Final Fantasy Brave Exvius

[TK_SVT]

I'm fully F2P and wasn't even trying for anything right now. Pulled a Yan on my lone pull for the day. (The 1/2 price daily.) I've actually got a fairly formidable team that has been assembled from free and 1/2 price dailies over the past few months. I've maxed a bunch of them out with cactuars. (Yan will have to wait for more cactaurs, right now...) But my bigger problem is that I don't have the gear to really equip them. Other than collecting a trust moogle when I can, I don't TMR farm. I've kind of reached a point that it almost feels like I'd have to do that to progress much more.

 

[TK_SVT]

The good thing is that the game is pretty generous with moogles now, so you can still slowly build TMR through moogles if you don't want to farm at all. Should be able to get 4x5% from expeditions, 8x1% from weekend quests, and 1x10% from arena every month at least. Usually there will be at least another 10% from the monthly login rewards. I tend to only farm when I have 4-5 of the same unit and farm them when I'm doing something else like watching TV or reading a book.

Have you done many of the trials, and where are you on the story? Some of the best equipment can be from the trials, and Apocalypse is a good sword you can get from completing the Aurora keys. I can add you to my friend list if needed.

Yep, I've been grabbing the 10% monthly arena moogle, and the weekend quest moogles. (Though I don't know where you get 8 from, unless you're meaning monthly, in which case, yes.) I try for the 5% expedition ones, though I seem to be unlucky in that I don't always have the right character for those, or they fail. I have pretty good summoning luck. I have _TERRIBAD_ expedition luck. I've had 99% expeditions fail before. I'm waiting for a 100% one to. With Final Fantasy math, I'm sure it's possible for me.

I've managed to survive the ADV trials, but so far, PRO will still kick my butt across the board.

I have been nursing the story along really slowly, mining it for lapis only when I need it. And, honestly, the game is pretty generous with lapis from other methods, so I haven't pursued story in quite some time. I'm nearing the end of Olderion. At this point, if I do a couple story missions, I usually take just one strong character as a bodyguard, and a few to level up, because if I assemble a good party, all the enemies will die as soon as my team looks at them.

My arena party currently consists of:
A really poorly equipped Warrior of Light
A decent Ashe
A fairly good Tidus with dual wield
A decent Amelia (natural dual wield guns)
A decent Ayaka (which isn't saying much, as I don't think it is even possible to have a lousy Ayaka...)

And, depending on things banned, I keep equipped to swap in:
A decent Zyrus

These guys are currently levelled, but probably not enhanced, and definitely not equipped:
Ace
Agrias
Bran
Chizuru
Nyx
Orlandeau
Rikku
Veritas of Earth
Veritas of Flame
Veritas of Heavens
Veritas of Water
Yan (soon, as it's cactaurs this weekend)

And a couple healers that are now retired since I somehow got Ayaka:
Luka
Refia

It was pretty funny. When Ayaka was introduced, I went after her with all the summons I had at the time, as I didn't have any healers. Came up with Refia. But just got a random Ayaka on one of the free summons just before she went back on banner recently.

 

[TK_SVT]

You should take that Orlandu off the bench. With his enhancements he is one of the top damage dealers in the game right now.

If you are struggling with content, are you breaking? Your Warrior of Light's breaks make a huge amount of difference.

I don't think I have the right crystals to enhance Orlandeau. I'll check it out again, though. I got a ton of them from the last vortex love thing. Maybe some are the right ones, for once.

Yeah, I keep WoL around for breaks. That arms eraser is almost always his first turn. My problem is his resistances are crap, and I don't have great defense on him, so after that point, I'm usually wasting turns reviving him or destoning or whatever. :/

 

[TK_SVT]

TK_SVT, do you have any dupes of any characters? Basically I'm looking for someone you can aoe chain with in Arena. If not, replace WoL with Veritas of the Dark when Dual Slash isn't banned. Even with crappy gear, he can do tons of damage in arena. I'd even give him dual wield over Tidus. Remember that arena gearing is separate from your other groups, so you can gear the same equipment to DV in Arena and Tidus in your regular party. On most fights, DV kills everyone who can't evade on his own by using Dual Slash as a sort of finisher. He can hit for 2k, 4k, 4k, 1k on spark/elemental chains. Even without chaining, he's bringing 4k damage, which is about the most you can do in arena without chains. Plus he heals from dark damage, so any sucker like me who uses Victoria to chain with will hate you.

I'll check out replacing WoL with VotD for arena. I've been re-examining several things based on suggestions by you guys. Thanks! I do like my now semi-geared-up Orlandu. Honestly, though, for arena fights, provided status ailments aren't banned, I have a pretty easy go. I usually break armor, hit with Amelia's ricochet STOP and the Chaos Grenade someone holds from Rikku's Pouch, and the rest is simple cleanup. I haven't kept too many dupes, but I haven't had the issues with arena.

It's the vortex raids and bosses that have tended to wipe me out, and cause a lot more difficulty than I expected. I found out why my WoL was having so many problems, too. And it was me. I never awakened "Light is with Us" and wasn't using it nearly enough. I'd been using his "Brave presence" to draw attacks, rather than "Light is with Us" to block for everyone. With it awakened +2, man, that makes a huge difference. I didn't realize that literally blocks AoE for everyone. Beating the ELT raid went from being a 8-10 turn touch-and-go barely squeak though thing, to a 3-4 turn simple job. It's amazing how much more damage you can do when you're not struggling to keep everyone alive. So that was my "Oh, DUH!" weekend moment.

 

[TK_SVT]

Speaking of multiple devices... I don't really want to go through the hassle of making and deleting a dummy facebook account when I change my phone soon. (I've never had a real facebook account, and I'm surely not starting now.) I'm on Android and moving to another Android. I suppose I could root both of them, but I'm not really sure that is a "better" solution. Is there truly no other options, though?

 

[TK_SVT]

One more question while I'm at it - I've got something like 30 character-specific Trust Moogles clogging up my inventory. Is there a fast and easy way to see who they go to, or do I need to slog through the Upgrade system and check every single character to see if they are connected to any of the Moogles?

Ugh, character management leaves a lot to be desired in this game. I need to go back through and spend some time cleaning up my character slots. But this particular question has a semi-reasonable answer. You can filter/sort by Trust Name. This will put the trust moogles for a certain trust next to the characters they go to. Except for the characters in a party -- just because. It'll also tell you what their trust is. It will also hide the actual character names, though. Also, just because. :facepalm:

 

[TK_SVT]

Yeah, really a high resist Magic Tank - Mystea/Basch or Chow - and a provoke tank are all you need to be safe for 3* Ifrit and Siren. Just need to alternate Fire and Water resist gear on your magic tank. For Ifrit, if you can hit a threshhold/turn, you don't need the provoke tank. For Siren, you'll want sleep resist on your provoke tank.

The other three slots can be whatever you feel like dragging along as long as you can fill those two. If you can do an evasion build on your provoke tank, you can very likely go without a healer at all as long as you can hit 200% fire resist for Ifrit and at least 100% water resist on Siren.

For both, be sure to inspect your friends if you're reliant on them for DPS. If they equip Fire/Water weapons, they'll heal the respective bosses on every hit for all damage done; functionally negating any damage your chaining pair does.

I took a couple runs at 3* Ifrit over the past few days... And failed miserably. I'm pretty much completely ignorant about setting up a tank... And I'm sure it doesn't help that don't have a good (5* base) tank to work with. Any advice for if you don't have Mystea, Basch, Chow, or Dark Knight Noel? I do have WoL, VoE, Cagnazzo, and probably some others, but not really magic. Am I just hosed until I pull one? My closest effort has been an ill-advised run with using dual reraise on my healer and one damage character each turn after my tank and others got incinerated.

 

[TK_SVT]

or just VoF.

:high: I didn't think of that.

I guess I could do it. I do have a VotF.

Probably faster to just give up and locate a decent magic tank friend, though. I need to clean up my friend list, anyhow. It's been full of deadwood for a good 6 months or more. What can I say? I'm pretty casual.

edit:

My suggestion would be to bring Sparkles: 394,742,104

I just set him to Basch with ~10000 HP and 200% Fire Resistance.

Oh wow! Yeah, that would do it. Thanks! I'll clear out my list and add Sparkles. (Ilwrath -- possibly ironic, given flames and fire being the topic here.)

I'm 981,445,796 if anyone wants an semi-decent Tidus for chaining. (Unless he happens to be swapped out every once in a while.)

 

[TK_SVT]

Man, went through all of my 550k raid currency summons on Saturday. Nothing has made me consider quitting this game more than the drudgery of summoning all of those units, and then all of the merging. They really need to make some QoL efficiency changes. I don't remember the other raids being this bad, maybe I had previously split the summons into 2 or 3 times or something. All in all, I think I was dealing with it for around 6 hours or so. Fortunately I was off camping with little else to do, so ended up doing it while reading. Still extremely painful. Not looking forward to doing it again for bahamut, but at least I have a reberta spear and some zyrus' TMR to look forward to.

550k raid coins? Yikes! You aren't kidding that'd be pure misery. I only (?) had like 160k. And I still hated my life for over an hour. After the summoning phase, I had over 1,000 characters. Combined them back down to only 400. And the only reason I bothered to face that was the fact that the wind storm knocked out power, leaving me trapped camping out in my own house after putting the kid to bed. For entertainment, all I had was the phone, not a ton of wireless data (no WiFi, now) and a big-ole' battery booster. So, FFBE it was. If it wasn't for that fact, I probably would have seriously considered selling all the dupes. At least you can sell 99 at a time, instead of combining only 5 in a go.

 

[TK_SVT]

Sadly I forgot for a day or two over the weekend that it was free summons... urgh. For my mental sanity I'll just assume it was going to be a Shadow and a Lani.

I did the same thing. I'm sure the summons I forgot to get on Sunday were crap.

My wife has really been wanting an Orochi. ...because dragon? (shrug) Anyhow, not enough to really dip into her summons much or lapis. But she was so excited when she got a gold this morning on her half-price. ...and it was Shine. The game does like to troll people.

 

[TK_SVT]

So what's the opinion on Shylt vs Mystea? I got a completely random Mystea a few days ago (just a couple days after complaining I didn't have any magic tanks). Looking over stats and abilities, they look almost identical?

 

[TK_SVT]

All good points. Especially status ailments vs break resistance. I remembered having a Ribbon sitting around after one of the recent Mog trades. So, I went ahead and leveled-up Shylt, and moved gear over. So Mystea had the job less than a week before being replaced. Oh well, nothing lost that can't be replaced during the next Cactaur Dunes.

 

[TK_SVT]

Right now I don't actually run a dedicated healer. I don't think I'm far enough where it makes a lot of sense. Things mostly seem either easily doable, or impossible with very little in between at the moment.

I've been playing off and on as F2P for quite a while, now. And I felt stuck in exactly that place for quite a while.

I'd recommend trying to set up some different party configurations, though. Especially one with the traditional healer. I skated by using just Ashe's Heavenly Fury (or whatever it's called) and some side healing. But definitely, Ayaka is a good enough healer that she warrants a spot, at least as an experiment on how else you can set up your party.

Also, likely an AOE Physical Tank would be useful. I'm not sure who all has that skill. I use Warrior of Light. But having someone absorb and mitigate all physical, plus having a full dedicated healer, leaves your remaining slots to focus simply on combos to inflict as much damage as possible. It's somewhat rarer that you get hit with lots of magical damage, but there are AOE Magic Tanks, too. I saw you had Shylt. I use him for that role.

But that really was a turning point for the type of things I can take on. Setting up your character roles for a battle really makes a huge difference between having a fairly easy success, and getting wiped out in a turn or two.

 

[TK_SVT]

I’m not stuck per se. Mostly it is just overload. Do I spend energy on story or on the events for example. The story isn’t challenging. I’m on the ghost ship in Olderion. I do the advanced version of the raids because it feels like I have to play perfect or use one of my few super strong friends to move up to pro (maybe the healer would help there). The bosses you can kill for a nice item all basically stomp me except the first two.

Yup, I don't know if there is really a right or wrong answer to that. Speaking for myself, I typically do the daily rewards stuff, the 1/2 price summon (and free summon if available), and at least 5 arena battles, and any special limited time storyline/raid stuff.

That nets you at least 90 lapis a day, and usually a decent bit more. (If you don't count the cost of the 1/2 price summon.)

I typically only do the regular story when I'm stuck somewhere or have extra free time. It's pretty funny how OP to the regular story you get. If I happen to have some semi-decent gear on Xon, I typically kill everyone by just mugging them for items and gil. A boss might take a slash or two.

Some people will tell you to knock out the main story first, though. Only after that to then focus on doing the daily stuff. It's really just kind of personal preference, I think.

 

[TK_SVT]

Golem is fun. Now, in theory you could build an evasion Veritas of the Earth, set it to auto, and walk away for a couple days sure. But, if you want to finish it in short order you'll need:

• A 100% physical provoke tank. Evasion handy, else really meaty with high Earth resistance. Golem will slowly murder your party otherwise.
• A Cover Magic and Cover Physical Tank unless you can hit 100% Earth resistance on all units in your party and keep it there (either via gear or buffs). The boss debuffs for Earth at 100%, so you'll likely need Bushido Freedom and careful planning to go the gear/buffs route. This is absolutely necessary because both the AOE Magic and Physical attack deal Earth Damage (why Evasion VoE can just sit back and chip away the boss for hours - they just heal him and he dodges all the others).
• Golem also debuffs all stats, so Stat Debuff Resistance is handy to get things done fast.
• Weak to Air - Tornado chainers for the win.

Note that the boss opens with his AOE Magic attack. So you'll want magic cover/100% earth resistance up at the start. You won't need your provoke until Turn 2.

A Cover Magic and a Cover Physical Tank? How does that work? Does that have to be on same character? When I tried to combine WoL and Shylt on a team, that didn't seem to work out well for me. I got slaughtered. It seemed like only one AOE cover was taking effect per turn. And, with my luck, it was often the wrong one for the big attack. (WoL would step up before a Magic, which does nothing, and vice-versa.) Is there a trick to it?

 

[TK_SVT]

Yeah, as a pretty decidedly casual player, I'm not sure 7* really has an advantage for me, yet. I made a 7* Lightning, Dark Fina, and Dark Knight Cecil. I had the characters sitting around, so why not? I don't have enough cactaurs to go to 120 level on any of them, but they're all above 110, at least. But honestly, even at 7* they seem to be a bit of niche players, all three of them. Lightning is probably the only one with a fairly sound role in what I'd consider my primary squad, and even then, I might be using her more for novelty of change than actual added usefulness.

Before doing that, I spent a few EX summons I had sitting around in my inventory forever, hoping to get a 2nd Orlandeau, but that never works. He's still trapped at 6* for me. I did get a Pure Summoner Rydia, though, which I had wanted ages ago, and then forgotten about. So not a total loss, I guess. Another useful alt.

 

[TK_SVT]

In my experience, I've had pretty good luck getting rainbows from EX tickets. Now which rainbows I get is much more of a luck of the draw. I think generally my expectation of Ex tickets is so low that any rainbow coming out of it is a plus

Yeah, exactly.

I've found PS Rydia to be one of those really useful units for normal mission clears. Any time I have an evoke an esper type of mission she's in the party. She can also help out as a healer, or Tornado chainer.

Once again, reading my mind. Esper summon missions. Plus some side healing is never a bad thing, and not entirely useless on chaining, though, really, I need to work on getting better gear for magic and elemental chaining. For the most part I still just try to chop up everything.

For 7*, in most cases you should get most of the key abilities around lvl 110, so you should be fine in that department. Probably only go for lvl 120 on units you will use often, or if you have too many cactuars laying around.

Yeah, I read that, too, which was why I stopped there. (And I ran dreadfully low on cactaurs, which surprised me.)

For Dark Fina can also use her to chain Tornado, or some of her other 7* abilities if you have others on your friends list. For now I would expect her to be pretty useful for trials where you need to do magic damage instead of physical damage.

In hindsight, I think you're right, and I just need to gear her up better. My magical gear is... primitive, at best.

 

[TK_SVT]

I want a second Ang. I know it's a bad idea (11 4* tickets, 1 3*, 30k lapis). Finishers are eh and I don't have the fleet of STMRs to back him up. Still. However I expect a time limited banner at the end of this month, guessing it's gonna be SoM or another random one. If it's SoM I need everything I can get, since I already have a Randi.

Yeah, I had a single Ang, and a single Yun, and a bunch (~50) of 3* tickets I forget about. But, anyhow, after burning through a bunch of those, I still have a single Ang, a single Yun... But also two Chows? Can't say that was the outcome I expected. But I'll take it! I now have the 7* good boy.

 

[TK_SVT]

I am now at 15 10+1's without a 5*,Gumi really needs to rework those algorithms. :/

Eeesh, yeah, that is not a good ratio at all! 150 3* summons and 15 4* summons with absolutely no 5*'s obtained? That's absurdly bad.

---

On the other side, on my 1/2 price daily I got an Ignacio. Now debating if it's worth doing the Step-Up to try to get a 2nd.

 

[TK_SVT]

It took me until my 10th 10+1 to get a 5*. As with most things in this game, it's because I stopped even hoping to get it and it became pure habit. That's just how RNG seems to work for me.

2G, 9B for me.

I'm still just really happy about my luck with the step-up. I am annoyed at how awful Item world has been. It needs a no-dupe enchantment rule and a guaranteed (at least one) 10% or above on the last two floors. I saw my first rare in three item worlds this round through. Got 30% ATK on my Sun Breaker... If I had gotten the rare on it, it would have been that by default. Ran that Bow alone probably 15-20 times. At first I loved Item World, but with how awful rates are it just feels like another RNG grind. I'm in the camp where 20% of the stat I'm looking for is good...

Agreed on both counts. I tend to have pretty good luck at summons, and I tend to think that is because I'm ultra-minnow, and very rarely ever use more than a single 10+1 or maybe 15 tickets at a time. Every now and then I'll do a step-up if it is fairly cheap and looks like good odds to get me something useful.

I have pretty much given up on Item World. I can't imagine my frustration if I tried grinding the same item like 20 times. I'll usually run something once or twice to get a little boost on it, but then kind of shrug and say whatever. I have a few items with nearly useless stats on them now, just because I wanted it to have something and gave up before getting something useful. Hooray! That auto-defense boost or MAG 10% was exactly what my high atk sword needed. That was worth the boredom of tapping through 10 floors. (sigh)

 

[TK_SVT]

Item world doesn't really bother me,admittedly my fully potted 7* Olive can solo the first 7-8 floors so that may color my opinion a little. :bigdumbgrin:

Well, it's definitely easy fights. I don't bother to do anything except tap names until floor 7 or 8, when I actually finally use a couple skills or magic. But still, it ends up being a good 5-10 minutes total or so of me basically tapping next and selecting nearly useless enhancements for whatever item I've chosen this time. Do I want 1% atk, 5% HP, or 5% DEF? Or just keep the 3% atk, auto-def boost lv.1, and 5% MP I've already assigned from the first 5 floors? What an embarrassment of riches floor 6 has presented, how will I choose? And think, just 4 more floors to go.

I'll sometimes run it to wind down at the end of the day before going to bed or something, but even then, I can't help but think I'd rather be playing something else.

 

[TK_SVT]

Yup, I got 11 golds off the 10+1 all 4*+ only summon, too.

But I did get a 2nd PS Rydia (for some reason I've always liked having a summoner, and she chains well with my Dark Fina that I've had forever) and a 2nd Ignacio (don't know what I'll do with him, but bonus, I guess.) off the various other free 10+1's recently, though, so I guess that used up my luck for a while.

 

[TK_SVT]

PSA, remember to complete the world revisit quests, I think they end on 2/29 or something like that.

...? That's a lot of easy lapis that I never realized existed.
The hardest part is finding the sites. Hell if I remember where Wolfsfang Peak is. We need a button to just to go the quest location.

Edit: I wrote that before really looking. It's not as bad as I first thought. They go in order on the map.

 

[TK_SVT]

Well it's just all last missions, plus all three esper fights.

Yep, it was just the first two continents of the map. I initially thought they were scattered randomly all over Lapis. That would have been a pain. But it wasn't the case.

How did everyone's 10k summon go? Mine was ok I guess 5th LM Fina, 3rd Aurora Fry, 2nd/3rd Regina, 3rd/4th Summer Fid, 1st AK Rain, 1st Dressy Aileen, 3rd OK Refia, 3rd Reerta, 2nd Aloha Lasswell. Getting closer to some STMRs is never bad, probably happiest about the Aloha Lasswell, since it's a good TMR to have an extra copy of.

Alright, I think. I'm F2P and don't really grind much on it, just play when I have a few minutes to clear my brain. Just got the 11 rainbows. Got:

1st palom & porom
2nd rivera
1st circe
3rd wol bartz
1st awol
1st crown prince noctis
2nd high seraph ultima
2nd machina
3rd ignis
3rd rinoa
2nd vincent

Awakened Warrior of Light and Crown Prince Noctis seem popular. Might use a UoC to get a 2nd or see if I could get a crystal of one or both of them to go 7*. And I still use AMoE chains a lot, so that 2nd Machina could be useful. No reason not to throw another chainer in the potential mix. Hopefully there's something else I've overlooked, as well. And getting closer to STMRs is never a bad thing.

I'm probably behind current on a lot of things. But I have a strong enough party that I haven't really pushed for much of anything. I don't seem to have a single glaring need for the stuff I've fought. I know I don't have the gear for top tier foes -- they simply overpower my party everywhere. But, for as little time as I've put in, I've just done the events, lately. Honestly, I don't know what I'd need most to get more current at this point. lol