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This is about FFT, so anyone who wants to talk about FFTA can go make your own thread. :p
Inspired by a recent WK comment about how magic is under-powered until you get access to the Calculator class I want to hear your thoughts about the physical/magical balance in this game. I have some, but it's late so I will save them for later.
Go, keep the FFT forum alive!
I like using both but really, melee is just better, easier to break, rarely if ever backfires (stupid charm status) and is mainly just hastle-free in Tactics. As opposed to magic which has to factor a magic stat, Faith, and the faith and magic stats of your enemies, requires a charge time which makes anything past the -Ra spells completely impractical, dealing with MP, weather, andyou have to be careful with positioning so the enemy doesn't just walk up to the mage, smack the mage and then watch as your Fire 2 spell finishes him off after taking off a third of the enemies health, and leaving you down one guy...
As oppose to a Knight who can take quite a bit of damage, can deflect several attacks with a shield and does awesome damage, or a Monk, who can use Earth Rend and Aurablast, as well as Chakra and Revive for white mage duty. Even the Chemist is more practical than a white mage cause his actions are immediate, don't miss cause the guy has low faith, and frankly has better range.
Mages are not terrible, but they require much more planning to make them useful and oftentimes, the melee class have similar abilities with no MP cost and don't have to deal with several factors like the mages do. I still love using mages, but an all mage team versus a melee team, I'm betting the melee will destroy them. The melee are just fully ready for ass kicking right out of the box, and tinkering with them only makes them more lethal.
I mostly used physical attacks and Agrias' sword techniques to fight. However, I also used Geomancer's abilities to soften up the enemies until I got my fighter characters close to them. Another strategy I used was a Summoner with Short Charge. Basic low-level summons, Titan, Golem and healing summons were especially useful, and IIRC, the Summoner gained EXP somewhat faster than the others due to such summon-spamming.
It's a good question and despite the easy breakability of melee classes, they have a lot of disadvantages as well. Because most of them have to get up close, it's easy for them to get separated, or worse, stranded, and hacked to bits, without chance for revival. So there's still some mental effort to do on their part.
I love magic, I think it's really powerful, I've just found MP management can be an issue. Other than that, I recall the spells stay pretty powerful and AoE makes them that many times more useful. B/C of JP buying and the way I personally grind, I can get second and third tier Fire/Ice/Bolt spells way earlier than I'm supposed to and just decimate the opposition.
Also, I would point out that one advantage a Priest has to a Chemist is that the Priest has tons of things to do (protect, shell, regen) on his/her turn when characters don't need medical attention. You could argue you could just wait them to get more turns but my preference is to buff. Also on my last playthrough I had a blast using the Oracle so they help with that too, as well as debuffing :)
Unfortunately, when it comes to the end of the game, to me it's all about spamming your overpowered moves before the enemy spams their overpowered moves and strategy goes out the window. In that case I don't recall what my party composition was but it was probably all melee with potentially a white mage/oracle. I've never used the calculator class because it seemed way too complicated for me but after all these years and a couple playthroughs i think i might be ready to give it a shot. I got a cool save on the PSOne Classic on the PSP right now, maybe I'll give it a whirl!
It depends on the situation and where you are in the game. But to generalize and hopefully help, I'll chime again. I also have a video on youtube of my solo in Tactics.
The reaction that puts melee to the test is Blade Grasp. I usually rely on that with MagDefUp. That way my defenses are balanced in the end.
You can argue this character over that, this ability over that like I did. What would put magic ahead of melee in my opinion is it's versatility in 'all' the magic users.
There's no character totally invincible from magic in Tactics. Even a time mage could spam Meteor if all else failed and recovered with 'ITEM'.
Magic users also make best of the secondary skill. There are fewer skills melee benefits from. The most being equip change. But like I stated it's versatility in the spells over swinging a sword all day.
As a complete jerk, I like taking the time to do away with Magic's unaccountability by reducing the Faith of all my characters to near nothing and watching any and all enemy mages do meh damage and few attribute changes before they are cruelly gutted upon the blades of my heroic mercenary band. I try to get the mage classes out of the way in the first chapter, because after that, they are used against you well enough to be a problem, so nullifying them come Bariaus Hill is usually my goal. So, yeah, I pretty much rely on brute strength melee to get through the game and consider it more useful (and reliable) than magic.
The Final Fantasy Tactics community readily acknowledges that magic is underpowered as the game progresses. There have been some patches to the game that seek to remedy this as well as make casters like Rafa and Malak a little more useful. I think that you can find a majority of them at Final Fantasy Hacktics.
I think by my 13th or so playthrough, I was trying some magic exclusive formations. Eh. They work. It'll just take alot out of you. It was long ago, but I remember having to be pretty buff heavy to over balance my classes. You can play through the whole game with all mages, and depending on the circumstances given in a battle, you can finish fights in fractions of the time it would take you to work around melee fighters, to set up the right spell in the right place and timing is everything.
... I miss this game. Its been years. Gonna have to grab it on psn when i ship out my ps3...
As far as 'on topic'; I can't weigh one over the other. Your mages are artillery to your ninjas infantry, or your knights as tanks. You can blend and balance, but get the same results at the end of the day by going heavy off balanced.