Draft Builds for Freelancer:

Build 1: The Sword Saint

Design Notes: Probably the quintessential Freelancer build concept, this is a spellblade who attempts to combine a degree of magical skill, swordplay and special techniques into a harmonious whole. The inspirations are the FF5 Spellblades, but most of all, Orlandu from Final Fantasy Tactics. Ideally, this build should be considerably less broken than he was, but attempts to retain his versatility if possible. It's somewhat squishy, particularly due to using Adept abilities with their usual HP drain and Lunge, but having access to the Healing spells and Night Sword should mitigate that, making for an incredibly reliable attacker who can get off three 150%+ Weapon Damage attacks a round or administer various debuffs (and attack multiple defenses and ignore armor - this is key for exploting an opponent's weaknesses!) and remain reasonably topped off without a healer constantly having to guard him.

Main Job: Freelancer

Level 8: Lunge, any Arcane Discipline (Shadow Strike and Holy Strike come recommended, with the selection dependent on the player's best guess on what weakness might feature more during the campaign - if neither is expected to feature, Shadow Strike is slightly superior due to Dark Pact), Pommel Strike. [DN: Pommel Strike's ability to disable Slow actions is so uncommon that it ends up invaluable. Adepts have to wait until L60 to get this, meaning it provides an unusually unique trick early on that can't be defended against except by special exceptions that guard against it. This is not to say Dirty Fighting is bad - it's just that there's other ways to duplicate this effect via Immobilize available to us, so no need to go with this one.]

Level 16: Blade Magic (Any, but recommended option is Snake Fang) [DN: Feign Weakness is a capital D Dead Level that requires you to expose yourself to danger to keep up in the damage race, so avoiding it and getting an incredibly unusual defense-enforcer is excellent. The ability to tell an opponent 'no, you don't get to use your good defense' is just golden, the fact all of the status effects Blade Magic uses are good is just icing on the cake. Blind is the weakest, but even so has its uses. If it can be reasonably expected that Poison won't be resisted by every enemy under the sun, Snake Fang is an amazing boss killer that effectively grants extra actions as long as Poison is active, and great for trolling mages regardless. Hallowed Bolt is also good, though ironically its usage is kind of split - it wants to be used against mages to Mute them, but they're the people most likely to resist its effect, whereas it can be a near-surefire hit against more physical oriented monsters.]

Level 23: Blade Magic Specialty (Stasis Sword or Fury Brand, ignore Shadow Blade) [DN: Both of these abilities are so good they deserve serious consideration for saccing points somewhere to double-dip. Immobilize completes the action-denial toolkit that was set up with Pommel Strike, but does way more damage and cancels Reactions instead. Fury Brand flat out neuters 90% of all encounters, especially bosses who do not pack Berserk immunity - the combination of juicy damage AND status infliction with absolutely no difficulty increases is just monstrously good. Fury Brand gets the nod over Stasis Sword because of how crippling Berserking is in most cases, but neither's a bad choice.]

Level 30: Night Sword [DN: Cleansing Strike is phenomenal as well, but Night Sword is just super core for making the build more self-sufficient. Being able to self-heal makes the Sword Saint self reliant, which whoever is playing party support/tank will greatly appreciate.]

Level 37: Quadra Slam [DN: There's no excuse not to have the required stats by this point. Quadra Slam is...well, it's bloody amazing, honestly. Landing all four hits takes serious work, but it's the highest reliable damage move in the game if it can stick the landing, because it shatters the damage limit by doing four separate attacks. Ungarmax hits harder, but its chargetime is so long that it's basically impossible to deploy it reliably without losing actions unless the Archer picks Fencer, and Vitals Aim has an only slightly lower chargetime in exchange for dealing only half damage before specialties. Barrage comes in so late that it's not even worth talking about - it's a victory lap and ironically not that good against the enemies you'd most want to use it against, AKA Superbosses, because they will have monster stats. Even against multiple enemies, the armor-piercing nature of Quadra Slam makes it good enough that it's probably just worth chucking out if you need DPR, because it will probably outperform Cleave against four enemies if the same number of shots land. Arguably the crown jewel of the Warrior Job, just a beautiful ability, really.]

Level 44: Dragon Breath [DN: Everyone else struggles to break the damage limit. Dragon Breath does so trivially, and is effectively an FFT-style Gravity attack - it chunks an opponent's max HP by percentiles without fail. There's just no contest here - particularly because if the GM is fond of bonus challenges, like bonus bosses, THIS is the ability that will most reliably take them down. Status effects can be no-sold, but damage is forever.]

Level 51: Free Space [DN: At this point, the build is basically complete, with Quadra Slam and Dragon Breath being its true capstones. Want to get more mezzing via Cleansing Strike? Reasonable. Wide-angle AoE via Elemental Overload for vulnerability tapping? Sure. Lethal Blow to make Dragon Breath even dumber? Go for it. Personal recommendation is an HP multiplier increase - being squishy is yucky!]

Level 58: Free Space [DN: As above. Another HP increase could be good, to really transition from a glassy DPS/Mezzer into a heavy duty bruiser who captains the party. Dualism is also neat for more versatility.]

Level 65: Finishing Touch or Shellburst Stab [DN: Shock would be a cool ability if Quadra Slam didn't exist. As is, it comes too late to be worth gambling on that doubled damage vs groups at a heightened difficulty, compared to throwing out a Quadra Slam and laughing all the way to the bank or maybe hitting a vulnerability with Elemental Overload across an entire team with no difficulty raises. Iaijutsu is just terrible when Finishing Touch exists and can have something like a 50%ish chance of Fataling if you pick Dervish and want to style. Divine Ruination imposes a massive debuff at such a high difficulty that it looks like trash compared to Fury Brand and Cleansing Strike, and the same goes for Soul Eater, which is again kind of obsoleted by Finishing Touch. Really, only two of these capstones do something distinctly better than what came before, so pick one of those! Finishing Touch is a total swiss-army knife, and Shellburst Stab combines with Dragon Breath to maintain outrageous damage all the way through a fight.]

Sub Job: Wizard [DN: the Healing spell group makes the Sword Saint self-sufficient, ish, and Counter Magic makes it considerably less squishy too. Force of Thought offers *amazing* utility, letting the Sword Saint cover its squishiness with Protect or Shell, or get Haste or anything else you like that you feel is missing. Fencer and Dervish are also fine choices, as all of them pad the Sword Saint's durability out some, and offer the awesome abilities of initiative control and tripled critchance. Really, the subjob selection has no bad choices except Defender and Phalanx, for what should be obvious reasons.]