Wild Arms: XF

[Dark Holy Elf]

Another update, redid all the OC data, including descriptions for all the non-damage moves. Hopefully it's more readable now. Also added a section on all the status effects and how they work.

Still to come before this feels complete enough to be a v1 and published on GameFAQs or anywhere like it: skill descriptions (the abilities gained from Job Levels 3 through 7), equipment abilities, and items. I think I'll save some of the other things I have planned (forging/prices, monster info) for a later version.

[Glen Veil]

As per Tides' Request:


Ragu O Ragla
Level 99 King of Monsters

9998 HP, 997 MP, 997 VP, 4 Move, 3 Climb, 0 Weight
997 Atk, 592 Def, 997 Mag, 997 Res, 997 Aim, 592 Eva, 997 Rfx

501% Speed vs average at level 99 with main 7 characters in base classes, 761% speed if you take them at level 50, which is around when you can first fight Ragu in game.  Effect of defensive stats to come later when I get the party up high enough so they can actually get attacks off on him without cheesing with Bluelike Alexia.

9% resistance to earth, 49% weak to ice, 99% resistance to fire, 19% resistance to wind

Status susceptibilities:
None, zero, zilch, nada, not even provoke :-(.

Skills:
Blood Heat
Weapon Block
Retaliation
Magic Block
Reflect
Anti-Knockback
Ignore Move Cost
MOV Up
Caution
Levitation
Critical Rate Up
Sniper Shot
Accelerate
Red Zone
Counter Rate Up
Illusion
Attack & Heal HP
Crisis RFX Up
Throw Block
Counter Rate Up
Critical Extra Turn

All of these do the same things as the versions found on the normal classes, so if you're not familiar you can look them up there.

Attacks:
Impulse Bomber: 200 non stat based ITD MT Earth/Fire Elemental damage, ignores targets innate elemental resist, but is subject to resist on equipment and given by spells, is also subject to non defense related damage reduction(Shields still reduce it by 10% for example).  Ragu has two forms of this, one hits all characters on a stone tile for earth damage, while the other hits all characters on Lava tiles for fire damage.  Ragu can only use the form of Impact bomber relative to which type of tile he is on, so stone if he’s currently on stone or lava if he’s on lava, 4 of the starting positions are stone while two are lava, Ragu himself starts on stone but can reach a lava tile turn 1, take this as you will.

Giant Impact:  Targets adjacent for 498 base physical damage before defense, 33% chance to crit for 2x damage after defense. Formula = (Ragu's Attack*3-Target Defense)/6
One Trillion Degrees:  Targets in a line for 750 base fire damage before defense, has a 1 Hex spread where it hits. Formula = (Ragu's Magic*4.5-Target Res)/6

Some Damage figures:

level 100 Untwinked:
Physicals average ~50 at ~30% chance to hit
Laby's lightning fails to hurt Ragu, and Levin's Blast only would do 16

I managed to Beat Ragu without relying on twinked Alexia, but it was using a heavily specific setup with the second most broken thing in the game used for damage. Anyways, here's some damage figures from that, my party average was ~80.

Note: Ragu was under the debilitator debuff for all of these, all characters minus Laby had atk & aim +25%

Clarissa: 68 damage(using shoot command for decelerate effect)
Felius) Axe to face: ~150 at 40% accuracy
SIX SHOOTER: 4006/6009 crit(Note, achieving this means spending 2 rounds giving Felius every buff in game while giving Ragu Fragile and Debilitator, Felius must also spend two turns using Amplifier, since he can't use this after moving and due to the nature of the map, he has to waste 2 turns moving towards the center before he can even use it, along with the other things, effectively makes this attack unusable until around five rounds in.  This is the most damage you can do to Ragu period barring some ridiculous Extra Critical cheese from Clarissa occurring)
Levin's Cancel Strike: 86 damage, 84% accuracy
Ragnar: 138 damage(using attack command for decelerate effect)

Labby and Alexia where to busy reapplying buffs/debuffs/reviving dead people every turn to get damage from

Comments: Ragu has a field wide MT ITD 2HKO, a OHKO physical that heals him for 499, and an attack that probably deals 2xaverage PC HP off of 501% speed, yeah no questions about him being an optional superboss <.<.  Ragu  also basically gets a 25% chance to reflect melee and magic, and has another 25% chance to outright dodge anything from debuffs to damage with those chances not being related to stats in any way.  He also gets a free turn when he reaches below 33%, along with Accelerate cheese off of HIS speed.  All that said, clearly PUNY.

[SnowFire]

A few comments:

On Rupert's moveset:

Double Fast Draw: 100% power physical. 72 damage.
Speed Fang (22 MP): 100% power Atk+Spd physical, hits every target in a ray, range 3. 141 damage.
Blade Pulsar (26 MP): 75% power Atk+Spd physical, hits everything on the map except Rupert (might have a range limit, vertical 2). 92 damage. Tends not to use this until at lower HP, below half?
Maximum Risk (32 MP): 150% power Atk+Spd physical, Valiant effect. 237 damage at full HP, increases linearly to 1786 damage at 1 HP. I've never seen him use it at full HP, but he'll use it as soon as he's even slightly injured.

He'll use the last two moves even at full health, but he does take awhile to do so.  I just fought final Rupert and didn't realize quite how the Crisis RFX Up worked (didn't know dead allies counted), and also wanted to steal the treasure, so I ignored Rupert to off the deserters(...whom he openly scorns, and possibly kills with Blade Pulsar, but they stick to it!).  I'm not sure what the trigger is - a certain number of turns passed, a certain number of allies dead - but he'll do it.  The distinction is probably irrelevant in-game but potentially relevant in the DL.  (If it's based on number of dead allies, he can use Maximum Risk turn 1!  If it's after 10 actions, he's boned!  ....unless it's "10 actions or takes damage, whichever comes first" of course.)  I DID debuff him some, so it's vaguely possible that "any hostile action against Rupert" is the trigger.

I'd also note that Blade Pulsar has accuracy problems, it hits maybe 50% of the time?  Dodgy characters like Nightstalkers I never saw take the damage, and non-dodgy characters like Alexia always took the damage, but I'd say it hovers there on average.  His High Cavaliers seem to always get hit, but the Striders and Enigmancers fare a bit better.  Double Fast Draw isn't great either.  I saw Maximum Risk miss several times as well but that may have been Nightstalker's Illusion kicking in.  Speed Fang on the other hand I never saw miss.

Also, I know it's listed in the moveset already, but it bears repeating that all of Rupert's good moves cost MP.  (The second time I fought the battle, I debuffed Rupert, MP-drained him, THEN killed everyone else off.  Much better plan.)  If you don't see Orlandu as OHKOing Rupert he probably wins anyway thanks to this.  His MP reserves are good enough that this doesn't really matter when the opponent can't MP-drain except against insane resources, at least.  If Rupert does get MP-drained he really is screwed, though.  The Double Fast Draw damage figure even sounds a bit generous - Labyrinthia the squishy mage took only ~80 or so, and I presume the damage would be way worse if he'd attacked sluggers like Ragnar or Felius instead.  (And the +25% DEF skill is one of the easier stat buffs to get.)

On Asgard:
Dark Holy Elf mentions that for those who give support credit, Asgard has a form just a few battles earlier with support.  Well, this is true, but it's not very good support for the record.  All the enemies have set wake-up ranges, and it's pretty easy to kill the early enemies and then activate just Asgard and an easily OHKOed undead Sniper (yay Sanctify).  The High Cavalier may wake up but she'll just waste turns Quickening not-woken-up enemies and herself, so eh, whatever.  Guess the support does matter a little since you can't quite go completely nuts on MP-intensive abilities as you might otherwise, but not too much; you can still easily Slow Down-> Cancel Strike -> no more turns for you.  Make of that what you will.

On Labyrinthia:
Should be noted that Lightning has an annoyingly short range of 3 hexes, similar to the problems Enigmancer's Devastate has.  Labyrinthia has enough problems in the DL already so I'm not sure if this should be held against her too much, but since she can't use it after moving, I'd say she's out of luck against enemies with notably good range, at least (even if I'd be hesitant to hold that against enemies in systems without movement).  Mustadio gets a win?  If his guns can beat the Distortion, at least.

[Rozalia]

If it's after 10 actions, he's boned!  ....unless it's "10 actions or takes damage, whichever comes first" of course.)  I DID debuff him some, so it's vaguely possible that "any hostile action against Rupert" is the trigger.

Might not have a trigger at all considering what you said. Might be there is a low chance of him using it whenever but as he takes damage the odds of him using it increase.
Would make some sense I think.

[SnowFire]

Rozalia: Possible.  Towards the end of that first battle, with Rupert's HP still untouched but all his allies dead (and everyone except Nightstalker Clarissa & Nightstalker Felius), he was pretty well constantly spamming Maximum Risk & Blade Pulsar.  Could be that his likelihood of using them just goes up as the battle continues.  In the DL, think I'd lean toward not letting him use it turn 1 no matter what the trigger "really" is since no one seems to have seen him use it turn 1 in-game, then let him go nuts on turn 2 and afterward.

Going back to boss notes, some additions...

On Eisen:
Should be mentioned again that if you kill him *you lose*.  This is practically impossible given his tankiness and a presumption that you'd stop hitting him when he enters his critical range, but in the DL?  Uhhhh.  Hard to square the flavor with "Ha, psychotic killer boss dude with no chipping, you killed Eisen so somehow you lose the duel!"  Also headachey scaling question, since if you don't give him much support credit then it's actually quite easy to kill scaled Eisen "accidentally" unlike in-game when your damage is basically being multiplied by 6 in the DL.

On Chelle:

Claw Laser: 100% power physical. 83 damage.
Predator Barrage (32 MP): 100% power physical, hits 1 + the number of empty spaces behind the target, and knocks them back. If the target is knocked into lower terrain than Chelle, hit count is automatically 4. 333 damage.
Battle Cry: Gives Chelle two immediate turns, which can not be used for Battle Cry. So she gets two actions every round, three movements, and gets three turns towards VP damage and status effects wearing off. Always uses this when able.

On Predator Barrage...  there are several issues with it.

First off, I haven't tested this, but I'd be shocked if Sentinel's Anti-Knockback didn't hose it.  (I know Anti-Knockback hoses Ragnar's Raving Rage, which is a very similar move.)  This means just 1 hit, which is about equivalent to Claw Laser.  Let the FE9 Oscar > Chelle hype begin.  More pertinently Anti-Knockback is *very* popular on bosses in-game, including the one-mission "Hi I am the boss" types.  And is weirdly popular even among a lot of random mooks.  As such, there's a good argument that at least some bosses should generally be assumed to spoil the move as well, though which ones is obviously open to interpretation.  Any notably "heavy" boss (i.e. Jade, Jecht) seems safe, as would non-moving bosses a la Nergal.  But since even people like Rupert & the Tormenta Triad have Anti-Knockback maybe you toss in Margulis & Ramsus, or just any boss with full status immunity?  I dunno.

Secondly.  Terrain issues.  I'm inclined to give Ragnar some credit for Raving Rage in the DL (well, against melee opponents) since he's a PC, you fight on a lot of different types of fields, you can set things up so that Ragnar can exploit a big knockback.  However, Chelle's a boss, and she always fights in the same location.  She'll hang out there until you wake her up, as well.  Thing is she's in the corner of the map, not the center of a wide-open field, and the mystical "edge of the map" works fine as a backstop to screw up Predataor Barrage.  IOW, in a hypothetical deploy-one-person and have all enemy support insta-die version of the map, Chelle will still hang out there, and you can move your one PC duelist along the edge of the map.  Chelle will charge, but even if she didn't, a ranged character could pelt her with arrows / spells to make her want to attack anyway.  If you just hug the edge of the map then Chelle is once more stuck with 1-hit Predator Barrages of suck.  (Now, in fairness, Chelle's support tends to draw you out in-game to not be *completely* flush against the edge, at least if you're using Nightstalkers and Innocent Blow rather than, say, Elementalists.  But then it's more of an AI issue, Chelle would do things like a 2-hit knockback to the edge when she could have walked the long way around to get a 4-hit knockback.)

As an addendum to the above, even if you *do* force opponents to, say, start right next to Chelle, she will likely only get one full-power Predator Barrage off, as she'll shove opponents to the edge of the map or some other blockage on the first PB, then be stuck with bad damage afterward.

So.  Predator Barrage has issues of working against bosses (who generally immune knockback); ranged PCs (who can shell Chelle from afar and force her to come to the edge of the map); and melee PCs, arguably, if they're willing to cede initiative and if your interpretations force bosses to attack rather than wait (Go to edge of map, waste turn, let Chelle come to the melee PC.).  Needless to say, if you hold to any of these propositions, Chelle isn't making Godlike.  Given lots of support credit, she's a tanky Heavy (with 5HKO doubleacted damage); given little support credit, she's more like Miluda+ who spoils debuffers in Low Middle.

Personally, I'm definitely inclined toward the low end of the respect curve here; Nightstalker Felius could have soloed her since she was doing 29 damage to his 270 HP, Felius had regen, and he was faster.  And this was with old, out-of-date +3 level armor too (okay, and Def+25% / Atk+25%, but you have so many skill slots by endgame that I definitely think they should be held against bosses somehow).

[Rozalia]

On Eisen:
Should be mentioned again that if you kill him *you lose*.  This is practically impossible given his tankiness and a presumption that you'd stop hitting him when he enters his critical range, but in the DL?  Uhhhh.  Hard to square the flavor with "Ha, psychotic killer boss dude with no chipping, you killed Eisen so somehow you lose the duel!"  Also headachey scaling question, since if you don't give him much support credit then it's actually quite easy to kill scaled Eisen "accidentally" unlike in-game when your damage is basically being multiplied by 6 in the DL.

Don't think anyone would pull that crap because thats like saying Adel is safe from MT moves becauce they'd hit Rinoa. I personally am all for ranking Eisen because he is a fine heavy boss (Too many godlikes these days), with somewhat crippling weaknesses (Gravity).
As for the support credit thing couldn't that be said of all bosses in SRPGs?

[dude789]

Snowfire, I really don't think you're giving Chelle enough credit. She's like 140% average speed and ends up getting three times to move due to her double acting move so chances are she's getting off at least one predator barrage in that first turn before the ranged unit can run away. Even without giving her credit for Predator Barrage she still ends up with an effective 2HKO off of that speed and with decent durability. It's really unfair to take bosses against an optimum set up to fight them especially with a game as abusable as WA:XF. 

[Talaysen]

It's really unfair to take bosses against an optimum set up to fight them especially with a game as abusable as WA:XF. 

No it's not.  Especially with a game as easily abusable as WA:XF.  Bosses get inflated in the DL anyway, so it's completely fair.

[dude789]

It's really unfair to take bosses against an optimum set up to fight them especially with a game as abusable as WA:XF. 

No it's not.  Especially with a game as easily abusable as WA:XF.  Bosses get inflated in the DL anyway, so it's completely fair.

I'm not saying that you have to fight her with a handicapped party, but common sense should be used in determining what type of party to compare her to. It we took the best possible party than all WA XF bosses would be OHKO bait because the PC's would just use intrude spam until they died. Predator Barrage does have distinct disadvantages, but her stats and touble acting ability help to really make those limitations less of a factor.

[SnowFire]

On Eisen:
Should be mentioned again that if you kill him *you lose*.  This is practically impossible given his tankiness and a presumption that you'd stop hitting him when he enters his critical range, but in the DL?  Uhhhh.  Hard to square the flavor with "Ha, psychotic killer boss dude with no chipping, you killed Eisen so somehow you lose the duel!"  Also headachey scaling question, since if you don't give him much support credit then it's actually quite easy to kill scaled Eisen "accidentally" unlike in-game when your damage is basically being multiplied by 6 in the DL.

Don't think anyone would pull that crap because thats like saying Adel is safe from MT moves becauce they'd hit Rinoa. I personally am all for ranking Eisen because he is a fine heavy boss (Too many godlikes these days), with somewhat crippling weaknesses (Gravity).
As for the support credit thing couldn't that be said of all bosses in SRPGs?

Well, I personally give support credit, but I know that many people don't, so I was "throwing that out there" if you will.  It's a similar issue with limits that fire off very fast - take a game with a 9999 damage cap and a boss who does something cool at 10,000 life.  In-game it's impossible to miss the limit, but multiply all damage by (# of PCs) and suddenly it's quite doable.

I actually do let Adel fight with a Rinoa that if killed loses the match instantly, because that's how the boss fight is structured in-game.  So at least I'm consistent, Adel spoils MT.

dude: Actually, Dark Holy Elf made a good point in chat which is that the other edge is more amenable to Chelle.  i.e. the North edge is a 3-5-3-5-3 formation where if a dueler stands in a hex with only three bordering hexes, Chelle is just plain out of luck with Predator Strike.  But the east edge is 4-4-4-4 where she can always shove either north or south.  Now I don't think her AI is smart enough to actually do this - so hanging out around that edge is also a decent idea in-game - but there's something to be said that you're not safe there.

Also.  I agree with you in general that bosses should not be held against highly-twinked parties.  I assume for Sephiroth that you just rush through FF7, or for FFT that you're not using some kind of MP-Switch / Move-MP UP / Calculator nonsense.  Just...  I feel a twinked party would be one with Anti-Knockback equipped.  In a duel situation, you can get the same effect as Anti-Knockback in-game with the edge trick I just mentioned, or at the very least a "knocked back to barrier, not a full PS" issue.  Dunno, just feel this is a relevant trick to hold against her, though I can understand your position, too.  At the very least, the Anti-Knockback issue creates strange situations.  For example Lunar is a game with knockback, so Xenobia *wails* on Chelle, and Alex probably wins as well - his good Defense makes it so that Alex isn't weak enough to get knocked back for too long.  I should add that I *do* in fact give Chelle at least some support credit, so she's not quite as bad as my most apocalyptic notes to me.  An above average speed dueler with a 2HKO and non-fail durability can't be too bad, even if it's *barely* a 2HKO and is owned by Defense if she's stuck with Claw Laser.

Anyway...

One last boss note.  Charlton's last form...  I don't think any of his spells can kill undead.  IOW, whenever Black Corruption killed a zombie, it always came back with some life.  I think it may even have gotten a stat buff (that or zombie damage is Maximum Risk style, and goes up at very low HP, since zombie hits went from 100 damage against Charlton to 250 damage).  The same may have been true of his book strike Negative Aura, that never got anywhere either.  I have no idea what to make of this in the DL, as you can credibly argue this is also a feature of XF undead rather than just Charlton.  Spoiled by Pamela who always insta-revives?!  (Reminiscient of how negative energy / death magic often heals undead.)

[Cmdr_King]

In Charlton's case, the same is true of the party as well.  Only specific anti-undead attacks (ie the Sacred Slayer attack spell) permanently kill the zombies on that map.  I guess they're supposed to be super-charged by Charlton's spell going out of control or something.

[Tide]

I was pretty sure that was the reason behind it plotwise. Edna does something to his necromancy book and the zombies basically are out of control (or "super charged").

[Talaysen]

Charlton's second form.  Ripping off most of the format from NEB.  Note that my stats are much different from NEB's due to different setups, but shouldn't be hard to scale to NEB's setups.

Charlton Blunt
Lv 59 Aristocrat

2180 HP, 496 MP, 535 VP, 4 Move, 2 Climb, 4 Weight
390 Atk, 339 Def, 652 Mag, 324 Res, 399 Aim, 315 Eva, 270 (324) Rfx

149% (154%) speed, 9% p. reduction, 20% m. reduction, 88% hit, 12% evade

90% resistance to earth.

Status susceptibilities:
Nothing whatsoever. It's freaking Charlton.

Equipment: Ex Mortes, Hope Diamond

Skills:
-Weapon Block (parries basic physicals, 25% rate)
-Mag+25% (obvious effect, already factored in)
-Anti-Knockback (can't be moved around)
-MP Recovery (regens 9 MP at the start of each turn)
-Awesome Battle Music (negates effect of Laguna plot hype in a duel)

Negative Aura: 100% power physical, BOOK elemental. 69 damage.
Energy Drain: Non-typed ITE melee attack. Drains HP equal to 16% of the Charlton's missing HP, and drains MP equal to 50% of Charlton's missing MP. Can't be used on undead. HP damage rises linearly from 0 at full HP to 348 at 1 HP.
Dark Destruction (18 MP): 100% power magic, long range, inflicts Misery at 50% success rate. 154 damage.
Call Servant: Summons a John Doe.  Used only as a counterattack (100%) after taking damage.  This can be one of two types, differing only in HP.  There can only be 5 of each type on the battle field at the same time.  He can use this in addition to a normal counterattack.

John Doe
Lv 56 Nameless Corpse
490 or 170 HP, 235 MP, 580 VP, 3 Move, 2 Climb, 4 Weight
315 Atk, 266 Def, 125 Mag, 166 Res, 330 Aim, 115 Eva, 90 (108) Rfx

50% (60%) speed, 69% hit, -47% evade

Corpse Touch: 44 physical damage.
Stink Cloud (36 MP): 100% chance to inflict Disease, 3 range.

Charlton starts with five of each type of John Doe on the field, totalling to 3300 HP.

Level 57 averages
PC: 149 damage, 311 HP, 285 MP, 366 Def, 361 Res, 344 Aim, 367 Eva, 181 (211) Rfx

[SnowFire]

Re Charlton 3: Interesting.  Didn't know your stuff would always fail to kill the zombies as well.  Makes sense, though.

On Weisheit: This is actually a note for pretty much all bosses, but it's worth noting that skill slots mean that an army of in-game generics is better than the DL-legal generics average, because they can cover weaknesses, equip other class's OCs for better damage, get extra stat boosts, equip better out-of-class equipment, etc.  Anyway, the "fairest" way would probably be some variant of equal selection where all the skills are assumed used equally, or you could assume better setups.  Most notably, the Accelerate skill exists for Grappler.  I personally found it totally awesome and equipped it on basically everyone, but it will randomly speed you up, sometimes a lot - as in, insta-double turn ahoy.  Less reliable than REF+25%, but that's the capstone skill for Nightstalker and difficult to get.  Anyway, since Weisheit's speed is *very very* relevant, if you hold even a little tiny Accelerator against him, it's notable.

I actually did an average of my own stats immediately after the Weisheit battle (so...  an extra level or two too good), which is pretty close to Dark Holy Elf's numbers, except with higher RFX (180 vs. 165), but that'd make sense since I had two Nightstalkers in the party.  So nothing much to report there!  Just figured I'd toss another data point in confirming.  Also confirming that I never saw final Weisheit use Parry or Divider either, so definitely think it's unlikely he can use them.

On the final boss:

-Teleport (instead of countering, will teleport to another hex on the battlefield. Counters with a physical as normal if blocked by Shut Out)

You sure about this counter with a physical bit?  I never saw that when I fought her using a Shut Out strategy, and I hit her a whole bunch.  It may be she doesn't counter Formation Arts and got unlucky before or something?

I can confirm that she can summon back her entire support.  I'm not 100% certain about the trigger, but I *believe* that it is "If Materialize misses," possibly "If Materialize misses and all her support is already dead."  The situation it happened in: I'd cleaned out all her demons, she casts Materialize, I don't know about Defender and trigger it, and she trades places into a corner-type hex with only three hexes bordering it, all on one side (read: No Formation Arts).  After killing the demons and continuing the beating, she gets a turn, uses Materialize, gets a miss, and then immediately afterward a "Reinforcements Appear!" message appears.  Coulda been conveniently timed - i.e. X amount of time after killing all the demons they all come back - but seems likely to be related.  Then *every single one of the demonss* you killed comes back.  Every.  One.  That would be ten, if you're counting.  On the bright side, if we assume that Materialize has to be blocked (rather than do this for free if everything's dead), it's very unlikely that she'll be able to do this in the DL.  I guess this can be tested easily enough - kill everything, then let her get turns - but yeah.  [I personally didn't mess around the second time, conserved my MP, and most importantly had Shut Out, so Katrina fell into a Formation Arts / Cancel Strike / Debuffs spiral of never getting a turn.  And I sure wasn't going to let her to find out.]

On Weapon Breaking: Came up in chat, but I hypothesized that Strahl Gehver and Alexia's unique weapon might be unbreakable.  I checked, and as it happens, it's impossible to tell; the one weapon-break in the game, Felius's Disarm, does not work on PCs mercifully enough.  Even for weapons that can be equipped by enemies and broken just fine.  So yeah, that's up to individual interps.  (The message will say "Can't Disarm Levin!" which, taken literally, means all WA:XF PCs are immune to breaking?!   Probably not, but you figure it out.)

[Talaysen]

Small note, but Clarissa's ID immunity grants immunity to any attack that has ID attached to it.  This includes the damage part too.

I'm not sure where this matters but just sayin'.

[Talaysen]

Hmm, looks like I was wrong with that.  Not sure what's up there then.