FFR: Solo Time Mage Part II
May. 6th, 2026 02:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sirsystemerrorIn Crescent Lake proper, there were only two spells an unpromoted Time Mage could use. DOOM seemed interesting on this run: it's time-elemental and kills the enemy three turns after the spell is cast. Usually, it's better to kill immediately, but like that LICH fight took more than three turns (Dio wasn't high enough level at the time). With nothing except the final boss resisting it, it could come in handy. DECAY2 is like the first one, but it starts out doing 10HP instead. Kind of sad for a L6 spell. DOOM is better in most cases. TELE couldn't be used, which is under most circumstances a fancy EXIT spell. Same for ECHO, but no loss there: this looks at how much damage the target took last turn then deals 25% of it. As I wrote in my magic guide, if you deal enough for this to be worth it, the enemy is probably almost dead anyway.
The midgame awaited. I didn't foresee too much trouble with the Ice Cave, but I went to Castle Ordeals first anyway because I at least wanted the Gold Bracelet there. But the game was out for blood. I have played through FF1 many times and I have never ever seen an Ordeals this bad in my life.
Every single encounter except R.GOYLEs and the 1/64 ZombieDs killed Dio at some point. MUMMYs and WzMUMMYs hit surprisingly hard and Dio had trouble killing them all with BURST2. MEDUSAs went on stoning rampages. He was crit and killed by ZomBULLs once, though could mess with them with OLD. MANCATs were their usual FIR2 spamming selves. A SORCERER got him once despite my best efforts. Even the NITEMARE spike killed him when he spent all his BURST2s and crit him! It was to the point of where I was considering a bold new strategy of not doing Castle Ordeals, or at least putting it off until Dio got the Ribbon, but the very last run I did reached the Gold Bracelet.
I was so rattled though I just cast WARP on the spot afterward. Interesting thing: it considers the floor rather than the exit. So he warped up into the maze, then warped onto the throne. (A similar thing happens in ToFR: you'll warp to the entrance and then out.) So he got out without having to fight the ZombieDs. Or getting anything else. I was considering the idea of using no spellcasting items on top of this anyway. I guess for now, I'm doing so.
As for the Ice Cave, Dio suffered exactly one reset: MAGEs in the tiny transitional room of all places, and only because of a pair of missteps. Shame, because the run was going so well: three chances to strike first in a row including on a SORCERER. The second run, he made it to the hole room, jumped in…
…and cast WARP. He respawned on top of the hole. From there, he grabbed the FLOATER without fuss and cast WARP several more times to make it out!
This I consider to be fine. If you dismiss too much for the sake of parity with other classes, you eventually start losing the class' identity. There comes a point where you're arbitrarily kneecapping yourself. It's not like this completely skips over everything like FLOAT+TELE. It's something you could do in vanilla if you could cast the spell before class change, and indeed, NG+ Black Wizard can pull this same stunt.
Yeah, it was absolutely possible to make it through without. Encounter watching to avoid SORCERERs and MAGEs plus preferably having the Zeus Gauntlet makes it fairly smooth. Turns out when you take away their ability to paralyze the player, most undead aren't that big of a threat. But it was a semi-unique niche and the biggest reason I did it? A big fat middle finger to the dungeon that deserves it the most.
Oddly between that and yeah the enemies just not being threats anyway, the Ice Cave became the midgame dungeon I reset the least in. Yes, Dio took three tries to make it through Gurgu Volcano. The first died on B2 to PEDEs of all things when Dio couldn't escape from them. Then KARY got off this massive critical that killed him in one hit!
Next attempt, I did get off SLOW. I put DOOM to work from there, setting the timer on the battle. With a MUDDLE for good measure, all there was left to do was sit back and wait for her to expire.
So stepping back for a second, this was a harder solo than I expected. While it could demolish bosses, it was painfully evident at this point that the class had a severe random encounter problem. Running was the best option, and when forced to fight, things could get bad. I was really feeling the job's lack of offensive magic: BURST2 wasn't keeping up. Similarly, the status stuff only hitting one target at a time offered minimal help. Being able to cruise past the undead was nice, but now that I'm past the part where they're relevant, how bad is this going to get?
A real life sleep later and not being as delirious, the next stop was hypothetically the Waterfall. Hopefully, the Ribbon would alleviate some of the defensive problems the class was suffering from. However, Dio had to gain a level first: he was only level 19, which isn't much for a solo job. Maybe that's the problem I have now that I think about it.
Either way, I pivoted and went for the upper Sea Shrine first to pick up the Opal Bracelet. That would get him some extra absorb. BURST2 was really sucking here; one time it took five of them to kill one lousy SeaSNAKE. I'm confident that the spell has less accuracy than FIR2/LIT2 at this point. Once I got back out, I also made a rare investment in the form of a ProRing. I usually hold off and get a freebie in the Floating Castle since Ribbons cover the death resistance and 7 more absorb over Gloves (less with gauntlet jobs) isn't worth it. Here though, every point counted.
I did this because the L7 spells Time Mage can get kind of suck, so I had the money to spare. There's HASTE2, which is the same thing except on the whole party. Pointless for a solo. Then you have COMET.
This spell.
Its formula is completely opaque. It just says random damage to one enemy. Enemy magic defense heavily affects this spell, at least, that's what I thought from my initial testing. Let's pick it up and run some more numbers once Dio has more charges.
At least BURST2 still shined in one place: MudGOLs resist the main three elements, forcing Black Mages to either use weird stuff like QAKE or their Renaissance-exclusive abilities on them. Like all but the aforementioned enemies, they don't resist time.
So COMET. I tested this on several targets: IMPs with their pathetic MDef, GATORs with their middle of the road MDef, and Blue D which has the max of 200.
IMP: 258, 200, 304, 200, 354, 226, 203, 386, 256, 330, 378, 312, 464, 396, 242, 236
GATOR: 376, 544, 143, 177, 250, 318, 372, 178, 286, 248, 132, 628, 238, 432, 352, 122
Blue D: 235, 174, 730, 280, 212, 170, 270, 60, 278, 187, 174, 132, 266, 88, 54, 155
Very interesting. So much so that I picked some more targets with the help of a non-variant (aside from not using the broken cheese) casual I did a bit ago. First, BROOMs, a new enemy that is Evoker-exclusive. The testing Time Mage here was level 20, very close to Dio's 21. These have very low HP (10) yet unusually high MDef: 120. And WzVAMPs. They're about as opposite as you can get: 300HP but only 87 MDef. Finally, CHAOS. The final boss seemed an important thing to get numbers for.
BROOM: 156, 376, 124, 87, 158, 162, 562, 564, 692, 192, 178, 125, 426, 452, 180, 244
WzVAMP: 382, 422, 166, 492, 133, 272, 290, 158, 466, 358, 294, 284, 540, 420, 370, 79
CHAOS: 115, 103, 63, 88, 102, 144, 103, 171, 66, 92, 88, 144, 143, 117, 158, 73
Some definite patterns here, but just from that, you can see how bad and inconsistent and even nonsensical this spell is. I'm thinking it uses a bunch of things in its formula. But yeah, you can see how awful it is against the final boss despite sharing 200 MDef with Blue D (which somehow got the highest high).
Well, all I could really do for now was gain some levels. A half-baked magic class shorn of its primary cheese might be able to finish off the rest of the fiend dungeons without incident, but then I'd have to grind for final gauntlet anyway.
I didn't really favor that right away on second thought, so I went into the Sea Shrine depths. It was best to keep running here since Dio didn't even have the Zeus Gauntlet; I was still considering no spellcasting items, and besides. It would have given him levels if I fought too often. Thankfully, no GHOSTs showed up, but WATERs were a problem. Dio made it to B1 then died to a big group of them, no chance. Then, when I was in the little passageway expecting HADES to show up, three WATERs did instead.
This was stupidly tight. I had bought DEMI2 earlier, and a casting of it sliced 150HP off all of the little tornado things. BURST2 from there did around 100 each, but that wasn't enough. Dio survived that round. He had to move first or dodge any attacks of WATERs. And, he moved first!
KRAKEN moved first when I got to him, dealing… shockingly survivable damage. The correct play here was SLOW for that reason: if he broke out of confusion, he could just smack Dio down. It did land. However, the next hit brought Dio to low HP even though the MUDDLE landed from there.
So I reset the battle. KRAKEN moved first again, dealing less damage. Dio had around half of his health. More than enough to work with.
Dio used SLOW, then MUDDLE, then OLD, then DOOM out of sheer impatience. The other option was repeated DEMI spells and probably COMET to finish. He was done for anyway, reduced to one hit and one point of damage.
I decided to get my grind done at this point, and I found a very interesting spot that few probably would've thought of. So, if there's one thing clear about Time Mage (no spellcasting items) so far, it's that it has trouble with larger groups of enemies. So single targets are the best. It's also a magic class, so it needs to be able to refresh often. So not dungeon spikes. What did I come up with?
You've probably never been up here before. Sand W is the slot 3 encounter here. In other words, the first and third right after a reset. Half of the time, it will use CRACK, to no effect against someone resistant to earth. The other half of the time, it uses a manageable attack. It has 200HP. From there, I could go south of Gaia and fight a TYRO and possibly a WYVERN. DEMI2 helps a lot - I picked it up because it was one more AoE spell Dio could use, even if it couldn't kill. 2683 experience for a worm is pretty good, comparable to the similar ANKYLO with less chance of dying.
The only problem with Sand W is its surprisingly low morale. 124 is pretty bad: it's only 4 more than GrIMPs. In fact, it's a little infamous amongst players who choose Blue Mage on New Game+ because if you level too high, which is really easy with its tripled experience? It becomes impossible to learn CRACK! Even if you have a class that can prevent enemies from running (one of the few uses BIND has), they will always try to and fail starting from level 48, and have very low odds even with normalish levels. Indeed, they already had a small chance to run from a level 24 Dio. At least for now, it was a good option.
I sent Dio up the Mirage Tower at level 29. Nothing to see or get there, so it was straight through. If DEMI into COMET didn't kill Blue D, I had him EGRESS until it did. Once in the Floating Castle, an EYE showed up first thing. It must've been upset about getting snubbed in the Ice Cave. Dio gave it the death it craved. He went and picked up the ProCape on F3.
On F4, he ran into 2 SORCERERs and a MudGOL. I had Dio act fast, dropping COMETs on each of the squids. Thankfully, they messed around with TRANCE instead of attacking, good thing because his paralysis immunity is absolute and one of them got FASTed. No WarMECH yet.
I tried toying with TIAMAT and nearly regretted it. She kept breaking out of MUDDLE. Dio had run out of COMETs, so I couldn't DEMI her into that. Instead, I tried out DECAY2. Some of these missed, but after a few turns, she was taking huge amounts of passive damage each turn. With some DEMI to help, she eventually died from the sap damage.
Save, HOUSE outside, and reload. If I was going to do this, level 29 was the time: INT and VIT both raise at 30, and no strong HP growth to worry about. It started out with an ambush. So I tried EGRESS! It reset the battle to not an ambush!
Dio moved first. When I said that only CHAOS and class-exclusive bosses resist the time element? Yeah, this thing's not included, and with INT in play, not even 200 MDef can save it. It turned its lasers on itself for like 250 damage each time. Dio dropped a DEMI for 376 damage! Yeah, the spell's practically made to annihilate WarMECH (and similarly added boss HADES for that matter). It attacked itself again.
A final COMET ended it. Boom. With that out of the way, only the final dungeon remained. Turn the page to find out how it went.
Next | Index
The midgame awaited. I didn't foresee too much trouble with the Ice Cave, but I went to Castle Ordeals first anyway because I at least wanted the Gold Bracelet there. But the game was out for blood. I have played through FF1 many times and I have never ever seen an Ordeals this bad in my life.
Every single encounter except R.GOYLEs and the 1/64 ZombieDs killed Dio at some point. MUMMYs and WzMUMMYs hit surprisingly hard and Dio had trouble killing them all with BURST2. MEDUSAs went on stoning rampages. He was crit and killed by ZomBULLs once, though could mess with them with OLD. MANCATs were their usual FIR2 spamming selves. A SORCERER got him once despite my best efforts. Even the NITEMARE spike killed him when he spent all his BURST2s and crit him! It was to the point of where I was considering a bold new strategy of not doing Castle Ordeals, or at least putting it off until Dio got the Ribbon, but the very last run I did reached the Gold Bracelet.
I was so rattled though I just cast WARP on the spot afterward. Interesting thing: it considers the floor rather than the exit. So he warped up into the maze, then warped onto the throne. (A similar thing happens in ToFR: you'll warp to the entrance and then out.) So he got out without having to fight the ZombieDs. Or getting anything else. I was considering the idea of using no spellcasting items on top of this anyway. I guess for now, I'm doing so.
As for the Ice Cave, Dio suffered exactly one reset: MAGEs in the tiny transitional room of all places, and only because of a pair of missteps. Shame, because the run was going so well: three chances to strike first in a row including on a SORCERER. The second run, he made it to the hole room, jumped in…
…and cast WARP. He respawned on top of the hole. From there, he grabbed the FLOATER without fuss and cast WARP several more times to make it out!
This I consider to be fine. If you dismiss too much for the sake of parity with other classes, you eventually start losing the class' identity. There comes a point where you're arbitrarily kneecapping yourself. It's not like this completely skips over everything like FLOAT+TELE. It's something you could do in vanilla if you could cast the spell before class change, and indeed, NG+ Black Wizard can pull this same stunt.
Yeah, it was absolutely possible to make it through without. Encounter watching to avoid SORCERERs and MAGEs plus preferably having the Zeus Gauntlet makes it fairly smooth. Turns out when you take away their ability to paralyze the player, most undead aren't that big of a threat. But it was a semi-unique niche and the biggest reason I did it? A big fat middle finger to the dungeon that deserves it the most.
Oddly between that and yeah the enemies just not being threats anyway, the Ice Cave became the midgame dungeon I reset the least in. Yes, Dio took three tries to make it through Gurgu Volcano. The first died on B2 to PEDEs of all things when Dio couldn't escape from them. Then KARY got off this massive critical that killed him in one hit!
Next attempt, I did get off SLOW. I put DOOM to work from there, setting the timer on the battle. With a MUDDLE for good measure, all there was left to do was sit back and wait for her to expire.
So stepping back for a second, this was a harder solo than I expected. While it could demolish bosses, it was painfully evident at this point that the class had a severe random encounter problem. Running was the best option, and when forced to fight, things could get bad. I was really feeling the job's lack of offensive magic: BURST2 wasn't keeping up. Similarly, the status stuff only hitting one target at a time offered minimal help. Being able to cruise past the undead was nice, but now that I'm past the part where they're relevant, how bad is this going to get?
A real life sleep later and not being as delirious, the next stop was hypothetically the Waterfall. Hopefully, the Ribbon would alleviate some of the defensive problems the class was suffering from. However, Dio had to gain a level first: he was only level 19, which isn't much for a solo job. Maybe that's the problem I have now that I think about it.
Either way, I pivoted and went for the upper Sea Shrine first to pick up the Opal Bracelet. That would get him some extra absorb. BURST2 was really sucking here; one time it took five of them to kill one lousy SeaSNAKE. I'm confident that the spell has less accuracy than FIR2/LIT2 at this point. Once I got back out, I also made a rare investment in the form of a ProRing. I usually hold off and get a freebie in the Floating Castle since Ribbons cover the death resistance and 7 more absorb over Gloves (less with gauntlet jobs) isn't worth it. Here though, every point counted.
I did this because the L7 spells Time Mage can get kind of suck, so I had the money to spare. There's HASTE2, which is the same thing except on the whole party. Pointless for a solo. Then you have COMET.
This spell.
Its formula is completely opaque. It just says random damage to one enemy. Enemy magic defense heavily affects this spell, at least, that's what I thought from my initial testing. Let's pick it up and run some more numbers once Dio has more charges.
At least BURST2 still shined in one place: MudGOLs resist the main three elements, forcing Black Mages to either use weird stuff like QAKE or their Renaissance-exclusive abilities on them. Like all but the aforementioned enemies, they don't resist time.
So COMET. I tested this on several targets: IMPs with their pathetic MDef, GATORs with their middle of the road MDef, and Blue D which has the max of 200.
IMP: 258, 200, 304, 200, 354, 226, 203, 386, 256, 330, 378, 312, 464, 396, 242, 236
GATOR: 376, 544, 143, 177, 250, 318, 372, 178, 286, 248, 132, 628, 238, 432, 352, 122
Blue D: 235, 174, 730, 280, 212, 170, 270, 60, 278, 187, 174, 132, 266, 88, 54, 155
Very interesting. So much so that I picked some more targets with the help of a non-variant (aside from not using the broken cheese) casual I did a bit ago. First, BROOMs, a new enemy that is Evoker-exclusive. The testing Time Mage here was level 20, very close to Dio's 21. These have very low HP (10) yet unusually high MDef: 120. And WzVAMPs. They're about as opposite as you can get: 300HP but only 87 MDef. Finally, CHAOS. The final boss seemed an important thing to get numbers for.
BROOM: 156, 376, 124, 87, 158, 162, 562, 564, 692, 192, 178, 125, 426, 452, 180, 244
WzVAMP: 382, 422, 166, 492, 133, 272, 290, 158, 466, 358, 294, 284, 540, 420, 370, 79
CHAOS: 115, 103, 63, 88, 102, 144, 103, 171, 66, 92, 88, 144, 143, 117, 158, 73
Some definite patterns here, but just from that, you can see how bad and inconsistent and even nonsensical this spell is. I'm thinking it uses a bunch of things in its formula. But yeah, you can see how awful it is against the final boss despite sharing 200 MDef with Blue D (which somehow got the highest high).
Well, all I could really do for now was gain some levels. A half-baked magic class shorn of its primary cheese might be able to finish off the rest of the fiend dungeons without incident, but then I'd have to grind for final gauntlet anyway.
I didn't really favor that right away on second thought, so I went into the Sea Shrine depths. It was best to keep running here since Dio didn't even have the Zeus Gauntlet; I was still considering no spellcasting items, and besides. It would have given him levels if I fought too often. Thankfully, no GHOSTs showed up, but WATERs were a problem. Dio made it to B1 then died to a big group of them, no chance. Then, when I was in the little passageway expecting HADES to show up, three WATERs did instead.
This was stupidly tight. I had bought DEMI2 earlier, and a casting of it sliced 150HP off all of the little tornado things. BURST2 from there did around 100 each, but that wasn't enough. Dio survived that round. He had to move first or dodge any attacks of WATERs. And, he moved first!
KRAKEN moved first when I got to him, dealing… shockingly survivable damage. The correct play here was SLOW for that reason: if he broke out of confusion, he could just smack Dio down. It did land. However, the next hit brought Dio to low HP even though the MUDDLE landed from there.
So I reset the battle. KRAKEN moved first again, dealing less damage. Dio had around half of his health. More than enough to work with.
Dio used SLOW, then MUDDLE, then OLD, then DOOM out of sheer impatience. The other option was repeated DEMI spells and probably COMET to finish. He was done for anyway, reduced to one hit and one point of damage.
I decided to get my grind done at this point, and I found a very interesting spot that few probably would've thought of. So, if there's one thing clear about Time Mage (no spellcasting items) so far, it's that it has trouble with larger groups of enemies. So single targets are the best. It's also a magic class, so it needs to be able to refresh often. So not dungeon spikes. What did I come up with?
You've probably never been up here before. Sand W is the slot 3 encounter here. In other words, the first and third right after a reset. Half of the time, it will use CRACK, to no effect against someone resistant to earth. The other half of the time, it uses a manageable attack. It has 200HP. From there, I could go south of Gaia and fight a TYRO and possibly a WYVERN. DEMI2 helps a lot - I picked it up because it was one more AoE spell Dio could use, even if it couldn't kill. 2683 experience for a worm is pretty good, comparable to the similar ANKYLO with less chance of dying.
The only problem with Sand W is its surprisingly low morale. 124 is pretty bad: it's only 4 more than GrIMPs. In fact, it's a little infamous amongst players who choose Blue Mage on New Game+ because if you level too high, which is really easy with its tripled experience? It becomes impossible to learn CRACK! Even if you have a class that can prevent enemies from running (one of the few uses BIND has), they will always try to and fail starting from level 48, and have very low odds even with normalish levels. Indeed, they already had a small chance to run from a level 24 Dio. At least for now, it was a good option.
I sent Dio up the Mirage Tower at level 29. Nothing to see or get there, so it was straight through. If DEMI into COMET didn't kill Blue D, I had him EGRESS until it did. Once in the Floating Castle, an EYE showed up first thing. It must've been upset about getting snubbed in the Ice Cave. Dio gave it the death it craved. He went and picked up the ProCape on F3.
On F4, he ran into 2 SORCERERs and a MudGOL. I had Dio act fast, dropping COMETs on each of the squids. Thankfully, they messed around with TRANCE instead of attacking, good thing because his paralysis immunity is absolute and one of them got FASTed. No WarMECH yet.
I tried toying with TIAMAT and nearly regretted it. She kept breaking out of MUDDLE. Dio had run out of COMETs, so I couldn't DEMI her into that. Instead, I tried out DECAY2. Some of these missed, but after a few turns, she was taking huge amounts of passive damage each turn. With some DEMI to help, she eventually died from the sap damage.
Save, HOUSE outside, and reload. If I was going to do this, level 29 was the time: INT and VIT both raise at 30, and no strong HP growth to worry about. It started out with an ambush. So I tried EGRESS! It reset the battle to not an ambush!
Dio moved first. When I said that only CHAOS and class-exclusive bosses resist the time element? Yeah, this thing's not included, and with INT in play, not even 200 MDef can save it. It turned its lasers on itself for like 250 damage each time. Dio dropped a DEMI for 376 damage! Yeah, the spell's practically made to annihilate WarMECH (and similarly added boss HADES for that matter). It attacked itself again.
A final COMET ended it. Boom. With that out of the way, only the final dungeon remained. Turn the page to find out how it went.
Next | Index
