Slize's Character Ranking/Balancing Topic

[Rewjeo]

Well, first off, I'm gonna try to write up longer reviews this time as well as trying to come up with hypothetical versions of characters that are more balanced.

Seth:

Seth is, well, Seth. He's arguably the best unit in any American FE. He's by far your best unit earlygame and remains one of your best by endgame. There's never a point where he shouldn't be deployed unless you've starved him of EXP early on. Which you won't, since I'm assuming you're playing efficiently. Not much else to say about him. Oh, yeah, he's got 8 MOV, the ability to easily S rank either swords or lances, and anima, too. And he supports Eirika, who's guaranteed to be deployed and wants his anima affinity.

10/10

Balancing ideas:

First we'll move his base stats from...

HP: 30->24

STR: 14->11

SKL: 13->10

SPD: 12->10

LUK: 13->6

DEF: 11->8

RES: 8->3

And growths...

HP: 90->45

STR: 50->25

SKL: 45->20

SPD: 45->20

LUK: 25->10

DEF: 40->20

RES: 30->15

So, now, although the first few chapters are very similar, his bases stop being adequate much faster, his durability isn't all that good, and his growths, especially with his low EXP gain, mean he's going nowhere fast.

Sethskip:

Well, it's called Sethskip for a reason. For most of the game, we're literally just charging Seth to the goal and taking crap out on the way. Occasionally a few people will help with routes and such.

654165168473248916532165344186534781/10

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I'll do Eirika later, but she's pretty bland to rate, and balancing her is pretty tricky. It wouldn't be hard to either do too much or not enough.

Edited May 6, 2010 by Slize

[Mekkah]

You turned Seth into Marcus, so I assume what you're going to do with Eirika is take away 5 or so base Spd and put all her growths in the 40-50s.

[Anouleth]

Or turn Eirika into Lyn by giving her worse durability and shitty prf weapon (talking about sol katti not mani katti) and no mount.

As for healers...

Either Moulder gets his magic cut, or Natasha gets her magic boosted. L'arachel joins with C Staves instead of D, has 7->8 movement instead of 6->7 and a faster Ephraim support. The healers are always going to be good relative to non-healers, may as well make them balanced relative to each other.

[Integrity]

Let L'Arachel join when you meet her in C4. Hell yeah. :o

[_____]

Or he could just make L'arachel prepromoted and similar to Saleh. Obviously, her stats should be pretty egh so she doesn't totally outclass him, but it gets rid of the whole "underleveled healer that gets ORKO'd" deal.

[Rewjeo]

I've got a problem with Eirika. She's pretty close to where I want her to be in Ephraim's Route, but on her own, she's way above. Should I leave her pretty much as is, or balance Eir. Eirika?

Edited May 2, 2010 by Slize

[dondon151]

You could probably reduce her performance overall and compensate by giving her more autolevels on Ephraim's route

I honestly don't think Eirika needs any tweaking. She's really not that good as is.

Edited May 2, 2010 by dondon151

[Narga_Rocks]

You could probably reduce her performance overall and compensate by giving her more autolevels on Ephraim's route

I honestly don't think Eirika needs any tweaking. She's really not that good as is.

Um, not that I believe everything smash says (obviously), but he gave Eirika a 9 on her own route. It seems to mostly be related to her ability to support seth and not leave him for a bunch of chapters and having more time to build. Now, I don't always pay attention to when he highly rates a character, but when it is practically a female swordmaster that he actually rates well, that says something.

[dondon151]

I'm speaking from experience and conjecture. Rushing earlygame chapters is mutually exclusive with giving Eirika EXP, so if you do that, then she's pretty bad.

[Tables]

Asides from the lords, every other character on the route split can be balanced by increasing their base level when they join, so the Lords are the only exceptions. You basically have two options: Make two sets of stats, one balanced on each route, or make them slightly above average on their own route and slightly below average on the other.

If you want, I can make a patch of this. As long as you don't do anything crazy, which I doubt you will anyway.

[Rewjeo]

Well, the #1 problem with Eirika is her availability. It means that her only-slightly-above-average-ness over the whole game adds up to a lot, and even slight changes to her will also add up a lot thanks to her huge availability.

[Dat Nick]

If tiers were based on rushing, you'd have Seth in God tier, Vanessa in Seize Ferry tier, and 75% of everybody else in "meh" tier. I don't think it's a really interesting or accurate way to rank characters.

[dondon151]

How is it inaccurate? Uninteresting I will give you, but it's only inaccurate in the sense that so many players here would rather hold back than play as fast as possible, which is a trait of the player and not of the game.

[Dat Nick]

Maybe it's accurate, but it's not even a tier list at this stage, it's a gigantic billboard that says SETH IS A SEX MACHINE. What on earth would be discussed in this theoretical list? "guys I think Seth hacks the game on a score of 11 rather than 10?" "Guys I think Ross sucks just a little bit less than Gilliam?" Orson contributes more than roughly half your army just for 5x utility alone, so he'd be one of, MAYBE four other characters not ranked in a dumbshit position. At least a warpskip tier list contains a reasonable amount of information and doesn't state what we already know (That Seth hacks the game)

[dondon151]

You can't make such conjectures about Seth without actually playing the game. Seth is only one unit and, even in the earlygame chapters where he rapes face, he can't be doing everything at once. And lategame, he's still good, but you need other characters to support him.

[Rewjeo]

Eirika

Eirika is, as I said in my previous post, only slightly above average combat-wise. Statwise, she's pretty much the definition of mediocrity. However she does have a few things going for her. She's around for 95.4545...% of the game on her route and 72.7272...% of the time on Ephraim's route. And every chapter she's in, she's forced. That gives her a lot of time to build up positives, even if she isn't doing very much. And her earlygame is pretty important, too. She's got pretty good offense(similar to Franz's, better than Gill/Vanessa thanks to hit rates), especially thanks to her rapier. It means that she's one of your best units for knights and cavaliers, although there her dodge-reliant durability can fall apart. Plus it allows for a 1-turn of the prologue. So she probably saves us a fair number of turns early on. In her own route, she also gets a second rapier, making for 80 total uses. And, once those finally start to run out, she gets Sieglinde, her own prf monster-effective sword. This is especially nice since there's some tough competition for Audhulma. She's also got a nice support with Seth for full ATK/DEF, which just so happen to be her two worst stats. She's also got reasonable supports with Ephraim, Tana, and Forde for full attack and half defense, although I doubt any are getting past C.

Eir. Route: 9/10

Eph. Route: 7/10

Balancing: She is not forced deployment.

But really, I'm gonna cut her down 3 base speed, but boost her growth to 82%. This way, her start isn't so good, but by level 15, she's back on track, meaning it doesn't affect her Ephraim route too much, but slows her down for a big chunk of her own. And afterwards, she still doubles everything. I'm not sure if this does everything, though. I may have to mess with her prf swords, and might just give her Dark instead of Light...

Sethskip:

Eirika doesn't do a whole lot here besides seizing, but she still has her rapier as well as being fairly important in her first few chapters, saving maybe 2-3 turns. Later, Sieglinde lets her maybe save a few turns, and at least do some self-improvement. She's forced deployment, but does almost nothing with it, really. So, this puts her at almost exactly neutral (5.5). But since she's just above neutral here: 6/10

Edit: Forgot to post her actual score

Edited May 6, 2010 by Slize

[Dat Nick]

You can't make such conjectures about Seth without actually playing the game.

I HAVE played the game, and I'm telling you right now that the only viable way to do anything quickly is to make it so Seth is the one who does it, you're not bosskilling any other way. Seth is going to get EXP from all this bosskilling, and add all that on top of him being the best candidate for ALL of your stat boosters (as long as he doesn't waste them by bypassing his caps) and him being one unit doesn't matter, he's going to plow to the boss virtually unscathed and will get there in as many turns as it takes 8 move to get to where he needs to be, provided he doesn't get roadblocked (not having the pass skill is pretty much the only thing in his way)

The game speed is far too fast for even characters like Franz to get any real action (mine was 2.80 something coming into Chapter 6, and I was going slightly SLOWER than you) so even your best combat units in the maingame are reduced to little more than chippers, who only exist to clear Seth's path/kill things in his place on Rout maps (because he can't be two places at once)

And of course he doesn't do anything, I said Vanessa had ferry utility for a reason.

[dondon151]

So how exactly do you plan on clearing those rout maps with only Seth? Seth's contributions towards completing the game may tower above everyone else's, but everyone else's contributions are still fairly comparable to each other.

[Mekkah]

Seth can't rout Ch4 or Ch9 by himself. Or actually he can, but it takes more turns than using other units to clear one section while he clears another.

[Dat Nick]

Excellent reading skills. I very clearly said:

who only exist to clear Seth's path/kill things in his place on Rout maps (because he can't be two places at once)

This is the only purpose 80% of units who are not named Seth serve.

Edited May 4, 2010 by Detective Badd

[dondon151]

So how exactly does that invalidate the tier list? Seth can be 100 times better than all other characters in the game, but comparing all of the other characters in the game would still be interesting.

[Dat Nick]

You think it's interesting to discuss who chips better out of Unit A and Unit B?

Edited May 4, 2010 by Detective Badd

[Narga_Rocks]

You think it's interesting to discuss who chips better out of Unit A and Unit B?

Interesting or not is irrelevant. What is relevant is that you can clearly figure out which unit is better. Also, if they are only chipping then is seth somehow getting every kill in the rout maps? I know you said earlier "aside from rout maps" for some of your complaints; however, this one doesn't mention any of that and even if it did I'd say the argument is invalid because you could focus the rest of the tiering based on performance in rout maps if you wanted to. I'm sure units still do things in the non-rout maps, though. Even if it is just getting things out of seth's way. It's not like he has Pass + Canto or anything. He in fact has neither, I'd assume, given this is GBA. At least, when it comes to attacking things. Canto still seems to work for all other types of actions (except healing) that mounted units can do. For some reason it is only fighting that causes problems with canto.

[Dat Nick]

Can people read my posts before replying to them? This is the third time I've had to state that killing things on rout maps AND clearing a path to the boss is the only function most units who are not Seth are able to serve when rushing. How can one sentence be this hard to comprehend?

Edited May 5, 2010 by Cody Travers

[Anouleth]

The fact is that Seth can save you dozens of turns single-handedly. Are we supposed to just not use him and waste turns so that other people can be used seriously?

I mean, I don't really get your point. Are you trying to suggest that the only purpose units other than Seth have is to kill enemies? Well, pardon my language, but no shit Sherlock. In fact, the only purpose Seth has is to kill enemies too, he just kills tougher enemies, with some occasional light rescue work.

Edited May 5, 2010 by Anouleth