Personal skills, would you like to fix them?

[Setsuko]

It's well known that personal skills... suck, at least on most characters.

For example, you can see the stewards difference over engage and Fate. 

Fates: +15 hit and +3 damage, +2 damage and defense, +15 avoid and + 3 defense.

Engage: +10 hit, +10 avoid, +5 crit

 

Honestly I think the reason for this is because IS wants a wide audience that isn't known for reading every single skill of every character I've taught this game to some friends who are not dedicated to playing FE or tactical games, and I see that despite giving them the notice, no one stops to see what personal skill each of the characters has.

However, what I want to propose is, which skills would you change? And what changes would you make?

[Armchair General]

Yeah, compared to 3H and Fates, most of the Personal skills tend to provide either two bonuses or provide an boost to either their allies or themselves whenever an certain type of unit is next to them. With Engage, there's an mild slant towards increasing one's attack power or for dominating player phase.

 

I think that the reason why they've cut back on the quality of the skills is that some of the Emblems already provides an accompanying bonus to accuracy, evasion, Speed...Plus, with an deployment slot of around 14; there isn't an lot of wiggle room on who gets to do what.

[DefyingFates]

While Armchair has a point about simplifying stuff, I think the point of the nerfs was because... well, everything got nerfed in Engage to make it more challenging, and I figured that was part of the parcel.

I do appreciate that the simpler effects make it easier to have mirroring Personal skills though, like the Brodian brothers having Sol and Luna, or Rosado/ Goldmary and Zelkov/ Kagetsu having similar activation requirements but opposite effects. I love me some thematic mechanics like that!

[Armchair General]

22 minutes ago, DefyingFates said:

well, everything got nerfed in Engage to make it more challenging

<laughs with 100% evasion>

[67chrome]

I'm fine with the skills being weak.

Also a fan of storytelling through tooltips, or tutorials on obscure mechanics through tooltips, so weak stuff that's interesting elsewhere doesn't bother me too much, even if it's stuff like Bunet's free lunch that'll only proc ~1 time in an entire playthrough.

----------

That said: there are a few abilities that aren't that interesting/helpful that could use a tune-up.

 

........................

Jade's Meditate could easily be boosted to +6 Res for waiting over +2.

ATM it's usually the difference of getting doubled for ~26 rather than 24, which isn't useful at all unless she re-classes.

 

........................

Fogado's ability could also be improved. I like the flavor, but the effect is pants.

It already requires him and his opponent to survive a combat, and all for -10% crit for just him if he enters combat against the same foe again?

For what's essentially +10% Dodge, something ~about as valuble as +1 Atk, it's a lot of hoops to jump through.

It should apply -10% crit on the foe as a global debuff all of his allies benefit from.

Or make him immune to crits, though I like a team-support angle a little more.

 

........................

And...Etie's ability I don't hate TBH.

I just wish she pulled a Dorcas/Bartre/Garcia with her HP+Str+Con instead of being ~half-Rinkah.

It's not like the 1st axemen even have a good stat-spread in the first place, by mid-game those are often slower than the resident armor knight, there Def stats getting shakey for a front-liner, and they're often tied for the worst Luck and Res stats as well.

But at least HP lets them have something resembling an Enemy Phase, in case, IDK, their personal ability only works during enemy phase.

[Shadow Mir]

Ehhh, I'm fine with them. At least there's no true stinkers in the vein of Arthur's. Or Izana's. 

[Mavi251]

6 hours ago, Shadow Mir said:

Ehhh, I'm fine with them. At least there's no true stinkers in the vein of Arthur's. Or Izana's. 

Agreed on this one. I think they're mostly fine, less Skill Emblem we have to deal with the better. The only thing I'd change with how some of them work is perhaps to standardize their effect range to 3 squares, along with support bonuses. 

[link16hit]

need boost for some of them but it is fine (looking at you Etie), compared to skill fest games we got before Engage. But one thing I would try, putting Lindon with lethality with a killer weapon (or wrath + vantage)? he could get +50 crit when low health.

[Dark Holy Elf]

I like some of the storytelling quirks they have but they are a bit weak, particularly some egregious ones like Bunet's and Etie's.

19 hours ago, Armchair General said:

<laughs with 100% evasion>

To be fair, even this was nerfed compared to some of the previous games, since at least if you do get to it, enemies don't attack you. And if you fall just short, to make them attack you, 10 displayed hit is a lot more dangerous in this game than Three Houses/GBA/Tellius (where that 10% is actually 2%). 

But yeah it's still too strong, especially because it's arguably easier to get high evasion than ever.

[lenticular]

I wish that there was a bit more consistency in their power levels. And by that, I don't necessarily mean that I want them all to be comparably powerful. Mostly, I just want there to be some sort of pattern behind who gets the good ones. If it were "important story characters get good personals" or "early-game growth units get good personals" or whatever else, then I think that would make them more satisfying to use. But as far as I can tell, there's no rhyme or reason behind who gets what quality of personal.

[Shadow Mir]

2 hours ago, lenticular said:

I wish that there was a bit more consistency in their power levels. And by that, I don't necessarily mean that I want them all to be comparably powerful. Mostly, I just want there to be some sort of pattern behind who gets the good ones. If it were "important story characters get good personals" or "early-game growth units get good personals" or whatever else, then I think that would make them more satisfying to use. But as far as I can tell, there's no rhyme or reason behind who gets what quality of personal.

I mostly agree; Fates in particular has some of the most egregious stumbles on this front. The royals universally win the personal skill lottery, but on the flip side, we have the likes of Arthur, Izana, Charlotte, Subaki, and Nyx, whom are hardly good, and their personal skills are either extremely conditional, or in the case of Arthur's and Izana's, actively detrimental to the team.

[Barren]

Out of all the personal abilities, I find Etie’s, Bunet’s and Fogado’s to be really useless.

The rest are either okay or quite relevant throughout the game.

While this might be a bit too demanding on my part, I kind of wish the dex% chance skills had a higher activation rate by like 0.25 or 0.5 to compensate for some of the character’s low dex growth/stat cap. Diamant would definitely appreciate it since his Successor class suffers from having a dex cap of 22.

 

This would indirectly make Alcyrst more ridiculous with Luna but I want them to be good damn it 😂

[SumG]

I don't have a strong preference for whether personal abilities are strong or weak, I'd just want them to be as balanced as possible. The real issue is when some of the abilities are fairly useful (e.g. Zelkov, Kagetsu, Panette, Hortensia), particularly on already strong units, while other abilities are not (Bunet, Citrinne, Etie, Alfred, Bucheron), and still others are outright detrimental (Lapis, Diamant).

[Florete]

A lot of them are fine, but some of them could do with help. For as much as I've used Etie (she's been MVP on two separate runs), I've never made real use of her personal skill. Some changes I would make:

Vander - Make it 1-2 less damage each instead. He's supposed to be Alear's main bodyguard so +5 crit is kind of weird. Vander also generally seems designed to help feed kills to other units, and him getting +5 crit goes against that.

Etie - This one feels difficult to make work without changing it pretty drastically. It requires using her action first, so it's hard to get her to initiate with it, which is what she wants as an archer. But then she also needs to not be at max HP, which isn't as common for a unit in her position, and then she also has a lower than average HP growth so she might not even get it there. Perhaps...whenever she's healed by an external source (staff, Seadall, etc.), she gets +2 Str for 1 turn. Maybe even change it to +Dex since she has the Str already, though the Str is more thematic for her.

Jade - The skill itself would be good on a unit who actually has Res to use, which is not Jade. For Jade, changing the effect to be "magic foes cannot make follow-up attacks" would be a lot more effective. That would be a big improvement, but Jade kinda needs it.

Fogado - This one is so weird. Not only does it require a combat both he and his enemy come out of, but in order for it actually mean anything he has to take another attack from them and they need to have had visible crit on him. Fogado doesn't have great Luck, but his class isn't designed to be taking many hits anyway. The easiest way to activate it would be to take a hit on enemy phase (which goes with Cupido's skill) and then initiate on player phase, but at that point you should be killing before the opponent gets an attack in. The "most recent opponent" condition is awkward to begin with, so at least make it, like...dodge -10. Or maybe crit -5 but applies on the enemy as a 1-turn debuff so anyone can use it.

Bunet - Make it any healing item. Vulnerary, Elixir, Antitoxin. No need for it to be just packed lunches. Maybe even make it work with tonics.

1 hour ago, SumG said:

and still others are outright detrimental (Lapis, Diamant).

I wouldn't agree with either of these. You have to sacrifice crit on Lapis but she can be a pretty good dodge tank with that skill (and the Hit can be nice, too), and Diamant getting +15 Hit is nothing to scoff at in a game with Break considering it only activates when he initiates.

In fact, I find it strange you'd list Kagetsu's as "fairly useful" but then list these as "outright detrimental." Kagetsu's is basically just a player-phase +10 hit, while these two do more but with minor drawbacks to work around.

[SumG]

45 minutes ago, Florete said:

I wouldn't agree with either of these. You have to sacrifice crit on Lapis but she can be a pretty good dodge tank with that skill (and the Hit can be nice, too), and Diamant getting +15 Hit is nothing to scoff at in a game with Break considering it only activates when he initiates.

Conventionally, sword users in general lean more heavily on crit chance than most other types of units because they tend to have low base attack and utilize low might weapons.  Lapis' personal ability undercuts this necessity, which effectively leaves her as an extremely low damage unit on high difficulties.  And while the ability might be nice on other weapon types to make up for their inherent lower accuracy, Lapis has extremely low build which makes it hard to justify using heavier weapon types.  Dodgetanking is all well and good, but this ability is a very narrow application since it requires another unit to be immediately adjacent to her.  So it only works if you are exactly at the fringe of enemy range.  Otherwise, the enemy will just attack the supporting unit instead.

For Diamant, as you progress up in difficulties enemies will become increasingly threatening.  Once you reach maddening, an average enemy is honestly going to have a higher assembly of stats than an average allied unit.  Diamant in particular has issues here since he falls into that unfortunate cluster of units every game that is just barely fast enough to be competitive on hard, but just under that threshold on maddening, which leaves him with dubious survivability to begin with.  Now on top of it, you want to give the extremely dangerous enemies an extra 15% hit chance?  That's reckless at best, especially considering there are much safer ways to improve an unit's hit chance (engravings, inherited abilities).  And again, this is for a unit that has access to swords, which should have some of the best accuracy in the game to begin with.  Does Diamant even need the extra hit chance in the majority of cases?  Which leaves the end result of the ability Diamant getting a benefit he doesn't really need in exchange for making an enemy already likely to seriously hurt him (if not outright kill him) even more likely to do serious damage to him.  That's not good.

[Florete]

30 minutes ago, SumG said:

Conventionally, sword users in general lean more heavily on crit chance than most other types of units because they tend to have low base attack and utilize low might weapons.  Lapis' personal ability undercuts this necessity, which effectively leaves her as an extremely low damage unit on high difficulties.  And while the ability might be nice on other weapon types to make up for their inherent lower accuracy, Lapis has extremely low build which makes it hard to justify using heavier weapon types.  Dodgetanking is all well and good, but this ability is a very narrow application since it requires another unit to be immediately adjacent to her.  So it only works if you are exactly at the fringe of enemy range.  Otherwise, the enemy will just attack the supporting unit instead.

She works well in fog clusters. I don't see Lapis as someone you rely on to do heavy damage to begin with, but as someone who draws in less accurate enemies and/or gets in safer hits before others finish them off (or finishes the job herself after drawing them in). Lapis is far from a perfect unit, but her personal skill is not "outright detrimental." She's not a star, but it helps her play a role.

32 minutes ago, SumG said:

For Diamant, as you progress up in difficulties enemies will become increasingly threatening.  Once you reach maddening, an average enemy is honestly going to have a higher assembly of stats than an average allied unit.  Diamant in particular has issues here since he falls into that unfortunate cluster of units every game that is just barely fast enough to be competitive on hard, but just under that threshold on maddening, which leaves him with dubious survivability to begin with.  Now on top of it, you want to give the extremely dangerous enemies an extra 15% hit chance?  That's reckless at best, especially considering there are much safer ways to improve an unit's hit chance (engravings, inherited abilities).  And again, this is for a unit that has access to swords, which should have some of the best accuracy in the game to begin with.  Does Diamant even need the extra hit chance in the majority of cases?  Which leaves the end result of the ability Diamant getting a benefit he doesn't really need in exchange for making an enemy already likely to seriously hurt him (if not outright kill him) even more likely to do serious damage to him.  That's not good.

Giving enemies an extra 15% hit chance doesn't matter if he breaks them or finishes them off. Yes, there are other ways to increase hit, so what? This is another one. He also has axes after promotion in his special class. He's not exactly a dodge-tank to begin with so you're probably not relying on him avoiding attacks to keep him alive.

And for what it's worth, these skills probably were meant to be balanced more around normal/hard than maddening.

[67chrome]

27 minutes ago, SumG said:

Dodgetanking is all well and good, but this ability is a very narrow application since it requires another unit to be immediately adjacent to her.  So it only works if you are exactly at the fringe of enemy range.  Otherwise, the enemy will just attack the supporting unit instead.

Lapis has a great Qi-Adept or Lucina ability for chain-guard stuff.

Slightly weird on a cannon backup unit, but backup also need to be around allies, and it can also be turned off if she runs under the same conditions to activate Atk/Spd Solo in FEH, which is trivially easy to pull off.

Having no allies adjacent in the 4 nearest tiles is the easiest condition outside of >25% max HP, and still lets her toggle between a gambling with crits or gambling with Avo.

 

29 minutes ago, SumG said:

For Diamant, as you progress up in difficulties enemies will become increasingly threatening.  Once you reach maddening, an average enemy is honestly going to have a higher assembly of stats than an average allied unit.  Diamant in particular has issues here since he falls into that unfortunate cluster of units every game that is just barely fast enough to be competitive on hard, but just under that threshold on maddening, which leaves him with dubious survivability to begin with.  Now on top of it, you want to give the extremely dangerous enemies an extra 15% hit chance? 

Diamant sure is slightly above average in Str/Spd/Def, no argument with his weird shift from Hard to Maddening there.

 

That said: Diamant's Prf skill only works during his own Player-Phase, which is pretty easy to play around.

If targets are broken it's a free +15% hit.

if he breaks a target it's a free +15% hit.

If he acts during enemy phase with Ike or w/e: he doesn't give any bonuses to enemies.

As an axe user in a game were axes are consistently ~20% less hit vs. swords, having +15% hit is also nice to toggle with for a cheeky Tomahawk or Killer Axe.

....................

As far as abilities go, I do like Diamant and Lapis's a little more than the rest.

Solid bonus but penalty is interesting and creates a dynamic if nothing else.

And the capacity to disable the ability to circumvent the downside is a nice switch to have.

[SumG]

14 hours ago, Florete said:

She works well in fog clusters. I don't see Lapis as someone you rely on to do heavy damage to begin with, but as someone who draws in less accurate enemies and/or gets in safer hits before others finish them off (or finishes the job herself after drawing them in). Lapis is far from a perfect unit, but her personal skill is not "outright detrimental." She's not a star, but it helps her play a role.

Fog tiles are like the fourth best thing you can be doing with Corrin, which is the main way you're going to run into fog tiles in the game.  If you're using Fog Veins, that means you're using one of the strongest emblems in the game to enable a middling strategy with a middling unit, a strategy that many other units can do better since they'll be able to do more damage than Lapis.  That's not a role, that's actively holding your team back by requiring a poor use of an otherwise strong emblem.

 

14 hours ago, Florete said:

Giving enemies an extra 15% hit chance doesn't matter if he breaks them or finishes them off.

In my mind, this is a pretty narrow application in practice.  Let's say for the sake of argument you put Diamant in his unique class, so he has access to swords/axes.  That means he breaks axes/lances.  That also means he doesn't break swords, tomes, knives, fists, or bows.  Further, some of the units that it should be 'safe' for him to attack because of access to break he may not be able to attack because of their massive defense (generals, great knights) and the fact that you have to actually do damage to get break.  Now I'll grant that he should be able to attack bows safely, since he can attack from 1 range without a counterattack.  But even taking that into account, here's the breakdown on which units this ability is beneficial on:

Helpful: Bows, most Lances, most Axes

Hurtful: Swords, Knives, Tomes, Arts, some Lances, some Axes

The list of enemies that the ability is more harmful than helpful is noticeably longer than the list of enemies where its helpful.

And we haven't even gotten to the consideration of scenarios where Diamant is already at (or nearly at) 100% hit with this ability, something that absolutely can arise.  At that point, you're just giving the enemy a free 15% hit for no benefit.  Maybe the ability would be helpful if you could elect to use it or not when attacking.  Sure, then maybe there are some fringe scenarios where you'd be willing to trade 15% hit chance coming at you to make it more like you secure a hit.  But when forced to use it every attack, its more harmful than helpful.

[Florete]

49 minutes ago, SumG said:

Fog tiles are like the fourth best thing you can be doing with Corrin, which is the main way you're going to run into fog tiles in the game.  If you're using Fog Veins, that means you're using one of the strongest emblems in the game to enable a middling strategy with a middling unit, a strategy that many other units can do better since they'll be able to do more damage than Lapis.  That's not a role, that's actively holding your team back by requiring a poor use of an otherwise strong emblem.

That's one application (and one that people do quite often, regardless of what you might think of it). The point is to use her to her own strengths, while you seem to want her to just fit your own desired role for her. As far as other units doing the job better, I never said she was good, but there are more reasons people use units than them being the best option for anything.

Maybe you disagree, but I would not see Lapis as a better unit without her personal skill, so it's not "outright detrimental." I don't rely on crit triggers with most units regardless, so if I'm using Lapis the drawback of her personal is barely noticed by me.

53 minutes ago, SumG said:

In my mind, this is a pretty narrow application in practice.  Let's say for the sake of argument you put Diamant in his unique class, so he has access to swords/axes.  That means he breaks axes/lances.  That also means he doesn't break swords, tomes, knives, fists, or bows.  Further, some of the units that it should be 'safe' for him to attack because of access to break he may not be able to attack because of their massive defense (generals, great knights) and the fact that you have to actually do damage to get break.  Now I'll grant that he should be able to attack bows safely, since he can attack from 1 range without a counterattack.  But even taking that into account, here's the breakdown on which units this ability is beneficial on:

Helpful: Bows, most Lances, most Axes

Hurtful: Swords, Knives, Tomes, Arts, some Lances, some Axes

The list of enemies that the ability is more harmful than helpful is noticeably longer than the list of enemies where its helpful.

And we haven't even gotten to the consideration of scenarios where Diamant is already at (or nearly at) 100% hit with this ability, something that absolutely can arise.  At that point, you're just giving the enemy a free 15% hit for no benefit.  Maybe the ability would be helpful if you could elect to use it or not when attacking.  Sure, then maybe there are some fringe scenarios where you'd be willing to trade 15% hit chance coming at you to make it more like you secure a hit.  But when forced to use it every attack, its more harmful than helpful.

This is not narrow at all, this is how people play and is a primary feature of the game. Your list ignores the fact that you have a team full of units, of which Diamant is only one. No single unit has access to more than two weapon types, therefore no one can break everyone. So what if he can't break swords? You should have someone else to break them.

Great Knights (Generals are immune to weapon triangle breaks) usually aren't defensive enough that he can't do damage to them with a stronger weapon, and a hammer/poleaxe/armorslayer is absolutely damaging them, and he's definitely going to appreciate the higher hit here. But again, if he can't, so what? If Diamant can't even damage these guys, most likely none of your physical units are and you actually want to take them out with your magic units. Why would you have him attack someone he can't damage, let alone be worried about giving them +15 hit?

Sword and knife enemies tend to be more accurate and speedy, so he appreciates the extra hit and probably wasn't relying on dodging anyway (if they weren't pre-broken and he's not finishing them off). Arts users are a joke when you initiate on them. That leaves tomes as the only enemy type where maybe his skill is doing more harm than good...though it's really more like Sages specifically, since Mage Knights are a bit faster and are weak to poleaxes.

The fact that you'd even mention scenarios where he's already at 100% hit sounds, like Lapis above, as though you're not thinking of applying the skill properly and just trying to have him do random stuff. Diamant's skill means he can more freely use weapons that aren't as accurate; a hammer/poleaxe on him has almost as much hit as an iron axe on someone else; a steel sword now has as much hit as a slim sword; a killing edge has as much hit as an iron sword. Etc.

Lastly, his skill isn't helpful against bows when he's attacking them up close (which is most of the time), because they can't counter and therefore it's not triggering.

[BloodRonin]

I like and dislike the personal skills in engage. Some of them (like Yunaka for example) are really cool since they are a direct line to that person's lore. While others are just... well, meh.