The best jobs in Bravely Default is a hotly debated subject in. After the game turned out to be one of the most successful RPG games on the 3DS people immediately begun to discuss the various jobs on offer. There are a huge amount of job choices in the game, each of them ripe with opportunities to combine with each other and create a world beating unit. But which jobs should you choose to put your time into and level up? Which will end up being the most useful? Below we list the 5 that we think are the best jobs in Bravely Default!
Ranger
Once gaining access to the Ranger job, the aesthetics of which you’ll either love or hate, it will be immediately apparent that the job is capable of dishing out some significant damage. By making use of the various ‘Slayer’ abilities – bug, beast, plant etc – you’ll be able to do an additional 50% damage when compared to a regular physical attack. This will come in handy throughout the game, especially once you identify the predominant species being battled in each area. At sea, for example, the Aquatic Slayer ability will come in very handy.
Towards the late game they do tend to fall off slightly, especially as some more advanced classes become available, however this is offset slightly by their ultimate ability, Multiburst, which hits random enemies four times, with each attack doing 0.6 times the usual physical damage. As you might imagine, casting this on a single target will rack up 2.4 times the damage for the cost of 1BP, which is nothing to sniff at. Their support abilities aren’t too great, focusing mainly on increasing accuracy and mutli hit damage, but it can be very useful to give some of your less physically able characters an ‘S’ rank in bows, helping them dish out a bit of damage when they’re not required to cast.
Job Highlights
- Good physical damage.
- Versatile damage throughout the game.
- Accessed fairly early.
- Great selection of damaging skills that target specific enemy types, like flying units.
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Red Mage
A bit of a personal entry here, and yet another game in which we truly enjoy the Red Mage job. There is just something so satisfying about having a mage that’s able to fill the middle ground between black and white, tossing out damaging spells or heals depending on your requirement. Should you play through Bravely Default more than once you’ll likely find them much less useful, but for those first tentative steps into a boss fight it’s ideal to have so many options available to you.
They will, of course, never quite manage to scale the heights of their peers, but happily Square prepared for this by giving the player plenty of reasons to level one: Support abilities. Not only is their ability list full of useful abilities, such as boosting your MP total by 20%, or reducing spell costs by 25%, but it also eventually gains access to an ability called ‘In The Red’, which increases magic damage done the further you dip into negative BP values. This all means that the Bravely Default Red Mage is incredibly good at supporting other classes, and you’ll often find their skills propping up some of the strongest combinations the game has to offer. Hmmm… If only there were another spell based class available that would maybe really love spending all of it’s BP in the first round to do massive damage. Some other kind of mage perhaps. Maybe in the same list based article...
Job Highlights
- Great spell selection ensures versatility.
- Fantastic support abilities.
- Ideal healing support for some of the harder boss fights.
- Despite not approaching the full magical power of others, the Red Mage skills are tremendously useful when combined with other magic using jobs.
Dark Knight
Dark Knights have always been an interesting class. No matter the game they hail from they tend to follow the same theme: The use of their own health to inflict damage on their opponents. In this regard Bravely Default is no different, though the Dark Knight here is only capable of dishing out said damage if you incorporate a little bit of planning.
The ability Dark Nebula is a great example of this. Upon casting this spell, you will sacrifice 20% of your maximum HP to deal big damage on all of the enemies in the encounter… And all of your allies. Sounds like an ability you really don’t want to rely on right? Well, what if you equipped something on your party members that nullifies dark damage? Now you have an ability that just does big damage to your enemies, and only costs HP – Not BP, not MP, just health. How about you multiply that by Braving loads of extra Dark Nebula. Then perhaps make more than one, nay even all of your roster into Dark Knights… You get the idea. This flexibility is why we chose it as one of our best job classes. It provokes these thoughts and experiments, ultimately leading to some combinations that feel almost broken. It’s helped too by having a support ability that increases your physical damage by a whopping 30%.
Job Highlights
- High physical damage.
- Potential to do very high ability damage.
- Excels with some great equipment.
- Skills learned here can be combined with other jobs to great effect, but be careful when spending HP.
Pirate
From one damage powerhouse to another. This time we’re highlighting the cream of the physical crop, the Pirate! This is by far our most used job in Bravely Default. There is something super fun and satisfying about hacking up our enemies with the plethora of axe based attacks on offer.
It’s not just about the pure power though, they have a few more tricks up their sleeves. They have a great selection of debuffing attacks available to them, like Shell Split, which does damage and reduced the enemies physical defence, something we like to follow up with 3 additional physical attacks for huge damage. Pair this with a good 20% attack up support and you have and incredibly potent physical threat, especially if you stack them up in a party together. Their supporting abilities aren’t that great, though chucking a super powerful axe on your healer with their ‘S’ in axes can be a bit of a laugh. Regardless though, if you’re going to go Pirate, go full Pirate and cleave your enemies to bits.
Job Highlights
- Very High physical damage.
- Great debuffs available.
- Some fantastic physical skills which, when combined with those available from other jobs, can completely delete random battles and deal huge damage to bosses.
- Axes are very powerful in Bravely Default.
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Black Mage
Oh look, another mage on the list. Funny that. In a game almost designed to let you find broken combinations we finally settle on the most broken of all, the Black Mage. To see this writ large one need only look at the speedrun scene, but we’ll do our best to describe it. Yes, the Black Mage has some of the most powerful magic spells in the game, and it has some fantastic support skills to further this power, particularly their ability to boost the damage of spells and ignore the opponents defence. None of this really compares however, to their level 8 skill ‘Black Resonance’. What this does is scale the power of your black magic upwards depending on the amount of black mages in your party, up to a 20% boost.
Some of you may be ahead of us here, but stick with us.
So theoretically you could, oh who knows, maybe make your whole party into Black Mages to get the full effect of this? Then maybe you could remember what that clever-yet-handsome article writer said about that Red Mage support ability ‘In The Red’, which boosts your magic attacks when you’re in negative BP? Which, in order to achieve, would require you to immediately spend all of your BP on consecutive spells. Who knows, maybe you could do this at the start of the fight when your BP is at it’s lowest? Now what you have is four black mages, being buffed by all of their friends, and their support abilities, and their red mage ability. All ready to fire off four incredibly powerful spells, each. In the first round. Ye gods, it’s no wonder the world of Bravely Default is full of gaping chasms.
Job Highlights
- High magical damage, obviously.
- Huge damage potential in the later portions of the game.
- Buffed by numerous support abilities from other jobs, which can create incredible amounts of damage.
- Multiple Black Mages will automatically buff each other.
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Categories: Bravely Default, Top 5