FFXIII battle system vs classic ones

I think that depends a lot on how you approach your party and paradigm deck. I don't know how Rowan did things, but what I've seen from other players who shared his viewpoints was a rather static approach to party choice and paradigm deck building. These players would tend to pick a party and put together a paradigm deck designed to handle all encounters, and then rarely change it outside of major shakeups. The problem with this is that there's very little overlap between the types of paradigms that work well against bosses and tough encounters and the types of paradigms that work well against weaker enemies and easier encounters. Thus, the decks tend to wind up with (typically) 3 paradigms that are well suited to hard encounters, 2 paradigms that are well suited to easy encounters, and 1 paradigm that functions passably for both but isn't great for either. An example:

Lightning/Fang/Hope
RAV/COM/RAV
RAV/COM/MED
MED/SAB/SYN
COM/SEN/RAV
COM/SEN/MED
MED/SEN/MED

If your deck looks like this and never gets tweaked, then you have very few reasonable options during any given battle. In order to experiment with reasonable-looking strategies, you'd have to alter your paradigm deck, and that would indeed require you to retry the battle.

On the other hand, if you view your party and paradigm deck as mutable resources, then you have room to set up a much more flexible deck for the type of battle(s) you expect to face. Thus, for fighting the wandering mooks, you might have a deck that looks like this:

Lightning/Sazh/Vanille
COM/SYN/RAV
RAV/RAV/SAB
RAV/RAV/RAV
COM/RAV/SAB
COM/COM/RAV
MED/SYN/MED

With 5 offensively oriented paradigms, multiple options for deploying a SAB, SYN, or both, and nuance in your chain-building and damage-dealing paradigms, there are a lot of offensive strategies that you can explore without changing the deck at all. Granted, with only one defensive paradigm you would struggle with this deck against a difficult encounter, but that's easily remedied by switching things up:

Sazh/Fang/Vanille
SYN/SAB/MED
SYN/SEN/MED
RAV/SEN/RAV
COM/SEN/SAB
COM/COM/SAB
COM/COM/MED

Again, you have the ability to explore numerous viable approaches without altering the deck, and, of course, you also have the ability to alter the deck if you lose a battle or decide that there are too many inefficiencies for a given battle. For that matter, it's also reasonable to pop into battle without bothering to set up, cast Libra a couple of times, check out the enemy info pages, and then Retry to set up with a lot more information than just what the enemy looks like.

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Originally Posted by tiornys

There are always multiple strategies to achieve 5-stars.


Switching paradigms is not a strategy, although most strategies will involve paradigm shifts. There is no formulaic procedure for going through the paradigms that is anywhere near optimal for the vast majority of fights. Outside of challenge-level play, no fight should ever take more than 10 minutes. Most bosses should be dead in less than 5 minutes and most wandering encounters should be dead within 90 seconds. If you were bored because you fought something for 20+ minutes without rethinking your strategy, that's on you.

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Went back to my file and checked, I beat it in 8 mins.

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Originally Posted by tiornys

I think that depends a lot on how you approach your party and paradigm deck. I don't know how Rowan did things, but what I've seen from other players who shared his viewpoints was a rather static approach to party choice and paradigm deck building.

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yes you are correct. I did use a static approach, and that lead me to a 5 star victory on everything. Thank you for further proving my point here.

I seriously didn't even fill a paradigm deck. I used 3 the entire game and had no difficulty beating it.

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Originally Posted by Rowan

yes you are correct. I did use a static approach, and that lead me to a 5 star victory on everything. Thank you for further proving my point here.

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Which point is that? The point that everything can be beaten with a simple approach? I've never disputed that. I disputed your assertion that there are bosses/enemies where only one strategy will succeed (because there are always multiple strategies), and I disputed your assertion that a static approach was anywhere near being "fully effective".

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Originally Posted by Heartless Angel

I seriously didn't even fill a paradigm deck. I used 3 the entire game and had no difficulty beating it.

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See above; this point is not under contention.

Guys, you can't Junction. Thus, shittiest game ever created.

Lets just say that FF13 is pretty damn easy and doesn't really give you many reasons to switch tactics, even for the 5 star rating. Approaches for those are narrower still. Yeah, junctioning was an awesome thing.

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Originally Posted by Odin1199

Lets just say that FF13 is pretty damn easy and doesn't really give you many reasons to switch tactics, even for the 5 star rating. Approaches for those are narrower still. Yeah, junctioning was an awesome thing.

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Sure. Also, every (offline) FF game from FFVI forward has been pretty damn easy, and don't really give you many reasons to switch tactics. If you're playing FF for the difficulty, you either love self-imposed challenges or are playing the wrong series. The main reason to do different things in all FF games, 13 included? Because they're more fun that way.

Problem being, different tactics weren't any more entertaining in 13. There wasn't enough actual variation in any playstyle to make one feel any different than another.

If all the moves/skills/magic revolve around meters recharging and no mp then yeah, this does look abit one dimensional and bland. There's no weight to things you do, all you do is wait and you're back to being the boss, casting Ultima and Meteo X on everything. What if I want to cast those things 3 times in a row? I don't effing want to wait. I want to use elixirs and cast them all at once lol.

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Originally Posted by Heartless Angel

Problem being, different tactics weren't any more entertaining in 13. There wasn't enough actual variation in any playstyle to make one feel any different than another.

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How educated are on FFXIII's strategy? Have you ever seen a really skilled player crush a large encounter with AoE chain-building and mass staggering? Have you seen a dangerous enemy destroyed by a controlled all-out assault taking advantage of constant hit-stun to prevent the enemy from taking actions?

Playing through chapter 11 with Snow/Vanille/Sazh feels very different than playing through chapter 11 with Lightning/Fang/Hope, or Sazh/Vanille/Hope, or Fang/Lightning/Snow, or etc.

@Odin1199, there's a lot of nuance in the battle system, and you can bring a lot of different factors together in a lot of different ways to produce powerful effects. There are also ways a lot of ways to speed up you ATB recovery; I've had fights where I was literally attacking as fast as I could execute the commands.

Well versed, actually. AOE staggering is how I dealt with most groups, smite juggling is how I dealt with most large enemies. It was still boring.

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Originally Posted by Odin1199

If all the moves/skills/magic revolve around meters recharging and no mp then yeah, this does look abit one dimensional and bland. There's no weight to things you do, all you do is wait and you're back to being the boss, casting Ultima and Meteo X on everything. What if I want to cast those things 3 times in a row? I don't effing want to wait. I want to use elixirs and cast them all at once lol.

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In past FF games you'd have to wait to cast still. There was no instant cast. Because it was all controlled by your ATB meter, same as FFXIII. So it is really no different than past FF games. The only different is that you can queue up actions in FFXIII to execute a chain of actions, which you can't do in past FF games. But FFXIII is controlled by the ATB the same as every single FF game since FFIV.

As long as you can say that every single past FF game was no deeper and the same level of boring in combat as FFXIII then I would agree that FFXIII would be boring for you. Because everything described is no different than any past FF game in the series.

Here comes the FF8 fans...

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Originally Posted by Heartless Angel

smite juggling is how I dealt with most large enemies.

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That's not what I was talking about, but props for figuring out effective AoE tactics. Have you ever killed the chapter 11 end boss in under 1 minute using reasonable development and resources? Or the chapter 12 end boss? I had a ton of fun pulling those off.

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Originally Posted by Andromeda

In past FF games you'd have to wait to cast still. There was no instant cast. Because it was all controlled by your ATB meter, same as FFXIII. So it is really no different than past FF games. The only different is that you can queue up actions in FFXIII to execute a chain of actions, which you can't do in past FF games. But FFXIII is controlled by the ATB the same as every single FF game since FFIV.

As long as you can say that every single past FF game was no deeper and the same level of boring in combat as FFXIII then I would agree that FFXIII would be boring for you. Because everything described is no different than any past FF game in the series.

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I wasn't referring to atb. That's an obvious thing in all FF's. I was talking about casting high mp costing spells and then using elixirs to be able to cast them as soon as possible and as long as possible. With no mp system in FF13, there's probably no way to hasten the cooldown for big spells and cast them like in previous games, where mp was the limit. How long do you have to wait to cast Ultimas and other similar spells?

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Originally Posted by Heartless Angel

Well versed, actually. AOE staggering is how I dealt with most groups, smite juggling is how I dealt with most large enemies. It was still boring.

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In older FF's you had to find weaknesses and ways of killing bosses and not just rely on one method all the time. That made things pretty interesting. Here it seems you can get away with pretty much one set of moves that you can use throughout the game. And why do you have to stagger them all the time anyways? Where did brute force go lol? That kind of cheapness in game design pisses me off tbh.

Each action requires so much ATB, the bigger things more of it. But it is just the difference of waiting a couple of turns. You'd still have to spend a turn other FFs using an item and then casting again. So there isn't much of a difference. Spells don't have cool down just the time for the ATB to fill again. And you can get equipment that speeds up the ATB meter as well haste. The time you spend wouldn't be much different.

But there is also tricks in the combat system, every other full cycle of ATB when you switch paradigms it will be refilled at no wait. So it is actually to your advantage to switch paradigms regularly to fully maximize your effectiveness in combat. It's far more quick paced and reactionary than past games and flexible to allow that reactionary stuff to be mean sometime. If a big attack is coming in you can switch to turtle and protect yourself, any other FF game you'd just have to eat the damage and pray that the game wasn't feeling especially cheap or mean that round.

I still stand by Lightning Returns and FFX-2 being the best combat systems Square Enix has made for a FF game, nothing comes close to matching the enjoyment. I actually like going into combat in those games, it's fun and active. The only other one that comes close is FFX. The rest are very simplistic affairs that too easily fall into button spam with only FFVIII providing something more active with Squall's timed attack bonus.

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Originally Posted by Odin1199

And why do you have to stagger them all the time anyways? Where did brute force go lol? That kind of cheapness in game design pisses me off tbh.

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You don't have to stagger them all, and in fact, for most enemies the most efficient strategies do not involve staggering. Staggering gets all the attention because it's obvious, but staggering is only a subset of the overall chain building mechanics and there are numerous other ways to amplify your damage output.

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Originally Posted by Odin1199

I wasn't referring to atb. That's an obvious thing in all FF's. I was talking about casting high mp costing spells and then using elixirs to be able to cast them as soon as possible and as long as possible. With no mp system in FF13, there's probably no way to hasten the cooldown for big spells and cast them like in previous games, where mp was the limit. How long do you have to wait to cast Ultimas and other similar spells?




In older FF's you had to find weaknesses and ways of killing bosses and not just rely on one method all the time. That made things pretty interesting. Here it seems you can get away with pretty much one set of moves that you can use throughout the game. And why do you have to stagger them all the time anyways? Where did brute force go lol? That kind of cheapness in game design pisses me off tbh.

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I just want you to know, that the spells available in XIII are not the same as what you would run into with a typical FF game. The way that they are organized is not the same, the way you use them is not the same. If you really want to chime in on the topic, I suggest you go purchase a used copy and play through it and discover what all the hubub is about.

came off a little harsher than i meant it to, please do not take offense i am not attacking you.

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Originally Posted by tiornys

You don't have to stagger them all, and in fact, for most enemies the most efficient strategies do not involve staggering. Staggering gets all the attention because it's obvious, but staggering is only a subset of the overall chain building mechanics and there are numerous other ways to amplify your damage output.

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Care to name a few? I dont really recall other than casting a few dubuffs.

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Originally Posted by Rowan

Care to name a few? I dont really recall other than casting a few dubuffs.

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• Raw stat increases through accessories and equipment upgrades (or leveling)
• The Commando role (especially in multiples)
• Stat-boosting buffs (Bravery/Faith/Bravera/Faithra)
• Damage boosting debuffs (Deprotect/Deshell)
• Elemental weakness exploitation (incl. En-spells and Imperil)
• AoE damage output on multiple enemies
• Conditional modifiers like Adrenaline, High HP: Power Surge, etc.
• Daze spam
• Sazh's Blitz vs. large/close enemies and other techy tricks
• And, of course, the chain gauge, which multiplies damage regardless of stagger status

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Originally Posted by HeroZero

I just want you to know, that the spells available in XIII are not the same as what you would run into with a typical FF game. The way that they are organized is not the same, the way you use them is not the same. If you really want to chime in on the topic, I suggest you go purchase a used copy and play through it and discover what all the hubub is about.

came off a little harsher than i meant it to, please do not take offense i am not attacking you.

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How so, Black Magic spells do the same but just add AOE which in most FF games you had a multi target option. Most the spells do roughly the same thing just added AOE and the 2 heal spells that heals based on health missing, other than that they are the same.

Which ones are you talking about other than "New" spells made for that game.

You don't HAVE to use stagger, save a for a few fights that use the Doom mechanic, setting a time limit. Even then it's probably possible to go without it. Never actually made a point of trying. Stagger basically just encourages you to keep the pressure on an enemy for maximum performance, rather than going defensive and waiting out the bad phases. You can still do it that way, it just takes longer.

I didn't have much trouble killing anything a short period of time, I spent a lot of time death farming adamantoises for trapezohedrons, so I was geared. Leveling and gearing is hardly a strategy. It's common sense, and something anyone who has ever played a video game is going to be doing. It's not that tactics were totally absent from 13, they were just one dimensional and unoriginal. Just about everything you mentioned applies to every final fantasy, many of them to every RPG. There were no specialist builds, or game breaking combos, or special ability setups that gave you an advantage beyond normal gameplay. Damn near everything you could do to optimize yourself was blatantly obvious.

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Originally Posted by Heartless Angel

You don't HAVE to use stagger

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It's not that you can "do without" stagger; it's that you should avoid staggering--or more precisely, not bother with the effort of staggering--in a majority of fights. It's faster to kill most things without staggering them than it is to kill them with a stagger.

I'm gonna take a couple of these out of order:

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There were no specialist builds, or game breaking combos, or special ability setups that gave you an advantage beyond normal gameplay.

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You're saying this like it's a bad thing. The way to gain an advantage beyond normal gameplay is to use better strategies and tactics instead of exploiting broken abilities/combos. That sounds like a plus in my book.

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I spent a lot of time death farming adamantoises for trapezohedrons
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Damn near everything you could do to optimize yourself was blatantly obvious.

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I find these two statements deliciously ironic. You spent a lot of time fighting an inefficient enemy for Trapezohedron drops, using an inefficient strategy for killing that enemy, and then you say that optimizing in the game is obvious. If optimal play is so obvious, why did you spend so much time doing suboptimal things?

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Originally Posted by tiornys

It's not that you can "do without" stagger; it's that you should avoid staggering--or more precisely, not bother with the effort of staggering--in a majority of fights. It's faster to kill most things without staggering them than it is to kill them with a stagger.

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On most enemies to which that applies, they'd die before hitting stagger anyways. Not really a strategic choice. When I talk about fights, I;m generally not talking about the mooks that go down in 4 seconds of focused attack.

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You're saying this like it's a bad thing. The way to gain an advantage beyond normal gameplay is to use better strategies and tactics instead of exploiting broken abilities/combos. That sounds like a plus in my book.

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Except all strategies in XIII WERE normal gameplay. That and in the overwhelming majority of cases, strategy made little to no difference in results. In most cases 5 starring was as simple as not wasting time on defense or support when you didn't need to. And a star rating for speed is hardly a motivator for the average player to actually care whether fight took 45 seconds or a minute and a half.

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I find these two statements deliciously ironic. You spent a lot of time fighting an inefficient enemy for Trapezohedron drops, using an inefficient strategy for killing that enemy, and then you say that optimizing in the game is obvious. If optimal play is so obvious, why did you spend so much time doing suboptimal things?

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Note the qualifier, "Damn near". As for why, I actually enjoy farming. That's something I do in any game. Also, I'm a completionist, so I needed to get those for the ultimate weapons anyways. Most of it I did while watching Netflix. Just like I do in most any game where I farm an area for long periods of time.

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Originally Posted by Heartless Angel

On most enemies to which that applies, they'd die before hitting stagger anyways. Not really a strategic choice. When I talk about fights, I;m generally not talking about the mooks that go down in 4 seconds of focused attack.

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"Most"? That's possible. I don't feel like going through and tallying numbers. However, I'm not mostly talking about those mooks either. There are a lot of enemies where suboptimal strategies do involve staggering (because they don't die before you get there) and optimal strategies don't. A few examples (not a comprehensive list) include Orion, Behemoth King, Boxed Phalanx, Managarmr, Vampire, Humbaba, and Sacrifice.

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Except all strategies in XIII WERE normal gameplay. That and in the overwhelming majority of cases, strategy made little to no difference in results. In most cases 5 starring was as simple as not wasting time on defense or support when you didn't need to. And a star rating for speed is hardly a motivator for the average player to actually care whether fight took 45 seconds or a minute and a half.

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Strategy becomes more and more important to success/fail metrics the less grinding you do. I don't see the average player getting through, say, the late chapter 11 bosses without either moving well beyond basic strategies or spending a lot of unnecessary time on leveling up. For that matter, have you seen how many players gave up at the chapter 9 end boss because they were at the CP cap and still having trouble beating him?

I also think you underestimate how much of a difference there is for the average player between "long, repetitive fights" and "quick, varied fights".

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Note the qualifier, "Damn near". As for why, I actually enjoy farming. That's something I do in any game. Also, I'm a completionist, so I needed to get those for the ultimate weapons anyways. Most of it I did while watching Netflix. Just like I do in most any game where I farm an area for long periods of time.

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Yeah, even with the qualifier that statement is not accurate. Most of the things you can do to optimize your results in FFXIII are not blatantly obvious. Evidence is available all over the place, from LPs on YouTube and/or casuals streaming the game on Twitch to the terribad advice littering forums, FAQs, and guides across the internet.

But hey, I'm glad you had fun with your farming.

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Originally Posted by tiornys

Strategy becomes more and more important to success/fail metrics the less grinding you do. I don't see the average player getting through, say, the late chapter 11 bosses without either moving well beyond basic strategies or spending a lot of unnecessary time on leveling up. For that matter, have you seen how many players gave up at the chapter 9 end boss because they were at the CP cap and still having trouble beating him?

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I think we disagree what constitutes strategy, Its poor strategy. that or either im not making my point clear enough. I failed to see my 'strategy' being any different that anything I did the entire game which I considered to be boring and I 5 starred the final boss with relative ease. I feel like im an authority on this because I play through FF series even if im not particulary liking them just so I can critique them and say how they are not better than FF7.

I put a bunch of counters on my weapon. Game plays itself, it's FF13. FF7 = FF13

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Originally Posted by loaf

I put a bunch of counters on my weapon. Game plays itself, it's FF13. FF7 = FF13

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ff13
-forced level caps depending on what chapter with crystarium
- party is almost always split up
- awfully linear
- auto attack your way to 5 star victory
- melodramatic shallow characters
- poor equipment variety
- no towns/world map
- rarely any shops
- game is bad.

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Originally Posted by tiornys

"Most"? That's possible. I don't feel like going through and tallying numbers. However, I'm not mostly talking about those mooks either. There are a lot of enemies where suboptimal strategies do involve staggering (because they don't die before you get there) and optimal strategies don't. A few examples (not a comprehensive list) include Orion, Behemoth King, Boxed Phalanx, Managarmr, Vampire, Humbaba, and Sacrifice.

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Which stagger only slightly faster than they die. Using a different party setup to finish a few seconds earlier is hardly tactical gameplay regardless.

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Strategy becomes more and more important to success/fail metrics the less grinding you do. I don't see the average player getting through, say, the late chapter 11 bosses without either moving well beyond basic strategies or spending a lot of unnecessary time on leveling up. For that matter, have you seen how many players gave up at the chapter 9 end boss because they were at the CP cap and still having trouble beating him?

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Yeah, that's true of pretty much every game. The less prepared you are, the better you have to play to compensate. Pretty much everyone grinds Final fantasies though, outside of people going back through for ridiculous challenges. I rather enjoyed the no Sphere Grid challenge and some its more psychotic variants in FFX. And no, I've never heard of anyone giving up on 13. For that matter I've never heard of anyone complaining about difficulty. I'd have to laugh if I did.

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Yeah, even with the qualifier that statement is not accurate. Most of the things you can do to optimize your results in FFXIII are not blatantly obvious. Evidence is available all over the place, from LPs on YouTube and/or casuals streaming the game on Twitch to the terribad advice littering forums, FAQs, and guides across the internet.

But hey, I'm glad you had fun with your farming.

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Evidence, hardly. A lot of sources of people doing shit that came to me with minimal thought. If you aren't pants-on-head retarded the game was a joke.

But hey, I'm glad you're satisfied with such simplistic tactics. I wasn't.

I'm seeing a lot of people say that staggering is not the only way or best way to go with the gameplay. I hated the game to be honest but I'm thinking of giving it another shot, and if I can make the gameplay more interesting by perhaps not relying on the boring stagger strategy in battle then I might find myself liking it more. So, could anybody tell me what are the better, different ways of going about battle strategies other than the typical and overused rav/com/stagger technique pretty much everyone seems to use?