Yeah Standard puts the character in their respective classes that is traditional to a Final Fantasy game. He or she is recommended or supposed to be that way because it matches their character personality and to play out as part of the storyline for example.
Expert gives you some freedom to choose whichever stats and classes they can be, but as mentioned above, requires you to be familiar with the mechanics of the game.
I'm pretty sure the characters all have different starting stats as well. Waaka would have high AGI, Auron STR, Yuna magic, and so on. Though 5 stat points here and there won't matter a ton, they are deffinately designed towards being different classes, but yeah they don't have to be fixed in the expert.
If you're curious, here are the two sphere grids.
Standard:
http://images.wikia.com/finalfantasy/images/9/94/Final_Fantasy_10_Sphere_Grid.svg
Expert:
http://i.imgur.com/UtyFI.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/ARlJM.gif
(Two pics of the expert one as neither of them are that clear)
fully maxed expert board should see 65000 Hp ( this should take nearly 400 hours ) without clearing any spheres and changing them, 99999 is possibly but urgh major work involved lol
Breaking the HP limit is a complete waste of time anyway for the following reasons:
-There is no attack in the game that can deal more than 9,999 to your entire party that cannot be predicted (i.e Dark Aeon overdrives). complete the monster arena? more than 9999hp is very useful for after the end game
-Restorative items don't heal more than 9,999 HP. fair point, but by the time you get to have more than that, you'll be using magic a lot more then potions
-Some Celestial weapons are linked to how much HP you have, so as your HP gets lower your damage also lowers and maintaining a full 99,999 is just wasted turns that you cannot afford in the more difficult battles, where as with just 9,999 it only takes 1 turn to fully heal.
only Aurons Celestial weapon gets stronger when he's low in HP, the opposite applies for every other character
And as you've already said it's a major ball ache for maxing out the sphere grid with HP spheres. I just see Break HP limit as a wasted slot on your armour when it could be replaced with something much more useful such as Auto-Haste/Protect/Potion/Pheonix
Breaking the HP limit is a complete waste of time anyway for the following reasons:
-There is no attack in the game that can deal more than 9,999 to your entire party that cannot be predicted (i.e Dark Aeon overdrives).
-Restorative items don't heal more than 9,999 HP.
-Some Celestial weapons are linked to how much HP you have, so as your HP gets lower your damage also lowers and maintaining a full 99,999 is just wasted turns that you cannot afford in the more difficult battles, where as with just 9,999 it only takes 1 turn to fully heal.
And as you've already said it's a major ball ache for maxing out the sphere grid with HP spheres. I just see Break HP limit as a wasted slot on your armour when it could be replaced with something much more useful such as Auto-Haste/Protect/Potion/Pheonix
I'm fairly sure it's impossible to defeat the stronger dark aeons/penance via traditional means (ie not going for the lame instakill) without breaking the HP limit.
I certainly found it very helpful. Also full-heal would max out a character's health even if it was above the 9999hp limit which, assuming you have the ultimate weapons (which again you pretty much need in order to take on the dark aeons), is the most logical way of healing as it only costs yuna 1mp.
Also full-heal would max out a character's health even if it was above the 9999hp limit which, assuming you have the ultimate weapons (which again you pretty much need in order to take on the dark aeons), is the most logical way of healing as it only costs yuna 1mp.