u/Koibu

As the title says, I'm doing a chemist SCC run in IC on Tactician. I do 44 damage with my guns on neutral alignment (up to 67 on best alignment), with a 30% hit rate on Elmdore, which is never going to go anywhere, so I've been trying to bait Ultimas onto my chemists and then have them move near him for the splash. If I can get 5-6 Ultimas on him (depending on the zodiac of the assassin who casts it), I can kill him. This is a solid plan, except that after ~6 rounds or so, his high speed screws up the order to the point the assassins begin to cast Ultima, I move next to him, het gets a turn and moves away, then the spells go off.

In Tactician mode, Elmdore has 11 speed instead of the normal 10, and the assassins have 10 speed instead of the normal 9. I've got 9 speed with the Lambent Hat (Flash Hat). I suppose I could grind levels enough to build a little more speed, but the damage output is so low on Tactician, that I'm genuinely worried about the few story battles down the road where there are monsters that scale with level. Right now I'm level 41. Also, gun damage doesn't scale with level, so I'd just get a little tiny bit more HP, +1 speed at level 52, and another +1 at level 69.

If you don't know SCC, it's Straight Character Challenge - all characters are one class and they can't use any abilities from any other classes. So no poaching, no stealing, no other gear, no spells, no reactions, etc.

My Party

Ramza Sagitarius: Chemist, 72B 70F, Level 41
Taurus Heretic: Chemist, 71B 48F, Level 41
Pisces Heretic: Chemist, 70B 40F, Level 41
Pisces Faith: Chemist, 72B 62F, Level 41
Cancer Faith: Chemist, 70B 69F, Level 41

I feel like I need Germinas Boots so I can more easily get into position next to Elmdore, but I also need a Featherweave cloak to encourage the assassins to cast Ultima instead of throwing or attacking. I can use the Jujitsu Gi to keep them from suffocating my generics, but Ramza needs the Black Garb to have enough HP to survive the draw out / Iaido (I could grind for more HP, but again, worried about later encounters).

Technically I can get 1 Glacier Gun from the Goland Coal City battle #2 if I can turn the chemist there into a chest and get the right RNG. I'm not looking forward to that because it's a ~1/8 chance (12.5%) of happening, and it'll take the whole fight to kill him and keep an enemy alive long enough to box him. It's doable, but the damage out with it will be 100 (2.3x damage 60% of the time), 129 (2.9x damage 30% of the time), or 172 (3.9x damage 10% of the time) which averages to 115 damage - only 2.6x damage for just one character. Not bad, but I'm so far from success that it doesn't feel like it's going to get me over the edge.

I could also go with an Assassin's Daggers for 3 characters and pray for good RNG to death sentence the assassins. If they (and their demon spawn) go, then I can spread out and slowly ping Elmodre to death with the other 2 people with guns, but the hit rate of doom feels a heck of a lot lower than the supposed 25% and with so few people using daggers it'd be rough - and even then the enemy will still get a few rounds to do stuff and I'm getting slaughtered.

I know in the original game Chemist was the easiest SCC, but the 30% damage-out nurf and the 20% damage-in nurf are totally brutal. Am I missing something? Help!

FFT is one of my all time favorite games, and I'm so happy that it's finally had a PC port. Ivalice Chronicles is 10/10, no notes (except it's Sweegy Woods, not The Siedge Weald). I really appreciated the Tactician Difficulty, it was the first time in a long time that I felt challenged by the game. Once it was done, I needed to increase the difficulty again, so I started to explore some of the self imposed challenge modes when I remembered something a friend had said maybe 20 years ago about SCCs.

So I grabbed the easiest class I could think of for it, Monk, and took at stab at a SCC on Tactician difficulty. It was so much fun! In order to make it work, I had to delve deep into the game mechanics to find little edges. Many problems can be solved by over leveling, which is boring and I really avoided as much as possible.

In Riovanes I had to level enough so that I would be brought to critical (for critical HP up to proc).

Limberry Castle Undercroft was a nightmare that I just couldn't do. The damage was insane. The statuses were horrifying. The knights and skeletons, normally an interesting side quirk of the battlefield that can mostly be ignored, became a huge threat. The final battle took 45 minutes. I can't tell you how many attempts I made at this, but it was well over 40.

Mullond Sanctuary was the impossible one. The demons scale with player level, and their huge AOE nuked me down so fast that I couldn't get anywhere near Zalbag, and even when I did, he'd just heal off me. I tried everything. I looked into every mechanic, replicated all the awkward damage formulas in spreadsheets so I could better predict damage output, mixed and matched all sorts of gear. Zalbaag has Defense Up, so he takes half damage from monk abilities. The plan was to kill the demons, but it just wasn't working. In the end, it was a combination of luck, skill, and level that made it work. Knowing what I know now, it might have been possible at a lower level, and certainly would be possible at a lower level if I had picked my zodiac signs with this battle in mind.

Anyway, the point is I finally did it. And for posterity sake I recorded all the battles and threw them together in a youtube playlist in case anyone else is trying a Monk SCC and gets stuck and needs to see how it can be done: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAhFElHKW8zjN0Hzb2f9TIISzpH_YkUqE

This was super difficult, but super fun, and very rewarding. Next is chemist. I've already started and OH MY GODS, is it hard. The 30% damage debuff from Tactician difficulty means the already weak chemist damage is now pitiful. You've got some healing, but you're taking 20% more damage, so the effectiveness of potions is really minimalized. Trying to get enough gil to buy potions becomes difficult because you need to use so many in each battle that you barely make money. I think this run will need to be done at as low of a level as possible so that X-Potions can remain effective. If I over level, I'll die to anything that scales with level. Wish me luck.

Here are the resources I used to get me through this. Huge thanks to these creators. I couldn't have done it without them.

Yatola's SCC rules (I'm ignoring level caps because Tactician)

Aerostar's Battle Mechanics Guide

Fritz Fraundorf's Full Walkthrough

MetroidComposite's Ivalice Chronicles differences guide

Help, I'm stuck. Chemist SCC in Limberry Castle Keep

Monk SCC on Tactician