Do enemies scale?

And if so, how is one supposed to grind for crystals to forge with? The game gives them out in pitiful amounts unless you grind, and they seem to be the only way to boost stats.

It’s a somewhat common misconception that enemies scale to your characters, but they don’t really. Enemies scale at a rate based on how many battles you’ve fought, what difficulty the battle node was, and what difficulty the game is currently set to.

Enemies scale at a slower rate if you refight battles you’ve beaten before.

Fighting “easy” nodes scales them slower than “normal” nodes, which is slower than “hard” nodes, etc.

They also scale slower if you have the game set to the easy difficulty, at a normal rate on the normal difficulty, and faster on the hard difficulty. The difficulty setting has no bearing on the current difficulty of the game; only how much the enemies scale for later.

So you can outscale the enemy the most by setting the difficulty to easy and refighting easy nodes. There are many mines/springs/caves/etc of any element that are repeatable, so you should be able to farm safely for any element you need. Some require you to rezone to respawn for some reason, though. For many nodes you can just stand in front of and fight over and over again, though.

Even if you don’t go through any of that trouble though, you get a lot of elements from the jobs and quests. So if your concern is primarily the elements, what I did was send as many people on jobs as I could and then refight a node until all jobs were done. Plenty of elements.

Thanks. I took your advice of exploiting the easy nodes for materials and such. So far so good.

The enemies scale with you, but if you level right, the enemies become weaker than your characters.

If you switch weapons with a character (usually to gain roles), or intentionally equip weaker weapons (to glimmer new techs), or switch to weaker characters with less HP, then enemies become really hard. "Easy" battles exist to level up your characters after switching.

Your max weapon level is determined by the enemy strength. Your characters level their weapon quickly if the enemies are strong, but stop when they catch up to the enemy.

"Hard" battles become pretty easy with an entire party with max weapon level and most of the techs for that weapon.

You will also need to upgrade weapons to near max to beat "Brutal" battles.