Chocobo Training

[Charity322]

Not sure if this is the right forum, but it didn't fit into any of the normal jobs/classes.

I wanted to know if anyone had some advice for leveling your chocobo?

My char is an Archer, so I was looking at the tank or healer chocobo skill trees as those are obviously where I'm lacking. Would one of those be more useful to back up an Archer than the other? Am I correct that you have to choose just one of the skill trees? If you can choose more than one will your chocobo use both autonomously at the same time?

Any advice would be welcome.

[Kitfox]

Healing chocobo is generally the most useful for soloing FATEs and that's probably the only thing chocobos are good for. You can max out all skill trees by the time your bird reaches rank 20. Chocobos have 4 different battles stances and they use their abilities depending on which one they're in, it can be switched at any time.

[Hasrat]

Are you sure about being able to get all skills? I thought I had read it can max out 2 trees but the third won't get far. But I maybe read some outdated stuff possibly. Haven't even really used the bird all that much myself.

[Tint]

Are you sure about being able to get all skills? I thought I had read it can max out 2 trees but the third won't get far. But I maybe read some outdated stuff possibly. Haven't even really used the bird all that much myself.

i have maxed out all 3 trees so yes, it is possible

[Khalithar]

i have maxed out all 3 trees so yes, it is possible

Can verify this. Once you reach rank 20 you can cap all three trees.

[Canadane]

Are you sure about being able to get all skills? I thought I had read it can max out 2 trees but the third won't get far. But I maybe read some outdated stuff possibly. Haven't even really used the bird all that much myself.

We went from being able to max 1 tree at rank 10, to the rank cap raise of 20 to maxing all 3.
There was never a point where we could do 2ish trees.

[Xenosan]

Be sure to get your weekly Challenge Log bonus for your companion (defeat 20 enemies, defeat 100 enemies), train your bird in the stables regularly, and whenever Fate grinding, bring it along.

Seems daunting, but it becomes pretty routine. Just the reality that it's something that's going to take more than just a few weeks. Just keep swimmin'

The complication is rank 10 abilities (the AOEs). You may need to buy a couple SP reset items from The Hunt vendors (cost a paltry 20 allied Seals iirc). Why:

You need to actually acquire the Rank 10 ability (meaning, bird has to learn/be able to use the AOE) to get Barding at Rank 10, and get all 3 at Rank 20.

So at R10 if you want the barding right away, invest the SP into the R10 ability, but then reset your bird and invest up to R9 (but don't put points into R10 AOE again).

Birds with AOE can be dangerous. And it's not just healer AOE spam that's the problem, but Tank/DPS. Say you're doing Levequest at a high difficulty, 1 of the leve mobs is standing next to a zone mob. During the fight with the leve mob, your bird will do it's AOE attack, hitting the unaggressive zone mob. Great, now that mob is hostile and you are put in a situation you probably didn't want.

After hitting rank 20, I unlocked all r10 AOE abilities to receive the 2 bardings I didn't have yet, but then used the SP reset carrot and only invest up to R9 in each tree - because I don't want my bird to have any AOEs. Just not worth the micro imo.

[Estellios]

The best chocobo is a mixed chocobo IMO.

Work up to Choco Cure in the healer tree then put points into attacker and defender for the various passive bonuses, getting as far into attacker as possible.

Keeping your chocobo in free stance makes it so it doesn't move from where it's attacking (the healer chocobo is really hard to keep alive because it keeps following you...) and it can dish out some pretty nice extra dps while still healing you if you drop below 50% or so. It's a lower threshold than a healer stance chocobo but it shouldn't be anywhere low enough to be an issue.

You can't really do this when your chocobo gets too high rank in the different trees though, since it gets too many self-buff skills and will spend more time using those than actually attacking or healing. You'll have to micromanage at that point but the chocobo will be really strong if you do that.