Watched mookish's run, it's great, very smart. For some reason, I was in the mood to run some numbers, so I made this spreadsheet based on the formulas and numbers in Ben Siron's FAQ on gameFaqs. (
FF Faqs) Ok, here are the raw results: (
openoffice.org spreadsheet) On the weapons sheet you can plug in different weapons to see their stats.
But the quick ideas:
-Because of the starting stats and damage calcs, fighters have by far the highest fighting damage output on low levels. Trailing second is the red mage. The fighter gets strength every level, but red mage only has a 62.5% chance, so his damage could be slightly increased by manipulating a strength increase every level.
-A black mage gets Lvl3 magic one level earlier and lvl4 magic two levels earlier. But I think mookish showed what is best, the pyntie-hat is unfortunately useless. One possibility would be obtaining the bane spell which could allow all bosses past that point to be beaten much more easily; the black mage would become a one-man killing machine. But level 12 is clearly not going to be reached until the end if at all.
-Due to their armor, the Astos, Lich and Kraken fights will be almost entirely based on critical hits and magic.
-It may be worthwhile to purchase small knives instead of or in addition to the rapiers starting out. Why? Small knife has 5 more +hit% which means more hits and therefore more critical hits. When all non-crits are just one damage anyway, this is better. By level 5 but the hit difference would bump up the number of hits (mookish already has better weapons at this point though)
-It's probably not worthwhile to kill anyone off. At least not until beating Kraken (blue dragon is pretty easy). Once the bane sword is in hand, only one person is needed. Levelups have a pretty small impact on fighting damage, it's almost always better to have more bodies since there will be more chances to get the critical hits which will kill Astos, Kraken and Lich. The only exception would be if killing one person off gave everyone else more hits.
I had one more idea which you probably know. For useless actions wouldn't the fastest command be run? In a non-runnable fight it would just spit out the can't run message but no animation.
