Final Fantasy III: Job Level

I keep mentioning how the game strongly encourages staying with the same job and punishes you for dabbling in lots of jobs. The punishment is pretty simple: you suffer a decrease to all stats and everything you do for a set number of fights each time you switch. The encouragement comes in the form of an increasing job level and all the things it impacts, which are:

• Number of swings when using the attack command.
• Crit chance.
• Damage done per swing.
• Damage done when casting black magic spells.
• Healing done when casting white magic spells.
• Damage dealt by summon spells.
• Attack power of monks and black belts when bare handed.
• Special abilities of some jobs get better. (Thieves steal different things, warriors do slightly more damage and take slightly more damage, etc...)
• At max level you unlock a cool item assuming you've done the Mognet stuff.

Or at least so a FAQ on gamefaqs claims. It later lists the critical chance formula which doesn't contain a job level component so I'm not sure which one to believe there. Even if it doesn't the rest of that stuff is all pretty important stuff I would think. Well, depending on how exactly job level impacts those things. It turns out the total damage done formula for a normal attack is actually pretty complicated...

damage = (1+A/7+J/14+(M-1)/7-W/6)*(K+S-V/2-D/2+J/11+M/9)*MIN(K/D, 2)*(80+H+A/10+J/10-E/20-V/6)/200*RANDBETWEEN(.5, .7)*MIN((A-E+105)/100, 1.1)

A = agility
J = job level
M = melee proficiency
W = weight of equipment
K = attack
S = strength
V = enemy vitality
D = enemy defense
H = weapon hit rate
E = enemy agility
V = weight of weapon

I love numbers and formulae and my eyes are glazing over just looking at that. And that's for the 'simple' case of one weapon! Using two weapons means doing something where you do that calculation for both weapons, add them up, and multiply by .6. And because that formula is just too simple there are also complications when using a bow, a harp, or bare hands. Yeah.

One thing that jumps out is that in the portion that calculates damage per swing 11 job levels are worth the same amount as one strength. So switching to a job with a better strength progression is definitely worth it from a damage per swing standpoint.

In the number of hits section 14 job levels is the same as 7 agility. I actually need a much better agility progression switch to make this worthwhile but it's very believable that it could happen.

Chance to hit? Agility and job level are equivalent. Chance to crit? Agility matters and job level doesn't seem to.

I also notice that melee proficiency is actually a bigger deal than job level in both number of swings and damage per swing. This is a number that just goes up as you attack. You have a different number for each hand which is a little weird and means you should either never use a shield or always use a shield. (Melee proficiency actually seems like a much better way of doing number of swings than the way FFI of FFII handled it.) It's unfortunately a completely hidden stat so I can't find out what it is. But on the plus side it doesn't really matter what it is... I can only make it bigger by attacking and I want to do that most of the time anyway! It does mean that my white mage is a much worse attacker than the rest of my team right now. So I should keep her in a caster role if possible.