FFXIII battle system vs classic ones

[Heartless Angel]

Buff yourself, debuff enemies, use elemental advantage. Some fights are faster if you go for the increased DPS of a Commando setup as opposed to a Ravager setup more suited to staggering. Nothing terribly complicated, but you can at least make it more interesting than wailing on auto battle. It really wasn't a bad game. Better than 12 anyways. But it could have been so much better.

[Sheechiibii]

Buff yourself, debuff enemies, use elemental advantage. Some fights are faster if you go for the increased DPS of a Commando setup as opposed to a Ravager setup more suited to staggering. Nothing terribly complicated, but you can at least make it more interesting than wailing on auto battle. It really wasn't a bad game. Better than 12 anyways. But it could have been so much better.

Thanks, I'll give it a go and see how I feel this time around. It's been years since I first played it so maybe I'll like it better now. I have to say, I do love 12, but the first time I played it I never even finished it so I know sometimes games deserve a second chance.

[Sheechiibii]

What would be the best way to upgrade my weapons and accessories then? If I'm focusing on elemental damage and buffs/debuffs should I go for magic increase over physical?

[Heartless Angel]

There are physical variants of elemental attacks too, so it doesn't matter much. I prefer to go physical with Commandos, and use the En- spells from a Synergist to add elemental effects. Sazh I believe learns the En spells soonest, but Lightning and Hope get them later on. Sazh is my preferred synergist anyways.

[Rowan]

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?

Synergist - Buff
Saboteur -debuff enemies
Rav - raise chian stagger gauge
Com - DPS class
Medic - Heal
Sentinal - tank/defend against strong attacks.

You switch between these classes in battle depending on what the enemy does. Unfortately there is no other way to play this game. Every character is the same thing. Sure, you can have 2 commandos and 1 ravager and setup a paradigm like that, but its hardly anymore efficient than having all 3 characters be the same thing whenever required. This is a huge argument im willing to have with someone here, try and tell me why its better to have a variation of paradigms as opposed to having all 3 characters being the same class at the same time when you can switch them all simultaneously anyway to the required class. Pro-tip- I 5 starred the game like this.

[loaf]

Okay Rowan there are bosses that require you to actual switch off, you did not 5 star the entire game like this. You had to do some sort of actual switching with the Paradigms to defeat a some bosses.

You make variations and the fights go faster. It's the same when you spent your 50 hours on Disc 1 getting Meltdown and Pain on FF8.

Your arguments are stupid. You're like Christianity shoving it down our throats.

I would like Rowan to prove to me he can 5 star the game with doing it his way.

[Andromeda]

Technically, it's impossible to actually go x3 on your roles until you reach Pulse I think it is. Up until that point you have to work with the characters and what they have unlocked.

If I remember right, I actually did two paradigms of COM I think post-game. And I combined up some of the others. I did this to optimize damage output when I was farming for traps. If you have two COM x3, you can switch between them every two cycles to get a free full ATB, thus allowing you to get more attacks in before the stagger wears off. I think I merged healer into the buff and debuff, since there were two characters that had the buffs I needed. And so I just went 1 healer and 2 debuffers or 1 healer and 2 buffers.

But I'll agree that post-game it makes more sense to go COM x3, RAV x3 and SEN x3 bare minimum. The rest I think is up to personal preference, since everyone is going to fight a little differently. Up until Pulse you can't even do that anyway. It's mostly a post-game strategy than a whole game strategy.

[Rowan]

Okay Rowan there are bosses that require you to actual switch off, you did not 5 star the entire game like this. You had to do some sort of actual switching with the Paradigms to defeat a some bosses.

You make variations and the fights go faster. It's the same when you spent your 50 hours on Disc 1 getting Meltdown and Pain on FF8.

Your arguments are stupid. You're like Christianity shoving it down our throats.

I would like Rowan to prove to me he can 5 star the game with doing it his way.

Nahh urr stoopid. I spent about 2 hours each town aquiring cards and stockpiling them for later use should I need them as apart of a really fun mini-game. Mini-game is like an alien term when it comes to ff13. that whole game felt like a really sub-par mini game that lasted 30 hours with a 20 hour tutorial.

@Andro, thats what I meant. Soz for the confusion.

[tiornys]

Every character is the same thing. Sure, you can have 2 commandos and 1 ravager and setup a paradigm like that, but its hardly anymore efficient than having all 3 characters be the same thing whenever required. This is a huge argument im willing to have with someone here, try and tell me why its better to have a variation of paradigms as opposed to having all 3 characters being the same class at the same time when you can switch them all simultaneously anyway to the required class. Pro-tip- I 5 starred the game like this.

Why is it better to have variation instead of having all three characters in the same role at all times? Because variation allows you to pursue multiple goals at the same time. Because triple-redundancy is frequently overkill, which would mean that you've spent your action economy inefficiently. Because different roles have various cross-synergies that can make mixed paradigms more efficient at what they do than a homogeneous paradigm, as for example COM/COM/SAB putting out more damage per round than COM/COM/COM against several noteworthy enemies. Because some roles (COM, RAV) are designed to spend a lot more time on the battlefield than others (MED, SYN), and restricting those roles to a single paradigm each dramatically limits your options for efficient deployment of those roles. Because different characters have different ability sets in the roles, and various ability sets are frequently underwhelming, useless, or downright counterproductive in various battles.

Quick example: the best paradigm decks against the chapter 12 bosses (among others) will all have RAV/RAV/RAV, RAV/COM/COM, and COM/COM/COM in them. Why RAV/COM/COM when the full paradigms are both already in the deck? Because--thanks to Army of One, Last Resort, or Cold Blood--it's the best choice for post-stagger chain building in those fights. Without RAV/COM/COM, you lose at least 30% of your damage potential and probably more (I'd guess closer to 50%), regardless of what you do with the RAV/RAV/RAV and COM/COM/COM paradigms during stagger. (Why this example? Because you explicitly called out two COMs + 1 RAV.)

Pro-tip: 5-starring everything in the game doesn't push the system very much, and it certainly doesn't make you an expert at analyzing the game.

What would be the best way to upgrade my weapons and accessories then? If I'm focusing on elemental damage and buffs/debuffs should I go for magic increase over physical?

For defense, damage reduction accessories like Black Belts are very effective for their cost and stay useful throughout the game (as opposed to a low level Bangle which becomes much less useful as your HP increase). For offense, Auto-buff accessories like Sprint Shoes and Morale Talisman are great against easier battles, while raw stat boosting is good for harder battles. As mentioned above, exploiting elemental vulnerability usually involves En-spells, so Strength and Magic are both viable.

To answer your earlier question about making the gameplay more interesting, I'd recommend keeping your paradigm deck (and team choice and equipment setup) flexible so you can try different tactics. For example many battles are best approached by using buffs without debuffs, or by casting buffs at a very different time than debuffs, but if you can't do this unless you have at least one paradigm with SYN but no SAB, and at least one with SAB but no SYN. Conversely, there are other battles that do want you to be buffing and debuffing at the same time (or at least part of the time), and you can't do that if you're using Rowan's preferred deck.

If there's more than one enemy on the battlefield, you probably want to be actively fighting more than one of them at a time. Look for different ways to do that effectively so you have a range of tools to apply. Pay attention to attack disruption and interruption, both against your team and against the enemy. It's easy and obvious to do this against a staggered opponent, but similar tactics work against numerous enemies even without a stagger. This is especially true when you start manipulating cut and keep values with Vigilance and Curse.

Also, Items and TP abilities. Potions (esp. backed up with Doctor's Code) are powerful healing until your HP totals reach 4 digits and remain decent for a while after that. Quake puts tons of chain duration on every enemy at once, Renew is a powerful heal & revive that you can use at any time, Dispelga is a trump to some of the most annoying situations in the game, and Summon gives you a powerful tool (free attack time) against glass cannon enemies and highly disruptive enemies.

[Odin1199]

Just out of cusiosity, is there such thing as fusion abilities, where new abilities are learned from a combination of old ones, or is this system common only in FF Dimensions? Do other FF's have this as well?

[tiornys]

As far as I know, that's only a thing in FF Dimensions, although I haven't played the MMOs or a lot of the spinoffs. I had to look up Dimensions to see what you were talking about (haven't played Dimensions either...) and a lot of the abilities do exist in other FFs, but you access them in different ways (mostly Blue Magic from my quick skim).

In any case, FFXIII doesn't really have these abilities nor this system. It does have something sort of similar where equipping two or more of certain groups of weapons and accessories gives you "synthesized abilities", but that's definitely not what you're talking about.

[Odin1199]

Getting new abilities just from equipping items is a turn off for me. Learning abilities is another thing though. Yeah, magicite gave you spells instantly as well, but that was a different thing. Espers died, but their energy was still attached to the magicite because magicite was their remains. Here we have items with some spiritual energy imbued in them from powerful humans. Still, you can't compare humans to friggin espers in terms of power. It's like comparing them to half gods lol. If there were humans with similar powers, there shouldn't have been many of them. I hope those items were rare at least.

[loaf]

So buffing your human abilities with magic is bad?

[Odin1199]

No, it's not bad. I was talking about the buffing mechanics of it. I'm fine with them I guess as long as they're not overused.

[LauriJ]

Ok, while the battle system in FFXIII and FFXIII-2 certainly were a bit awful, I still had fun playing the games. Also, Academia 4XX AF anyone? It's like you're actually there, taking on it's sights and sounds.