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The worst personal ability


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2 hours ago, SnowFire said:

It's still middle of the road at best (which makes it better than most healing passives), but don't really agree with your hype of it as notably strong.  It's pretty rare that both action economy is so incredibly tight that the "free" heal on Mercedes lines up with a turn where Mercedes is front-lining safely.  Live to Serve is handy in C1-C5 though, sure.  (I might be mildly bitter at the Reunion at Dawn Grapplers easily quadding her with Tomebreaker if she leaves her starting area.)

To be fair, those Grapplers have 37 atk and 29 speed and will quad and easily 4HKO-at-worst an average Level ~25 Enlightened One Byleth not specifically equipped to deal with them. Those Grapplers are pretty scary! (You can get Mercedes / any mage to tank a hit from them but it would require something like Gloucester Knights + Aegis Shield + a Giant Shell to hit 26-27 prot as a magic class.) You really want a good tank (either def or evade, since neither their atk nor their hit is super-high) to deal with them, or just kill/gambit them before they attack. As the game goes on it does favour taking hits with fewer PCs relatively and yeah that hurts Live to Serve for sure, I definitely agree that it's more of an earlygame ability overall, but well, that's true of many abilities. Felix's ability (which I consider one of the better ones) expires even faster, after all.

Otherwise... the turns don't have to line up perfectly, as long as (a) Mercedes takes a hit at some point, and (b) she heals someone any turn after before she needs to take a hit again. It's just good action economy and I've certainly noticed it helps a fair deal with pushing forward especially if you have a small group (I usually split my forces in chapters 4 and 6 for instance).

"Notably strong" is definitely not how I would label her personal, for the record. If I listed all the personal abilities in the game from best to worst I suspect it comes out mildly above the median... it's good enough that it helps my opinion of the character with it a little, but only a little.

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Since I didn't see anyone bring this up, I'm going to make the case for Goodie Basket being by far the worst personal in the game and it isn't close. At face value, it appears to be on the same tier as things like Lindhardt (aka, basically worthless), but it's actually significantly worse than that. See,  one of the only realistic ways characters like Raphael have at being valuable is by using wrath/vantage. Except Raphael can't really do that reliably either because his stupid personal can heal him out of wrath. Lindhardt's passive might be totally worthless, but at least it doesn't have a % chance of screwing him. 

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On 3/14/2021 at 10:20 PM, SnowFire said:

Sure, Magical Byleth is an activity point hog, I'll agree on that as a weakness.  That's a different complaint than "you will run out of Nos charges" though.  Faith dodgetank Dorothea (which is a real build) or Faith Berserker Linhardt (which is not a real build, but because Lin's Spd / Def are terrible) have weaknesses but running out of Nos charges is not THAT huge of one unless they are literally attempting to solo maps.

Well, a weapon with 8 weight, 1 might, and 12 uses wouldn't be my first choice for evasion builds, and honestly, if it is your go-to for evasion, I wouldn't expect that to last. Which brings up, what if you do run out? Are you gonna have them equip Heal, and thus let the enemy get free shots at them? I would consider that a negative for obvious reasons, because if I'm planning to lure in enemies, I want to actually damage them as well so I can have an easier time cleaning up on player phase.

6 minutes ago, Burklight said:

Since I didn't see anyone bring this up, I'm going to make the case for Goodie Basket being by far the worst personal in the game and it isn't close. At face value, it appears to be on the same tier as things like Lindhardt (aka, basically worthless), but it's actually significantly worse than that. See,  one of the only realistic ways characters like Raphael have at being valuable is by using wrath/vantage. Except Raphael can't really do that reliably either because his stupid personal can heal him out of wrath. Lindhardt's passive might be totally worthless, but at least it doesn't have a % chance of screwing him. 

Huh. And I thought the low activation rate was bad enough.

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5 hours ago, Shadow Mir said:

Well, a weapon with 8 weight, 1 might, and 12 uses wouldn't be my first choice for evasion builds, and honestly, if it is your go-to for evasion, I wouldn't expect that to last. Which brings up, what if you do run out? Are you gonna have them equip Heal, and thus let the enemy get free shots at them? I would consider that a negative for obvious reasons, because if I'm planning to lure in enemies, I want to actually damage them as well so I can have an easier time cleaning up on player phase.

Well, your expectation is wrong.  It did last.  Let me be clear, this isn't theorycrafting, this is based on an actual playthrough.  You can do fine with just the amount of charges you get from Nosferatu.

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6 hours ago, Burklight said:

Since I didn't see anyone bring this up, I'm going to make the case for Goodie Basket being by far the worst personal in the game and it isn't close. At face value, it appears to be on the same tier as things like Lindhardt (aka, basically worthless), but it's actually significantly worse than that. See,  one of the only realistic ways characters like Raphael have at being valuable is by using wrath/vantage. Except Raphael can't really do that reliably either because his stupid personal can heal him out of wrath. Lindhardt's passive might be totally worthless, but at least it doesn't have a % chance of screwing him. 

You know, that's a fair point. I don't personally value wrath/vantage builds at all so I don't include them as part of my calculus, but if you are trying to use them (or any of the Defiant skills) then Goodie Basket is definitely worse.

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i'm not the biggest fan of Wrath/Vantage in this game but Raphael is indeed well-suited to it due to his good strength... outside the personal which does make him worse at it. (By comparison, Balthus's personal makes him better at it, which is insulting with how Balthus is already a slightly better Raphael in most other ways, too.)

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