Skills

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Skills

Postby Thoul » Wed Oct 14, '09, 7:19 pm

In Phantasy Star IV, every character has a list of skills they learn. They include attacks, magic spells, healing moves, and more. What skills do you find the most and least useful?

For me, most of the attacking skills are the best. Rune, Chaz, Wren, and Demi all have a great set of skills with many kinds of attacks. I start with the most powerful and work my way down their lists in the boss fights. Barrier is also great.

I never really use many of Rika. Gryz, or Hahn's skills, though. Rika is usually on healing/shifting duty for me, though Double Slash does come in handy.
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Re: Skills

Postby Wolf Bird » Wed Oct 14, '09, 8:06 pm

I'm with you, Thoul. I abused skills with Rune, Kyra, Chaz, Wren and Demi. Also Raja during some of those boss fights (read: St. Fire...I think that's the name, I haven't played PSIV in forever.) I was more moderate with Alys, Hahn and Rika, and rarely touched Gryz'.

Medical Power=most awesome win ever.
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Re: Skills

Postby Erpy » Sat Oct 31, '09, 8:27 pm

I'm personally what people would call a mana-miser, meaning I hate wasting TP/MP in RPGs unless there are quick & easy ways to restore it. I found myself using skills in PS4 a lot, since using one didn't diminish the use of others.

Personal favorites:

Barrier: Not so much favorite, but rather absolutely necessary in order to avoid ridiculous level grinds against later bosses and later enemies who just love to slam your party with multi-hitting skills. It's literally the difference between a balanced boss fight and a one-sided beatdown in the bad guy's favor.
Crosscut/Doubleslash: There's nothing not to like about these ones. You get them early, you get a big stock of them, they get better as you get better weapons, get stronger as you gain levels and do more damage when a power-up spell is in effect. And I believe they're subject to critical hits too.
Efess: Great holy damage against everything. Sure, it's crap against non-evil enemies, but those become rare as the game goes on. Saved from the "cool-but-limited"-heap by the fact that Rune actually gets a respectable amount of charges. Better than Legeon in most cases.
Medice: A truckload of charges of a spell that heals like a trimate for humanoid and android alike. Great skill to keep you going during long dungeon treks or give Wren enough breathing room (so to speak) to inflict pain on magic using bosses.


Skills I like to use a lot:

Airslash/Disrupt: Great if you think it'll only take a physical hit to kill the opposing party. Disrupt is particularly good because you get the thunderclaw and silver tusk pretty early in the game, turning it into a killer move for randoms. It helps that they're useless in boss fights too, since it means you can spam them freely until the end of the dungeon.
Eliminate: Instant Death moves are pretty good in PS4 due to their overall reliability, but Eliminate is particularly good because Rika usually gets her turn before anybody else, meaning one enemy is usually out of the fight before it has even started.
Negatis: Kills everything with surprisingly high accuracy. Excellent if you can't be bothered to fight a battle the honorable way.
Tandle: The only lightning-elemental attack in the game (sans Rika equipped with a thunderclaw) and while in the end you actually end up with less charges than Efess and due to the absence of robotic bosses, there's never a boss fight where you can abuse it, it's dreadfully effective against robotic randoms.

Skills I don't like very much:

Just about every freeze move, due to the fact that enemies (like party members) can wake up before the next round starts when lots of other skills can usually shut an enemy up permanently.

Skills that I think are nice, but not great: (i.e: are somewhat overrated in my opinion)

Positron Bolt: This one's in the nice-but-limited group. Sure, it hurts a lot, but you only get a small stock of it, even near the end of the game unless you grind more than a rabbit on aphrodisiacs.
Legeon: Rune's ultimate attack looks and sounds really cool, but unlike the three skills you get before it, it doesn't excel in anything. Against dark enemies, Efess is better. Against droids, Tandle is stronger. Against non-bosses, Negatis is usually just as reliable to quickly end the fight, if not more reliable.
Ataraxia: This is just for me because I'm a mana-miser. However, I hardly ever truly needed to refill my tp. Raja's normal res-spell is so extremely efficient it takes forever to get to the point where you run out of tp to heal. And for attacking purposes...the dungeons where I used Raja only being Kuran and The Edge...on Kuran most techs aren't all that effective on droids and when you're crossing The Edge, most skills you have by then trump the stuff in your tech-arsenal in terms of sheer damage disposal.
Medic Power: Having a way to heal all humanoids in the party is good of course, but Medic Power only heals as much as Demi's current strength-stat, which is usually not much. Sure, it also revives all humanoids, which would be great if Demi was the HP-mastodont her master is, but for me...if I get into a situation where my entire party suffers such a severe beatdown that results in several party members being knocked out cold, Demi is usually among the ones in need of revival.
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Re: Skills

Postby SparkyIII » Fri Nov 13, '09, 5:44 am

Crosscut = win!

Doubleslash = awesome

loved vortex always.
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