In Final Fantasy Tactics (FFT), you get 5 ability slots to customize for each character, so you’re going to want to pick the best abilities/skills for each slot. This handy guide should help you select the best abilities/skills for each ability slot in FFT.
Slot 1: Secondary Skillset
Obviously you’re going to want to pick something that complements your primary class’s skillset. However, in general, there are some skillsets that are more useful and versatile than others. The Monk skillset goes well on just about every physical class, because the revive is so useful. Likewise, the Samurai skillset is incredible on any character. The Squire skillset is also incredibly useful because of the Accumulate/Focus skill. Item tends to be great on a character or two, Knight is pretty much necessary on at least one character to break enemies with. Those are probably the most useful secondary movesets overall.
Slot 2: Reaction Ability
There are basically 4 Reaction Abilities that are any good and everything else is only situationally better, or generally useless. The 4 abilities you want to look at for most characters are First Strike, Counter, Blade Grasp and Reflex.
Counter, which counters with a standard attack, is what you’re going to probably put on most characters. Blade Grasp makes your avoidance equal your bravery except against ranged attacks — in other words, if you have 97 bravery, as you should, almost every attack is going to have a 3% chance to hit.
Reflex doubles your dodges, so paired with a shield or a mantle accessory, you also achieve near-invincible dodge rates. First Strike preempts physical attacks and cancels them out, which usually results in murdering an enemy that’s trying to attack you — the only problem is, it doesn’t work on any named abilities, which includes the standard attacks from monsters. So it only works on humans.
Of all of these, Blade Grasp is probably the best overall, even though it got nerfed in WotL.
Slot 3: Support Ability
There are lots of options here, but again, some generally get more play than others. You don’t see Equip Bag being used very often. Dual Wield tends to be the absolute top tier for this spot, not only on physical characters who you want to be able to attack twice, but also on mages so they can equip two MA-boosting rods. Generally, weapons give great passive benefits, and doubling up on them improves a unit greatly.
Attack Boost and Arcane Boost have their uses on physical and magic characters, respectively. Attack Boost is generally a good idea for most of those unique knights that get thrown into your party throughout the game. Likewise, Swiftness has its uses for mages, roughly equal to Arcane Boost in terms of usefulness.
Most likely your go-to support ability is going to be JP Boost from the Squire class, at least until you get into the top tier support abilities you’ll want to replace it with.
Slot 4: Movement Ability
For movement there are really only 3 options. Teleport, which is the best. Move +3 which is great, but only available for male units. And Move +2, which is most likely what you’ll put on every character. Some might suggest Ignore Height from Dragoon, but Teleport already does that (and more) while being easier to access.
The way Teleport’s fail chance works, it already ignores height completely. It has a 100% success rate if you’re moving within your real move range, and then the success rate goes down the further out you get.
The only other thing with mentioning at all is that if you have Mana Shield, you can pair Mana Font with it, because you only need 1 point of Mana to invalidate an attack. That’s a pretty decent defensive combo. But, keep in mind, this is a game where by the end of it, enemies can barely touch you and you kill everything in one hit, so defensive combos are really not super useful overall, and the Mana Font/Mana Shield combo only blocks one attack.
That about does it for the best abilities for each slot in FFT.
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