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It's more broken in battle than outside of battle because of use and repetition (then again, I would've normally whined about it.. I did think about it for a bit though). For monsters to use it though, that would be annoying but at least that's counterable...
Ok well I think by the time you can afford to repeatedly cast L8 spells your party will probably be strong enough that you won't need to be repeatedly casting HEL4.
No monsters can can cast it (or Cur4).
I thought a lot of the original spells were defined moreso on hit rate.. like Slow vs Slo2 and Slep vs Slp2, etc.
Sure. And Lock is the same way. The higher level Lock spells both give higher evade penalties and work more often (higher hit rate). However even Lok4 can be evaded, but all the Invs spells always work.
Fst2 is built to a non-fighting character... the Black Mage benefits a little more, and the Staff weapon for mages seems to be the crap of the weapons (I haven't gotten far enough, but that's my observation). Even the White Mage gets da' hammer and doesn't even get this spell. Maybe it's just me, but even the easily solo targetable Fast is worth more than Fst2. The only way of balancing this aka neutering Fast is by making it self targeted so that the Time Mage is a little more important.. although I think you need to give the Time Mage an alternate weapon to play with as a bonus. Also.. you could make 3 versions of this spell... a level 6 version that is targetable.
Err... Fst2 works on the whole party. I assume you wouldn't make a party out of all time mages and black mages, and even if you do, well, I don't mind there being some spells that are junk for that specific kind of party. However, you will usually have more than one fighting character. The idea is that, say in a boss fight, instead of wasting four turns Fast-ing everyone you simply go Fst2!! In a party like Monk, Viking, Knight, Time Mage, that spell would be the bomb!
Now I can certainly see an argument that maybe it should be lower level but to say that "Fast is worth more than Fst2" when it is clearly strictly worse in every way makes no sense...
Also, yes the staff is intentionally the crap of the weapons.
Also, I think the Dark Knight is a bit superior to the Paladin. The Paladin's Holy weapons are probably going to benefit more towards the end, but the spell set will never beat the Dark Knight simply due to the existance of Fast. Perhaps upping one more White level could balance that out...
I dunno, I find the ability to cure and bring characters back to life to be pretty good... let alone the sheer number of undeads in this game makes Harm and Holy-elemental weapons the bees knees. The Paladin also gets more HP... if anything I'd be more worried about the opposite situation.
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