WORST UNIT TYPE

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In my experience the worst unit in any given RPG is almost always the generalist. For some reason being the jack of all trades while being a master of none is almost always a detriment in my experiment. After all, if your character is really, really, good at something you can usually setup situations where they can come into their own.

While a generalist just falls to the wayside since they lack the HP and DEF/RES to tank. They lack the hitting power to blow through walls and they lack the MP and INT/WIS to be an effective mage. And while I suppose they are a slightly less squishy form of a healer. They usually don't get access to the best healing spells either in my experience.

As far as prime examples of why being a generalist is less than ideal I'd point to Pokemon like Pidgeot or Kite from the original series of .hack games. And while you can fix Kite with some stat books in the last game. The amount of time you'd need to dedicate to making him an effective tank against the various elemental attacks is way to time consuming. And I'm the kind of person that is willing to dump hours of my life into getting characters up to level 99 at the halfway point of a game. Even if it means spending hours battling the same set of enemies over and over and over again.
I'm not even sure what game that character is from. I want to say "Dankest Dungeon" for some reason, but I've only ever watched a few videos of people playing that while talking to my youngest brother.
Craze
why would i heal when i could equip a morningstar
15150
that is indeed an antiquarian, the class that makes you rich and makes it easier to progress in the game

i think the issue with generalists in most games is that they aren't needed to conserve resources or fill roles. red mages/wizards were great in ff1 even if they fell off a bit at the end because they could heal, they could take a hit, they could deal a hit. lategame they can still temper/haste your monk or other dps. this works because the whole point of ff1 is resource conservation -- the red mage, despite being a generalist, is a release valve. no matter how much the black mage wants to, he cannot heal his allies.

anyway blue mages/related characters suck
author=Craze
that is indeed an antiquarian, the class that makes you rich and makes it easier to progress in the game

i think the issue with generalists in most games is that they aren't needed to conserve resources or fill roles. red mages/wizards were great in ff1 even if they fell off a bit at the end because they could heal, they could take a hit, they could deal a hit. lategame they can still temper/haste your monk or other dps. this works because the whole point of ff1 is resource conservation -- the red mage, despite being a generalist, is a release valve. no matter how much the black mage wants to, he cannot heal his allies.

anyway blue mages/related characters suck


I agree with you on blue mages, because they need in-depth knowledge of where to get their skills and how they work. Sometimes requiring extra work to include them in your party for casual playthrough. And if you have access to that knowledge you can find better strategies anyway. The concept is fun, use the skills of your enemies against them, but it doesn't work all the time (Also related. The Beastmaster job in FFV and Gau in FF6 suffer the same problem)
It depends a lot on the game mechanics. I've played in simplistic systems where there were different stats for different types of skills, and they simply rolled based on those stats with no consideration for what they were attacking or defending against. Hence the winning strategy was to simply boost one class of stats and skills, because there was no situation where it would be at a disadvantage. In better-designed systems, there exists some reason why ignoring any particular area of development carries some risk, and crippling overspecialization can be a thing too. If you're in control of multiple characters at once, it tends to be more fun (and if the system is well-designed, more effective on the condition that it's played skillfully) to have a diverse team, so that your team is generalized through individual specialization. Generalist characters/classes can still have their uses though, such as helping players who are inexperienced or just don't care about complicated tactics plow through at their own pace.
This is honestly an incredibly broad question, but in the majority of cases, the worst characters are those with poor Speed. In most cases, they're the ones who invest in Defense, too. Given a general face, it means the old bearded dude in the heavy armour is going to be the worst character, rarely getting a chance to do anything before everyone else has mopped things up, missing whenever they do go for a swing, yet still dying about as easily as everyone else.

Speed tends to be ridiculously valuable in many games, as that one stat often affects Turn Order/Frequency, Accuracy, AND Evasion. Defense tends to be the among the worst stats, not being useful whatsoever against magical foes, of which tend to be extremely common later into games, and Defense rarely offers enough of it to meaningfully reduce the damage taken, meaning they're typically dying sooner than HP-heavy characters/classes anyway, who can also put that HP-pool to soaking up magic attacks as well.

About the only other obvious answers are the above mentioned 'outside-combat utility' characters, like Merchants and Farmers. Yes, they can get you money and resources, but they're nigh-on worthless in an actual fight of value. In a game where you can go back to old areas to gather stuff with them easily enough, they can serve a role, but throwing them face-first into the actual difficult content (ie. bosses) is foolishness.

The other other obvious answer is anybody built around ailments or debuffs. This is kind of a series-by-series issue, but good lord, in the average random RPG these skills are worse than useless. They rarely land, are extremely weak when they do, and anything you'd want to use them on (bosses) are almost always completely immune. It's a real shame too, because in the games they do work, they tend to be the more interesting characters/classes to use.

Lastly, I ought to add that the average player focuses exclusively on seeing damage. No value placed on utility, support, or even healing. They're all about seeing the biggest number with the least effort.
I don't think there's a universal answer to this because it really depends on the gameplay systems at play, as well as they type of player playing the game.

A Thief might drive an efficient player crazy.

A Thief might be perfect for the self-imposed player who wants to spend an hour getting the Genji Armor.

A Thief might have some great game-breaking exploit that a speedrunner just found.

Or maybe the game really has no use for the Thief at all. Really just depends on the game and how it's designed.

It's really all about the context.
Have WoW on the mind lately since I've been playing classic. I guess you could consider Druid/Shaman/Paladin generalists and the latter 2 suck while Druid is pretty sick because it actually fulfills all 3 roles rather well (best AOE tank in the game), an annoying escape artist type in pvp, and has cool aesthetics/forms to boot.

Any gimmick like totems or weird auto attack passive bonuses are also indicative of shaman/pally but they require setup and are pretty lame. Paladin was also pretty rushed on WoW's launch, probably extra rushed because generalists are harder to design (hilariously Paladin has a damage spell at the very end of the... Healing talent tree)

Speaking more broadly I tend to stay away from classes that require extra resources like an alchemist type that throws items or something. FF Ninjas I can live with since they're usually throwing leftover junk anyway. Any class that are super reliant on outside aspects of the battle are probably terrible.
Jeroen_Sol
Nothing reveals Humanity so well as the games it plays. A game of betrayal, where the most suspicious person is brutally murdered? How savage.
3885
Debuffs are in an interesting category where they're really hard to balance. If bosses aren't immune to them, then they are extremely broken and can shut down bosses completely, making the characters who use them the best in the game. But if bosses are immune, the characters using the debuffs become completely obsolete.

I really like how Pokémon balances this. The buffs and debuffs don't completely shut down pokémon, and any pokémon can only suffer from one major debuff at once. This still makes debuffs really good (as anyone who's been hit by a few sand attacks can attest to) but it's not horrendously broken.

So basically being a debuffer is good in a game that manages to balance around it well, like pokémon, but if it can't, then the usual solution is indeed to make all bosses immune and then they become the worst units.
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