Vanile's Weapon

[davfra]

Vanile has her Binding Rod level 21. She also has a Healing Staff level 3. Should I concentrate on the Healing Staff or carry on upgrading the Binding Rod?

[Andromeda]

It really depends on if you even use Vanille. Eventually you probably will if you don't plan on using Hope, but I would not worry about Vanille's weapon until you plan on using her. And even then, I would not suggest upgrading any weapons unless you plan on actually transforming them to their tier 2 versions. The only weapons that actually make a good increase are Sazh's weapons, due to the fact that Sazh's base stats are fairly low so his weapons make up for his base. The rest of the characters have good base to start with that the extra 50-100 strength or magic you get will be nearly meaningless since you can get the same from a single unupgraded Warrior's Belt.

In the end you should pick your weapon based on the secondary effects that they come with and not the stats on them, because they won't mean a lot in the end.

Personally for Vanille use either the Healing or Malboro, the Malboro gives you increased debuff success which will be a lot more useful especially if you want to use Death later on with her, which you will if you do anything post-game.

[davfra]

Thanks for that. I use Vanille all the time with Lightning and Fang. I find Hope a bit of a whimp.

[Che]

Personally for Vanille use either the Healing or Malboro, the Malboro gives you increased debuff success which will be a lot more useful especially if you want to use Death later on with her, which you will if you do anything post-game.

This. You will use Vanille if you plan on doing any endgame content because SE decided that you can't even match up against an Adamantoise without cheesing it with Death. Or have fun grinding countless hours on bullshit mobs, otherwise.

[Andromeda]

I can stand toe to toe with an adamantoise without using death. I actually never used death on them, because had my fill of the failures on Gigantaur and Neochu that I didn't want to do it endlessly with the adamantoise that I'd have to fight repeatedly anyway and not just once. There are several workable strategies and everything in the game is beatable with death, but it will require you to do a lot of work before you can be successful. If you want an early lead or whatever, Death is the cheap way out though it won't feel like it after you have failed 50 battles.