Fluctuating Enemy Stats/Skills

[Irysa]

Yay or nay?

In theory, they make strategies less static, which creates more variety in play. But in reality, such fluctuations are close to irrelevant in easier games/modes and an annoyance/cause for resets in harder environments.

Whilst it's certainly possible to create new/adjusted strategies for scenarios where the stat flucations don't match up, the temptation to hit reset is simply too strong for me on FE11/FE12 highest difficulties. The difference between being able to ORKO, avoid being 2HKO'd or having an enemy be critrate lured around creates a knock-on effect in terms of strategy that I'm too lazy to accomodate for most of the time. I've been playing some RNG hacks of FE6 and 7 lately that prevent the predictability of the vanilla games, but even on HHM (a relatively low difficulty in comparison to later titles) I've ended up resetting a bunch to rig boss stats for Marcus so he doubles.

FE13 removed enemy stat fluctuation, but instead has randomised skills. Awakening's randomised skills are in theory just as bad, but have far less effect in practice, even on Lunatic. Patience/Avo+10 proccing on Swordies in earlygame can be annoying, but hitrates are pretty high in FE13 and the Dual System exists to migitate hirate issues. Critboosting skills are lame in theory but don't tend to affect strategies frequently, and the Dual System helps again. +2 skills rarely matter due to the skewed Exp gain, Stat Curve, Rallies and Tonics (I've found +5 Hp to be considerably more annoying than any +2 skill ingame). Breaker skills can be worked around pretty easily. So really that only leaves the occaisonal +1 Mov Assassins or Rally Defence Generals later on who can mess things up.

Lunatic+ is a whole different kettle of fish but you can effectively reach a point where the skill distribution is entirely irrelevant, since Robin is just that OP (Galeforce, Bows, Nosferatu, and Sol are all effective at helping here). This means it's only a really big problem for the first 6 to 7 maps of the game. Honestly, "too much Counter" is usually the biggest cause for concern before Robin reaches unkillable status, as most other skills are relatively easy to work around. Generally this means just hoping for each large enemy cluster of 1 range locked units that has to be engaged primarily on EP to not have more than 1 Counter per cluster for Chapters 3 to 6 (by 7, Robin can likely oneshot various enemy types), and this is really not too hard to just reset for either.

Ultimately I don't really like the extra randomness on stats. I feel like random growths, hits, misses, skill activations and crits already account for a significant range of diversity, and stuff like HHM Chapter 11 clearly isn't designed for it either - Sometimes Hector can't double Soldiers, and Archers who proc extra Def or HP can't be 2RKO'd by Matthew and Hector teaming up. Skill randomness I'm pretty ambivalent about though.

Edited May 3, 2015 by Irysa

[X-Naut]

I'm fine with Shadow Dragon levels of fluctuation, which just boils down to "Does this unit get the extra point from having a fraction of a stat or not?" but can live without it. (GBA and Thracia fluctuation, though, need to stay gone)

What I really want to see go though is every enemy unit being the same damn level. I mean sure, we want enemies to be on a consistent curve, but what's wrong with a few slightly deviating from the median? That and the lack of stat fluctuation make enemies look too much like clones.