Final Fantasy 12 :OMG Discussion Thread

[Almaa]

I don't know if it's because I got my second quickening with her, but Penelo's MP just quadrupled almost...

Does quickening increase MP?

yes, when you unlock a second and third quickening you get an MP bonus equal to your total MP

[izembo]

so how do quickenings work? >_>

[Po]

Man all this Gambit talk makes it sound really fuckin awesome. I can't wait till I am able to get it. I finished the first 2 hunts and just gave Dalan the sunstone and got the crescent stone from him. I am about to go raid the Palace. It seems like from the cutscene after that with the three people, something is about to pick up and I can't wait.. I just got tired last night since I had to start over to get Zodiac Spear
One of the features that seems cool is that you can customize any character to be proficient in any weapon you want right? Unless I am understanding that wrong. I'll prob just have Vaan be my sword user, since I am used to the main character in an rpg always being that character. I have a feeling I am just going to love Baltheir though (since I'm a Ranger). I would think I'll love Basch too, since he came across as a bad ass in the beginning tutorial section.
So will I have gambits to mess with soon? I hope so, they sound really awesome. I was thinking it was just gonna be a glorified system like you had for Donald and Goofy in KH, but it seems like so much more than that which is exciting. Also I really like the License Board system, lot more user friendly than the sphere bullshit in X.

[Sonomaa]

try giving vaan a dagger, I found he could do as much damage as his sword with a dagger, except faster ^^

when you start moving to the left and down on the lisc board (in the spell area) you get into boosts like HP and attack, I went pretty far in my grinding last night and found an attack speed booster, 10% haste yay
havent unlocked any quickenings yet, want to make sure I get the right ones for characters (or does it just not matter)

[Po]

Sounds good Sonomaa.
Quickenings are all unlocked from the license board right? And then once you unlock them on the board do you buy them from a shop, or are they just choices in the battle menu?

Make a FFXII section Sonomaa :D

[Correction]

try giving vaan a dagger, I found he could do as much damage as his sword with a dagger, except faster ^^

when you start moving to the left and down on the lisc board (in the spell area) you get into boosts like HP and attack, I went pretty far in my grinding last night and found an attack speed booster, 10% haste yay
havent unlocked any quickenings yet, want to make sure I get the right ones for characters (or does it just not matter)

Doesn't matter.

I realize FFXII can make you paranoid about how you go about gathering treasure, but there's no way you can make a mistake unlocking quickenings for your characters.

They all deal equally shitty damage on their own, esp. considering the MP cost. The main reason to have them is they dramatically increase your MP for spellcasting and let you do the chains which are the heart of the fun of doing 30-50k damage to bosses using all your remaining MP.

[Vile]

try giving vaan a dagger, I found he could do as much damage as his sword with a dagger, except faster ^^

when you start moving to the left and down on the lisc board (in the spell area) you get into boosts like HP and attack, I went pretty far in my grinding last night and found an attack speed booster, 10% haste yay
havent unlocked any quickenings yet, want to make sure I get the right ones for characters (or does it just not matter)

There are 18 Squares on the whole board that you can learn quickenings.
When someone learns a quickening from one of the squares, it becomes an empty slot on the other 5 characters boards. Pretty much what you wanna do is head towards the quickening squares where you know you're gonna have that character go on their board.

If you have a character who you know is gonna be using staves//rods there are 3 in that area. Maybe another character is gonna use Great Katanas, there are 1 or two spaces near there.

It doesn't matter where you learn them from, and each character learns their moves in the same order (Ex for Vaan its Red Spiral, White Whorl, then pyro something or other)

There is prolly gonna be one character who is gonna have a bit of a journy to get their quickenings. I had to send Fran all the way through armor and save up 150 LP to buy the Genji square to get her last ability D;



Edit: Even if you don't plan on using them much, getting them for the mp boost alone is worth it. Penelo had a base of around 90ish mp@20 with no quickenings. With all 3 learned it boost it up to 270. When you have spells like Cura which cost 32? mp and no way to buy ethers it can be a problem. As the dungeons//bosses//enemies become harder early on more mp is definetly a good thing.

[Sonomaa]

right now my pt setup is vaan with dagger, fran with bow (Ill get you back killer bow, if its the last meow I do!!11), balthier with gun or spear, and basch with sword. I shift balth and basch out a lot. Not sure what direction Im going with balth, he might be my ability whore, basch is becoming my PLD with steal. Fran is my rangermage. I use her for great damage on bow and nuking. going to flip her armor over to the mage stuff now that I can get her quickenings and power her MP up.

I did the attack up and HP up lisc areas, they have made a tremendous different, vaan went from 120 a stab with assassins dagger to 150s with 1 attack up, and 170s with the second attack up. I unlocked another gambit and set all 3 members to do ally: protect so they will put protect on as needed (set this at the bottom while your farming so youll cast protect after everything is dead and not waste MP.

Farming in the mines has been a significant source of money using my steal macro, the second double tracks can pop about 40 skeletons, stealing a bone chip from each one of those nets 193 gil each, so after each run where I go outside to reset mobs and treasure nets me close to 10k gil. Ive bought everything in that town possible and have 30k after several runs. Not stopping untill I have my killer bow back, level 15-16 so far, very fun to farm/grind too, got a good attack macro and I dont target jump thanks to everyones help.

[SamanosukeShiva]

I use Vaan, Balth, Basch in my PT. Now @lv19s

Just unlocked 3rd Basch's quickenings, the graphics looks really tight. 1shotted nearly all the bosses with quickenings combo =)

[Sonomaa]

the part I died in was to those 4 mamool guys further in the mines, didnt mean to walk into them, they mustve taken my killer bow ; ;

[Eaglestrike]

I go Vaan/Basch/Penelo, I like Penelo and it was either her or Ashe for healing (they both came precharged with some white magic iirc). I use a dagger/lightarmor on Vaan atm, polearm/heavy armor on Basch and currently a staff/mage armor on Penelo. I'm looking into a better weapon choice for Penelo though, what are her specialties again? Rods/staves? Do maces count? I may end up giving her a bow or something to stay in the backline, not sure.

I'm nearly capped on all the augmentation, I guess not nearly but most of my characters have all the blocks showing and like 80% filled up. Everyone has had a golden amulet since level 24ish. Currently passing through Salikawood at level 35s.

If anyone wishes to semi-spoil things for me, is there any point where I lose certain party members? I don't level the other 3 people at all, so I'd like to know if I'm going to get screwed having 1-3 underlvl'd naked members of my party lol

[Sonomaa]

whats with all the fran hate ; ; nobody likes the bunnykitty

[Po]

So like if you take your 3 characters to whatever level 30, and ignore the rest, they won't be level 30 when you pop them in like older FF's? I kinda like that system, and then you just equip them when/if you need to.
But that's not the system here eh? It seems like a good system, who the fuck wanted to level Caithsith? Not I. And it's not like he was ever useful, oh well.

[BerenTebogo]

the part I died in was to those 4 mamool guys further in the mines, didnt mean to walk into them, they mustve taken my killer bow ; ;

First time through I did the same exact thing lol

I also had Vaan using a dagger like you do, but after lv 15ish I swapped him out for sword when I found one I liked (I use Ancient sword now)

I haven't had much luck with the melee/mage combo but I have Ashe in full mage gear, 3 MP cost down, 3 MAB+ and tons of other BLM stuff and she's an absolute beast. I honestly cant tank effectively with bausch or vaan cuz she's too brutal.

Penelo is my WHM, and an amazing one, but I only ever use her as a "oh shit" swap her in, cura / stona / etc etc (Cluckatrice hunt with 4 mobs spamming petrify and I entered it all DD, almost lost lol) but aside from that I don't use her for much. She has 80% of the WHM board unlocked, even spells I wont get til last dungeon probably.

And I still haven't found a bow or gun combo I like, so the rabbit and the french guy do not get used, WAY too slow.

[ghanima]

I haven't had much luck with the melee/mage combo but I have Ashe in full mage gear, 3 MP cost down, 3 MAB+ and tons of other BLM stuff and she's an absolute beast. I honestly cant tank effectively with bausch or vaan cuz she's too brutal.

When I got decoy (arcane magic, gives you lure status which is kind of like provoke+sirvente on one member) it was the best thing ever, gogo having Penelo and Fran nuke away and it never runs after them. I would set up usually: Self -> Decoy on whoever was my tanker or have one of the others do Ally:Basch -> Decoy.

[zymurgy]

If anyone wishes to semi-spoil things for me, is there any point where I lose certain party members? I don't level the other 3 people at all, so I'd like to know if I'm going to get screwed having 1-3 underlvl'd naked members of my party lol

Level all 6 characters equally...seriously. There have been so many fights where I just get slaughetered and have to bring in another char to take their place. They are all good characters...there is seriously no reason to not level all 6.

Oh and to the guy who is unlocking sword+ on vaan in an attempt to make his sword skill better or whatever, the licenses just make it so that you can actually use the items that are listed there in grey (they become white if you have one in your inventory). You shouldn't be bothering with unlocking such high level swords so early since you don't even have them yet. Focus on going south west on the north palette on all your chars. That's where the augments are. You get some pretty nice stuff like battle lore, shield block rate up (helps a lot), hp+, etc...

[Almaa]

I don't think it matters which characters get which quickenings... basically how I understand it, it's a super strong attack or spell or something and each character can unlock up to 3, so there are 18 on the board. They become a command in the battle menu like under mist or something, I haven't unlocked one yet either but I'm right next to two of them.

[Eaglestrike]

If anyone wishes to semi-spoil things for me, is there any point where I lose certain party members? I don't level the other 3 people at all, so I'd like to know if I'm going to get screwed having 1-3 underlvl'd naked members of my party lol

Level all 6 characters equally...seriously. There have been so many fights where I just get slaughetered and have to bring in another char to take their place. They are all good characters...there is seriously no reason to not level all 6.

Oh and to the guy who is unlocking sword+ on vaan in an attempt to make his sword skill better or whatever, the licenses just make it so that you can actually use the items that are listed there in grey (they become white if you have one in your inventory). You shouldn't be bothering with unlocking such high level swords so early since you don't even have them yet. Focus on going south west on the north palette on all your chars. That's where the augments are. You get some pretty nice stuff like battle lore, shield block rate up (helps a lot), hp+, etc...

Haha, my 2nd big judge fight at the mountain place I used all 20+ phoenix downs I had, all 6 characters, like 2 were alive at the end...and 3 of my guys are naked. I just can't fund it, I'm about to go farming at Pron Coast to be able to get the 3 people I use their best armor/weapons. I usually stay on top of hunts for the most part, unlocked everyone I could and completed about 80% of them so far but I am having gil troubles. I hardly have spells so I have no form of blm, just as much white magic I found use for and some green magic. Any good places to farm? The wolves that dropped the 1k+ to NPC blood was good but wondering if there is better.

So like if you take your 3 characters to whatever level 30, and ignore the rest, they won't be level 30 when you pop them in like older FF's? I kinda like that system, and then you just equip them when/if you need to.
But that's not the system here eh? It seems like a good system, who the fuck wanted to level Caithsith? Not I. And it's not like he was ever useful, oh well.

That's not exactly how other systems worked. Other systems the other characters would only level up after big cs's or something, or maybe at just a slower rate, in FF7 I know my Yuffie wasn't close to Cloud in levels.

The way the system works is you only get EXP if you're in the 3 man party fighting, but you get LP if you're in or not, so all characters can still learn new spells/abilities and equip better gear, they'll just be lower in hp/mp and other basic stats because of low level.

[Daegar]

Just a question for the more experienced people. I'm level 17 and just got my first esper but I am having serious MP problems. I run out of mp in nearly every long fight and it's cause me to die quite a few times. Is this normal or am I doing something wrong. I know that unlocking quickenings will increase it, but I've got one for most of my characters and don't want to have to go through a bunch of useless liscenses just to increase my mp unless I have to. Is there any other way to increase my mp or should I just suck it up and ignore the augementing liscenses for a while and just go straight for quickenings?

[Eaglestrike]

Just a question for the more experienced people. I'm level 17 and just got my first esper but I am having serious MP problems. I run out of mp in nearly every long fight and it's cause me to die quite a few times. Is this normal or am I doing something wrong. I know that unlocking quickenings will increase it, but I've got one for most of my characters and don't want to have to go through a bunch of useless liscenses just to increase my mp unless I have to. Is there any other way to increase my mp or should I just suck it up and ignore the augementing liscenses for a while and just go straight for quickenings?

Spend some time farming LP's. There are a few things to get:

Channeling- Reduces MP cost for spells.
Inquisitor - Gain mp when dealing damage.
Martyr - Gain mp when taking damage.

I didn't unlock quickenings until just recently so I just now have the mp boost. Some fights I would run out of mp on but also some others I wouldn't. I did a Ring Wyrm hunt and the fight was like 20 minutes long...but mp was fine the whole time because I was capped on the above things. Other mobs have higher damage output but yeah. I also have gambits running to spam pro/shell on my guys and debuffing bosses is awesome. Blind on that Wyrm was key because I had tried just before without getting blind (or using pro/shell) and I was dying and barely holding on. I was perfectly fine with pro/shell and blind on mob.

Farming LP's for a while can really really help. Also, Regen removes sap and effectively reverses it, I have Vaan cast that on anyone who falls below 80% hp and it works quite well.

Edit: Also +magicka power things to unlock via LP's that'll enhance your cures will save mp quite a bit too. I'm a fan of a dedicated healer so I have someone in mage gear that's doing most of my healing and her healing powers are awesome.