There are no good “permanent” builds especially if you’re playing in hard mode. Simply because most big bosses require a different focus. The best way to go about it is to find guides for whichever boss you’re playing and reconfigure as necessary.

Optinoob and Blitz are the ones I checked out for Remake. I assume they pumped out a lot of Rebirth videos at this point.

Cetran Bracer (8 slots), Cetran Armlet (8 slots), You only get one of each, ever. Hades armlet (7 slots but cuts down defense). The 6 slot Enhanced ones are good also, Valkyrian bangle.

Accesories: Genji Glove( break dmg limit), Enhanced Karmic cowl (for debuffs), Riot Vest ( vitality and hp), Fortitude Ring (+50 on all defense), Space Ranger Medal +10% attack and magic, Ribbon( negate all debuffs), Transference Module( boost limit gauge with every ATB use), Gotterdammerung (best accesory in the game, pain the butt to get also, enter all battles with Limit Gauge Full, must for the very final final VR fights in the game).

Materia that I never take off on all 3 party members: Steadfast Block, Precision Defense, Prayer (you can buy more from the Chocoranch in Cosmo Canyon after Ch12,), HP up MP up, Magnify with Healing, Revival.

Then the rest is Elemental with whatever you are fighting is weak to. I.e: Phoenix is fire, so you pair it with Fire materia in the Accesorie slot, you absorb fire and heal yourself.

Warding with Poison or petrify or time. YOu can put Magnify with Time to haste all, or Barrier to Protect all.

Blue materia are the best, but also the ones that take the longest to reach max level. The final level for Swiftcast is 18000 AP.......

MP absorb with whatever you are fighting is weak to.

Spirit Up or Vitality Up are good defense.

Skill Master to the fastest character, for every ATB you use, you fill up your allies ATB a little. So Yuffie or Tifa.

Weapons, depends on the skills of each weapon and what you are fighting. But good ones are Reprive, Blood sucker for Cloud. Red is anything that fill up the Vengeance Gauge fast. Yuffie Attack/Magic Up, Barret Defense, Aerith Magic Up/Defense up, she is the strongest character and the most brittle one, you can reach 99,999 dmg if you buff her right in a fight. Cait, anything with Luck, his Fortune Telling and Moogle Knuckle hit like a truck. Tifa, anything that fills up your ATB gauge fast.

Summons, Odin because he insta death almost everything with his Zantetsuken. Phoenix heals and revives when he/she leaves. Moggles/Magic Pot/Chocobo Buff, Gilgamesh buffs and attacks.

Short answer, in normal or easy it doesn't matter

In hard, you will need to tailor it to specific pieces of content, there is no one size fits all setup

A bit odd to be playing Rebirth if you haven't finished Remake yet. But also the materia system is meant to be self-expressive, in a way. You can do specific materia builds but it's not necessary. 9 times out of 10 you can just run with whatever seems the most fun.

Some synergistic beginner friendly materia combinations are:

Elemental + Fire/Lightning/Ice/Wind materia to add that element to your weapon attacks, and as it levels up you'll resist and eventually absorb that specific element when struck by spells and attacks using that same element.

Magnify + Healing materia to allow you to cast Cure/Cura/Curaga on your entire party.

And some good standard materia you can always rely on for stats boosts are materia such as:

HP/MP Up for more max hit points and magic points respectively.

Steadfast block is good for gaining ATB charge when blocking incoming attacks.

Precision Defense Focus is good for increasing the timing window for perfect blocking

These are the most basic and user-friendly ones I can recommend as they don't require you to have a specific playstyle or build in mind. Just good one-size-fits-all sort of thing.

You absolutely do not need to be worrying about optimizing builds on a first run on 'Normal' difficulty. Especially this early. You can practically button mash through most of the main storyline content. Even if you needed a build, it'll be specific to that fight, and won't be optimal beyond that fight.

There were maybe 2 or 3 bosses and a few simulator/battle square encounters where I swapped around some equipment and materia- mostly to slot 'Elemental' in armor to counter enemy magic or 'Safety Bit/Karmic Cowl' to counter an instant death attack or 'Ribbon'/'Warding Materia' to counter an enemy that liberally uses status effect magic. Elsewise, exploring and learning the other combat mechanics is going to be a lot more fun and rewarding than playing spreadsheet simulator with materia + equipment.

Builds are mostly a necessity for post-game content. For now, I'd say go ahead and experiment with all materia. Find your favourites, and focus more on rotating out 'MAX' level materia for lower level materia to get a nice stack of levelled materia for that post game content.

Where's this screen in the menu?

Give your main character enemy skills, darkside, and chakra, hp up, mp up. One of your side should have synergy with quake and prayer. The rest of the slots depend on what you need, healing, raise, fire, ice, thunder, magnify some of them, elemental some of them, add some support materia to finish it off.

To give you another tip (albeit, pretty specific), don't sleep on Cloud's counterfire synergy ability, it basically automatically perfect parrys any ranged projectile attack, though you do have to somewhat time it. You can generally tell which enemy attacks are counterfire-able if Cloud gets hit by that attack while in Punisher mode and he doesn't retaliate. I say this because for some reason there are some exceptions, like you can't counterfire Odin's ranged spear attacks, but then you can counterfire a Jabberwock's stomp attack. Elemental spells are counterfire-able as well, so if you see an enemy casting Fire/Blizzard/Thunder/Wind at you, you'll know what do.

Get multiple copies of the same meteria (specificly stuff like fire, ice, lightning, wind, and healing)

Pair these multiple copies with blue materia like hp and mp absorb. That way, whenever you attack using magic, you both heal your character and refund some mp at the same time. You can also use a magnify materia at the same time so you can take out large groups quickly. Use first strike and atb boost materia to speed this up.

Healing materia paired with magnify and magic focus materia at the same time is more effective than prayer materia, it heals more and only costs one atb bar rather than prayer materials two. Aerith can use soul drain to regain the mp she loses using healing materia (the only downside since prayer doesn't cost mp). Putting a healing carcanet on Barret with the prayer materia is a decent alternative.

Master elemental blue materia as soon as possible and always use assess on new enemies, while it's useful in the weapon slot it's even better on armor, several enemies in the game become nearly unable to damage you at all, if you max out elemental it will even heal you, lots of enemies do elemental attacks, these attacks can be viewed after using assess so you can plan accordingly.

Once you obtain Yuffie and Aerith has the skill atb ward, you can do the best strategy in the game. Equip yuffie with the speed Demon key chain (you get it for beating Roche at Junon with all your soldiers still alive), then while in battle use a time materia to apply haste to Yuffie and have Aerith place an atb ward down underneath Yuffie. When Yuffie uses brumal form with this setup and standing on the ward, it won't consume any atb, you can use it infinitely so long as Haste is active and while she uses it on the ward it will also charge your allies atb Guage, you can instantly use skills that would normally cost two atb charges repeatedly.

Tifa + Starshower ability destroys everything, same with Cloud + Firebolt, also consider adding Str Up, and Elemental to Cloud and Tifa. And if all else fails go to options and system and change the difficulty.

I had the opposite problem found the game didn't offer much of a challenge except for the Odin summon which despite completing every sidequest and was past lvl 60 could not beat after 30 or 40 tries.

If you’re doing side content fully you’ll be overleveled on normal difficulty in my experience.

Also prayer materia and first strike materia. Same as remake.

I got through the entire game and most of hard mode without ever using attack magic, synergy skills or punisher mode. So that shouldn’t really be your restriction. I find synergy skills garbage. There’s no time stop so very difficult to implement. You can ignore them, I only used them at the very end of hard mode to boost the relationship with cloud.

Also the enemy skill materia in this game is really good. Sonic boom and plasma discharge you should use all the time with melee attackers.

You’re gonna want to make each character a different class so to speak. Aerith for me is the person that buffs everyone else whether that’s with using magnify+barrier or magnify+haste or magnify+anything really.

Theres two relics that always go on my revenant; Fist weapons restore FP and Start with wraith calling bell.

The bell is very FP efficient and does decent damage. She starts with fist weapons so it’s a no brainer. Ive found the FP for specific weapon hits is better than regain FP per successive hit.

I prefer to upgrade her base weapon after using relic to give it an affinity and combine this with good seals and an offhand switch I can use to restore FP when attacking. (It's not a good and reliable source of FP but this is my copium)

I never really bothered with staves or bows when I play in a team. If the run is successful I have some starlights shards in stock anyway.

As you said, summons can't easily tank alone. They really shine when there is a dedicated frontline in the team tho.

Melee tank with a wraith bell as my anti boss weapon, as much damage negate and health as I can find, some magic power up and then fp on hit effects, I tend to find she works best as a melee brawler with her spells locked to healing/buffing or ringing the bell.

For weapons holy/lightning/fire infused zweihander/greatswords/heavy spears or heavy rapiers are her best weapons imo because of reach and posture damage with her starting claws being better if you find none, I find this build hinges of Augurs fathom relic as it singlehandedly fixes her durability issues(+ 100 health which is effectivly +50% health at level 1 that degrades to about +13% health at level 15), the aoe heals and buffs also effect her summon.

I like to use sebastion and fred with a heavy weapon to backstab/chain stun/posture break all day 1 and 2 enemies.

Literally as a hybrid melee and incantation, idk why ya'll love to say shes fragile... she really isnt give her a few levels and she can take hits, heal back up and go right back to shredding bosses, and by the time you reach nightlord you should be around 12-13 and by then shes got enough health, stamina and FP that being "up close and personal" isnt a problem at all.

Ive been maining revenant ever since i got her day 1, and ive always played her as a super aggressive aggro juggling hybrid damage dealer.

Also the FP problem... isnt a problem at all, there are many relic and weapon passives that fix that problem.

• Regain FP with Reaper attacks - Literally just find a good scythe like Halo Scythe or really any scythe with a good passive, element and ash of war and play aggressively and smartly and you'll have no problem with FP

• Regain FP with successive attacks - Literally get fast weapons like daggers, short swords, curved swords and again play aggressively but smartly and you'll have no problem keeping your FP filled (or just combine with the reaper FP skill and be aggressive and double up on FP regaining, like I do)

Stop using her summons as means of tanking or damage dealing, just see them as aggro pullers thats it. Just summon them to draw enemy or boss aggro so you can either safely wail on the enemy/boss or revive your allies. Literally as simple as that.

Also you do realize you can resummon the same spirit right? If the boss is gonna do a nuke or a big hit on them just summon them again, itll summon them away from the boss and closer to you allowing you to keep them safe and high on health and still be able to use them for aggro keeping. I call the tech "spirit juggling"

Oh boss is gonna nuke or AoE and my Skelly boy would be killed? Ill just run away and quickly summon him right next to me, thus dodging the big attack and remaining alive and then you can just resummon him again closer to the boss, rinse and repeat.

Also when it comes to revenants survivability.. you do know it helps to choose those negation/elemental negation passives that bosses drop right? People focus way too much on picking the offensive options when they should really be picking the defensive/survival options.

Ive had runs where i got a few HP+ increases, physical and magical negation/resistance buffs as well as holy/fire/lightning/etc.. negation/resistance buffs as well... and i was a tanky lil demon taking hits like a champ and shredding bosses.

Ya'll need to realize that an S scaling in something like Faith or Int doesnt mean that character has to be restricted to a pure caster character, these arent 1 dimensional characters they can utilize a bunch of different weapons and playstyles

She’s insanely good day 1 and day 2 to a lesser degree but falls apart against nightlords IMO

Maybe I’m getting unlucky or not looking in the right spots but I haven’t been able to consistently find good incantations. Haven’t run into the FP issues others mention cause I’m barely casting spells

I’ve defaulted to using FTH scaling weapons and using the spirit summons to distract nightlords and then just hammer them. Will unsummon when they’re about to use a giant AOE attack.

Her runs feel more luck dependent to scale vs the other characters (although I still think she is better than guardian)

One thing I learned platinuming remake and now working on platinuming rebirth is that any build is viable. Just find a play style you enjoy and have fun.

I don’t use Cloud as a mage I usually use him as a Revive holder, someone dies that’s Cloud’s MP. Everything else is like HP up, Strength Up, Precision defense. Probably Elemental + (what ever the boss is weak against) Enemy skill for the attribute boost.

Make sure you are setting up your quick commands with the triggers, you want minimum Prime Mode (gives you stronger attacks in Punisher) and Focus Thrust, (this hits stagger, and extra on pressure). Infinities End for more power (I usually hit 9999 with this) . Then something that will bring you to an aerial enemy, triple hit, Firebolt.) You really get more in the action if you are not bring up the menu much.

Really Cloud is a good counter guy. You really have to get good at timing the block, knowing when/who Punisher’s counter is effective Remember he also has range attacks after a dodge, and fast step when you hold attacks. He can be more of how you use him type of character, since he good at magic and attack.

Remember your synergy skills (block + button) , Spell Blade/Power Cleve with Aerith/Tiffa can hit hard, and you don’t need to wait for it, it’s just there. As well as counter abilities. These become much more important in Hard mode.

You could do crit build. Stack luck and strength materia as much as you can and equip the crystal sword (with skills for crit rate and/or crit damage). Crit builds surprisingly can do alot of damage and work extremely well with Caits lady luck ability.

high def build. Equip max hp, equip the umbral sword with the +50  def weapon skill, stack a fortitude ring or an enhanced karmic cowl (preferably the latter) and Alexander as a summon. Equip barrier and provoke on cloud and now you have a solid tank with good attack power and offensive capabilities better than Red and Barret.

Theres also a build for speed/atb build with cloud. Equip the sleek saber (atb recovery/atb charge rate for weapon skills), aureate pinion, maxed speed materia, first strike, atb boost, haste, atb stagger and skill master materia. Pretty fun build overall if you want to main cloud.

It's all viable. I would even go as far to say that you can probably do a no materia run if you are good enough. Other have pushed builds out. Though I do see crits being slept on. They are stupid good if you can stay glued to the enemy but have no way to quickly put them into a staggered state. 

Igneous Saber if you want to use buffs or debuffs due to having boosts for those, sleek Saber with ATb charge up for pure physical.

It’s more about skill than any materia, but you’ll certainly want strength up materia. Skill master is nice but there is only one so put it on whoever you use the most abilities for. ATB boost is solid. Don’t worry about elemental weapon since it scales off magic attack, so unless you doing like buster sword or something with more magic attack its way less extra damage than the tooltip suggests. Enemy skills do magic so again, forget it unless you’re just using it for like Gorgon shield and sonic boom buff. Darkside is nice for physical builds, and chakra or Regen will be the best ways for him to self heal with a low magic attack stat. Curaga would be fine too, but I wouldn’t bother using cura, cure or pray. HP absorb - auto weapon ability is solid healing too, if you don’t mind his ai spending your ATb on the shortcut abilities.

He prefers barret Tifa and Cait as party members as a physical build due to their synergy skills being physical damage

I like taking advantage of Aerith’s Arcane Ward. It gives you a second cast of offensive magic cast inside of it. Just equip the best elemental materia for the foe you are fighting and then link magnify to it. You can hit a whole party of enemies twice. Super effective.

You can stack multiple Elemental Spells with the Blue Materia. For example let's say you set up Cloud with the following Combination of linked materia

Fire-Magic Focus, Fire-Swiftcast, Fire-MP Absorb and Fire-HP Absorb

Anytime you cast Fire with Cloud it will do more damage, fire off quicker and it will restore both HP and MP

Put elemental plus the element the enemy is weak against on your weapon. You could do the same on your armor say if someone always attacks with lightning it will nullify it and if you have it maxed it will heal you.

Who's the best flash?

Optinoob has some crazy builds but would require several mastered materias. Another one is the HP<->MP plus Limit build but this requires proficiency in perfect parries 🙂

Which 3 characters are you using most often? Either way, give cloud long range, counter attack and cover. Spread out who has magic materia. As of now, of cloud gets silenced, you’re screwed. You should have at least 2 or 3 enemy skills by now, each of your 3 starters should have one.

Since steal success is based on level only, give it to Cloud since he will always be a bit higher level than anyone else. Also, I would buy several ALL materia.

This game doesn’t require builds you can attack almost anything and kill it with just attack

Death Sentence + Power Soul = game beaten.

I run Cloud as a healer/fighter (Cure, E-Skill, Heal, Life, Counter+Hades). Tifa as my main fighter with Cure and E-Skill, Steal, some combat magick). Barrett as a tank loaded with some combat magick.

Rapha and Marach are an excellent example of where to add some re-balancing touches. To me, doing so is a no-brainer. We'll see if the development team had the time, money, or drive to do so.

The only thing I've seen that was specifically mentioned was Charge +7, so Archers should be better.

Rapha is the best Treasure Hunter for Midlight's Deep.

she is balanced 😂

Seems like most of the rebalance comments were about the difficulty. Since they specifically mentioned not wanting to change gameplay too much from the original experience. Besides the whole archer charge comment, I don’t think anything else about abilities was mentioned.

I’m preparing for minimal ability changes to be honest. It’s just altogether a pretty odd scenario. I thought by adding the classic version of the game they would have leeway to freely rework gameplay mechanics and balance. So many abilities and classes could use a rework. We’ll just have to wait and see if more information comes out. But I would have thought if class/ability balance changes were done they would have mentioned it along with all the other improvements.

I have the ps1 game. It's fun but a lot of subtext reading to understand all the bar rumors and quests.

I did enjoy stealing gengi and exploiting items under that platform. I had entire parties with Excalibur for fun. They took that out because it was never in the game. OG had some fun stealing, catching, degrowth trapping exploits that were fun to play after a few wins. I love the game but was hoping for more material. Honestly, I love the game. I've played it in all forms. Probably will here too.

I think we can make a sweet sequel with even some of the heros come back. Someone is going to mess with that stone and wiegraf is going to come out of it. He still has a class conscious. Helps delta win the war and become king.

That's just many ways I could see a next chapter..