During the course of my eventual defeating of Penance I actually found it very easy to gain Ribbon for each of my characters, primarily due to the large amounts of arena monsters I had to kill to increase my stats. As a bit of a side note if you are currently at 9999 HP and keep gaining HP (not possible on the standard grid IIRC) from nodes then once you do get BHPL your HP will be set to the value it is at with those added nodes. Whether or not you can reach 99999 HP or not is how you decide to customise your grid. A route some people take is to max out Luck over Evasion and Accuracy, since Luck directly affects both of these stats. Having a Luck of 255 would mean every attack would hit automatically, and an evasion of 25 would be needed to avoid every attack that isn't auto-hit (Tav probably knows the number, so don't take it as read that 25 is the value since I'm not 100% on that). It may also be worthwhile leaving Magic at a lower value, simply because once you have BDL and 255 Strength physical attacks outclass every magical attack, and the only monster Physical Immune is Jumbo Flan.