Why do we have segregated bathrooms? The history of it goes something like this:
Early 1900's women: want to join the workforce
Early 1900's men: women's place is in the home.
Early 1900's women: join workforce anyway
Early 1900's men: makes separate potty rooms so that women feel like they don't belong
Ladies and gentleman and those unspecified, the really real reason why we started separate bathrooms is because men wanted a barrier for women to maintain the pretense that men and women are different and therefore should be treated differently. The reason why we still have segregated bathrooms is because of building codes. Womp womp. If people are decent, why can't we pee and poo in the same room? The only reasons why you would continue to want desegregaged bathrooms is because you have weird, prudish puritanical or traditional or conservative beliefs based on values rather than reason.
If we desegregaged bathrooms, that would make one of the problems of people who identify as nongendered or trans irrelevant. Not that I care about the plight of complete strangers or ideology or whatever. I just think segregated bathrooms are dumb.
Wednesday, October 30, 2019
Wednesday, October 23, 2019
Sunday, October 20, 2019
Final Fantasy III Class Tier List
Hello and welcome to my complete Final Fantasy III class tier list! Yes, that's right, I said complete (Note, this is not complete on purpose). Ladies and gentlemen and those of unspecified gender, I want to tell you what! So, without further adieu, a summary of the jobs of each crystal and a final summary at the end.
Wind Crystal
Wind crystal jobs tend to have lower stats on higher levels than later jobs, however the trade off is if you stick with a wind crystal job for the whole game, you'll be fairly high in job level which kind of balances out. Also, you may be eligible for a legendary blacksmith items without any extra grinding. If you try to earn job level 99 with a non-wind crystal job, you may have to grind hard. Consider using at least one wind crystal job the whole game. Trust me, you'll be fine.
Warrior
You may want a warrior for consistent melee in the early game. The warrior is kind of a shit melee class, so don't get too attached. They can only use early game equipment and the Excalibur. I recommend upgrading to a knight ASAP.
Monk
You can alternatively use a monk for the early game melee and you can't go wrong with punching in Final Fantasy games because punching in Final Fantasy games is usually slightly worse than the chosen one wielding the power cosmic. The only problem with the Monk class in FFIII is that they are shit at first. Get your job level to about 14 or so and you should begin to see a solid return on your investment. Weaknesses: They are glass cannons.
Thief
I used a thief in my previous play through all the way to the end game. The thief is broken! It gains JP faster than any other class and will be 30 job levels higher than the party average before your know it. The game will give you knives to keep your thief competitive late game. My thief consistently outdid my knight in damage output and could reliably one-hit or two-hit anything. In addition, with its high speed, my thief would be likely to act sooner in turn order, dispatching an enemy and reducing the amount of damage received by the party each battle. By the time I got to the evil dark knight dungeon with duplicating enemies, I could do 5000 damage or max damage on a crit and I was one-hitting almost everything. My other party members would defend every turn because anything they could contribute was too little to matter. Thieves are amazing!
Red Mage
I love the red mage in concept!!!! There's a reason why you don't see red mages in FF games after this game, and it has to do with the later job class systems allowing you to customize your characters and effectively build a red mage. The FFIII Red Mage class in my experience is crap. One of its perks is that it can use that one early game sword that does extra damage to undead. Cool. This class is just too well rounded. It's not the star of anything; it's your backup at everything. This class doesn't hit hard enough to hit, it doesn't magic well enough to magic, it has less MP, access to weaker equipment, etc. I find that in RPGs, you usually have to specialize to be successful.
White Mage
The white mage has a lower JP rate than other classes, so to keep your white mage falling too far behind, you should use the defend command instead of wasting your turns planning another action that doesn't go off because another character defeats an enemy before your white mage's turn. The white mage is essential for healing during boss battles. You can not get away with relying on items alone to heal. Pick a white mage or die.
Black Mage
I hate black mages, but you're required to have them for some boss fights. Whatever, this game is balanced to allow your black mage to be helpful outside of boss battles. The whole concept of crowd control is gone though. Seriously, if I was confident that I could kill everything with melee, I would only use melee.
Fire Crystal Jobs
I couldn't name all the fire crystal jobs when I began writing this, but you're looking at Geomancer, Knight, Ranger, Scholar.
Scholars
Scholars are interesting in concept; I wish you could get more attack items. When they use items, the effect is doubled. They're like a prototype Final Fantasy Alchemist/Chemist class with a scan ability. The game tells you that you need that scan ability for at least one boss. You don't. I can't justify this class, but I would like to. I think the scholar has a very low JP gain rate.
Ranger
I've never used a ranger because of a little thing called ammo system.
Geomancer
I really like this class in concept as well. They have spells that don't use MP! The downsides are that their spell list is determined by the terrain, meaning you will most likely be fighting fire enemies with fire or water enemies with water. See the problem? Also, they use spells at random so they aren't reliable. I really, really like reliability in my RPG party. If I have some real badasses and thus I have some discretionary room to fuck around, I may invest in a character who might waste their turns or one shot everything on the screen like a geomancer. I think the geomancer has a low JP gain rate.
Knight
You know the end game is going to give you cool knight shit. That's why you have to pick a knight over a viking when deciding what class to have for tanking even in the early game. Deal with it. Excalibur, Ragnarok, and Ultima. If dual wielding shields is a thing (I think it is), a Knight is more effective as tank than a Viking because they have a Defend command which lets them intercept attacks for allies. Therefore, they're better at being a super tank than a viking.
Water Crystal Jobs
The water crystal offers jobs: Viking, Dragoon, Dark Knight, Evoker, Bard.
Viking
I have seen a let's play where the player used a viking just to do something different. Vikings are surprisingly effective at melee and as tanks. I recall that you can dual wield shields in this game and make a viking a super tank, or maybe I'm full of shit.
Dragoon
I shit you not, you are required to change your entire party into dragoons for one boss battle. After that, you don't need to use them ever again. Dragoons are bad at being tanks because they're special ability Jump removes them from the battle for one-two rounds. This means your squishy characters can take more damage before your dragoon hits an enemy for double damage once every two turns. Also, math makes that attack seem redundant. Jump will do 4x damage to flying or air themed enemies which are not the majority of dangerous enemies. Even if jump damage scales exponentially with job level, I can't find myself recommending it because healing spells won't target it while it's airborne.
Dark Knight
A dark knight in the remake of FFIII is a sort of samurai / ninja themed non-ninja character who can use katanas which are effective against enemies that duplicate. You know what else is good against enemies who duplicate? A character who hits hard enough to one-shot that enemy. You also have the dark attack attack which sacrifices the users HP for extra damage. Dark Knights are not tanks by the way; they're armor is just OK.
Evoker
I want to give it a fair try, but I didn't and I won't. I'm just too comfortable with my party by this point in the game. In case you don't know, Evokers are baby versions of summoners.
Bard
I want to use a bard too, but I hear nothing stellar about them.
Earth Crystal Jobs
Unfortunately, I don't like spellcasting classes in JRPGs. This crystal offers 4 spellcasting classes and it's clear (to me at least) that you're meant to pick and commit to only 2 at most and it's supposed to be a difficult choice. The deal with these spellcasting classes is that they are overall better than their lower tier counterparts, but in some ways the lower tier counterparts are better. For example, the White Mage has a higher Magic Power stat and more lower level MP than the Devout. I think you're supposed to trade being really good a using low level spells for being OK at using lover level spells and having access to end game spells. This kind of makes sense for the white mage because having more Cures is better than having fewer, slightly more potent Cures for dungeon crawling. Other than that, Earth Crystal jobs will be at job level 1 and your other jobs may have quite high job levels.
Magus
The big boy Black Mage. Has access to higher level black magic, has more MP, etc. Flare, Meteor, Death.
Devout
The big boy White Mage. Has access to higher level white magic, has more MP, etc. Can cast Life 2, Cure 4, and Holy, which is cool.
Summoner
The big boy version of the Evoker. Access to higher level spells, more MP, etc. Can cast Odin, Leviathan, and Bahamut.
Sage
This is the big boy red mage if the big boy red mage can't hit or wear armor anymore. You have access to all magic. I don't know how much more or less MP you have or how much more or less potent your spells are, but I suspect that a jack-of-all-trades super wizard sacrifices something. Oh well, I can choose to cast any three of Bahamut, Full-Life, Holy, Flare, and Meteor plus Odin with one character. That's cool.
Black Belt
I think this class is amazing for 2 reasons. 1, you don't need a weapon to be a good DPS, however this game actually gives good fist weapons so you'll still hit like a truck. 2, very high HP growth. If you want to get your HP significantly higher, make your characters into black belts and grind out 10 character levels each. You'll be happy you did. This class is still kind of a glass cannon though.
Ninja
In the NES version, this was a secret class that could use ALL weapons and armor making it super fucking duper! In this version, it is a more traditional ninja: glass cannon melee! It has low HP and Defense. I find they get KOed more easily than your magic classes. You can throw ninja stars which do tons of damage. It's amazing if you don't plan on grinding out tons of job levels, but if you do plan on job level grinding, ninja stars are not so impressive.
Summary
For the length of the game, I recommend a dedicated healer, a dedicated tank, and a dedicated melee attacker. I only keep someone prepared to do attack magic stuff because the game seems to like to throw the occasional boss at you that can only be hurt by attack spells and you want something like a black mage with a decent job level for the sake of potency. Just have your bases covered for the whole game; the game is kind of balanced for that. For your final party, I think it sounds risky to leave out a White Mage or a Devout. Notable classes (IMO) for your final party include Knight, Ninja, Black Belt, and Sage. Ninja probably beats Black Belt. I think you have some real leniency to have one wind crystal job with a job level of 99 for that sweet legendary black smith item, in which case I recommend the thief for DPS based on experience. End game grinding is required.
You can't in my experience avoid a balanced party. You can't have 4 Black Belts for instance. I've tried. Longer dungeons will make you burn through too many resources. The game will throw 1-3 enemies at you per battle; 1 or 2 on average with 3 being rare or more common at mid-late and end game. I think any way you roll, your party's damage output will generally be enough to defeat one enemy per round. Your party will on average take 2 to 3 hits per round of combat. That's just the way this game is balanced. Bosses will be threatening enough to give you a game over if you get unlucky or you make a poor decision.
The game will make resources available (such as weapons, armor, spells) to encourage you to choose different classes at different phases of the game and free resources (weapons or armor found as treasures) are available to encourage or limit use of specific classes. You will not have enough swords and armor to equally equip 4 knights for instance.
Wind Crystal
Wind crystal jobs tend to have lower stats on higher levels than later jobs, however the trade off is if you stick with a wind crystal job for the whole game, you'll be fairly high in job level which kind of balances out. Also, you may be eligible for a legendary blacksmith items without any extra grinding. If you try to earn job level 99 with a non-wind crystal job, you may have to grind hard. Consider using at least one wind crystal job the whole game. Trust me, you'll be fine.
Warrior
You may want a warrior for consistent melee in the early game. The warrior is kind of a shit melee class, so don't get too attached. They can only use early game equipment and the Excalibur. I recommend upgrading to a knight ASAP.
Monk
You can alternatively use a monk for the early game melee and you can't go wrong with punching in Final Fantasy games because punching in Final Fantasy games is usually slightly worse than the chosen one wielding the power cosmic. The only problem with the Monk class in FFIII is that they are shit at first. Get your job level to about 14 or so and you should begin to see a solid return on your investment. Weaknesses: They are glass cannons.
Thief
I used a thief in my previous play through all the way to the end game. The thief is broken! It gains JP faster than any other class and will be 30 job levels higher than the party average before your know it. The game will give you knives to keep your thief competitive late game. My thief consistently outdid my knight in damage output and could reliably one-hit or two-hit anything. In addition, with its high speed, my thief would be likely to act sooner in turn order, dispatching an enemy and reducing the amount of damage received by the party each battle. By the time I got to the evil dark knight dungeon with duplicating enemies, I could do 5000 damage or max damage on a crit and I was one-hitting almost everything. My other party members would defend every turn because anything they could contribute was too little to matter. Thieves are amazing!
Red Mage
I love the red mage in concept!!!! There's a reason why you don't see red mages in FF games after this game, and it has to do with the later job class systems allowing you to customize your characters and effectively build a red mage. The FFIII Red Mage class in my experience is crap. One of its perks is that it can use that one early game sword that does extra damage to undead. Cool. This class is just too well rounded. It's not the star of anything; it's your backup at everything. This class doesn't hit hard enough to hit, it doesn't magic well enough to magic, it has less MP, access to weaker equipment, etc. I find that in RPGs, you usually have to specialize to be successful.
White Mage
The white mage has a lower JP rate than other classes, so to keep your white mage falling too far behind, you should use the defend command instead of wasting your turns planning another action that doesn't go off because another character defeats an enemy before your white mage's turn. The white mage is essential for healing during boss battles. You can not get away with relying on items alone to heal. Pick a white mage or die.
Black Mage
I hate black mages, but you're required to have them for some boss fights. Whatever, this game is balanced to allow your black mage to be helpful outside of boss battles. The whole concept of crowd control is gone though. Seriously, if I was confident that I could kill everything with melee, I would only use melee.
Fire Crystal Jobs
I couldn't name all the fire crystal jobs when I began writing this, but you're looking at Geomancer, Knight, Ranger, Scholar.
Scholars
Scholars are interesting in concept; I wish you could get more attack items. When they use items, the effect is doubled. They're like a prototype Final Fantasy Alchemist/Chemist class with a scan ability. The game tells you that you need that scan ability for at least one boss. You don't. I can't justify this class, but I would like to. I think the scholar has a very low JP gain rate.
Ranger
I've never used a ranger because of a little thing called ammo system.
Geomancer
I really like this class in concept as well. They have spells that don't use MP! The downsides are that their spell list is determined by the terrain, meaning you will most likely be fighting fire enemies with fire or water enemies with water. See the problem? Also, they use spells at random so they aren't reliable. I really, really like reliability in my RPG party. If I have some real badasses and thus I have some discretionary room to fuck around, I may invest in a character who might waste their turns or one shot everything on the screen like a geomancer. I think the geomancer has a low JP gain rate.
Knight
You know the end game is going to give you cool knight shit. That's why you have to pick a knight over a viking when deciding what class to have for tanking even in the early game. Deal with it. Excalibur, Ragnarok, and Ultima. If dual wielding shields is a thing (I think it is), a Knight is more effective as tank than a Viking because they have a Defend command which lets them intercept attacks for allies. Therefore, they're better at being a super tank than a viking.
Water Crystal Jobs
The water crystal offers jobs: Viking, Dragoon, Dark Knight, Evoker, Bard.
Viking
I have seen a let's play where the player used a viking just to do something different. Vikings are surprisingly effective at melee and as tanks. I recall that you can dual wield shields in this game and make a viking a super tank, or maybe I'm full of shit.
Dragoon
I shit you not, you are required to change your entire party into dragoons for one boss battle. After that, you don't need to use them ever again. Dragoons are bad at being tanks because they're special ability Jump removes them from the battle for one-two rounds. This means your squishy characters can take more damage before your dragoon hits an enemy for double damage once every two turns. Also, math makes that attack seem redundant. Jump will do 4x damage to flying or air themed enemies which are not the majority of dangerous enemies. Even if jump damage scales exponentially with job level, I can't find myself recommending it because healing spells won't target it while it's airborne.
Dark Knight
A dark knight in the remake of FFIII is a sort of samurai / ninja themed non-ninja character who can use katanas which are effective against enemies that duplicate. You know what else is good against enemies who duplicate? A character who hits hard enough to one-shot that enemy. You also have the dark attack attack which sacrifices the users HP for extra damage. Dark Knights are not tanks by the way; they're armor is just OK.
Evoker
I want to give it a fair try, but I didn't and I won't. I'm just too comfortable with my party by this point in the game. In case you don't know, Evokers are baby versions of summoners.
Bard
I want to use a bard too, but I hear nothing stellar about them.
Earth Crystal Jobs
Unfortunately, I don't like spellcasting classes in JRPGs. This crystal offers 4 spellcasting classes and it's clear (to me at least) that you're meant to pick and commit to only 2 at most and it's supposed to be a difficult choice. The deal with these spellcasting classes is that they are overall better than their lower tier counterparts, but in some ways the lower tier counterparts are better. For example, the White Mage has a higher Magic Power stat and more lower level MP than the Devout. I think you're supposed to trade being really good a using low level spells for being OK at using lover level spells and having access to end game spells. This kind of makes sense for the white mage because having more Cures is better than having fewer, slightly more potent Cures for dungeon crawling. Other than that, Earth Crystal jobs will be at job level 1 and your other jobs may have quite high job levels.
Magus
The big boy Black Mage. Has access to higher level black magic, has more MP, etc. Flare, Meteor, Death.
Devout
The big boy White Mage. Has access to higher level white magic, has more MP, etc. Can cast Life 2, Cure 4, and Holy, which is cool.
Summoner
The big boy version of the Evoker. Access to higher level spells, more MP, etc. Can cast Odin, Leviathan, and Bahamut.
Sage
This is the big boy red mage if the big boy red mage can't hit or wear armor anymore. You have access to all magic. I don't know how much more or less MP you have or how much more or less potent your spells are, but I suspect that a jack-of-all-trades super wizard sacrifices something. Oh well, I can choose to cast any three of Bahamut, Full-Life, Holy, Flare, and Meteor plus Odin with one character. That's cool.
Black Belt
I think this class is amazing for 2 reasons. 1, you don't need a weapon to be a good DPS, however this game actually gives good fist weapons so you'll still hit like a truck. 2, very high HP growth. If you want to get your HP significantly higher, make your characters into black belts and grind out 10 character levels each. You'll be happy you did. This class is still kind of a glass cannon though.
Ninja
In the NES version, this was a secret class that could use ALL weapons and armor making it super fucking duper! In this version, it is a more traditional ninja: glass cannon melee! It has low HP and Defense. I find they get KOed more easily than your magic classes. You can throw ninja stars which do tons of damage. It's amazing if you don't plan on grinding out tons of job levels, but if you do plan on job level grinding, ninja stars are not so impressive.
Summary
For the length of the game, I recommend a dedicated healer, a dedicated tank, and a dedicated melee attacker. I only keep someone prepared to do attack magic stuff because the game seems to like to throw the occasional boss at you that can only be hurt by attack spells and you want something like a black mage with a decent job level for the sake of potency. Just have your bases covered for the whole game; the game is kind of balanced for that. For your final party, I think it sounds risky to leave out a White Mage or a Devout. Notable classes (IMO) for your final party include Knight, Ninja, Black Belt, and Sage. Ninja probably beats Black Belt. I think you have some real leniency to have one wind crystal job with a job level of 99 for that sweet legendary black smith item, in which case I recommend the thief for DPS based on experience. End game grinding is required.
You can't in my experience avoid a balanced party. You can't have 4 Black Belts for instance. I've tried. Longer dungeons will make you burn through too many resources. The game will throw 1-3 enemies at you per battle; 1 or 2 on average with 3 being rare or more common at mid-late and end game. I think any way you roll, your party's damage output will generally be enough to defeat one enemy per round. Your party will on average take 2 to 3 hits per round of combat. That's just the way this game is balanced. Bosses will be threatening enough to give you a game over if you get unlucky or you make a poor decision.
The game will make resources available (such as weapons, armor, spells) to encourage you to choose different classes at different phases of the game and free resources (weapons or armor found as treasures) are available to encourage or limit use of specific classes. You will not have enough swords and armor to equally equip 4 knights for instance.
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