How to buff skill?

[Alastor15243]

I think it's pretty uncontroversial to say that skill is the worst primary stat in the game, in the sense that a point of skill is pretty uncontroversially less valuable than a point in anything else besides HP, and that the benefits of small increases in skill are almost entirely unnoticeable. Rally skill, for example, only grants you a 4% increase in skill activation rates, +2% critical chance, and +6% hit rate. Every other rally grants a more tangible benefit, even luck as of Fates with crit evade being harder to come by.

So I think it's pretty clear skill needs a buff. But how would you go about that, if you were in charge?

Personally, I'd first change up the formula to be a mix of 4-10 era and 3DS era, with hit and evade being skill x2 + luck and Speed x2 + luck respectively, but using the new crit and crit evade formulas of the 3DS era of (skill-4) divided by 2 and luck divided by 2 respectively.

But furthermore, I'd mix up how the skill activation rates go. The way procs currently work has three problems in my mind:

1: They are not consistently useful, growing slowly in effectiveness from when you get them until the endgame

2: Even in the endgame, they are completely unreliable unless stacked like crazy

3: There's currently no way to resist them, which can make them extremely annoying on enemies.

I would fix this by making proc skills have a formula somewhere along the lines of (user's skill - defender's luck), and then given some multiplier from there, so like with other stats like strength vs defense and speed vs speed, the benefits of having more skill than your enemy has luck are solid and noticeable even in the early game, but don't become ridiculous in the endgame. Of course under this system you'd probably only be able to have one proc on your character.

What would you do?

Edited November 14, 2017 by Alastor15243

[JSND Alter Dragon Boner]

Proc skills are cancer so i honestly would remove that from equation

 

I would probably make it give a flat damage increase using the skill system of Echoes. 

Edited November 14, 2017 by JSND Alter Dragon Boner

[Harvey]

May I ask just why many people seem to think that skill is the least important stat? It is needed to HIT enemies is it not?!?!?

 

[Alastor15243]

1 hour ago, JSND Alter Dragon Boner said:

Proc skills are cancer so i honestly would remove that from equation

 

I would probably make it give a flat damage increase using the skill system of Echoes. 

Making them all player phase skill commands like lunge or the like would be an interesting thing I'd like to see in action, it would definitely help prevent enemy phase from becoming so heavily emphasized as long as they didn't make most of them worthless by disabling doubling for nearly all of them like in gaiden. But skill obviously needs to have SOME kind of secondary effect like speed does or it's just objectively worse than it. And I don't think crit rate quite cuts it there.

One other idea I was throwing around once or twice was that skill had some impact on how many skills you were allowed to equip, like for every 10 points you have in your skill stat you can equip one extra skill.

 

31 minutes ago, Harvey said:

May I ask just why many people seem to think that skill is the least important stat? It is needed to HIT enemies is it not?!?!?

 

And each individual point of skill has an almost negligible impact on that. You need to be doing a ridiculous amount of damage or have a really low hit rate before a single point in skill is going to have as high of an impact on your damage output as a single point in strength does.

It's not that you don't need skill. It's just that numerically, each point of skill is objectively worth less than each individual point in strength or defense or speed.

Edited November 14, 2017 by Alastor15243

[X-Naut]

Having a Hit formula that empowers the Skill stat is probably the best solution to making Skill useful, although there's a limit to how much you want to do it. The GBA's 2x Skill is fine, although a 2.5x or 3x multiplier may not be out of the question. Similarly, place a limit on how much you can passively boost Hit through forging and supports.

I don't like the new crit formula though, as I feel that it devalues high Luck stats.

Another idea I had that would also resolve the question for how to handle Magic and Resistance, is to have Magic be a joint stat like in FE5, but when using Anima magic your Attack is the average of your Skill and Magic stats. (Light and Dark magic use Magic exclusively for Attack.) Now Skill is at least more significant for tome users, like how Strength is significantly less useful than for physical fighters.

And while this would benefit the enemy more than the player, a minimum Hit floor based on the user's Skill stat would give it something else to do.

4 hours ago, JSND Alter Dragon Boner said:

Proc skills are cancer so i honestly would remove that from equation

Agreed

[Alastor15243]

3 minutes ago, X-Naut said:

I don't like the new crit formula though, as I feel that it devalues high Luck stats.

I disagree. Fates is the only game where I've looked at a character in a situation with high-crit enemies and actually gone "thank god he has high luck". Devaluing luck actually ironically made having a really good luck stat more valuable because before, pretty much anyone could be immune to crits from anyone without a killer weapon, whereas now lower-luck units may actually be in trouble without some help.

Edited November 14, 2017 by Alastor15243

[eclipse]

Use a Skill Book!

There's got to be a middle ground between Shadow Dragon mooks and FE6 throne bonuses.  A little more emphasis on Skill in the hit formula, and a general hit reduction on weapons would probably work.

[Magical Glace]

@Mister IceTeaPeach once suggested that Skill could be used as a buffer for weapon weight.  Avoids the staticness and girl shafting of Con and the mage shafting of Str, and makes skill more valuable.

[ping]

I wouldn't say that less valuable stats are really a negative as long as it's properly integrated in the game (and particularly unit) balance, which unfortunately hasn't really been the case in any FE title, as far as I can tell. For example, let the skill-specialized cavalier have a twice as large skill advantage over the power-cav than the latter has in Str. Or in  similar vein, if a typical physical unit has a Str growth of 50%, give a hybrid unit growths in the area of 40% Str / 30% Mag.

23 hours ago, JSND Alter Dragon Boner said:

Proc skills are cancer so i honestly would remove that from equation

Amen.

[Alastor15243]

1 hour ago, ping said:

I wouldn't say that less valuable stats are really a negative as long as it's properly integrated in the game (and particularly unit) balance, which unfortunately hasn't really been the case in any FE title, as far as I can tell. For example, let the skill-specialized cavalier have a twice as large skill advantage over the power-cav than the latter has in Str. Or in  similar vein, if a typical physical unit has a Str growth of 50%, give a hybrid unit growths in the area of 40% Str / 30% Mag.

Amen.

The problem is there are also things like rally skill and skill-debuffing shuriken that essentially do fuck all because skill is such an underpowered stat.

[Harvey]

On 14/11/2017 at 9:22 PM, Alastor15243 said:

It's not that you don't need skill. It's just that numerically, each point of skill is objectively worth less than each individual point in strength or defense or speed.

And I disagree here. Skill is just as important as any other stat. Swordmasters need it to be deadly. TO beat tougher bosses, lots of skill is needed. Can you honestly think of a way to defeat ishtar without a Forseti user whose skill is high enough to kill her?

 

[Alastor15243]

16 minutes ago, Harvey said:

And I disagree here. Skill is just as important as any other stat. Swordmasters need it to be deadly. TO beat tougher bosses, lots of skill is needed. Can you honestly think of a way to defeat ishtar without a Forseti user whose skill is high enough to kill her?

 

My point is, when would you ever be more grateful to have a single extra point of skill as opposed to a single extra point of anything else? Never. Because each individual point does almost nothing compared to an individual point of strength or defense or speed.

[ping]

2 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

The problem is there are also things like rally skill and skill-debuffing shuriken that essentially do fuck all because skill is such an underpowered stat.

Well, same solution - make it so that Rally Skill gives like +15 skill and the shuriken reduce it to zero for a round or three.

[Note: the newest FE game I've played is New Mystery, so I'm just pulling those numbers out of my arse. But the idea is really the same - since one point of Skill is less important than Str or Def, increase the numbers]

[Another note: Drastically increasing the Rally Speed bonus might be an interesting way to indirectly boost slow classes/characters. +10 speed is relatively unimportant if the character receiving it doubles without it anyway, but huge for a slower unit. Just a random thought that just crossed my mind]

[Alastor15243]

4 minutes ago, ping said:

Well, same solution - make it so that Rally Skill gives like +15 skill and the shuriken reduce it to zero for a round or three.

How is that a better solution? Why wouldn't it be better to just make each stat equally as valuable to avoid annoying things like stat inflation and forcing debuffs to follow different rules for different stats? Especially when currently the caps are roughly identical for different stats even when they do things like higher growths or inflated rally bonuses.

Edited November 15, 2017 by Alastor15243

[Zasplach]

40 minutes ago, Harvey said:

 Can you honestly think of a way to defeat ishtar without a Forseti user whose skill is high enough to kill her?

 

Febail or whatever his name is now with Ichavil tends to be a pretty popular choice for killing her.  

And the question about how to buff skill is a tough one.  As long as individual weapons have such an important correlation with actually hitting the target.  Either skill is the least important offensive skill because weapons are more important in determining hit or skill becomes the most important stat because it plays a greater role in hitting than weapons and if you don't hit your other stats don't matter. 

[Alastor15243]

4 minutes ago, Zasplach said:

And the question about how to buff skill is a tough one.  As long as individual weapons have such an important correlation with actually hitting the target.  Either skill is the least important offensive skill because weapons are more important in determining hit or skill becomes the most important stat because it plays a greater role in hitting than weapons and if you don't hit your other stats don't matter. 

Frankly it would be as easy as buffing hit and avoid calculations so that skill and speed make more of a difference in terms of hitting and missing. Personally I feel the calculations should at least be doubled, so each point of skill increases your hit rate by at LEAST 3%. At least then Rally Skill would translate to a +12% hit rate, which is substantial enough to be comparable to the other rally abilities.

[Shadow Mir]

55 minutes ago, Harvey said:

And I disagree here. Skill is just as important as any other stat. Swordmasters need it to be deadly. TO beat tougher bosses, lots of skill is needed. Can you honestly think of a way to defeat ishtar without a Forseti user whose skill is high enough to kill her?

 

Here's the problem with this - I literally can't think of any post-Sword of Seals game where skill was actually important. As is, skill only tends to be important for axe users, and that's more because they have the most inaccurate weapon type.

[Dunal]

Buff SKL to 3% HIT per point and then raise LCK to 2% AVO per point. Lower SPD to 1% AVO.

Lower the damage of critical hits to 2x damage rather than 3x, but SKL innately increases crit by a higher amount, with LCK negating crit non-linearly (so increases dodge by 0.5% up to 10, then 1% up to 20, then 1.5% up to 30 etc...). Latter sounds odd but it makes bad/excess amounts less punishing / more useful respectfully at different intervals of the game. You can then grants units AVO based on how much excess dodge units have over the enemy's crit rate. This would then be the opposite for hit/crit rates: hit chances over 100% then gets converted to crit, meaning excess SKL becomes stronger.

A skill system where it's a longer term version of Heroes. Average skill proc will be every ~15 attacks. And every ~4 SKL a unit has reduces this by 1. 

You could have other misc factors like every point of SKL increasing WEXP gain by 3-5% per point. Or Bows/Daggers having partial DEF ignoring factors with enough SKL (since they're aiming at weak spots).

Edited November 18, 2017 by Dunal

[MisterIceTeaPeach]

On 15.11.2017 at 2:10 PM, Glaceon Mage said:

@Mister IceTeaPeach once suggested that Skill could be used as a buffer for weapon weight.  Avoids the staticness and girl shafting of Con and the mage shafting of Str, and makes skill more valuable.

Actually I didn't see this notification in my box, but thankfully I still checked out this thread.

Skill is weapon buffer is definitely preferrable than con because it's not "sexist", but I think it wouldn't really fix the weapon balance.

If you consider that most sword classes are fast with high skill and using the most accurate weapon type, whilst most axe users are rather slow combined with low skill and the most inaccurate weapon type, the cut between axes / lances and swords would be even bigger than in FE6. Swordusers would have the highest accuracy and never feared to get doubled while an axe armor would have low hitrate and get doubled by tons of opponents including magic users.  

This idea would only work if the class growths and weapon stats would be fixed. Otherwise this idea would be even worse than FE6's weapon balance which is bad enough already.

 

As for the weapon weight I still favor FE14 because it affects everyone in the same way. The speed (de)buff is fair and equal.

 

Now for the topic here's my suggestion how skill, speed and luck should affect the unit's stats: 

Skill: +1.5% hitrate, +1% critrate, +0.5% evasion

Speed: +1% evasion

Luck: +0.5% hitrate, +1.5% evasion, +1% critavoid

Edited November 19, 2017 by Mister IceTeaPeach

[Gradivus.]

- Regarding stats' effects per point:

Skl: +2 hit, +1.5 crit

Spd: +1 avo

Lck: +1 hit, +1.5 avo, +1 cr.ev

- Change crits to Dmg*2. This should make crits more relevant overall and less broken, now you just get them with rigging or killer weapons and they are too strong then. It's weird no FE game has tried that yet when it's so obvious what's wrong with Dmg*3 crits. (FE4 and 5's formula doesn't count either, it looks more nuanced than Dmg*3 but is just as broken)

- To compensate for the fact that capped Skl vs capped Lck usually means you still face around 12-15 crit, add items that increase crit evade. Example: Having Iron Rune in your inventory gives you -10 avo but +10 crit evade.

- Give a unit an extra attack in melee combat if their enemy doesn't hit any attacks. That encourages high hitrates because missing becomes much more costly. (and it adds realism because if you whiff that attack, sure your attacker can strike you once more!)

- Give a fat boost to hit and might at WTA, like +20 hit and +2 mt, and just a -10 hit debuff at WTD, give mediocre hitrates (e.g. ranging between 55 for hammers and 90 for iron swords) to weapons. That way, WTA is particularly useful against high-avo units and with inaccurate weapons, but doesn't give you free dodges in other situations, and high skill is vital at neutral and negative weapon triangle.

- Change the way proc skills work, instead of Skl% chance they can be cooldown/command-based or guaranteed, depending on what makes the most sense for each skill. Taking the luck factor away from proc skills balances the fact that crits happen more often. (e.g. Aegis reduces the damage taken from magic by (your skill)% no matter what, Sol and Luna can be used once each 3 turns, Astra costs you 20 HP to use, etc.)

- Weight shouldn't exist in its old implementation, neither with skill nor any other buffer, because weapon drawbacks can be more diverse than just speed (and w/o buffer is still more fair than with buffer). I would like a drawback system similar to Fates'.

- Minimize the effects of supports or scrap them altogether to just being side-story. They're just a cheap replacement for hitrate stats that mostly just comes to your best units' advantage.

[Shadow Mir]

About the only way that I can think of to make skill more useful as a stat is to have more weapons like Subaki's Pike, which had its Mt doubled if the user has higher Skill than the opponent.

35 minutes ago, Gradivus. said:

- Regarding stats' effects per point:

Skl: +2 hit, +1.5 crit

Spd: +1 avo

Lck: +1 hit, +1.5 avo, +1 cr.ev

- Change crits to Dmg*2. This should make crits more relevant overall and less broken, now you just get them with rigging or killer weapons and they are too strong then. It's weird no FE game has tried that yet when it's so obvious what's wrong with Dmg*3 crits. (FE4 and 5's formula doesn't count either, it looks more nuanced than Dmg*3 but is just as broken)

- To compensate for the fact that capped Skl vs capped Lck usually means you still face around 12-15 crit, add items that increase crit evade. Example: Having Iron Rune in your inventory gives you -10 avo but +10 crit evade.

- Give a unit an extra attack in melee combat if their enemy doesn't hit any attacks. That encourages high hitrates because missing becomes much more costly. (and it adds realism because if you whiff that attack, sure your attacker can strike you once more!)

- Give a fat boost to hit and might at WTA, like +20 hit and +2 mt, and just a -10 hit debuff at WTD, give mediocre hitrates (e.g. ranging between 55 for hammers and 90 for iron swords) to weapons. That way, WTA is particularly useful against high-avo units and with inaccurate weapons, but doesn't give you free dodges in other situations, and high skill is vital at neutral and negative weapon triangle.

- Change the way proc skills work, instead of Skl% chance they can be cooldown/command-based or guaranteed, depending on what makes the most sense for each skill. Taking the luck factor away from proc skills balances the fact that crits happen more often. (e.g. Aegis reduces the damage taken from magic by (your skill)% no matter what, Sol and Luna can be used once each 3 turns, Astra costs you 20 HP to use, etc.)

- Weight shouldn't exist in its old implementation, neither with skill nor any other buffer, because weapon drawbacks can be more diverse than just speed (and w/o buffer is still more fair than with buffer). I would like a drawback system similar to Fates'.

- Minimize the effects of supports or scrap them altogether to just being side-story. They're just a cheap replacement for hitrate stats that mostly just comes to your best units' advantage.

I'm down with a critical hit nerf (as is, they're far and away more useful for the enemy than they are for the player), but I'm not so supportive of a cooldown system for skills.

[Gradivus.]

1 minute ago, Levant Mir Celestia said:

I'm down with a critical hit nerf (as is, they're far and away more useful for the enemy than they are for the player), but I'm not so supportive of a cooldown system for skills.

Why not?

[Shadow Mir]

2 minutes ago, Gradivus. said:

Why not?

I just think that it wouldn't translate well to a main series FE game. Well, that, and it sounds like it's too abusable as well.

[UNLEASH IT]

1 hour ago, Levant Mir Celestia said:

I just think that it wouldn't translate well to a main series FE game. Well, that, and it sounds like it's too abusable as well.

It's better than % procs. At least with the cooldown system, I know when I'll be eating a Vengeance from Takumi and can subsequently plan around it

Edited November 19, 2017 by UNLEASH IT

[Shadow Mir]

27 minutes ago, UNLEASH IT said:

It's better than % procs. At least with the cooldown system, I know when I'll be eating a Vengeance from Takumi and can subsequently plan around it

You ask me, this defense falls flat in the face of the very high potential for abuse... Also, I wouldn't be pleased to know that the cooldown on a skill is so high that I can't expect it to be useful at all.

Edited November 19, 2017 by Levant Mir Celestia