After hitting 40, I retired my entire party, and replaced them with clones for the bonus SP, except for the Medic/Runemaster, whom I replaced with an arcanist/medic, and I'm still not sure if that was the best of ideas, now that the party as a whole is back up to lv 30. Arcanists bring plenty to the table via their binds, but as a medic replacement, they aren't as effective as I had hoped.

The passive heal on the circle is fairly low, so using the dismissal heal is fairly important if you want to make use of an arcanist as a healer. However, that's a one turn setup regardless, so I can see things going sour for me pretty quickly if it comes to a boss fight. Off course, I can also fill that hole with the dancer's healing step, so perhaps its not THAT big of an issue.

The bigger issue though, is simply the lack of out of combat healing. Bracing walk maxes out at 10hp per step, and that's simply too much of a SP investment for something that's only really worthwhile with a warding bell. Yes, I can place points into the Medic's sub-tree healing skills, but it seems to be a fairly inefficient use of both TP and SP.

For people that have went down the same road, how is the arcanist/medic fairing in the 4th stratum and beyond? How is the TP management working out if you are using the refresh skills and straight heals semi-regularly on-top of the arcanist circles and debuffs?

I have access to the 4th strata but I haven't gone there yet.

For the Arcanist I found it replaced a low level Medic (~lvl 25) very well since it had access to a cheap and effective party heal (that, of course requires one turn to set up in the worst case scenario). Now I'm level 40 and I really don't have any major problems with healing. I offset the one turn set-up with the Calm Breath burst skill or I use the Fortress' ally shield abilities to cover the ones who might not survive if it comes to that.

I'm not really having any problems staying alive. I don't know if that will change drastically in the next area though.

Also, what does retiring do exactly? I knew it lowered the characters level by 10 and I heard it... replaces the character with a new one (is that right?) but I didn't know it gave you skill points. How many skill points do you get for retiring and is it worth it to lose those 10 levels? Do you have to grind back up or are you doing fine in the 4th strata with a party of level 30 characters?

EDIT: Oh, and TP management has been fine, with Proficiency and Expertise I believe I get 8 TP when I dismiss a circle and the heal costs 12. If I use Chain Circle (which I usually do) that's 13 TP (for now) and then 12 TP for the heal with 8 returned. So, 17 TP for a party heal that does a pretty good amount and potential binding of arms.

EDIT 2 cause I must have selective reading or something as I see more things after I post: I have bracing walk at 4 and it is quite useful. It's a 6 SP investment to get it there though, so I don't know if you are down with that or not.

@superwristbands: Retiring replaces your old character with a new one at half the original's level. The new character comes in with bonus SP depending on the level that the original was retired at (30, 40, 50, 60, or 70). And no, you're going to have to do a bit of grinding to get back up to par, particularly if you retire your entire party like I did. But the food item that greatly increases either exp or rare breed chances helps with that quite a lot, as well as all those QR code quests.

@turambar: Heh, the thing I thought I was sure about was wrong! Half the levels sounds harsh and I've been grind free so far. I think I'll keep it that way.

I retired my Medic into an Arcanist as soon as I could and then soon subbed a Medic onto it. It's worked out well. Bracing Walk is better than Patch Up, even with only a couple points in it. Circle Boon and Dismiss Heal are sufficient for general healing and a few points into the Medic's standard heal is good for immediate healing. (Which I haven't had to use that often, but it's good to have.) You'll probably want Refresh and Recovery for ailments. If you get Healing Mastery later it will boost the effects of Circle Boon. Between the class proficiency and TP Return the Arcanist ends up with more TP than I really know what to do with.

Honestly I had more issues with the status effect/bind half of the equation than the healing. I found them to be kind of underwhelming until level 40 when you can access Effect Boost and TP Return. Then they're awesome.

@superwristbands: It's not that bad. As soon as you unlock the new classes you get the option to instantly level up a character (well two characters) to 25, 35, and 45, respectively. Your team might be a bit higher than that at that point, but I didn't feel I needed to grind up my Arcanist for to be effective. Even without that, it's quite easy to fight gold FOE's for TONS of exp.

@zeik: Thanks again duder! I didn't think to use training after retiring. I retired my Arcanist/Runemaster for a Arcanist/Medic and bumped her up to level 35.

Also, dang at the amount of exp the gold FOEs give. I avoided them after a bad experience with a sheep. I took out a gold one of those icy pincer dudes and got 90k exp and then a gold dinosaur thing for 85k (both in the 3rd land).

Gold FOE's can be dangerous if you're unprepared, since they get stronger every turn, but they're great for exp.

Something else to note, in case you don't know, is that you can feed certain FOE's specific food to automatically turn them gold. The Omnihunter's in the second land for example like Golden Goose (rare bird in land 1) and the Icy Pincer's like Happiness Hare and the Sheep like Gold Stinkhorn.

Be careful around those gold dinosaurs in the 3rd land though. They naturally get stronger every turn and it combines with the gold boost every turn. So if you don't kill them quickly they will quickly be able to one shot your whole team.

@zeik: Good to know about feeding them. That will make things easier (especially since the Icy Pincer's seem pretty easy to take out).

Also, I kinda figured those dinosaurs would wreck me but I saved and went for it. I got lucky and took it out on, like the third turn. Blinded it then used Shadow Bite for 800 then Follow Trace activated and hit for another 600 or so. It was pretty sick :p

I'm pretty sure the Icy Pincer's have an instant death attack, so watch out for that. It sucks to lose a character to instant death just as you're about to defeat it. Also remember to use Holy Gift.

@zeik: How do you have your SP distributed? You're skipping auto-revive from the looks ofi t?

This is my current set-up with my Arcanist/Medic at Lv 48 (Recently retired at 50):

Arcanist:

Proficiency/Expertise/Enlightenment - 3/3

Circle Boon - 6/6

Dismiss Heal - 5/10

Dismiss Blow - 1/6

Poison Circle - 2/8

Paralysis Circle - 8/8

Chain Circle - 2/8

Tame Ground - 2/4

Bracing Walk - 3/8

Charm Eye - 4/4

Atrophic Eye - 4/4

TP Return 4/6

Releasal Spell - 2/4

Ailment Boost - 9/10

Medic:

Healing - 3/5

Refresh - 3/3

So yeah, WAY more Arcanist than Medic. I'm probably going to invest in more Medic abilities later, but I've found the Arcanist abilities to be more necessary/useful. Something I forgot to mention before, the Arcanist's Ailment Boost and TP Return work with forged status effects and binds, which means you can fill a dagger full of ailments along with spread or pierce and not only consistently get free ailments, but also free TP.