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Unranked Games / Shin Megami Tensei Devil Survivor 2: Record Breaker
« on: September 17, 2015, 06:54:43 AM »
It is mankind's darkest hour. A catastrophe has struck the globe. The Big Dipper is attacking humanity. A secret Japanese governmental organization, JPs, decides to unleash its most powerful weapon to combat the crisis: teenagers with magic cell phones.
This topic was compiled & tested using Devil Survivor 2 Record Breaker ver 1.1 on the Path of the Septentriones and Apocalypse difficulty (= default difficulty). My understanding is that not very much changed mechanically between the original DS2 and Record Breaker in the Septentriones path (a few new skills & demons), so this topic should basically be good for the original. I may edit in the new character for the Triangulum path added specifically for Record Breaker later, but she won't be in the averages.
DL Translation & interpretations
In-game, you can deploy up to 4 demon tamers, each of whom can include 2 demons in their squad. All PCs can also use "Summon" to replace dead demons or empty slots as a map action. Unfortunately for the cast in the DL, every single action that isn't "basic attack" or "guard" is shared cast-wide. In game, you "crack" a skill, then can set it on ONE of your 4 deployed characters on a map. So the game forces build diversity. Having an entire cast totally skilless is pretty lame, so I'm going to stretch usual DL legality a bit to guarantee basic damage skills for everyone so we aren't subject to everyone including mages spamming basic attack. Giving mages magic means giving fighters physical damage skills as well, of course.
Game Mechanics
Battles take place on a map, with movement. Engaging an enemy starts a skirmish which lasts 1 round by default, but characters can potentially earn an Extra Turn and take 2 rounds. The attacker gets an initiative boost in the resulting skirmish. I would assume that both sides trade starting a skirmish with the other in the DL.
Here are the stats:
HP, MP: The usual.
Level: Higher level characters do more damage to lower level characters. This topic is taken at Level 60, which is near what you'd expect for the penultimate map ("Last Assassin" or "Strong Breaker").
Str: Do more damage with physical attacks, slightly reduce physical damage taken.
Mag: Do more damage with magical attacks, slightly reduce magical damage taken.
Vit: Reduce (all) damage taken.
Agl: Determines action order in combat. Affects accuracy & evasion of physical attacks. Accuracy is quite high at endgame for most characters (~100% hit rate).
Speed: Hidden stat, for good reason: it's identical for 13/14 characters. Speed determines how long you need to wait before a new turn for *map actions*. Without legal healing / map actions, high speed just means you'll be the initiator of a skirmish more often, which will give you the +5 Initiative boost more frequently.
Derived stats:
PCHP: The character's HP divided by the HP average.
DefMult, MagicMult: Multipliers incoming damage of this type by this amount. 0.5 would be "takes half damage", 2.0 would be "takes double damage."
PDur, MDur: The character's PCHP divided by their DefMult & ResMult.
Effective speed: Rate of getting turns. See below.
Elements:
Physical element is... well.. Physical.
Magical elements are Fire/Ice/Elec/Force (=Wind).
Curse element consists of status attacks & % of current HP attacks ("gravity").
Almighty element is almost always magical, always ignores shields + reflection (e.g. Makarakarn, Tetrakarn, Shield All), and is very rarely resisted. DS2 associates Almighty more strongly as "Holy elemental" than some other games of the series.
Extra turns & effective speed
After the first round of a skirmish, characters with an Extra Turn get to act in a 2nd combat round.
You can get Extra turns by: Just having high AGL (including the initiator bonus), inflicting critical hits, hitting elemental weaknesses, elementally resisting enemy attacks (a little), nulling / reflecting / draining enemy attacks (more).
You can lose a previously gained extra turn by: eating a critical hit, having your elemental weakness hit, having your attack be nulled/reflected/drained, and specific abilities that steal them.
Unlike many other SMTs, none of these are *guaranteed*, but probably increment some hidden counter or generate a new chance to gain/lose an extra turn, so inflicting 3 crits will be more likely to give you an Extra Turn than 1. Having high AGL to begin with makes this easier.
For the "effective speed" stat listed for characters (not to be confused with map speed). This is a rough estimate of the rate of getting turns vs. average, not the order within a turn. It is based strictly on AGL; it doesn't include Extra Turns gained or denied via crits, weakness hitting, etc.
My assumption is that an average speed (17 AGL) character will get an Extra Turn 50% of the time due to sheer AGL. So it would be something like "got an Extra Turn when I initiated, didn't when the opponent attacked me," or 3 turns in 2 skirmishes. A 4 AGL character is assumed to never get Extra Turns even with the initiator bonus (2 turns in 2 skirmishes). A 30 AGL character is assumed to always earn Extra Turns even when attacked (4 turns in 2 skirmishes). Example: Daichi's 118% speed is because he's assumed to collect (3 * 1.18 = 3.54) turns in 2 skirmishes with his 24 AGL.
Skills
Each character has 3 active skill slots, 3 passive skill slots, and 1 automatic skill. As noted above, you can't assign a skill to more than 1 character.
Passive skills & automatic skills are thrown out for sanity in the DL. Many of the benefits from these would get eaten by the averages anyway.
Note that all physical skills cost percentage of max HP to use. If you don't have enough HP to pay the cost when your turn comes around (e.g. due to intervening damage), you skip your turn.
Legal skills
For the most part, there are enough skills to go around by endgame, especially if you run a semi-balanced split (e.g. at most 3 mages + 1 fighter or 3 fighters + 1 mage). So most everything is legal. However, I'm not a fan of letting characters switch to backups that'd normally be horrible for them considering the 3 active skill limit, and additionally some setups only have enough "room" for 2 characters (rather than 3), so I'm going to lock down a few skills.
Physical (Str) - There's a crapload of comparable physical skills that are just based on raw Str. Power Hit / Assassinate / Mighty Hit / Weak Kill are all comparable, with Mighty Hit potentially being the best alone (gives a free crit so potentially gets you an Extra Turn) although passives matter in-game (Ares Aid, Crit Up, etc.). So. Going to assume that Power Hit is the default, having a reasonable HP cost, not messing with crit/speed nonsense, etc. Everybody can use it if they want and have the required Str 12. Mow Down is a backup if multitarget damage is required. PCs without Str 12 get Fatal Strike instead (although they are probably boned if they are resorting to physicals), which is similar but has a mercy effect: it can't kill unless the target's HP is 1.
Physical (Str/Vit): 4 options here in Berserk/Deathbound/Brutal Hit/Hassohappa, but the multi-hit Berserk & Deathbound are what you want in the DL. That's only 2, so only PCs in the top half of Str have access to these to me. These effects lose power as HP drops, although the formula is weird; you do roughly ~60-75% damage at very low HP at endgame, but this changes by level (drop is less relevant the more absolute damage you do, less relevant otherwise; so Io is more affected than Jungo), so what do I know. Deathbound (20% HP cost) is more powerful than Berserk (13% HP cost) but costs more. I've assumed Berserk as the default in the DL since the characters don't have easy map healing to undo the self-damage, so Deathbound's HP cost is more relevant here than in-game.
Physical (Str/Agl): 2 options here in Multi-Hit & Multi-Strike, which are identical in the DL (Multi-Strike is Multi-Hit on everyone for free with no loss in damage). The formula is apparently:
* Multi-* user has less AGL: 2 hits
* Multi-* user has 0-4 more AGL: 3 hits
* Multi-* user has lots more AGL: 3 + (1 extra hit for every 5 AGL difference), max 7 hits
Only the top half of the cast in AGL is allowed to equip Multi-Strike in this topic.
Magic: Mostly legal (at least the damage magic). Inferno is uniqueish and gained 2 seconds before game-end, so I'm ignoring it as illegal. Megidolaon is similar, but it's actually worse than Holy Dance, so sure whatever it's legal. Everything else is fine… there are 5 Dances for multi-hits, 4 Dynes for good ST damage that's cheap on MP, 6 big MT nukes. Plenty for everybody.
That said, to enhance uniqueness some and not have the whole cast able to effortlessly hit any elemental weakness with no loss, I've locked down elements a little further. It doesn't make a big difference, feel free to allow all elements to everyone, but in-game, being able to equip the appropriate Elemental Amp makes the character uniquely good at using that flavor of magic. I've additionally used slightly higher requirements than the in-game ones, to reflect characters good at that element on Day 5-6, not just getting the ability to equip the Amp at the last second on the Final Day.
* Strength>15: You're suited to equip Fire Amp, so you get Fire spells (except Inferno).
* Vitality>15: You're suited to equip Force Amp, so you get Force spells.
* Magic>15: You're suited to equip Lightning/Ice Amp, so you get Lightning & Ice spells.
* Magic>18: You get Almighty raw damage spells. (Megido/Megidolaon have very high Magic reqs, 18 & 24.)
Note again that due to no passives, the amps aren't actually equipped for the damage in this topic, but so it goes. (That also means that Almighty damage is arguably overhyped vs. in-game… it certainly is overhyped vs. no resistance. Of course, Almighty damage is good anyway because lategame enemies are shot through with elemental nulling, shields, etc. that Almighty usually cuts through, so whatever.)
Multi-hit / unfocused odds
In a duel, the multi-hit unfocused attacks are basically the best, for all that they're more balanced in-game (they'll hit the wrong enemy that reflects/drains it, the leader gets a damage reduction bonus while allies are alive so unfocused attacks aren't good at either focusing the leader (if you just want to gank them and be done with it) or at *not* hitting the leader so you can off the support first. I have not confirmed these, but they seem about right from Cogito's FAQ:
*1 Target: 2-3 Hit - 2 (65%) 3 (35%)
*2 Targets: 2-4 Hit - 2 (30%) 3 (60%) 4 (10%)
*3 Targets: 2-5 Hit - 2 (05%) 3 (45%) 4 (40%) 5 (10%)
Any target cannot receive more than 3 hits with each skill use.
This means that for a 3-turn damage average for duel use, I'd assume 7 hits of the Elemental Dances/Berserk/Deathbound (2+2+3).
Demons
Aren't included here. Demons play by their own rules, but by default they have "fair" stat builds ( 16+level stat points distributed) and have the same skills PCs do, but their skills are set on fusion / leveling-up and can't be rejuggled or reassigned. BUT they don't have to worry about uniqueness or other demons / PCs having the same skill. So if you did include demons, it wouldn't change the averages too much, unlike Ogre Battle or Soul Nomad.
Damage figures
Damage is taken from tests vs. an L64 Murmur on the free DLC map "Lost Demon Rescue" with 24 Str, 23 Mag, and 16 Vit. (No dialog to skip past, very convenient to fight on turn 1, almost equal Str & Mag so it won't favor one or the other.)
The average of enemies on "Last Assassin" is 19.4 Vit & 16.6 Agl, but that agility figure is a bit slanted because of several 4 Agl Behemoths on that map, so for Multi-Hit/Multi-Strike I've assumed enemies with 17 Agl, the PC average.
If you're curious about some of the lesser magic options, I've included them under Yamato's entry. Hopefully it should be easy to get a sense of how the damage for other characters would differ as well if they opt for them.
Damage averages
All physical skills are self-damaging in this game. Similar to Persona 4, I've opted to reflect this in the damage averages via subtracting (%max HP) * (2.5 killpoint) from the actual damage to give an "effective damage" for the damage average. So a move that inflicts .53 PCHP damage but causes the user to lose .13 PCHP on average is really dealing .40 PCHP net.
Possibly more controversially, I've elected to reduce Berserk damage to 85% of its normal power (roughly equal to being at 50-65% HP or so?). Berserk users damage themselves so it's impossible to use the ability 3 times at max power, and it'll be even worse in practice as it simply isn't reasonable to expect opponents to do nothing or not occasionally outspeed.
