mage both have Sleep! Black has great offence but they don't even need it. Put all the Wendigos to sleep and then unload with whatever; sleeping Wendigos can't do the whole body-swap nonsense, kill one and you win. Red Mage of course has a similar tactic. They'll need roughly 57 -ara spells to finish the job, but they still can't really lose. Running out of MP's a concern in a fiesta setting, same as Atomos (unboosted -ara spells are much weaker); that's the only knock on them though.

Haste is no longer an advantage for Time Mage, so suddenly their effective offence isn't so good. They can try to Slow the various Wendigos which is helpful, though you kinda want to keep them all around the same speed so they can't use Hurricane + something else at the same time. Still Slow will hit 90% of the time so this isn't too difficult to pull off. 24 hits, 58 total attacks, but unlike fighters they block Confuse, can sit in the back row, and have Regen + a Heal Staff.

Summoners hate Wendigo's counters to MT, which is almost everything they have. Their one single-target attack useful here (if they got it) is Odin's Gungnir, which will strike a random target. Fortunately it hits damn hard, you only need 7 hits to connect which means 22-25 total, depending on if you count and then use a finishing Syldra or not. MP's a concern here, as each Odin casting eats 48 (24 with one of two Gold Hairpins you can have now), so you can only cast about 32 with said two Hairpins at normal levels. Golem/Carbuncle can totally protect you, but at the cost of more MP, so it's probably safer to just use Golem once and then use Hi-Potions after any Hurricanes that land and self-attacks after any Confuses.

Blue Mage can pull out Sleep Blades and put the Wendigos to sleep; it'll land around 40% of the time. Once it does, they can find the real target using MT then blast it away with Aeroga (or whatever). They may wish to wait until they learn Mind Blast first! Anyway they aren't quite as fast to inflict sleep as red mage but they have a lot more offence and tricks besides.

Chemist offence beats White Mage but not much else. None of their tricks are really worth it here, Dragon Kiss can block Hurricane but it's not worth four Dragon Fangs, etc. They can hit each other with the Heal Staff and slowly drag this out, or they can go for offence with Turtle Shells but it'll need a crazy number, no thanks. So at the end of the day this becomes "how much do you value the Heal Staff saving you some Hi-Potions" and well hey they do block confuse so they're in less danger of losing than a lot of jobs anyway.

Geomancer's Gaia will trigger either MT attacks or gravity, nope not gonna happen. So... physicals I guess. Assassin Dagger is the best option, along with any Rune Chimes they may have ground for from the early parts of the final dungeon (they're rare drops). Rune Chimes deal about Ranger-level offence, a purely knife-powered offence will be less than half of that. They immune confuse, unlike Monk, and can heal, unlike Berserker, so they probably beat those two I guess.

Bard now has all the songs, and that means they can boost their own level and strength. So while their offence may start bad, a max-str/level Assassin Dagger hit is gonna do 6k. (They can also boost magic, which helps the Apollo's Harp, and speed.) I'm not sure exactly what the optimum amount of time to sing before switching over to bashing is, and their low HP means they're in some danger, so I don't want to hype them too much.

Finally, Dancer is new and improved; they have Lamia's Tiaras, and up to four Ribbons. If they took a trip to Phoenix Tower they can common-steal Rainbow Fresses and use both those AND Ribbons to immune virtually all status (only zombie sneaks through) and have a 50% Sword Dance rate. Anyway, Lamia's Tiara is all they really need here, though Ribbon is nice for stat boosts. Sword Dances, when they land, will do around Black Mage-level damage, so kill in 7 hits, probably around 33 attempts needed. Faster than Ranger, but with worse stats and in the front row, though immune to confuse with rare self-healing.

1. Black Mage
2. Blue Mage
3. Mystic Knight
4. Red Mage
5. Knight
6. White Mage
7. Dragoon
8. Summoner
9. Ninja
10. Time Mage
11. Samurai
12. Chemist
13. Ranger
14. Dancer
15. Beastmaster
16. Bard
17. Thief
18. Geomancer
19. Monk
20. Berserker

[Dark Holy Elf]

Fork Tower: for those of you who don't know, you get to divide your party here, sending either 2 to each tower or a 3/1 split. At the top of each tower you'll fight Minotaur and Omniscient, back-to-back. I'm treating these as separate fights for ranking purposes but of course they're closely tied together. One particular thing to note here is that winning the fight with fewer PCs is a major boon: if you can defeat one of the bosses solo, then it frees up a third PC for the other, so that will earn a lot of points.

Minotaur

Minotaur is a Fire Embelm character. Each turn, he uses a physical attack, and he will counter anything with a physical attack as well. There's just one catch: he wants you to play by his rules too, so he fights in an anti-magic field: Mute is set. This means you can't use any MP-costing skillsets in thie fight (including !Blue, which is not normally the case for silence), nor Sing, nor bell attacks (if you cared).

He's remarkably straightforward otherwise: no defences or evasion, no status holes (in FF5! I think he's the only such boss), the only other special property of note is that he nulls or absorbs a few oddball elements, including Holy.


Knight against a pure fighter! Guard/Cover with a critical ally is a win, as always. There's some difficulty setting this up, but if you do it's a 100% chance of victory. Knight has another perk: their new Defender can itemcast Protect, to make 'em even more durable and have an easier time setting up the critical ally (in fact, if you use back row + Protect, Minotaur can't possibly bypass this range). As a riskier move, they can go solo and 5HKO with the Brave Blade (if they've ecaped 17 times or less) after setting up Protect. They'll only need to use a few Hi-Potions this way, probably 3-4.

Monk has Focus, but it (along with Monk's normal attacks) triggers two counters. This won't kill you at full HP but it hurts like crazy. Alternatively they can use items and defend, and rely on their own 50% counters. Slower, but effective; you'll ultimately need to use about one Hi-Potion per counter (slightly less), but no reason not to do this solo. Expect to use about 15 Hi-Potions.

Thief should count themselves lucky Twin Lances don't mean twin counters. Still, uh, they get 2HKOed in the front row. They'll probably want a second Thief in the back with a Main Gauche to throw a Hi-Potion right after each counter, and even then they lose some ground each time, and of course need to heal after Minotaur's own turns. They do doubleturn always with Haste, but that's still one attack and 2 Hi-Potions for every Minotaur turn. Since they kill in 18-19 hits or so, that's around 35 Hi-Potions. Maybe a bit less if they get some dodge luck.

Dragoon can Jump from the back, but holy being blocked means they're stuck using Partisans. Oh well, still a 12HKO and they can actually use shields too. Alternatively, there's Lance! The draining will more than offset one Minotaur attack if they're in the back row, and with Main Gauche + Crystal Shield they have about 60% evade, so they can just auto-battle through this barring a run of really bad luck (which can happen, and this fight is slow, so better stay awake and be ready to break out the odd Hi-Potion if needed).

Ninja has Image! Use that and one weapon, and they can solo this. (One weapon means only one counter, important.) Just alternate Image and attack and you win. For hilarity they can also throw the Assassin Dagger, which is an instant kill in this fight and this fight only, I dunno why either.

Samurai has loads of physical protection here: shields, Shiradori, and they can even go Elf Mantle and get Haste from Masamune: over 70% evade overall. Minotaur will 3HKO on a hit, but that's nothing a Hi-Potion can't take care of. So they can solo this if they want, just healing whenever they take damage, which won't happen too often, probably about once for every two attacks they make (they need 11).

Berserker also 11HKOs or so... and may just avoid being 3HKOed back, and has that evade, so on average they'll die in 7 attacks. If it weren't for counters they'd win this slugfest! But counters are a thing. Sadface. A better bet might be to use the Gaia Hammer; it'll miss 40% of the time (partly due to trying to cast Earthquakes which Minotaur immunes) and only 17HKOs when it hits, but they can use it in the back row and now they die in... about 13 hits on average. So still totally unacceptable. Oh well.

I'm assuming Ranger has Rapidfire from here on. They kill in 6 hits, from the back row. They get 4HKOed back so will probably need to heal around 4 times.

Mystic Knight gets their gimmick blocked, so they're a pure fighter. Compared to Thief, they hit a little harder (or a little less hard if they don't have an Enhancer), have more HP, and crucially, a shield, which will roughly half their Hi-Potion use. Soloing is a bad idea, though.

Beastmaster can catch monsters here which they can release for a little over a third of Minotaur's health each. Not bad, but obviously really proportional to how many Beastmasters you have. Their Fire Lash kills in about 13 hits from the back row. Soloing is kinda painful as usual for someone with no evade or counters of their own, but with two things are quite simple, taking out 2/3 of the boss HP then having a simple back row heal-and-hurt.

Chemist can buff themselves with Protect. If they want they can do Elf Mantle + buff themselves with Haste, too. Their damage remains poor barring expensive Mixes, but Morning Star attacks work well enough. They can recover well with the Healing Staff too, and in fact with Protect + that + back row it's really a simple matter of when, not if, they win.

Geomancer's Gaia does in fact beat out the physical damage of many jobs, here! Similar enough to Thief's. Sometimes they'll try to pull a gravity move instead but that will just fail and trigger no counter. They can hang out in the back row, which is cool. Can't really solo and the lack of shield + worse stats offsets their back row compatibility compared to Mystic Knight.

Finally, there is Dancer. Sadly for them, Minotaur counters all dances, not just the ones which hit hard. Which is a shame because successful Sword Dance procs will 5-shot (so on average, they need 10 hits). Minotaur, however, 2HKOs the front row back so this is a major pain, like it was for Thief, and they should employ the same basic strategy (second Dancer in back with Main Gauche and healing). They're pretty close to Geomancer, but I think this works out in their favour.


And finally... those who really, really hate Mute and shouldn't really be here if they can avoid it. The good news is that yes, mages can still win this fight. They have physicals too after all, and mimicking the same strategy that Thieves employ will get them all through it (so yes, they're still better than Berserker at the anti-magic boss... good job berserker). Rod breaks also still work, as does the Healing Staff, so they do have options besides!

Let's talk about the Healing Staff first. Even off the weakest mage who can use it (Red), it more than offsets one hit from Minotaur in the back row. So they can slowly employ the Chemist strategy to win, although without Protect doing this solo is, while possible, too obnoxious to really consider. With the extra turns from two, though, it's fine. They all do similar physical damage (White/Time with Sage Staff, Red with Morning Star) and have similar speed/durability (Red's a little faster and a little frailer). Red's healing is notably worse though. Time Mage can break rods if they get impatient, for a tiebreak with White.

Black Mage, Blue Mage, and Summoner (no, Call doesn't work) can pull out rod breaks for... possibly the first time since in about half the game. They are unboosted -aga spells. It'll take around 9 to kill. They could use physicals instead, but they're so much weaker and trigger so many more counters they'll spend far more on healing anyway. Regardless, it takes around one Hi-Potion to make up for an attack (a bit less, so around 9 rods and 15ish Hi-Potions should get the job done. This is going to run around 12k gil... actually pretty similar to Thief, but without their speed. Blue Mage can get away with less, though, because they have shields and those are obviously great here. Black Mage/Summoner are basically tied.

That leaves one final mage, one with neither staves nor rods... yes, it's Bard! The best thing you can say about Bard is that "at least they CAN heal". And hey Apollo's Harp isn't too awful a weapon, and weirdly it does work.


1. Ninja
2. Knight
3. Dragoon
4. Chemist
5. Ranger
6. Samurai
7. Monk
8. Time Mage
9. White Mage
10. Red Mage
11. Beastmaster
12. Mystic Knight
13. Dancer
14. Geomancer
15. Blue Mage
16. Thief
17t. Black Mage, Summoner
19. Bard
20. Berserker

The top seven jobs are notably better than the rest because they can reasonably solo this fight. And I'm not sure what it says about Dancer, Geomancer, Thief, and Berserker that they lost to a half or more of the jobs who get their skillset sealed in this fight.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Omniscient

Unlike Minotaur, Omniscient makes no attempt to shut off everything physical with a field effect. Instead, he just counters anything that isn't magic by casting Return, restarting the battle. Note that "anything that isn't magic" means almost everything: the only things which sneak through are the MP-costing magical skillsets. Stuff like Gaia and itemcasts still get countered. So if you're not a mage, the only way to defeat him is either to run him out of MP (he has 30k) or take advantage of certain status holes.

He's weak to Wind, but has Auto-Protect/Shell. He casts various magic, most of it not too scary. He'll heal himself occasionally with Cura or Drain, the latter also being his only offensive tool to go through Reflect. He has Slow, Stop, and Mini (Hermes Sandals block the first two, the latter can be healed by an item). His most damaging move by far normally is Bio, which does around 900 or so damage (half that to him), pretty decent; it's used only 1/24 of the time though and everything else is less than half as strong. Below 4000 HP he'll start spamming -aga spells which really hurt (probably OHKO damage) and he has Flare as a death counter, which hurts even more.

Reflect Rings are a tempting option here for some jobs, so I'll talk about them now. They're either a rare drop back in Barrier Tower, or more easily now are available as a common steal from a random in the Phoenix Tower. Not trivial to get, but it could be worse.


Let's start with the mages, since this fight is obviously designed for them. White Mage, sadly, doesn't have Holy yet, even though Minotaur was guarding it. They'll deal. They can hit Omniscient with Berserk. This gives him OHKO damage against the back row, but that's really not that bad, I promise... because White Mages have Blink. So set that up first, then cast Berserk, then recast Blink whenever it wears off. This will be very annoying for a solo but due to Haste you still win easily even then, with more white mages it goes more smoothly. Oh yeah, they can also Dispel him at the start of the fight to remove Protect/Shell and speed this up.

Black Mage has offence, certainly; the problem is surviving -aga spells and Flare at the end. The brute force way is to count HP carefully and then unleash a barrage of -agas to dodge his limit entirely (with Haste, this is very doable), and get one Black Mage ganked by Flare and win with the other. That's probably simplest, and in fact they do it so quickly that Omniscient should only get two turns, neither of which he can do anything useful with. If they snagged a Reflect Ring, they can solo this easily enough, since now nothing he has is scary.

Time Mage has Comet spam, which is really weak against Shell, but still works. They can also apply Slow, giving them a colossal turnsplit with which to try to dodge the limit with... though honestly unless there's three of them they'll still have problems! But whatever, with the turnsplit even him OHKOing someone isn't that bad, revive and move on. You'll need two for this to work, or a Reflect Ring. Notably they can also cast Stop if they need a brief window to attack without counters; this is more useful if they're paired with a fighter job.

Summoner can cast Carbuncle, giving them a Reflect Ring without a Reflect Ring. And Syldra hits Omni's wind weakness, essentially cancelling out Shell. Like White Mage this is quite safe, but since it's way way faster there's less chance of screwing things up.

Blue Mage can cast Mighty Guard to survive Omni's limit (even Flare, probably, though it depends on level), and Aeroga wrecks him real bad anyway, worse than Black Mage does. They won't do too well solo though, since Vampire will miss a lot due to Shell and they will still be 2HKOed by the limit they can't possibly dodge. But with two PCs, they're like Black Mage but better in every way.

And finally there is Red Mage: they are like White Mage without Berserk/Shell, or Black Mage without offence. Which is... pretty bad, they'll be eaten alive by that limit unless they want to play the Phoenix Down game for a while (granted, it'll work). With Reflect Rings things will go more smoothly, still need to slowly hack him down to that range though, which will take about 45 boosted -ara spells. Kinda icky given the MP limits of 1-3 PCs, but it's a better version of the strategy outlined for fighters below. They can also cast Silence and then break out physical attacks or rod breaks while it lasts.

Mystic Knight may not have magic, but they something even better: 100% silence via Spellblade. You cast that, then you tape down your A button and win.

Bard similarly has status shenanigans via Stop. Thanks to Shell it'll miss a bunch, but the animation tells you when it hits, and as long as you have a second Bard handy, you can thwack him with the Air Knife right after. Repeat if necessary. You can make the whole process smoother if you buff stats first, though this does need two bards as Omni will never hit you out of a song, so you have to do it yourself.

Chemist, like White Mage, has access to Berserk (costs 1 Turtle Shell). Unlike White Mage, they don't have Blink. They can apply Blind via Dark Matters (may take a few tries due to Shell), which reduces his hit rate to 25%, and Drink to get Protect on themselves so that he doesn't OHKO when he does hit. Two Heal Staff hits should take care of the rest. This strategy is a bit dicy for a solo but should work well enough with two PCs, one to heal and one to try to apply blind. Obviously rather resource-intensive, but better than Red Mage's plan I think.

The last job with a good way of winning this is Beastmaster, who can track down a pair of Zus, a W1 random which still exists in a certain section of the world map. Obscure but we'll take it. The Zu release is Breath Wing, which ignores Shell and does wind-elemental damage equal to 25% of the target's HP... 50% in Omniscient's case! Two of those is a win. He'll counter the first with Return, so the solution is to bring two Beastmasters, and try to silence him with a Mage Masher. It only works about 9% of the time, but every failed attempt earns you a Return... so you'll succeed after a bit. Once you do, the second Beastmaster immediately follows with a released Zu, then the next turn, the first Beastmaster uses their own. Collect victory. Similar enough to Chemist, but both safer and faster.


Fighters pretty much all have the same basic strategy. Have at least two, grind out two Reflect Rings somewhere, and have some Mage Mashers handy. As mentioned, it only inflicts Silence 9% of the time. BUT, you can attack your party members without triggering Return counters, and bounce the random Silence procs onto Omni. When one hits, the other fighters can immediately lay into him. Then repeat. Super annoying because you have to outrace Omni's regen and healing spell use (also Drain, though with a Reflect Ring you can put Bone Mail on one fighter to absorb that... not an option for Geomancer), but it works if you can equip Knives.

From this point, you can more or less rank the fighters by how fast/powerful they are, which indicates how much advantage they can take of each silence. Ninja is probably best, because dual Mage Mashers doubles your chance to proc silence (in fact, ninjas might even be able to do this without Reflect Rings). Working down, they're followed by Knight, Ranger, Dancer, (gap) Samurai, Dragoon, Geomancer, Thief. If you're curious why Dancer is that high, it's because they aren't suffering for their weaker weapon here; Air Knife Sword Dances hurt. I'll move Thief a little above the three jobs above them because hey, the easiest way to get Reflect Rings is by stealing and they're notably better than that, plus the three jobs above them only barely have more damage anyway (they're all using Air Knives, just have higher strength).

That leaves the walk of shame. Monk can't equip knives. All they can do is grab one or more Reflect Rings and do one of two things. They can wait for Omni to bounce Silence/Stop onto HIMSELF, then hit him. Or they can go Reflect Ring + Bone Mail and leave the game on for hours and hours and hours until he runs out of MP. (You can skip 2/3 of his 30k by using an Ether on him the first time he silences/stops himself, but it still takes forever.) And finally, Berserker can't even do this whole "waiting" thing, so their only hope is to give their fastest member a Mage Masher and hope its 9% chance kicks in every time while the slightly slower Berserkers use Air Knives. Or seriously, use a better class.


1. Mystic Knight
2. Summoner
3. White Mage
4. Blue Mage
5. Black Mage
6. Time Mage
7. Bard
8. Beastmaster
9. Chemist
10. Ninja
11. Red Mage
12. Knight
13. Ranger
14. Dancer
15. Thief
16. Samurai
17. Dragoon
18. Geomancer
19. Monk
20. Berserker

[Dark Holy Elf]

Final dungeon time! As a note, I'm going to be assuming Island Shrine and Fork Tower were done. Taking points off for requiring something from these would mostly hurt White Mage, and I feel that these rankings have undersold White Mage for long enough in their pre-Holy phase. I may put in a slight penalty for Time Mage needing to do a whole other useless dungeon for Meteor, though. You can also grab a bunch of other items in dungeons at this point; I'll largely assume the party has.

Calofisteri

She'll use various spells, including Reflect. Once reflected, she'll bounce spells off of herself and onto you, including Reflect. If one of your PCs is reflected, she'll bounce buffs and healing off you. It all sounds really clever, until you realise that (a) she hardly ever uses attack spells, just status moves like Old, Stop, and Poison; Bio is the only attack spell and she only uses it if reflected, and (b) the "there's a reflected ally" AI takes priority. So uh if you have a Reflect Ring on, she'll never use any offensice spells ever.

Well, not quite. She does have the highest physical defence sported by any boss in the maingame (except Melusine, who wasn't wearing clothing either...) and counters any damage with Drain, which is pretty weak, but could annoy some weaker classes anyway? Especially once she gets Protect/Shell up, which she will sooner or later if your offence is bad (sooner rather than later if you go in with reflect up yourself).


Let's start with the mages. White Mage first. Calofisteri will only use Stop, Old, and Reflect at first. White Mage is immune to the first, has Esuna for the second, and Dispel for the third. Oh yeah and they have freaking Holy now, not that they need it. (Their MDef, MEvade, and Shell would power them past Drain nicely regardless.) They win.

Black Mage can two-round Calofisteri, but if her opening turn is Reflect, well, that's the end of that! Then she could get on a bad run, casting Bio and Old a lot or something. Not too likely but y'never know! They can also bring in a Reflect Ring and the worst she'll do is cast Shell on turn 2 but that's yeah not soon enough. Drain counters could pile up on one target I guess, but it's not likely.

If Time Mage has Meteor, they wreck the boss so hard. If they don't have Meteor, then they can still use Slow, Old, and Comet to get the job done, though obviously Drain is more of an issue now (still not much of one against mage MDef, and Old eventually wrecks its accuracy down to like 30%). Meteor's enough of a hit to drop them belo Black Mage I think.

Summoner can unleash Syldra which again does huge damage, and will two-round with it. It's hard to even care about the "but but what if all the Drains focus" because Phoenix. Uh Holy costs less MP and is stronger on the one person who strengthens it?

Blue Mage has Aeroga... which is excellent but runs into Reflect. Oh well, just bring in a Reflect Ring, same thing works, just a bit weaker. Level 2 Old might be worth a turn? Maybe? Same situation as Black Mage, otherwise, just with worse damage.

Red Mage offence is way, way worse, but it doesn't matter. They have POIZN. And Silence. They hit around 60% and 40% of the time respectively. So poison her, and try to keep her silenced as much as possible. She might be able to pull a Reflect/Reflect/Esuna chain to heal herself, but even if she does you can wait for Reflect to wear off and do it again. (Poison kills in 16 turns.)


Okay, I'm gonna talk about two more notable strategies at this point. One, Bone Mail kinda mocks this boss; it nulls every status she can apply except Stop (and Hermes Sandals null that), as well as absorbs Drain and Bio, her only damage moves. So uh if you have it, you win, and it's just a matter of when. Of course the other PCs may die but you can always revive 'em at the end.

Additionally, you can run her out of MP. She has 1000, so if you sit there with a Reflect Ring long enough, she'll bounce buffs and healing off you until she's out. Then you can attack her safely without fear of Drain.

Everyone except Black/White/Time Mage and Summoner (who wreck the boss) can use Bone Mail, except Bard and Geomancer. Everyone except Berserker can use the "wait her out of MP" strategy.

Speaking of Berserker, they do decently enough here thanks to axes cutting through her defence. Drain could still focus onto someone and kill them but the Bone Mail user can't die. Anyone stuck with a non-endgame axe isn't even in bad shape, since the Poison Axe may poison her.

As for Bard, they can buff all their stats until they hit... actually still not that hard because they run into her defence in an annoying way, but easily enough to punch way past Drain. I guess they might use some Hi-Potions. And Geomancer... yeah I dunno. They're probably last.

Fighters just hit her; the order is something like Ranger > Dancer and Knight > Samurai > Dragoon > Ninja > Thief > Monk. Ninja and Monk are lower than you might expect due to Dual-Wield/fists triggering two counters. Monk may actually want to pull out Kaiser Knuckles to overcome her defence, despite losing Haste. Ranger's really good, actually; the Artemis Bow hits a weakness and Rapidfire is ITD in general, it's entirely possible they might one-round (probably not) but two at worst, and I don't think Drain can possibly focus to a kill in the meantime.

Mystic Knight goes Flare Sword and that gives them high ITD damage. Or they can go Silence Sword on 1-2 PCs (she has 10% evade) and make a total mockery of the fight that way.

Beastmaster has the Beast Killer whip (possibly more if they want to steal 'em, they're rare steals in the Great Trench) which also hits a weakness, but their other weapons will be weak here. They could catch some things to help out but this boss is basically a joke so who cares.

And finally there's Chemist. They can poison her with a Dark Matter and hope she doesn't heal herself, resetting it if she does. (They'll need to do this at least once on average.) They can also try to silence her with Mage Mashers in the meantime; since these don't break her defence, she doesn't counter! The rate's crappy, though (around 12%)... still might be enough. Or y'know, they can Bone Mail auto-battle through this. Whatever, this boss sucks.

1. Ranger
2. White Mage
3. Summoner
4. Mystic Knight
5. Black Mage
6. Blue Mage
7. Time Mage
8. Red Mage
9. Knight
10. Dancer
11. Beastmaster
12. Samurai
13. Dragoon
14. Chemist
15. Berserker
16. Ninja
17. Thief
18. Bard
19. Monk
20. Geomancer

I bothered to make a list, but I'm not really sure I'll count it up in any final tallies I do. This boss is terrible, anyone with Bone Mail literally can't lose (which is almost everyone), and it's certainly down there with Tyrannosaur and Abductor. When the worst case scenario for anyone but Geomancer is "um you revive three people when the fight ends" and really almost the entire list is quibbling over the use of 0-2000 gil, you know things are dumb.

Besides it's not like we lack bosses to throw our endgame team against! Next up: the endgame version of Byblos. Is all lost this time? Probably not.

[hinode]

This is pretty late, but I feel that rod breaking in world 2 deserves a major asterisk since you have to buy all your Fire/Ice/Thunder Rods ahead of time. If you didn't get enough of them, too bad, you're stuck with breaking Venom Rods instead as your only option, which is significantly weaker. This really only matters for... Red Mage I think, everyone else stops caring about rod breaking after Gilgamesh 2, and it's easy enough to stock up enough for the very first W2 boss.

Also Gargoyles are entirely capable of suiciding via consecutive Fusions, at least in the SNES version. Dunno if they fixed that in later versions, but it made me laugh when I saw it happen. I'd throw them out personallly, you fight them multiple times throughout W3 and they're basically a joke for everyone except Berserkers.

[Dark Holy Elf]

In theory I'd imagine they still could (at least in GBA; later versions changed the core engine), but I also imagine it's based on the ever-so-slight randomness of initial ATB... the turns would have to come at the same clocktick from what I understand? Otherwise the slightly slower Gargoyle's "alone" AI would kick in. Good to note, but for the most part since we're talking reliable strategies I'd generally tend towards assuming better-case scenarios for the boss (hence for instance my focus on assuming Titan actually does fire off Earth Shaker on its second turn 2, should it live that long).

As for skipping them in counts... maybe? I mean they're not Calofisteri/Tyrannosaur/Abductor bad, but they're certainly mediocre. One thing I was thinking of doing either when I have time is to try to rank all the bosses by difficulty based on the median job's difficulty of defeating them, and then I could try to do something crazy like weight harder bosses more. Because yeah performance against Antlion or Gargoyles means a lot less than performance against Atomos or the final boss.

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

Once you're done, you think an offbeat ranking for the remaining optional bosses on World 3 would be too much work to do? This is a really interesting read in general and I'd like to see how the jobs fare in the non-forced content of note in general.

[Dark Holy Elf]

There aren't really too many of them, but I could. Odin, Leviathan, and Bahamut are at least potentially interesting; the pigs pretty much get Magic Lamp-Odin'd by everyone. And Odin depends a lot on a real-life timer so I'd probably need to dig up a save which hasn't fought Odin yet and test how that goes. And then finally there's Omega and Shinryu, of course.

We'll see how I feel when I get to the end of this, there are still a surprising number of bosses left to go.

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

My main interest lies in the remaining summons, yes. Three little piggies are skippable. Omega and Shinryu would be funny, at least, though not sure how practical they are.