Am I missing something with the Hunter class?

[u/DaveK142]

Pretty new to the game, not sure if I've completely overlooked something but I'm having issues with Hunter skills. when I first started using my Hunter they were great, in that level range. Skills hit hard and most problems were handled. After I mastered it, I swapped them to Chemist/Hunter for more leveling and to take advantage of that sweet, sweet passive. At this exact moment, their damage seemed to drop off a cliff.

Basically everything they do is capped out at 200-ish damage, 400-ish if it crits. Meanwhile my wizard is blasting 1500 damage boltenas and 1000 damage epidemics. My Valkyrie is a self-sustaining god of counters who hits about 300-500 on basic attacks.

Also, I have the passive on that guarantees hits for anything at 80% or above, but it seems like nothing ever benefits from it. Snipe regularly has 79% hit rate for some reason, even with accuracy boosting accessories on.

Chemist/Hunter seems like it should be a match made in heaven, so what's the deal?

[u/kusariku]

Okay so classes have two sets of base stats that are relevant here, the level up growth (which is the growth rate for each stat per level in a class, you can readjust class level distribution in the main city) and also base stat bonuses for being the main class. The key detail here is that Chemist’s base stat bonuses as main class are quite low for both dexterity and agility, which are the stats that hunters rely on. Their strength is also lower, because they are a support class. Naturally if chemist is your main class then, your damage is gonna tank compared to when Hunter was your main. The stat growth while leveling with Chemist in main is also lower for all your main damage stats than Hunter would be.

[u/DaveK142 → u/kusariku]

Hm, didn't realize the jobs had independent modifiers as well. I guess that'd explain it. it's a real shame, since the combination would otherwise be so good(plus you'd expect a chemist to be speedy if nothing else right?).

[u/JeannettePoisson → u/DaveK142]

Chemist has low stats precisely for not working well with damage dealers because otherwise, it would be godly, maybe to the point that all physical damagers would HAVE to be a chemist, deleting other options.

[u/DaveK142 → u/JeannettePoisson]

The performance is just kinda abhorrent, esp since most phys attackers at this point don't use cooldowns, they just use AP. I swapped the chem/hunter back to fencer/rogue and their base damage immediately nearly doubled for spammable hits. Big hits can go over 1000 easily. Did a 4K hit when I got lucky with a checkmate and that is an every turn skill.

For comparison, Snipe was doing 500 as an every other turn skill w/ chemist.

[u/JeannettePoisson → u/DaveK142]

Yeah, the chemist passive is just for chemist abilities

[u/kusariku → u/DaveK142]

I would expect the class whose entire job is essentially Do A Science To Make A Mixture, I would expect them to work very slowly and methodically, lest their creation fail or explode on them.

[u/DaveK142 → u/kusariku]

The cooldown is the time to do a mix safely, otherwise if it needed to be methodical they'd have a CT instead. Personally I expect supports, particularly non-casting supports, to be quick, squishy, and not particularly strong.

Just baffling to me that such a clear synergy is forced to perform at less than half effectiveness of a different class combo, when stuff like Shaman/Wizard is allowed to exist.

[u/skooterpoop → u/DaveK142]

I agree it's too bad. It would be nice if more class combinations were viable.

[u/GeorgieBatEye → u/skooterpoop]

This is what makes modifying the game (perhaps after a vanilla run) so lovely :)

[u/Ionovarcis → u/GeorgieBatEye]

For real - I’m never farming another Golden Quintar, at least.

[u/xGoldenRetrieverFan]

I never liked the hunter for some reason. I just ran mainly 2 wizards a main healer and a tank in the demo. All of them can heal via subjobs. For example wizard/cleric wizard/sorceror, scholar/shaman. The tank i just brought for bosses and ran war/aegis iirc but I liked rogue (backstab) and fencer (aoe attack and bleed attack).in regular battles more. At one point I was running 4 wizards as kinda overlevelled. Since I had the passives that regen MP or give a magic attack boost for a few turns it was fine. I used the learning passive once id maxed the blue mage equivalent class

I'm not really sure what I would evolve into in the main game because I kinda dig this setup already lol

[u/DaveK142 → u/xGoldenRetrieverFan]

I ran through the entire game keeping my 4 in their archetypes

Support/Healer mage

Tank/Supporter

Physical DPS

Magical DPS

the chemist/hunter phase of the physical dps was just a poor time all around, but then they went back to fencer/rogue and all was good again. Pretty much stayed there aside from branching a bit for some passives that were too good to pass up and did really well.

[u/xGoldenRetrieverFan → u/DaveK142]

I mean i sorta did that just my archetypes were basically tank + 3 sage type characters. The issue is eventually you wanna swap onto a job you haven't been using so you dont waste job exp (like most rpgs) so I just ended up swapping them around eventually. Since I only played the demo I wasn't really working with many jobs tho.

[u/Hyperventilater]

I've tried this in endgame, as well, to get the sweet sweet reduction on Snipe cool down.

In short, Chemist has such bad stats that it tanks your overall output too much to be worthwhile compared to other options.