What if you could fully assign the Avatar's growths?

[Jotari]

So a bit if a criticism against Avatars in recent years is that they are getting progressively less customizable. Basically you the only thing you can choose about them is their gender. But even back in the day their growths and bases have always been a bit set, you could only choose modifiers. What if, however, that weren't the case. What if you had complete control over assigning the Avatar's growths. They give you 300 points at the start of the game and you could freely assign them to the eightish available stats.

So the question would have to be, would that be broken? Min maxing typically is the most effective thing in video games, but I have to question how I'd go about doing it for Fire Emblem? Assigning 100% growths to str, speed and dex would make for a player phase menace. But then you'd have basically no HP or defense so it would be like the ultimate glass cannon. Going the other way and investing everything in defense, resistance and HP to make an impenetrable wall might be more effective. Either way, wether it be tame or broken, I think it would be fun to have complete control over a character's growth (bases too could be assigned in a similar way).

[Morgan--Grandmaster]

I'd make my avatar pretty balanced. Atk and Mag would depend on the class, but for me, having a main character that can do a bit of everything with no crippling weaknesses is the way to go for me.

[Shanty Pete's 1st Mate]

Assuming we don't have any control over the Avatar's bases or caps, I don't see it as particularly broken. An approach like "all-in on HP, Strength, and Speed" works great... until you hit the caps in those stats, and have to get by on your base Skill and Defense.

Just saw that you mentioned bases: curiously, if you're going "all-in" on certain growths, then you'd want to invest bases in the non-growth stats. Having 8 base Def, and a 100% HP growth, sounds pretty alright... until I remember that I start with 1 each in Strength and Speed. And while I could move bases into those stats, they essentially become "wasted" once I start capping.

So I guess this is a lot of words to say... min-maxing your growths and bases doesn't actually sound like the optimal approach. It can enable certain short-termand mid-term strategies that wouldn't be otherwise possible, but leaves the unit's long-term viability in question. I imagine that even with full customization on the tables, most players will be wary of going above 60%, or below 20%, in basically any stat. Particularly in an MU who will trigger a Game Over on death, and may be needed to recruit certain units, and to seize.

[Zapp Branniglenn]

It would be really shocking to see this particular customization screen in a new fire emblem, because it would be the first time the series has ever acknowledged stat growths in such an official, numerically explicit capacity. That's always the sort of thing we datamine. 

As far as metagaming goes, I doubt I would go 0% in any stat, besides I guess magic if I determine the stat to never be worth investing in (Byleth would certainly min max out his magic growth, maybe even if he were sticking with his unique class). But having 0% means your base is forever. With a 10%, there still exists potential to be stat blessed to some degree. Plus if the game has low enough stat caps you might want to stick with a balanced stat spread.

Edited May 20, 2023 by Zapp Branniglenn

[Jotari]

18 minutes ago, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:

Assuming we don't have any control over the Avatar's bases or caps, I don't see it as particularly broken. An approach like "all-in on HP, Strength, and Speed" works great... until you hit the caps in those stats, and have to get by on your base Skill and Defense.

Just saw that you mentioned bases: curiously, if you're going "all-in" on certain growths, then you'd want to invest bases in the non-growth stats. Having 8 base Def, and a 100% HP growth, sounds pretty alright... until I remember that I start with 1 each in Strength and Speed. And while I could move bases into those stats, they essentially become "wasted" once I start capping.

So I guess this is a lot of words to say... min-maxing your growths and bases doesn't actually sound like the optimal approach. It can enable certain short-termand mid-term strategies that wouldn't be otherwise possible, but leaves the unit's long-term viability in question. I imagine that even with full customization on the tables, most players will be wary of going above 60%, or below 20%, in basically any stat. Particularly in an MU who will trigger a Game Over on death, and may be needed to recruit certain units, and to seize.

It would also synergise interestingly with the promotion to bases method. Ie you have 1 defense and 0 defense growth because you're investing in offense...but then you make your character a Fortress Knight because promoting to general puts your defense stat at General's defense base. It could make for some very unconventional builds.

[lenticular]

If this ever were to exist, I think I'd prefer it be limited to NG+ only. Partly because it's absolutely not something that you want to throw at a new player as soon as they start the game, but also because I don't think it's something that you can make reasoned decisions over until you actually play the game. Until you know the game, it's just going to be guesswork. Maybe educated guesswork if you've played other games in the series, but still guesswork. You really need to know what caps are, how many times you can expect to level up, which classes are best, what enemy stats are like in the end game, etc. If it was a NG+ feature, it also wouldn't matter so much whether it was balanced. NG+ is where you put weird and potentially unbalanced stuff for people to play around with if they want to change up how the game plays.

[Jotari]

31 minutes ago, lenticular said:

If this ever were to exist, I think I'd prefer it be limited to NG+ only. Partly because it's absolutely not something that you want to throw at a new player as soon as they start the game, but also because I don't think it's something that you can make reasoned decisions over until you actually play the game. Until you know the game, it's just going to be guesswork. Maybe educated guesswork if you've played other games in the series, but still guesswork. You really need to know what caps are, how many times you can expect to level up, which classes are best, what enemy stats are like in the end game, etc. If it was a NG+ feature, it also wouldn't matter so much whether it was balanced. NG+ is where you put weird and potentially unbalanced stuff for people to play around with if they want to change up how the game plays.

Even of you do completely mess up your Avatar it shouldn't result in the end of your file. The rest of your army should be able to pull the weight.

[Imuabicus der Fertige]

If that be the case, I think bases and growths you should be able to assign, but there should be 2 different point budgets for both. Caps should increase depending on how much you add to the growth + base, with base weighing into it more heavily (like x/40 + y/4 = cap rounded down - I don´t know, I´m not a mathematician). And then you throw all that on top of your starting class.

I think that´d be absolutely broken. The only case of 100 or more growths I know of are Sedgar/Wolf, they alleviate much of the physical threat of the game and they only need HP and DEF to do it - their counterattacks are a neat bonus but not much more, if I remember my playthrough on H5. You´d essentially be able to pick a class for a unit and guarantee it´s performance in said class - think a minmaxed Fates Ninja, TH Wyvern, Archers and Mages in general and so on and so forth. 

Yeah.

That´d be cool.

 

[AnonymousSpeed]

While I'd like to have more control over the stats of characters like Byleth and Alear, assigning individual growth points would be annoyingly granular.

Maybe not broken, since growths don't matter that much (depending on the stat-scaling in the same), but I would rather pick a couple boons and banes instead.

[lenticular]

15 hours ago, Jotari said:

Even of you do completely mess up your Avatar it shouldn't result in the end of your file. The rest of your army should be able to pull the weight.

Sure, it wouldn't ever make the game completely unwinnable, but it would make it a lot less fun. At least for me, and I imagine for most people. If a character is force-deployed for every map, I don't want them to be absolute deadweight who I have to babysit. If the story talks up how amazing a character is, I want that to be at least somewhat reflected in terms of game performance. An iredeemably crappy main character seems like something that would suck all the life out of a game.

[AnonymousSpeed]

Worked out alright for FE6

[Jotari]

1 hour ago, lenticular said:

Sure, it wouldn't ever make the game completely unwinnable, but it would make it a lot less fun. At least for me, and I imagine for most people. If a character is force-deployed for every map, I don't want them to be absolute deadweight who I have to babysit. If the story talks up how amazing a character is, I want that to be at least somewhat reflected in terms of game performance. An iredeemably crappy main character seems like something that would suck all the life out of a game.

Well I like Binding Blade, so to each his own.

[SnowFire]

A lot of the Shin Megami Tensei games have fully customizable growths, and honestly, it's not THAT interesting.   The result is generally "put 90% of your growths into Magic" or "put 90% of your growths into Strength" or "do something suboptimal."  As already pointed out, something like a super-Def, super-Res Avatar would create a movable wall for perfect baiting that would mess up the balance of a lot of FE map designs.  Meanwhile, a super-offense avatar would make balancing bosses potentially tricky if they'd have to survive against that.

Also, "mixed" builds that have both Str & Mag damage options are *fun*, but tremendously suboptimal in a "naive" scoring of growths where 100% Str & 0% Mag "costs" the same as 50% Str, 50% Mag.  But...  we want to optimize fun, so maybe don't make fun & interesting builds with choices also total garbage.

[Dark Holy Elf]

One safeguard you can make when assigning stats is to increase the costs of minmaxing. For example, D&D 5e makes you pay 1 point to raise a stat by until the stat hit 13, then 2 more points to reach 14, 2 more points to reach 15, and 3 more points to reach 16. I would probably want to do something like that with a hypothetical growth assigner. Also, I would probably specifically want to provide a discount for raising the lower of your strength/magic, because that is typically much less useful than raising the higher of the two, and I'd rather reward/encourage hybrid builds (to be in line with other avatars). 6 strength + 6 magic should not be more costly, points-wise, than 8 strength + 0 magic in my opinion.

I also second lenticular about being cautious of this option on the first playthrough. Either gate it to a second file (not NG+ necessarily, but at least "read the game data and see the game is already completed"), or provide a very clear warning that fully customized growths are not recommended for first-time players.

 

To the original question, assuming a relatively typical set of FE mechanics (e.g. the GBA games), something like 70% str / 70% spd / most of the remaining 160 in HP/def/luck in some permutation / very little in res or skl feels like the most "broken", rather than going for 100. It depends greatly on enemy stats, though, and the ways you'd have of supporting your own stats, to answer questions like "is investing stat points into small accuracy boosts (skill/dex) worth it for reliability" or "should one go for maxed evade (i.e. 100% speed and lots of luck)" or even FEH-style "are there ways to one-round enemies without speed" (at which point 0% speed becomes viable, though you'd want high def and res to survive the doubles you'd face).