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Experiments with Enemy-Exclusive Skills


ajmiam
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So I recently picked up a Powersaves device and being extremely curious, decided to play around with putting enemy-only skills on the characters in my (completed) Birthright file (which will never be used for online play). I found a few interesting subtleties and interactions, but the biggest surprise was how well the game handles (from a "correct behavior" standpoint) player units having skills they shouldn't. All of them that I tested (listed below) work as advertised with only the most minor of exceptions, and none of them caused any glitches I could detect.
Here's all I found out. Some of this information might already be known, but a lot of it I couldn't find anywhere. These facts could be useful if you want to know what to look out for when facing enemies with these skills, or you want to do a for-fun run of the game using some enemy skills, or you want to maybe incorporate them in class skill trees in a ROM hack, or you are just curious about the intricacies of the game's mechanics.
General notes about Powersaves and skills:

  • You can only use Powersaves to add skills to the top-left character in your roster. You can change this character by entering a Challenge or Invasion battle and deselecting all of your units except the one you want to be affected, then choosing Exit, then saving. (Does anyone know of a way to do this when no Challenge or Invasion battle is available?)
  • Make sure you fill the skill slots in order! That is, if a character currently has 3 non-personal skills, be sure you don't fill in slot 5 unless you fill in slot 4 first. If you leave a gap, you won't be able to de-equip the skills positioned after the gap. I'm not sure if any other undesirable effects can occur, but best not to chance it.
  • Skills you apply to a character (whether standard or enemy-only) using Powersaves will vanish permanently when you de-equip them instead of being stored under "Available Skills". Apparently only skills that were earned during actual gameplay are saved when you de-equip then.
  • Enemy skills can be passed down to children as normal. In that case, they are considered "earned" by the child, so he or she can remove them and later re-equip them, as demonstrated by the unholy spawn of Staff Savant Sakura and Inevitable End Saizo:

kUGYFem.jpg

  • Units with enemy skills can be saved to the logbook when you complete the game, but you can't buy the enemy skills from them (perhaps because they have no defined gold cost, or because the game just checks for it and forbids it) and if you buy the whole character, they won't have the enemy skills (perhaps this is due to the same logic that removes enemy skills from captured prisoners? Or are DLC skills also removed this way?)

Here's some trivia about the various skills I tested:
Inevitable End

  • As the description suggests, any stat reductions caused by the user on an enemy will be added to debuffs already on that enemy, rather than only the largest reduction on each stat taking effect.
  • If a ninja (by "ninja" I mean anyone equipped with a shuriken or dagger) with Inevitable End double-attacks an enemy due to 5-point Speed advantage, the enemy does not suffer double the debuffs.
  • However, if two ninjas are in Attack Stance and the supporting one has Inevitable End, the debuffs caused by the two ninjas' weapons will stack with each other. It doesn't matter whether the lead unit has Inevitable End. (If the lead unit has Inevitable End and the supporting one doesn't, the two ninjas' debuffs will not stack with each other.)
  • If a unit with Inevitable End has debuffing skills like Draconic Hex and Seal Defense, those skills' effects WILL stack with each other AND with any debuffing weapons that character uses, even on the same attack.
  • Normally if you successfully hit an enemy with an Enfeeble staff, you can't Enfeeble it again within the same turn--the UI just won't allow you to pick it as a target. However, the game correctly LIFTS that restriction for Staff users with Inevitable End, allowing the player to select a just-Enfeebled-this-turn enemy as a target for Enfeeble! This is a subtle point that I'm impressed the game got right. I wonder if all of the skills were developed with the possibility of being used by both players and enemies, with Intelligent Systems later deciding to make some of the skills enemy-only. Or it could just be a by-product of the logic that allows AI Inevitable End staff users to Enfeeble the same player unit multiple times in a turn.

Staff Savant

  • This works exactly as described. The effect that increases staff range to 1-10 applies to healing staves, not just offensive staves. The UI correctly shows the full range as green squares and correctly allows the player to choose any valid target within the range.
  • The effect that prevents staff uses from consuming a charge DOESN'T apply when you use a Staff through the Items menu->Use command. (E.g., using a Dumpling Rod to heal its holder.)

Immobilize

  • If this skill is on a unit, any enemy hit by an attack from the unit will be Frozen. It doesn't matter whether this unit or the enemy attacked first.
  • This unit's attack must hit to trigger this skill. Misses don't trigger it.
  • If this unit is the supporting unit in Attack Stance and lands a hit, it will not trigger this skill.

Hit/Avo +10, +20

  • The bonuses these skills give do not appear on a character's stats page (in the middle where you see Atk, Crit, Hit, Avo), but they do correctly modify the hit percentages on the combat forecast (when you select an enemy to attack and one more A press will commit to the attack).
  • If a unit has both of these skills, their effects WILL stack for a total modifier of 30.

Resist Status/Immune Status

  • These skills affect stat drops inflicted by enemies onto the unit with the skill, and post-combat damage that would be dealt to the unit with this skill because of Poison Strike, Savage Blow, etc.
  • If your unit has Immune Status and an enemy it fights has a "Seal" skill, the "Seal" skill's icon will pop up after the battle even though it has no effect. (Check your unit's stats and you'll see they haven't dropped at all.)
  • These skills do not reduce or prevent damage from terrain.
  • These skills do not reduce or prevent self-inflicted stat reduction, e.g. from silver weapons, making their descriptions slightly inaccurate.

Dragonskin/Divine Shield

  • As the description states, each of these skills halves damage that the user takes from attacks. Fractions are rounded down, so e.g. 21 damage becomes 10.
  • If a unit has both of these skills equipped, they WILL stack, QUARTERING all damage taken. Wow!

Final Question:
Do you think any of these skills could have been made available to player units without destroying the game's balance? Some are obviously way overpowered, but others I'm not so sure about....
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NGL I was expecting a complete shitpost but this is actually a decent dump of information on these skills so props for that,

The game's balance is already fucked,but imo these skills are justified in their enemy lock,

Edited by joshcja
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I'm not really surprised that most of these skills work properly when applied to player units, because player and enemy units both use the same type of data, unlike in most standard RPGs where player characters' and enemies' data blocks are different.

Nonetheless, thanks for sharing!

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When I first found out that there were more powersave codes available for fates I was excited but immediately after discovering that un-equipping a powersaved skill permanently removes the skill I was bummed out lol. Through save editing however you can have your units learn and unlearn skills including Songstress, Beast, Corrin, and Enemy only skills. So for a lunatic Conquest run I have Xander running around with Dragonskin and Immune Status (take that garbage inevitable end ninjas). I did not, however, know that Divine Shield and dragonskin stack. That's super interesting lol.

Edit: Have you tried messing around with the enemy-only classes yet? I haven't tried the bigger one's like Silent Dragon, Blight Dragon, or Empty Vessel. I think the one that might glitch out the most would be the Silent Dragon.

Edited by Lady Wonder
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The power of the dark side is calling me. It's voice is that of a siren.

The only skllls that doesn't sounds that broken to me are Hit/Avo +10/+20 and Resist/Immune Statue well, but damn, they all look tasty.

no,

enjoy your shadowban

Tell us that you honestly, truly, really don't want them.:p

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no,

enjoy your shadowban

Lol, I'm not foolish enough to go online with 'em. :P This is for goofing around offline only, and there's no way I'm ever going to use Powersaves to taint my initial run of Lunatic Conquest while it's still in progress.

The power of the dark side is calling me. It's voice is that of a siren.

The only skllls that doesn't sounds that broken to me are Hit/Avo +10/+20 and Resist/Immune Statue well, but damn, they all look tasty.

Tell us that you honestly, truly, really don't want them.:p

My thoughts:

Resist Status absolutely should have been player-available since without it there's no real way to protect against status spam. Immune Status might be too much as it pretty much nullifies the difficulty of certain chapters. (Not that it stopped Saizo from killing himself in Conquest 17 in spite of my best efforts to keep his health topped off....)

Hit/Avo +10 should be OK since it's not a huge boost but +20 might be pushing it. +20 is strictly better than Lucky Seven, and imagine stacking H/A +10 and +20 on an already-evasive unit like Ryoma....

Dragonskin, Divine Shield, Immobilize, and Staff Savant are insane. Infinite Bifrost, anyone? How about infinite Freezes that also deal damage? But now that we know Dragonskin and Divine Shield stack, I wonder how long it will be until someone hacks both of them onto a boss just to be evil....

Inevitable End is the one I'm not so sure about. It's devastating when used by enemies since player units are expected to fight many battles per map, meaning the accumulated debuffs have a large effect. But enemies have an average lifespan of like 2-3 attacks anyway, so piling debuffs on them is...mildly helpful I guess? It'll sometimes turn a 4HKO into a 3HKO, or, with the proper build or positioning, turn a 3HKO into a 2HKO, but plenty of standard skills can make those same claims. Like, would this have been out of place as the Level 5 skill of Master Ninjas? Or am I wrong and it is actually even more broken than stuff like Replicate, Warp, and Galeforce?

My reason for asking about skill power level was: I'm working on coding a skill-tree randomizer* (shuffling all of the class skills and re-assigning them randomly) and was thinking of giving the user the option (keyword: OPTION) of tossing enemy skills into the shuffler, but organizing them into tiers so the player can enable the weaker ones without having to enable stronger ones.

My current plan for the tiers is

"Fair" tier: Hit/Avo +10, Resist Status, Inevitable End**, and all the DLC/future DLC skills that are enemy-exclusive in the base game (Bold Stance, Point Blank, Winged Shield***)

"Powerful" tier: Hit/Avo +20, Immune Status

"Broken" tier: Dragonskin, Divine Shield, Immobilize

"SS" tier: Staff Savant, which can be enabled or disabled independently of all the other skills because it is very VERY broken if used unrestrictedly, but whereas Dragonskin is pretty dull and uninteresting, this one can be kind of fun to abuse.

*Sorry to get your hopes up; the randomizer won't ROM hack the game for you as I don't know how to do that. It'll just display a randomly-generated skill tree and then it'll be up to the player to Powersave the skills onto their characters accordingly, replacing the "standard" skills, as they level up and earn them.

**This one can be moved if people think it's a bad idea.

***This one (and stuff like Weaponfaire skills and Staff Savant) will always, if included in the shuffle, be given to a class that can use it.

Edited by ajmiam
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Like you said, inevitable end might not be too nuts on player units given the nature of player/enemy characters. It may be useful for powerful bosses though.

Have you tested Entrap with Staff Savant out of curiosity? I bet you could basically just move gradually and pull enemies in one-by-one to make things really easy.

These all sound like they were really fun to mess around with!

Great Post! Everything is well-organized and the info sheds a lot of light on the specifics of each skills mechanics!

Edited by quasimopho13
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