Most Overrated Job Class (again...)

[VeloZer0]

That's not what I wanted to hear

Lets get some debate going, I'm just getting started.

[Shotgunnova]

Knights, definitely. They seem fine when they're first unlocked, being the first unit that can equip gobs of heavy armor and whatnot, but their flaws become more apparent as chapters go one: (1) lame speed growth, and can't equip SPD-boosting Thief Hats later on (2) poor base move & jump (3) attack skills have no range. Knightswords help redeem them a little, but they're generally out of the picture for me by chapter 2/3.

[the AJman]

Sorry VeloZer0, at the time I posted that I didn't have anything else to say to that, its tough arguing against a good arguement.

However I did go through my saved data and did a little experimenting myself, and your right the ninja with martial arts does more damage than a knight with two knight swords. Now I don't have a lvl 99 character with max brave, but I do have a lvl 81 Ramza with 97 brave and these are the results I came up with.

Ninja with Martial arts and bracer- 570 per hit ( over 1000 all together)
Knight with Chaos Blade and Excalibur w/ bracer- 440 per (about 880 all together)


So the ninja clearly out did the knight in damage, I completely agree with you on that issue. However, I also checked both on the other points you made, the ones regarding evasion, speed, and moves.

I'll address evasion and survivablity first

Base evasion for a knight without shield- 10
Base evasion for a ninja- 30

This looks like a massive difference, but when I put both of them into a conflict the ninja's evasion percentage wasn't much better than the knight's, not even very noticable. I counted out of six times the ninja was hit, it only dodge one attack. The Knight out of six hits didn't block any. Thats not a big difference in evasion at all and the fact that the knight had at least 200 more hit points meant that he was still able to endure more hits than the ninja. And this of course was without giving the knight a shield.

As for speed,

Knights base speed without equipment- 10
Knights speed with equipment and no speed access.- 10
Ninjas base speed without equipment- 13
Ninjas speed with equipment and no speed access.- 15

For the Ninja out of the first thirty moves in the battle, the ninja got six turns. The knight out of the first thirty moves got four, however there was about two or three more enemies in the battle using the knight. I'm not sure if the amount of enemies has much to do with how often a character gets a turn, if it does than I'd say that the ninja only gets about one extra turn to the knight, but if it doesn't than the ninja gets about two turns more than the knight. If the ninja only gets one extra turn, I'd say that the real speed advantage the ninja has is the fact that they can go first in every battle.

As for how far they can move,

Ninjas move stat -7
Knight move stat- 6

Both characters had move +3 ability
Its a single square difference, its not exactly a big advantage.


So I guess in conclusion, The ninja with martial arts will out damage just about any knight, I still stand by my arguement that the knight has greater survivability though. And ninja's with out the martial arts ability as far as I can guess (though I'm sure someone with bring in a set up to prove me wrong) is still sub par to a knight.

And just for fun I did use the item dupping glitch and made two Chaos blades and threw those on Ramza as a knight with the bracer. He did 999 points of damage per hit, I know its cheating and it really shouldn't be considered part of this arguement, but I thought I'd throw it in there anyways.

[RedPouch]

My two choices are Calculators/Mathematicians and Ninjas. The first one has easily the worst stats of all the classes, yes their abilities are useful cause its instant casting with no mp cost but the work needed to make sure you don't nuke your own party or worse, heal and buff the enemy party is not worth the stress IMO.

I have to highly disagree. Using a Black Mage with the Calculator's math abilities made it ridiculously easy to get through the last part of the game. It's been a really long time since I've played this game, but I remember they made it extremely effortless due to how fast they could kill all enemies in a rather short amount of time [like 1-2 rounds?]. I also never had a friendly-fire issue, as there were always ways around it. They made the entire end-game so easy that it was actually very boring and quite unchallenging. My other times going through this game without them were a lot more fun considering combat lasted longer than 1-2 rounds.

As for Ninja Knights, I felt they were awesome, but they hardly even got the chance to do anything in battle due to how quickly the Calculators killed everything. Oh and for the record, I'm calling them Calculators because I've played played the PS1 version of this game, which was several years ago. But I remember it so distinctly. Ajora was a joke as well!

[Wolf Kanno]

The Calculator ability is extremely overpowered, but the work towards getting one and learning its abilities (unless you spam the JP trick you cheaters ) is too much of a pain in the ass in my opinion.

Course I do have a bias against mages. For me, its more fun trying to build evil party configurations without resorting to Duel-Wield and Mathematics, so I don't necessarily have any love for the abilites and I find their classes have very little to offer without them. Course Ninja does have some things but Calculator's are just terrible across the board statistically. You make one, learn his abilities and then never use the class again. No one means to say Calculators are good, they just like their abilities and quickly move them to a class that can use them better.

Besides, it just feels rewarding being able to swiftly move your party towards the enemy and annihilate them without warning and not resorting to magic or long range.

As for the Final boss, Ultima is a joke in this game (XII on the other hand...). In fact a chemist could solo the boss, all you have to do is keep Alma alive and the boss constantly targets her. Not only does she heal herself, she also makes sure to be next to the boss when Ultima casts All Ultima on her. I won the game the first time on accident cause the boss targeted her and got caught in its own attack

[RedPouch]

Well now that you explain it that way, I do actually agree with everything you said. The way you worded your first post made it sound entirely different. I do agree because [as I said in my first post] I feel that the Calculator abilities made everything extremely boring by removing any smidgen of challenge the end-game had. I haven't played the remakes, so I don't know anything about Dark Knight or Onion Knight [though Dark Knight sounds cool, I've always loved classes like this].

By the way, what's your avatar from? He's cute.

[Wolf Kanno]

Dark Knight is pretty broken, but fun to use. They are like Gafgarion except with more abilites (Souleater ) and some solid stats. They're a pain to unlock though.

True Onion Knight is even more broken and damn near invincible in their Onion gear. Unfortunately, they work like the Mime in that you can't give them a sub class, reaction commands, or movement abilites so they get really boring, really fast.