FE4 Skills Tier List

[Caliban of Sycorax]

Skills are looked at by a few criteria:

Effectiveness: How effective the skill is at accomplishing its goal. To this end includes activation rate and frequency, among others.

Overall Usefulness: How will these skills help your individual units in each chapter? In the long run?

Contributions to Completion: How the skills help complete chapters efficiently (this does not mean lowest possible turncount; it instead refers to an average completion time for a chapter)

Availability: This is not looked at as much, but it is looked at when looking at units with each skill and who has them. This is only used when debating nitty-gritty.

My Name is Pursuit and I'm Hilariously Broken Tier

Pursuit

Dance

High Tier

Elite

Prayer

Charisma

Bargain

Mid Tier

Continue

Wrath

Critical

Astra

Steal

Low Tier

Charge

Ambush

Luna

Sol

Awareness

Big Shield

LOL Tier

Life

[spoiler=changelog]Jan 7, 2013:

1) Tier List reformatted. Major changes include Awareness and Steal dropping heavily, Dance moving into Pursuit Tier, and Bargain and Astra moving up.

2) Luna moved below Ambush and Charge.

Jan 9, 2013:

1) Charge moved above Ambush

2) Bargain moved to High

3) Continue and Critical moved to Mid, Wrath placed in between Continue and Critical

4) Sol moved above Awareness

Edited January 9, 2013 by Hamlet

[Psych]

Critical isn't nearly that high, and Astra should be way higher. No player units get Life, and I'd move Wrath up. Continue could probably move down, but otherwise I can't think of anything.

[CT075]

I would rank Charge underneath Ambush for the sheer reason that Charge can potentially fuck you over (enemy gets another chance to attack means they get another chance to crit/etc), whereas Ambush is actually somewhat useful for "glass cannon" type characters. I'm looking at you, Arthur/Tinny.

I don't like the way the tiers are labeled, you make the sword skills seem worse than they actually are

(note: i'm ranking the skills alone, without really considering who they are available to)

[Caliban of Sycorax]

I agree, especially since Arthur/Tinny also have Wrath. They'd Ambush/wrathkill everything in my opinion.

Critical isn't nearly that high, and Astra should be way higher. No player units get Life, and I'd move Wrath up. Continue could probably move down, but otherwise I can't think of anything.

Where should Critical, Astra, Wrath, and Continue move?

Life's going to the bottom.

[CT075]

Life is almost completely useless, even in player hands. +4 HP is hardly substantial, and >healing in FE4

Wrath > Bargain, I'd think. In my experience, it's a very, very risky move unless you have Prayer or Ambush.

Critical down to underneath Elite, I think. Maybe just above it. I think Continue is fine where it is.

Astra > Sol for obvious reasons

[Caliban of Sycorax]

Done.

[Tables]

Steal and Wrath should be about equal? Both are incredibly useful skills - one for providing huge amounts of money, one for destroying stuff easily, but hampered by only being available to 1/2 units per generation. I don't see much of a gap between them, certain not 2 tiers worth.

[Dark Sage]

Critical isn't nearly that high, and Astra should be way higher. No player units get Life, and I'd move Wrath up. Continue could probably move down, but otherwise I can't think of anything.

tbf, all of the units with access to Astra have foot soldier movement, while users of skills like Continue and Critical can be mounted. So in practice, skills like Charge and Critical are going to be used more because the units with them will get more combat exposure than the swordtwins will. And since the swordtwins will rarely get exposure to combat after a certain point, Astra isn't that useful.

That said, bullshit on it being a tier below Awareness and Charge being that low.

Edited May 12, 2012 by Dark Sage

[Anouleth]

tbf, all of the units with access to Astra have foot soldier movement, while users of skills like Continue and Critical can be mounted. So in practice, skills like Charge and Critical are going to be used more because the units with them will get more combat exposure than the swordtwins will. And since the swordtwins will rarely get exposure to combat after a certain point, Astra isn't that useful.

By that standard, Steal should be bottom since it's only attached to Dew and Patty and Daisy who suck balls. In fact, Steal should be lower anyway. It's not like Bargain doesn't remove most money issues on it's own.

Prayer should be below Elite.

[Psych]

tbf, all of the units with access to Astra have foot soldier movement, while users of skills like Continue and Critical can be mounted. So in practice, skills like Charge and Critical are going to be used more because the units with them will get more combat exposure than the swordtwins will. And since the swordtwins will rarely get exposure to combat after a certain point, Astra isn't that useful.

That said, bullshit on it being a tier below Awareness and Charge being that low.

The only people with Critical are Ethlin, Levin, Noish, Leaf, Altenna, and any potential children. It's pretty rare for it to activate actually, and Altenna and Levin's son will have Holy Weapons so that's just overkill. Ethlin still sucks at combat, even with it.

[bottlegnomes]

tbf, all of the units with access to Astra have foot soldier movement, while users of skills like Continue and Critical can be mounted. So in practice, skills like Charge and Critical are going to be used more because the units with them will get more combat exposure than the swordtwins will. And since the swordtwins will rarely get exposure to combat after a certain point, Astra isn't that useful.

That said, bullshit on it being a tier below Awareness and Charge being that low.

Like people have said, I think ignoring the people the skills are available to is a good idea.

Anyway, I'd agree with prayer being below elite. Also, possibly elite above charisma. When you have 3 units with it it's nice, but 10 hit and avoid by itself isn't doing anything spectacular. Elite is either keeping a unit really strong or getting a unit going with much less trouble.

Ambush above at least charge.

Wrath above continue and possibly critical because it's actually reliable.

Also, if we're ignoring the units the skills are on, astra (other name's too long) needs to go way up, continue needs to go way down, or a combination of the two, since astra is basically continue on steroids with a slightly lower activation rate, and it isn't canceled out by hero weapons.

Maybe switch luna and sol, but I'm not too sure about that.

Edited May 12, 2012 by bottlegnomes

[FabledTome]

Prayer isn't a completely worthless defensive skill, but it's significantly worse than the other four you've ranked it with/above. As with Great Shield overall, I could also do without it more than I could Astra/Luna/Sol since they provide durability in their own ways by ensuring enemies die without countering, draining HP, etc.

[BBM]

Also, I don't see how Ambush is the 2nd worst skill in the game? What's bad about always being the first attacker when under half health? It's not as good as Prayer, since that doesn't require the unit to be able to counterattack and kill to avoid death, but if we're taking units into account, both Aless and Lex are units capable of killing someone without getting counterattacked, and Arthur and Tinny can combo it with Wrath for good effect. At any rate, I think it's definitely better than Big Shield, which is only on 1 unit per generation. Neither of them are good, if we take that into consideration, and one of them comes in the 4th chapter out of 6 in the 2nd generation.

[CT075]

Prayer's one of those weird skills that's kind of worthless on it's own but can have weight combined with something else

for example, Wrath/Prayer is almost as good as Wrath/Ambush (and all three is like invincible mega tank but that's beside the point).

I will admit it's too high.

[bottlegnomes]

Also, IIRC, doesn't prayer only work for one turn? So you need to heal the unit next turn or he/she is fucked.

[Anouleth]

Why is charge so low, too? Generally good activation rate, better than Astra/Luna certainly, and risking another hit isn't such a horrible thing. It's also not locked to sword footies.

[Refa]

Also, IIRC, doesn't prayer only work for one turn? So you need to heal the unit next turn or he/she is fucked.

LIFE RING.

[bottlegnomes]

LIFE RING.

?

[CT075]

any kind of healing resets it

ie, life ring healing from 1 -> 4 means that prayer is active again

[BBM]

Prayer is also good when Hel Mages start showing up. Getting hit by that basically makes you invincible for the rest of EP.

[bottlegnomes]

any kind of healing resets it

ie, life ring healing from 1 -> 4 means that prayer is active again

Ah, that is indeed nice.

Prayer is also good when Hel Mages start showing up. Getting hit by that basically makes you invincible for the rest of EP.

IIRC, don't they come in groups and often away from most other enemies? If that's the case, it's not doing much good there, since hell can't kill a unit.

[Stark]

Assuming we're evaluating things in a vacuum here:

Elite should be right below pursuit/dance. It's basically a license to trounce everything, including the arena. (Leading to tons of cash.)

I'd argue the hilariously broken FE4 dance should be above pursuit.

Critical and continue should be closer to luna and astra. They all have roughly the same effect: one-rounding when you otherwise wouldn't.

Awareness way, way down. There aren't enough enemies that can crit you, and enemy sword skills are almost nonexistent.

Prayer is pretty beastly. I wouldn't drop it. Also, I learned something new today about the life ring healing reseting prayer.

Don't think ambush should be so low, especially b/c wrath exists. Wrath should probably go up for the insane synergy with prayer/ambush, avoid in general and guaranteed player phase blicking.

[BBM]

Pursuit is effectively double damage. Without it, units have to OHKO/2HKO with a Hero weapon/activate a skill to kill anything quickly. Pursuit is WAY more important than Dance. In fact, I'd argue Pursuit for it's own tier.

As for Hel, IIRC, Hel mages come in groups with other Dark Mages wih Jormungr, don't they? Also, can't Hel kill a unit if it's already at 1 health?

[bottlegnomes]

It's been a while since I played 4, so the thing about the groupings may be right, but I'm 99% certain that it won't kill a unit at 1 health. I think they first introduced that in FE5.

[Tables]

Hel does a minimum of 1 damage, I believe.