FF The 4 Heroes of Light - Low Level Game Part 9: Mammon
5http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=7E52E2031D6AB0D6
Playlist of the challenge, updated each new video. See the description of the first video for general info and details on this run.
With this we tackle the second half of the game. The enemies get considerably stronger, the shops get new equipment and we finally have a party of four, which means no more experience will be absorbed by guest characters. Does this make the second half easy? I think not.
I initially wanted to begin with fighting Belphegor to get the ultimate white magic spell Lux first but there was one tiny problem - Belphegor heals himself with Cura, and his attacks put you to sleep. While I can get him to critical health just fine, one character has to solo the end of the battle to reduce the experience gain by 75% (it's not split in this game and everyone gets the same number when the battle ends, so you need to kill all but one character for the purpose of a low level game).
This is why I left Belphegor for later (until I would get better means of dealing damage), and decided to do the Invidia sequence of the story instead.
Mammon isn't hard at all if you set yourself up properly. She has no offensive tricks besides a regular ice-elemental attack and ice magic, meaning with some Ice Shields and Elementalist's Mysterio we can reduce all physical attacks to 1 and all magic to 0.
Brandt, now at lv. 1, will be the battle's survivor, so he gets a Water Cape in addition to that. This gives him natural 100% resistance and after Mysterio is used it turns into absorption instead. Everybody else gets Ribbons, because Mammon may use Confuse and Poison. We have higher defences than attack so Confuse isn't a terrible problem, and Poison is a joke and nothing to fret over.
Players in a normal game will struggle to deal any damage to the boss. She has some incredible defences instead, and if a normal party can't strike through them, a low level party won't penetrate them either. This is why we use 3 Salve-maker who can deal fixed 160 damage per each Poison Pill'd X-Potion.
Pay attention to my equipment at the start of the video. I unequipped people's armour, which is pretty much the only piece of equipment that provides vital defence and magic defence boosts. This is to ensure that when the boss is about to die, I can easily get the naked people to die by not renewing Mysterio at the appropriate moment, leaving Brandt solo to finish off the boss (he is properly equipped).
Players can also steal a Claustrom rod from the boss, which does happen to be the best rod available without any raids of the bonus towers. However, I already have a Darkness Staff powered up to +9 and that one's only 1 point below Claustrom in effectiveness, so I decided against pillaging the rare rod. I doubt I'll be using more than one mage character at any time to make use of it, too.
Now to decide which town I'll be liberating next... Having to finish each battle solo at this point really makes it a lot more difficult for most of the bosses, but I have plenty ideas in mind.