Need Help on Maximizing Combos in Symphonia

Hey guys. I would like your input on how you maximize combos in Symphonia. I am playing through the game where I purchased the "Combos" grade shop option which knocks all experience down to 1, but multiplies the combo bonus by 5. Through very careful manipulation I barely managed to get the "Gung Ho" title for Lloyd. However, now that I have the title, I want to try and max out the experience. This is where I would like some help.

What are your suggestions for trying to max out the combos and rack up experience? Party suggestions? Ex-skill suggestions? T/S suggestions? Any help is appreciated.

This Guide can help you get started.

I think Spell Cancelling is still in the game, so you could try to do that as Kratos or Zelos to rack up the hits.

As your party members, I would suggest Raine, Krats/Zelos, Lloyd and Genis.

Make sure you equip the weakest weapon you can find (the not unleashed devil's arms come to mind) and start hitting an opponent that heals when hit by a certain element (like the Ice Warrior things with swords in Celsius' Temple).

Make sure that roughly each 100th hit is a Photon by raine. Normally enemies stagger at a certain combo count (around 100), but with photon they get stuck and the combo count continues. Alternatively, you can use hourglasses, which can easily be farmed with Zelos' Personal Ex Skill and two Rabbit's Feet equipped (make sure to take off the devil's arms for this part).

Whenever the ice warrior you're pummeling starts to run out of health, heal it with one of Genis' ice spells (go Strike for Ice Tornado and Absolute).

Lloyd can assist you in pummeling the Ice warrior with his 27 hit combo:
Sword Rain -> Lightning Tiger -> Sword Rain Alpha -> Raining Tiger Blade.

End the battle with the prisms stars Unison Attack.

That helps a lot Sliv. Thanks! The only downside is I had to take garnet off Lloyd and put the sardonyx on him, but it is worth it to get 4700 experience on a regular enemy.

Edit: Can someone tell me how the Combos bonus works? I have had a 108 hit combo and got less than 1000 experience, yet had a regular battle (non boss battle) where the experience was about 4600 and the max combo was maybe 70 hits.

Maybe it's a modifier on its own?

10 hits is 1x experience, 20 hits is 2x experience, 100 hits is 10x experience, 1000 hits is 100x experience?
And then that modifier multiplied with the innate experience from the monster(s) you have defeated I guess?

I really have no idea.

I've been curious about this as well. My cursory experiments with it seem to indicate it's the number of combos you do in the battle that counts more so than the maximum number of hits shown at the end. E.g. doing lots of 10-hit combos seems to work out to more EXP than a single 100-hit combo. But I'm still not certain how it calculates it. My guess would be you get bonus EXP for each combo you do, multiplied using some formula by the number of hits in that particular combo, and then added up at the end. But I don't know for certain.

I think you are on to something Phaelin. In my own experience, I tend to get more experience from battles with more enemies (4 or 5) than I do with less enemies. I also think you get more experience when the whole party is fighting, as opposed to setting everyone to guard while Lloyd goes berserk.

Right now I am using a party of Lloyd, Genis, Raine, and Presea, but I may change it up some to see what works best.