Robot said:
I looked into the whole Second Seal thing, and they might be worth it. I owuldn't bother with it unless you want to make a character 'perfect' and have all sorts of good skills. My only problem with it is that they bring you down to level 1, but not in a good way like a Master Seal, so you'll need to grind A LOT to get them back up. I'm probably not going to bother with them, but maybe on one character for fun or something.
They do, actually. The way Second Seals seem to work is that you keep all of your stats (they may fall because of naturally slower gains or to meet the new classes stat caps) whenever changing to a respectively tiered class. Say, if you change from a level twenty Mage to a level twenty Thief. Both of those are basic classes, so you wouldn't lose any stats. What that means is that you didn't lose anything; in fact, you gained nineteen more levels to get stat gains from! Of course, if you go from a promoted class back to a basic, then you're correct, as you're going to see a big, bad drop in stats.
As for the math in how slowly you level up (which could be seen as a bad thing), I read somewhere that it's something like, [Character's Level/2 + 1 = Internal Level] So basically, if you Second Seal a level ten Thief, your new level when calculating EXP is going to be six. Or in other words, your EXP is going to be gained as quickly as if you were a level six character.
Also, Master Seals send you automatically to an internal level of twenty one. So using a Master Seal on a level ten character isn't the best idea (unless you just want to earn new skills in different classes) since you would be losing out on a lot of "cheaper" EXP by passing levels eleven through twenty.
/thethingsNeoGAFteachesyou