Nate (post: 1296682) wrote:I dunno if I agree with that. The biggest reason I sold my copy of Disgaea without caring is because in the first battle against Kurt, the enemies all went after my Cleric and killed her in two hits basically. My answer to this was "Level up more, of course!"
Unfortunately since you only get experience for killing enemies in Disagaea and not for doing any action (unlike better SRPGs like Final Fantasy Tactics or Arc the Lad), and Clerics were notoriously bad at whacking things, my cleric seemed unable to level up...as for my other characters, not even that one level where every bad guy is standing on a 3x Experience square were able to raise my characters level at a decent pace.
And at that point I hadn't been grinding, which is probably why my cleric was so underlevelled. So yeah, at that point I basically said forget this game, too much grinding...especially when I realized the max level is 9999.
Your problem is, quite frankly, "you're doing it wrong." Your Cleric should never be whacking things to gain EXP. Your Cleric should gather enough mana (and it takes almost none to make Good-for-Nothing mages) and then use her to create 1 mage of each element type. Then, place a mage next to the cleric on the battlefield. As long as they are adjacent, the cleric will have access to the mage's spells because the Cleric is the character you used to create the mage. Once the Cleric has cast each spell 10 (I think -- been a while since D1) times, the cleric learns the spell permanently. You then focus on raising the Cleric's INT instead of RES and it's not a problem. The damage scale in the game should allow your Cleric to do a lot of healing due to having rising healing tiers, and even the basic spells will do insane damage if you're always taking advantage of the enemy's elemental weaknesses.
Also, in the Disgaea games, when you're in it for the long haul, that 9999 levels is nothing. Especially so in Disgaea 3: I can reincarnate a character and have them go from level 1 to level 9999 in less than 3 minutes. It requires a lot of prep work (took me about 35 hours), but can be duplicated with any character at any time once the prep work is done. Disgaea 1 and 2 have similar abuses. As a side note, however, to max a character's potential, you need to gain 186,000 levels with that character.
Also, as a general rule for Disgaea: Every stat that isn't adding more damage or accuracy isn't worth your time. Fights in the late game are almost universally a one-shot affair -- either you kill them in one shot, or they kill you just as fast. It's impossible to raise DEF and HP enough to stop it, so you might as well take your first-turn advantage to the max. Clerics eventually become useless because of the absence of a resurrection ability.
Embraced by a gentle breeze, my heart breaks as I think of you.
All alone at the top of the hill, I watch as the seasons go by.
--
Wishing for courage softly, I pray.
There's no going back now, to those tender days when you held me in your arms.
MOES "I can has Sane Sig now?"