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FFR: Solo Dark Knight Part II
May. 8th, 2025 02:23 pm
The promoted run is absolutely going to be more interesting, and not just because I'm not spending 90% of it running from stuff. Much of what the Dark Knight gets in the second half of the game is exclusive to their promotion, the Deathknight. It's not necessarily good or very exciting, but it's there. Much like my Elementalist run, I'm sticking to no spellcasting items for a promoted job to up the stakes rather than being brainlessly masochistic. Having actual HP should make it not hurt as much against KARY and KRAKEN.
The Deathknight gains a bunch of new abilities. The first is SOULEATER, a decently strong move that hits all enemies at the cost of 20% of their max HP. It pairs nicely with their unlockable ability, MISERY, which increases damage the lower their HP. It's a really cool concept that encourages risk/reward.
Undead are healed by SOULEATER, for around the same damage they would've taken. However, the move also has a special secondary effect: everything that's hit by it will be inflicted with darkness, the undead included. Which may seem pointless, but remember: Dark Knights get an extra 32 hit% against enemies inflicted with this. The odds of infliction are very high. The only thing immune is the superboss you can only fight with a Spellblade in the party. It also inflicts tiredness afterward, which prevents the use of SKILLS - which includes BLOOD WEAPON, so you can't just use it and get to healing off the damage right away.
Besides the added spells that most magic jobs get, they also gain the CONSUME BAT ability. This allows them to kill any bat NPC and gain stats from them. Here it is in action. Every floor in the game with a bat has a fixed set of growths from eating them. It was better to get VIT boosts sooner rather than later!
There's a lot about the Dark Knight class that I actually like in spite of it being bad, but this isn't one of them. This is really just a way of papering over their horrendeous fixed stat growths. If you run multiple in the same party, only one can benefit from each bat. On the other hand, in a solo like this, you can see some pretty insane stats. Like I said, the biggest problem with it is that you have to go back to all the dungeons that have them. It's a massive pain. I avoided using it on my casual playthrough between that and because I was unaware of their stat growths and thought it'd break them.
After eating the LUCK bats in the Northwest Castle, the Waterfall was the logical second step, but for more (and less) reasons than usual. The first time Cleese reached the spike tile, there were seven COCTRICEs! Bad turn order meant he ended up a statue. The second time had just one, plus a horde of MUMMYs! I countered by using the Deathknight's LIMIT, DREADSPIKEs. This causes them to absorb a portion of physical damage taken from enemies, up to 50% of the character's max. This kept Cleese's health up while I whittled the enemies down.
Despite not using Defense, there was still the Ribbon and this interesting goodie to be picked up. The Coral Greatsword, as you might expect from sharing the name with a similar weapon, is effective on aquatic enemies. It is exclusive to the Deathknight. It's a mere three points of attack stronger than the Cobalt Greatsword and five points of accuracy lower. This is a pattern with the late game greatswords: lower accuracy for slightly higher attack.
He also got his revenge when the spike spawned eight COCTRICEs: here's SOULEATER in action. It seems to be like a magical attack in some capacity since it had a chance to double. The biggest problem with it is the health drop. Just this one mini dungeon used up over 50 HEAL potions because of liberal use of SOULEATER. I'll really need to weigh whether it's worth it to use it or not. You cannot drop this willy nilly without support. Which thankfully includes its own BLOOD WEAPON, but you still need to consider whether the missing health will be bad for the next encounter.
From there, the next destination was the Earth Cave for the rest of the VIT bats on B2. The third and fifth floor had STR bats, and the fourth floor had AGI bats. No longer a problem to tread thanks to the Ribbon. After getting through there, that just left the Marsh Cave. It had LUCK bats on the first two floors, and INT bats on the bottom.
Here's Cleese's stats after the great bat eating adventure. Well, almost the whole adventure. You can gain a total of 23 STR, 15 AGI, 14 INT, 23 VIT, and 24 LUCK if you're diligent enough. Ironically for having the worst in the game, a Deathknight who manipulates AGI and LUCK can have the highest combination of them (which determines ambushes and preemptives) and can actually become the only job in the game with a guaranteed run chance. Even the Thief has a tiny chance to fail a run.
As you can see too, level 28 is when he got 4-hits with the Bastard Sword. He had 58 damage with it versus 85 across 3 hits with the Onyx Greatsword: a weapon purchasable in Gaia with 52/-20/15 offenses. Onyx did 225-480 to 10 absorb enemies, Bastard did 192-424. But if we're using Cobalt for the higher hit%, that's 210-450. Yeah, not that big a difference.
That just left these guys. You can eat them too, even after you find out they're sentient. They're very special: the Sky Warriors give a strong HP growth when eaten. It is the same as an actual one in every way: 20-25 HP at base plus VIT÷4. You can get the most out of them by eating them later, but getting a strong boost sooner is also very good. I know that some soloists in the New Game+ difficulty eat one or two and save the rest for later. What about Cleese?
Well, let's think about this. He's level 28, and I intend to go all the way here even if I don't have to. He has 6 strong HP growths left to gain. He has 487HP right now. Worst case (no further VIT gains), that's 336HP from VIT and 120 from strong HP. A total of 943. So no matter what happens, Cleese is guaranteed 999HP with these. He'll gain 185HP if I eat them now - no reason not to manipulate the maximum amount of a strong HP growth. If I wait two levels and get two VIT growths, that'll be 190. That felt like the best idea.
I went ahead and filled in Cleese's spell list after this, except for BLEED (which Cleese could not use without a friend to drain) and BLND. BANE, RUB, and XXXX are as you know them: instant death spells of various kinds. Deathknight isn't as good as using them as some of the other classes in FFR due to their low INT (and I hadn't been focusing on Cleese's), but they're there and nice. I talked about BIND before, but I had a plan for it. ABSORB is a new one: it targets an enemy and steals a buff from them (or according to Wrolyn, doesn't actually steal it, just copies it). It's pretty niche because very few enemies use them in the first place.
EN-DARK is a new one you can get from the Lefein shop. The Death element in vanilla existed only to be resisted by enemies. Even in this fan remake/expansion, only CARBUNCLE is weak to it. However, as the description says, anything not resistant to the element will have a chance to be instantly killed. Notably, only LICH among the four fiends resists death. It's neat against them, and that's about it. Notably, this is Deathknight exclusive: the Spellblade doesn't learn this one.
Oh yeah, their spell charges cap at 6. Worth pointing out.
I got the levels Cleese needed, then moved to activate this quest in Onrac. Just like the guy says, your Deathknight will need to take 1000 damage in the same battle without dying (Final Fantasy Renaissance does include means to revive during battle). SOULEATER self-damage does not count. This requires good setup against the right enemy. Something like an ANKYLO could definitely deal damage, but for the solo Cleese, that would kill him faster than HEAL potions could restore it.
Yum. Actually, it looks like this could get even higher than the 25+(52÷4)=38 it was normally: I only found this out by sheer coincidence. Thankfully it was on the second bat, so Cleese only has 1 less HP than he should. Which is still 4 more than I expected.
Anyway, I settled on ZomBULLs to achieve the quest. 40-80 attack with one hit on Cleese's 41 absorb was more than manageable. They also had a decent but not high chance of missing. Their morale was the only potential problem, so here I am getting actual use out of BIND! Only in variants.
A message appears in battle once you've achieved the condition, so there's no need to count manually. I swung around to do the BOTTLE quest before heading back to pick up the MISERY trait before going into the Sea Shrine.
Heading up let me test balancing SOULEATER with BLOOD WEAPON for the first time. It wasn't always practical in the Waterfall because MUMMYs exist. GHOSTs still exist here though, so Cleese still had to be careful. Can't use either of those on them! Can't run either.
It took three attempts to make it to the bottom. GHOSTs killed one attempt. I tried DREADSPIKEs, but it could not keep up with the damage they were dealing. WATERs were the other culprit. Cleese used SOULEATER, which it wasn't enough for a kill, so he got killed. I learned from my mistake and had him use BLOOD WEAPON and attack the next time. That eventually brought him to the bottom floor.
Uh, wow. I have never seen KRAKEN attack that much before. I had the sense to use DREADSPIKEs against him, but then he got a massive critical for over 650 damage. EN-DARK went off on turn 2, but Cleese died before he could attack on turn 3.
The next attempt died to GHOSTs again. Am I going to have to encounter watch? They're slot 4 on B2 and B4. For the record, WATERs are slot 5 in B5, slot 6 in B4. But with BLOOD WEAPON, even the max draw wasn't dangerous. They were back then, but now Cleese had the HP to get around them.
The second attempt at KRAKEN, I just had Cleese use EN-DARK and go. KRAKEN again kept physically attacking! It did not proc on the second turn, but on the third...
That wasn't formally instant death, but it effectively was. See how you like it, jerk!
One last dungeon left. This guy would normally have a funny reaction if you talked to him after eating the Sky Warriors: "YOU DID WHAT?" It didn't show up here. Maybe it only does so if you eat them after you've gotten all the orbs? Oh well.
Cleese could use the Dragon Armor in Mirage Tower. With ProRing later, he would have 51 absorb, the highest he could get. Not being able to use shields hurts the Dark Knight's tanking abilities. One bit of design that I like about Final Fantasy Renaissance is that nothing really obsoletes the Fighter/Warrior in that respect. They're not the be all end all of party leaders anymore, but they're still the best at soaking hits. They also are the only ones to have 3% MDef growth - Monk still gets 4%, but even all the new jobs get 2%. The three heavy armor classes that were added have problems: Lancer and Dark Knight can't use Shields, and Spellblade has low HP. The Viking job class is one that's scheduled and will probably change this when and if it pops up, but they're likely to not be as good on offense.
Sitting in the eastern room of F2 was this horrible weapon. The Buster (great)Sword is a reference and massive joke of a weapon. It has 60 attack, the strongest of all greatswords. It also has 20 crit%. The massive problem is that it has -30 hit%.
Let's math this: Cleese has 97 damage on 3-hits with the Buster. 87 on 4-hits with the Coral. Let's say WarMECH shows up, or he's fighting TIAMAT, both with their 80 absorb. Buster Sword will deal 51-342 damage. Coral will deal 28-376. More variance, but it's much less likely to do less than it is to do equal or more. And that's just on bosses with very high absorb. On 10 absorb enemies (it's a good average, which is why I've been using it), Coral would do presently 308-656 and Buster would do 267-552, a lot worse! Crit chance throws a wrench into things, but you still get one more roll with more hits. Buster will be better than the other strong greatswords at certain thresholds: levels 20-23, 31-34, and 42-45. A Dark Knight should go with whichever gives the most hits.
TIAMAT was absolutely wrecked by the first swing of the battle: 889 damage! I then tried to do a stylish finish with XXXX - this spell instantly kills anything as long as it is under 300HP and not resistant to the death element, and she fulfilled both conditions - only for it to not work due to an outstanding bug. After trying several more times and eventually landing a STUN, I finished her off. Ugh.
Of course, I was going to pick a fight with WarMECH. It struck first for 302, then did 267. Cleese nearly one-shot it with sheer damage. Which allowed for this little bit of humiliation. It nearly killed Cleese with the next physical, but didn't get the job done. Cleese was now level 39, without having gone out of the way to grind after the midgame except for those extra two levels before eating the Sky Warriors, which partly made up for running a lot in Ordeals anyway. That said, I didn't feel the need to gain the rest of the levels. Into the final dungeon!
If this were not a solo challenge, Cleese would have a special weapon to pick up in the very first room of the past Temple of Fiends, as long as he had a Ninja buddy along to use its SEARCH ability. The Chaos Greatsword is a weak weapon on paper: 30/-10/30 offenses, so it seems like a greatsword version of the Vorpal, etc. However, much like the Crimson, it has a hidden property: increasing the odds of EN-DARK's KO landing. Because EN-DARK is a gimmick, so is the Chaos Greatsword. Its main purpose is unlocking a hidden achievement for making use of its special property.
After the non-promoted run, it was very cathartic to run into a group of FrGIANTs and FrWOLFs on F2 and just SOULEATER the lot of them. It's amazing how less deadly the fights in here were. With so much more HP, KARY's hits went from killing in two to being harmlessly healed. Same for KRAKEN.
So let's talk about the big awesome sword. Like every class in the game, Dark Knight can use the Masmune. While it's not as likely to critical as the Greatswords, it still had 56 power to, say, Onyx Greatsword's 52. And of course, +50 hit%. It was kind of jarring seeing that massive hit% spike. Suppose Cleese hypothetically hit level 42 here. Buster would do 1-100 damage on each of its 4 hits against CHAOS. Masmune was going to do 1-92 on each of its 6 hits. That math doesn't change too much at the current level.
TIAMAT doesn't have that much more, and she got cut to shreds. This was certainly a victory set in stone, but I wanted it to be a big win. Might get killed in the process, but oh well. Let's go!
My idea was to stall until FAST, use ABSORB, then use it to utterly wreck CHAOS. Even if SLO2 hit, that should counter it. The stalling didn't go very well. Actually, I discovered a neat property of ABSORB here: it was absorbing CHAOS' status immunities! That's pretty sick actually. If it isn't intentional, it should be - even if it doesn't actually remove the buffs from them. Especially if it does though: it'd give it a fun niche. But finally, he used FAST and Cleese was able to ABSORB it!
Then he got NUKED to death. Yeah, saw that coming. And wow, nice bug. Negative HP. I think (and later got confirmed) this happened because DREADSPIKES was active at the time. Only a flesh wound indeed.
Not too much trouble to run back a second time. But SLO2 hit this time, and ABSORB actually missed. Cleese could still do heavy damage, but got killed by a CHAOS critical. On my third run, Cleese actually ran into enough unrunnable encounters that he hit level 42. So I tried Buster against TIAMAT for kicks. First hit? 4 hits, 200 damage. Blah. Second one was like 1200.
Switched Masmune back in for the third attempt at CHAOS. I failed again in a way: I was stalling more aggressively, making an active effort to keep Cleese healed. I used DRAIN and also set up darkness for later. I used BLOOD WEAPON and went to chip him. Except then Cleese went crazy, hit for over 1100 damage, and killed him right there. No, no. We're going to get this done RIGHT.
The fourth attempt went very well. CHAOS barely used physicals, and Cleese was able to keep up. I hit SOULEATER's darkness. Eventually, CHAOS used FAST and ABSORB hit! I pressed FIGHT and prepared for this epic hit.
OZMOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. I thought this was because of SOULEATER and made another testing run, but no. It just doesn't work. In fact, he didn't even get an extra hit from darkness! I guess it only works with Greatswords despite not saying as such in the description? All that swag for nothing! A pair of 1000+ damage swings ended it either way.
Well, that was a run. The promoted version was definitely a lot more fun than trying to fool around with low level. It's why I do these: for fun!
I still feel that the Dark Knight is one of the worse new jobs in Final Fantasy Renaissance, but despite that? I like it overall. The low hits/high damage and crit gimmick is pretty interesting. My initial impression was that it's similar to Monk in how it's more of a late bloomer, and I feel that assessment is a correct one. There's also the investment aspect of having to run around old dungeons. But unlike Evoker, you aren't actively punished with superbosses to make the class function. There's nothing wrong with creating a weaker job, as long as it's fun or interesting, and Dark Knight definitely hits on the interesting. Compare with stinkers like FF5 Geomancer that barely give you any options.
It's actually probably the most unique new job in that sense. A lot of new jobs feel derivative - for example, Lancer being a less tanky Fighter with JUMP (though Fighters get their own things!) - but because of the gimmicky weapons and spells, there's nothing quite like a Dark Knight.
It was a fun solo run as well, especially with BLOOD WEAPON. It's not great in a full party, but it was able to shine in a solo. And balancing it with SOULEATER after promotion was also cool. I was expecting it to be harder than it was, but really: the only difficulty was the tedium in stat resets. Those low growths and having to make up for it with bats is the one part of the job that I don't really like.
Another one I can add to my list. Not sure what's next, but I have a few ideas. Thanks for reading.
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