Author Topic: Ranking characters by in-game use: obscura edition  (Read 20925 times)

Random Consonant

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Re: Ranking characters by in-game use: obscura edition
« Reply #75 on: October 16, 2023, 08:27:02 PM »
Quote from: Tide
Trails to Reverie Rankings - Standard Difficulty as always. If they wanted to make things harder, should have done that and slapped Normal / Standard on that instead. Anyway, some notes here as well because this game is massive (also surprised no one else has made a post about it).

Well 51 characters is a lot to cover and a lot of them just run together in the mind a lot, especially since for a number of them there isn't really anything you could say about them that you couldn't for the past 4 games.  Also I've been very lazy about this lately.

I think I broadly agree with the overall rationale so I don't have much to say about the cast other than quibbling with placement.  Not going to comment on the characters gained through ORBS.

Lloyd: Higher, though by how much depends on whether or not you can break the Chrono Burst restriction with Burning Heart.  Still, having suction is good, defense... isn't actually completely shameful to have for once for all that I still wouldn't call his stat build brilliant, his BOs are fine since bosses get turns again, and Burning Heart is still pretty dumb.

Elie: About right, I think.  Panic button and the ability to inflict weak is great, but she still has the general caster woes and Strike Bell getting demoted to a BO doesn't help.  Her main game availablity is a bit spotty but that's true for pretty much everyone on Lloyd's route except for the man himself.

Randy: Lower.  He's basically Agate except War Cry doesn't self buff and he has a +damage% BO instead of a +break% BO, that's not really enough for a tier's worth of difference, let alone being above Gaius and his lol I inflict absolute delay S-Craft of stupid.

Tio: Higher, though this is mostly Absolute Reflect BO still being completely broken since the counterplay to them is rare and hers gives CP.  Secondary time lock is nice since you're not sacrificing a free slot for Action or Cast.

Noel: About right.  Her spread ailments around like an absolute lunatic MO actually works this time but that's pretty replaceable.

Wazy: About right, fast cast BOs are nuts and his gives you an ATS buff in the bargain.  Akashic Arm isn't as disgusting relatively speaking as it was in Azure but it's still pretty great.

Rixia: Higher.  So her suction move is actually pretty bangin', big area doubletap for 40 CP?  I'm in.  Honestly seems better than Fie outside of dodgetanking on the strength of that alone.

Lechter: About right.  He's usefuly in Lloyd's second chapter where you don't have warm bodies but that's about it.  Generalists tend to need something special going for them and he really kind of doesn't.

Tita: Lower.  While the durability, while nerfed from CS4 is still kind of hilarious, she's just so slow.  Castworst speed IIRC and she has the dubious distinction of being the only PC to have normal crafts with 3500 delay.  +60% damage for 6 turns is a cool BO effect but for 4 BP it had better be.

Agate: About right.  Wild Rage sure exists and is a thing that says +STR (L) on it and nothing else particularly offends.

Alisa: Lower, I think.  Heavenly Gift is good but the base version isn't S tier good and you're waiting until Trial Door 8 for the upgrade... and I'm not convinced that's S tier good either.

Sharon: About right.  Pretty clearly worse than Rixia due to stats/no self buff and the fact that they priced her 100% evade BO the same as the Absolute Reflect ones is a bit of a bad joke.

Machias: Yeah this is probably his best showing I think.  All the PCs running together in the mind just makes the big thing he brings to the table stand out more.

Towa: Maybe higher?  Weak's a pretty cool thing to be able to inflict but it's hard to argue that she isn't the worst out of the PCs that can do that.  Unlike the others though she does get Arts Boost...

Estelle: Lower.  Iffy stat spread, fairly mid BO.  Ratings on Barrage/Wheel of Time are good but single target lock on them's a strike against.

Joshua: About right.  Saved from mediocrity by Black Fang.

Rean: About right.  I initially considered kneejerking him as lower due to losing the stupidity that was Divine Song but I think the speed's too good for that.

Juna: About right.  Her CS4 niches kind of got eroded for various reasons and she has to wait a bit to get Accelerate... but really, with so many cast members running together in the mind the fact that she gets an Accelerate craft and can exist alongside Machias at all is still good enough for this tier.

Kurt: ...About right.  There isn't actually much redeemable about him, but he's not Swin, which is the only thing that gives me pause here.

Altina: Higher.  Again, like Tio this is mostly Absolute Reflect BOs being broken.

Ash: Higher.  He's still pretty mid but the craft list is good enough to dodge a D.

Musse: About right.  The demise of spammable Chrono Burst and the nerf to her BO means there's little she does to stand out.

Claire: ...About right.  Generalist stat build with nothing except an Accelerate BO going for her.

Elise: Lower.  Pretty much everything I said about Lechter applies to her as well, except she brings healing to a fight that shuts orbments off.  I guess that's more notable but not enough for a tier's worth of difference.

Millium: About right.  The eternal problem child strikes out again.

Jusis: Lower.  Generalist stat build problems.  Elvars helps a bit but the individual buffs are too paltry and Platinum Shield is competing with a bunch of other broken defensive options.  Those and Boost Arts are good enough to dodge a D but he's still very mid.

Elliot: About right.  There's really nothing you can say about him that hasn't been said in every CS game ever.

Crow: ...Yeah this is about right.  His base ATS isn't amazing but he benefits from fast cast setups so much it isn't funny, and even if you don't want to do that for whatever reason he still has a lot of the things that Rean also has going for him.  I'd probably be inclined to argue that Low Rent C is better but that's it.

Emma: About right.  She can CP battery, she can do the caster thing, but neither of these things are especially standout.

Sara: About right.  Lacks what Crow and We Have C At Home bring to the table but she certainly tries.

Gaius: Higher.  Howling Heavens is still a thing that says Absolute Delay and the demise of Chrono Burst loops just means this is very stupid instead of utterly gobsmackingly stupid, Golden Howl is still a thing that trades HP for CP says +STR, and like Rean he actually has passable casting ability.  I guess his BO is still bad?

Fie: Lower.  Dodgetanking is great and all but that's mostly all she brings to the table.

Laura: About right, maybe higher.  Lion Rush is a heck of a drug considering it has 2000 delay with those ratings and even if it's just for three actions, +80% damage on the BO for 3 BP is solid.  I'm not certain this is enough on the Wild Rage havers though to warrant moving up.

Celine: About right.  You could use literally any other caster instead and lose basically nothing worth having.

The C Stands For Casval, Actually: Well I already said I'd arguably consider him better than Crow.  Impressive stats, for one.  Dark Requiem may not be Divine Song but it's still ridiculous.  Zevarl is silly since it's an attack that also gives +SPD (L), Noblesse Rune is silly since it gives +STR/ATS (M/L) AND 1 BP for 1000 delay... I guess he shows up in the TRC later than Crow does?  Regardless he's absurd.  but what do you expect considering it's Rufus who's been hyped to hell in the story?

Swin: ...Lower.  I find Swin to the be the worst PC in the game and I don't think it's particularly close.  Problematic stat spread, junk craft list, bad BO, generally no real perks outside of his really convoluted Marking gimmick which doesn't really work since it doesn't offer enough to be worth it.  I guess he has Arts Boost for C-louche's party in the timeframe where Renne isn't around but ugh.

Nadia: Higher.  She actually has a fair amount going for her so I'm actually the most surprised by this one.  First, she gets a unique accessory that's basically a free Cast 3 quartz, that's pretty great.  Secondly, she gets Threddy Bear, which is a thing that says inflicts Weak and inflicting Weak is pretty good.  I guess Fire's not the most amazing primary lock for a caster to optimize around but she's pretty good outside that.

Lapis: About right.  Pretty much Edel Heart/10 since she has the generalist issues on top of being rather undurable.

Renne: Probably higher.  Has Arts Boost, has an accelerate BO that also gives fastcasting, has a self buff that gives +ATS/SPD (M) and 1 BP, agreeable stats for what she wants to be doing.

Duvalie: About right.  Apparently she went to the Alan Richard school of fast craft spam between games but forgot that she was dealing with CS3 onwards CP costs so somewhat comically she's almost TOO fast to really function.  Still a damn sight better than whatever her CS4 showing was trying to do.

Arios: About right, his Gale has All Cancel attached to it, nothing else is even relevent.  (He's still good outside of this.)

Random Consonant

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Re: Ranking characters by in-game use: obscura edition
« Reply #76 on: October 16, 2023, 09:55:07 PM »
Fire Emblem Engage: The other reason for my laziness in this topic because I'm supposed to be obligated to think about this pile of meh or something.

Anyways I wouldn't describe character balance as being particularly good outside of there being an overall lack of slam dunk characters.  The lower end of things... is better than some but there's too much that I'd consider irredeemable.  Anyways.

Alear: Weird and hard to rate fairly.  Bizarrely the closest comparison I have is Micaiah where getting good use out of them requires some lateral thinking around their perks of Rose Thorn 2.0, convoy access, and the only dragon typing you'll see until C22 because their combat is pretty mid otherwise.  I think it works overall, even if I didn't make the arguable best use of it.  7/10.

Vander: So 40 HP to start with is actually a lot, turns out, and lets you get away with more than you should with those stats.  Has a clear point of obsolencese and paladin is a very weak class in this game but it's hard to argue with the early game performance when you have so much incompetence going around.  5/10.

Clanne: So tomes are actually good in this game.  Clanne... is less good.  Middling bases, shaky offensive growths (and mixed offensive builds aren't really wonderful in general), bad personal but 75% of the cast has bad personals so whatever... I really don't see what he has to recommend him over literally any other tome user in the game.  3/10.

Framme: Early staff filler.  You use her because staves are good and then you bench her once you get better options.  Same score as Vander works.  5/10.

Alfred: What the fuck.  I guess he's durable when he's not getting doubled by things but cavalry is a weak class tag and stat spread is pretty uninspiring.  2/10.

Etie: Early bow user.  You use her because the game uses fliers early but above average strength as your only good stat doesn't really work out long term.  3.5/10.

Boucheron: You know I wouldn't be averse to the whole axe myrm thing he tries to do if his bases were more agreeable.  As is... he's durable via HP but not to the extent that Vander is early (and not really more durable than Alfred when he's not being doubled either) and the poor luck stat is a flight risk unless you give him an engrave or a compact axe which nah.  2.5/10.

Céline: Better start than Clanne but still has a lot of the same issues.  Her luck does make her a good candidate for some Divine Pulse staff nonsense but that doesn't come until Hortensia joins and, well.  4/10.

Chloé: One of the few glimpses of true earlygame competence.  Offense can be a bit of an issue but she has a personal which can help with her issues there (gasp!  An actually useful personal skill in Engage!) but being a flier is nice and the speed is screaming.  Others can outdo her with class swapping but the ones that can join later and miss out on early Canter so I don't think I'd call them better.  7.5/10.

Louis: One of the other glimpses of true earlygame competence.  Amazing defense and immunity to break are some pretty great boons early.  Falls off once promotions start happening because he gets doubled by mages and explodes to them and enemy backups foil the concrete tanking thing (unless you give him Corrin.  Don't give him Corrin.) but it's really hard to argue with that earlygame.  6/10.

Jean: Early staff filler except he joints like four and a half chapters later with nothing to show for it.  Trying to leverage his personal is a pretty bad trap if you ask me, Engage not really the sort of game where it's worth messing around with that kind of project, the game shows a lot of teeth and it shows them very early.  2/10.

Yunaka: So daggers are actually pretty good in this game and thieves are the only ones that get to use them before promoting... too bad thief isn't a great class long term and Yunaka's stats aren't the greatest.  Still probably better than whatever the hell Clanne is doing with his life.  5/10.

Anna: Oh look it's Boucheron with a worse start and a more convoluted gimmick.  Either you suffer through 5 levels of axefighter with her and make her a radiant bow user, or you switch her to mage and have her do very little that Citrinne isn't already doing for you.  No.  1/10.  BUT SHE IS ONE OF THE TWO CHARACTERS WHO CAN MAKE SS DISHES IN THE SOMNIEL

Alcryst: Somewhat better than Etie and has a more useful personal.  Still not really that great.  4.5/10.

Lapis: Lapis is better than what I intially kneejerked but she still suffers from being in a very weak class and needs two seals to really function as a PC, and that's not something I look kindly on unless you're bringing something truly useful to the table.  Alear can do this, Lapis... doesn't really do anything that Chloé isn't already doing.  4/10.

Citrinne: Citrinne is also better than what I initially kneejerked and in her case it's somewhat significant?  Mage Knight is pretty good for her, turns out, +3 speed on promotion plus +3 more against physicals once Chaos Style shows up is pretty nice.  Too bad Ivy exists though but otherwise she's fine?  6/10.

Diamant: Aggressively mid.  Basically Alear with some stat shuffling and without the stuff that makes Alear cool.  5/10.

Amber: Very strong but as mentioned before cavalry is a weak class tag and he'd be better off as anything else so he has the same problems as Lapis and as such, gets the same score.  4/10.

Jade: Louis who is worse at everything that matters and sports low luck at a time when enemies start packing steel weapons.  Which is actually a concern instead of a complete joke since IntSys finally learned to not make them ridicuously heavy and also gave them +5 crit because ???.  Anyways Jade bad.  2/10.

Ivy: Tomes good.  Staves good.  Flying good.  Ivy is the only one of two characters who gets all three.  She joins at the point where people start missing out on early Canter and the stat spread is merely good (outside of DEX/LCK but who cares after C14, Ivy probably makes the best use of an Academy engrave) but those are the only real problems.  Anyways Engage isn't the sort of game that lends itself to a high score cieling but I think Ivy does hit that cieling.  8/10.

Kagetsu: Hello, yes, it's Stat God Kagestu, here to wait patiently until he can reclass into something that isn't swordmaster and then kill everything.  Fortunately he doesn't have to wait that long.  7/10.

Zelkov: Generally better stats than Yunaka, but joins at a point where thief dagger use is less attractive.  Probably worth the same score.  5/10.

Fogado: Generally the best radiant bow user unless you want to baby Anna (you don't want to baby Anna) but since the radiant bow has 19 mt this is actually a pretty good niche.  Not terribly impressive outside of this as he sports the same offensive issues seen on Chloé but hey.  5.5/10.

Pandreo: Then you get this guy who's basically just Bishop Pent except you can reclass him into something with a better tome rank if you want.  7.5/10.

Bunet: Um.  At least you don't have to baby him so he's maybe better than Anna?  Maybe?  There really isn't anything good to say about him, the clear loser among the Solm retainers.  1.5/10.

Timerra: Well crit debuffing is nice and she's fine on her join map... just so many issues longterm.  I haven't really seen a way to get milage out of her outside of Sandstorm procs and the problem with that is that you're relying on *proc skills* which is not a wonderful place for a character to be in.  But that's still nicer than what I said about Alfred so.  4/10.

Panette: Panette is a character where I saw the glass jaw before the ridicious strength stat and reclassing/emblem potential and wound up making an unfair initial assessment because she's actually pretty good once you work around those issues.  7/10.

Merrin: Kagetsu with worse stats but starts off in an actually good class.  It roughly balances.  7/10.

Hortensia: See Ivy, except swap the staff/tome ranks and give her a speedy but physically frail and low damage stat build.  You're here for the staff cheese though.  7.5/10.

Seadall: So I said there was only so high the rating cieling can go for Engage characters and Ivy hit that cieling.

I lied.

So normally the problems that plague single-refresh dancers is that 1) they tend to be low move, 2) they tend to be liabilities when caught by enemies, and 3) you're simply optimizing your existing action economy instead of actually improving it, so if you mess up and the worst cast scenario under 2 happens, well, maybe you should've fielded someone else in that slot instead.  Seadall's... not as good at avoiding 2 as 3H dancers can be but makes up for that by virtue of the fact that you just got a pair of boots lying in one of Solm Castle's doodad drawers, the fact that you can buy Canter for everyone and it may as well be a free skill for him, and the fact that an engaged character's actions tend to be more valueable than an unengaged character's actions so the action economy optimization is better than "give your best character another action" is in other games.  It's ridiculous and even if you, like me, didn't actually use him it should be painfully obvious to see why he's great.  9/10.

Rosado: I vaguely recall doing the math and found that his bases were disappointingly close to a level 20/1 Chloé, which isn't helped by his decision to be an axe/spear person to start off with.  I also distinctly recall him being unable to oneshot the corrupted wyrm that exists to be an Eirika engage attack tutorial on Hard mode.  Needless to say these were not great impressions.  4/10.

Goldmary: Okay physical filler and hero is a perfectly fine class to exist in, so better than Rosado, for all that I like him far better.  5/10.

Lindon: Solid magic filler with some crit build potential.  Far worse life choices to make, certainly.  6/10.

Saphir: Okay physical filler character with an iffy personal skill.  4.5/10.

Mauvier: Pile of solid stats, wants a better class to be in than Royal Knight because good grief that thing.  5/10.

Veyle: Oh look, it's dragon typing and it's just in time for Alear to get peak magical vtuber powers so someone else can use Byleth for the rainbow instruct/dance, that's nice.  6/10.


Tide

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Re: Ranking characters by in-game use: obscura edition
« Reply #77 on: October 17, 2023, 02:52:29 AM »
Trails Stuff

Oh hey, Random responded. Awesome. I love having actual discussions and stuff. Responses and thoughts:

Quote
Lloyd

I keep forgetting Burning Heart exists because the rest of Lloyd's build is just pretty unimpressive. His locked nodes suck and his crafts outside of Zero Breaker and Burning hearts are eeeeeeeeh. Like seriously, ST damage for 80 CP is not exactly great shakes. He's the worst of the 3 Protags - I just waffle on how good he is. His BOs are worse than both of Rean's and C's and I find him in some very stiff competition when you start comparing the As. But between B or C tier... sure I have no qualms of him being a B Tier PC. The biggest issue he has is that his best role (if you want to call it that) is tanking and he gets overtaken in that department largely by Tita, so he's usually doing a secondary role or something.

Quote
Randy/Agate/Gaius

So of the 3, Randy was the one I used the most primarily due to Crimson Gale's easy CP maintenance early on. Later when everyone gets there stuff, I feel like Agate is the weakest of 3 and Gaius becomes the strongest because as you note Absolute Delay is pretty funky - especially if you start stacking Delays on him. So...moving Randy down to B tier with his other compatriots is probably fine with me as well. He probably has the best BO of the 3, but yeah, that's a relatively minor boon since in the grand scheme of things, Raging Fire is only a 5% damage difference outside of the buff and I don't find the buff on BO from Agate to be that meaningful (at least for sweeping...Emblem starts with All Stats Up L, which is enough for what you're going for).

Quote
Renne

Also waffled between a B or an A! Completely forgot Zodiac Code gave 1 BP. So lol, that's probably enough of a boost, though most likely she's on the back end of that tier if we're concerned about ordering.

Quote
Tio/Altina

Yeah agreed. Absolute Guard is a really good back door escape option and both girls work in this role. The issue is, I don't think either is quite a B Tier PC because other than that, they are pretty inter-changeable with other casters. And yeah, eating a S-craft is generally not something you want to do, but even in the event you don't an Absolute Guard BO ready, stuff like Elliot's Sapphirl Symphony exists and that cuts off 70% damage and gives Regen. That's enough of a save most of the time if needed. I think Tio is slightly better because her craft set is a bit more focused whereas Altina always has the weird flurry that she always has, but that's largely preference at this point.

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Alisa

So this is just me liking the bell curve to be symmetrical. Ie: Top of S tier should match the bottom of the lowest tier. So if I have 4 on top, then 4 should be on the bottom with the majority of the cast lumped somewhere in the middle. And the issue then is, if Alisa isn't S tier, who replaces her in that? And it's pretty hard to think of something else who does. Because yeah, Heavenly Gift alone isn't S tier...but the rest of Alisa's stat mix is pretty solid and she's a good caster, which is better of the two default roles if you had to choose. Again, while I didn't order the tiers when initially grouping them, she's probably on the tail end for sure.

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Elise

I got a lot of use out of her BO during Chapter 2. It's the combo of slight heal + 50% Evade boost for a notable duration. Needing only 50% Evade to reach 100% helps a lot. Like Elise gets outclassed pretty bad late - but compared to say Lechter, she definitely feels better than him! Maybe I'll use them more to get a better feel. Lechter is definitely more mage oriented though because his crafts in general are pretty sketchy.

Quote
Fie

Yep - no problem with this either. Another case of not sure if she's in the higher or lower one. In the end I went with B because I'm pretty sure you can do some neat things with Concealing Wind. Just people think of her as Evade tank and call it shut. Again, will likely experiment a bit.

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Nadia

Weak is cool! Just 60 CP isn't exactly cheap like Towa's 20 CP Weakener. The other issue is that since it's a craft, it means you can't use Bells to soften the recovery and turns spent where you are using it are turns Nadia isn't casting...which runs contrary to her unique accessory. Which speaking of, maybe it's just me, but I also didn't find it super valuable. Like I kept it cause it was unique, but if you had the choice between raising Speed or improving Cast speed, the former is usually better because it helps with the recovery of various moves and skills. On top of that, she's paired with C and if you are using Fast Cast strats, the value of that accessory diminishes because you can't get lower than 1 Clocktick for any casting. Maybe this changes on higher difficulties, but I certainly didn't feel like either things was super advantageous for her.

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Swin vs Kurt

We definitely agree that both are probably bottom feeders - especially if you discount STONE characters. I think my preference for Swin is that C's route lacks any true front line character. Lapis tries but her HP is pretty low so she can't really tank. So Swin being an extra warm body while C and Nadia light things up *does* help even if he goes down after like 2 hits because let's face it - he's not much more durable than her. Comparatively, what reason is there ever really to put Kurt into the team that the other characters available cannot cover? I have a real tough time answering that. Don't get me wrong - Marked is a pretty underwehlming mechanic. If other characters were allowed to trigger it when attacking with a physical for example, that'd greatly improve him since he would at least kind of work as a BP battery. But even then, he'd be a slow one because of the one turn delay required. So as is, yeah he's pretty lame! But lamer than Kurt? I dunno about that.
« Last Edit: October 17, 2023, 03:02:04 AM by Tide »
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Random Consonant

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Re: Ranking characters by in-game use: obscura edition
« Reply #78 on: October 17, 2023, 04:39:15 AM »
Quote from: Tide
Oh hey, Random responded. Awesome. I love having actual discussions and stuff. Responses and thoughts:

It's nice being able to talk about things about the game that aren't HELL MODE G.

Quote from: Tide
I keep forgetting Burning Heart exists because the rest of Lloyd's build is just pretty unimpressive. His locked nodes suck and his crafts outside of Zero Breaker and Burning hearts are eeeeeeeeh. Like seriously, ST damage for 80 CP is not exactly great shakes. He's the worst of the 3 Protags - I just waffle on how good he is. His BOs are worse than both of Rean's and C's and I find him in some very stiff competition when you start comparing the As. But between B or C tier... sure I have no qualms of him being a B Tier PC. The biggest issue he has is that his best role (if you want to call it that) is tanking and he gets overtaken in that department largely by Tita, so he's usually doing a secondary role or something.

I think this is reasonable enough for the most part, if he has an argument for A tier it's very much based on One Weird Trick that he's not even all that well set up to exploit.  I don't really think 2 Earth/1 Fire is *that* bad

Quote
So of the 3, Randy was the one I used the most primarily due to Crimson Gale's easy CP maintenance early on. Later when everyone gets there stuff, I feel like Agate is the weakest of 3 and Gaius becomes the strongest because as you note Absolute Delay is pretty funky - especially if you start stacking Delays on him. So...moving Randy down to B tier with his other compatriots is probably fine with me as well. He probably has the best BO of the 3, but yeah, that's a relatively minor boon since in the grand scheme of things, Raging Fire is only a 5% damage difference outside of the buff and I don't find the buff on BO from Agate to be that meaningful (at least for sweeping...Emblem starts with All Stats Up L, which is enough for what you're going for).

Reasonable, Randy does do a pretty good job at randosweeping and I'd agree that's he'smore attractive than Agate in that regard.

Quote
Yeah agreed. Absolute Guard is a really good back door escape option and both girls work in this role. The issue is, I don't think either is quite a B Tier PC because other than that, they are pretty inter-changeable with other casters. And yeah, eating a S-craft is generally not something you want to do, but even in the event you don't an Absolute Guard BO ready, stuff like Elliot's Sapphirl Symphony exists and that cuts off 70% damage and gives Regen. That's enough of a save most of the time if needed. I think Tio is slightly better because her craft set is a bit more focused whereas Altina always has the weird flurry that she always has, but that's largely preference at this point.

Yeah don't get me wrong, I don't think this is better than Elliot the one-man panic button in the grand scheme of things but I also don't think the difference is that great.

Quote
So this is just me liking the bell curve to be symmetrical. Ie: Top of S tier should match the bottom of the lowest tier. So if I have 4 on top, then 4 should be on the bottom with the majority of the cast lumped somewhere in the middle. And the issue then is, if Alisa isn't S tier, who replaces her in that? And it's pretty hard to think of something else who does. Because yeah, Heavenly Gift alone isn't S tier...but the rest of Alisa's stat mix is pretty solid and she's a good caster, which is better of the two default roles if you had to choose. Again, while I didn't order the tiers when initially grouping them, she's probably on the tail end for sure.

Fair!  I'd probably agree with Alisa in S if I were rating on a curve myself.

Quote
I got a lot of use out of her BO during Chapter 2. It's the combo of slight heal + 50% Evade boost for a notable duration. Needing only 50% Evade to reach 100% helps a lot. Like Elise gets outclassed pretty bad late - but compared to say Lechter, she definitely feels better than him! Maybe I'll use them more to get a better feel. Lechter is definitely more mage oriented though because his crafts in general are pretty sketchy.

I think this is mostly just a question of offense vs. defense, since Lechter's BO is +40% damage with 2-turn Insight and Elise is 50% evade with some HP/CP healing.  Rean C2 probably just makes you care more because of that fight that throws a Gospel at you and doesn't let you use Elliot or Altina.

Quote
Yep - no problem with this either. Another case of not sure if she's in the higher or lower one. In the end I went with B because I'm pretty sure you can do some neat things with Concealing Wind. Just people think of her as Evade tank and call it shut. Again, will likely experiment a bit.

Well this is mostly me autopiloting on a Fie vs Rixia comparison and well, Rixia has her own stealth thing too!

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Weak is cool! Just 60 CP isn't exactly cheap like Towa's 20 CP Weakener. The other issue is that since it's a craft, it means you can't use Bells to soften the recovery and turns spent where you are using it are turns Nadia isn't casting...which runs contrary to her unique accessory. Which speaking of, maybe it's just me, but I also didn't find it super valuable. Like I kept it cause it was unique, but if you had the choice between raising Speed or improving Cast speed, the former is usually better because it helps with the recovery of various moves and skills. On top of that, she's paired with C and if you are using Fast Cast strats, the value of that accessory diminishes because you can't get lower than 1 Clocktick for any casting. Maybe this changes on higher difficulties, but I certainly didn't feel like either things was super advantageous for her.

Well Towa's Weakner is also single target only, which can be fine, but there's enough fights where being able to hit multiple enemies with it at once is still valueable, and it's not like you have a shortage of casters on C's route to exploit it.  And sure, eventually the accessory becomes pointless because of the cast time floor but you don't actually hit that for a while even with fast cast BOs, and maybe this is just me feeling sepith/u-material starved but I didn't feel like there was enough going around in the +spd accessory department to compete with it for a while.

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We definitely agree that both are probably bottom feeders - especially if you discount STONE characters. I think my preference for Swin is that C's route lacks any true front line character. Lapis tries but her HP is pretty low so she can't really tank. So Swin being an extra warm body while C and Nadia light things up *does* help even if he goes down after like 2 hits because let's face it - he's not much more durable than her. Comparatively, what reason is there ever really to put Kurt into the team that the other characters available cannot cover? I have a real tough time answering that.

My general approach to C's route was to forgo pretty much any idea of direct tanking because... yeah.  But since we agree that the only reason to bother with either is the result of a forced hand, my general though process is that Kurt has a better toolkit to work with (access to impede, slightly better AoE access, self buff that doesn't take until Lv200 to be worthwhile) and feels less bad to be forced into using as a result, so the only way Swin above Kurt would make sense to me is to curve performance on individual routes and discount the TRC entirely.


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Re: Ranking characters by in-game use: obscura edition
« Reply #79 on: October 17, 2023, 03:36:05 PM »
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HELL MODE G

You mean that mode where it jacks up the difficulty and forces you to start without NG+? I imagine it reeks of elitism. Maybe one of these days if I had more time, I'd go back into it, but for now, yeah no.

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I think this is reasonable enough for the most part, if he has an argument for A tier it's very much based on One Weird Trick that he's not even all that well set up to exploit.  I don't really think 2 Earth/1 Fire is *that* bad

I guess Earth nodes can focus on bumping up Break damage but even then, you only have one set of quartz that really do that. The bonus on many other Earth quartz is simply either a DEF or HP boost. So having 2 locked Earth nodes puts you in this weird position where you are very likely going to end up boosting HP. In the grand scheme of things, killing things faster so they don't get turns is often the best crowd control / strategy. Again, maybe on HELL MODE this isn't possible because enemies just have too much bulk and the extra HP matters...but if its anything like VP/VP2, you'd often prefer the extra offense anyway. One thing that I did forget and is funny about Llyod is that Burning Heart also lets him neutralize enemy BOs much better because he can mix Burning Heart and Chrono Burst together - then using items inbetween to restore his resources as needed. This is an extremely narrow niche but has its uses, so yeah, probably a solid B tier.

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Yeah don't get me wrong, I don't think this is better than Elliot the one-man panic button in the grand scheme of things but I also don't think the difference is that great.

Probably a case where numerical rankings are better because it would be like 0.5 point separation versus what looks like a tier separation. Or start trying to order the tiers, but then you get into some very nitty gritty details. Like Elie vs. Elliot is slightly more offensive versus pure defensive and which one you think is more valuable. The problem is going numerical means sitting down and doing that 50 characters. Maybe when I feel unlazy.

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Well Towa's Weakner is also single target only, which can be fine, but there's enough fights where being able to hit multiple enemies with it at once is still valueable, and it's not like you have a shortage of casters on C's route to exploit it.  And sure, eventually the accessory becomes pointless because of the cast time floor but you don't actually hit that for a while even with fast cast BOs, and maybe this is just me feeling sepith/u-material starved but I didn't feel like there was enough going around in the +spd accessory department to compete with it for a while.

The gacha nature of RC's item loot makes things hard to evaluate because if you luck out and get more Black Emblems or something, getting an it's upgrade to +16 Speed is an investment but a worthwhile one. It really comes down to what loot you get and where you can pool back and what you can invest in. The problem with the +Cast Speed boosts is that they are diminishing returns so you save a quartz slot for Nadia in exchange for an accessory slot. To me, it definitely seems like it comes out to a wash. For what it's worth though as I noted, I often had her unique accessory equipped, although that's also like looking at the 3 teams and trying to outfit the entire party so I'm not de-equipping and re-equipping every time I switch.

I find that a lot of the major game fights are all single enemy targets. Like if you look at C's chapter, Chapter 2 bosses have the most targets in a fight (4 of them!) but then in Chapter 3, the big bad is single target...so is Chapter 4. In fact the last boss that had more than one target was in the Liberation of Crossbell part from memory. So the GT nature of Nadia's craft is nice but doesn't feel like there are many cases where it comes up. Maybe in the early RC Stratums that I'm forgetting?

The other thing about Towa's Weakener is that it also has less delay. I don't have the numbers but it has the same natural delay as an Item use...so like 1500 or something, which means she also recovers faster. This is important since the Weak turns expire based on the enemy's turn count so recovering quickly lets you take better advantage of it. I think Alfin's also has a faster recovery, but hers cost 30 CP and is tied to a RC only PC so she's definitely worse than both.

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But since we agree that the only reason to bother with either is the result of a forced hand, my general though process is that Kurt has a better toolkit to work with (access to impede, slightly better AoE access, self buff that doesn't take until Lv200 to be worthwhile) and feels less bad to be forced into using as a result, so the only way Swin above Kurt would make sense to me is to curve performance on individual routes and discount the TRC entirely.

So looking into the two of them a bit more, Kurt is probably better late. Kurt does have a better craft set, but a lot of that guzzles CP like mad. And unlike Randy/Gaius/Agate, he lacks a way to quicky regain that, so he really needs late accessories or a battery to make good use out of it. On the other hand, Swin wins on better S-craft (larger targetting area) and arguably better Brave Order (debatable; Kurt's has a bigger effect but less duration, while Swin's has a small stat boost (useful for layering and reapplying buffs), is cheaper, lasts 2 extra turns but also has a reduced effect). Those are very minor advantages. For nodes, its 2 Wind + 1 Water versus, 2 Time + 1 Earth. I think Kurt has an advantage here despite Swin being arguably faster once you start stacking quartz. Overall, it probably comes out to be a wash. They feel comparable enough that I think putting them together on the lowest tier probably makes the most sense. Like, I actually don't know if any other PC in the cast is as bad as the two of them other than real late joiners from RC gacha stones.
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Re: Ranking characters by in-game use: obscura edition
« Reply #80 on: October 21, 2023, 11:45:23 PM »
Labyrinth of Touhou 2.  Disclaimer that I've only been as far up as Floor 17, so it's only covering most of the maingame, things may change at 19-20.

Reimu Hakurei: Reimu very much fills the role she did in LoT1.  That is to say, while she can contribute damage early on (and the ability to hit both defenses helps), her main role later into the game is to make sure the party does not god damned die to the next oncoming full-party nuke the boss is inevitably leveling their way.  She can also help protect you from Spirit damage in particular, reducing it for the whole party by up to 30%.  Between the best multitarget healing in the game and the partywide defense buff, I'm giving her a solid 8/10.  It's overkill at times, but god damn is it nice to be handed the good full-party heal.

Marisa Kirisame: Marisa, on the other hand, is very much the definition of an earlygame unit who falls off later.  It's not just that she's a mono-Mystic character, since she gets some ways to work around that like Sheer Force, but that she also has no access to defense-piercing, something that is very necessary in the later game with the flood of enemies who have significantly high Mind.  Master Spark is big and impressive, but it falls off somewhere around Floor 9, due to that comparably lacking defense penetration.  She's fast, at least, but not much else, and she falls off a damn cliff.  I give her a solid 5/10.

Rinnosuke Morichika: It's not really fair to judge Rinnosuke by the metric of other characters; on his own, he has a rainbow buff and a small heal.  His real benefit once you start getting party members is to hang in the back and give you increased money and item drop rates, and he is...convenient.  He also gets better stat boosts than anyone else, natively, and this can lead to some optimization with subclasses, possibly, but it's going to be a hell of a time getting there.  He pulls double duty on money and items, and the former absolutely helps as you build characters up.  Using one of the eight reserve slots on him during exploration isn't that much of a hassle, but kick his ass out the second a bossfight comes up.  6/10.

Keine Kamishirasawa: Keine...is serviceable starting out, being able to hit both defenses of an enemy group.  In a bossfight, though, she is almost always guaranteed to be in the role of buffer, since she lacks anything in her skillset with any real punch.  Lowish delays help, though, and she's got the best party-wide attack buffing in the entire game, so I don't have problems there.  Plus Disk tries to give her more offensive functionality when she gets done buffing with History Accumulation, but you need absolutely stupid amounts of SP to actually max it out, and it's not as much of a fix on its own.  Still feels like a good 6.5/10.

Momiji Inubashiri: Momiji is your first tank, with a bent on speed and offensive support.  She's got solid attack stats for a tank, and the best raw defense in the game.  The key here being raw; she needs help to buff it, and...the farther in you get, the more her set of passives wears on her.  She gets a strong passive accuracy buff, species advantage versus flyers, and the ability to ignore buffs, alongside being able to act immediately upon being swapped in.  However, Floor 12 is roughly the last place she's useful, and she falls off sharply after that, between a flood of magic-focused bosses and no real way to keep up.  A pity because I really do like her design.  5/10

Youmu Konpaku: Youmu is...a bit confused in her build.  She doesn't know whether she wants to be a bulky attacker or a hit-and-run specialist, and her kit seems to fight itself.  Dexterity, Desperation, and Regen read as her wanting to stay in, while Meikyo and Sword Spirit support a hit-and-run style.  Her costs relative to her MP do not help one bit, though she does have reasonable physical coverage.  5/10, I honestly didn't touch her after I got Yuugi.

Kogasa Tatara: Surprise!  Probably your first status specialist, and likely one of the better ones in lategame.  Kogasa's whole kit largely is built around Terror; inflicting it and abusing enemies who've been hit with it. Sheer Force helps a lot for that, and she gets sustain between Troubled Forgotten Item and the Umbrella skills from Plus Disk.  She has to pick one, but it's solid.  Sheer Force also means she is an extremely solid pick for the Toxicologist subclass, since cutting enemy resists by a third can lead to some magic, and the extra skills she gets there all add statuses she doesn't get.  6/10 normally, I can see her jumping up to 7/10 with Toxicologist.

Rumia: I'm going to be brutally honest.  Rumia feels like she absolutely stomps Marisa's ass in single-target nuking, and this is in spite of having generally worse stats across the board.  Moonlight Ray is way too good of a spell for its cost and delay, to the point that Rumia easily keeps pace with one of our main heroines despite being so much farther behind.  Her other two spells are situational, but they're situations that come up more and more as the game goes on; Dark Side of the Moon is one of a rare few true ITD spells - for the same cost as Moonlight Ray, even - and Demarcation is a multitarget heal that trades potency for clearing debuffs.  Though frankly, it being a multitarget heal at all is impressive in its own right.  Youkai's Knowledge and Piercing Attack only seal the deal for her, especially in the first half.  6.5/10, if she had better stats she'd easily be hitting an 8/10.

Cirno: Cirno only really has one job.  She has always only had one job.  It is, however, a very good job: speed debuffing.  As anybody here knows, speed manipulation is king, and Cirno is extremely good at kneecapping an enemy's speed.  She...also does cold damage but off of ho-hum stats and largely unremarkable formulas.  She's honestly not even expected to do anything after she's done her job; it shows, too.  She even has a trait that lets her just place an unresistable speed debuff on everyone when she gets killed.  And she will get killed.  I don't even think the flood of cold-weak enemies in floors 13-15 really help her case for damage, you have better options for cold damage at that point, but her speed debuffing is second to none.  6/10.

Minoriko Aki: Minoriko is best described as Reimu-Lite.  She's got offensive spells of two varieties, a heal, and a defense buff.  Just that the former are Nature-element rather than Spirit, and her buffs and healing are single-target.  That's not a bad thing, though; she's way more efficient as long as she's not using Warm Colour Harvest, which will bottom her MP out in two uses.  Offensively, she's amazing against Komachi, and on floors 4-6, where the vast majority of enemies are weak to Nature element. Offensively, she's better than Reimu in fights where the boss is going to spend most of their time hammering on one person, and she's guaranteed to be your first source of regular Nature damage.  And like Reimu, the damage falls off later, but the support doesn't.  7/10

Komachi Onozuka: Komachi has an extremely poor track record in her playable incarnations across, and as someone who unironically mained her in Hisouten, I honestly feel bad for the girl.  Thankfully, this may be her best incarnation yet.  She retains her sponge tank archetype from LoT1, but the important thing here is that she gets a lot more going for her than a massive bloated HP score.  The Shinigami's Work cranks her death rates up to where they're reliable in the vast majority of random encounters (handy for the second half of the game where you start running into enemies that you need piercing or ID to dispose of), Regeneration Ability gives her some more durability in long fights, and Edokko God of Death lets her get some solid hits in in return.  Especially if the other guy killed someone else or used an attack with an ID rider. She's never really pivotal to a fight, but she has very seldom been dead weight.  I'm giving her a 7/10, easy.

Chen: Chen reprises her role from the original almost perfectly.  High speed, near-nonexistent cooldowns, frail as hell, but now taken to further extremes.  Chen gets the same Accelerate skill that Momiji possesses, and can leverage it better courtesy of Kimon only having 500 delay and Flight of Idaten having 1200.  Yakumo Clan means that when Ran and Yukari join in, she gets up to a 32% bonus.  And lastly, Instant Attack lets her instantly act when she is brought out of the backline, allowing the assault to continue faster and longer.  She still is largely dependent on Kimontonkou for defense penetration given her poor attack stat, which means she struggles more and more as she gets later in.  You generally need to know which fights to bring her in for.  6/10.

Nitori Kawashiro: Nitori on the surface is terrible outside of Super Scope 3D having some of the highest stat mods in the game, even after being nerfed in Plus Disk.  This also doesn't matter because Maintenance is the single best passive skill in the game.  Double stat bonuses from all equipment means she is able to punch well above her weight class, and she only gets stronger the further in you get.  I honestly have nothing else I feel I need to say.  Easy 8/10.

Parsee Mizuhashi: Parsee's effectiveness is practically binary in nature.  If she's unable to land Terror, she's only going to be mediocre at best.  If, and if she can, however, Jealousy of Kind and Lovely does absolutely preposterous damage output, and if you can land it on multiple targets, you can see a screen full of 4-5 digit numbers.  Parsee also has a large number of damage buffs; Final Blow lets her hit targets afflicted with Terror even harder, Jealousy Manipulation lets her hard-counter enemy debuffers or follow up your own debuffing even harder, and Flames of Jealousy is a strong Dark damage boost.  I think the dev realized this, too, because everything worth landing Terror on becomes an absolute nightmare to land Terror on, to the point that you may as well not try unless you're running both Reisen and Kogasa to dedicate your entire party to landing Terror.  And if that doesn't happen, then she instead runs into massive walls of Dark resist.  I absolutely enjoy her, she has been good, but with how she falls off, unless she catches back up in the very endgame I can't in good faith give her more than a 5/10.

Wriggle Nightbug: Wriggle is a lot like Cirno, a one-trick pony.  That trick, in this case, being poison.  And to be fair, that poison is accurate and long-lasting.  Comet on Earth, her main infliction skill, inflicts 40,000 ticks of poison.  This is a lot.  Unfortunately, this is about all she can do, and I see poison come up as an option less and less as the game goes on.  Poison can't kill and Wriggle's own attack stats are terrible.  She gets poison and paralysis counters as well, and you could make a case for her tricks letting her synergize with Remilia, but that's stretching.  I have to give her a 4/10.

Kaguya Houraisan: Hooo boy.  Kaguya is tough to place because you have two places where you could get her, as with the next entry, and it is a rather sadistic choice.  Kaguya has one major trick up her sleeve compared to any other mages, and only one: Royal People of the Moon.  In exchange for a 75% chance to lose 1 MP a turn, she gets the ability to ignore 90% of her targets' defenses in her spells.  This is more notable the later in you get, where more and more magically hard targets pop up, especially in fights.  The drawbacks to her are not minor, though.  She's slow, she's frail (even with good elemental affinities all around), and her MP recovery is some of the worst in the game, meaning that if someone pops her with Destroy Magic (or god forbid, the spell formerly known as Djinn Storm), she is useless for the rest of the fight.  Her magic comes in three varieties but her biggest spell is Spirit element, though 316.84% MAG vs. 8.9% MND is a pretty big nuke.  There's only a couple of targets this is relevant for before F10, however.  I'm going to give her a 6.5/10.

Fujiwara no Mokou: Probably the better choice of the two feuding girls from IN, Mokou is at first glance a nondescript but competent attacker.  This is an easy mistake to make, as Resurrection lets her have durability that is completely disconnected from her HP score.  It has, at max rank, a 90% chance to proc every time her HP hits 0 and only costs 5 TP.  And that TP score can go well over 30, giving her something along the lines of seven lives.  Keep her from getting knocked back down when she gets up, and she can regen 20% max HP a turn.  She's as good at fire damage as Utsuho down to having Blazing, so no need to run the two at the same time.  The guts-tanking is still so good that it can absolutely trivialize a hilarious number of finishers and boss gimmicks, and the majority of things on floors 7-9 are weak to Fire or Wind.  8/10, easy.

Aya Shameimaru: oh holy fucking shit what.  No, really.  Aya is unfairly good here for an obvious reason.  Gensokyo's Fastest Lessons gives her a guaranteed free turn at the start of the fight.  She's already one of the fastest in the game, so the majority of fights start with her just triple-turning because she popped anything other than Divine Grandson's Advent and so has her delay anywhere from 5400 to 7500 rather than the 5000 that all the plebs have to contend with.  Speaking of, Sarutahiko's Guidance is a haste spell on an extremely short cooldown, and Divine Grandson's Advent is Quick.  She could do no damage and still be stupidly good off of this, but no, she actually can do okay damage as well, while being faster than Chen.  9/10, easily the most useful character in the game.  Only reason I can't give her higher is because she can't entirely carry the party throughout the game, but I am finding very, very few reasons to not let her have one of your slots.

Mystia Lorelei: So...I've honestly never tried using her.  You'll likely get her late in the second stratum unless you're good at taking down FOEs as they come in the earlygame, and by then her numbers come off as...okay.  Her passives largely revolve around Silence, but her one Silence inflictor has 9500 delay, even with a not terrible MP cost.  She comes off as a generalized status-slinger, which can be useful in and of itself at least, and Paralysis is always nice to have around in Poison Moth's Dark Dance.  She does okayish damage, but being able to throw around three ailments at respectable rates is her real boon.  Also she gets Instant Attack for the shenanigans related to that.  6/10, one of these should be able to stick most of the time.

Kasen Ibaraki: It takes twelve wipes to recruit her, so you are likely getting her probably somewhere within the second stratum.  Saying that, it's honestly worth pancaking yourself on the Floor 2 FOE or something twelve times just to recruit her faster.  She's jacked in general.  Solid stats all around, good attacks that hit reasonably hard and have good infliction rates across three elements and two statuses, and a self-buff that is a slightly worse Grand Patriot's Elixir make her an absolute monster to bring along, and she even scales reasonably well, albeit at the cost of having less than great MP recovery compared to how quickly she burns through it.  Also her passives are kind of awkward and scattershot outside of Fighting Spirit, I guess that's an issue.  If I have to nitpick her active set, it'd be that Echo of the Nine Forest Gods is saddled with compensation for multitarget when Kasen's a bossfighter like the rest of the oni.  Still worth a 7.5/10.

Nazrin: I won't hold the event reqs involving her against her (that's for someone else).  I can, however, say that I really don't like her setup.  Nazrin is designed for a very specific type of farming where instead of sitting in the backline like Rinnosuke, she is meant to be out in front.  But she's geared with nothing but single target spells that I have found often struggled to kill what they hit.  Even if they do, she's burning through a lot of MP in short order if you get Extra Steps because the spells are all single-target, and she doesn't really have much outside of that.  4/10 and I feel like I'm being nice.  At least Wriggle had a hypothetical use in bossfights.

Hina Kagiyama: Hina is extremely gimmicky.  But god damn, that gimmick can pay off against the right targets or with the right party.  Whatever you do, don't get her any debuff resist.  She wants to get all of that misfortune for herself, after she spreads it herself with Misfortune God's Biorhythm.  So she can then turn around and either ride the high of treating them as buffs of double magnitude, or use them to fuel Pain Flow for more utterly preposterous damage.  Get party members who either are resistant to debuffs, or don't care about them in one way or another, and she can pull some absolute bullshit - and debuffs are far less often resisted than other status.  I have trouble fitting her into parties but I absolutely respect the strats she can pull off in the best way. 7/10.

Rin Kaenbyou: I've tried to use her.  I really have.  And to my frustration, Rin has only really felt "okay" in practice.  Semi-composite attacker with good speed and the ability to leverage Extra Attack (which is notable; EA can proc multiple times on the same action since it checks not only for the initiating attack, but for every extra attack procced by it), but she basically needs Extra Attack for any of the rider effects on her skills to reliably proc against neutral, nevermind actual resists.  She's very much an auxiliary attacker in practice, meant to focus down enemies who've been statused or otherwise handle formation juggling.  You could probably get more out of her with her cast synergy skill, since those delays running at a 32% stat bonus can lead to some good stuff, but her specific synergy gets...awkward.  More on that later.  5/10, though i may be rating her low.  May need a second run to really get a good viewpoint on her.

Utsuho Reiuji: Okuu here is, in short, the mage for people who don't want to actually care about elements.  Utsuho gets Sheer Force alongside some Kaguya-level near-ITD in Giga Flare, which means she is always getting something out of that spell.  And compared to Kaguya, she packs better bulk and speed.  Definitely a winning trade.  And if you didn't take Mokou, she's going to be your first major fire-using character, which means she performs amazingly in stratum 3.  Fire damage comes and goes with the stratum, but Giga Flare is evergreen.  Intense Nuclear Reaction and Hell's Tokamak have their sub-uses (self-buffing with the former, MND debuffing with the latter), but in general she is there to nuke, and there's enough resistant bosses going forward that I can appreciate this.  7/10

Satori Komeiji: Satori will take a bit to wrap one's head around.  Her gimmick is unique, as she's got almost a mime-style build going on.  Spellcard Recollection is the core of her kit, and it lets her use any other native spell (read: not subclass) that any of her allies possesses.  The trap here is to look at that, look at the ATK/MAG split, and try to build her at being able to do anything.  Don't do that.  Instead, you want to build her based on the party you're running, in two regards.  First of all, Trauma Recollection is a straight up boost to hitting weaknesses that stacks with the element boosters.  If you're on a second attempt at a boss or otherwise know what you're up against, bring her in and optimize her the best you can do what your desired attacker is doing, she'll behave as a force multiplier.  The second is to look at all those high-powered spells running off of poor stats, or by individuals who won't have the offenses to back it up due to role.  Moonlight Ray, Mountain Breaker, and World Creation Press are all easy routes to high damage with her, as are the likes of Chen's skillset.  Or grabbing high-power MAG attacks off of physical attackers who aren't expected to build MAG.  Or Jealousy of Kind and Lovely running off of better ATK.  The point is, Satori is a remarkable force multiplier for your party.  Don't try to make her do everything, just make her do one thing well.  7/10.

Yuugi Hoshiguma: I'll spare the gushing, since Yuugi is probably one of my favorite Touhou characters to begin with.  Really, there's not much that needs to be said though.  Second highest ATK in the entire cast.  Enough bulk to take hits.  Knockout in Three Steps has one of the best ATK to DEF ratios even with the problems it has.  Between its bases, Yuugi's own raw stats, and her passive skills.  Adamant Helix gives her a scaling damage bonus up to 66% based on her lost HP (have fun with punishing any HP-to-1 attacks), Ruinous Super Strength is a flat-out 30% physical damage boost, and Last Fortress is amazing as long as you keep her alive through a bossfight where everyone else is dropping.  Hell, Supernatural Phenomenon hitting weakness will crush just about as hard as Ki3S under the right circumstances.  One of the best attackers in the game if you ask me, the sheer damage she puts out is disgusting, even if she starts having some more survivability problems later on because of the flood of magic-oriented bosses.  8/10, easily.

Hong Meiling: People who are familiar with LoT1 are probably expecting her to be a tank.  And to an extent some of her traits do play into that; between Natural and Gatekeeper's Duty.  But then you look into things like Brilliant Light Gem being some Chen-level bullshit, or how Mountain Breaker is basically Knockout in Three Steps with only 5200 delay instead of 10000, an accuracy bonus rather than a penalty, and less than half the cost.  An offensively-built Meiling is a thing of absolute nightmares.  And even if you don't, Satori can just yank those spells for herself because they have similar ATK values and only one of the two is going to be expected to tank in any capacity.  I can't really give her any less than an 8/10.

Alice Margatroid: I'm docking her a point for how god damned infuriating her recruitment bossfight is.  Alice isn't the greatest when it comes to raw magical power, but she's very much a finesse pick.  This is the first character since Reimu we've had who can reliably hit both defenses with the same offensive stat, which means that there is very little she can't do.  Hell, Enhanced Doll Mobility and Doll Guard give her even more bullshit all around.  6.5/10.

Patchouli Knowledge: Patch is a study of extremes.  Best magic stat in the game, a whole array of wide-area nukes running off of that magic stat.  Oh, and Silent Selene.  Grand Incantation is something she shares with Reimu that lets those nukes hit even harder, and she can gain extremely high elemental resistance from whichever spell she deigns to cast.  Girl of Knowledge and Shade is an improved version of Sheer Force at that.  Her downsides?  Slow, frail, and can't really do much about high defenses herself if she can't overpower them with a big enough MAG score.  Not to my taste, but I imagine there's some people who would enjoy her.  Not sure I'd give her more than a 6.5/10 though.

Eirin Yagokoro: Eirin is...what do I even say about her.  People of the Moon lets her get some defense penetration at least, but her actual noteworthy skill is Healing Limit Break.  Which basically means she is going to be locked to the Healer subclass because her only native heal is a fixed 50% mHP restore.  Hourai Elixir at least does also cure all ailments and debuffs, but she needs subclasses to take advantage of her overhealing trait on people not named Komachi, and that's...all that stands out.  And Healer's class skill is single-target anyway.  I guess she gets debuffs as well, but she's going to be compared to the next entry on that, and she's...not great.  Okay, I'll give her that Astronomical Entombing gives the best Heavy status in the game and she's got a competent MAG score, there.  Kneejerking 4.5/10, probably 5.5/10 with Healer.  I've never really found myself wanting to use her, though.

Reisen Udongein Inaba: Mokou keeps winning.  If you pick Mokou on floor 5, you get her on Floor 7 instead of Eirin, and she's honestly better than Eirin in most ways that matter.  Higher speed, better costs and delays, and perhaps most important here: Intense Vertigo.  This just passively cuts all enemy resistances by 20%, and enables other ailment-users to do their work.  Discarder is also a solid debuff infliction option: enemies have split debuff resistances by type, so having the rainbow debuff makes sure something sticks.  Intense Vertigo's the real winner here, though, since ailment and debuff resistance come up more often the later in you get. Don't expect too much else out of her, but it's an amazing feature that nobody else gets.  Oh yeah, and when she gets the MP to afford it, Grand Patriot's Elixir is still one of the best stat buffs in the game. 6.5/10

Sanae Kochiya: Sanae's probably best seen as a counterpoint to Reimu.  Reimu focuses on offensive flexibility across defenses and partywide defensive support, whereas Sanae has slightly better elemental diversity and more powerful single-target support.  Honestly, advantage Reimu; while Sanae has Power of the Living God to boost Spirit damage, she's not the main one to be able to take advantage of it; Spirit is not an element generally known for particularly high-power attacks, and by lategame, you generally want to ensure everyone's survivability, rather than go full FGO and crank up one person to the heavens.  Still, the rainbow buff is real solid if you can throw it down on someone.  7/10.

Iku Nagae: Holy shit, Iku has a rather comprehensive package going on here.  Good speed, Elekiter Dragon Palace hits disgustingly hard, and between Flexibility and her own affinities, she can self-buff without suffering the drawbacks.  Those aren't the main draw here, though.  Hagoromo Like Sky, one of her passives, is the real draw, and changes her from a Wind-element offensive buffer/defensive debuffer specialist to a Mystic-element blender.  Changing her basic attacks from essentially 100% MAG-50% MND to 140% MAG-10% MND is almost unfair, especially with Sorcerer giving the option of jumping that up even further for the paltry cost of 1 MP per attack.  Considering basic attacks run off of 3000 delay instead of 5000, Iku will generally proceed to shred everything.  Oh, and Magic Counter exists too.  Magic damage becomes more common as the game goes on, so you will in fact see this come up a lot.  8/10.

Suika Ibuki: I think it's just a hard and fast rule in LoT that you'll be damn good if you're an oni, and Suika is no exception.  She'll drain your money for the first nine floors to get her recruitment items, but she's in fact worth it, particularly in the lategame where she can start tanking through magic attacks reasonably well.  Gathering and Dissipating is a lost cause, but Throwing Mt. Togakushi is another strong Nature attack off of deceptively low delay, and Throwing Atlas is one of the strongest Wind attacks in the entire game.  Art of Segaki Binding...exists, but it's got a rather vicious status cocktail to delay an enemy while you do setup or recuperate.  Free-Spirited Oni is an inverted Adamant Helix based on the target's health than the attacker's, but the two bigger strengths in Suika's kit are Fog Labyrinth and Art of Oni Binding.  The latter gives a free chance of Paralysis every time Suika gets a turn, and while the strength is low, the added delays add up.  The former is a 20% accuracy and evasion buff for the entire party, and evasion is an extremely valid tactic for lategame survival.  Suika's never quite going to hit Yuugi levels of damage, but she doesn't need to.  7.5/10.

Ran Yakumo: Ran here is a general all-rounder, and in a vacuum, presumably a straight upgrade to Keine.  Trades defense for speed, better MP economy, three elements available, and Soaring En no Ozuno is a solid option to hit physical defenses with.  The buffs are comparable, but while Keine gets a secondary self-buff as of Plus Disk, Ran can instead buff the backline.  This is deceptively good, as buffs do *not* decay on backline party members.  Even at double cost for the spells and half efficacy for the backliners, this is solid if you can afford the patience to do so.  The only thing I can say against her in this is that bosses may not be willing to give her the time to juice everyone up, so you'll probably be running Reimu alongside her to keep the buffing line alive while you prep everyone else to drop nukes.  7/10.

Remilia Scarlet: Remilia is the embodiment of...solving your problems by throwing a giant pile of stats at them.  She has precisely one offensive spellcard to her name.  Fortunately, Spear the Gungnir is serviceable enough between its speed, power, and accuracy bonus.  The real draw to her is that she has extremely high marks in every stat that is not Magic and MP.  The latter of which she is fairly efficient on anyway, and the former of which she doesn't use unless you force her to via subclasses.  High speed, high defenses in both categories, good ATK, and these all compound with Majesty and its automatic 6% buff to all stats every turn she gets.  However, her simplicity is also her problem, as she only has the one spellcard, and is thus mono-physical.  Curse of Vlad Tepes is a self-buff that is, unless you bring the likes of Eirin, Sanae, or Meiling along, more of a problem than it's worth.  7/10, you could definitely do much worse.

Sakuya Izayoi: And here...is much worse.  Sakuya ate some hell with the Plus Disc's nerfing of Extra Attack, but frankly a lot of her skills are...unimpressive, and the only real use I've largely gotten out of her was clearing out random enemies while exploring.  She's not even great at that.  Aya outdoes her speed buffing despite only being single-target, and Jack the Ludo Bile is both way overpriced and inefficient for what it is.  Don't bother bringing her for bosses.  4.5/10, and that .5 is out of pity because Sakuya doesn't deserve to be put on the same exact rung as Nazrin.

Kanako Yasaka: Floor 10 brings you round two of the Kaguya vs. Mokou choice, albeit without another linked pair, this time between Sanae's two goddesses.  And to be quite honest, Kanako is by far the better of the two picks.  She's not just tanky for a mage, she is tanky, period.  Majesty adds on top of that.  Sky Creation means she does monopolize your fourth slot over someone who could probably use the targeting reduction, but it's a 32% damage boost.  Like Alice, Kanako targets both defenses with one stat, and has all-around solid spell options; Beautiful Spring like Suiga is one of the stronger Cold spells in the game and it has a fairly short cooldown at that.  7.5/10, definitely one of the best general-use mages out there.

Suwako Moriya: Suwako is a super-frail double-stat attacker.  And if this were a different game, she'd be really good within that niche.  Unfortunately, Labyrinth of Touhou is a game that rewards hyperspecialization as far as stats go, so Suwako has the option of doing everything terribly, or locking herself out of one half of her skillset (or making Satori use it).  She's going to be constrained to a hit-and-run style if she wants to get the most out of her setup considering she gets a 24% damage bonus from being in Slot 1, and I suppose for what it is worth, Froggy Power lets her get extra Nature damage.  In practice, though, I'd rather just load up on oni.  Moriya's Iron Ring is probably the actual best thing she brings to the table; faster than average delay, and one of the better Paralyzes in the entire game, but paralyze-locking bosses is typically not a common strat.  I guess you could use her magic options for trash clearing, but...eh, she hasn't impressed me for the most part.  6/10.

Tenshi Hinanawi: Tenshi is the last proper tank you get, and she takes it to an extreme.  Unlike Momiji and Meiling with their more balanced approaches, Mokou throwing extra lives at the problem, and Komachi going all in on HP, Tenshi goes to the extreme and goes high on both DEF and MND, doing her best to re-enact every "No Damage" hit from GBA Fire Emblem.  Anything that does punch through will put her down in short order.  Fortunately, she does her best to make that difficult; Free from Worldly Thoughts just cuts physical attacks by another 30%, and Enduring Celestial gives her a free 33% DEF and MND buff at the start of battle, no matter where she is in the formation.  Contrary to her defensive focus, she has some notable use in her spells, most notably Sword of Hisou, which has a dispel effect boosted to 80% by Sword of Hisou's Owner - the single best counter to when bosses stack buffs, and this happens enough in the following floors to be worth it.  World Creation Press, on the other hand, is likely better off grabbed by Satori unless you're building her offensively and working her support with Iku.  7/10 overall.

Flandre Scarlet: Loses two points for recruitment alone: you need 300 BP with all the other SDM characters, 30 FOEs down (which means deliberate backtracking), and 60 achievements to even get to her recruitment fight.  Which...is honestly not too bad compared to a couple of the ones who come up.  Flandre herself is...a bit of a mean joke in NG if you ask me.  Her damage is monstrous, especially running off of her high stats, but it all comes with notable drawbacks; Forbidden Fruit and Laevateinn both eat MP from your other party members as well as reducing their ATB, while Starbow Break instead deletes 40% of Flandre's maximum HP.  Smoldering Madness is the one upside she gives the party, giving them an 8% ATK buff whenever she gets a turn, and good luck making Vampiric Wrath work, ever, without her getting reduced into a fine paste.  Probably the worst part is just that her elements of choice are of questionable use once you enter the first stratum after she joins.  4/10, though if the final stratum is better about any of these, she may recover comparably.

Yuyuko Saigyouji: Yuyuko takes Komachi's instant death specialization and takes it up to eleven.  Reasonably strong magic in Spirit and Dark aside, her real boon is just that her instant death rates start at 33% and go all the way up to 108% base.  However, and this is probably a controversial opinion here: I don't think her trades are good for this.  Komachi's death is good enough, while she is remarkably bulky and fast.  Yuyuko, on the other hand, has to deal with the usual mage problems of being slow and frail.  Still, anything without Death immunity will more likely fall than not, and Gelatinous Cubes and the like crumple fairly quickly to ID.  Not sure I'd bring her to bossfights unless I really needed strong Spirit magic, 6/10.

Yuuka Kazami: Yuuka is getting two points docked off for her recruitment being obnoxiously byzantine; needing BP from four characters, two of whom are only the most tenuously connected is already nasty enough.  Yuuka herself has an impressive statline herself, with high marks in just about every stat except Mind and Speed.  While she has three spells, all three of them have their uses (and Flower Shot is perhaps one of the single most economical spells in the game), and the combination of Extra Attack, Majesty, and Encounter with a Strong Foe (which will proc on every instance of Extra Attack as well) means she will punch way higher than her skill bases suggest. However, not only is she slow, but she has the unfortunate luck of being in the part of the game where major bosses either resist magic or nature, leading to her just giving a lackluster performance overall, and she just leaves a feeling of disappointment overall  3.5/10.

Yukari Yakumo: Yukari is...frankly quite difficult to talk about because she is the master of edgecase bullshit and weird shenanigans.  Running a Kanako-lite setup statwise, Yukari is bulky and reasonably strong on magic, but slow.  She can offer defensive party support if Reimu is busy healing (or just double up on DEF/MND buffs with her, it's literally the same damn spell in practice).  She helps mono-focused tanks, well, tank better with Border of Power and Magic if you're willing to sink in the twenty-four skillpoints to use it.  She also has a panic button in the form of Yukari's Spiriting Away that instantly gives the rest of the party a turn; strong, but say goodbye to any of her MP.  Shikigami Ran Yakumo+ is possibly one of the single strongest spells in the game (576% MAG - 120% DEF), but if you want to actually leverage it you may as well go in on the Yakumo Clan synergy skill; it requires both Ran and Chen up front with her.  She's got good elements for where she joins and a defense-piercing option, though, so I think I'll give her a 6.5.  She's good, but you have to play to those edgecases.

Byakuren Hijiri: So I know Byakuren's got her fans here but I'm going to have to start out docking her two points for recruitment.  One of the four items is based on a random drop (though I did get sufficiently lost in F14 that it dropped anyway) and the other three require a shitload of BP with Nazrin.  You know how I feel about Nazrin.  Onto Byakuren herself...she's good, but feels geared towards postgame in particular.  Her passives are all regen/auto-buffing options that cost 18 SP apiece to juice that stat (or restore HP) by 12% a turn.  Majesty on steroids, really.  She can build for magic, but frankly it's better to pretend Magic Milky Way is just a debuff spell and focus on ATK with her.  And to her credit, Skanda's Legs and Master of the Trichiliocosm are lightning-fast, especially with the speed buff the former gives.  Star Sword Apologetics comes with its own debuffs and is a composite.  Duplicating Chant...got nerfed in Plus Disk alongside the rest of her kit.  She used to be broken, but now is simply good.  5/10

Eiki Shiki, Yamaxanadu: Two points off for recruitment.  Komachi is good enough and comes early enough that it's not that hard to get 400 BP with her, but requiring seventy two achievements is a god damned war crime.  Shiki's statline plays at wanting to be a hybrid, but as anyone knows at that point in this game, you don't do that.  Either build her for crowd-clearing with Trial of the Ten Kings, or Spirit-element single-target ITD with Last Judgment.  Wandering Sin is there for the disgusting status cocktail it gives.  Cleansed Crystal Mirror does shore up her defenses a bit more than they appear, but Eiki still has mediocre durability and the combination of poor speed and some of the worst spread of delays possible.  True ITD off of an actually good attack stat is good at least, but she will need a lot of babysitting.  Can't give her more than 4/10 here, sadly.
<+Nama-EmblemOfFire> ...Have the GhebFE guy and the ostian princess guy collaborate.
 <@Elecman> Seems reasonable.

Random Consonant

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Re: Ranking characters by in-game use: obscura edition
« Reply #81 on: January 06, 2024, 06:35:04 AM »
This Way Madness Lies: Why yes I just befriended Not!Cthulhu (he punched himself to death soon afterwards)

Fairly nice cast balance overall?  Even the characters I was most eh aren't really dire or anything.  Availablilty for characters not named Imogen/Miranda/Beatrice on the other hand...

Imogen: Well, she's forced but you'd probably want to field her anyways since both the stats and the skillset are pretty good, nice selection of damage (including light, which no one else really gets), some healing skills (one of which can be made full MT while in hyper), stun (with ailment hp bypassing vulnerability inflictions), charm (with damage boost if inflicted while hyper) and offense buffing's there too if you want it.  I guess her early traits aren't all that exciting?  7/10.

Paulina: Well she heals a lot and can be durable... eventually.  The former's nice early when you don't really have better options, but overall she doesn't really have damage and her ability to inflict ailments is entirely reliant on items and also basically nonexistant.  Probably looks a bit better towards the end since you can probably do things with Long Winter but that's final dungeon level late.  4/10.

Viola: Viola hits things.  Repeatedly.  She doesn't do much but hit things (and be somewhat durable) and isn't *especially* exciting about it outside her ability to get extra turns (thereby cheating her hyper gauge) while doing so but hey.  She is pretty frontloaded, so that's nice, at least.  5.5/10.

Rosalind: Unlike the previous two, Rosalind's more of a generalist who's good at stats that aren't HP or speed.  The skillset, on the other hand... it's pretty iffy early, especially when not hyper but then you get a bunch of good stuff MT healing, strong vulnerable infliction, a charge effect (hi vulnerable)... stuff like that.  Also gets a trait which lets her do +50% more damage to vulnerable enemies which can get into 5-digit damage territory levels of hilarious.  Viola's better early, but not by enough to make up for how much better I found Rosalind late.  6/10.

Miranda: Um.  Miranda is *weird*.  Her power's pretty junky, she's kind of frail, her skillset is sort of all over the place and unlike every other character, going hyper shifts her functionality from offensive status slinger to defensive... something, I'm not sure what.  Also she's forced a lot, and while I can safely say I eventually felt comfortable with the offensive part of the skillset (some of which is actually quite nice) I can't say I was galaxy brain enough to comfortable enough with her entire gimmick.  LVP?  I'm not entirely certain, she does at least have a good enough ailment stat to the point where you're okay with an odd dead turn where you Cat Ears/Shield Breaker something if you have to but janky support character is pretty down there on the Zeboyd games comptence hierarchy.  4/10.

Beatrice: Hey everyone it's time for BIG POIZN.  BIG POIZN is actually pretty good apart from the fact that it can't be lethal turns out (especially since it doesn't get rid of vulnerable).  Not to be content with that she also has all the ailments, all of them, in multitarget form so that's also nice (too bad the upgrade to Woo seems to be bugged to not use the listed values), as well as a charge skill for ailments (that can even be targetted on others while hyper, which is crazy).  Direct damage is pretty lacking overall (it's all dark unless you set an early trait to make it pierce, and there's not that much of it) and the durability is kinda bad again but oh well, probably clears MVP anyways because charm and BIG POIZN.  7.5/10.

Kate: TANK.  Kind of proactive about it but not in an especially reliable way?  Having another source of targettable unstoppable is nice, of course, and the skillset otherwise... could be worse for what she's supposed to be doing.  Honestly the main reason I used her because of her unite with Imogen which lets each party member null an attack.  Probably enough for a 5/10.
« Last Edit: January 06, 2024, 06:44:21 AM by Random Consonant »

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Re: Ranking characters by in-game use: obscura edition
« Reply #82 on: August 21, 2024, 04:04:55 PM »
Crystal Project

As Crystal Project takes very, very heavily from FF5, I decided it would be only fitting that it's the classes that get ranked in this case.  And don't worry, as it is a FF5-like, there's a lot of classes.

Warrior: Warrior is a very comfortable class.  Able to use a broad variety of weapons, Warrior also benefits from its skills simply being able to use any weapon, and able to alternate between tank, damage-dealer, and a bit of mezzer as necessary, it has something for everyone.  Best of all, Warrior's stat spread makes it an incredibly versatile endpoint for weapon-based classes.  Hard to say anything abd about it aside from that it doesn't take magic hits very well.  8/10.

Monk: Monk plays at being a magic tank with the high HP and SPI.  The skillset, however, is one of the best in the game for sheer damage potential, and Brawler will get extremely high marks off of a high-STR character when compared to available weaponry.  Chi Blast also exists and has its own unique gimmicks, being a nontyped skill that can't be shut down, running off of an absolutely monstrous SPI multiplier.  It's deep in the skilltree, though, and runs the cost of requiring 30 AP.  The availability of regen and a powercharge-style setup for the fist skills is impressive in and of itself, though, especially with how dominant Wind Fist can get.  7.5/10.

Rogue: Rogue...is better than most thief classes in RPGs.  This is not a high bar.  Rogue is the starter kit for DEX/AGI classes, as well as a physical attacker/support hybrid.  Damage and status are both there, but all of it is with a twist.  Rogue absolutely needs to be at the bottom of the aggro table for 90% of what it does.  It has two options it can leverage for when it's above 90%.  While one of them is reasonable, the other is a high-AP attack that is going to often be less practical.  I like Rogue here, but it's probably the one of the starter classes that phases out the most in endgame.  6/10.

Wizard: Really, I can just sum up Wizard with it being your only real starting AoE option.  Don't act like Monk's got anything going for it there, the one AoE attack it has needs a lot of setup from going into Warrior first if you want to make it be turn 1.  But in lategame the big draw to Wizard is the top-ranked spells.  Flare and Thunder both hit like trucks, full ITD in the former case and half ITD in the latter.  It doesn't bring anything else and is bound pretty hard by MP, but it's solid at what it does.  Helps that magic ignores counters and evasion.  7/10.

Warlock: Warlock is an incredibly bizarre class.  It dresses itself in the trappings of a Red Mage, right down to having doublecast as an option.  The devil is in the details, however, and it trades roles off with Cleric as one gets further into the game.  By mid- to lategame, Warlock is almost entirely a support class, with never getting any offensive spell options past the starting three.  Doublecasting, however, combines amazingly well with its suite of utility spells.  Action economy is king in lategame, and Warlock's the only party member able to consistently revive multiple characters in a single turn.  Or dispel.  Dispels are huge in this game.  8/10.

Cleric: If Warlock was the all-rounder who turned into a support, then Cleric is the other way around.  However, Cleric's support is ultimately one-dimensional outside of boosting or busting fire damage; the former is targeted while the latter is field-wide.  That aside, it just...does healer things.  What it has is two spells that are non-elemental and run off of SPI, making them unique in their ability to not only key off of a defensive stat but, well, be non-elemental.  It's not great but it's not nothing.  Cast times are a bastard on healing and revival, though.  6.5/10.

Fencer: Fencer is...weird.  I've gone through it with a character twice and both times I have yet to feel anything about the class.  It has AGI, it has rapiers, it has some crit shenanigans, it has status, it can work okay off of a Rogue start.  It's...okay?  I don't feel entirely comfortable ranking it but I'd say 6/10, with potential to go higher.  Doesn't play nicely with Hunter but that's due to weapon exclusivity, it'd be a perfect fit otherwise.

Shaman: Shaman has an argument for being the single best class in the game, and I do not say this lightly.  Having access to both offensive debuffs off the bat makes it invaluable support already, but then combining it with early access to Daze (you do not get Slow until much later, so Daze and its chargetime punishing is the next best thing) and attaching non-negligible damage to all of it just caps it off.  The base chassis also has the single best Mind growth in the entire game and remarkable survivability via passive parasitic healing, you know, in case you needed even more convincing to give this class a spot in your lineup.  9/10.

Scholar: Blue Mage!  In true Blue Mage fashion, Scholar's spellset is mostly built around edgecases, with a couple of "reliable" options - albeit notably less reliable than the actual damage-dealers.  Scholar's never going to be a primary there.  Even better, the game does let you know what spells a monster has are learnable fairly easily.  This is good, because unfortunately, Scholar spells are learned by individual, you cannot master the class without learning them all, and Learning costs 25 whole-ass LP.  for the record, that's as much as is needed to master some classes.  In practice this is a very funky healer/support class, and that's honestly fine.  7/10.

Aegis: Aegis has one cool trick, and that's the ability to tank without needing to generate aggro.  It's the only cover-based tank in the game and that...honestly that does count for something; generating aggro in some fights or party comps can be a pain, as can holding onto it, so this is a nice alternative.  Aegis has a lot of nice tricks to give other clases, but isn't one you'd want to field yourself often.  It's a class you will have to make time to level, though, as it's kind of agonizing to try and do so when you immediately get it.  And...well, I would say don't expect it to do much more than tank but you can pull some dirty tricks with a Cleric or Monk secondary; that SPR can be put to work other than tanking, is what I'm getting at.  6/10.

Hunter: Hunter is the alpha strike specialist of the game.  Quick Shot->Snipe will do severe damage, and bows are uniquely high-power in this game.  Furthermore, this is one of the notable Agility-based classes, with perhaps the best Agility growth in the game.  On the downside...well, this is where weapon-locking skills comes into play.  Bows do not play well with other classes often, and then you have to consider skill bases.  Being entirely cooldown-based, however, does allow for some fun cross-class combinations should you find skills that complement the statline and equipment.  7/10.

Chemist: I...don't like Chemist.  That does not mean it's bad, though, and you have three general uses for Chemist.  The first is simply if you want to run away from as many fights as you can, as Chemist has perhaps the best escape skill in the game.  The second is if you desire to run dedicated support for Samurai.  The third, however, is where I see its true value.  Chemist is a fairly utility-based class, but the true utility is in bossfights where you now have an entire alternate set of resources to keep your party going.  The MP restoration is not great, but it's the best you have this side of Warlock, the HP restoration is workable, and this is the only class that can actively fill others' AP, with near-perfect flexibility with other classes courtesy of its skillset's lack of stat-dependence.  All while not using either of its own.  Just don't look at the "all cooldowns are 1 turn" and think you can get insane damage out of Hunter skills.  The agility on this class is precisely dick.  7/10

Reaper: Reaper is an absolute monster of a class, and probably one of the better ones out there.  The lifedrain skills are scythe-locked, but the self-harming skills are universal.  It also has a very high Mind, which means it can carry caster skillsets competently as well - and none of the skills cost AP or MP, again.  It is a bit high-risk high-reward, but if you can keep their HP high, they become significantly tankier than their HP score indicates, as they gain Max HP with the damage they inflict.  It's a class with a solid variety of applications and frankly one of the best damage-dealer options.  8/10.

Ninja: Ninja's own skillset barely exists.  One attack on a cooldown repeated six times for different elements, and some dodgetank facilitation.  And yet it has an incredibly strong role as a carrier for Rogue and Assassin skillsets in particular.  The class' unique innate passive is Dual-Wield, and dual-wielding is still incredibly strong.  And one could argue Chemist could transform Ninja's utility half into a bizarre dodgetanking setup.  The uses alone justifies the class getting a 6/10, since the rest of the skillset frankly doesn't on its own.

Nomad: Nomad is a very, very weird class, and I'm not sure if it's supposed to be accessible as early as it is.  But I figure it is as an easter egg for people who get creative in going off the beaten path.  It's a fighter-mage hybrid class that uses AP, not MP, to cast spells, and is the main source of Water/Ice damage in the game.  This means that it combos very interestingly, both ways, with other spellcasters, as well as physical classes who don't have much need for AP.  There's even a passive attack stance, interestingly.  The core class' passive may also have some interesting interplay with classes who do run AP-heavy skillsets like Monk, as it provides a damage bonus for the amount of AP spent.  6.5/10, honestly.  It takes some setup to work with.

Dervish: Dervish is...fascinating.  Its passives try to set up to be a tanky caster, especially with getting extra durability while casting.  Which, while interesting, is usually counter to what you want to do and just set up so that your casters don't get hit while charging spells.  The other big thing is that Dervish is the Earth/Wind caster, and is best described as an AoE counterpart to Wizard, focusing on wide-area purging as opposed to focused damage.  This, however, is probably why I'd rate it a bit lower, since the biggest threats in maingame tend to be single bosses, and Wizard's AoE tends to be good enough for randoms.  Nice in exploration though.  Oh and Meteor is a fun way to wipe your own party.  6.5/10.

Beatsmith: The speed option for STR-based attackers.  Beatsmith has an unorthodox habit of its moves locking it into repeating it three times...which is what it wants, considering it gets a cumulative 20% bonus for repeated actions.  Beatsmith consistently is able to punch well above what its weight class would appear to be due to this, as long as you set it up it with a spear or one of the few ATK-focused staves.  It has utility, but what you're likely to be using this for is a fast attacker who can hit one or all enemies. 6.5/10

Samurai: I really, really want to like Samurai.  The skillset gimmick is incredibly satisfying to pull off, and the burst damage potential is absolutely there - in theory.  In practice, it is an incredibly selfish class that refuses to play nice with anything else, except *maybe* Reaper if you squint.  Samurai has sole claim to Katana as a weapon class, which means that only classes with "universal" or non-weapon skills are compatible.  Its skillset cannot be exported to any reasonable effect. And to get the most out of it at all, you either need to wait between turns or dedicate a second character entirely to feeding them AP.  Don't get me wrong, the damage is real.  But other classes can set up comparable damage without either waiting for three to four turns or having a dedicated Chemist support.  My pick for game-worst class.  4/10

Assassin: Assassin is the DEX option for people who are done with trying to maintain minimum aggro on Rogue and desire power.  Power in this case being a whole bunch of physical status options, including both ATK Down and MND Down.  In short, Assassin is mostly a physical Shaman, albeit a bit more awkward due to the fact that if you don't want to use knives, you're stuck only using one third of their skillset.  Unlike Shaman, it doesn't just leverage its statuses.  It can capitalize on them with Coup de Grace, what is essentially Soul Liberator.  It's a specific class for a specific playstyle, but it is incredibly strong in that niche.  7/10, and a good part of that is just that it comes significantly later than Shaman.

Valkyrie: Valkyrie is often regarded as the "good" tank.  I'm...not so sure anymore after having played with it.  High HP, STR, and VIT, terrible SPI, and it moves like a slug.  The gimmick to its skillset is that it's the one class that gets power out of both STR and VIT, really.  That and some party support.  Reraise as a passive feels fairly strong, but the way it works in-game is that you still suffer all the penalties of dying (AP to 0, lose all buffs) alongside having your time to next turn maxed out.  Frankly, I find the best way to play a Valkyrie is to just master its skillset, and then shove the whole thing on Warrior, who can back it up with better speed.  5/10.

Summoner: Summoner is a project class, far more than any other in the game.  This doesn't have to do with building Summoner up (which is necessary) so much as unlocking their skills - you need to locate and fight the respective gods you can command, spread out all across the world map.  And they are not easy fights, each one a gimmick boss in their own right.  They're cheap on LP, though, and have incredibly strong effects.  Almost enough to forget the longest CTs in the game and the sheer amount of MP guzzled - enough to dissuade the option of putting the skillset on any other class except *maybe* Scholar.  7/10 once you start getting a skillset together for it, but you're going to be fighting uphill the entire time.

Weaver: If you told me that you'd give me Time Mage as one of the final jobs of the game and I'd like it, I wouldn't believe you.  But Weaver has multiple aspects that gives them some in-game oomph from the word go.  Of its primary tools, Slow is available off the bat, Haste is available in a single job level, and then you have one of the strongest passives in the game: All actions you take on your first turn are multi-target.  This makes for some deceptively good strategies pending on what you have available.  For secondaries, the class itself slots in perfectly as a support option on anyone who can leverage it.  Secondaries for the class itself are reasonably common, ranging to Hunter or Assassin off of good agility, to Scholar or Warlock for a strong turn 1 buffing option.  7/10, pleasantly surprised.

Beastmaster: The last class you really get, unlocking around the same time as Summoner and Weaver, and to be quite frank, well, they can't all be winners.  Beastmaster's got multiple gimmicks, while being Berserker by another name.  The primary one is that its moves all have CT instead of AP, which allows for some effective ways to pocket AP for a class that wants something better than a basic physical while saving it for something bigger.  Plays well with Monk, and the fact that axes are an option means that it can possibly have some interactions with ninja.  And at the least, it has chunky HP for an attacker, even if the ATK growth is only mediocre.  I'm not sure anyone would be shilling the higher damage variance that comes passive with the class.  5/10
« Last Edit: August 21, 2024, 09:31:57 PM by 074 »
<+Nama-EmblemOfFire> ...Have the GhebFE guy and the ostian princess guy collaborate.
 <@Elecman> Seems reasonable.