[I Scream, You Scream] Building your Scream Team: A Comprehensive Guide to Planning for the Scream Meta, Pt. 1

So we're right on the cusp of a new age of 5-star abilities, SSB prevalence, and of course, Ramza. I've been seeing a lot of threads pop up asking for honing advice or pulling advice and I thought I'd write this guide to give you an overview to help you in your farming, honing, and pulling. The biggest advantage we have in Global is the ability to see into the future. Once equipped with that information, we can plan far better than players in JP ever can.

This guide will be split into the following sections:

Party Composition

Abilities & DPS

Orb Chart

Character & SSB evaluation: Mages & Supports

Character & SSB evaluation: Celerity & Spellblade

Character & SSB evaluation: Job Classes

SSB Rankings

Banner Evaluation: Intro & Cloudy Wolf

#Why Scream Meta?

Scream is, without a doubt, the most powerful soul break, even in JP to this day. Players generally agree that there is a holy trinity of soul break effects consisting of Wall, Hastega, and Medica. You could argue that a 4th one should be added: Boostga, making the trinity, a tetrad. Scream combines Hastega and Boostga (ATK +50%) into one concentrated package, and turns the holy tetrad back into a holier trinity: Scream, Wall, Medica.

Whereas in proper Final Fantasies, you have access to all your spells and abilities in every battle via battle menus, in FFRK, abilty slots and soul break effects are limited and therefore at a premium. The more utility that can be squeezed into one action, the better. This is also why, physical skills, now that they're hitting for far more with Scream's boost online and providing extra utility, outperform magical attacks, which for the most part only provide damage. The other factor is that DeNA jacked up the RES on Ultimate bosses. JP Ultimates currently have around twice the RES that they do DEF. (Only one recent boss, Ifrit, an optional fight for record dive rewards even harder than Ultimate+ bosses, has had extremely high DEF on par with its extremely high RES. We'll have to wait and see if this becomes a trend in the future.)

#Party Composition A Scream Meta party in general looks something like this: (Do note, I'm optimizing for single-target boss battles, since that's what the majority of Ultimate fights are.)

Lifesiphoner 1

Lifesiphoner 2

Flex Slot

Ramza

White Mage

Ramza:

• Should have either Scream or Cheer.

• 90% of the time, you're bringing Full Break and Magic Breakdown on him.

White Mage:

• Should have either Wall (Tyro or Y'shtola) or Medica

• Usually, you're bringing Shellga or Protectga, and Curaga/ja

So between Ramza, your White Mage, and your RW, you have three soul breaks to fill with Scream, Wall, and Medica. If you have Scream and Medica, you can RW Wall. If you have Scream and Wall, you can RW Medica. And lastly, if you have Cheer (Ramza's Medica) and Wall, you can RW Scream. (Do note, if you have SG and a Whm Medica, you could replace Ramza with Tyro as Support. But Tyro's ATK is subpar, so Ramza is the preferred option.)

(If you have neither Scream nor Wall, you may want to RW Scream and mitigate as much as possible using other methods. Well-timed magic blinks may help a lot against certain Ultimates. This is what I did to some extent in JP for Ultimates until I pulled my own Thyrus. Also consider building up SB charges and using a mythril refresh.)

Lifesiphoners:

• You should aim for strong single-target SSB's for these two characters and equip them with +20 or 30% bonus DMG RMs (If you have enough of them. If not, Ace Striker(Tidus)/Warrior's Growth(Ramza) are alternatives).

• Good abilities for their other slot include: Power Break, Armor Break, Dismissal, Tempo Flurry, Drain Strike, Banish Raid, Spellblades for elemental weaknesses, and the Machinist Shots for status vulnerabilities.

Flex Slot: There's three main options for your last slot: DPS, Tauntaliators, or a secondary support.

• For DPS, the best candidates are Knights using Saint Cross, Thieves w/ 170 SPD using Thief's Raid, and a bit later on, Dark Mages using Memento Mori + Dark Zone, and Chainchargers using Chainstarter + Full Charge. You can also use a third Lifesiphon here.

• Tauntaliate, or Draw Fire + Retaliate, is still useful to mitigate damage in certain U/U+ fights. Gilgamesh, Auron, and later, Basch, are your choices here (and Tyro if you want a ranged option).

• It's always nice to have more slots for Breakdowns. For secondary supports, having Sup4 is good enough, since Ramza has Sup5 to cover Full Break. The best options would be Vaan and Ingus, since they have better stats than other Sup5's and Vaan has Thf5 and Ingus Knt5 so they can equip Thief's Raid and Saint Cross respectively to be a hybrid DPS/Support. (Though Vaan loses out on one hit from Thief's Raid since he barely misses 170 SPD at Lv 80)

• A 20 or 30% bonus DMG RM is usually your best option here.

Sample Scream Team following the above template:

Character	Skill 1	Skill 2	Soul Break	Record Materia
Locke	Lifesiphon R3	Armor Break R3	Valiant Knife SSB	Pride of the Red Wings
Bartz	Lifesiphon R3	Power Break R3	Excalibur SSB	One-Eyed General
Agrias	Saint Cross R2	Banish Raid R3	Split Punch SB	Holy Knight's Pride
Ramza	Full Break R2	Magic Breakdown R4	Scream SSB	Mako Might
Yuna	Shellga R2	Curaga R5	Hymn of the Fayth SB	Dr. Mog's Teaching
RW: Sentinel Grimoire/Stoneskin II

That's it for Part I, pretty basic stuff. The next sections will get into the nitty gritty.