I find that this is the party set up I use for every game. Not sure how I feel about that...
I'd say, for A5, you need to be able to do a TON of damage, because a lot of enemies just have gallons of HP, more so in this game than any other version it seems, you really need to focus on killing things. I feel like I've gimped myself in the first play through by trying to get neat stuff like defense, hardiness, etc.