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FF12 Best Job Combos & Jobs for Each Character

This FF12 Best Job Combos guide will teach you all the top tier, best FF12 Job Combos to help you minmax your characters for the perfect playthrough.

If you’re playing Final Fantasy 12 Zodiac Age (FF12), you’re going to want to know the best FF12 job combos and jobs for each character. Because Final Fantasy 12: Zodiac Age allows you to assign two jobs to each character, you have a lot of options to pick from, especially if you’re trying to min-max.

Introduction – FF12 Best Job Combos

Choosing the optimal setup for FF12 best job combos is a surprisingly complicated puzzle because not only do you have to take into consideration which jobs synergize well, you also want someone in your party able to equip each of the best endgame equipment combinations so nothing goes to waste. You also want to ensure that each character gets 3x Swiftness.

You also want to make sure your summons can be assigned to unlock all the best abilities for each character without leaving anyone out. It’s also possible to circumvent the need for summons on certain classes by combining jobs that open up abilities on the secondary board behind locked nodes.

Finally, you want to make sure your choices represent basically 2 pretty balanced teams (an “A” team and a “B” team) which have healing, support magic, physical DPS, magic damage and ranged attacks on their own.

All in all, it’s a pretty tough call. Choosing the right FF12 best job combos can be difficult, especially if you want the most optimal FF12 job combos possible.

Optimizing Swiftness

For Swiftness, 7 classes have access to 3x Swiftness, 2 requiring Summons to unlock (Monk & Foebreaker, both requiring Ultima).

The classes capable of obtaining 3x Swiftness are Machinist, Monk (with Ultima), Time Battlemage, Foebreaker (with Ultima), Archer, Bushi and Shikari.

So you want to make sure every character has one of those, and make sure if you’re using a Monk and a Foebreaker on the same team, you pick which one will be getting Ultima beforehand and assign the other a different 3x Swiftness class.

Top Tier Equipment

final fantasy 12 best job combos masamune

There are some pieces of equipment that are incredibly useful, so you’ll want to make sure you have a user for each one. These are:

Masamune I – the most powerful Katana, which is treated as a one-handed sword for gameplay purposes. This typically goes to Vahn because he has the best combo rate and fastest attack animations for one-handed swords.

Yagyu Darkblade – the most powerful ninja sword and best dark-elemental weapon in the game, only usable by a Shikari. This is great for damaging the super boss Yiazmat, who’s weak to dark elemental damage.

Excalibur – a holy-elemental greatsword that can be boosted by 50% by wearing the white robes, producing an absurdly powerful physical attack.

2x Genji Gloves and Jackboots – You get 2 Genji Gloves, which dramatically boost combo rate and increase physical damage substantially, and you also get Jackboots which gives 50 speed and 20 vit. Genji Gloves massively increase damage from high combo weapons (Katanas, Poles, Ninja Swords), but Jackboots increase Ninja Sword damage even more, so you want someone you can give that second Genji Glove to.

Burning Bow/Flame Staff + Ardor – Not strictly necessary, but Ardor is the strongest spell in the game and its damage is boosted by 50% when using the Burning Bow (Archer) or Flame Staff (Black Mage).

List of Best Job Combos

best final fantasy 12 job combos

These job combos are generally considered to be the best.

Knight/Samurai

Knight/Samurai gives the character access to both Greatswords and Robes, which allows them to utilize the Excalibur/White Robes combo.

More than that, Samurai gives tons of magick power nodes to increase the usefulness of the Knight’s white magic.

Knight also helps out the damage of katanas, although you have a great deal of flexibility when choosing weapons and ultimately this character is likely to equip a greatsword (Excalibur).

Samurai gives the Knight, who only has 1 Swiftness naturally, access to all 3 Swiftness ranks from Samurai.

Black Mage/Monk

Gives your Black Mage 3x Swiftness (using Ultima), as well as all the best high level White Magic. This is actually a better “Red Mage” setup than the Red Battlemage.

Capable of high level Black and White magic, and no slouch when it comes to combat either thanks to Monk’s combat prowess.

Overall this build has very few weaknesses.

Black Mage/Red Battlemage

Generally considered to be the powerhouse specialized offensive caster.

It gives Black Mage some healing capabilities via the Red Battlemage line, but more importantly, allows Red Battlemage’s powerful Ardor spell to be combined with Black Mage’s Flame Staff to produce devasting results.

Unfortunately, this class only gets 2x Swiftness, so even though its magic power is higher, I find that it’s better to go with…

Archer/Red Battlemage

Similar to the Black Mage/Red Battlemage, but has access to 3x Swiftness and boosts its Ardor damage via the Burning Bow.

It is significantly weaker magically, though, gaining only 12 Magick Lores compared to the Black Mage’s 16.

However, it also gets access to Addle/Shear, better physical attack power to conserve MP for random battles, and a ranged attack. Do you want to be faster & more versatile or stronger?

Shikari/Foebreaker

Shikari gives the Foebreaker 3x Swiftness without having to use an Esper and Ninja Swords (a much better weapon type than Foebreaker’s axes), while Foebreaker gives Shikari access to every break, as well as a ranged weapon type (hand bombs).

People love this combination, so I thought I’d list it, but I think Foebreaker is generally unnecessary because you can gain access to all the breaks via Monk/Uhlan and Archer/Time Battlemage, and Genji Gloves are not necessary on Shikari since the Jackboots are better. It’s not as good as…

Shikari/Samurai

What this combination has going for it is the fact that it can equip Black Robes in conjunction with the Yagyu Darkblade to increase dark damage by 50%. This is an insane boost for killing Yiazmat. It also provides Shikari with Genji Gloves but, as I mentioned, the Jackboots tend to be better for Shikari overall.

Samurai/Monk

Probably my favorite physical damage combo and the undisputed best user of the Masamune I and the Genji Gloves. Monk gives Samurai all 16 battle lores, dramatically increasing katana damage, while Samurai gives monk a substantial amount of magick lores to increase their white magic output. Definitely one of the best FF12 job combos.

White Mage/Machinist

Machinist does a lot for White Mages. It gives them access to guns, which do fixed damage and thus are just as effective on the physically weak white mage as anyone else. It gives White Mage access to Hastega. It gives White Mage 3x Swiftness.

It’s very similar to White Mage/Time Battlemage in that it produces a highly specialized support character, but the main difference is the White Mage/Machinist can also hold its own with physical attacks via guns, whereas a White Mage/Time Battlemage has to rely on Drain the whole game.

Best Jobs & FF12 Job Combos for Each Character

ff12 job combos ff12 best job combos

Vaan

Vahn gets a great combo attack speed animation for one-handed swords making him the ideal katana user. The most optimal combination of jobs for Vaan in FF12 is Samurai/Monk so he can use the Masamune I + Genji Gloves combo.

Basch

Basch has high physical attack, defense and HP stats, making him an ideal Knight, just as he is canonically in the story. I recommend making him a Knight/Samurai to take advantage of the White Robes/Excalibur combo. This gives him one of the best possible FF12 job combos.

Penelo

Penelo has high magic power, making her the best overall option for a Black Mage. You have a choice between Black Mage/Red Battlemage and Black Mage/Monk.

Either choice is excellent; the former is a more specialized mage, but the latter is 95% as good while also having substantially better healing and powerful physical attacks. Both of these options are among the best FF12 job combos.

Balthier

Balthier has a fast combo animation with high combo weapons as well as high attack and top tier speed and it would be a shame to let that go to waste by sticking him with guns as the game pushes you toward.

I’d suggest making him your Shikari to take advantage of the Yagyu Darkblade. Shikari/Samurai would be ideal to give him the black robes, and it’s one of the FF12 best job combos, but if you’re following this guide that’d put you at 3 Samurais, which is kind of overkill.

You could go with any of the other mystic armor users for the Black Robes (Shikari/White Mage is particularly nice), but I actually like to go Shikari/Time Battlemage to give it access to more utility while still allowing it to focus mostly on offense.

Fran

Fran is well known for not excelling in any stats except Vit, and not in the cool ‘jack of all trades’ way, more in the sad ‘bad at everything’ way. She makes a great candidate for a Machinist/White Mage, which doesn’t need stats to excel. This gives her one of the most useful FF12 job combos for support.

Ashe

Since Ashe has high magic power and reasonably high attack, she makes a suitable Red Battlemage. She’s probably the best candidate to go Archer/Red Battlemage, one of the most well known FF12 best job combos.

FF12 Final Party Jobs

If you follow the recommended classes, that gives you a party of:

Samurai/Monk
Knight/Samurai
Black Mage/Monk
Archer/Red Battlemage
Shikari/Time Battlemage
Machinist/White Mage

All of these are top tier FF12 best job combos. That’s 3 healers, 2 time magic users, 2x expose/wither, 1x addle/shear, 3x Swiftness on all characters, an Excalibur/White Robes user, a Masamune 1 + Genji Gloves user, a Yagyu Darkblade user, 2 powerful offensive mages. It’s got everything you want as far as FF12 best job combos go.

It doesn’t make use of every class (to be honest, Uhlan and Foebreaker are kind of subpar), but it’s about as good a party as you’re going to get.

However, there’s a lot of wiggle room in optimizing jobs and job combos for FF12 and there’s no definitive right answer. I recommend you take the ideas from this guide into consideration and make your own class combos based on your personal preferences.

That about covers for FF12 job combos and the very best FF12 jobs and FF12 best job combos. Be sure to check out the Games Section for more game guides like this one.

Author

  • Ryan Night

    Ryan Night is an ex-game industry producer with over a decade of experience writing guides for RPGs. Previously an early contributor at gamefaqs.com, Ryan has been serving the RPG community with video game guides since 2001. As the owner of Bright Rock Media, Ryan has written over 600 guides for RPGs of all kinds, from Final Fantasy Tactics to Tales of Arise.

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