JUDE'S PROFILE

There are positives and negatives to both options, most of which have already been mentioned. Everything that's explicitly given to the player takes away a degree of discovery, so just decide where and when you think that's a good trade. My kneejerk reaction is to prefer killing x number of y shows y's HP bar, because it adds a micro-system and some micro-content to the game. One idea is to take a page from a lot of action games. Don't show the HP bars of common enemies, but display them for bosses. It adds a small element of drama to the fight, identifying this encounter as being Very Important... Bonus points if the HP bar fills up with little beeps at the start like Mega Man.

Go with Shadowsteel on Yuffie against Godo if you've honed it. Same damage as poison but it ticks way more often. My Valefor is still R2 because I honed Quetzalcoatl first. All of my 3-star summons are R5 though, which is handy against weaknesses or with a +element weapon/armor.

Ah... Neat. Got a new item today in the daily draw. 2-star Slasher Axe (FF12). I wonder how many 2-star items there are left to collect. They're so rare.

author=LockeZ
From where I'm sitting the part 1/part 2 events are completely indistinguishable from the normal/elite events. All the event battles before the boss rush are pointless and don't really need to exist any more. And at this point the boss rush and the ++ boss are pretty trivial too in most events. I wish they'd make it so we can just start at the boss rush, and get rid of the mythril rewards for everything below it so there's no need to spend two days doing them all. It's nothing but grind for the sake of grind, taking up the player's time for no reason except to produce a skinner box effect.

They need to reward mythril for newer players. So instead of getting rid of it, they should change the way it works. Complete any stage and get mythril for it, but make the difficulty of that stage variable. Once completed the mythril can't be claimed for any other difficulty tier of that same dungeon. All of the other rewards escalate based in tier, but each tier includes all of the rewards of its subordinates. Instead of normal vs elite, they would be shredded out similarly to daily dungeons.

Instead of Renewing Cure on Pretty Cecil, give him Curaja. Also, if you're using a physical party then Boon kind of neutralizes itself since you provoke counter attacks, so either go magic or drop Hastega effects in favor of maybe Amarant's Aura. Also, your synergy is dope. I don't think you're lucky so much as you've pulled on FF13 quite a bit, similar to how I've pulled on FF6 a lot. Conversely, I've never done a single FF13 pull and got all of my items on that first lucky draw festival. My FF7 synergy, on the other hand, is pure luck since most of the FF7 items I have came on non-FF7 banners.

So I went ahead and did Ultimate Bart, since my character levels seemed fine. This is the party I mastered it with:



Kind of a strange party. I used Retaliate so that Sazh and Y'shtola could deal more damage during their free turns, but mostly so that I could avoid getting Boon, Protectga, and Stoneskin dispelled by Bart's counterattacks. Cloud may be a better choice here--I never compared to see if the pumpkin ball synergy makes up for Tyro's stat deficiency compared to a Shadowblade with 142 base Attack... but in hindsight I am guessing it does not. Could've also given him my 5+(+4) Boon gun (like 102 Attack, I think) and went pure Advantaliate since he was retaliating for like 5.5k with the pumpkin ball, so the 10k Thundara Strikes aren't that important compared to the 11k+ I could've done. And Ice Jump was only doing like 7.5k anyway. Plenty of tweaks I can make if I want to try again.

Not really too much detail to my strategy. Keep Retaliate and Advance active... Hit pauldrons with elemental weaknesses and switch to full Retaliate strategy after that. I saved Stoneskin for when Bart first empowered his pauldrons, but then kept it active from then on. I had to quit and reload once since I didn't have Stoneskin active when Bart first shrugged off his pauldrons. His first move was to tri-Ruin Fang, and just Shellga wasn't enough to survive that so my hopes of mastery were scuttled.

I considered Steal Power on Tyro to help mitigate Bart's smile attack, but decided it was too tricky to balance that with Advance. Smile hits pretty hard but Protectga/Stoneskin was enough to deal with it, though at one point two of my party members were at critical HP so maybe Curaja instead of Blizzara Strike would've been safer... Tyro's Advance-powered normal attacks were hitting for like 5k+ anyway.

I think I'm at like 30 Mythril or so, saving for FF9. I am not sure which banner to pull on, though. Beatrix's sword and Quina's spear look great, but as always I could use more mage gear and the second banner is loaded up. I also have 100 Gems leftover from that pack I got for my FF4 pull, so I'll have to use that at some point.

I've cleared everything that's available now, so I'm just waiting on the bonus battles.

Due to all of that free FF13 gear, my synergy isn't too shabby. I went ahead and combined my Boon Guns for Lightning and gave Sazh the New Years one. Bartz is using the pumpkin ball because it doesn't make sense to give it to Hope, who lacks physical abilities. I've got a 4++ fist for Snow and a 4++ staff for Vanille, in addition to Snow's ice punch armor. This should be fine.

I think Fang will be required for some bonus battles so she'll be lacking in the weapon department, but my 5+(+15) Shadowblade should be plenty serviceable, sporting about 140 Attack.