I like Elves and Human, so I kinda fill my party only with those.
From my experience with the previous demo, not the one release this week, I found Valkyrie and Ranger to be underwhelming.
I went for vanilla Human Fighter MC dude, but rerolled like crazy and maxed like 3 or 4 of his stats.
You kinda need a Thief, good exploration utility with Lockpick.
Mage is almost a must because of extra utility, spell slots to cast jump or the minimap spell.
Can't remember if Alchemist was the class with Appraisal skill or it was a different one, but I found it to be good utility later in the game to be able to upgrade gear on the fly instead of having to revisit town to identify everything.
I made a Summoner hoping to capture and raise a couple of high level summons and then eventually respec to ranger and be able to still use those summons. Was disappointed to find out that your attributes reset when you respec, so it was pointless to reroll until 30+ points on character creation.
I found that Blade Dancer class to be really amazing DPS and I think later she unlocks random chance to instakill.
If you are planning to go one of each race, I suggest Dwarf Blacksmith, found it to be decent and with great utility.
So my best party so far ended up being:
- Fighter MC
- Thief (usually keep Max)
- Blade Dancer
- Summoner
- Alchemist
- Mage
I don't remember if Cleric was in the game, but I think I had one of those too. Probably Mage and Alchemist were interchangeable, or I just learnt all the spells on my MC.
From the demos, these are my thoughts on this:
Fighter or any melee-oriented class is worthless for the MC, due to all the good higher-end armor being female only, so might as well go thief/assassin or spellcaster
You cna really make up for spellcasting classes with items, there's three staves for aoe elemental attacks [fire/ice/elec], there's a raise dead staff, a light storm staff, a ring that casts the minimap spell, and appraisal, repair, and jump are all alchemy, which can be done by making the MC an assassin (and also dual-wield/instantkill chance) eventually
Mage spells can be cast by wizards[魔法使い], bishops[司教], bards[吟遊詩人], sorcerers[ソーサラー], and dervish/spellblade/blade dancer[曲刀兵]
Priest spells can be cast by clerics[僧侶], bishops, druids[ドルイド], valkyries[バルキリー], monks[モンク], and lords[ロード]
Alchemy spells can be cast by alchemists[錬金術師], druids, sorcerers, and assassins[アサシン](i think)
Various equipment pieces are disallowed on some of them but allowed on others that are similar (quite a few cleric equippable items not equippable by bishop)
I usually try to make MC an assassin, or go sorcerer or druid for coverage.
Max has been required in the demos i played, so he's the thief.
One or two of the melee that can cast spells, valkyrie is good for a high defense backup stack of heal and statue cure spells while another healer works in battle, lord is about the same, and monks can also run this but they're going to be stunning enemies rather than murdering or tanking, blade dancer/whatever can also sideload mage spells so she cna cover minimap.
Blacksmith, hunter, and pirate need something more to make them desireable, imho, at least blacksmith can repair stuff.
Bard weapons are pretty useful, a pair of sleighbells almost guarantees a line of enemies is frozen asap, and that's kindof crazy.
Summoner is the only one who cna get anything better than a slime, but they cna also use some bows and whips, and also just slap the three elemental staves in her inventory for spellcasting attacks.
Bishop, Druid, and Sorcerer all bring double-lists to the table, but i tihnk they learn spells a bit slower, i'm not sure by how much, but grinding in this game ain't so bad when the enemies are dropping so much loot it fills my inventory very quickly.
And then there's the problem of the stats resetting on classchange, which makes it a giant waste, really, i wish we got those stat points back for class change, or some kind of equation to give us a certain amount of stats to distribute based on lv/etc when changing classes to make levelling higher before changing worth it, or something.
I just wish the loot drops had a slight lean towards the classes you have, because i am warehousing so much cool shit for classes i don't run on that particular group... lol.
I'm guesssing that the blade dancer that others mentioned must be a class that shows up quite bit later because it doesn't show up in your class list nor mine either.
