Another triple crown! I mean srsly that's a pretty low bar with a meaty magic team that includes a Time Mage for Quickvenom shenanigans, but whatevs. It was more fun beating Shinryu with other tricks anyway.
Anyway, class review time!
Blue mage. It's one of my favorite classes and also one of my favorite punching bags. Lots of people will say "yo dis a supr borken job because it can play utility all day, exploit tons of boss resistance blind spots, and get higher gas mileage for your car." For the most part, Blue Mage lives up to its great rep. It's got skills that cover so many things and can be the difference-maker for a bunch of bosses. Still, many of their skills are specific to certain circumstances and may require a number of casting before hitting if not being entirely ineffective due to how fiddly magic accuracy can be. Lots of good skills come late in the game and/or might be be behind the wonderful confuse/!Control patience barrier. Other skills are straight-up useless. Even though I bash them a bunch, they've still got a ton of tricks that can get you through all sorts of situations. There's just a whole lot of times when they just don't work like you'd think.
Time Mage just seemed to be around for Hastega and Slowga most of the time, but got a big boost with Meteor in the endgame. Whoever was TM also became my designated rod snapper once those spells had done their job. That was about it. TM was mostly along for the ride this year while other jobs did the heavy lifting. Then again, Summoner and Blue Mage cover nearly all the damage and tricks you could want.
Summoner is just all kinds of stupid awesome. They are damage monsters in nearly every situation from the time you get them onward. Golem is probably the best straightforward defensive move in the game, and Carbuncle handles most of the magic side. Spamming Syldra with air knives equipped became a staple of the last third of the game, and was most of my strategy for Neo Exdeath, too. Gold Hairpins kept their MP usage manageable. They might be mostly straightforward - pick a spell and it'll do damage - but AoE damage can be hard to come by. Groups of mobs just fall over to these guys, and having a source of ~12k damage per turn against NED somehow made it stand out even more. It's a fantastic class and it was great to have one around.
White Mage was pretty vanilla, but super good to have in a pinch. Curaga and Arise saw a lot of use late game, and the Berserk/Blink strategy against Shinryu proved to be a lot more fun than Quickvenom silliness. Holy got a few licks in, too. That might have been the only memories I really had of them, but this stuff was available when it counted. They're the only really reliable source of healing and it requires a whole lot less babysitting than any other class that can.
I'm feelin' a No 750 team next year since the majority of the classes I haven't played as fall into that category. See you next year!
