Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark (FFT-alike) aka "throw stone" memo

Yeah, i never reset anyone, but when I was done collecting skills I put the character in the main role that gave the most points in their role and a secondary that either complemented what I wanted to do with them or, in some cases, the secondary class is what i wanted them for but the main class grew a stat that i wanted better.

Here are some end-game examples of what I ended up with:

Ranged Mage Offense:
IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/qpIDuoi.jpg)
Main: Sorcerer - Highest Mind and MP growth and attacks hit EVERYWHERE - every enemy on the map
Second: Vessel - summons do good damage
Passive: Mana Font(Mender) - 1MP per step
Passive: Mind Expert (Druid) - Mind goes up 14+level (65 for this character)
Counter: Root(Sorcerer) - ANY offense action against him causes root on the offender (includes teammates if they hit by accident

Ranged Physical Offense:
IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/FD8Cz6g.jpg)
Main: Assassin - Highest attack + Speed combo for ranged, also has attack that does like 4x from behind
Second: Ranger - the class I really wanted for this character
Passive: Know Weakness (Ranger) - Increases critical chance by 25%
Passive: Concentration (Gunner) - All offensive actions have +20% accuracy except steals
Counter: Teleport Other (Gunner) - Any offensive action by an adjacent unit teleports them to a random dry spot on the map

Melee Physical Support
IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/PvdG1Sb.jpg)
Main: Fellblade - Good Attack, Mind, and Defense growth. Attacks use Mind and Attack (some of them use both at the same time
Second: Knight - Lots of support skills. Can be used on self also which allows her to move in close
Passive: Defense Expert (Templar) - Increases Defense by 32 + (Level * 1.5)
Passive: Life Font (Knight) - recovers health per step 4 + (Level / 4). So she was getting around 18hp per step
Counter: Fleet of Foot (Scoundrel) - +1 movement also gets rid of root

With the exception of the Ranger, these classes were decided on near the end once I looked at the stats they ended up with and decided where they would fit the best with the teams I built. Building the characters is really fun especially with class experimentation and seeing what can cross. Gunner with Knight secondary lets you use One for All which follows up any teammate's attack within weapon range - gunners have insane range, especially from up high. if you could find a good spot, your gunner could follow up just about every hit.

Nice. I don't have sorcerer unlocked still, but my wizard is primary in mender now, and got that MP passive. My Mender is switched over to Wizard. Probably take both of them through Druid soon.

I've also used my peddler a bit and items are nice, plus the passive to open a chest or gather is super useful. Might have to grab that on some other character, or keep it when I change this one.

Don't have Fellblade yet either. Got a nice Templar going and that's ok. Knight subclass on a couple characters too. There's a lot of interesting stuff out there. Seems pretty easy to make a useful character out of almost anything.

I found my first seal a few minutes ago, right before 2nd temple. So I could make a werewolf now. Looks like the skills aren't super great, but might be fun anyway. Although I only have on eligible non-story merc, so maybe I should just make a new one.

Looks like Lord, Princess, and Vessel are the best of those seal-locked classes. I'm going to have to make at least one male non-story character for Lord probably. So far I got the default wizard and every other custom I've made is female. I figure Kyrie and Anadine are kicking ass, so might as well have more ladies helping them.

Seems like I'm doing something wrong.

Got Druid, Fellblade, and Gadgeteer unlocked. Made a new werewolf character. Last couple story missions I've had 3 or 4 of my team get knocked out. Seems ok because I have others to rotate in.

But last night happened again and I'm starting to see assassin and other classes as enemies that I don't have yet. I thought maybe I would replay a mission because I missed a chest. But I guess the enemies were a couple levels higher than the first time. I got wrecked.

They muted my primary wizard, now a druid, over and over, so he wasted his turn fixing that. Couldn't get close enough to him with my Peddler to cure. Just annoying. And then they revived the couple enemies I did manage to kill and I lost 2 characters right after that and it snowballed bad. Kyrie and Reiner were my last two standing and I quit.

Anyway, wondering if I should go back several story spots to find more appropriate leveled patrols or what? I was winning story missions at least but it feels like I'm slipping there.

Haven't seen any mute protection items yet. That alone would have saved me. Wizard had a few guys on deaths door before he got picked on. So wondering if those are at a nearby store and I should push through. Or maybe go back to arena and try that for some grind.

Anyway just had a few minutes to play last night and it ended up being very not fun.

Humans are the most dangerous enemies in the game and the smartest. I had to change paths away from my brute force strategy once they learned how to combine healers with buff/debuff supports. This is seen in full if you fight in the arena, you have to pick them off one by one and hope the healers in the back can't reach. They'll have like 2-3 dedicated to healing/buffing and then a couple more with healing capabilities, and everyone else hits or debuffs. I had to rearrange my healer's abilities to counter that and my front line attackers had to learn buffs and debuffs, which is why they both have Knight class as the secondary.

This game weighs heavily on the buffs/debuffs and the right move at the right time changes the tide of battle heavily, which is what I really liked about the game. I forget what the game levels up to though - like if it keeps track of your characters or if it has static levels based on location ( i think its the latter). Even just positioning correctly can help with all the opportunities to knock someone off a ledge or into the water - or if you are super slick, use the float boots, float over some lava and use the ability to switch places with an enemy to make them fall to their death.

All that said, you may just need to go back and run some lower level missions to gain points and adjust your secondary and passive skills. Maybe mix in more classes with buffs. Gambler was extremely good for me and has that passive that lets them move first all the time (unless someone else has the same passive) and you can then use that first move to do random buffs to whoever is about to move up OR (as I like to do sometimes) use that free turn to toss some MP to your attack mage.

The classes you are missing now are probably the ones that require 4's and 5's. For example, Assassin requires Gunner 4, which requires merc, knight, and Ranger at 4. If you want to hit hard with your mage, push it up to sorcerer (druid 5). Someone needs to learn barrier. More than one person if you can. Mass Barrier too to put it on more than one person at a time. It blocks the next negative status affect. Alchemistic also unlocks the mystic shield where damage hits MP until it reaches zero. This helps your mages stay alive as long as they have MP boosting abilities such as Mana Font.

If you are having issues with story battles there are two things to try.

1. Go back and do some patrols.
2. Switch your party away from "learning" primaries to something that they're already strong in. E.g., if you have a guy who has everything you care about in Templar and so you recently switched him to Scoundrel or whatever, for the story mission switch him back to Templar/Knight even if you don't care about the Templar AP anymore. He'll perform better.

I don't find buffers to be particularly useful until rather late in the trees, when you can do powerful double buffs or first turn group buffs.

Don't neglect pursuing useful counters or passives which aren't in the path you'd normally take for a character. Most notably, Mystic Shield is absurdly good on a lot of the physical classes that don't depend upon high MP cost abilities, and it is well worth taking some time to beeline a class that you intend to ultimately be physical or hybrid to Alchemystic to obtain it. The Sorceror's Root counter is another great one, and works well with anything.

Think #2 might have been part of my problem. Changing some characters that were maxed out to try to learn those passives or unlock other classes, and not using their strongest stuff anymore.

I was also looking a that Gadgeteer start combat with 15MP. Lot of cool stuff out there.

I did go back and win a couple easier patrols tonight, unlocked some more classes, and only lost 1 person during the fights. Maybe I'll try to refocus a bit for story.

I over-grinded at times where I wouldn't move on with the story until I got to the next class for my characters. If I was in a class to learn a specific ability or just to gain levels to unlock another class, I did patrols until it was done, then switched to the next "primary" class, got properly equipped at the highest possible stats (not always the best/most expensive weapons since I was building specific for certain hybrid stats), and moved on to the next few story bits until that class was maxed or if I ran into a wall.

The arena really helped me figure out the best strategy for my teams. Those battles were so difficult for me and really showed me how to prioritize enemies and where my team's weaknesses were. I think losses in general show you your weaknesses. I had an issue with attackers who couldn't defend and would die in turn 1 when two or 3 enemies targeted them. Also, I had like zero buffs ready outside of my Gambler and his are random. Also, levels don't matter as much as raw stats - although obviously it helps. As you can see, my ranger up top is only 39 with others over 50, but his range, accuracy, and plethora of status effects were so high that he didn't need to keep up with levels. He also had dual wield for 2 guns and the guns he had equipped were the guns with the chance to cause "stop" which really put an enemy in a bad spot. Even if they had barrier, it was hitting twice and if luck was on my side, he'd hit twice with the same status and that unit is now a sitting duck.

So basically, do a ton of patrols and figure out how to best use your team. Make sure you are doing the ones that are at or right above your level when you want to see what your team is capable of. Then a bit below when you want to grind xp. One thing to keep in mind while grinding, level differences increase or decrease xp/ap gains, even if they are your teammates - this means that if your healers/buffers are lower than your story characters or whatever and they do anything with support for those characters, they will get a lot more xp/ap. This also means if the units are much lower, you will get very little for them, whether its an attack or support.

That's a good idea to grind secondary stuff on patrols and then switch back to main. I got caught the other night with my main Mender out. Though I switched another character (Alch?) to Mender, she didn't have high enough to have revive yet. Then when someone went down things got rough.

Even though teammates not in battle get XP, it's not enough to really keep up.

I guess it all boils down to having some strategy outside of battle too, haha. Figure out what classes I'm moving which characters to and do it at the right times.

Do I understand that Vicarious Learning AP right? Someone has to use that primary class to gain that AP for everyone else? I think I had screwed this up when I switched the Alchemystic to Mender primary, so then everyone stopped getting AP at Alch 2, when rank 3 unlocks another class.

And I guess that means I need to switch at least one character each to Fellblade and Gadgeteer, so everyone else with it unlocked will start earning.

Vicarious learning gives your entire bench the points, even if they don't have the prerequisites to switch to the class. By the time they are able to equip the class (if ever), they'll have some levels in it if someone else was using that class as primary.

Stele wrote:

And I guess that means I need to switch at least one character each to Fellblade and Gadgeteer, so everyone else with it unlocked will start earning.

If a Fellblade primary is an active participant in a battle and earns AP, then your entire active party and your bench earns a small amount of Fellblade AP, regardless of their current class.

Here again, don't overly sweat this stuff. Vicarious AP gives a nice little trickle that, over time, lets you get free progress into lines that a character never equipped. But if there is a class you want to pursue for a particular character as their next step, it's quite fast to just manually rush them through the minimal prerequisites in a few patrols.

When patrolling for grinding, it is always preferred to have a guaranteed or near-guaranteed way to ensure that every character has a way to force AP gain every turn. This sometimes means equipping a secondary just because it provides a self-buff that you don't really care about, but ensures that you'll be able to earn points on your turn. If you can't do something that gains AP on a turn, just throw a rock at someone, including your own party. Which will cause your party member to take damage, which allows a healer to use a heal on them, which lets your healer get AP on their turn when there would otherwise be no below-full-health target to get points from. You'll figure out these little tricks as you go.

Yeah that makes sense too. The AP always goes toward primary class so just do something.

I was trying not to grind too much and focus on story but once I started making backups and new classes things got spread around too much. The 3 main story characters are all pretty great and the starting Wizard and Mender they gave me too. But of course one story character or another have disappeared for multiple missions. And the 4th story character is good. But I've got a whole other squad to work in basically, and need to spend a little time balancing.

Guess it just finally caught up to me and I got a bit frustrated. Lots of good ideas the last couple days that should help this weekend. Thanks.

Yeah, keeping a rotation helps for when a story character has to leave and also for when someone is down and needs to rest for a fight (more if you revive them and they die again). There is an item later on that prevents that negative impact on stats from dying, but I think there's only 1 or 2 so not something to build around, just nice for using with someone who is a glass cannon type.

For "always gaining ap every turn" - the Defend ability worked extremely well for my attackers. You can have them defend someone who is much stronger and they will gain more AP, even when that unit clearly doesn't need the defense. Or pair them with a healer who will stay in the back. You can use defend every single turn and essentially do nothing while gaining good AP. The gambler abilities are good for this too since they are random and don't miss - though they do randomly do the opposite of what they are supposed to do rather than miss. I'm sure there are plenty more of these actions.

Well if anybody else never finished this like me, now is the time. The JRPG quarterly game. Will be posting in that thread for the next 3 months.