Final Fantasy III: Water Crystal Jobs

The party of knight, knight, white mage, knight ended up being better and worse than expected. I definitely didn't have 6 quality swords to use and really only had 3 which meant one of my knights was awesome, one was ok, and one was pretty weak. In random encounters they were all fine but on bosses if they didn't have top swords they hardly did any damage to the boss. On the plus side just standing around and casting cure every round meant I simply couldn't lose either. Boss fights took forever but I wasn't in any real danger of losing. I did decide to job level grind before tackling the water crystal boss to get my guys from 6 swings a round to 8 swings per round. It turned out doing so also leveled up melee proficiency in one hand so they were swinging 9 times. (I bet they'd start swinging 10 times after just a couple more fights.) One thing I did notice is that having lower agility meant they went after the white mage pretty much always. And she still does more damage with her lightning staff than they did with auto attacks so often she'd kill the monsters before they could get their job level experience. Sigh.

At any rate the town after the water crystal doesn't sell any gear for knights at all so I really want to swap out at least 2 of my knights for other things. On the plus side I have 5 new options to consider!

First of all there's the viking. He's an interesting job and doesn't at all do what you'd think he does from the name. When I think of vikings I think of crazed killing machines on boats. Maybe my view of vikings are just different than reality though as I remember being extremely disappointed by the board game VIKINGS! since it had a lot of vikings doing non-combat related things. There was no raping or pillaging involved. But I digress... The viking job in this game is the true tank job. His special ability is provoke which forces one enemy to attack him in the next round and also lowers the enemy defense in the process. Unfortunately they decided to scale both of these abilities with job level so you really want to level a viking a whole lot to make his ability useful and it takes max job level to make it a guarantee. But having the ability to make bosses focus their attacks onto one target is insanely powerful. Unfortunately compared to the knights I have now he actually has worse vitality so while he may be a 'tank' he won't have as much health. He does have higher strength so he'd probably do more damage at equal job levels?

Next is the dragoon. Like Kain in Final Fantasy IV he has the jump ability as his special ability which causes the dragoon to disappear from the fight and then come back next turn to do a bunch of damage. Unfortunately the damage done is worse than just attacking twice would have been until you get the dragoon's job level up pretty high. Max it out and it does a ton of damage and it also does double damage to flying monsters. Beyond that he has less strength and vitality than a knight but more agility. And if you recall earlier when discussing the thief I said there was one item in the game that you needed a very high level thief to steal? It's the best weapon for the dragoon. Yeah, I didn't level a thief the whole way which pretty much excludes dragoon from being a top end game option for me this time around.

Then we have the dark knight. Like Cecil in the first part of the harder versions of Final Fantasy IV he has the souleater ability which is a massive AE attack which hurts all the enemies and the dark knight. The damage from this ability scaled pretty crazily with job level, current health, and weapon attack. It seems pretty great at wiping out random fights filled with dudes but I like using those fights to level up my job levels and my melee proficiencies... Like the dragoon he has more agility than my knights but less strength and vitality. I don't know that I want to use a dark knight the whole time so the fact that using his ability costs me melee proficiency in the long run really sucks. Also less max hp than just staying as a knight, so I think I'll be passing.

Next up is a new spellcaster job: evoker! This job gets to cast summon spells for cool and powerful effects. Unfortunately there are a few drawbacks here... For one, there is no place to buy summon spells that I can access right now! Switching to an evoker immediately is just kicking myself in the junk for fun and that doesn't actually sound like fun at all. Then like the geomancer you don't get to decide what the summon does, it picks from 2 options each time. 2 very different options one of which you probably don't want. It also has pathetically bad vitality. Yeah, there's pretty much no reason to want to switch to one of these guys.

Finally there's a unique job: bard. She has the special ability to sing a song with her equipped harp which does something cool to the party. Small defense buff, or attack buff, or damage, or an ae heal, or a damage taken debuff. All of which sounds kinda cool but they can't all be done right away since you can't get all the harps right away. As far as stats go they have bad strength and vitality so she probably does bad damage and has lower maximum health. I can definitely see bards being good with some setups (the AE heal combined with the dark knight's souleater seems pretty spicy) but that doesn't really fit in with the way I'm playing right now.


So, what am I going to do? Well, none of these jobs can take the place of my white mage yet so I'm keeping her around. I really want to ditch some knights for sword related reasons but dark knights also use swords so that doesn't help. Evokers and bards don't fit my party plan. I do like tanks and vikings use different weapons so I think I'll switch into one of those. I could switch into a dragoon for the short term but since I can't get their best weapon I'm not going to stay with them forever. I think I'm better off keeping the higher vitality knight around. As such I believe my party for now is going to be viking, knight, white mage, knight.