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I'm receiving my Bachelor of Arts in English today, and my diploma is going to be partially written in Latin!  I'm so excited about this last part.  Magna cum laude, alea iacta est, veni, vidi, vici, et cetera, ad infinitum, ad nauseum, e pluribus unum hell yeah.

Four and a half years of college down, like 8-10 years to go!  *flexes*

On an unrelated note, damn it takes lots of schoolin' to become a professor.

Alternate title:

Elidibs and His Fightin' Lucavi/Espers/Scions/Totema/Zodiac Beasts

This is personal patch stuff here, but I thought I'd share some of what I'm doing, maybe return some of the massive amounts of creative inspiration I've gotten from this board.

Basically, I've always liked Elidibs but found the encounter with him somewhat underwhelming.  You learn from Magic City Gariland that he is a legendary Wizard, you stumble upon him in a cave, steal his Zodiac spell, he blows up, end of that guy.  I decided I wanted to make his presence as a kind of ominous secret boss a bit more tangible throughout the game.

So:

Rarely, on certain battlefields, some random encounters will generate a high-level, immortal-flagged guest Wizard named Elidibs that bears the Serpentarius zodiac sign.  The guest will have mastered Black Magic and be awesome all around.  It'll make those occasional fights easier, but the wtf moment would be worth it.

Throughout the first nine levels of Deep Dungeon, more of these Elidibs Wizards would show up (this time fighting the party), betraying the fact that they are puppet/astral projection/whatever things rather than THE Elidibs himself.

The scripted Elidibs fight at END will have Serpentarius Elidibs supported by six more Wizards, rather than the usual crap-ton of Apandas.  Each of these six will represent puppet versions of the six Zodiac beasts that did not make it into Vanilla FFT (using FFXII to fill in blanks: Mateus, Famfrit, Chaos, Shemhazai, Zeromus, and Exodus), each with a custom skillset.

Once Elidibs is defeated, his spirit remains, and END becomes sort of an arcane sanctum for him to continue his spellwork.  One of the battles that becomes unlocked would pit the player against a random number of Elidibs Wizards (maybe 6-8?), each equipped with one of the Zodiac skillets and carrying the appropriate Zodiac sign.  Lots of big flashy spells getting fired off at once, basically.  It would also mean Zodiac would be learnable in more than just one battle, as one of the wizards would be sure to pack Dark Cloud.  But it'd also be interesting to see the sorts of interaction that the various Lucavi have with one another.

Okay, so I've deleted my original post on the subject of Blue Magic, because I figured out what I was doing wrong, so nevermind any of that.

I'm using Math Skill as my skillset for Blue Magic.  How can I use any of my abilities in battle?  I'm always getting the error message that I haven't learned any 'combo abilities,' and thus cannot use any of my correctly learned blue magic.

Is there something I can do to make my abilities usable?  Do I have to flag them as Math Skill abilities?  Will monsters still be able to use them naturally if that is the case?

I'm embarrassed  .

When you encounter an enemy unit in battle, how exactly does the game determine what skillsets and abilities that unit carries?  Does it come with a random amount of JP that the AI can then spend on random abilities within the unit's base and prerequisite classes or what?

The reason I ask is because I'm curious if lowering the JP costs on all the abilities in my personal patch will allow for more diverse enemy skillsets.  I'll likely restrict my own ability selection so I'm not hurling Ramuhs, Earth Slashes, and Wiznaibuses (Wiznaibi?) at the first Dorter battle, but I would like to see enemy Wizards able to cast spells in excess of Fire 2 by midgame, if at all possible.

Any thoughts?  I'm trying to avoid playing with the ENDT.  I'm comfortable knowing my limitations.