I have decided to break out FFT since I never beat it way back in the day. I got thru 15 battles I think back when I was playing it.
My main question is which jobs are the most useless for a newb? I don’t want to train into something like Samuri because it sounds cool then find out I wasted points on a crap job/class.
Any suggestions on which jobs to avoid?
(Yeah yeah, I know, eveyrone plays differently. But there must be SOME jobs in here that really are not worth the time and points)
Oh yeah, also, should I try to make my main group of guys as strong as possible, or should I make a whole bunch of dudes to choose from?
First, please don’t say “newb.” Next thing you know this is going to turn into “th3 str41t d0ap” and nobody wants that.
There really are no useless jobs at the start. Everybody can use skills from each of the classes, and I even would train my main character as both a chemist & a squire. You only start to get into “useless” classes at around the third tier, and even then you can make do with anything, but some are less useful than others: Geomancer, Mediator, Dancer, or Calculator. And in my experience, Summoner and Oracle were just barely useful enough to warrant the time building up their skills. Also, Samurai was cool but extremely expensive – you have to keep buying swords, and they keep breaking.
Keep in mind that there are definitely useless skills, however. Many of the chemist skills aren’t worth the trouble – potion, ether, and phoenix down are the only real essentials. For the Archer, only get a few of the Charge skills; at around Charge+07 it takes more time than it’s worth.
I usually ended up with my main character going through all the classes, one or two strong fighter characters, and one strong magic character. You get so many NPCs by the end game that you don’t have to level up no-names unless you’re really into trying every class.
Are you trying to imply calculator is a useless skill? Hell, using the calculator ability is easily the best way to cast your spells. (I mean by the end everybody on my team except Cid had maxed out that calculator skill, it’s great. Easily the best skill in the game.)
Well actually I’m talking about the math skill. It’s actually just another way to cast spells. The thing is that there are a bunch of spells in white, black, time, and oracle that are also considered a math/calc spell. If you’ve learned any of these equipping the math skill will let you use them and you don’t have to equip white/black/time/oracle.(So with math you could cast cure 3, holy, flare, bolt 3, etc and not waste a slot by selecting black and white.) Also when you cast through math your spell comes out immediately and costs no MP.(Huge advantages there.) The final thing is that the characters targeted by your spell is determined by some mathmatical calculation.(But the squares around the targeted characters glow so it’s not so bad. You can very easily target every character on the board however.) As for how to level them up I just had Ramza yell at them for awhile(Since that speeds you up.) while they just casted fire 1 and cure 1 for awhile. When I did that I could level them up as far as I needed in one fight.(Of course I also equipped gained JP up.) Oh, here’s a url to a gamefaq guide on this.
Calculators are far too time intensive to be worth all the bother. Sure you could spend 15 or 20 battles yelling at him and methodically having him train in all four(!) magic classes (I’ve done this before, by the way), OR, you could just make that character a ninji with two spell edges and a accessory to boast speed even more. Actually, now that I think about it, by the time you get a calculator with all those spells, you would have gotten ThunderGod Cid. With Cid in your party you no longer have to fear death. Calculators are just not worth the investment. Same goes for most of the jobs that SolGrundy listed.
Oh what’s a spell edge do?(Ok, I missed it.) Anyway it wasn’t that big deal for me since I had already trained to at least level 4 in black and white magic.(Gaining flare, holy, raise 2, cure 3, and fire 1) so getting a couple of levels in oracle and time wasn’t that big of a deal.(And I got haste2 and paralyze spells) It is true though, Cid is very powerful.(Of course with around 4 calculators backing him up half the time he’d never get to the enemy in time. With the calculator crew I generally could do a battle in around 10 minutes.)
Calculators are especially good when you learn Death, equip one with a Faith Rod, then use CT3 (I think). It targets everyone on the screen and has about 90% chance of success. Of course, you’d need to put Angel Rings on each of your characters in case a monster didn’t die, but, you know…
Well, in games with job classes like this, I usually work at mastering Black/White magic early on, and usally have at least one person working at a type of magic at any one time(In FF5, I had half my team as magic users at any one time, and something similar in FF1).
Calculators are just not worth the investment. Same goes for most of the jobs that SolGrundy listed.