FFT - Level 1 Random Reclass MBO - Part 11: UBS Lancers
8Orbonne Monastery I aka Underground Bookstore Lancer battle. Yeah, this is actually one video of just this one map. lmao.
Challenge playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbSv8zSDR9c0e87aLa76GTNS4ISZz81CT
The RNG for this fight:
11 Ramza - Time Mage
12 Crono - Wizard
11 Lenneth - Thief
12 Mitsuru - Chemist
11 Ryu - Chemist
Oh boy. Two Chemists, which you'd think is nice except for two little nuances... One is that Ryu doesn't even know Hi-Potion (I believe X-Potion isn't unnatural to expect at this point in the game). The other one is that guns are bloody expensive and instead of the superior 64 dmg guns I still have the 36 dmg ones (6x6 over 8x8 which is how the guns' attack formula works). So one of the Chemists is kinda terrible, which is why I give him Time Magic secondary for Haste. The better Chemist gets taught Steal: Helmet just because I need more money (especially after having my own stuff stolen, broken or discarded due to the GS code earlier in the challenge and especially in the last two maps).
Ramza is a Time Mage. His magic is not really satisfactory for offence in this job, so he gets Squire's skillset for Yell spam. Yell's primary target is the male Wizard, Crono, who took all the MA stack equipment to seriously wallop people... with level 1 spells! What can you do, it's the best I had.
Finally, and just as I've got used to, Lenneth was a Thief, and received Martial Arts to hurt people with her punches, bolstered by things like Twisted Headband. It took me a while to discover she had best compat against one of the Time Mages here, but when I did, she found a use better than dealing inaccurate chip damage.
The plan is kinda simple - Ramza yells the Wizard so that he gets more turns than anyone else, while everybody gets Hasted, and less potent units form a wall to ensure the Lancers are unable to attack the Wizard (he doesn't die until the last minutes of the video, so that part of the plan is successful).
Since one of the Lancers could reach my Chemist from long-range on turn 1, I got two Bolts and one punch on him, but let him go. Could've been a big mistake, as not only did the Chemist have Hi-Potion, but so did one of the Time Mages. None of them apparently had Phoenix Down, so killing one at a time would've been preferable to targeting as many as possible.
One of the Lancers received over 150 dmg from Crono - probably high Faith + good compat. Nice surprise, yet it took me a long time to kill even that Lancer because of the merciless spamming of Slow, sandbagging with blocks and Hi-Potion and all kinds of nasty crap.
It might seem like spending so much time against three living Lancer spells out your own doom, but this wasn't the case, somehow. One thing is, you can limit which units they can target and how far they can Jump by utilising walls, the ceiling and other units (including enemies) as meatshields.
There was another weird thing about the Lancers - instead of destroying the party with spears, they would often go for Throw Stone and Dash for no apparent reason. Really struggling to think what the logic behind the AI was right there.
As you can see by the video's length, it's 18 mins long and I sped the thing up 2x as per usual, which means the battle took 36 minutes long.
This was tiring as hell by the end (as you can tell by a couple screwups like having Crono target absolutely nobody with a spell) but there was also a really good consequence of spending such a long time on this map - both the Chemists were literally swimming the Chemist JP when it was over, especially the one who wasn't dying all the time. The rest got some Chemist JP via spillover, too.
Ramza was a dark horse, yet an important hero, first using Yell to give Crono an advantage in terms of turns given on the battlefield, and then restoring people's HP for free with the Healing Staff. Unsurprisingly, he unlocked the Summoner class after this.
Another very important thing to mention is that Lenneth had enough JP to learn Magic Attack UP after the fight, thanks to spillover JP from Crono.