Thanks for your input. It's greatly appreciated. One quest I'm struggling with is the "Rule of Three" quest where it says I need to fight a three-headed serpent but I keep fighting and losing to Sybil's Team.
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What level should I ideally be at to be considered overleveled for the Capital City Quests? Or better yet, should I try crafting this shotgun build for Bessie?:
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I can give you screenshots of all the gear I have. But I've mainly been using the "optimize" button when equipping more powerful items.
That's where you're having an issue, while you certainly CAN just hit the optimize button, that'll only account for what items have the highest stats, not what each item does.
If the shotgun you're referring to (I can't sign into steam for some reason on browser so I can't view it), is the super shotgun, absolutely get that.
For general guidelines, as you move forward, be on the look out parry related items, specifically items that increase your chance to parry, and items that increase your NUMBER of parries per turn on a character, and I recommend putting those on your main character (red head), as he will eventually unlock an ability that will actively allow him to parry more attacks than any character in a single turn.
For Bessie, she's perfect for multi-hit and status effects on enemies, if you make that shotgun, she can single-handedly clear out 90% of non-boss enemies in the game on her own because the shotgun hits all enemies twice, for her, you got some options depending on your taste in gameplay, you can either put all critical related items on her, or try making it so that instead of just 2 hits she can potentially land up to 4 or even 8 hits on an enemy, or you can level up certain blessings which may grant bonuses to poison effects, which at max level they'll keep all enemies permanently poisoned for as long as Bessie is alive at the start of a fight, or even gear her up with evasion equipment and try to max that out so she's near impossible to hit-
The world is your oyster.
As for Ray, I highly recommend anything that lowers magic costs, and that can grant her access to her transformations ASAP in a fight.
If you're in the capital and you're level 25 or higher, you're definitely overlevelled.
Remember that levels scale exponentially, not linearly, if you're already level 23 or higher, you're definitely over levelled for the quest you're trying to do, it's likely you're just having a hard time because your gear is mostly randomized, or you haven't been buying better gear from the shops.
If you have the right gear in this game, you can easily beat enemies over twice your level, I know personally, I cleared out the whole arena after I was a little further in the story than where you're at right now.
It's honestly all about just learning what the items do and what party member they'd work best on.
Edit: What I will say in regards to grinding, is that you're better off not trying to grind for levels, but rather trying to farm enemies for specific drops/equipment. Some enemies will drop seemingly plain but secretly broken powerful equipment, especially be looking out for anything that is "antshell", you'll thank me later.