I hope you enjoyed it. I was trying to be helpful.And holy crap Ashiel, that was comprehensive
Prince Lex said:I don't know if it's already been said, but the absolute best spot for getting to the next level of limits anywhere in the game is that room near the end of the Mythril Mine. All enemies appear in groups of 5 there.
The room I'm talking about is through the little door at the back here, in the last screen:
The map that Prince Lex is referring to is this one:
Inside here you can find groups of enemies like the ones I mentioned before. This is the Junon side of the mithral mines, but has similar encounters to the eastern side of the cave. I recommend leveling in either of these locations; but you'll definitely want to pick up the Long Range materia from the eastern cave; which is a good time to do your leveling while there.
The enemies found on this map are as follows.
Statistics courtesy of Absolute Steve said:
The other leveling map in the mines is the eastern map from the entrance of the mines. In essence, both of these maps are basically identical in terms of encounters, so everything I have to say for the following map applies equally to Prince Lex's map. The only difference between the two is Prince Lex's map you get to by heading north from the Junon-side entrance, and this one is found by heading north-east from the Kalm-side entrance.
This is the map you find the Long-Range materia and a chest that contains an item (I forget what item at this point, as it's irrelevant). Anyway, this is your gravy spot for acquiring limit breaks and money within the mines. Groups consist of the following:
Statistics courtesy of [B]Absolute Steve[/B] said:
In short, you will never face less than 4 enemies at a time. The Castanets are weak vs Fire, so a Fire-All will end the encounter instantly. The ark dragons absorb Fire and you can steal Ether from them. Both the Castanets and the Ark Dragons hit fairly hard (especially the Ark Dragons' flamethrower enemy skill), which is excellent for building your limits quickly. The crawlers are "meh" for building your limits, so kill them off first. They're not particularly weak vs Fire, but they're not resistant to it either, so you can usually at least soften them up with a Fire-all (possibly wiping out castanets at the same time), without killing the dragons.
Since you can keep stockpiling Ether in this room from the dragons, with a surprisingly good steal rate, this makes this room the perfect place to get gil and limits prior to reaching Junon; simply because the enemies are always in groups of 4-5, hit sufficiently hard to build your limits quickly (this is especially true if you've used Hypers on your party and they are hit with Flamethrower), and you can restore your MP when it gets low using your stolen ethers (and you will profit in Ether because you shouldn't be using more than one ether now and then, while getting a new ether almost every battle).
If you want some gil, you can sell of excess Ether at 750 gil a pop. I went into the mine with about 10-15 ether, and left with around 48-50 ether. If I sold off the difference, I could have made between 24,750-30,000 gil, not counting the average 387 gil per encounter. After about 50 encounters (assuming I ran into an Ark Dragon every 2/3 encounters and stole an Ether from it), you could make about 19,350 gil from the combats themselves, and another 24,750 gil in ether.