FFR: Solo Time Mage Part III

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I decided on a goal of 37 to start out with. This would give Dio another strong HP up. 42 and 47 were the next ones upcoming. It was coincidence that this was the same level I attempted to do my solo Black Mage (promoted) run at. I had him level up in the Temple of Fiends itself. The payouts were great even if it took three to four turns to kill most enemy groups.

Oh yes, speaking of promotion, most of the promoted spells are questionable in nature. ZA WARUDOSTOP and ZAP! are actually nice with INT in play now. The latter would be a random encounter cleaner, better late than never.

QUICK is utterly useless. It makes the target ally move first on the next turn. The next one. There are similar skills in other games (like Etrian Odyssey's 1st Turn) that go first and make an ally move right after, which is great for reacting to things. This is not one of those. It was apparently a hassle to code it to be better, so it stays sucking. METEOR is COMET four times. Considering how janky COMET is already and also the fact that it's L8 and hard to reach, yeah. L7 has UNDO which restores 1 spell charge in all levels of any ally. Neat but no good for a solo - it can't self-target.

Then there's FAST2. It triples hit%. It's great, enough said. Funnily prior to 2.0, this quadrupled hit but was self-cast only. Basically a SABR counterpart.


First attempt in, Dio ran from everything before they could move up to the PHANTOM. Very good start. I decided to EGRESS until COMET killed it in one hit. Which uh, happened first try with a 402, so I missed the screenshot. A WORM showed up on F1. Dio used MUDDLE and physical attacks to beat it! EARTHs on the other hand, were very scary. Can't run from them and they're in tons of slots, always showing in big groups as well. Thankfully this was the only set Dio bumped into. I used DEMI2 followed by two BURST2s, and thankfully that was enough.


The strategy against the four fiends was very similar. MUDDLE LICH, and SLOW the others. DOOM and wait. If anything goes wrong or takes too long, EGRESS. LICH was a bit scary because he broke out of MUDDLE on the last turn. It would've cost a lot of potions if he used a big NUKE, but he used a physical instead. The others went fairly smoothly. KRAKEN never even swung despite needing to EGRESS and try several times for the DOOM to land.

That just left CHAOS. I didn't grab the Masmune. I didn't think Dio was going to need it here. Hoped.


My first order of business was to hit him with OLD. However, no matter how many times Dio tried, it was ineffective. The only thing I could think of is that it's time-elemental even if the description didn't say so. CHAOS is not immune to the status itself (the only vanilla enemy given absolute protection to certain status). DECAY2 also failed to land after several attempts. It has to be time-elemental as well.

The chance for a spell to hit is 148 + accuracy - magic defense (200). INT is supposed to give a bonus to status accuracy equal to 2.5× its value. So even if the spells had 0 accuracy, Dio with his 50 INT should've had a 36.5% chance of hitting. That wasn't the case.


This was a serious problem. I did have the Defense in Dio's inventory, but I wanted to get through completely without using spellcasting items at all. I started out with HASTE (which I bought before going in correctly intuiting that it would be useful) to try to react with EGRESS whenever Dio's health got too low. My strategy was to stack MARK spells and do physicals after several DEMIs.


But eventually, a FASTed attack effectively one-shot him. Yeah, ouch.


Well, if OLD is out because of incomplete information in the description, and I'm not using spellcasting items, that left exactly one way of weakening his physicals. SLO2 is bad for the player under most circumstances. They share the same 64 accuracy. Very few things that resist SLOW that you would want to hit with it: yes, even KARY, KRAKEN, and TIAMAT all do not resist the status element. Though in vanilla, 200 MDef makes it very (but not completely!) inaccurate on WarMECH and CHAOS, the few things you might want to hit with it that are immune. Going from 2 hits to 1 would significantly increase the margin of error here.

There was another problem on my mind though. The random encounters. I had gotten insanely lucky on that run there. Indeed, things like Gas Ds or EARTHs could (and did) easily end Dio's run through. They took a lot of precious DEMI2s and BURST2s (which also means DEMI).


I got a run through the water floor when four of these little jerks attacked. This was bad. Actually way worse than the three from before which I got lucky on. But I had a plan. MUDDLE them all and wear them down. This took a LOT of EGRESS use but eventually, they stopped breaking out. Dio survived one fight at like 37HP! You can see the… uh, fadeout from EGRESS here. It glitched out instead of showing the screen closing because I brought up the in-game menu.


It all lined up eventually. KRAKEN thankfully cooperated for the most part, but then Dio was down to around 9 HEALs. CHAOS was going to take luck, and I didn't need more luck on top of that in making it to him. It was time for a plan.


He had 6 WARP charges, more than enough to escape. I'd been considering this: get the Masmune, go out, and use it to help on the way in to make it more consistent. That run was kind of dead anyway, so this was the smartest play.

Aside, that made the prospect of a run that does use FLOAT (but not TELE) more intriguing. Most players use the charges to skip over the spikes with the bosses. But well, the bosses weren't the problem here: it was the random encounters on certain floors. If I was using it, I'd use it to skip the Earth and Water floors!


Here were Dio's new stats with the weapon. He got a level from having to fight too much. Missed some rolls, but they weren't important at this point and there was nothing that could be done about it. I was focusing on other stats over STR: 42 is the maximum a Time Mage can have at this level. It shouldn't make too big a difference.


I tested it against PHANTOM to start out with. It sufficed against it. That's one COMET use saved for what it's worth. Here's a more practical use of it: BURST2 for the FrWOLFs and then instead of futzing with spells against them, Dio could simply cut them apart. Yeah, exactly what I was looking for. He still died to EARTHs on this first run because they kept breaking out of confusion and the attacks didn't do enough.


I tried a different approach to LICH to take out the chance of a stray NUKE. It worked well. I also accidentally MUDDLEd KARY once which worked out. I eventually made it back to CHAOS, although not without another long encounter against four WATERs. This time at least, the Masmune helped to destroy two of them while only having to confuse two of the things.


A quick check revealed no, Masmune wasn't the answer here, not without the Power Gauntlet at least. Even with FAST it wasn't doing a lot: 6hits! 90 damage was one roll I screenshotted. But SLO2 landed fairly consistently, and was fun to do as revenge for all the runs he's killed this way. Here's how one battle went.

SLO2, CRACK.
ICE3 42, HASTE
MARK2 30, physical 85
MARK2 60, INFERNO 66
MARK2 90, LIT3 54
MARK2 120, SLO2 ineffective
MARK2 150, SWIRL 47
MARK2 180, TORNADO 62
MARK2 210, physical 90
MARK2 240, CUR4
DEMI 500, FIR3 29
ICE2 33, DEMI 375
Panic because Dio was at too low health and EGRESS


Okay, yeah. This wasn't going to be easy. At least Dio could reset a battle as long as he was alive. This run here barely survived NUKE, and thankfully Dio did move first: you can see that HASTE isn't even consistent. I immediately mashed EGRESS.


Thankfully, I didn't need to reset completely and do the run again. But with HASTE and EGRESS around to retry so long as Dio never died outright, I eventually got the win.

Basically how this winning run played out and what I was doing above: SLO2, HASTE, then cast MARK2 until CUR4. Use DEMI and then physically attack until dead while hoping he doesn't go too much further into his spell progression. He ended up with a MARK of 180 in this run. Masmune didn't really do that much, but it was working out to like 250-300 a turn on average together with MARK. I went through so many repetitions that I didn't bother keeping track of the battle like I normally do. I was trying to HP watch, but it changed memory addresses hence why I missed the Terminated message.

Well, this run did a lot to color my perception of the Time Mage for the worse. Some of it I already knew, but the limitations of the class were on full display in this playthrough. The thing is, Time Mage is secretly a support class. A lot of its best skills are there to help others: FAST and FAST2 for physical attackers, GAIN and DOUBLECAST for mages. FLOAT to ignore randoms, TELE to cheese the game in tandem with it or at least work like EXIT (WARP is here too). The MARK and DECAY spells obviously shine best for low offense parties. While MUDDLE can clown bosses and DOOM laugh at them, it's against random encounters – the meat of the game – where the class can struggle. It has little in the way of AoE besides BURST2 and ZAP! which comes very late – most casual parties may only barely reach L25 for their first L8 charges. Spellcasting items help and it's what any normal player would do. It's still kind of sad that's what it has to fall back on without anyone to support.

Although on the other hand, the only biggest difficulty of this run came from the large random groups that couldn't be run from. And if I had known OLD was secretly time-elemental, I might've picked up GAIN instead and tried to blow them up with boosted BURST2s. That one's not on me though.

I also have a newfound appreciation for EGRESS. It's kind of niche in a party setting because if things are going wrong, the Time Mage needs to stay alive to slam the panic button. Yet I got excellent use out of it here. HASTE also turned out to be very nice, even if it was only in that one niche situation. Better to be only useful in one spot than nowhere. I also got more use out of DOOM than I was expecting, though it's mostly because COMET sucks so bad. It was just the best way to win! Normally, it's outclassed by how bosses can die much sooner than in 3-4 turns. You could argue that instant death is cheesy too, but like I said, sometimes you have to draw the line as not to remove identity.

No regrets about FLOAT/TELE though. Because if I had those? Time Wizard gets an ability called SET TELEPOINT by using TELE in Castle Ordeals. With this, it can throw down a warp in mid-dungeon, leave with the TELE spell, and return at will! Coupled with FLOAT's ability to skip randoms, it means you never have to fight them again. Or at the very least, never run out of spell charges because it can be used with 0 (or even with a dead character). This combo is why a lot see it as the most overpowered class in the game. But that's basically not playing the game, and why I stayed away from both spells. Of course, it'd still have to figure out CHAOS at the end, though it'd effectively be risk-free. That said, FLOAT was definitely the answer for dealing with the more troublesome randoms, and I don't think it's that bad on its own.

I picked this solo expecting it to be fairly easy even with restrictions, mostly due to being able to ignore all the stunlocking enemies. Because they're really the biggest obstacle when it comes to a solo. Well, turns out it wasn't that easy. Maybe that was what's bugging me here more than anything, and it was mostly on me due to no spellcasting items. Still, the fact that Dio won without them says something about this class! It had the tools needed, it just needed the luck (and EGRESS helped with that). Hopefully it was entertaining in spite of that!

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