Part 83: Final Badge Classes
With everything wrapping up, it's time for:Job Update: Final Badge Classes
Lich:
The Lich is the final gender-neutral magic class and it is quite powerful. For growths, the Lich has the highest Mind growth in the game and a high HP growth as well. But those are balanced out by tying for the lowest Speed growth, the 2nd worst Res growth, and the lowest defense growth as well. Equipment-wise, it has the typical set of mage equipment but could also use scythes if you wanted to for some reason. The Lich class is focused almost entirely on dealing Dark damage. This can be really powerful, as all dark spells are about 10% more powerful than the other corresponding elemental spells. However, this focus is also a big problem for the Lich’s skillset. Once you return to Gelligh after the Desert Temple, enemies like the Kawa and Helhund appear, who resist Dark damage, and after the Mountain Temple demons become the majority of enemies and they also resist Dark damage. This change in the enemies really hurts the Lich class’s damage potential. Despite this problem, the Lich still has some very nice abilities, including Reanimate, which I covered my love for back with the Anatomist, Blood Magic, and Chilling Touch. Overall, the Lich class has strong potential that’s held back a bit by enemy design. But if you can play around it or combine it with other classes like the Druid, Wizard, or Sorcerer to cover its weaknesses then it can be really powerful.
As a side note: an important piece of equipment for the Lich class is the Ebony Rod. The Ebony Rod is a middle of the road rod, with its typical claim to fame being that it gives the wielder 100 dark resistance. However, it also boosts Dark damage inflicted by the wielder by 25%. Throw it on a Lich and that’s basically a flat 25% damage boost to all of your spells. You will lose a bit of damage compared to the very best rod, but otherwise the loss of 8-10 Mind would be well worth it for the percentage bost.
Notable Abilities:
Blood Magic: In my opinion, one of the most powerful passives in the game. It lets you start casting big spells right out of the gate and with a bit of healing support you can keep casting the whole battle. It also combos really well with Mystic Shield to protect your caster on enemy turns. You really just need to make sure you don’t get killed by counters, since they bypass Mystic Shield, and that you don’t get poisoned/bleeding because those can prevent your spellcasting at inopportune moments.
Chilling Touch: Slowing enemies gives you more turns. You taking more turns means you can tip the scales of a fight in your favor more easily. Combine this with a map-wide attack like Darkstorm, and you can easily slow down large portions of the enemy team.
Nightmare: A unique attack with a huge area of affect (equivalent to a burst that isn’t centered on the user) that does solid damage and can poison enemies. It can be nice to hit a ton of enemies at once if you don’t want to use Darkstorm or want to focus on the debuff portion. You just need to be careful about hitting yourself, because there’s basically only a 1 square layer where it won’t hit the caster.
Lord:
The Lord is the final hybrid class of the game, and for some reason the devs decided to gender-lock it to males. This always messes with me, because I always seem to make my main physical attacker female. Regardless, the class is a very solid one. It has growths that are either just about average or above average across the board. It starts off with a solid equipment selection, but one of its passives is Equip All which does what the name says and lets Lords equip everything. Its abilities are all interesting. There are four hybrid attacks with different AOEs and chances to inflict debuffs, an amazing buff skill in Rally, Holy Burst, and an AOE heal in case you need a backup. But the really amazing part of the class are the passives. Equip all gives the unit a huge amount of variety and Cleave is just as amazing as it is on Anadine. Overall, a very solid class that you could definitely use as a main or secondary set. Though it’s not as ridiculous as some classes on its own.
Notable Abilities:
Zodiac Attacks: The four zodiac attacks are nice, cheap attacks that can hit from range and can inflict otherwise relatively rare stat-debuffs. They’re not amazingly powerful, but are definitely useful.
Rally: Perhaps the best offensive buff skill in the game. It’s 20 MP, but buffs attack, mind, and hastes the user and all adjacent units. If you can get this off early or position your units to hit a bunch with one cast then this can really tip the scales of a fight in your favor.
Equip All: Just like it says, a passive that lets the unit equip whatever they want. This is really nice to let you tailor your unit however you want. I don’t think it’s as useful without the innate flexibility of the Spymaster, but it’s still a very nice passive, especially for adding bulk to otherwise fragile units.
Cleave: Just like on Anadine, this lets the unit take another turn after getting a kill, once per move. This is the final part of what’s probably the most powerful attacker in the game: a dual-wielding Scythe using Warmage, though it’s obviously useful on any unit you expect to do a lot of damage or pick enemies off.
Princess:
The Princess is the female equivalent to the Lord, and is magical to the Lord’s hybrid. It has the 3rd highest mind growth in the game and the 2nd highest res growth, above average speed and is either average or below average in everything else. It starts off with a semi-limited equipment range, but also gets Equip All, so that’s not really a constraint. Ability wise, you can basically think of it as the opposite of the Lich. It has a number of Holy element spells (though not holystorm), it gets the basic Revive spell, and it gets a powerful AOE heal. It also gets the Quicken spell, which is essentially the opposite of the Lich’s slowing Chilling Touch. However, what I think makes the class incredibly powerful is one of its passives: Double Cast II. When using the Druid’s Dual Cast, each spell is cast at full cost, but only 75% power. Double Cast II has them at full power. Overall, it’s a class that I’m a big fan of, just don’t necessarily use that often because I tend to make my magic users male.
Notable Abilities:
Holy Locus: A unique spell for the class. It’s just as powerful as the regular elemental locus spells, but way more things are weak to Holy damage than any single element, so it’s still very useful.
Mass Heal II: A more powerful version of Mass Heal that’s unique to the Princess class. It’s more expensive, but also 50% more powerful than the base one.
Double Cast II: An incredibly powerful passive that lets you cast two full strength spells in a turn. This lets you do tons of things, from healing more people to massive damage and is a huge boost to whatever spell caster you can put it on.