Is the Time Mage redundant if you have a Red Mage and Machinist in the group?

[Soulmancer]

Talk to me.

I know I wouldn't get Time Magic Tier 4-7... But you get 1-3 and eventually 8-10

[Sakhari]

Time Magic in general is, in my opinion, something you can pretty easily do without. Things like Haste, Float, and Berserk, (which you'd miss with those other classes) are nice to have without needing to farm motes or equip trap-immunity accessories and a TM gets access to Hastega a bit sooner than the Machinist but none of that really changes the game much.

Usually, I'm only grabbing Time Mage for the mix of Heavy Armor, Magic Lores, and 3 Swiftness that another class (like Monk) could make use of. The magic also adds some utility to classes that are fine on their own but don't have much else to do besides attacking.

If you don't have another job that could benefit from the pairing, don't be too concerned about leaving the TM class out of your lineup. Especially if someone else has Hastega covered.

[matthew]

I was thinking of going Uhlan, time mage. But reading the above, I'm wondering I should either go Uhlan, knight, or Uhlan, archer? which would you suggest?

[Soulmancer]

Well I had planned to do a Great Sword wielding red mage + time mage with heavy armor... until I realized you can't even unlock Great Swords 1 until the very end of the friggin game. Considered Bushi then realized you also run into the issue of not being able to use heavy armor until the very end... maybe red mage / uhlan... though I'd be losing out on swiftness 3

It's annoying that many equipment options for classes are locked until the final espers. Crossbows may have been an idea but I already use a Machinist/White Mage

[Sakhari]

Originally posted by matthew:

which would you suggest?

Well, I'm certainly no expert but if it were up to me...

Uhlan / Knight is almost completely redundant and neither of those classes have much to offer the other. I'd avoid that one.

Uhlan / Archer gets all of the speed bonuses, all of the good item lores, (potentially) all of the breaks, and a different armor type to work with if your strength is already capped at 99 (access to a Brave Suit in that case is nice). If you end up wanting to play with bows, Uhlan's heavy armor, adrenaline, and last stand benefits the Archer. It also has a weapon for almost every elemental weakness though I think that's a lot more useful on paper than in practice.

Uhlan / Time has redundancy in the armor but gets the third Swiftness node and the magic gives it some utility to use MP on. Uhlan is one of the classes that I think benefits from TM just giving it something else to do.

I'm not personally a big fan of the Archer or Uhlan classes so I'd probably favor Uhl / Tim but I think either is a fine choice.

[Sakhari]

Originally posted by Soulmancer:

maybe red mage / uhlan... though I'd be losing out on swiftness 3

Just a bit of general advice (since I went through this same period of choice-paralysis) - if there's a pair you want to try but the only thing stopping you is a third swiftness node, I'd say just try it. The difference between 2 and 3 nodes isn't big enough to merit worrying about, especially if there's a bunch of added utility you'd rather have access to.

Knight / White and Knight / Black, for example, only get two Swiftness nodes each but I've still thoroughly enjoyed both of them and they held up very well.

[matthew]

thanks for that, Uhlan / archer it is. But as this is my first playhtrough, I was going for what works best and enable as many jobs as possible. for a second playhtrough, I will probably skip Uhlan and choose something else.

[Soulmancer]

Yah... The bigger issue is that I already assigned Red Mage to Basche and Uhlan to Balthier so it would mean a re-start or breaking my goal of using all 12 jobs.

Maybe a red mage bushi earlier as it looks like I get heavier armor a bit earlier if I assign exodus to him.