Stat Raising Question

Been playing FFII lately and grinding away for excellent stats but I've noticed I can't seem to raise three stats in particular artificially. By this, I mean that my party smacking each other around or Input/Cancel don't seem to do the trick. I have a decent idea about one of them but I'm completely baffled by the other two as they seem to go up in level completely randomly. I am playing the FF Origins version.

The three stats in question are Evasion, Agility, and Magic Defense.

From my observations, it seems like Evasion and M.Defense can't be raised by your own party members and requires battling higher tier monsters. At least that's how Evasion has seemed to work but I want to W-Check in case I'm just being impatient. Agility seems to be connected to Evasion rating and the weight of your equipment but it just seems like it gains levels randomly sometimes. Gus has been using lightweight equips for awhile and his Agility has grown like a snail whereas I through Maria into heavy gear and through her on the frontlines and now she's gaining Agility like its going out of business. This just seems to conflict a bit with what I've read from other guides.

M.Defense is another I'm thinking only works like Evasion but once again, it seems like my party members gain levels for it against enemies that don't use Magic and are low tier. So I'm curious to know if there is another way to affect it cause most guides seem to be very vague on this stat and most presume its purely let powerful monsters cast powerful spells. I'm wondering if equipment might also play a part cause I didn't start gaining M.Defense for my actual party (Minwu excluded cause he gains it fairly often) until I acquired Golden Armors from the Sergeants in Fynn.

Does any one if EoFF have this game hacked open to give me an idea how the algorithms work for these stats. I actually was hoping to max most of my parties stats. Thank You. :choc:

you can't raise your own agility cause you won't dodge when you attack yourselves. If you get blinded and attack yourself you'll notice you'll hit them all even though you can't hit the enemy very well. The manual says that you only have to be targeted for agility to rise, but that is a dirty lie you only have to successfully evade.

It's kind of a good thing because else if you raised your agility to fast and not your stam/hp, then you would end up with a character that usually dodged everything but then got kod by a single attack when the enemy got lucky. This way you can still level up HP by self flagellation.

I think Evasion growth is boosted by equipping a shield too.