1946 replies to this topic

[dondon151]

but that doesn't show that sophia is more useful than other units at being staff bait, only that she can be used as staff bait, which is not very useful in itself when there are numerous other candidates. now if we can prove that sophia is more likely to be a higher staff target due to an equation that determines staff priority, then we can chalk something up to that, though it's not of much value in the first place.

i seem to recall enemies preferentially targeting allies who either have an equippable staff in their inventory or have a staff rank.

are you going to contest the other points?

[Toothache]

From my observations, it seems her priority IS much higher than other characters. Of course, you do have to put her closer to the staff enemies to encourage them, but in favour of a lower Res target, she does lure them towards her more often than not. There's a certain logic to how the AI targeting behaves in this manner, so you do have to work within this, but Sophia definitely works as a lure. Of course, other characters can work for this, like you say anything with a staff rank works, but Sophia has among the highest Res on average which allows her to shrug off more staves aimed at her. And don't forget there's a lot of Bolting/Purge users that she can shrug off as well.

As for the other points, I did say there were other characters more suited for different roles, so I don't have much to contest. I'm saying she COULD be used as a nosfertank, but she's better as a long range magic/staff lure. So there's some potential variety in her use. BTW Dark accuracy sucks regardless of who's using it, so Sophia missing is as much of a threat to her as it is to Niime, for example.

Edited by Toothache, 09 November 2012 - 05:14 AM.

[General Horace]

there's a huge difference in Niime's hitrates against enemies compared to sophia

assuming sophia somehow gets to 20/1 by the time chapter 21 rolls around, the wyvern riders there have around 30-35 evade

Sophia has 95 base hit with nosferatu, Niime has 117.

Niime has ~93 true hit while Sophia has ~68

while sure if they both miss, the threat is the same, but the odds of Niime missing compared to sophia's odds of missing aren't really even comparable.

not commenting on staff ai targeting because quite frankly i have no idea.

[Silvercrow]

I have a hard mode file with a trained Sophia at chapter 20x Sacae (which has several status staff users), and upon experimenting a bit the enemy status staff users do not seem to prioritize Sophia, even if I remove everything from her inventory other than Staves. They definitely preferred to target Niime and other various combat units (Lance, Rutger, Lugh).

It's hardly conclusive, but it definitely doesn't seem like she's getting any special attention.

Edited by Silvercrow, 09 November 2012 - 09:00 AM.

[Toothache]

On further inspection, the priority seems to be something like this for Sleep:

Staff user (highest res gets first priority, strangely) > lowest res melee unit > lord

Explains why I was seeing Sophia get targeted more often than not. With a bit of training she can certainly out-res any other unit you may want to use and her relative uselessness elsewhere makes her a perfect sort of staff lure.

Silence only targets magic units as you know. Not sure how the priority works there, but I did some testing in Ch14 and unpromoted Ellen was getting targeted first all the time. Requires further testing for sure for anything conclusive, but I wonder if shutting down pure healers is the highest priority or again it is somewhat stat-based.

[dondon151]

is there a reason why sophia seems to be preferentially targeted by sleep in chapter 14 over cecilia, or am i just wrong on this observation?

[Toothache]

Something to do with the Def stat, I believe. Sophia has 1 base Def, where as Cecilia has 7 base, so despite having 5 more Res if both are in range Sophia gets it first. The Def stat comes into play when Sleep starts targeting the melee units as well. It may even be a combination of Def and Res which determines priority.

Edited by Toothache, 15 November 2012 - 03:21 AM.