dgwillia said:
Personally, i never really cared about the tiers or what not. For this game i picked....
Gladiator, Ninja, Arbalist, Zodiac, and Monk
It's not precisely a matter of tiers. But in general, you won't be able to beat an EO game (or, at least, you'll require massive grinding) if your team is poorly-balanced and lacks
all of:
-A strong way of dealing damage across multiple elements.
-A healer capable of healing your entire party at once.
-Defensive buffs capable of protecting against all of the game's physical and magical attacks, or boosting your max HP.
The problem, I think, is that most people don't have the last one, so they find most of their party getting killed by late-game bosses and assume that that means that they need to grind more. That's not how you're supposed to play EO -- it's more about making sure you have a counter to whatever the enemy is using, and a way of hurting whatever the enemy's weakness is. You don't need the "best" class, but you do need to have a wide variety of abilities or you'll get slaughtered. You also have to make sure that your entire party has something useful to do at all times, which can get tricky with some of the more limited classes -- though dual-classing helps a bit with that, you still only have so many skill points to spend...
(Of course, EO3 might be a bit different than the last two. They seem to have nerfed a lot of the traditional strategies -- anti-element abilities are now slower to learn, say, with it requiring 10 points rather than 5 to get total immunity.)