some questions about gameplay (no spoilers please)

[Madscientist]

I have started the game, just finished chapter 2 and now I have finally enough blood chrytals to change jobs. So now my questions:

- How do you do job change?
So you want healing skill from class A, damage skill from class B and the passive ability from class C.
So I have to:
1.) Use blood devolution
2.) select class A and learn healing skills
3.) select class B and learn damage skills
4.) Select class C and stay there, selecting the skills from class A and B in the skill menu
I have not changed the job so far and not used blood devolution because I don´t want to screw things up. At the moment I have rather little of some blood chrytals, so I cannot chose all jobs and I hope I can use blood devolution

How does the lick mechanic work?
When they lick each other
- sometimes they regain HP
- sometimes they regain SP
- sometimes they gain a buff and I have no idea what it does (icon = blood splatter with a +)
It would be really helpful if I know what will happen when I use this command and what the buff does.

- Is there an effective way to regain SP? ( except items)
I use mostly physical attacks and save SP for healing. My mage is powerful in theory, but out of SP after some fights if I use AoE spells ( which are really good against large groups).

- So only Jack and item master job can use items?
Except their blood abilities these girls are still humans. They eat, they sleep and they do other things normal people do. So you have to feed them with potions but they cannot put them into their mouth themselves?
off topic: Does Jack have to feed them with normal food as well? There was a cut scene where they were eating together in HQ.

- Am I uderleveled?
I am about lv 18 after finishing chapter 2 (on normal difficulty) and I try to explore every map fully. ( I might have missed some things but I try to play it without guide.) So far no big problems. I have the DLC super armor equipped that reduces encounter rate. Should I take it off?

Party setup:
Until now I have only 5 members, so there is no choice. But when I get more members my plans are:
- 1 char in the front row (Alice), 4 in the back row.
- Front row char as marshal (multiple hits, counter) with paladin skills (protection and healing)
- 2 ranged fighters (sniper or speed gunner, not sure what is better)
- 1 item master with healing who has also healing spells
- 1 Necromancer who has most spells from the therapist plus AoE damage from mage
Is this a good idea? So far I had only the starting jobs (not enough blood crytals until now) and with the chapter 2 boss it was a problem when only Jack could use items and only 1 char had an AoE healing spell. ( I beat him first try without problems, but I had to use a revieve item in combat which feels almost like a failure. ( OK, I am a perfectionist. I mean, thats exactly what those items are made for. If I do not use them in boss fights there is no reason to have them at all. Yes I am guilty of hoarding items in every RPG.))

- Is there any point in shrinking items?

[MoreBeer]

Lick's mechanic works based on who gets licked. Lick each in turn and remember who grants what boost.

Level 18 after chapter 2 isn't underleveled. I'm level 16 after it, and I haven't used the DLC armor and even done some backtracking. I get very little XP now in the graveyard, so to progress I need to go to downtown/temple.

Your setup looks pretty good for the party/ Paladin class is probably the best for protecting the back-rankers, while Marshal is more for counterattacking. Pick your poison appropriately. Item master and back-rank mage both are remarkably effective, and yes only a girl with item master can use items.

Not sure about the answer to the first question. The spells each character knows doesn't seem to matter quite as much as their class in terms of effectiveness, from what I've seen.

[Mann42]

Class Changes
Passive skills (Job Specializations) don't cross over between class changes. You can learn any other Skill from a class you've already changed to, but only the Passive of the active class matters. Ideally, you'll change to every class at least once, then end up on the class with the Passive/Stat Spread you prefer.

I've played around a little bit with Blood Devolution but the bonus it gives doesn't seem worth it for the amount of time it takes to relevel. I haven't tried it at higher levels, though, so maybe it gets better.

Lick Mechanic
The lick mechanic works differently depending on who gets licked. You can see what each character's "Blood Ability" is by going to Status page of the character you want to check and then hitting the button for "View Skills" (or something similar). That list will have each character's personal Passive, followed by their Lick effect (it has a blood drop icon to the left of the blood ability name).

SP Management
SP is hard to manage early in the game, but it gets a bit easier to balance by the 4th dungeon or so. Outside of SP items, you can recharge SP from Massacre kills, from Jail Blessings (the wheel that pops up when you max out Hunger/Libido/Sleep), and there are two characters that restore SP on Lick. In the late game, there's an Accessory that will regen 5% of your SP at the start of their turn, which you may be able to find from the wandering merchant.

Item Use
Jack being able to use Items is just a balance mechanic to give him relevance in combat, since he can't attack. Sure, it may not make a lot of sense, but in most cases your Blood Maidens are more effective using attacks and skills than they would be using an Item, so plan accordingly.

Leveling
Level 18 seems about right for Chapter 2. If you are worried about being underleveled, I'd recommend just exploring out the map for the Dungeon you just cleared - when you kill a Nightmare, an extra floor also opens, and it has the highest level enemies you can find in that Dungeon. Explore that and you'll usually go up a couple extra levels.

You'll also hit a point in the mid/late game where you may need to grind for Blood Crystals, which will also often give you a couple of extra levels here and there. It's hard to fall behind, and some enemies/bosses will always hit hard, regardless of how much you level.

Class Tips
Some general class info (I won't list the characters you haven't found yet but you will find multiples of every class). This may be too much info for you though, so feel free to skip if you think it's too spoilery. I do wish I had known this when I started to understand what each class did, so I'm putting it here.

• Every class has an effective mega-attack that hits multiple targets Alice has Amber Red (Marshal), Sleepy has Amber Red (Archer) and Gigantast (Blood Hunter), Red has Cluster (Pierrot), Snow has Disaster Rune (Blood Chemist) and Thumb has Mortal Force (Blood Witch).
  
• Until you can afford the more expensive multi-hit abilities listed above, there are some decent lower cost alternatives at lower levels. Alice has Force Wave (Marshal), Sleepy has Force Wave (Speed Gunner), Red has VY Blast (Libero) and Bloody Maneuver (Leech), Snow has a bunch in Scholar (Mimic), and Thumb has Flame Pillar and Sandstorm (Magician), along with Shock Blast and VY Blast (Therapist).
  
• Alice can learn Cover (Paladin) which allows you to intercept any melee attack by an enemy on a Blood Maiden. Paladins also have the highest defense stat. If you top them off with defensive skills like Resist Attack or Attack Stall on the enemy, Alice can eat a lot of damage and protect the rest of the party.
  
• Alice learns Rage Rush (Marshal) and Sleepy learns Random Rush (Speed Gunner). These are the best single-target boss killer attacks in the game, especially if you buff them with Charge or Blow first. Sometimes they whiff and only hit once, but they can (and will) hit up to 4-5 times on a single target. Once you have your second fighter, have one of them be a Cover tank and the other one run Rage Rush for boss fights.
  
• Some bosses are designed to do so much damage that, even if you over level, you may still find one of your Maidens KO'd. Don't treat it like a failure, be prepared to revive and react quickly to recover.
  
• For healing, Snow has Items (Item Meister) and Healia (Scientist); Thumb has EX Healia (Blood Witch), Omega Heal and Resurrection (Therapist); Red has EX Healia (Libero) but also has a lot of buffs (Poet) and debuff skills (Fairy) that can help maximize outgoing damage and reduce incoming damage. I usually have Snow be my "main" healer (after Jack, who is using healing items if he's not purging), with Red doing backup EX Healia if necessary - but having EX Healia, Omega Heal and Resurrection on Thumb as backups can also help immensely.

Shrinking
Most items become less effective when you shrink them. The only item types I've found to reliably get better when shrunk are Heavy Swords and Nurse Outfits (late game armor).

With that said, it doesn't cost much to experiment, since you can just go out into the City Streets and spend SP to shrink stuff and compare, then return to town to refresh it afterwards. If it's not as good, you can just use the shrink ability on it again to turn it back to its original large form.

[Madscientist]

Thanks.

- About licking: If you select it and then you can select the target you can see what it does. So far (chapter 3, 6 girls) only Alice (HP) and Snowy (SP) make sense to lick. I can use Snowy as potion for my mage if things get bloody.

- Ok, so blood devolution actually means that you lose all your levels and you have to level up everything again through fighting?
Dam, and I thought its just a respec. My Initial skill destribution is not perfect (e.g. using passive skills in my starting class) so I do not have many skill points for stuff in the new class.
This means I will switch to the most useful jobs now, and once I have the most useful skills there and at least 20 levels more I will change to another job, learn the skills there and return the best job at once. (each job change requires a point and you only get it every 10 levels.)

The game is more fun than expected. Usually I play "normal" RPGs (e.g. Trails series for JRPG or Planescape Torment as western) because I like story. It is good to see that there is a dungeon crawler where you have a story and characters with a personality, your not just a set of stats who clicks things to death from beginning to end.)

Some things could be better:
- It would be really nice if you could see the stats and skills of a job before you select it.
Right now I have to write down the stats, save and then try out different jobs and see how things change. Final Fantasy X2 had also girls with different jobs, but you could see in the menu the abilities of each job and you could change jobs at will.
- It would be really nice if the game explains to you how the job/skill system to you.
I have played many RPGs, so fighting is not a problem. This system is not really hard to understand, but it took me until the end of chapter 2 to have enough chrystals to change a job. Since I could find out things only by trail and error I spend some points in a bad way until then and I could not have known it better. The game really encourages save scumming when trying to optimize your jobs skills unless you have played it before or you read a detailed guide before playing, but I did not want to have spoilers before playing and I don´t want to restart.
Well, on normal the game seems quite easy so far so I should be able to finish it with a not perfectly optimized party.

PS: Its amazing what crazy ideas japanese developers have. Turning several fairy tales into a bloody and sexy vampire massacre. And those fairy tales can be quite violent in their original version.
At least the game is not as nuts as the dating sim with birds. ( never played it and never will. Just the idea behind it sounds completely insane.)

[Madscientist]

One more question:
Can I use the same 5 girls in my party for the whole game or do I have to use one specific char in my party at some point?
It would be super annoying if suddenly I have to use a char who is completely underleveled.

In most JRPGs I try to keep all chars at the same level because at some point you have to split the party or one char leaves for some time for story reasons.
Thats the reason I never finished FF6. There were so many chars later and endless grinding to level them up became too boring, but you need 3 groups with powerful chars for the last dungeon.

[MoreBeer]

You may well want to swap in characters to your core group when you first find them, and they'll be levelled appropriately to the point of the story you get them in. If you decide you don't ever want to use a character, I don't think you're ever forced to use them... but some of those job classes are super useful even if they don't appear so at first.

That said, it's trivial to powerlevel a single character. Go back a dungeon or two, let your experienced fighters massacre everything before the enemies get in a single attack. Your lowbie will just rake in the xp.

[Madscientist]

Thanks again

Warrior type chars (e.g. Alice) are good tanks and damage dealers. You need one for the front row
Archer type chars (e.g. Sleepy) are good damage dealers
Mages (e.g. Thumby) can nuke everything to the groud or heal everyone, if you have the SP to keep them going.
The best thing about alchemist types is that they can use items. Else I found them to be quite average.
Bard type characters (e.g. Red) seem to be Jack of all trades, master of none. I see little point to use them instead of a specialist.

So my party would be 1 or 2 warriors, 1 or 2 archers, 1 alchemist and 1 mage. The alchemist is a support healer who can use items in case I do not have the right spell or the healer dies. 2 mages would be great if you get the SP to let them use AoE spells all the time.

The game does not seem to be very difficult anyway. If bosses can be weakened and I have some AoE healing, I should not have many problems in the game.

[Mann42]

You will never lose a character once you get them, so if you want to focus on just 5 characters and level only them, you'll be fine.

Your class assessment correct. Warriors for tanking and dps, Archers/Mages for DPS. Bards are the optimal support class, for buffing your damage dealers/tanks and debuffing the enemy. Alchemist types are a comparable support class to the Bards thanks to Scholar (which has a ton of debuffs) and healing (from Ex Healia and Item use), but can put out respectable damage via Disaster Rune/Lunacy too - also, the second Alchemist type character you get (other than Snow) has one of the strongest SP restoration Lick abilities in the game, and for that alone can be really nice to have in your party.

It's definitely more challenging if you're running on Nightmare difficulty, but yeah, it's not the hardest game.

[Lanosa]

You can still learn skills from other jobs you already unlocked with a character. So, if you change Alice to Destructor, and then to Paladin, she can still learn Destructor skills after change her job, but her actual job skill will be better than other job skills.

Speaking about licking: all characters has their own Lick skill. When you lick a character with other, the licked character activates her skill. Alice heals her licker, Red Riding Hood applies a healing buff to all members, Snow White fills her licker's MP, and so on. The more blood splats the licked Blood Maiden has, the better is her effect. It's also useful when you see a Blood Maiden in danger to become Blood Skelter and Jack can't heal her corruption before her turn.

SP can be regained returning to town, leveling up, and when you upgrade Jack's Mary Gun, he gets some new options, like regenerate SP.

Yes, only Jack and Blood Maidens with Item Meister role can use items. When an Item Meister use an item, it's more powerful if she uses it instead Jack (a 50% HP revival item can fill almost all the HP bar). Beware though, if you change her role to another, the items she uses have the same effect if Jack uses it.

If you explore all the map, you can't be underleveled. Except if you're on Nightmare (hard) difficult, then you must grind some more experience before progress.

Your setup is not bad. I prefer have 2 in front (1 paladin and 1 speed character), and 3 back (a healer, an Item Meister and a mage)

I don't know if shrink a regular item makes it better, but, without spoilers, there are some places where you can find something you must put on a smaller hole than it to open a door. Here is where shrinking works fine.

[LuxEtUmbra]

Mary Skelter is about mages, played using Alice for physical skills, the rest of the party was mages. Red was Physical/healer, all others using magic skills.
Don't remember having to use SP in a conservative way, specially above middle game forward.