It's go time! Three different airships later and I've finally reached the final crystal and unlocked the remaining jobs. It's time to pick what I expect to be my final party for the rest of the game. The earth crystal has 6 new jobs...
First of all, the black belt. In a sense this is the 'upgraded' monk job. It attacks barehanded like a monk. It has a useless special ability like a monk. (You can spend an entire turn charging up so you can do double damage on the next attack. Or two turns to do triple damage. Maybe useful on enemies that split but pretty much a non-factor for the most part.) On the plus side the black belt has way more strength, agility, and vitality compared to the monk. In fact it has the most vitality of any job in the game and is a must use if you want to max out your health. With a high job level and high melee proficiency I imagine these guys do pretty good damage. Part of me wants to turn my tank into one of these for a while just to build up maximum health.
Next, the magus. This is the ultimate black magic caster. I haven't purchased any black magic spells since the start of the game when I had some red mages. This job might be pretty good but it doesn't really fit in with what I've been doing so far.
Now a real choice: the devout. This is the upgraded white magic caster. The white mage can never cast level 8 spells and gets substantially fewer casts of the higher level spells. On the other hand the white mage gets significantly more casts of low level spells. And is already job level 58. And will gain job levels faster than the devout. If we look at the healing spell formula every 2 mind is worth an additional base healing of the spell and every 4 job levels is worth the same amount. At level 50 the devout will have 12 more mind than the white mage which is nowhere near enough to make up the job level difference. I'm pretty sure in the short term the white mage will actually be significantly better both in terms of total amount healed across all spells and in terms of throughput over a short period of time like a boss fight. On the other hand arise is a level 8 spell and it's awesome and devout only. And if I end up leveling enough that the white mage gets job level capped the devout will eventually pass her.
Next up, the summoner. This is the upgraded evoker and actually gets different affects from each of the summons. The evoker was random, the summoner is fixed. And better. Summoner is tempting to play around with for sure but I don't have any of the summon spells yet so he's going to have to sit on the bench for at least a while.
Sage is an interesting option. Take the magus, the devout, and the evoker and squish them together. You can't learn all the spells but you get to choose which spells you do want to have across all three schools. Their spell progression is pretty bad, unfortunately. The devout gets twice as many level 8 spell casts as the sage. The sage does actually get more level 1 spells though if I want more cure spells...
Last but definitely not least... Ninja! The ninja is simply awesome. He has a very useful special ability: throw. This lets you chuck old weapons for big damage. Eventually you can get shurikens which do even bigger damage. Even when you're not throwing weapons they have high agility and strength so they do a ton of auto-attack damage. They get to use some spicy weapons. They're pretty much guaranteed to go first each round. The only downside is they're rather squishy, especially against spells.
I think next time I play this game I want to try ignoring melee attacks for the most part and just use spells and cool abilities but this time through I've been running tank+healer+melee DPS and I don't see any real reason to stop now. Especially with the way melee proficiency works it really feels like I should keep on beating down at this point. My plan is to use a party of viking, black belt, devout, ninja and see how that treats me. I'm also going to try scumming for health by tracking when my viking is going to level up and switch him to a black belt for the bonus vitality. I'll get punished by the weakened debuff a bit by doing so but viking and black belt are similar enough that the debuff won't last very long. (5 fights total for the 2 switches I think, and it'll only get lower as I gain job levels.) This party will be worse in the short term but once I find a vendor for level 8 spells it should get better.
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