

If a battle ends before your healers manage to fill everyone’s health bars up, simply open the main menu then hit the hotkey that opens the map (that’s Triangle for the menu, then Square for the map on PS4), which is a very useful shortcut to the “Handy Heal” option buried in another menu which will automatically heal everyone up in the most efficient way possible.Įventually your team is going to start running low on MP reserves, and there’s only so many monsters you can finish off before you risk having a party member die.

Regardless of what enemy you’re farming for experience, the AI does a great job of keeping everyone alive and topped up as you grind away.

This is most apparent when a caster goes in for a 7-10 damage melee attack on an enemy instead of casting a spell because it secretly knows it can get away with it. Not only does this mean that you have less menus to navigate through, it also means that you can generally hope to fight more efficiently as the game will often cheat with knowledge it shouldn’t have. By doing this, you give over the controls to the AI as soon as you hit fight, letting the game decide the best course of action during battle. The first step is to make sure that your entire team is set to “Fight Wisely” in the tactics menu. When this happens, the game can feel like it slows to a crawl, but thankfully there is a way of making the grind a little more automated. While Dragon Quest XI does a great job of keeping your team appropriately levelled throughout the story, there are a handful of sections that seemingly jump in difficulty, forcing you to spend a while grinding away a few levels to stand a better shot at winning the fight. When you eventually unlock the eighth and final party member, they should be swapped in to replace Erik as they also fulfil the role of tank. The best people to use for this would be the hero (the main character), Erik, Rab, and Serena. By doing this, you can make sure all bases are covered on both magical and physical fronts, ensuring that if anything happens to a member of either vocation, there’s always someone else there ready to do the job. While the team members available to you can change depending on what part of the story you’re on, a good rule of thumb when building your squad is to aim for two melee and two magic characters. There’s a total of eight party members available in the game, but since you’ve only got four active slots to fill during combat, choosing the right team composition can make or break the next encounter. As your journey stretches across the farthest reaches of Erdrea, you’ll soon find yourself accompanied by a number of party members, each with their own unique skill set.
