Merlin's Tactical Menu Usage Tips

[Merlin]

So you're probably wondering what exactly this topic is about. It isn't a walkthrough, nor is it a guide on how to beat certain bosses or grab rare treasure. There are plenty of guides on that. What I am going to help you with is the most common goof-ups that even people who have beaten the game continue to do, even at high levels. You probably don't even realize you're doing it. The problem is, there are a lot of tricks to maximizing your capability while playing this game that people simply overlook or don't think about. I'm here to rectify that, in hopes that it will help you out not only with simple tasks, but with those nasty bosses that are whipping your ass.

This tips-list isn't for just new players, its for everyone. Heck, people higher in levels will probably find it just as useful. But enough babbling, let's get this thing started, shall we?

First off I'll point out something you probably know, but really pay no attention to or simply don't take full advantage of. At any time in a battle, you can open up the Main Menu. You're probably thinking "well no shit Merlin, you can do that in a lot of games!" Well yeah, but do you really take advantage of that? I doubt it. How can this feature really benefit you? Well in quite a few ways. This is a tactical game after all.

STEP ONE: EQUIPMENT
Let's take equipment for instance. At any time, battle or not, you can switch your gear on every character other than your guest, given you have the proper license to wear it. The most basic use of this is equiping a ranged weapon when you fight creatures that cannot be hit by melee weapons. You probably know that much. If not, now you do. But you can do so much more! The most common phrase I see around here is "The boss cast ____ spell and screwed my whole party!" Hmm... do you see the predicament here? Its not that the boss is an asshat, its that you're simply not making use of the menu. Your first order of business is to go buy every accessory that has an immunity on it. There is one for Poison, Silence, Slow, Blind, Immobilize, Disable, Sleep, Oil, Sap, Petrify, Confuse, etc. Don't go whining that you don't have the money... go get some! Not having every one of these that you can possibly get at your level is sheer laziness and utter stupidity. Every one of them can make a bad situation into an absolute joke. 'But I love my LP/EXP/Bubble item!" Uh.. so? LP/EXP items only need to be equipped when a monster dies for them to work. Bubble... there's a spell for that... use it. What wastes more mana, casting Bubble or having your entire Party Disabled and down to critical before you can save them and heal them back to full? Err....

So, if you've been following me up to this point, you should have ran off and bought every one of these. So how do you make use of them? The main use for these fancy items is in boss fights. Remember how I said you can use the Menu at any time? Right. The moment that the Boss starts casting a group-wide status effect, pop up the Main Menu and equip the gear that makes you immune to it! The moment you close the menu, the boss should be unsuccessfully slapping you with a status-effect. Yes... that group-wide Disable went poof! Now you have two choices: If the boss is pissed and tries again, leave it on... otherwise switch back to your regular accessory. Its so simple its sadistic. Why let a stupid boss kick your ass over something so simple? Show him how multitasking makes him look like a jackass. Show him who the real gear-master is.

STEP TWO: CHARACTERS

The second-most common mistake is improper use of the characters you have. I'm not talking about how you choose to equip them or even what 'class' you want to play. If you want 6 WhiteMages go for it. That isn't the main issue here, its the fact that you have 6 characters for a reason. I know you're all used to regular FF games where there is no point in all those characters other than looks... well get out of that habit now. Square-Enix gave you SIX characters for a reason. Like mentioned in the beginning, this is a tactical game. I find it disturbing when I hear horror stories of people with 3 highlvl characters and they have to be saved by pitifully-underleveled characters. This is just wrong in so many ways. Its fine and dandy for regular monsters, but for Hunts and Bosses its just wrong. Having all of your characters leveled equally makes a HUGE difference in making tough fights seem a lot more palatable.

My personal method is to have a back-up for each of my mains. I have two ranged, two tanks, and two healers. If any of my main characters die, I have an equally-powerful, equally-leveled, and equally-equiped replacement ready to take his or her place. Yeah, it takes longer to get where you're going, but the rewards are so great. I can name quite a few times where this has saved me from bad situations. Say your main healer runs out of MP.. you're screwed right? Not if you have another main healer ready to take his/her place. Use that fancy menu you got and dump the mana-less healer for a healer with full health and MP.. Talk about turning a grim situation on its axis. Interestingly enough, this is the most basic of swapping strategies. The most sadistic is yet to come.

FOUR Quickening Chains in a Row: Huh?!??!?!?!? Mist Charge is your friend. This makes bosses feel very stupid, and you feel very very evil. Open up with your three main characters (or if your sadistic like me, your backups) and open a can of Quickening Woop-ass. Once your first chain is done, swap out a character and put in another with full MP. Start up a new Quickening Chain. Rinse and repeat until every one of your characters is dry of MP. If you're fast on the draw, you can get 9-hit+ chains on each one and make quite a few bosses/marks wipe before they even have a chance to beg for mercy. Now granted, later in the game there are marks with hundreds of thousands of HP and one with 50 million HP(yep! ) so that won't be entirely effective against them... but for quite a few marks and Bosses, you can beat the shit out of them with a brilliant lightshow you can write home about.

There is one last exception to the above strat: Elemental-absorb mobs. The perfect example of this is the King Bomb. He absorbs fire, so every Quickening based off of Fire will heal his ass. The most notable being Vaan's, Balthier's, and Basch's. Balthier has two that are fire-based, but his lvl2 is water based... so its really up to you. If you hit his lvl2 multiple times, you can do massive damage.. but screw up and use either lvl1 or lvl3 and you just healed the boss. Basch's lvl3 is fire-based, but his other two are not. Vaan, like Balthier is pretty much a no-go. If you keep that in mind, you can still do multiple chains, but just not as many.

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I hope this information helps some folks out there, no matter what level you are. If you find it useful, rate up! (at the top of the thread, it says 'rate thread'. ^_^ ) If you have anything you think I should add, please let me know. I wrote this all in one shot, so it might not be organized beautifully.. I might tweak it if people find it useful. Let me know!

To-do List:
On-the-fly Licensing

[Hildegarde]

...ah, but, even so, bosses are asshats!.

Joking aside, this guide is very useful, I find it especially gratifying, since I'm having a bit of bad luck with my quickenings, anything that can be said about them helps me oodles.

Other than that, I'm not sure of what can I post here without it being a SPAM post.

[Andromeda]

I don't know Merlin. I think there has only been one time that I needed my other characters and that was simply because I did not have my Disable accessory like I thought I had. I was pretty sure that I had bought some a while back. But I find that I can get through any battle without the need of extra characters. I mean it is all well and good your character dies, but um, hey Phoenix Down, lookie all better. In my case, Arise, Full HP and with Haste one, it takes a fraction of a second longer than an instant Phoenix Down. No point in switching in new characters for some I can raise. And lookie no MP, oh wait, I'm the tank now. MP charge from damage, MP charge from dealing damage, I got all the MP I need. My tanks are never in short supply on MP.

Quickenings I find utterly useless because they are a waste of MP. Sure if I had my other characters I could go and use them with their Quickenings and go to my main pair for the rest. I could, but Quickenings are just eating MP and I can deal the type of damage I get out of Quickenings easily enough.

Now I do plan on leveling my other sorely underleveled characters, because in the future I am probably find some use for them. Or at least I feel better about dropping them in for the split second I need them. Because I unless I need them for a split second because something horrid happened, I really do not need them unless my entire party wipes. If my entire party wipes I need a better strategy, because they should not be all wiped if I was doing my job correctly.

The accessory switching and equipment switching, I do that all the time. Probably the nicest feature to have in the game. It feels a little cheap, but the other games allowed you to do it too. Though I think they made you use up a turn for it. Here there is no penalty for switching. During boss fights I will switch to sleep immune or something else that is painfully annoying, because as you said. What the point in a LP or Exp bonus if you are not alive to enjoy it?

I can agree on most of your points. And I will not disagree with leveling your entire, but for the story part of the game it is not a requirement. And for just about every single mark, it is not needed. There has only be two marks that has given me any amount of trouble where I was worried about living. They were both VII Rank marks, so they are naturally rough customers.

Personally I need some better equipment, only one of my guys has a better armor and none of them have a better sword other the Save the Queen. Equipment makes the character, when you have all of the LP and the leveled needed, the least factor is your equipment. Better gear makes you a stronger character. Other than you just need the wits about you to be able to adapt to the changing environment.

[Georg Prime]

Definitely a helpful guide.

Most of it i certainly agree with other than a few points like Quickenings. They are useful at the beginning, but as time goes on you really use them less and less. I mean when your characters are doing damage in the thousands with normal attacks, quickenings are just a waste of time and a waste of MP. The only time i use them is when i get an enemy really low on HP and want to finish them off quickly because often enemies will restore their HP when it is low enough or use critical HP attacks. Even then, unless im getting like a 12+ chain im usually better off attacking. 18 is the highest i've gotten so far and that did some good damage and yes i haved one 4 different sets but even on a lot of bosses that still does crap damage and just drains your MP.

I mean i see why its helpful to have all your characters leveled up equally. I am one who is a victim of having severly underleveled characters. But honestly i haven't really had any need for them at all thus far in the game. I don't think its completely neccesary, i realize that it would make battles easier but you don't really need to do it. I'm more than likely going to level than up more just to do it, and maybe i'll get some use out of them but my active team for the most part is really all i need.

Yeah i fall victim to the accessory thing sometimes. Not everyone has their accessorys leveled up as well as others, so sometimes i'll be in a little trouble but only on certain bosses does it become a really big problem. I plan on leveling those up more so i can have all the immunity things equipped on whoever i want.

I agree with Andromeda about the importance of equipment. I just was on a boss i was having a lot of trouble fighting and i upgraded everyone's equipment one level (Basch's two levels) and suddenly the boss fight has turned around considerably. Just needed some new armor and a better selection of healing items and the problem was solved.

[Merlin]

I think Andro contradicted himself in his line about equipment... but I know what he was talking about. Like I said in the beginning, it isn't a guide on how to beat any boss or how to go through the story. Not all the information is useful at any given time. Quickenings, for instance, are useless on highlevel monsters since it uses all your MP and the damn thing still has thousands-->millions HP left. Even if you do a BlackHole for 60k, its still a lot. ^_^ Quickenings are a way of killing certain Bosses/Marks in a speedy fashion or stoping a Boss/Mark from regaining his entire Health Bar. Its really situational. I don't know about you, but I don't feel like fighting the King Bomb and having him spam his HP back up. He does it only so many times, but how long will that take? Kill King Bomb in 1 minute... or Kill King Bomb in 10 minutes.. or maybe longer depending on your level. That's not even including the fact that he could wipe my whole party in less than a minute. Sure I could spend hours leveling up... or I could just use Quickenings and nail his ass to the wall. I think the choice is clear...

One thing I will point out is that if you wish to play the game in a 'completionist' fashion, you will never obtain everything unless:

Spoiler: you master Quickenings and have all of your characters leveled to at least 50. You are rewarded for pulling off a Black Hole and for having all of your characters at least that level, so yeah... if you're just blowing through the story it might not be useful to you, but if you want to beat the game completely, you definately should put some time in it. The more you use Quickenings, the more likely you can pull off a Black Hole... right?

Threw that in a tag in case you want to figure it out on your own... but yeah... there's a very good alterior motive behind my suggestion to level all your characters and use Quickenings. It will help you out more than you realize.. haha.

In any case, that does give me an idea for a strategy, based off a tip Andro put in his post. I am going to reorganize some stuff as well to make the guide more useful depending on what you are doing. I'll probably work on it tonight, since I have to go to work now. I'll clean up the organization and put notes on what stuff is useful for. Thanks for the advice. ^_^

[tarshil]

Very good advice, and i have done most of it and even took it one twist further. I was fighting Exodus, and he has this move that pretty much wipes out all of my characters in one hit. So what i did was equip Vaan with the bubbly belt or whatever it is, kept his health up no matter what, and when Exodus went to use that move, i took everybody else out of the party and it only hit him. then i put everybody back in the party and healed vaan, and started attacking again.

i know this sounds cheap, but it is an effective tactic. just remember, if their name is not red, you can take them out of battle with out having to replace them.

[Merlin]

Getting them 'cleared' of red status isn't always easy, unless you do it the dirty way. Tell your characters to Flee and they cancel all current action. This way, only the person being targeted by the enemy is unable to leave the party. Force the monster to attack the one you want to stay in, Flee, and bail your party members. Then just tell the one left to attack. Voila.

Of course, you could also cancel their gambits... but if they are attacking, they are still doing a consistent action.

[Georg Prime]

I've done that same thing...usually it's not with big attacks but status ailments. I agree it is kinda cheap, but hey doesnt mean you can't do it . I first found that tactic very effective while fighting the Elder Wyrm. Yup using the flee techinque is the way to go.

[tarshil]

when i took my characters out of battle they were attacking and everything. at the top of the menu when you go in to party is says you can't remove someone who is being targeted. the flee takes too long and frees everyone up to be hit.

[Merlin]

Decoy is such a beautiful spell. The one being 'targeted' should be the one you are leaving in the party. Making that happen is amazingly easy. As for Flee, it doesn't take long.. about 3 seconds for your characters to stop. That is, unless you fart around before switching to the menu and they resume using gambits. Its all about timing, and that is something one has to obtain through practice... or like I said, turn their Gambits off. You have infinite time in menus, unless you changed the battle mode.

[david_pickett_84]

Great explanation. FFXII is such a massive game, it seems that it takes more brains than grunt to get through this game.

[ksdsdf]

I've never ever used the quickening for a real battle - unless i can't use Magics.
At the late of the game, I use my magics ( based on elements) to damage foes.
You can deal massive damage if you notice the elements of your foes ( remember to dispel, or lower their magic defense)
With mods that don't have any weak element, I use the non- element spells, status spells ( Slow and Sap are the spell that I use the most)