Which party is the hardest in FF1?

[Sullla]

johnsobas said:
thieves are awful, they don't have any special abilities besides being able to run more easily and evade attacks more. they can't equip all the good armor and weapons, and they have no spells (unless you upgrade to ninja, which i won't).

after getting lucky and fighting only 2 wizards i was able to beat them.
I'm fighting astos right now and i'm doing 1 damage per hit. If i get really lucky i get a critical for 21 damage.

Having problems with Astos? Hmm. Thieves can equip the Falchion in the early game, which is a pretty decent weapon (10 damage/15 hit percentage). Thieves also get pretty good strength upgrades in the early game; I think they get a point to their strength for each of the first 10 level ups. If all four of your Thieves are using falchions, they should be reaching 2 hits around level 9 or so. (If you aren't at least at that point, you need to do some more fighting!) Let me go check some quick math...

OK, at level 10 a Thief will have 14 strength, which gets halved and added to the damage stat from his weapon (10 damage in this case, from a falchion) for a total of 17. You're correct; that won't be enough to get through Astos' defense, which is on the high side at 40 absorb. If getting 2 hits with each character, that comes out to 8 damage per round of combat... but Astos will cast the SLOW spell at some point, which will knock everyone down to a single hit. Not an easy battle by any means! Thieves do have decent armor (you can get up to 12 absorb at this point in the game) and pretty good hit point growth as well.

Your best hope is to run the fight a number of times and hope to get lucky on the critical hit rolls. Your thieves won't be able to cut through Astos' absorb until reaching level 18 at the very earliest, and that's just too late. Interestingly, once you get past the bottleneck of that battle, the game should become a bit easier (you'll have access to the Rune/Dragon/Coral swords which do decent damage). I'm sorry if I underestimated the variant earlier, I thought that Thieves were able to use the Silver Sword in the early game. Whoops!