If I could afford only 1, I'd go with Blessed Shield. Free Cura is great.

How does Phantom Weapon work exactly?

Does it add the weapon p.atk to int?

It adds physical attack to magic attack.  So phantom weapon and the most  powerful axe, plus axe lore if you have it, will make a good magic user.  A monk with natural talent is the best magic user you can get though.  No other set up can take close to 9999 damage with fire.

You want to use a monk and not another class because you'd be required to use knuckle lore which will use up all your slots.  Then you can't use that BP Recovery set up for max BP every turn.

That was a wtf battle I just had.

Dragon zombie, which is an undead weak against Fire/Light.

1 of my char went Blessed shield All, use Sage's staff, use Sage's staff, use Sage's staff.

The dragon just dropped dead and then rise from the dead, and then dropped dead again.

Why is Enemy's Invigorate (failed cast) damaging my whole party? WTF?

From Barras after entering light pillar.

Tagged since I keep on getting my ass kicked

I've been doing well thus far. However...

The Dragons are kicking my ass right now. I working on the keystones so that I can get into Vampire Castle. Salamander wasn't that bad, but the Ice Dragon is beating like I stole something. I may have to go into battle with all my specials and burn my SP.

Spiritmaster and Merchant are your friends and saviors for the Dragon fights. Have a high speed Spiritmaster start the battle with Enigma, Merchant use 3x BP Drinks (The 1000 gold ones) on Spiritmaster, then on the next Spiritmaster turn cast Fairy Ward.

That way you'll suffer 0 Elemental Damage for 4 turns and won't suffer the nasty Status effects from their elemental breath attacks for 5 turns. The dragons are piss poor easy with this strategy.

The reason the Ice Dragon is kicking your ass and Salamander was easier is because there's two dragons that don't have status effects on their breath attacks, Salamander and Wyvern. Mizuchi, the Ice Dragon, has a Stop effect with it's breath attack, which has a 50% chance of sticking to your characters. 

I've actually beat Mizuchi earlier tonight. I used examine to find his weakeness (Lightning). I set all of my Specials to do lighting damage, equipped the Stop Immunity ability, my Ice Flame Shield to my healer, Ice Charms to everyone else. I had my Templar (Edea) use Rampart on each of her turns, hit him will my specials, and had my Arcanist use Sacrifice and hit him with Thundaga. It took a few turns but he went down.

Congrats . Specials are rather useless for damage output on Hard though, only used them for stat boosts, as most bosses have 1,5x to 2x the amount of their Normal counterparts HP stat. Dragons were at 150K, so I had to rely on a strategy of constantly mitigating their elemental damage + statuses while freeing two characters for constant damage (two Dual Wielding Ninjas with counter-elemental weapons).

The best BP support class is what I mentioned on the previous page. A refined version of that same class is a conjurer because of their slow speed making sure they go last. 

Conjurer, BP Recovery on everyone, Group Cast All, Status Ailment Amp.  Up to +6BP on everyone every single turn.  -4BP to 3BP every new turn so you could potentially use max BP every turn except the first turn with the other three characters. 

Here's a video of me killing one of the temple bosses on hard mode on auto.  I didn't really put any strategy into doing the most damage since I've beaten the game, mastered most classes and I'm pretty OP, but just showing that each turn my characters can use 4BP(could up to seven after the first turn but left it on auto so they kept using 4BP.) 

Even under job level 9 as a red mage only it's better than the merchant or entertainer as long as the other characters have BP recovery as a skill equipped which is a low level red mage requirement.  It can only give 2-8BP separately rather than 6-24(or 32 but that's useless since 6BP will take you from -4 to 3 at the end of each turn.  Two red mage support/healers characters and two physical attackers work very well still.  Good if you're trying to beat the game with no random battles.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mI8sR7NZ5k&feature=youtu.be