ABP, et cetera

Having recently beaten, Final Fantasy 1-4 (excluding 3j), I've progressed onto Final Fantasy 5, and for some reason this game seems a lot more fun than the last time I attempted to play it. There haven't really been many games where I found it -fun- to sit down and level up, just because of the general feeling of repetiveness. However, it's strangely fun to sit and try to level up ABP for me in 5, I find a strange attraction to wanting to master all the jobs on my four characters before progressing much farther in the storyline.

Now, I had neglected to change out classes and wanted to master the classes they had equipped from the start that I assigned. That being Bartz- Knight, Reina- Monk, Galuf- W. Mage, and Faris- Thief. You can imagine the trouble I had with Byblos.

When I passed through the ship graveyard I noticed that it was fairly common for fights to give 2-3 ABP, but after that most remained 1 ABP per fight for harder fights. So, after Mastering my first jobs on each character I decided to go back to the Ship Graveyard to ABP up at level ~22, with Bartz as a Sorcerer, Reina as a Summoner, Galuf as a B. Mage and Faris as a Ninja. The fights are fast and it didn't take -terribly- long to get all of them up to the final levels of each of those classes (though I have yet to finish mastering them yet).

I'm thinking now, a few things, is it worth it to sit here and master a bunch of classes before getting the 4th set of them. I do find it strangely fun to do it (maybe its the character sprites!). Also, if there are any better places to ABP exp up than the Graveyard (thats at least common 2-3 ABP exp per fight encounters) closeby before or immediately after getting this next set of jobs.

I'm sure further in the game there are places where you get more ABP than that, it's fun to do, I agree, and it was awesome when I beat the game and every character had every job ability scroll by. Is it necessary that early? No, I'd wait until you can get more ABP per battle, which shouldn't be too far away, I don't know how much you know about the game so I'm not gonna say much else and possibly ruin something.

THE JACKEL

Take it from someone who's beaten Final Fantasy V more than a hundred times.

It's definitely worth mastering all of the jobs, you'll need them for sure.
The last boss however is pathetic, really.

The only real benifit to mastering jobs is the transfer of abilities to your Bare character, which is great late in the game. The best way to beat the Final Boss is with Bare. However, early in the game, you want to be earning AP, so equipping Bare is pointless. Therefore mastering jobs right away is unimportant - especially since for the mages, you don't have the MP to spare for the higher level spells yet or even the locations to buy them.

Don't bother levelling at the ship graveyard. The jacole cave is much better if you'll trade your thief (or anything else) in for ninja to get throw. of course you also need magic, but it's like what, 10 ap to get to use level 1 black magic? So you really can't keep your original classes, but geeze, it's SO MUCH EASIER.

It's the cave with all the squirrels. the nice brown ones will always give you 2 ap and they're dead easy to kill.

the grey ones will give you five no matter how many you run into. which can sometimes be a lot if you hit them with a black magic before they run away. or kill you all. whichever comes first.

but, throw and black lvl1 are immensely awesome in this. (you'll also want white magic abilities since healing is a pain if they accidentally get you. phoenix downs are a bit expensive at all times)

but it goes as such: encounter a grey squirrel, have you fastest person with black magic (which means that maybe you'll want to fight five/ten battles and give faris black as a secondary ability) cast something like, fire. providing you're still alive, squirrely will disappear and SIX (or seven or so) will pop up. Smack them with a water tech (or a flame tech. or a bolt tech. If you're playing the non-snes version, these are called scrolls?) bye bye squirrelies.

600 exp for all, 5 ap, and about 600 gil. provided none run away.

and jacole cave is easy to get to, the only thing is flying back to lix (or rikks?) for free healing. (or if you're sailing, that'd just be hideous)
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in the second world, there's a lovely castle south of the first town you run into, when you're free to run into towns. It's immensely deadly unless you can control the nice dragons. Again, have your fast person (hello faris[or bartz even]) use the secondary ability control (level two tamer, right? the dudes that use the whip.) every time you see a skull (skele?) dragon. they should turn around, and you're free to use their flame attack on them five times until they disappear. (four times if you've got dancers and they use sword dance a few times:D that doesn't uncontrol monsters, apparently. which is awesome. ) actually, dancer is an AWESOME class to have everyone as, or not. I dunno. but it's still pretty awesome.

Or, if you're into less deadly methods, wait until a little further into the second world, where you get picked up into a certain castle. go to the basement, with a lot of softs, or with a lot of MP and level 5 doom, and kill the stoney soldier dudes inthere, for 2-8 ap a battle. depending on number of soldiers you fight.

(luckily they can only cast break once, then they run out of mp. but, if you dance it out of them, they won't be able to cast it at all, and you'll save on softs, *and* get mp out of the deal! yay dancers!)

8ap>5ap+exp>5ap+lessexp>3 ap>2ap>1ap>

you can easily master several job classes in that basement. go for it.