Yep, you knew this was coming. I'm at the end of the game now, more or less. Just what appears to be one final battle. So I can start gathering details soon enough AND because I still have my CS2 Excel, plop those in there and start getting actual numbers down on paper. It goes without saying but SPOILER ALERT for the rest of the topic.
Random - If you are reading this, do you have the damage formula on hand? That'll help my work significantly. I do have access to what I think are the Delay values for each action thanks to the GFAQs character analysis topic. Okay, on with the show.
Unlike CS4, Reverie is actually relatively straightforward. There are no bonding events, no super unique Rean accessories, no mecha summoning...just characters, their skills and abilities. And on some level this makes sense as it is mostly a combat focused game compared to the others in the Erebonian arc. However, this doesn't mean it doesn't have its own issues:
Ranking Characters:
Good news - Characters can be easily separated into two groups and there largely is no issue regarding Guests, Pseudo PCs or what not. Once a PC joins up, they basically join up for good. Even if they are not available in the main story at the time, you can access them at the Reverie Corridor. The best way to think of the Reverie Corridor (RC for short) is that it is like P3's Tartarus. It's basically a giant, randomly generated dungeon that is separated into what the game calls stratums. Stratums open up over time as the game progresses until the end of the game, at which point the entire dungeon fully unlocks.
Exploration of the RC is completely up to the player. You can do it as the floors open up (what the game expects), not touch it at all or grind like you are OK and stat max every PC if you want before the 3rd Chapter. Because the RC is pretty much a free-for-all, you can use any and all PCs you've acquired so far. HOWEVER, there are some PCs which are RC only. They unlock as you progress up the Stratums and unfortunately, their unlocks are not fixed. Rather the way it works is that each Chapter adds a set of available RC only characters to a pool. Then, from Floors 1-3, you can unlock 1 of the available characters up to that time. Floor 4 lets you recruit two addtiional characters, and at post-game, you can get whichever other characters you are missing. The characters for each pool is as follows:
Available Starting Chapter 2 - Alfin, Angelica, Roselia
Available Starting Chapter 3 - Toval, George, Victor
Available Starting Chapter 4 - Aurelia, Olivert, Vita
Post-game only - McBurndonalds
In case it wasn't clear, here's an example. You reach the 1st Stratum, you can unlock one of Alfin, Angelica or Roselia. Say you unlock Angelica. This means that on the 2nd Stratum in Chapter 3, your available characters are Alfin, Roselia, Toval, George and Victor. There is no preference or order in which RC characters unlock. I will however make a special note regarding Aurelia because she has a unique distinction where she serves both as a guest in Chapter 3 but unlocks only in the RC via gacha. Since she joins up with the same quartz set up as in Chapter 3, she's also one of the few characters where she's immediately usable out of the box. It is easy to treat her as just a regular PC like the others for this reason.
Long story short, unlike CS4, I think there is a very easy to go about ranking in Reverie. The available 40 characters in the main game + Aurelia are obviously all rankable and averaged against each other into the main topic. For the additional 9 RC only PCs, they will be added on at the end of the topic and averaged against the entire cast. This seems to be the fairest way to get around the gacha nature of their unlock but still take into account their possible availability. The only character who I think shouldn't be ranked is McBurn as he is 100% a post-game unlock only. All other characters can show up any time before the end of the game and be part of your roster so it seems a bit silly not to include them at all.
Starting Values: Craft Points (CP)
Also a much more simplified version in Reverie due to the access of the Celestial Tree. In the RC, there is a tree which when examined will restore the entire party's HP/EP pools. As you progress through the RC, you can get upgrades to it, which allows it to restore CP, Brave Points (BP), Assault Gauge (AG) and the frequency at which it can full restore you. At the max upgrade level, there is no downtime and you can full restore yourself after every fight if you wish. Now for the duration of the main game, you are unlikely to unlock the full upgrade until during the final act but before the last dungeon in the game as there are some better upgrades you can unlock first (the Max BP capacity being the key one).
This means that for most of the game, there is some concern regarding CP maintenance. And let's be honest - even after unlocking it to the max level, there is still CP maintenance because it doesn't make sense for you to go back to the Celestial Tree after every fight. However, what it does mean is that for major confrontations, you are always going to walk in with full resources because the RC is pretty much accessible at any point in the game. So on the surface, it looks like 200 CP would be completely reasonable.
This interpretation does have one major weakness - it hugely incentivizes PCs to hoard their CP and not use any crafts because then it drops the multiplier on the S-Craft by 50%. S-Crafts, like in any other Trails game, can be deployed at any time once you reach 100 CP. So these things are great for burst damage and pretty much staple as part of the damage average. Unfortunately, the hoarding it creates basically kills off a lot of PC uniqueness because while part of a character's identity comes from their craft (skill) set, nobody wants to end up losing that much damage. As such, I'm not a huge fan of a 200 CP interp. Rather, I think a more reasonable approach is 150 CP as a starting value. It matches what I consider stable CP maintenance values for most of the game while also keeping that 200 CP max within reach. You'll recall in in CS2, it made more sense for PCs to start at 100 (or 115 for Dhyer), so this CP inflation is also inline with the CP inflation that happens during CS3, CS4 and now Reverie.
Starting Value: BP
You already saw this in CS4's topic, but just as a recap: BP is used to fuel Brave Orders; powerful field wide effects that hit all allies. You can use them even if you are alone and they are unique to each PC. However, you can only Brave Orders so long as you have the BP to pay for it. Unlike in CS4, the max BP is 8 but to get there, you have to unlock the additional capacity slowly through the RC. Otherwise, the maximum BP pool is 5. Note that some Brave Orders cost more than 5, and as such are pretty much inaccessable if you hold them to some no RC interp. For BP maintenance, it is a similar story as CP maintenance here. Harder at the start of the game, but very easy towards the end once you fully powerup the Celestial Tree. So no issues of keeping BP at 5 or 6.
On the other hand, the question of whether or not PCs can gain more BP still remains. As noted in the CS4 topic, BP can be gained primarily from staggering and triggering a link attack. This is obviously impossible if you are fighting solo and there ARE solo fights in-game where your BP is limited to how much you had going into the fight (excluding item use). Allowing phantom PCs as noted previously does replicate more of what happens in-game, so I'm okay with keeping this line of interp open. The issue here is that it weakens the strength of +BP crafts in game. Things such as Renne's Zodiac Code are pretty great in-game because other than just self buffing, it also restore this very valuable resource that is otherwise unrecoverable unless you have another PC around (and even then, it's a bit random depending on staggers). So, YMMV. You do reward the good physical attackers in-game if you allow Phantom PCs because they are more likely to trigger a stagger, so the dial goes both ways.
PC Skillsets: Trial Doors
Pretty easy work around here too. Only Alisa has a call bigger Laggy button, so it should be easy to see how this works. However, the main thing to consider here is that some PCs will not have access to their full potential without completing a Trial. The complication is that not all trials are available at end game and require you to do the post-game RC exploration. In this case, it's probably easier to ignore these for the main cast. I will make note of which characters are affected since once again, YMMV.
PC Skillsets: Sub-quartz
See the CS4 Planning Topic. But long story short - every PC can equip a Secondary Master Quartz which then shares its primary passive to the user and half of its stats. Since all PCs will typically gravitate towards the most broken MQs, this creates a situation which removes uniqueness and generates all kinds of offensive translation such as everyone with free Auto-life. Even if you apply elemental rules, this wouldn't really work because it just forces PCs to then gravitate towards the most broken MQ in their own element. Ergo, Secondary Master Quartz are banned / disallowed for the purposes of the topic.
PC Skillsets: Quartz schools
Reverie still utilizes the same ARCUS system for every PC, so everything in the CS2 and CS4 topic still applies. The complicating factor here is U-Materials. Essentially, Reverie goes the CS4 route and dials up the U-Material frequency to overdrive. You get a *lot* of these things but the consequence to that is everything worth equipping basically consumes U-Materials. So two schools of thought here as in CS4: One is to ignore these all together and just use the base quartz available. This is easier to stat topic but at the cost of possibly weakening uniqueness because each element has some cool stuff that is only available via U-Material exchanges. Yet at the same time, not everyone will want the same quartz. For example, Rage is Fire element but despite the regular version giving 10% Evade, it is clearly physical oriented so while it might make sense for Sara to equip this, it makes less sense for a pure Mage like Emma to use it. Therefore, the second way of thinking about it is to provide a "pool" of U-Materials and every PC can then spend this pool on their desired set up. As long as it is within budget, they can go wild. This is very similar to NEB's proposed way of looking at some recent FE games where Gold is a limiting factor on what is available to a PC. The major downside to this are the Bells. Bells are unique quartz that halve the recovery delay on a spell. Since Arts is very likely going to be once again the main source of big damage for characters, cutting down 1/2 of the recovery delay can become pretty huge. I'll be open to hearing opinions from others regarding what they think about this. You could also just do a ban on Bells but keep everything else available.
