sirsystemerror | FFR: Solo Archer Part II

There was nothing to loot with the Mystic KEY except stuff to sell for money. The Silver Bow in Crescent Lake had 15/25/25 offenses, being a clean upgrade over the Elven Bow. Contrast with the Iron Bow from Melmond: 20/0/15. It's pure bait: Silver Bow is always going to do more damage. Armorwise, he picked up a Silver Bracelet (there was no need to go for the one in the Marsh Cave this time). And there was also another interesting piece of equipment: scarves can presently be worn by the Dancer, Bard, and Archer classes. They're mechanically shields with some riders. I skipped the first one in Elfland, but picked this one up.

Linen grants no absorb bonus, but adds 8 to hit%. Most armor in FF1 has a weight value, and scarves have a negative value (actually an evasion value as FFR listed), which results in increasing evade! The one in Elfland does give 1 absorb, but only -1 weight and +5 hit%. It's so insignificant that I totally forgot about it.

Well, next step is grinding. 44 MDef is nowhere near what I'm comfortable with for the Earth Cave. It probably won't be here. But if you're wondering, it looks like this. Not the best shot of it, but yeah, it's a glowy mess.

It actually was the Hall of Giants. Just stun the guys and go to work. Wasn't expecting that, but all of the other spots weren't great: EARTHs were too hard, peninsula was just viably GIANTs and maybe TYROs anyway and big groups of the former still hurt, outside Crescent had big groups. From observation here, the math on bows seems to be not as speculated.

I did some testing on damage numbers. Against SHARKs and their 0 absorb, with 27 damage and 94 hit% and excluding criticals, Yahata did: 80, 132, 149, 86, 97, 92, 138, 86, 123, 86, 120, 135, 120, 112, 103, 141, 135, 109, 138, 146, 149, 129. Doesn't line up with adding half of hit% as flat damage or to the damage formula directly: it seems closer to the latter plus some extra points. Unfortunately, the exact formula is opaque. But let's talk more about it.

To contrast, a Warrior with a Silver Sword getting 3-hits? 39-78 is their base damage at 14, so 117-234. A Thief at 14? 16 STR, worst case. Let's have them use the Dragon or Coral Sword for the maximum 27 damage they can have in this worst case. 27-54 across two hits: 52-108. Not that much worse. A Monk does 28-56 on 4, also clowning the Archer.

Hell, Dark Knight with a Cobalt Greatsword just gets to 2-hits at 14. Let's assume 26 STR there: 60-120 damage across 2-hits. Pretty good finally, and a shade behind Archer if one of the hits misses! With Bastard for higher accuracy, that's still 38-76 across two, matching the Archer at worst. Or even a Red Mage: I'll lowball 18 STR there, 32-72 across two. Similarly comparable. The Spellblade? Oh those are fun, they get a 50% damage boost when wielding an elemental weapon and 100% when hitting a weakness: with 18 STR at 14, that's 43-86 with the Acid Sword if it works by affecting damage directly: 86-172. And that's all before defense.

I could go on and on. In short, they're effectively on the level of part-time physical attackers like the Red and Blue Mages, though ahead of Thief and Dancer (both of which get better). Where Archers are supposed to compensate is the ability to critical hit way more often: Silver Bow had a one-in-four shot of it. It's still not exactly reliable.

It's worth noting that not all enemies give a material drop. GARGOYLEs are one of them. They could hypothetically drop WINGs, but they just don't. But strangely? SHADOWs were worth fighting. These undead are notable for two things: having the highest ambush rate in the game and hitting for darkness instead of paralysis. That meant they were a safe source of ASH.

I decided on the somewhat suicidal level 20 to go after the VAMPIRE. I got there on a good string of encounters, so it went fairly well. I could've gambled on a HEAD SHOT since he's a humanoid, but I went ahead and used an AIM for the kill. The only question is could he escape? He had to fight three WIZARDs and flee from two sets of three IMAGEs, but he did so.

After fetching the ROD, the trip down to LICH was ended by ridiculously unlucky circumstances: 4 COCTRICEs appeared, and Yahata failed his run attempt. I had been gaining LUCK every level, so this was unlikely. To add insult to injury, he endured all the attacks only to be petrified by the very last one. Something similar happened on the runback: a run fail, followed by paralyzing undead.

Third run in went smooth. I actually paused to figure out where I was on the encounter table when I got to the plate: 62 was the next encounter. 1-4-6-1-4-3 were going to be the next ones. Because the tables were fixed, I could now see what they were: 1 downstairs is 2-4 WIZARDs. 4 is TROLLs, 6 is GrIMP/WrWOLF/GIANTs, and hopefully I'm out by 3 which are IMAGEs. 1 up here is safe: WrWOLFs and GrWOLFs. No sticking beyond that though: 4 is the undead up here. Because WIZARDs are suspect, I decided I'd pull the wolves.

The two encounters from there weren't a problem. In fact, only 2 WrWOLFs spawned, so I just had Yahata flee. The slot 1 rolled two WIZARDs. Good. I TAIL SHOT them for safety and got to the stairs.

4 and 3 are no threat on B5. It's slot 2 IMAGEs to watch for. Which would be right after. But IMAGEs are slot 3 on B4, so forward. B5 lasted two encounters and Yahata was at LICH. I decided I'd risk it and THROAT SHOT him. He hit with a 144 damage ICE2 before that and got silenced. The shot went critical for 140. LICH did a physical attack and failed to paralyze.

Of course I was going for the paralyze next. It was a coinflip whether it would take: LICH is a MagicBeast and a spellcaster. But then Yahata pulled out a critical for 260 for the exact damage kill.

Somewhat arbitrarily and to double-check something (if BAHAMUT has any particular reaction to only having Archer TAILs, he does not), I decided to go for Gurgu Volcano next. I was disappointed to confirm that Archers cannot use the Scale Armor. You would think the thing that poaches monsters would wear their remains, but it's not the case.

But this was where I could obtain the last two materials. SCALEs are weird in how they're the only resource without a guaranteed source of dropping. They can drop from Dragons (both sprites), Hydras, Naga, Worms, Wyverns, and TIAMAT, but all of them dropped something else. Furthermore, you need two of them to pull off a SCALE SHOT. You might think that it's something amazing due to the extra hassle needed. It's not: it reduces enemy defense by 4-8, guaranteed on dragons. Enemy defense tends to be either so high it won't make a dent, or so low it won't make a diffrence.

Then there's WINGs. As you might expect, anything with wings drops those. I could've gotten them from COCTRICEs or slot 8 WYVERNs on the peninsula, but why bother for something so insignificant? On paper, WING SHOT is nice: it nullifies touch effects on enemy physicals. Tag a SORCERER and proc, and all they can do is poke you with their spaghetti arms and pray for TRANCE stunlocking forever. Hit a zombie, and there goes its stun strike. But then the question becomes: what about their friends? These enemies tend to show up in massive groups. Even if you hit and succeed in the dice roll, there's still the rest of the horde. I guess you can hit CHAOS with it because he's a boss with a paralyzing strike to spare an unribboned party member, but then you can also use LEG SHOT (or ARUB if you have access).

The first time Yahata fought KARY, this happened. TAIL SHOT procced and brought her down to dealing around 40-60 damage, but that did too much. The second time, he went first. Then he hit LEG SHOT.

The smart thing to do from here was AIM and fire. Instead I gambled for fun and spite. Keep in mind though, there's only a 1/6 chance of this effective instant death at best assuming equal distribution of the status ailments. Contrast the broken LEG SHOT, which has a 50-50 chance of making something dead to rights.

There wasn't much to write about Ordeals. except for a ridiculous fight against MUMMYs and WzMUMMYs. Yahata kept being knocked asleep, woken up, then knocked back asleep. He actually managed to kill two of them because of the aforementioned quirk with FIGHT attacks being executed if woken up midround. I had to flee after that because he was so low on health. I one-shot the ZombieD with a STUN arrow.

Bears repeating, but using the Zeus Gauntlet (or anything else) to kill enemies does not net you material drops. I used it on the rivers and for some early attempts at the Ice Cave to deal with WIZARDs (that and overleveling were Yahata's only options for dealing with large groups of them), but that's it for spellcasting items.

Well, I gave Ice Cave a few tries as it stood, but quickly decided nah, my patience for this is less than my patience for a grind. And when it comes to a grind, it's a matter of finding the right spot for one. And I found a very strange one.

You probably know this spot for being full of Silver equipment you tend to ignore because it's outdated or questionable. So you might not know that this tile here has a Gray W. But it made sense for Yahata: it's near the entrance, it's always a single enemy, it pays out a decent amount, and I guess I can farm SCALEs here for what little it's worth. FIRE burned through HEALs faster with no material drops and AGAMA was too far in.

I got up to level 31 to give Yahata 75 MDef. The real danger here was PERILISKs on the way out. Thankfully they never did kill him, but R.GOYLEs almost did! He failed to run and got hit with HOLD. He only escaped because two of them ran themselves.

With that out of the way, the Ice Cave was a smooth second try. Yahata did get stunned by the undead spike, only to break out on the same turn and escape. Then a single SORCERER showed its ugly face. I had Yahata attack it for the kill, safer than running. The EYE wasn't a threat and died instantly to a THROAT SHOT no less. Got out of the second go at the undead spike cleanly and nothing else dangerous popped up.

One last thing to talk about that didn't even take an extra step to pick up since the bottom spaces of rooms have no encounters. The Icepick is one of the new knives in FFR (the first was in Earth Cave and I didn't want to chance picking up for a meme). It has 18/25/3 offenses, and as you might expect, is ice-elemental. Yahata currently had 5-hits with the weapon.

I ran some damage tests against ZomBULLs. Yahata has 39 attack, they have 14 absorb.

Icepick: 192, 241, 198, 234, 200, 245, 257, 216, 160, 244, 214, 176, 230, 233, 217, 225
Silver Bow: 128, 148, 240, 136, 194, 175, 117, 136, 221, 225, 225, 224, 190, 182, 186, 167

This isn't factoring in crits where the Silver Bow could suddenly do like 480 damage (or 278) if it rolled the 25%; Icepick has about an 11% chance of one of the rolls going critical. This is where the problems with bows' one hit really starts to become apparent. Like I said though, the job is technically saved from being bottom of the barrel in a normal party by trivializing bosses with STUN arrows and HUNTER'S MARK. If you're the type to hold back from brokenness? Yeah, it'd be the worst job if not for these.

In practical terms, though? This meant I switched Yahata to the Icepick. I was past the point where randoms were a threat, and having more consistent damage on them would be better than the chance of a critical or ability to inflict a status.

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