FFR: Solo Time Mage Part I
May. 6th, 2026 02:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sirsystemerrorI'm back with another Final Fantasy Renaissance solo class, and this time, I wanted to explore what is commonly agreed to be the most overpowered job in the game, the Time Mage. Unfortunately, most of the reason why this is the case amounts to cheesing the game by not actually playing it.
Well, I'm getting ahead of myself a little. It's a magical job that buys its spells in stores, like the vanilla mages do. Notably, the job class stops gaining fixed INT after level 30, similar to the White Mage. The stat is in-play in Renaissance, so that will make a difference. Other than that, I'll talk about it as I go, because the main meat of the job is in the spells!
You were expecting a scientific reference of some kind, but it is ME!! DIO!!! Yeah, a Jojo's reference, the vampire who has some time manipulating abilities seemed like a fun pull. These are the starting stats of the Time Mage. Very mage-like in nature: lots of INT, not much of anything else.
The more interesting thing to note are its skills. It can cast the EGRESS ability in combat. Besides being a Shining Force reference for some reason, it is effectively Reset from Final Fantasy V. It notably rerolls whether the battle was a preemptive or an ambush. It has its uses. TEMPUS ADEPT is just a flavor skill. But the real treat is RESIST TIME, shown here.
Resisting the Time-element is mostly pointless. Only rematch LICH and PHANTOM make use of the element as far as vanilla enemies go, and there's few even among FFR's extra enemies. Resisting slow is whatever, resisting sleep is fine for the one time it might come up. But resisting paralysis? Yes, this is good for a solo all right.
Dio purchased a Wooden Staff and a Cloth. The Time Mage's equipment is also very mage-like, so the real point of interest were the spells. LOCK is how you remember it: almost useless. BURST is a basic Time-elemental spell comparable to FIRE and LIT in power. HASTE is a weird one that increases an ally's chances of moving earlier in a round.
DECAY is weird. The description isn't very useful, only saying the target enemy loses 5HP cumulatively every turn. How this actually works is that the enemy will lose 5HP their first turn after acting, 10HP on the second turn, 15HP on the third turn, and so on. While it does not stack, you can cast it multiple times to have multiple instances of the spell running. For example, an enemy can lose 5HP, then you cast the spell again and they'll lose 15HP: 10+5. Next turn they'll lose 25: 15+10, assuming another isn't cast. It's strange and it's slow. A normal party won't get any use out of it. And I feel there's a better option for low offense parties anyway.
Needless to say, I just got Dio BURST and went off to train. Here's EGRESS in action while I was grinding. As implied, I could hypothetically have him spam this until he got a chance to strike first (or died from a bad ambush). One time he ran into a MADPONY. I stubbornly used EGRESS until finally the preemptive happened, and Dio killed it with two casts of BURST.
The goal in the early game was level 4, giving four casts of BURST against GARLAND plus two strong HP ups. It was a bit of a tight thing: I ended up using EGRESS multiple times when the spell kept giving truly horrendous rolls. Like I even saw the minimum 10 multiple times when trying to do this at level 2 earlier! It makes me wonder if the spell has a lower accuracy rating than FIRE and LIT.
The winning run saw something like 42, 40, and 20-something that just wasn't enough. Luckily, he moved first and killed the boss from there.
430 gold after that. That was actually perfect and exactly enough for my next goal. My first run to Pravoka failed due to a crappy D-Pad that made me take one extra step which was enough for four MADPONYs to show up. Don't ask why I was using that controller still, especially with a confirm button that liked to jam as well. I got there the third time and went to the magic shop.
SLOW is a vanilla spell, but the others are new. DIM and MUDDLE are simply single target darkness and confusion respectively in a special element. The time element is only resisted by CHAOS and a handful of class-exclusive bosses. Darkness is pretty useless, but MUDDLE can be absolutely devastating. But it was the Slay the Spire reference MARK that I was interested in here. It targets everything, adds 15 marks to them, then all targets that have marks take damage equal to the amount they have. It stacks and also triggers on physicals.
So with one cast of this, the PIRATEs were history. There are a number of classes that have problems with them, and Time Mage is not one of them.
The next step was to reach level 5, which Dio was close to, and earn 1500G for a level 3 spell. Very small groups of KYZOKU were ideal here. Like, one or two. It wasn't the most straightforward option. I could also have bought and used MUDDLE. By the time I considered it, Dio was also close enough that it was better to just limp the rest of the way there.
Now, L3 spells are special. There's LOK2, which is not how you remember it: the bug causing it to increase enemy evasion was fixed, so it is only basically pointless instead of actively detrimental to use. BURST2 was what I was after: it's a big hit all spell at the same level of power as FIR2 and LIT2. DEMI is interesting: it does 50% of an enemy's current HP. It's only 25% against bosses, But it remains a good alpha strike: that's still an instant 500 damage against CHAOS when he's at full health.
As usual for a mage class that has a spell like this, grinding took off from this point. He could usually wipe KYZOKU encounters in a single casting of the spell, and whatever was left could be cleaned up easily. I actually stayed off the Peninsula of Power. Didn't feel Dio needed to go there.
A funny interaction of MARK, by the way: it works with confusion self-hits. A fun trick, although it's best with something that can cast CONF. The Wizard Staff, for example.
Level 8 with 33 HEALs and 3 PUREs was when I had Dio take on the Marsh Cave. CRAWLs were funny here. Normally, their presence would be my cue to have a solo character drop a nuke or mash the run button. With Dio's immunity to paralysis, they were basically harmless. They only have 1 attack, so they couldn't even get through his Cloth. However, as if sensing what was going on, the game threw big groups of SCORPIONs at me. Not much you can do against a SCORPION ambush.
(Okay, I could have tried going in from a hard reset. And there is one thing Time Mage specifically can do. I'll get to that and why I'm not doing it shortly)
Normally, you wouldn't be able to confuse the WIZARDs. They are immune to the status element, which means they are immune to the CONF spell. But since resistance is governed by elements in Final Fantasy 1, that meant they had no immunity to the time-elemental MUDDLE. Of course, they could still recover instantly and kill Dio, which is what happened my first attempt at the battle. BURST2 was another option, and it was what I would've used if there were four. The second go at it though, there were only two WIZARDs. MUDDLE was absolutely correct in this instance, and it stuck this time around. I hit the other and watched as they killed themselves.
It was a very good thing I did conserve that last use of BURST2 too: on the way out, Dio bumped into a group of three SCORPIONs! Instead of hitting run, I hit the spell. It killed two of them, and regular old BURST got the last one.
Once Dio was back in Elfland, I had to have him grind out a level before ASTOS. He'd actually hit level 9 in the Marsh Cave, but he would've hit level 10 off of the dark elf if he didn't do this. No need to make a reset heavy fight even more reset heavy. But now is a good time to talk about the fourth L3 spell that Time Mage has access to.
Say hello to the FLOAT spell.
The insanity of this isn't immediately apparent on paper. As you can see, it allows you to float over river tiles. This allows you to reach the Ice Cave the moment you have enough spell charges (and HOUSEs) to get there and back. You can get the FLOATER before setting foot in the Marsh Cave! Of course, you'll have to get through the Ice Cave itself, and if you can do that at low levels? You honestly deserve early airship access.
However, FLOAT also prevents random encounters while it's in use. This does not include ones initiated by speaking to things on the field, but it includes spike tiles. If I were going all out, Dio wouldn't have to have fought the WIZARDs or a chunk of the enemies in the Marsh Cave! You can also float over holes in the Ice Cave. Trivia, it didn't use to, but this got changed. Last and certainly least, it also prevents damage tiles from taking effect. This spell is very good and it only gets better with a spell in Crescent Lake that can be used after promotion: TELE. It isn't anything special on its own: it's like a fancy EXIT spell. But unlock a hidden function and put them together, and well. You get something like this run.
Even though it's not as game-breaking by itself, Dio would not actually be using the FLOAT spell. I did keep an extra save just in case, but this run will be free of it.
Back to normalcy. ASTOS wasn't too big of a problem. Confuse him and that took care of that. Messing around like this was possible, but BURST2 was more consistent (I did the fight a few times, I forget why). Again, I noticed it wasn't as reliable as I've seen FIR2 and company be. I'm not sure if it was just me or if it really does have lower accuracy. Unfortunately, spell accuracy is opaque in FFR.
I went on the usual Mystic Key looting tour after, including the Silver Bracelet. I always go for it with a magical job, as that's 5000G saved you can put towards more spells. It was still annoying with Dio, but once he had that, suddenly things were a lot less threatening. Like I ran into SCORPIONs again, and they weren't that bad!
Another problem I noticed was his LUCK. 6 base isn't the worst, but I was noticing he was failing to run a lot. It made EGRESS shine a lot more though: he could use it and suddenly get back up to full HP, giving him more chances to safely escape. I made a note to try to get some bonuses to it whenever practical.
Oh yes, and if you're wondering, you can't softlock yourself with FLOAT. This guy may seem just like a silly reference (he will only heal Time Mages), but his actual purpose is to prevent you from getting stuck if you FLOAT over to the Dwarf Cave. In all other instances, any other saves you make will not be permanent and will disappear after you reload the game. Which does mean you need to actually hit soft reset from the pause menu sometimes.
That was 32849G after all that. I got Dio a pair of Gloves to help maximize his absorb. Now let's look at the next two tiers of spells. FAST is still weird in FFR and doubles hit% instead of number of hits. MARK2 is a stronger version of the spell that applies 30 marks but only hits one target. OLD is neat: if it hits, the target starts losing 20% of their attack each turn. Obviously for a solo that isn't holding back, the Defense Sword supersedes it, but it has its uses. GAIN, however, was much more questionable here. It always goes last in a turn and doubles the effectivity of the next spell the target casts. It can be powerful, but has action economy issues for a solo Time Mage. This spell was L1 prior to 2.0 of FFR and was just stupid there. Well-deserved nerf to move it up to L4.
As for L5, well. If you were expecting BURST3, it's instead disappointment. There's the vanilla WARP and SLO2, the former of which Time Mage can use without promotion. BIND is one of the worst and most niche spells in the entire game: it prevents enemies from running. The only use is to help a Blue Mage or Beastmaster in New Game+ where you gain levels so fast enemies they might want to learn from/capture start running. DEMI2 is just an AoE version of the base spell.
I had Dio gain a couple of extra levels before tackling the Earth Cave, just because he made it nearly down all the way before I checked his stats and saw he was about to level up. So I had to abort even though he was right near the VAMPIRE! Thanks to RESIST TIME, he had nothing to worry about from stunlocking. Instead, the threat became accumulated damage and COCTRICEs. There wasn't much that could be done about the latter, but as discussed above, EGRESS did help with the former.
MUDDLE, a self-hit, and a strong BURST2 wrecked the VAMPIRE before it could do anything.
And instead of walking out, Dio could cast WARP! He had enough charges to take himself out of the cave completely. Neat that it actually gets to make proper use out of the spell. There's also a reason it was probably exclusive to after class change that Dio could exploit, but we'll get to that when relevant.
After getting the ROD, Dio returned and made his way back down. Here's a fun shot: these things aren't that scary when they can't stun you. I tried to be careful about using my BURST2s, but it was still rather finnicky. One had to be used to kill a group of WIZARDs, and another charge for COCTRICEs because I wasn't risking a run roll there. Coupled with two more used on big undead packs (I was impatient), that left one L3 charge left for LICH.
The strategy was simple: abuse MUDDLE to keep him locked down. He got off a big ICE2 before then. FAST and attacking only did 2 damage, one for each hit, so I used DEMI for about 88 before using BURST. I could've used MARK to speed things up, but played it safe. Eventually, Dio and LICH worked the latter down. I missed the screenshot, but he did terminate himself.
Good enough point for a page break here.
Next | Index
Well, I'm getting ahead of myself a little. It's a magical job that buys its spells in stores, like the vanilla mages do. Notably, the job class stops gaining fixed INT after level 30, similar to the White Mage. The stat is in-play in Renaissance, so that will make a difference. Other than that, I'll talk about it as I go, because the main meat of the job is in the spells!
You were expecting a scientific reference of some kind, but it is ME!! DIO!!! Yeah, a Jojo's reference, the vampire who has some time manipulating abilities seemed like a fun pull. These are the starting stats of the Time Mage. Very mage-like in nature: lots of INT, not much of anything else.
The more interesting thing to note are its skills. It can cast the EGRESS ability in combat. Besides being a Shining Force reference for some reason, it is effectively Reset from Final Fantasy V. It notably rerolls whether the battle was a preemptive or an ambush. It has its uses. TEMPUS ADEPT is just a flavor skill. But the real treat is RESIST TIME, shown here.
Resisting the Time-element is mostly pointless. Only rematch LICH and PHANTOM make use of the element as far as vanilla enemies go, and there's few even among FFR's extra enemies. Resisting slow is whatever, resisting sleep is fine for the one time it might come up. But resisting paralysis? Yes, this is good for a solo all right.
Dio purchased a Wooden Staff and a Cloth. The Time Mage's equipment is also very mage-like, so the real point of interest were the spells. LOCK is how you remember it: almost useless. BURST is a basic Time-elemental spell comparable to FIRE and LIT in power. HASTE is a weird one that increases an ally's chances of moving earlier in a round.
DECAY is weird. The description isn't very useful, only saying the target enemy loses 5HP cumulatively every turn. How this actually works is that the enemy will lose 5HP their first turn after acting, 10HP on the second turn, 15HP on the third turn, and so on. While it does not stack, you can cast it multiple times to have multiple instances of the spell running. For example, an enemy can lose 5HP, then you cast the spell again and they'll lose 15HP: 10+5. Next turn they'll lose 25: 15+10, assuming another isn't cast. It's strange and it's slow. A normal party won't get any use out of it. And I feel there's a better option for low offense parties anyway.
Needless to say, I just got Dio BURST and went off to train. Here's EGRESS in action while I was grinding. As implied, I could hypothetically have him spam this until he got a chance to strike first (or died from a bad ambush). One time he ran into a MADPONY. I stubbornly used EGRESS until finally the preemptive happened, and Dio killed it with two casts of BURST.
The goal in the early game was level 4, giving four casts of BURST against GARLAND plus two strong HP ups. It was a bit of a tight thing: I ended up using EGRESS multiple times when the spell kept giving truly horrendous rolls. Like I even saw the minimum 10 multiple times when trying to do this at level 2 earlier! It makes me wonder if the spell has a lower accuracy rating than FIRE and LIT.
The winning run saw something like 42, 40, and 20-something that just wasn't enough. Luckily, he moved first and killed the boss from there.
430 gold after that. That was actually perfect and exactly enough for my next goal. My first run to Pravoka failed due to a crappy D-Pad that made me take one extra step which was enough for four MADPONYs to show up. Don't ask why I was using that controller still, especially with a confirm button that liked to jam as well. I got there the third time and went to the magic shop.
SLOW is a vanilla spell, but the others are new. DIM and MUDDLE are simply single target darkness and confusion respectively in a special element. The time element is only resisted by CHAOS and a handful of class-exclusive bosses. Darkness is pretty useless, but MUDDLE can be absolutely devastating. But it was the Slay the Spire reference MARK that I was interested in here. It targets everything, adds 15 marks to them, then all targets that have marks take damage equal to the amount they have. It stacks and also triggers on physicals.
So with one cast of this, the PIRATEs were history. There are a number of classes that have problems with them, and Time Mage is not one of them.
The next step was to reach level 5, which Dio was close to, and earn 1500G for a level 3 spell. Very small groups of KYZOKU were ideal here. Like, one or two. It wasn't the most straightforward option. I could also have bought and used MUDDLE. By the time I considered it, Dio was also close enough that it was better to just limp the rest of the way there.
Now, L3 spells are special. There's LOK2, which is not how you remember it: the bug causing it to increase enemy evasion was fixed, so it is only basically pointless instead of actively detrimental to use. BURST2 was what I was after: it's a big hit all spell at the same level of power as FIR2 and LIT2. DEMI is interesting: it does 50% of an enemy's current HP. It's only 25% against bosses, But it remains a good alpha strike: that's still an instant 500 damage against CHAOS when he's at full health.
As usual for a mage class that has a spell like this, grinding took off from this point. He could usually wipe KYZOKU encounters in a single casting of the spell, and whatever was left could be cleaned up easily. I actually stayed off the Peninsula of Power. Didn't feel Dio needed to go there.
A funny interaction of MARK, by the way: it works with confusion self-hits. A fun trick, although it's best with something that can cast CONF. The Wizard Staff, for example.
Level 8 with 33 HEALs and 3 PUREs was when I had Dio take on the Marsh Cave. CRAWLs were funny here. Normally, their presence would be my cue to have a solo character drop a nuke or mash the run button. With Dio's immunity to paralysis, they were basically harmless. They only have 1 attack, so they couldn't even get through his Cloth. However, as if sensing what was going on, the game threw big groups of SCORPIONs at me. Not much you can do against a SCORPION ambush.
(Okay, I could have tried going in from a hard reset. And there is one thing Time Mage specifically can do. I'll get to that and why I'm not doing it shortly)
Normally, you wouldn't be able to confuse the WIZARDs. They are immune to the status element, which means they are immune to the CONF spell. But since resistance is governed by elements in Final Fantasy 1, that meant they had no immunity to the time-elemental MUDDLE. Of course, they could still recover instantly and kill Dio, which is what happened my first attempt at the battle. BURST2 was another option, and it was what I would've used if there were four. The second go at it though, there were only two WIZARDs. MUDDLE was absolutely correct in this instance, and it stuck this time around. I hit the other and watched as they killed themselves.
It was a very good thing I did conserve that last use of BURST2 too: on the way out, Dio bumped into a group of three SCORPIONs! Instead of hitting run, I hit the spell. It killed two of them, and regular old BURST got the last one.
Once Dio was back in Elfland, I had to have him grind out a level before ASTOS. He'd actually hit level 9 in the Marsh Cave, but he would've hit level 10 off of the dark elf if he didn't do this. No need to make a reset heavy fight even more reset heavy. But now is a good time to talk about the fourth L3 spell that Time Mage has access to.
Say hello to the FLOAT spell.
The insanity of this isn't immediately apparent on paper. As you can see, it allows you to float over river tiles. This allows you to reach the Ice Cave the moment you have enough spell charges (and HOUSEs) to get there and back. You can get the FLOATER before setting foot in the Marsh Cave! Of course, you'll have to get through the Ice Cave itself, and if you can do that at low levels? You honestly deserve early airship access.
However, FLOAT also prevents random encounters while it's in use. This does not include ones initiated by speaking to things on the field, but it includes spike tiles. If I were going all out, Dio wouldn't have to have fought the WIZARDs or a chunk of the enemies in the Marsh Cave! You can also float over holes in the Ice Cave. Trivia, it didn't use to, but this got changed. Last and certainly least, it also prevents damage tiles from taking effect. This spell is very good and it only gets better with a spell in Crescent Lake that can be used after promotion: TELE. It isn't anything special on its own: it's like a fancy EXIT spell. But unlock a hidden function and put them together, and well. You get something like this run.
Even though it's not as game-breaking by itself, Dio would not actually be using the FLOAT spell. I did keep an extra save just in case, but this run will be free of it.
Back to normalcy. ASTOS wasn't too big of a problem. Confuse him and that took care of that. Messing around like this was possible, but BURST2 was more consistent (I did the fight a few times, I forget why). Again, I noticed it wasn't as reliable as I've seen FIR2 and company be. I'm not sure if it was just me or if it really does have lower accuracy. Unfortunately, spell accuracy is opaque in FFR.
I went on the usual Mystic Key looting tour after, including the Silver Bracelet. I always go for it with a magical job, as that's 5000G saved you can put towards more spells. It was still annoying with Dio, but once he had that, suddenly things were a lot less threatening. Like I ran into SCORPIONs again, and they weren't that bad!
Another problem I noticed was his LUCK. 6 base isn't the worst, but I was noticing he was failing to run a lot. It made EGRESS shine a lot more though: he could use it and suddenly get back up to full HP, giving him more chances to safely escape. I made a note to try to get some bonuses to it whenever practical.
Oh yes, and if you're wondering, you can't softlock yourself with FLOAT. This guy may seem just like a silly reference (he will only heal Time Mages), but his actual purpose is to prevent you from getting stuck if you FLOAT over to the Dwarf Cave. In all other instances, any other saves you make will not be permanent and will disappear after you reload the game. Which does mean you need to actually hit soft reset from the pause menu sometimes.
That was 32849G after all that. I got Dio a pair of Gloves to help maximize his absorb. Now let's look at the next two tiers of spells. FAST is still weird in FFR and doubles hit% instead of number of hits. MARK2 is a stronger version of the spell that applies 30 marks but only hits one target. OLD is neat: if it hits, the target starts losing 20% of their attack each turn. Obviously for a solo that isn't holding back, the Defense Sword supersedes it, but it has its uses. GAIN, however, was much more questionable here. It always goes last in a turn and doubles the effectivity of the next spell the target casts. It can be powerful, but has action economy issues for a solo Time Mage. This spell was L1 prior to 2.0 of FFR and was just stupid there. Well-deserved nerf to move it up to L4.
As for L5, well. If you were expecting BURST3, it's instead disappointment. There's the vanilla WARP and SLO2, the former of which Time Mage can use without promotion. BIND is one of the worst and most niche spells in the entire game: it prevents enemies from running. The only use is to help a Blue Mage or Beastmaster in New Game+ where you gain levels so fast enemies they might want to learn from/capture start running. DEMI2 is just an AoE version of the base spell.
I had Dio gain a couple of extra levels before tackling the Earth Cave, just because he made it nearly down all the way before I checked his stats and saw he was about to level up. So I had to abort even though he was right near the VAMPIRE! Thanks to RESIST TIME, he had nothing to worry about from stunlocking. Instead, the threat became accumulated damage and COCTRICEs. There wasn't much that could be done about the latter, but as discussed above, EGRESS did help with the former.
MUDDLE, a self-hit, and a strong BURST2 wrecked the VAMPIRE before it could do anything.
And instead of walking out, Dio could cast WARP! He had enough charges to take himself out of the cave completely. Neat that it actually gets to make proper use out of the spell. There's also a reason it was probably exclusive to after class change that Dio could exploit, but we'll get to that when relevant.
After getting the ROD, Dio returned and made his way back down. Here's a fun shot: these things aren't that scary when they can't stun you. I tried to be careful about using my BURST2s, but it was still rather finnicky. One had to be used to kill a group of WIZARDs, and another charge for COCTRICEs because I wasn't risking a run roll there. Coupled with two more used on big undead packs (I was impatient), that left one L3 charge left for LICH.
The strategy was simple: abuse MUDDLE to keep him locked down. He got off a big ICE2 before then. FAST and attacking only did 2 damage, one for each hit, so I used DEMI for about 88 before using BURST. I could've used MARK to speed things up, but played it safe. Eventually, Dio and LICH worked the latter down. I missed the screenshot, but he did terminate himself.
Good enough point for a page break here.
Next | Index
