Do the job levels mean much for stats? Like is a level 4 knight stronger than a level 1 knight assuming the same level on the char and gear?
Pretty sure job level is solely for earning abilities. However, equipping some job abilities will grant a stat boost if equipped on another job. I think equipping Summon on a non-summoner job grants a pretty hefty boost to magic, for example.
There’s a little more to it than that in how those boosts overlap or don’t, and mastering jobs will grant stat boosts to the freelancer job, but generally, job levels are for abilities, not stat improvement.
Edit: And that stupid Cid letter is the exact thing that’s interfered with my playthroughs before too. It’s pretty bad design, though somewhat easier to forgive in the context of that era.
Your four main stats (strength, magic, whatever the other two are) are based on your current job. It doesn't matter what your job level is. So a rank one Knight is pretty much the same as a rank three Knight.
Your equipped secondary skill can replace (upgrade) one of those stats in some cases. For example, Equip Sword/Equip Axe will iirc give you the Strength stat of their corresponding job, which is a pretty big upgrade if you put it on a caster for example.
And yes, if you fully master a job, that will give all of that job's passives to the Freelancer job, including the stat replacement.
The three jobs to master for the sake of Freelancer are Monk (for strength and stamina), Thief (for agility) and Summoner (for magic). Every other job gives lesser stat boosts but Freelancer only keeps the largest from all your mastered jobs, so you really only need those three.
If you want a general use superpowered Freelancer, master Ninja as well to get more pre-emptives and dual wielding.
The only jobs that grant actual passives are Knight, Monk, Thief, Blue Mage, Mystic Knight, Geomancer, Ninja, Samurai, and Chemist. (You get the innate abilities like cover, counter, learning etc.) Freelancer can naturally equip everything.
I remember FFV being very friendly in that there wasn't a severe penalty for changing jobs. IF Bartz is a fighter most of the time and you suddenly switch him to say white mage, he's a perfectly good white mage. Most of the unlocks are for using class abilities with other jobs, or super fancy advanced skills, but they have access to all the base stuff and do it well. If you're changing to a job to do X, they'll do X.
"The sausage of Green Earth explodes with flavor like the cannon of culinary delight."
I remember FFV being very friendly in that there wasn't a severe penalty for changing jobs. IF Bartz is a fighter most of the time and you suddenly switch him to say white mage, he's a perfectly good white mage. Most of the unlocks are for using class abilities with other jobs, or super fancy advanced skills, but they have access to all the base stuff and do it well. If you're changing to a job to do X, they'll do X.
Also I think it's fair how changing abilities to add spellcasting will leave you with less MP, since your stats changed mid-dungeon. If you commit earlier, you can start fresh and full, but randomly subbing in a healer comes with a small cost.
I will say that red magic is disappointing, and should've at least gone to level 4 (out of 6) rather than 3. By 3 you do have a lot of staples and necessities but it's just a little too lacking. Level 4 gets you Esuna but not Curaga, and a couple niche utility black magics too before the -ga spells.
Is there something special about these crystal things? Out of nowhere they just do turn after turn of Firaga and Aqua Breath which does like 700 DMG to all my units. Not much I can do to recover from that shit.
Just making sure I'm not hamstringing myself by fighting them or not guarding on the fourth turn of every enemy wave or something.
The four crystals in Moore Forest are all aligned to different elements, as you may have worked out.
When a crystal is low on HP, it switches to stronger attacks. If they're all low on HP at the same time, yeah, they're probably going to rock you.
An easy way to deal is go all summoners. Spam Titan with everyone to kill the one that's weak to earth quickly, and hopefully get two others from above critical HP to dead before they start using the bad attacks.
Then there's just one left, switch to a different element to kill it.
Also I'd this Exdeath Castle run afterwards the final dungeon or is there more after? I feel very underpowered and I only have about a dozen cottages right now.
I like the idea of a world where you can accidentally wander into a too-difficult area and need to run, it makes the world feel a little more realistic instead of perfectly designed for you wherever you end up.
I liked it a lot in FF2 where you could grind on early enemies enough. to take on medium enemies in a tougher area, to take on harder enemies in an even tougher area. You could spend a lot of time just leveling in the overworld if you wanted to, it didn't feel like you were pushed to move on to the next quest.
But the problem that sometimes arises is that sometimes in RPGs the townspeople will say "don't go into that dungeon! It's a horrifying place full of traps!" and that's exactly where you're meant to go, but sometimes they will say "don't go into that castle down south!" and that's because the enemies inside will kill you, and there's no way to know which is intended. Sometimes even within the same game.
Sometimes you're supposed to be the hero going where no one else dares to go, and sometimes you're being signposted by the game developers to seriously avoid a place.
It takes modern designs like Xenoblade or MMOs to literally tell the player HEY YOU'VE STUMBLED INTO A HIGH LEVEL AREA.
On a related note why does running from battle have to be such a high failure endeavor? Curiosity led you to a higher level area or you encountered a random high level monster? This might be the one time you thought about running but it's sure as hell not going to work!
Yeah I ran into a Gil Snapper and for whatever reason I couldn't run from the fight so it murdered me. And there's another time where I held the run button for probably 2 minutes and nothing happened.
The Gil turtle(s) in FF5 is kind of an optional mid game super boss, for what it's worth. The only thing you're missing by skipping it (them) is a big pile (64k) of gil.
I think FF5 usually plays it straight when someone tells you "don't go there, you'll get murdered". Examples being Walse Castle basement, Sealed Castle. I can't remember if someone also tells you about the Gil turtle or not.
I like the idea of a world where you can accidentally wander into a too-difficult area and need to run, it makes the world feel a little more realistic instead of perfectly designed for you wherever you end up.
I liked it a lot in FF2 where you could grind on early enemies enough. to take on medium enemies in a tougher area, to take on harder enemies in an even tougher area. You could spend a lot of time just leveling in the overworld if you wanted to, it didn't feel like you were pushed to move on to the next quest.
But the problem that sometimes arises is that sometimes in RPGs the townspeople will say "don't go into that dungeon! It's a horrifying place full of traps!" and that's exactly where you're meant to go, but sometimes they will say "don't go into that castle down south!" and that's because the enemies inside will kill you, and there's no way to know which is intended. Sometimes even within the same game.
Sometimes you're supposed to be the hero going where no one else dares to go, and sometimes you're being signposted by the game developers to seriously avoid a place.
It takes modern designs like Xenoblade or MMOs to literally tell the player HEY YOU'VE STUMBLED INTO A HIGH LEVEL AREA.
Yeah, its a hard thing to really address and none of the options are perfect.
You can signpost everything in an artificial way like MMOs do, you can make the game so linear that you can’t reach places that are too high level, you can use scaling and flatten the level curve, or you can just go the Elden Ring tack of letting players wander where they will and hope they eventually learn, but none of those solutions are really ideal.
If you're going to have monsters that vary wildly in threat level, the most important thing to have with it is a forgiving death penalty. Dragon Warrior kicks you back to your last inn with all your EXP and item pickups intact; your average Final Fantasy hard resets you back to your last manual save.
Dying at random is a lot more tolerable when dying barely hurts.
My favorite musical instrument is the air-raid siren.
If you're going to have monsters that vary wildly in threat level, the most important thing to have with it is a forgiving death penalty. Dragon Warrior kicks you back to your last inn with all your EXP and item pickups intact; your average Final Fantasy hard resets you back to your last manual save.
Dying at random is a lot more tolerable when dying barely hurts.
Pixel Remaster at least teleports you back to your last quick save, last save, or has an autosave in the last area you entered. So generally speaking dying isn't too big of a deal.
I'm trying to keep everyone on the same page as far as job mastery if nothing else so I change everyone to freelancer when they get split up.
Works pretty well too because I have a few things mastered so freelancer is really strong to have at times when I'm stuck with a smaller group.
I always switch all 4 to the same job to level any job, kinda dumb I know. :P
The fiestas broke me of this, and I have to say I really enjoyed the game a lot more when my obsessive tendencies were kept in check.
On the WoFF front, I appreciate that the monsters not in my stack get at least enough XP that I don’t feel compelled to re-organize after every battle… mostly.
I do wish they'd let you change stacks during battle in WoFF, because it's super feels bad when you run into, say, an enemy throwing lightning when you're in a stack with +150% weakness to lightning. The good news at least is that the enemy variety in any given area is fairly low, so you can work out that kind of problem in your first few encounters and adjust your stacks accordingly.
The big thing with WoFF battle system that I wish worked differently - a split stack is just asking to get killed. Which is sad because there could be strategy to splitting up to do support stuff (since you get more actions that way), but it just means you're going to get one-shotted because of how it reduces all your defense.
Yeah. I could never think of a good reason to split up the stack.
FFV Fiesta is such a neat way of playing the game. It also showed me that literally no job is useless in that game. Not even Berserker.
Though, there is something annoying about how, if you roll Geomancer as one of your jobs in the Fiesta run, none of its passives are worth equipping; someone's always gonna be a Geomancer and apply all those passives already.
If you're going to have monsters that vary wildly in threat level, the most important thing to have with it is a forgiving death penalty. Dragon Warrior kicks you back to your last inn with all your EXP and item pickups intact; your average Final Fantasy hard resets you back to your last manual save.
Dying at random is a lot more tolerable when dying barely hurts.
I dunno, Dragon Quest/Warrior games also had the penalty of halving your gold. And they've traditionally been fucking terrible with their economies. Like the average equipment price in a town will be in the thousands, while outside you'll be lucky if monsters are dropping more than 20 gold. Losing half your gold is a real kick in the teeth in these games. But at least it's better than potentially losing hours of progress.
"The sausage of Green Earth explodes with flavor like the cannon of culinary delight."
I’m not a huge fan of “grind more” penalties like xp loss or gold loss. Playing sekiro and dark souls I felt like those penalties were just annoying more than anything and led to me just having to metagame artificially.
Like “oh there’s a boss here better go all the way back to a checkpoint and spend all my souls/gold/etc. “ Or having to go back to an earlier area and grind to make up for getting through a difficulty spike. Or having to immediately make a desperation run for my lost souls every time I went to a boss fight.
I know there has to be some penalty for death, though, I just don’t really know the answer to make it something you consider enough to not blindly run in without making it punitively annoying.
I guess I would say that whatever systems we have gravitated towards have grown into "good enough" or at least "diverse enough that if one annoys you, another won't." I'm ok with save points which might make you run through a section of dungeon again, but just as often they're right before the boss which defeats the purpose (or just lets you go all-out, which the game intends). Save anywhere tends to not be punitive at all, but also the most time-respecting thing.
Really this goes into discussion of everything else RPG-related. Some games have had you start at full health for every fight, and then have intentionally challenging fights. (Those I often feel are more mechanically interesting but less time-respecting, because every trash mob is meant to be a minor ordeal.) Some games heal you at save points. Some only let you save in town and it's a long attrition as you get to the boss.
I like save-only-in-town dungeon crawlers that are explicitly designed the resource management being a big pillar of the game more than half-hearted "well we used to use resource management as an aspect of the gameplay but we have made it so much of a non-issue over the years it now feels vestigial in newer games" of typical JRPGs
I like save-only-in-town dungeon crawlers that are explicitly designed the resource management being a big pillar of the game more than half-hearted "well we used to use resource management as an aspect of the gameplay but we have made it so much of a non-issue over the years it now feels vestigial in newer games" of typical JRPGs
Yeah, Etrian Odysseys are great for this, because the attrition is actual attrition that works well, while keeping combats short instead of a complex puzzle every time. I gravitated away from Steamworld Quest before finishing it because of the length of "minor" combats.
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Pretty sure job level is solely for earning abilities. However, equipping some job abilities will grant a stat boost if equipped on another job. I think equipping Summon on a non-summoner job grants a pretty hefty boost to magic, for example.
There’s a little more to it than that in how those boosts overlap or don’t, and mastering jobs will grant stat boosts to the freelancer job, but generally, job levels are for abilities, not stat improvement.
Edit: And that stupid Cid letter is the exact thing that’s interfered with my playthroughs before too. It’s pretty bad design, though somewhat easier to forgive in the context of that era.
Your equipped secondary skill can replace (upgrade) one of those stats in some cases. For example, Equip Sword/Equip Axe will iirc give you the Strength stat of their corresponding job, which is a pretty big upgrade if you put it on a caster for example.
And yes, if you fully master a job, that will give all of that job's passives to the Freelancer job, including the stat replacement.
If you want a general use superpowered Freelancer, master Ninja as well to get more pre-emptives and dual wielding.
The only jobs that grant actual passives are Knight, Monk, Thief, Blue Mage, Mystic Knight, Geomancer, Ninja, Samurai, and Chemist. (You get the innate abilities like cover, counter, learning etc.) Freelancer can naturally equip everything.
Also I think it's fair how changing abilities to add spellcasting will leave you with less MP, since your stats changed mid-dungeon. If you commit earlier, you can start fresh and full, but randomly subbing in a healer comes with a small cost.
I will say that red magic is disappointing, and should've at least gone to level 4 (out of 6) rather than 3. By 3 you do have a lot of staples and necessities but it's just a little too lacking. Level 4 gets you Esuna but not Curaga, and a couple niche utility black magics too before the -ga spells.
Well that's for Doublecast which is awesome. :P
Oh I assumed it was the next level of magic. Good to know! Just don't know if I have it in me to grind that up.
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Just making sure I'm not hamstringing myself by fighting them or not guarding on the fourth turn of every enemy wave or something.
When a crystal is low on HP, it switches to stronger attacks. If they're all low on HP at the same time, yeah, they're probably going to rock you.
An easy way to deal is go all summoners. Spam Titan with everyone to kill the one that's weak to earth quickly, and hopefully get two others from above critical HP to dead before they start using the bad attacks.
Then there's just one left, switch to a different element to kill it.
Firaga is a bitch.
Also I'd this Exdeath Castle run afterwards the final dungeon or is there more after? I feel very underpowered and I only have about a dozen cottages right now.
As you're suspecting, there will be more game afterwards. There are several hints large and small, meta and in-world, suggesting so.
I like the idea of a world where you can accidentally wander into a too-difficult area and need to run, it makes the world feel a little more realistic instead of perfectly designed for you wherever you end up.
I liked it a lot in FF2 where you could grind on early enemies enough. to take on medium enemies in a tougher area, to take on harder enemies in an even tougher area. You could spend a lot of time just leveling in the overworld if you wanted to, it didn't feel like you were pushed to move on to the next quest.
But the problem that sometimes arises is that sometimes in RPGs the townspeople will say "don't go into that dungeon! It's a horrifying place full of traps!" and that's exactly where you're meant to go, but sometimes they will say "don't go into that castle down south!" and that's because the enemies inside will kill you, and there's no way to know which is intended. Sometimes even within the same game.
Sometimes you're supposed to be the hero going where no one else dares to go, and sometimes you're being signposted by the game developers to seriously avoid a place.
It takes modern designs like Xenoblade or MMOs to literally tell the player HEY YOU'VE STUMBLED INTO A HIGH LEVEL AREA.
I think FF5 usually plays it straight when someone tells you "don't go there, you'll get murdered". Examples being Walse Castle basement, Sealed Castle. I can't remember if someone also tells you about the Gil turtle or not.
Yeah, its a hard thing to really address and none of the options are perfect.
You can signpost everything in an artificial way like MMOs do, you can make the game so linear that you can’t reach places that are too high level, you can use scaling and flatten the level curve, or you can just go the Elden Ring tack of letting players wander where they will and hope they eventually learn, but none of those solutions are really ideal.
Dying at random is a lot more tolerable when dying barely hurts.
Pixel Remaster at least teleports you back to your last quick save, last save, or has an autosave in the last area you entered. So generally speaking dying isn't too big of a deal.
(post Castle Exdeath stuff)
Works pretty well too because I have a few things mastered so freelancer is really strong to have at times when I'm stuck with a smaller group.
I always switch all 4 to the same job to level any job, kinda dumb I know. :P
The fiestas broke me of this, and I have to say I really enjoyed the game a lot more when my obsessive tendencies were kept in check.
On the WoFF front, I appreciate that the monsters not in my stack get at least enough XP that I don’t feel compelled to re-organize after every battle… mostly.
3DS: 0473-8507-2652
Switch: SW-5185-4991-5118
PSN: AbEntropy
FFV Fiesta is such a neat way of playing the game. It also showed me that literally no job is useless in that game. Not even Berserker.
Though, there is something annoying about how, if you roll Geomancer as one of your jobs in the Fiesta run, none of its passives are worth equipping; someone's always gonna be a Geomancer and apply all those passives already.
I dunno, Dragon Quest/Warrior games also had the penalty of halving your gold. And they've traditionally been fucking terrible with their economies. Like the average equipment price in a town will be in the thousands, while outside you'll be lucky if monsters are dropping more than 20 gold. Losing half your gold is a real kick in the teeth in these games. But at least it's better than potentially losing hours of progress.
Like “oh there’s a boss here better go all the way back to a checkpoint and spend all my souls/gold/etc. “ Or having to go back to an earlier area and grind to make up for getting through a difficulty spike. Or having to immediately make a desperation run for my lost souls every time I went to a boss fight.
I know there has to be some penalty for death, though, I just don’t really know the answer to make it something you consider enough to not blindly run in without making it punitively annoying.
Really this goes into discussion of everything else RPG-related. Some games have had you start at full health for every fight, and then have intentionally challenging fights. (Those I often feel are more mechanically interesting but less time-respecting, because every trash mob is meant to be a minor ordeal.) Some games heal you at save points. Some only let you save in town and it's a long attrition as you get to the boss.
Yeah, Etrian Odysseys are great for this, because the attrition is actual attrition that works well, while keeping combats short instead of a complex puzzle every time. I gravitated away from Steamworld Quest before finishing it because of the length of "minor" combats.