Best classes to 'sit' in?

[Sines]

So, simple subject. Once you've mastered all the classes you want to, you have to leave your characters in some class to actually fight in. I'm wondering what people like, and why. I'll go and list some of mine.

Knight - Life Font and No Flank are both fairly solid skills, and it's honestly one of the better pairs of skills out there, if you want a tough character. Access to spears is well appreciated, especially since they work well with both Defensive Hit and All-For-One. While they lack a finisher, Defensive Hit and Heavy Hit are both free and very solid ways to spend turns while waiting on a finisher from another class to build up. A great class for a tank, and even other frontline characters. Just give them a finisher from another class to round them out.

Druid - Mostly for male mages, but this class has a lot of things going for it, and can even arguably compete with Princess... sort of. While Double Cast 1 is obviously inferior to Double Cast 2, Mind Expert is a great addition to help make up for that loss of power when double-casting spells. And Duality is well built for double-cast, unlike Regality. Panacea and Total Shield are cheap and don't suffer from the DC1 penalty, and the bulk of Bleeds damage is not affected by it either. Contrast this with the Princess, who only has one spell costing less than 10 mana. The Druid also gets a great selection of gear, allowing pretty much everything a caster might want except for Heavy Armor. While DC2 is objectively superior when slotting it as a secondary passive, the Druid does a lot to make sure DC1 is well supported on it's own. Not to mention, the truly awesome combo of "Blood Magic and DC2" takes ages to get. If you're not going to take forever to perfect builds, then a Druid with Mana Font and/or Economy does the job just fine. And if you do pick up Blood Magic, you've still got Heal 1 to top your health off.

Fellblade - For a hybrid character, it's mostly a competition between this class and Warmage. Honestly, Fellblade wins out for one key reason. Hybrids love the Soul Eater, and the Warmage can't equip it. It even gives a 16% boost to crit to ensure that Versatile gets well used. Being able to equip a shield is just some extra icing on the cake. The loss of free Leech Mana and Elemental Affinity does hurt, but the extra damage those offer is made up for by the phenomenal stats on the Soul Eater, and the extra defensive potential of a shield. And as far as skill sets go, the tougher enemies get, the more important it is to have a high chance of inflicting Sleep or Blind on them. It's a pretty darn close competition, though.

Mender - Sometimes you can't beat the basics. While other classes can heal, it's Revive 2 that really sets the Mender out from among the other options. Thanks to the injury system, reviving someone with low health is a very risky endeavor. Being able to revive someone with full health is a pretty darn big deal. Throw in Mana Font as a casters much needed mana source, and Blessed One to have them top themselves off while healing others to make them harder to take down, and you've got a fairly solid set. Biggest downside this class has compared to Princess, Druid or Plague Doctor is the lack of shields, which is not insignificant, but healers are your back line and generally most safe, and Blessed One helps offset any damage that doesn't come from the kind of focused attack that a back line character doesn't deal with too often. Just mind the Rangers and Gunners.

Ranger - Know Weakness is a key skill in any crit build, so it gets points for that on it's own. Evasion Up is not the most useful thing in the world, especially on a ranged character, but it's a solid defensive skill that protects them (potentially) from everything. But the crit build works really well the Rangers skill set. Sniper Shot is the best finisher in the game, with the downside that it's ridiculously expensive (also the root, I guess, but you've got a bow, you'll be fine). But when you can rely on crit basic attacks, and free cost Rooting and AoE attacks, you don't have any other competition for the mana, so you can be patient. Not to mention, Collect Pelt, Balm and Scout may be situational, but they've quite useful when they do come up.

[Mechalibur]

Some of my favorites:

Templar - Access to scythes and a very well-rounded skill set. Defense expert is solid, especially when combined with Defensive Hit from Knight. Also works terrifyingly well with Duelist secondary combined with elemental mastery.

Warmage - Good hybrid growths with the always useful Infused Edge combined with Leech Mana for spamming it. Works great with male mages + cleave. I don't use soul edge on warmage much anyway since many enemies resist dark.

Princess - Borderline OP growths, Double Cast 2, and decent spell selection.

Vampire - Excellent growths with a good weapon selection. Charm and Night's Embrace are both very useful to have.

[Sines]

Blood Nova is also a pretty good attack. 1.1 Hybrid scaling that causes bleed? Not too shabby. And while I'm not a huge fan of flying, Bat Form is easily the coolest looking flight movement in the game. That being said, I like Vampirism as a skill more than the class itself. It's pretty good, but it doesn't have anything that really stands out to me. No shields, no heavy armor, and most
of it's best moves encourage being at melee range, which makes it's use of Bows and Guns not quite as impressive. Though one can certainly argue in favor of sniping enemies while saving up mana, and then bat-winging in for the Charm or Kill.

And no argument here about that stat growth. It's pretty damn good, with HP being the only downside, and it doesn't even sacrifice all THAT much for it.

EDIT: Y'know, looking around at other classes, I'm starting to think Mercenary is an interesting tank alternative to Knight. Equipment-wise, you can equip a Maul (with +HP and good damage) AND a Shield, as well as Heavy or Light Armor. And I think that Maul HP gets multiplied by Health Expert as well. You lose 1 Defense and 0.5 Resistance per level, but you do get +0.5 HP and Attack and +0.08 Speed. Admittedly, Mercenary's skill set isn't the best, but it is a nice set of utilities (all of which have 0 MP cost) that could pair reasonably well with a more offensive melee kit. Templar's Righteous Blade fits well here, thanks to Mercenary skills not using MP, or you could use your massive health pool to make Desperate Blow hit like a truck.

Actually, I think I'm going to do that next playthrough.

[Mechalibur]

I honestly don't think Heavy Armor is that important - it's usually comparable or slightly worse than the light armor equivalents. The major exception is Soul Armor, of course, but only one unit can end up using it so I'll pretty much always have at least one person able to use it. Even with a ranged weapon, there's usually at least one enemy that gets close to the vampire to make use of charm, in my experience. Especially on elite difficulty where there are 9+ enemies on later map.

Maul HP isn't multiplied by Health Expert, last I checked - it should only be base HP. But yeah, overall mercenary isn't terrible, you just really need to make sure you have a secondary skillset that can deal some damage since none of the mercenary's skills break 1x damage (other than ideal forceful push)

[Pwylle]

The only skill set I end up using in almost every play through, is 2-3 characters with Lethality, floating or aquatic (boots/class). Anadine keeps Demonic Rage for the push skill and corrupted blade more then anything.

Sabotage units into water/Lava for instant KO, mop up the rest. Absorb Mana or Evade skill for reaction. Allows to spam righteous blade or assassinate or whatever class you end up rolling. Instant kills like that are just much more valuable in saving "turns" then anything else.

Evasion is overall much more "defensive" then any real amount of defense as it will reduce the most amount of damage overall. Those 5-10 extra points of defense from growth just doesn't really seem to do anything late game, while going for 30-40% evasion is huge. Also speed is vastly under valued. More turns, more healing and damage.

I think overall, HP growth is the most daunting to use on healer/mage characters. Making pure mages just seems like a total trap given that the other stats suffer so much for doing so.