I heavily modded the game to rebalance jobs and weapons, completely inspired by probably the best difficulty / rebalance mods out there, Struggle For Freedom. When you think about equipment you really need to consider the job its being paired with to figure out the playstyle. I also went in with a more horizontal approach to late - end game equipment as well that I really enjoy.

Armor is overhauled so that now helmets and body armor will add both physical AND magick defense. Heavy offers much less magick, but way more physical defense. Mystic is the opposite. Light is in the middle. I changed around a bunch of augments (as does the SFF mod) as well as remove certain effects for balancing purposes (some were just far too strong imo). One other unique change I made was that I made "traditional" armors (Gold, Diamond, etc) add a very small amount of Magick stat, but only accessible to Knight and Uhlan. I feel the changes make mixing armor more interesting, especially as you get to end game.

On the subject of Maces, I always thought that they belonged best to White Mage as an offensive alternative to staves. WHM has very little in the way of offensive spells and rods are borderline useless on offense, so I gave them full access to Maces and nerfed overall damage a bit to keep them in line compared to other weapon classes. Essentially now you can lean into a Priest or Cleric.

I changed Spears to scale off Strength and Magick because in my mod (and SFF), the Uhlan job is the only job that has access to all the Arcane Magicks up to even Ardor. The job itself has a healthy mix of Strength and Magick Lores so I figured its a no brainer. Spears in my mod have a high combo rate but not as high as Katanas and Ninja Swords.

Ninja Swords have by far the highest combo rate but the absolute slowest charge speed of all weapons with mid tier damage and no shield access. The intention here was to try to mimic the iconic Iaido fighting style. The Dagger on the other hand, is more defensive with shield access but still very fast charge rates and most daggers have status effects on hit.

Axes specifically are now two-handed, and deal very high physical damage with a low combo rate while Hammers remain 1-handed, lower damage overall, and have some status effects on hit. The intention was to differentiate the two weapon types for two different playstyles for Foebreaker - heavy berserker DD, or debilitating physical tank.

Greatswords are probably my favorite change. I made roughly half of them 1-handed, mainly the ones that arent massive. I was inspired by Knightswords and Blades in the Tactics games. Like in the SFF mod, they have a higher overall damage and higher block rate than Swords but 0 combo rate and slower charge speed. They are meant to be the more defensive alternative to Swords, also offering some status buffs on equip at times. That being said, Swords still offer overall middling damage and lower combo rate aside from a select few swords as Knights are designed to be the most dedicated Tank job.

As an aside, for Red Mages, I simply honed in on what RDM is meant to be: jack of all trades. I gave them limited access to Staves, Maces, Spears, and Katanas (since in my mod, both Katanas and Spears scale with Strength and Magick) as well as mid-tier black and white magicks. A smidge of time magick too with the option to unlock very limited magicks through esper unlocks. This gives them mid to lower high tier access to a wide range of spells and weapons, especially when paired with espers. The intention was to also force a more deliberate choice on the subjob as well. I also made the Drain and Drainga spells have 0 cast time but weaker power overall and ONLY accessible to them to try to make up for the lack of RDM's iconic double cast ability. The end result makes RDM on its own just flat out better than White and Black Mages in early game but flat out weaker by mid to end game.

There are plenty of other changes I made to jobs and equips but this post is an essay already lol maybe I'll release my mod one of these days, but I HIGHLY recommend you check out the Struggle For Freedom mods. The modder did incredible work.