What would it take to put Skill and Luck on par with the better stats?

[isetrh]

I could have included Res in the title, but that one seems obvious: it's nowhere near as good as Def because it's hit nowhere near as often.

For Skill I could see the fix being to increase the Hit:Skill ratio. I don't know howmuch would be ideal though. 5 points of Hit per point of Skill, maybe? Weapon hit rates would probably have to be lowered to balance it out with this method.

Edited July 30, 2015 by isetrh

[Maritisa]

I've already come up with a solution for Luck, although it effectively also makes it the best stat in the game.

Every 10 points of luck (Or 7 if you wanna be cheesy) could cause the game to reroll the RNG once if it rolls poorly.

eg: You have a 50% hitrate, but both RNs roll and cause you to miss. If you have 10 luck, the RNG will roll again for you. If you still miss, and you have 20 luck, it'll roll yet again, and so forth. For crits, hits, skills, everything. Carrying to growths might be OP, but I digress.

The thing about this setup is that Luck is still based on Luck. It actually makes characters more lucky, without explicitly affecting the formula like it does now.

The avoid and dodge bonuses could be moved to Skill instead?

I've also heard that idea, of lowering weapon base hitrates but raising the skill bonus, but then earlygame would be hell... lol

[General Horace]

I actually find luck to be a very undervalued stat (in the games where it affects avoid anyway). A unit with low luck (like let's say Saul at 20/9 where he has 22 speed and 5 luck) vs a unit with comparable speed but higher luck (a 20/4 Clarine with 22 speed and 22 luck). If Saul's facing a 55% hitrate (~60% true hit), Clarine's facing 37% hit, or ~28% true hit, which is a HUGE difference. The evasive durability of high luck units is often overlooked quite a bit, especially when gba enemy hitrates tend to hover around 50-70 hit where there's a pretty big variation. Low% crits are pretty unlikely, but I think anyone who's played H5 has had Jeigan eat a few crits in the early chapters too.

Skill isn't as good in my opinion. In the games where it seems to be good (FE4, FE6, etc) it's more the weapon that the high skill unit is using that's better, in both cases, its usually swords.

[Refa]

Skill's better in games where you have skills because skill helps skills proc when the skills run off the skill stat used to help skills proc skills.

[Katie]

I kinda feel like Skill is already on par with the other stats in the games where it affects skill activation rate.

[Jedi]

Luck is very important in Shadow Dragon and New Mystery.

Skill is important as Refa said, when you have skills to proc OR if its harder to hit things, see Thracia and Binding Blade.

[Florete]

I agree with Horace in that I think Luck is undervalued by a lot of players, but it's still true that the stat is a bit underpowered. One way to make it more useful would be to have more enemies with decent crit, as dodge is the one thing unique to Luck as a stat. I also like Ritisa's idea of it making a character more "lucky," though I'm not sure how I feel on the proposed effect.

Skill is certainly more effective when skills are in play, though I also think raising the crit boost would help noticeably, and that would go hand-in-hand with powering up Luck.

[Refa]

Cam had a similar idea WRT units getting lucky, but it only worked for growths as opposed to everything. That'd be pretty cool.

Edited July 30, 2015 by Refa

[Gaia]

But skill is on par with the other stats

[Silent Mercenary]

Added to the above, a few more good Luck% skills would help. Something in the vein of Armsthrift that would alter the way you play. The few Luck% skills in Fates are mostly to get random resources/money (with a few protection ones), but they did make Midoriko a very popular rental unit pre-DLC. Most players will probably keep choosing Luck as a flaw and disregarding it until the impact it has is more marked.

Also, returning the Hit and Avoid formulas to include full Luck instead of half would help.

[BrightBow]

Any kind of Luck based skills shouldn't be a thing, at least not for something that has a significant impact. You can't integrate abilities into your strategy when they only trigger at random.

Skill used to be at it's most most useful in Thracia, were the PCC multiplied the effect that skill had on the critical hit rate, to the point were it was possible to reach 100% critical on the second hit with Skill alone. It helps that critical hits themselves were more useful since they doubled the attack power, so it was also a way to damage enemies that couldn't be scratched by normal hits at all.

Edited July 30, 2015 by BrightBow

[Jedi]

Added to the above, a few more good Luck% skills would help. Something in the vein of Armsthrift that would alter the way you play. The few Luck% skills in Fates are mostly to get random resources/money (with a few protection ones), but they did make Midoriko a very popular rental unit pre-DLC. Most players will probably keep choosing Luck as a flaw and disregarding it until the impact it has is more marked.

Also, returning the Hit and Avoid formulas to include full Luck instead of half would help.

I like how in Marths remakes, that Luck effected your crit evasion pretty drastically. Why not do that again?

[BrightBow]

I like how in Marths remakes, that Luck effected your crit evasion pretty drastically. Why not do that again?

Because it consequently makes Skill less useful.

[Tamarsamar]

Honestly, the fact that criticals do triple damage in FE alone is enough to make me value Skill and especially Luck more highly than the simple 1:1 stats.

[Shrouded In Myth]

I think Berwick Saga had its hidden Luck stat function as a Miracle proc.

Of course there is no growth for it and can only increase through food.

And maybe it can increase during a no stats level up? I'm not sure.

[Dunal]

If anything, it's other stats that also need less importance.

Speed needs to grant only 1 avo. and luck giving 2 or 3.

Make skill increase hit by 3 and adjust weapon hit rates accordingly. Make excess hit rates beyond 100 grant additional crit equal to half of the overloaded hit (so if you have 120 hit on an enemy, you gain 10 more crit). This makes skill more useful when you have a bulk of it.

Increase base HP and weapon might (damage values are higher by default), to make strength and defense less important.

Bring back fatigue (FE5), improve it, and make base HP affect it (make the system less binary so that with enough HP you can bypass the system more than other units). As in, for every 2 base HP you can engage in one more battle on a map without being fatigued on the next.

Have more enemy magic users to make res better. Include 1-range only magic users so they're less annoying in bulk too (having an overloaded amount 2-range enemies is bad bad bad).

And if you really need to nerf speed more, then make double attacking have 1/2 damage on the second hit, and then make it so myrmidons/peg knights/thieves/light magic etc... have a skill where the damage is normal.

There. Done. Balance. Hurrah.

There's a couple fangames being made with some of these (FE7x comes to mind). And it really really improves things.

Edited July 30, 2015 by DLuna

[X-Naut]

And if you really need to nerf speed more, then make double attacking have 1/2 damage on the second hit, and then make it so myrmidons/peg knights/thieves/light magic etc... have a skill where the damage is normal.

There. Done. Balance. Hurrah.

You're better off doing the opposite, introducing a skill that lets you double regardless of speed, but only lets you do half damage (and only when you initiate the attack). Although I'd also give faster classes a skill that lets them double as long as they're faster, again when initiating.

Most of what I'd say about improving Skill/Luck has already been said, don't make weapon hit rates too high and give enemies a decent Avoid stat for Skill and raise critical rates slightly for Luck. FE12's piecewise crit formula is a good model to follow.

[Shadow Mir]

But skill is on par with the other stats

I never felt that to be the case in any game since FE6.

I kinda feel like Skill is already on par with the other stats in the games where it affects skill activation rate.

Really? Because I'd EASILY say Radiant Dawn begs to differ.

Edited August 2, 2015 by Levant Colthearts

[Anouleth]

Does Skill need a buff in the first place? Historically, units with good skill have always been perfectly fine (think Haar, Rutger, or Palla) and not in need of a buff, and units with low Skill have often suffered for it (think Fiona, Wade or Dart) and don't really deserve a nerf. Skill feels bad and it feels like it doesn't have a big impact, but that's because it affects probabilities which are always hard to evaluate properly.

Secondly, I'm not convinced that all stats need to be balanced against each other so that one point of each is exactly equivalent to a point of anything else.

[Magical Glace]

I'd agree hitrates should depend more on skill and less on your weapon. Like in FE6.

I like the "extra chance" idea. Though, considering caps are higher now, maybe raise it to 15 - 20?

That said, I do think Luck is underrated, especially in the GBA games. The avoid boost is pretty handy, especially when you take into account true hit makes it have more effect.

[Florete]

Does Skill need a buff in the first place? Historically, units with good skill have always been perfectly fine (think Haar, Rutger, or Palla) and not in need of a buff, and units with low Skill have often suffered for it (think Fiona, Wade or Dart) and don't really deserve a nerf. Skill feels bad and it feels like it doesn't have a big impact, but that's because it affects probabilities which are always hard to evaluate properly.

Most of the time, having good skill isn't what makes the unit good, nor is having bad skill what makes a bad unit bad. Any examples from FE6 may be partial exemptions to this since Skill actually was somewhat important in that game, but even there Gonzales is considered decent at worst despite having awful Skill. Haar is great because he flies and has great Str and Def. Fiona is bad because pretty much all her bases are bad. Dart's Skill is one of his problems, but he's really not a bad unit in the first place. I would say his base Spd and promotion cost are bigger problems.

[BrightBow]

Come to think of it, Skill was actually quite useful in Tear Ring Saga. In TRS, the lightest weapons were usually also the most inaccurate weapons. Accurate weapons like Lances were usually too heavy to double against most targets, so you often had to choose between being able to double attack and between reliably hitting a target. Except of course, you had a lot of Skill to counteract that. So basically a high Skill value was a requirement to reap the full power of weapons with low weight.

It helps that the game would occasionally deploy obstacles with massive attack power but extremely low hit against the player, which put further importance on being able to fight effectively with light weapons, in order to maximise one's avoid value.

Edited August 3, 2015 by BrightBow

[Brinzy]

Give everyone baseline Miracle equal to Luck value!

[Jayvee94]

Skill's better in games where you have skills because skill helps skills proc when the skills run off the skill stat used to help skills proc skills.

Yo dawg, I heard you like skills...