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FFR: Solo Lancer Part I
Sep. 17th, 2024 09:43 pmThere were still some achievements to knock out in FFR before the next version update, coming back to it after half a year's break. One of them was to do a solo on Renaissance Mode. Two of the new classes stood out that would be simple enough and could earn me achievements at the same time: Lancer and Blue Mage. Because I didn't fancy hunting for IronGOL during a solo run to get the achievement for learning all Blue Magic, Lancer it is!
The Lancer is as simple a class as it gets. It has one command to keep track of: JUMP. This takes the character out of battle for a turn and executes an attack with one less hit than a normal FIGHT, where all hits are critical and (from observation with the numbers) with heightened attack. It then inflicts Fatigued status, which prevents it from being used consecutively (and probably lowers evasion). Were I to promote it to Dragoon, it would notably gain SUPER JUMP to hit all enemies in the battle at once. This makes solo Dragoon the easiest in the game even (especially) on New Game+. Other than that, it is very comparable to the Fighter: its SAIVL growths are one-to-one identical except for not getting as many strong HP ups or MDef, and wears heavy armor; although the Opal equipment remains exclusive to Knight. They also cannot equip a shield: even the ProCape is off-limits to them! In that sense, they're actually more comparable to the Black Belt/Monk: a wrecking ball, not a tank.
Everyone calls their Lancers Kain. I wanted something different. Aranea from FF15 came to mind, but really. A guy who jumps on others as his primary means of offense? It's a him!
A fun aspect about solos that Ozmo implemented into 2.0 with the ability to choose empty slots: you get alternate dialog acknowledging that you're not playing with a full party. It ranges from just changing to a non-plural form to funny to straight-up mean, especially the fountain and well quotes.
GARLAND is still a fraud, by the way: a JUMP and an attack knocked him down. At level 2. Sara was very ungrateful to the solo.
Mario ran into the dreaded double OGRE encounter on the way to Pravoka. And he won: a JUMP for each of them, and he survived long enough to do so. Got him a nice chunk of experience. The PIRATEs were laughable with a heavily armored high HP character.
I grinded cash with KYZOKU resets before heading into the Marsh Cave, not for just supplies, but for a Silver Spear. This costs 4500 gold and sports 25/15/3.5 offensive stats. It's basically a Silver Sword for the Lancer. Funnily enough, this would get replaced by a slightly better weapon on B3 of the Earth Cave, but it was far better than any other weapon available now. This brought Mario to level 5.
By going into Marsh Cave from a hard reset, I could get an ideal encounter draw for traversing the cave: there was only two encounters with stunning undead, starting with a ZOMBIE/GHOUL mix at the start of the cave. It was very surmountable, either with luck or fighting them. It was the WIZARDs that were problematic. Here you can see a flaw of JUMP in action: it can miss! I believe it effectively performs an attack with 32 less hit%. Needless to say, this encounter got scuffed despite rolling the minimal draw of two. The ones with four of the fish-things were especially rude: they all moved before Mario, reducing him to critical health before he could do anything.
It was my fourth attempt at them that made it through: a three-pack. The first one fell easily enough, and I had Mario attack the second. However, they reduced him to critical health at this point, so it was completely up to turn order! He landed...and the WIZARD did not move! One more turn, a FIGHT...he goes first! CROWN claimed. I had him mostly run throughout the cave both in and out, but he fought a SCORPION group on the way out; there weren't that many and they were simply too dangerous to leave to simple run chance. Similarly, I had him JUMP on a CRAWL on the way out instead of just running.
On the other hand, ASTOS was a first try fight. Mario went before the RUB, and his JUMP hit. That was the end of it right there.
After doing errands with the KEY, it was off to the Earth Cave. This is one of the biggest obstacles for a solo character, and I actually feel it's worse than the Ice Cave sometimes. It's longer and you're lower leveled for it. As I was clearing out the top two floors, Mario hit level 14. This bumped him up to three hits, or two if he was JUMPing. The damage spike was even more noticeable than it would be for a standard character (except Monk): there were times when he was failing to one-shot BULLs just before this. Now? They were being overkilled.
Here's the Arcane Spear. It has 26/20/3.5 offenses, and is effective on Magic Beasts - known better as magical in AstralEsper's mechanics FAQ. This was going to be Mario's weapon for a while: the next upgrade in Crescent is only better by one point of power, and the next direct upgrade is way off in Mirage Tower. Actually, the ones on the northern continent may be Dragoon exclusive! Guess we'll see.
Of course, Earth Cave B3 is actual hell. Stunning undead are in tons of encounters. Despite this, my first death here came courtesy of WIZARDs. It was a four pack, turn order was bad, and a missed JUMP sealed Mario's fate. The VAMPIRE is a problem too: the first time i got there, he just used DAZZLE and went right into massive physicals.
There's only three ways around this for most characters. One, smash your head against the wall until it works. I did this for a bit, then I got an undead ambush on the way back that gave me no chance. Two, grind to boost magic defense. Boring. I actually hadn't gone out of my way to grind levels at all so far (the cash grind was something different!). Third is to game the encounter table. It's entirely deterministic: a table of 256 encounters. I tried this before with my solo Thief on Classic, failing because FFR wasn't true to the NES encounter table. But it's fixed now.
I was bored. So yes, I seriously went in on encounter 186. It was worth a shot. This gave me ten battles to get through the floor, defeat VAMPIRE, and get out. Long story short: it worked. Game gave little leeway with the encounters though. It was only because they stopped coming at the very end that I was able to make it through.
As part of restocking, I purchased the Steel Armor. This is normally something you should never ever do in a casual playthrough. The boost it gives over Iron Armor is absolutely not worth the price tag. Instead of buying this for 45000G, you could spend 48000G on six level 5 spells for your mages. Or, spend it on anything else besides a piece of equipment that will be obsoleted in Gurgu or the Ice Cave. In a solo, however? Yeah, the defense boost is worth it.
One nice thing that lined up here from that earlier stunt: I was now in the encounter 216-225 range, another fantastic stretch with no stunning undead or COCTRICEs to deal with. It was a leisurely stroll through the floor as a result. When I reached the stairs to B4, I was on encounter 224. This would give me three to make it through B4 before killer encounters showed up. Only thing to do was march forward.
The encounters went WIZARD, WIZARD, TROLLs...and I was not close to the stairs at this point. So I tried a creative strategy: switching to Silver Armor to try to increase evade with its lesser weight. It turned out not to be necessary, because Mario got through that floor without further encounters. The ones on B5 were safe, so that brought him to LICH.
The game tried to give me a massive heart attack by having the boneman open with a physical attack that paralyzed! Luckily, Mario instantly recovered and took an ICE2. Then he jumped up and did 388 damage!! LICH moved before him on the landing turn...
...and then Mario moved after with a fight, settling things. Phew! And all this at level 16. Dragoon NG+ may be pretty infamous amongst the FFR community for being an easy solo, but Lancer is no slouch itself.
With that out of the way, I made my way over to Crescent Lake to pick up the CANOE. There was another equipment upgrade here, the Platnum Spear. However, it was only a single point of power stronger than the Arcane Spear, so I stuck with what I had for now.
Of the three midgame dungeons, I settled on Gurgu Volcano first for a few different reasons. One, it was easy, which would allow Mario to gain some levels along the way. Two, I could get a free Silver Helmet and Silver Gauntlet here for a small defensive upgrade. And more importantly, the Flame Armor would add an extra safety net in the Ice Cave.
It was very smooth sailing through the volcano. I beat the Red D on B5 without incident, hitting level 20 in the process, then moved onto KARY. The best thing about JUMP is that critical hits partly ignore defense: they're effectively the sum of two identical attacks where one does not factor it in (the formula is specifically (A...2A) + (A...2A - D, both A values are the same). The fiends in particular have a lot; the snakelady here has 50, for example. JUMP just says "screw that" and smashes them into a fine mist.
With the Flame Armor, I was able to sell back the Steel Armor. I went ahead and bought Platnum Spear at this point. No reason not to.
Ordeals was the next stop here. The Zeus Gauntlet has a good chance of wiping groups of COCTRICEs, providing yet another safety net for the Ice Cave. There were some other useful items here. The encounters in here were very tame; I had all of one (ZomBULLs) throughout the maze room. Only a MEDUSA group in the last room was any dangerous, and Mario escaped from it. I got the Gold Bracelet, Heal Staff, and Zeus Gauntlet here, avoided getting stunned by a Zombie D, and got out first try.
Also, this bears repeating: empty slots work as item banks. So you're not handicapping yourself by not using corpses instead. Speaking of, since Mario could never equip a shield, he was not handicapping himself by putting Zeus there despite not being able to equip it. Well, there is one special slot for Dragoons, but a Lancer would not be getting it.
But the Ice Cave is next, and I have a lot to say about it, so we'll page break here.
Next | Index
The Lancer is as simple a class as it gets. It has one command to keep track of: JUMP. This takes the character out of battle for a turn and executes an attack with one less hit than a normal FIGHT, where all hits are critical and (from observation with the numbers) with heightened attack. It then inflicts Fatigued status, which prevents it from being used consecutively (and probably lowers evasion). Were I to promote it to Dragoon, it would notably gain SUPER JUMP to hit all enemies in the battle at once. This makes solo Dragoon the easiest in the game even (especially) on New Game+. Other than that, it is very comparable to the Fighter: its SAIVL growths are one-to-one identical except for not getting as many strong HP ups or MDef, and wears heavy armor; although the Opal equipment remains exclusive to Knight. They also cannot equip a shield: even the ProCape is off-limits to them! In that sense, they're actually more comparable to the Black Belt/Monk: a wrecking ball, not a tank.
Everyone calls their Lancers Kain. I wanted something different. Aranea from FF15 came to mind, but really. A guy who jumps on others as his primary means of offense? It's a him!
A fun aspect about solos that Ozmo implemented into 2.0 with the ability to choose empty slots: you get alternate dialog acknowledging that you're not playing with a full party. It ranges from just changing to a non-plural form to funny to straight-up mean, especially the fountain and well quotes.
GARLAND is still a fraud, by the way: a JUMP and an attack knocked him down. At level 2. Sara was very ungrateful to the solo.
Mario ran into the dreaded double OGRE encounter on the way to Pravoka. And he won: a JUMP for each of them, and he survived long enough to do so. Got him a nice chunk of experience. The PIRATEs were laughable with a heavily armored high HP character.
I grinded cash with KYZOKU resets before heading into the Marsh Cave, not for just supplies, but for a Silver Spear. This costs 4500 gold and sports 25/15/3.5 offensive stats. It's basically a Silver Sword for the Lancer. Funnily enough, this would get replaced by a slightly better weapon on B3 of the Earth Cave, but it was far better than any other weapon available now. This brought Mario to level 5.
By going into Marsh Cave from a hard reset, I could get an ideal encounter draw for traversing the cave: there was only two encounters with stunning undead, starting with a ZOMBIE/GHOUL mix at the start of the cave. It was very surmountable, either with luck or fighting them. It was the WIZARDs that were problematic. Here you can see a flaw of JUMP in action: it can miss! I believe it effectively performs an attack with 32 less hit%. Needless to say, this encounter got scuffed despite rolling the minimal draw of two. The ones with four of the fish-things were especially rude: they all moved before Mario, reducing him to critical health before he could do anything.
It was my fourth attempt at them that made it through: a three-pack. The first one fell easily enough, and I had Mario attack the second. However, they reduced him to critical health at this point, so it was completely up to turn order! He landed...and the WIZARD did not move! One more turn, a FIGHT...he goes first! CROWN claimed. I had him mostly run throughout the cave both in and out, but he fought a SCORPION group on the way out; there weren't that many and they were simply too dangerous to leave to simple run chance. Similarly, I had him JUMP on a CRAWL on the way out instead of just running.
On the other hand, ASTOS was a first try fight. Mario went before the RUB, and his JUMP hit. That was the end of it right there.
After doing errands with the KEY, it was off to the Earth Cave. This is one of the biggest obstacles for a solo character, and I actually feel it's worse than the Ice Cave sometimes. It's longer and you're lower leveled for it. As I was clearing out the top two floors, Mario hit level 14. This bumped him up to three hits, or two if he was JUMPing. The damage spike was even more noticeable than it would be for a standard character (except Monk): there were times when he was failing to one-shot BULLs just before this. Now? They were being overkilled.
Here's the Arcane Spear. It has 26/20/3.5 offenses, and is effective on Magic Beasts - known better as magical in AstralEsper's mechanics FAQ. This was going to be Mario's weapon for a while: the next upgrade in Crescent is only better by one point of power, and the next direct upgrade is way off in Mirage Tower. Actually, the ones on the northern continent may be Dragoon exclusive! Guess we'll see.
Of course, Earth Cave B3 is actual hell. Stunning undead are in tons of encounters. Despite this, my first death here came courtesy of WIZARDs. It was a four pack, turn order was bad, and a missed JUMP sealed Mario's fate. The VAMPIRE is a problem too: the first time i got there, he just used DAZZLE and went right into massive physicals.
There's only three ways around this for most characters. One, smash your head against the wall until it works. I did this for a bit, then I got an undead ambush on the way back that gave me no chance. Two, grind to boost magic defense. Boring. I actually hadn't gone out of my way to grind levels at all so far (the cash grind was something different!). Third is to game the encounter table. It's entirely deterministic: a table of 256 encounters. I tried this before with my solo Thief on Classic, failing because FFR wasn't true to the NES encounter table. But it's fixed now.
I was bored. So yes, I seriously went in on encounter 186. It was worth a shot. This gave me ten battles to get through the floor, defeat VAMPIRE, and get out. Long story short: it worked. Game gave little leeway with the encounters though. It was only because they stopped coming at the very end that I was able to make it through.
As part of restocking, I purchased the Steel Armor. This is normally something you should never ever do in a casual playthrough. The boost it gives over Iron Armor is absolutely not worth the price tag. Instead of buying this for 45000G, you could spend 48000G on six level 5 spells for your mages. Or, spend it on anything else besides a piece of equipment that will be obsoleted in Gurgu or the Ice Cave. In a solo, however? Yeah, the defense boost is worth it.
One nice thing that lined up here from that earlier stunt: I was now in the encounter 216-225 range, another fantastic stretch with no stunning undead or COCTRICEs to deal with. It was a leisurely stroll through the floor as a result. When I reached the stairs to B4, I was on encounter 224. This would give me three to make it through B4 before killer encounters showed up. Only thing to do was march forward.
The encounters went WIZARD, WIZARD, TROLLs...and I was not close to the stairs at this point. So I tried a creative strategy: switching to Silver Armor to try to increase evade with its lesser weight. It turned out not to be necessary, because Mario got through that floor without further encounters. The ones on B5 were safe, so that brought him to LICH.
The game tried to give me a massive heart attack by having the boneman open with a physical attack that paralyzed! Luckily, Mario instantly recovered and took an ICE2. Then he jumped up and did 388 damage!! LICH moved before him on the landing turn...
...and then Mario moved after with a fight, settling things. Phew! And all this at level 16. Dragoon NG+ may be pretty infamous amongst the FFR community for being an easy solo, but Lancer is no slouch itself.
With that out of the way, I made my way over to Crescent Lake to pick up the CANOE. There was another equipment upgrade here, the Platnum Spear. However, it was only a single point of power stronger than the Arcane Spear, so I stuck with what I had for now.
Of the three midgame dungeons, I settled on Gurgu Volcano first for a few different reasons. One, it was easy, which would allow Mario to gain some levels along the way. Two, I could get a free Silver Helmet and Silver Gauntlet here for a small defensive upgrade. And more importantly, the Flame Armor would add an extra safety net in the Ice Cave.
It was very smooth sailing through the volcano. I beat the Red D on B5 without incident, hitting level 20 in the process, then moved onto KARY. The best thing about JUMP is that critical hits partly ignore defense: they're effectively the sum of two identical attacks where one does not factor it in (the formula is specifically (A...2A) + (A...2A - D, both A values are the same). The fiends in particular have a lot; the snakelady here has 50, for example. JUMP just says "screw that" and smashes them into a fine mist.
With the Flame Armor, I was able to sell back the Steel Armor. I went ahead and bought Platnum Spear at this point. No reason not to.
Ordeals was the next stop here. The Zeus Gauntlet has a good chance of wiping groups of COCTRICEs, providing yet another safety net for the Ice Cave. There were some other useful items here. The encounters in here were very tame; I had all of one (ZomBULLs) throughout the maze room. Only a MEDUSA group in the last room was any dangerous, and Mario escaped from it. I got the Gold Bracelet, Heal Staff, and Zeus Gauntlet here, avoided getting stunned by a Zombie D, and got out first try.
Also, this bears repeating: empty slots work as item banks. So you're not handicapping yourself by not using corpses instead. Speaking of, since Mario could never equip a shield, he was not handicapping himself by putting Zeus there despite not being able to equip it. Well, there is one special slot for Dragoons, but a Lancer would not be getting it.
But the Ice Cave is next, and I have a lot to say about it, so we'll page break here.
Next | Index
