Ways to break or overpower Kreisia's battle system

[Victar]

Just for fun, I thought I'd list a few ways to break or overpower Kreisia's battle system, both during the first playthrough and in the postgame. This list is absolutely not complete or comprehensive.

Skills are obtained through defeating enemies or winning battles with a weapon equipped. The invite orb forces enemy encounters; with the battle shortcut turned on the party can easily plow through weak enemies over and over to access their stronger skills early. This is especially valuable because Cynthia needs a lot of points to unlock her good mass-healing skills ("It's prayer time" is NOT a good mass-healing skill).

Parameter buffs and debuffs are critical. The most important thing to do ASAP on a lot of early and midgame boss fights is to debuff the boss and keep it debuffed. Anemos' Attack Down and Guard Down are the easiest ways to debuff a single enemy; both Anemos and Cynthia eventually get attack spells that will debuff groups of enemies.

Emergency Shield items are shockingly overpowered, since they block all magic skill damage and last the whole fight. They also seem to block magic healing and maybe buffs, but shielded characters can still heal with items. Unfortunately, there's only a few Emergency Shields available in the game early on, mostly from hidden-passageway chests. Emergency Shields were the only way I could beat the hard-as-all-get-out Verdigris Pass boss at level 37 (on Normal). After this boss, Emergency Shields are sold for in-game gold in certain shops.

In the battle system, more speed = more turns and less speed = fewer turns. This means that anything that gives a boost to speed is overpowered, and anything that penalizes speed is worthless. Also, any ability that has an ultra-long cast time is mostly worthless - sadly, this includes Priestess of Alora, which looks like it SHOULD be good since it buffs three members of the party.

The accessory that swaps the Speed and SP parameters is utterly broken. Take a character with high base SP, possibly from eating some SP drops, and watch them get turn after turn to hand out items like candy. Combine this with the consumables that buff parameters or fill the burst gauge for extra mayhem. This accessory is probably not worth it on Yusis due to the -30% strength penalty, but amazing on anyone else.

The accessory that gives two actions a turn is also broken. Its description implies that the character only gets two actions once per battle, but the character actually gets two actions for every single turn of battle. I believe it's possible to buy these from the Kreisia points shop or the arena points shop in the 3DS version.

For the post game, a little level grinding is basically required, because without enough speed the postgame bosses will get so many turns that the party never gets a chance to fight back. The easiest way to grind is with experience flowers combined Anemos' Savage Blessing, which gives 4x experience and gold. A falcon orb accessory will ensure that Anemos gets a turn early enough to simplify grinding. (The falcon orb won't make Anemos go first if the party ambushes enemies, not that it matters much).

Metal Slime grinding is possible with Laminah's Mjolnir, which is sold for arena points in the postgame. An alternate way to get arena points is with in-game gold, which is easy enough to grind in the postgame dungeon with help from Savage Blessing and gold flowers.