Let's do a brief breakdown of where my characters are at. This is a little bit of a projection forward, as I've already played through what I will cover in the next "real" update.
We'll start with the story characters, and then the generics.
Ramza
This is Ramza, our lead character. Due to being present in almost every battle, he is easily our highest-level character, at lv 25. He's
kinda the powerhouse of the party, though there are caveats to this. His current Job is Samurai, which has the Iaido ability, for which he has the command for every katana currently available. Unfortunately his Magic Attack is only 06, so Iaido mostly serves to deal efficient AoE damage and he struggles to land hits that hurt. He benefits from being very tanky and having no wasted turns; any turn he hands without an enemy in range, he can use Mettle, his second Command Ability, to raise his own Speed or Bravery, which means by the end of a fight Ramza is acting at a significantly faster rate than other characters, making up for his somewhat lacking damage. He has 563 JP in Dragoon from hanging out with Hadrian that I don't really have a use for, so I'm letting it pile up to maybe buy Ignore Elevation, which allows a character to cross any terrain.
The 988 JP in Samurai is… Well I'm not sure what to do with it. Samurai can learn Bonecrusher and Shirahadori; Bonecrusher deals high damage in reaction to being critically wounded, and Shirahodori grants massively increased evasion against all physical attacks, but either of these would have to replace First Strike, which is really fucking good, so it's hard to pick? Samurai can learn Doublehand in order to wield a sword in both hands for increased damage, but that is only useful if I swap Ramza into a different physical job and I don't know if I'll do that.
For now he's just steadily learning new Iaido moves until I figure out the next step.
Agrias
Agrias is dead simple: She's a Holy Knight. Her Holy Knight Sword Skills take hundreds of JP to learn, so she's just staying in that job until she's learned all of them. I just leveled her up into Knight long enough to learn Parry and otherwise she's just been a straight Holy Knight this whole time. In combat, I have her use her versatile array of sword skills to hit at various ranges and elevations, either single-target or AoE. In theory the main reason to choose a sword skill are the different debuffs they inflict (Doom, Silence, Confuse, Instant Death) but I've almost never seen them land. Agrias is a little like Ramza in that she's very tanky but her damage has remained relatively low even as she caught up to the group in level, likely because as a female unit, her main growth is in Magical Attack, but her Sword Skills deal Physical Damage, so she's kind of a walking contradiction.
Things might improve now that she's about to change jobs, though. That 1084 JP will be enough to teach her her last Holy Sword Ability, Hallowed Bolt, at which point there's nothing interesting left in Holy Knight - it's basically just Squire and she has everything I care about from it. Which means I'll need to find her new jobs to pursue to expand her toolkit, and I have… Absolutely no idea which those should be. She'll always be rocking Holy Sword in either of her command slots, but what's a good combination with it? Sword Skills are, as I recall, based off Physical Power, not magical, which is unfortunate because Agrias has Magical Power at 7 but Physical Power only at 5. Nonetheless, I could have her level up towards Dragoon or Samurai for increased physical power, maybe? Alternatively, Agrias suffers from chronically low movement range, so maybe Thief for Move +2? Tough to call.
Mustadio
Mustadio has long left the Machinist job behind, having learned all it had to offer. He's been steadily leveling up Chemist since, and he just learned Ether, which should make MP-hungry jobs like Summoner more sustainable. I don't really have much else in mind with him; Mustadio is a reliable presence on the battlefield, dealing decent damage at range, instantly killing undead enemies with Seal Evil, and being able to chuck potions and phoenix downs at whoever needs them. He is, unfortunately, fragile, and so he ends up going down more often than I'd like, which is annoying as he's one of my only two healers. Mustadio is theoretically capable of disabling enemies at range, but the success rate on that is barely above 50%, which in video game terms
feels like 0%, so I don't use it as much as I probably should.
I don't really have any plans for Mustadio long-term beyond Chemist. I guess I could level him up into Knight so that he can learn Equip Heavy Armor and stop being so goddamned fragile? "Items" and "Aimed Shot" take up his two command slots, so I'm basically just fishing for Support/Reaction/Movement Abilities here.
Now onto the generics!
Hadrian
Hadrian is the team's
actual powerhouse. You can see here that his Physical damage is rated as 9, same as Ramza, and his Mythril Spear has a Weapon Power of 10 to the 11 of Ramza's current katana, but the difference between them is night and day. Whatever the reason, Hadrian regularly breaks the 100 damage threshold, and on occasion even deals over 200. With Jump abilities maxed out, Hadrian can hit any tile within an 8-tile radius, which usually covers the majority of the map in any given encounter. Jump gets bonus damage from using a spear, so Jump damage is already very high; but if any enemy makes the mistake of coming into close range of Hadrian then he can hit with his basic attack, which gets the benefits of Doublehand, can hit 2 tiles away, and deals even
higher damage than Jump. The man is a walking death machine clad in heavy armor, who spends like a third of every battle in the air, untargetable. For this reason he is usually the last man standing in any scenario that goes against me. Realistically, I think Ramza may deal more damage over time when self-buffing with Tailwind because he gets more actions, but frankly I'm not sure that makes up for watching him roll 160 damage against some poor bastard.
I'm not sure where to go from there. He has 880 Dragoon JP because I'm stockpiling to learn Ignore Elevation; once he has it, that will be his main command ability, support ability, and movement ability all squared up, and I'm not sure where to go for the last two. Hadrian's second command ability at this time is Item, of which he only knows Potion and Phoenix Down; he's basically just my backup when all the healers are down, who has to physically go over to slap them with a Phoenix Down. Maybe I could level up Chemist so he has more Item options? But Item is a failsafe, it's not his main calling. The best paths forward I can imagine are like, some further Samurai leveling for Shirahadori? Maybe a different Command Ability? Hadrian can still be made more powerful, but for the most part his build feels largely complete.
Osric
At lv 15, Osric is the chief victim of the story characters displacing generics. I've been trying to take him into random encounters, but our boy is struggling. This is in part because, as it turns out, summons are where I experience the
most choice paralysis: As you can observe here, Osric has a baffling
1945 unspent JP in Summoner, because I just… Don't know which summons to actually take, so I end up taking none of them. Osric secondary skillset is as a Time Mage; except that's not really true, his only Time spell is Haste, because… Who needs anything else? Even just using Haste, Moogle or Ramuh, depending on what's needed, grants Osric tremendous utility. And that utility is good enough that I have stalled on spending any of his JP on anything else - especially after spending a huge chunk of JP to unlock the Lich Summon, which has an incredibly cool animation but, despite costing more MP and taking longer to cast, doesn't appear to really deal more damage than Ramuh, so that felt like a trap.
Osric doesn't see a lot of battlefield use, but I still send him on a bunch of Errands, and his Time Mage JP is currently being pooled up to learn Teleport, which should greatly increase his mobility and therefore versatility.
Gillian
The Girl With The Gun. Gillian is another character with an utterly ludicrous amount of stored JP (1910, seriously!?) just because I don't know which white magic spells are actually
good, so I just end up spamming Cura and Protect/Shell. If anyone has recommendations, I'm all ears.
Gillian's presence on the battlefield isn't flashy, but it's reliable. Guns have fixed damage and fantastic range, so she can ping enemies when finishing off someone is more efficient than healing. She can also use Protect/Shell to defend other characters, which has been a godsend in the last crop of missions. On turns without a clear action, she Preaches to herself to permanently raise her Faith, though it's been a slow process.
Gillian has a background as Mystic but I'm not sure what to do with it. I could remove Speechcraft and replace it with Mystic Arts, but status effect builds make me nervous. Right now she does her job well enough and I'm worried about upsetting a delicate balance by changing something.
Hester
Hester is kind of a wild card, which is another way of saying her build isn't nailed down yet. Her stint as a Dragoon is temporary; I'm just trying to get her to Geomancer 5/Dragoon 5 because I've been promised a tasty prize at the end. Her current ability line-up is bad but ignore it, I'm literally just using her for Errands right now so she has the wrong abilities equipped. When not moonlighting as Hadrian's distaff counterpart, Hester is actually a very effective character; she learned to throw shurikens and bombs from Ninja, and she's got some basic Geomancy, but more importantly she learned Dual-Wielding from Ninja and Attack Boost from Geomancer. Dual-Wielding means she can equip two weapons and hit twice, without any reduction in damage, so this is practically a straight up double in damage; Attack Boost just increases all physical damage dealt. They're both support abilities so I can only have one, but the goal there was to either have Hester as a Geomancer dual-wielding swords, or as a Ninja with Attack Boost and native dual-wielding. Both have proven very effective, though I think I lean towards Ninja; Hester as an Attack Boosted Ninja is incredibly fast, incredibly mobile, incredibly deadly, and has a ranged attack fallback option.
Right now I've figured out that the mystery unlock class available only to women will be Dancer (that's not hard it's literally listed in the description of items I just don't have eyes), so I'm waiting to see what
that's like and whether that informs her build going forward. But if for the sake of argument we grant that this was all a waste of time and I don't use Dancer at all, then I'll probably have Hester grind out Geomancer Abilities, then return her to Ninja with Throw/Geomancy/[Some counter ability]/Attack Boost/Move +2. She's got some levels in Monk, so it'd be easy to grab Counter, and then that would make her build complete?
So there you have it, that's my current party line-up. Not included are Ladd, Livian and Alicia, who were shaping up to be my B-team and have some levels to prove it, until it turned out that story characters would keep joining up and eating party slots, so they've been benched more or less indefinitely.
And there you have it, my no-doubt terrible current line-up, featuring not one but
two characters with over 1900 unspent JP. When I tell you this game hits me with decision paralysis, it's not an exaggeration. Thoughts are welcome.
