Dakkodango Translations

Basically I am just curious how people make use of them. Namely which ones do you use, how do you progress them, and that ilk. Also posting reviews or lists of which mercenaries are best/most needed is fine.


Personally I like the ones that can primary-second as a healer in times of need. Ideally ones that will have MP left, like Knights or Priestesses. Though I suppose druids would be good to. But I haven't really used them much. For me having healers is the name of the game. If everyone in my army has a usable heal I am happy.

Mercenaries must have list:
1: Bowman(archers/Hunters mainly)
Why? Easy these fellows can take down mages left and right, and mages are dangerous. In addition it doesn't seem you get too many uniques able to use the bow well. So you kinda have to hire them. You can't make do with with Rianna, Ogram, Arawn, Octavia, Lyr, etc, like you can with the healing subgroup.
2:Knights/Priestesses/Druids
Why? Healing power ftw. You can't have too many healers. However, at least some of them should be able to do damage.
3:Everyone else
Why? They have their uses, so I swap the others in and out as needed. Fencers can be handy to run down mages(but are frail and might get swatted before they get there). Magic Damage dealers are useful for obvious reasons. Soldiers are good tanks. Really, I think just about all the mercenaries have a use of some kind. Except Paladins... Paladins suck(joking, they can be handy, but a pure fighter or mage would be better in most cases in my opinion).

I went through the bonus tower with Arawn, Riannon, Ogam, Morgan, and 4 archers. For me, archers are the best offensive units in the game... when buffed with their hit and attack speed abilities, they massacre everything. They can even take several physical/magical hits and live, unlike all the magic classes (which nuke even better, but the enemy has archers too )... so if Arawn fails to hold aggro, they aren't wiped out immediately.

Well it looks like Bowman are in agreement here!

I haven't really decided which I like best. I really only need them for the mages. So I have been playing around to see which ones I prefer.

I think the only Mercs I have not used are Seer and Musician... I wonder if they are worth unlocking. Seers will probably become unlocked as a natural course(eventually), however, Musician requires 20 levels of Paladin. That I normally don't have.



I haven't really used much use of Job Changing so far. The stat increases seem to be small. What is it, an increase of 1 for every 100 in a stat?

Also does anyone know the growth rates on the characters and mercenaries? Are they set, are they random? or what? Just wondering how bad you can be RNG screwed in this game. Have had some 'fond' memories of that in Fire Emblem .

Shun wrote:
I think the only Mercs I have not used are Seer and Musician... I wonder if they are worth unlocking. Seers will probably become unlocked as a natural course(eventually), however, Musician requires 20 levels of Paladin. That I normally don't have.
I haven't really used much use of Job Changing so far. The stat increases seem to be small. What is it, an increase of 1 for every 100 in a stat?
Also does anyone know the growth rates on the characters and mercenaries? Are they set, are they random? or what? Just wondering how bad you can be RNG screwed in this game. Have had some 'fond' memories of that in Fire Emblem .

-Minstrel is the best class (same as Taliesin), if you want easymode battles.
-In Job Changing you keep all the skills of your previous class, so you can build a multi-proficient character.
-Stat growth rates are set afaik. And they're about same if not exactly the same on mercs and main characters.

Phlebas wrote:

Shun wrote:
I think the only Mercs I have not used are Seer and Musician... I wonder if they are worth unlocking. Seers will probably become unlocked as a natural course(eventually), however, Musician requires 20 levels of Paladin. That I normally don't have.
I haven't really used much use of Job Changing so far. The stat increases seem to be small. What is it, an increase of 1 for every 100 in a stat?
Also does anyone know the growth rates on the characters and mercenaries? Are they set, are they random? or what? Just wondering how bad you can be RNG screwed in this game. Have had some 'fond' memories of that in Fire Emblem .

-Minstrel is the best class (same as Taliesin), if you want easymode battles.
-In Job Changing you keep all the skills of your previous class, so you can build a multi-proficient character.
-Stat growth rates are set afaik. And they're about same if not exactly the same on mercs and main characters.

Just a few things I have noticed:
- Musicians in my term would probably be the better class as opposed to Minstrel, although it alone does not have any advantages. (From having both a musician and a minstrel, I have noticed that their skills and stats are almost the exact mirrors of each other, meaning, they are only different by gender) But the key of a Musician's advantage over a Minstrel is in its skill build from job changing, Both could achieve a reasonable degree of spellcasting, but since they are offensive archers by nature, the most important loophole is in healing magic and the archer subclass skill carryover. Currently, my Minstrel's highest healing ability is only feel-good heal, a carryover from knight, but the Musician's highest heal is incredible heal, a carryover only possible with priestess or seer. Where with the archer abilities, Musician gain rapid-shoot (half cooldown speed) where Minstrel gets a relatively less useful +attack ability.
Given all else equal, a well oriented musician have a foot in the lead to minstrel. (Although it requires alot of training)
- Mercs are better (sadly, in my opinion) to main characters, and if given enough training time, mercs could outclass characters (with the exception of arawn and riannon, since their attribute are unique and arawn have unique abilities). Currently, after 3 job changes (Which I still dont know why I bothered) post lvl 30, my Minstrel and Musician have nearly 1.5x more with each stat in a comparison to the average of character. Appearantly, the job change not only change the initial stat of the character, but also seems to affect long term growth, I havnt figured out how much yet.
In other words, if you have enough time, it seems possible to have a team of mercs more useful than the characters (Although it is a huuuuuge pain to do so.) When you toss the torcs/knitted muffler into the equation, you can have units with insane abilities and stats to get you through the harder difficulties.
On a side note, paladin is quite useful when you incorporate job change, with the higher magic capabilities, it can easily outclass it's counterpart, the knight, which is limited to low lvl heals or spells it doesnt have the mp to use.

Thanks for the tip about the mercenary skills in that other thread Mauzel.

I was thinking about dual classing a level 30 Priestess into a Paladin, since the job description says casting time for paladins are faster.
Obviously a faster cast rate (like Riannon) is worth gold for any healer, but Paladins will have way lower mana and probably much worse mana regeneration than a pure priestess. Anyone knows if this build viable if I just want a pure healer?

DFT wrote:Thanks for the tip about the mercenary skills in that other thread Mauzel.

I was thinking about dual classing a level 30 Priestess into a Paladin, since the job description says casting time for paladins are faster.
Obviously a faster cast rate (like Riannon) is worth gold for any healer, but Paladins will have way lower mana and probably much worse mana regeneration than a pure priestess. Anyone knows if this build viable if I just want a pure healer?

There is a solution for either one of the character. Poet bracelet for the Paladin (Regen MP even while performing an action), or Demon bracelet for the Priestess (Gives Paladin's Quick Cast ability). The rest depends on taste, if anything else. I do recommend the Priestess/Seer with the Demon Bracelet, since I generally use an 2-5 Ranged Merc (Minstrel/Musician/Hunter/Archer) in my team with 1 healer and almost all backups, I am rarely troubled by physical damage from enemy archer, since my archers could quickly take them out, while enemy mages have longer reach with some high lvl AOEs. The extra MP regen also serve as a strong magic def, as well as I dont have to heal my team of archers frequently since AOE heals are generally quite nice for a group of identical range of attack units.
If you have a varied unit group that does not have a strong ranged backing to take out those pesky archers, but focus on sniping out the mages (ie. 1-2 archer and a mixture of close range units/tankers...in other words, archers alone are not sufficient to stop enemy advances... such as the main character group) A paladin may be useful in combat purely for the extra defense, but it must be a spear paladin for it to be useful, since you get 1.5-2x the amount of damage when gettin hit while casting a spell.
But in comparison, get a Seer if you can, itself is a skill mix of Paladin and Priestess, quite useful. And in comparison you will probably like a pure healer. Keep a healing paladin around, but only as an supporting/emergency healer if possible.


Here is a basic example of the skill mix I use, just for your reference (In other words, the Merc only team I generally use. You can probably see that the way I trained the mercs tend to follow the unlocking sequence, since they are pretty much the mercs I started the game with. Wasted over 5 hrs of game time to get decent sounding names with corresponding elements... *sigh*):
Sol (Fire) - Minstrel: Mix of Knight (L20), Magician (L30), Hunter (L20), Minstrel (Continuing on)
Aurora (Water) - Musician: Mix of Archer (L20), Priestess (L30), Paladin (L20), Musician (Continuing on)
Nirvana (Earth) - Seer: Mix of Priestess (L20), Seer (Continuing on) <- pointless to go the Paladin path since seer covers all the useful skills.
Minerva (Wind) - Paladin: Mix of Fencer (L30), Paladin (Continuing on) <- Mostly used for tanking, if there is ever a need to do so.
Castor (Fire) - Hunter: Mix of Knight (L20), Hunter (Continuing on)
Pollox (Water) - Hunter: Mix of Knight (L20), Hunter (Continuing on)

The hunters is mostly for increasing firepower of arrows. As you can see, my main healer/mage is my Seer, with key supporting healers as my Musician and my Minstrel, which also doubles as attackers. Minstrel/Musician generally have quite a bit of MP growth because of their music capabilities, although not as strong as the usual pure archer/hunters, Minstrel/Musician can be used as a very nice multi-proficient character to have around. In my case, Minstrel/Musician could be used as mob clearer with AOE magic spells while at the same time could do 1v1 attacks when in case of bosses.

Mauzel wrote:Just a few things I have noticed:
- Musicians in my term would probably be the better class as opposed to Minstrel, although it alone does not have any advantages. (From having both a musician and a minstrel, I have noticed that their skills and stats are almost the exact mirrors of each other, meaning, they are only different by gender) But the key of a Musician's advantage over a Minstrel is in its skill build from job changing, Both could achieve a reasonable degree of spellcasting, but since they are offensive archers by nature, the most important loophole is in healing magic and the archer subclass skill carryover. Currently, my Minstrel's highest healing ability is only feel-good heal, a carryover from knight, but the Musician's highest heal is incredible heal, a carryover only possible with priestess or seer. Where with the archer abilities, Musician gain rapid-shoot (half cooldown speed) where Minstrel gets a relatively less useful +attack ability.
Given all else equal, a well oriented musician have a foot in the lead to minstrel. (Although it requires alot of training)
- Mercs are better (sadly, in my opinion) to main characters, and if given enough training time, mercs could outclass characters (with the exception of arawn and riannon, since their attribute are unique and arawn have unique abilities). Currently, after 3 job changes (Which I still dont know why I bothered) post lvl 30, my Minstrel and Musician have nearly 1.5x more with each stat in a comparison to the average of character. Appearantly, the job change not only change the initial stat of the character, but also seems to affect long term growth, I havnt figured out how much yet.
In other words, if you have enough time, it seems possible to have a team of mercs more useful than the characters (Although it is a huuuuuge pain to do so.) When you toss the torcs/knitted muffler into the equation, you can have units with insane abilities and stats to get you through the harder difficulties.
On a side note, paladin is quite useful when you incorporate job change, with the higher magic capabilities, it can easily outclass it's counterpart, the knight, which is limited to low lvl heals or spells it doesnt have the mp to use.

I agree that Musician is better than Minstrel, but for different reasons altogether. Minstrel's can get incredible heal, it just requires taking a Knight to 50 first. However, the only real direct advantage between musician and minstrel, is the class special: Musicians get debuff immunity where Minstrels get extra mp regen.

Looking deeper, at the male merc classes vs the female merc classes, there are a few other things worth noting:

Skills not available to male mercs:
Concentrate (Archer level 1), gives +hit (accuracy)
Abandonment (Fencer level 15) gives +avoidance (evasion).
These are the two combat stats that have no other way to buff. No spells can affect avoidance and accuracy, only those two skills, and they're not available to male mercs.

Prediction (Fencer level 1): negates the next attack if it is physical
Magic Prediction (Fencer level 10): negates the next attack if it is magic
Go-no-sen (Fencer level 22): auto counter-attack
Cancel All (Priestess/Seer Level 25): dispel
Movement Speed Down (Priestess/Seer Level 15): reduces target's movement speed
Attack Speed Down (Priestess/Seer Level 15): reduces target's attack speed
Physical Shield (Priestess/Seer level 5): Increases defense
Magic Shield (Priestess/Seer level 5): Increases RGS (does not seem to affect healing, just magic defense)
Stardust (Seer level 29): slow-casting Star attack
Meteor (Seer level 50): massive star attack

Skills not available to female mercs:
Nature's Teachings (hunter level 1): doubles effectiveness of consumables
Survival (Hunter level 10): instant self-heal
Insult (Soldier level 1): taunt
Abusive Language (Soldier level 15): area effect taunt
Bellow (Soldier level 22): alert all enemies to come after you (happens eventually on its own)
Movement Speed Up (Magician/Druid level 15): while female mercs can use Full Speed (Archer, level 20) on themselves, they cannot buff other people's movement speed.
Curse (Druid level 25): small AE mp drain (up to 50% of target's remaining power)
Criticality (Druid level 50): massive darkness attack

In addition, male mercs (via magician/druid) can learn all 4 sets of elemental attacks (3 each), where female mercs can only learn the attacks for their elemental affinity (wind, earth, fire, water).

Overall, my female mercs out-shine my male mercs in almost every way, but male mercs are useful enough to bring along one or two of them.

For mercs with every possible skill, then you need the following:
Male Mercs: Hunter 20, Soldier 22, Knight 50, Druid 50, Minstrel 50
Female Mercs: Archer 20, Fencer 22, Paladin 20, Seer 50, Musician 50

note:
Druid's do not get Knight spells (but they probably should, otherwise the only heal they get is Blessed Drops)
Seer's get elemental attack spells like Paladins, but they do not get Blessed Drops nor Warp.

For me I really do not care which I use a musician or minstrel though having debuf immunity is extremely nice. My big love of the minstrel is how their songs stack and are instant. This means in the last battle when I was fighting the two mage type and one physical type nukers I would switch my four mercs from
"Arawn in the Dark" to "Lovers' Serenade" and back thereby almost making me imune to the effects of the attacks. I was taking the nuking attacks with 11k defence and 11k mdef. The problem I had was when the melee enemies closed in. When that happened I just took Arawn and warped him in place of a magic nuker and warped him back in place of one of the melee attakers and then killed a magic nuker. This ment that I pretty much no longer had to use "Lovers' Serenade" at all and then I just did it again with the other Magic nuker. I did this on Imposible difficulty so yes this is probably the best way to beat that battle. though it mite be worth it to use a couple of mage type attacks to kill the melee guys switching to "Elves' Toccata" right they are launched.

You just gotta love full bow parties in battle... Nothing seems so hard...;p