Cactuar’s finally appeared on GP, but should I bother fighting them? There’s usually an advantage for doing so, at least in other FF’s.
It’s pretty much what everyone else has been saying, Random: Instant Stagger.
It was during Spring Break so all I did for about two days was just fight him over and over until it proc’d. When it did, he went down easier than a hooker asking for crack.
I don’t know how to compare it to crisis core because I did not play that game but basically the missions are all in chapter 11 and you find the stones all over the multiple maps in this area. You can only do one at a time and all of them send you to kill a specific “mark” basically a rare monster to kill. There are about 65ish I believe and they can get a little boring but the later Titan ones are very challenging and give good rewards. They are key though if you want to unlock the full potential of your characters because they give you critical items to do so. You do not however have to do a single one to defeat the final boss of the game.
IMO they would have been much better utilized if there had been maybe a total of 15-20 marks and they were mostly all challenging special named boss enemies. Each one would give you a different special item I.E. the growth egg, genji glove…
^ This. They seem pointless. And weirdly strong too. 
Eh fight them for the heck of it. When in the Mission 42 area, you may encounter Flowered Cactuars that may drop Ribbons.
Now that I think about it,
reminiscence
Spoiler
Cactuars only ever seemed useful for me in FF7 where I’d usually let them beat me up to fill the Limit Gauge and have 7777 HP and go fight the Weapons.
I killed my team mates, revive them, give them a couple potions, equip myself with -hp% materia so it goes below 7000 then enter a fight and wait 'til the last digit was 7. Then from there, it was just a matter of potting up to 7777. 
They were pretty useful for me in FF8, as they dropped some good AP, 20 I think, as long as you had max speed and accuracy :lol:
once I get to Gran Pulse, how long should I spend grinding until I continue the story? I am currently only able to handle the flying fuckers, the wolves, and the flans…everything else annihilates me right quick
ive been grindin for close to 7 hours and i can still stand to do it some more.
but i also back tracked to do more quests and go travel to the other end of gran pulse so there’s that too
yeah i have been all over and collected all the chests i can…how long until i can handle the king behemoths or those fuckers with the shell u gotta knock off?
Seriously, I spent most of yesterday running around levelling stuff up. All my base skills are level 3’s…is the next part of the story hard, or can i actually do it now and come back to grinding? Just kinda getting bored of fighting the same 3 enemies
It’s not that hard if you’re using paradigms properly. I got my characters to lvl 3 in their main roles and took care of the hardcore-grinding during the post-game.
If you must grind CP in chapter 11 then the wolf and behemoth spot shown on the first page I believe is your best bet early. Your crystarium should be capped at a certain level that didn’t take me very long to reach so I can’t imagine it taking that long. Once that is maxed i would highly advice at least beating the final boss for chapter 11 before thinking about grinding again. After that then you can try to get the characters last abilities respectively. I would suggest on getting Vanilles last ability death as it is very handy for enemies that may seem impossible. You could also grind at this spot between 11 and 12 as well however 12 has a lot of strong monsters to fight and the best grinding spot in the game as far as the story part goes.
they’re very similar.
iirc, the missions in crisis core required you to go a save station to access the menu and choose a mission. to go from point A to point B and fight a few things inbetween.
same shit in here except you walk up to these stones that tell you the mission. then it’s point A to point B.
so, out of curiousity, any chance we’ll see less pallette swap monsters in future games?
Kinda that that shit should’ve stayed back in the 90’s
Are there any pointers for mission 62? Fuck those things everytime i go in its like INSTANT death no matter what I do…
What is mission 62 again? I don’t have access to the game ATM.
it’s the double Raktavija fight.
The key for me was debuffing it, and you can either buff yourself or use shrouds. IIRC then I rush it with com/rav/rav (so the meter doesn’t drain to quick) then rav/rav/rav to fill it up fast. occasionally switching to med/med/med if I needed to. Once staggered com/com/com. I killed each with one stagger.
Oh that, I did the same thing I did with Gigantuar.
Sit my ass on the couch for two days and fight til I got lucky and proc’d Instant Stagger. Lol.
lol, that may have happened for me. Not too sure because I know with certain accessory combos my Hope get’s instant stagger. Though I don’t know if I had that set-up for that fight because I think I gave everyone magic resist accessories or royal/imperial armlets (resist damage)
I went in with the intention of manually attempting to 5* them.
It just so happened that the time I would get 5* is the time I got an Instant Chain proc. 