[FE8] Skill System v1.0 - 404 skills done, more on the way

[2WB]

@redlightning

Using the term “transfer” entails immunity, because it means your weapon can’t have the devil reversal trait when you’re using it.

No, I do not read this this way at all - Giving it away doesn’t mean you are immune to getting gifted it at a later point. Someone ends up with it when you ‘transfer’ it.

My expectation of two units with a devil weapon and “transfers away devil effect” fighting is that each of them simultaneously transfers the devil effect, thus both units would end up with it (unit B is suffering from unit A’s devil weapon and vice versa). My expectation, if there’s only one devil weapon involved, is that the unit who didn’t have the devil weapon doesn’t have a chance of whacking themself.

The problem of not knowing that “devil effect” has a specific meaning; (21 - Lv)% or (31 - Lck)% chance of damaging yourself instead of your opponent when you hit them - is a problem that is difficult to clarify; and directly feeds to why Alice among others have believed that it would be based on the user’s luck - since there’s an implicit oddity in ‘passes your devil reversal off’.

To me personally, I think that it’s immediately obvious that you would never be actually penalized for having more stats, because that’s just very Un-Fire Emblem. More stats is better and inverting that isn’t okay; and if the designer betrays that idea I would feel betrayed and lied to about the basic conceit of having numbers go up. Fire Emblem isn’t Final Fantasy Tactics where having more stat sometimes is a downside, the precedent set by every game to my knowledge is that it is never worse to have more numbers - ie. there are not “deals bonus damage equal to 50% enemy’s res”; so there’s no logical reason - from my perspective - that having a unit having gotten high luck would make their devil reversal passing away to be less impactful.

@redlightning

I don’t mean to be rude but is English your first language?

Just never say this. Please.

The words you used are insufficiently clarifying. It’s not as simple as you think it is; and please trust me when I say that I know how a thing seems and sounds and looks simple - the problem is that you are not the target audience - or more accurately, the persons reading you do not have your context.

@redlightning

But even if you know how it works in vanilla, why would the average user assume it works the same in skillsys if the source of the reversal isn’t even a weapon anymore but a skill?

a. Why would it work differently?
b. At some level, the player and designer must have some level of intrinsic trust and faith that they are going to work with the other. You simply can’t reasonably design things without this - look at Fire Emblem Heroes’ skill tooltips for an example of what it looks like when you don’t - literally full-phone screen sized skill descriptions that have shortening keywords in them:

And I think we can all agree that these are awful, just about the worst to read, yeah?

@redlightning

For example right above, it took someone pulling the code out in order to definitively prove what the skill does.

This is true of literally everything. The only way to 100% conclusively prove something mechanically about a video game is to look at the code - otherwise, someone could have snuck in random elements that coincidentally never occurred in your test rounds.

I don’t think this is a good argument. It’s the easiest way to demonstrate the objective truth.

[Alice]

I WAS gonna say, maybe just havig each hacker give it a longer description with the patch that allows you to have up to 5 lines of text. But that would look needlessly complicated.

My main gripe is that the original description implies that your chance of devil reversal will be the one that the enemy has, which is not true. However, I’m not the best writer, so I’m not sure how else you would convey the correct way of how it works in just those 2 lines of texts, uless you removed the bi that explains what are the chances of devil reversal. But I don’t think that’s ideal either.

In the PR, I submitted this:

Devil's Luck: Immune to Devil Reversal.[N]
Curses enemy with Devil Reversal if unit.[N]
has Devil weapon equipped.(31-Luck %).[X]

which is perhaps SLIGHTLY more accurate than what redlighting proposed, but still not fully true?

Maybe I should change it to this instead:

Devil's Luck: Immune to Devil Reversal.[N]
Curses enemy with Devil Reversal if unit.[N]
has Devil Reversal effect.(31-Luck %).[X]

Thoughts?

[redlightning]

Devil’s Luck: Immune to Devil Reversal.
Gives unit’s Devil Reversal to the enemy.
(31 - attacker Luck % for reversal).

Keeps immunity, keeps the requirement that you need devil reversal to give it to the enemy, and clarifies that it’s the attacker’s luck being used rather than your own. That feels like a pretty good solution to me and it’s nice and simple. Seems like it would make everyone happy.

[Alice]

THIS! Great solution

[Someone]

@rain

I tried master. Unfortunately, this causes a much more serious issue where, when Ross reaches level 10 and the player enters a new chapter, something terrible happens. I’ve tried both master, 1a0002, and a commit further back (Dark Bargain Fix). All of these have Ross either becoming a garbage unit, or promoting with no dialogue into the player’s choice of six different classes, including Monk and Pirate.

That is happening due to having Mokha’s ClassChg List expansion enabled. That patch reworks promotion to allow up to six promotion options and comes with some extra promotion options added by default as an example (in Journeyman’s case, it adds Mage, Shaman and Monk). It doesn’t feature dialogue for trainee autopromotion and the ‘Ross becoming a garbage unit’ thing is an actual bug (which should be reported to @Mokha).

If you don’t plan to use said patch’s features, you should go to EngineHacks/Config.event and comment out line 229 (#define CLASS_CHG_EXPANSION).

[Shuusuke]

I feel like the reply to my post mostly exemplified the issues I mentioned, and what few points that could be worth arguing against were mostly already addressed by 2WB, so I’ll keep it brief.

A hypothetical looping problem that literally can't exist : The only way you’d know it can’t exist is if you checked the code, which is something you’re supposedly against doing.

People will make assumptions no matter what : This should not encourage anyone writing a description to pile up more assumptions than necessary. The fact that you had to list all of those cases that your description left unaccounted for exemplifies what I said.

Then you go on to attempt to mock me for my English understanding when the misunderstanding wasn’t even mine to begin with. You’re only mocking Alice, yourself, and whoever else misunderstood for their English knowledge.

The fact that someone is ignorant of how Devil Reversal works is really not the fault of the description. And if they’re not ignorant, why would they assume that in this case it’s different, when the description doesn’t say it is?

It took someone pulling the code out to prove what the skill does : Yes, that’s how proving it works, instead of “the description wouldn’t say it otherwise” (ignoring the fact that the description in fact does not say it). During my time helping people, I’ve seen this misunderstanding come up before, so I’d looked into the code by chance, but that is not a requirement as you seem to put it. If someone’s unsure of what it does, ideally they would check the code, which wasn’t the case this time so someone else did it for them.

So in the end, you didn’t convince me that the current description is inadequate nor that your alternatives are improvements, as I think that adding “attacker” to the description just opens up more room for assumptions. “It’s always been the attacker, right? But if this time it’s explicitly saying it’s the attacker, does it mean it’s the defender when it doesn’t say anything?”, and you go back to the initial problem just with a different cause. You might think I’m being melodramatic or paranoid, but you yourself called me “experienced” so I’m sure you see where that comes from, even if you disagree. But that’s fine, you shouldn’t aim for convincing me since I’m not a skill system dev, and it’d just waste both of our times. If they’re convinced, they’ll change it, and then if I make a hack that uses those skills I’ll change it back, and no big deal.

[2WB]

@Alice

My main gripe is that the original description implies that your chance of devil reversal will be the one that the enemy has, which is not true.

I do not believe the description implies this; but that’s because I take “moves devil reversal to opponent” as transfer of the effect (“31-Lck% of hit self”) and that effect coincidentally scales on the stats of the unit suffering from it.

My description of choice would be

Devil’s Luck: Immune to Devil effect, and
passes it from self to foe.
(Devil: 31-Lck% of harming self on hit.)

But the problem comes in how there are multiple skills of a similar nature and it will always be a bit difficult to reconcile how This and That and Other all interact with one another - my personal favourite example being “how does having multiple proc skills actually work” - Because the answer is “it rolls each one successively”.

If you have Sol and Luna, you do not have a [Dex% ^ 2] chance of getting both effects. You have multiple independent chances for rolling each and at most one can proc - Having multiple skills increases the chance of getting any of them, but decreases the chance of getting the ones later on the list.

That’s not obvious from the skill descriptions, and doesn’t really make sense to put in any proc skill’s description that there’s an order to the skills and each one checks if it happens in order of Lethality > Aether > Astra > Dragon Fang > Sol > Luna > Ignis > Vengeance > Rend Heaven. This order is a pretty rational one - When you’re in need of a heal you want it to be highest priority, but you also want the skills with the lowest chances of activation to be the least affected by this indirect rate decrease, since being a stronger skill also maps to having a lower proc rate.

This is what I mean by needing intrinsic trust. You can’t reasonably fit the explanation of how that works in the skill description, and you should not have to. In the case of the devil reversal effect, we’ve also not specified that it’s “instead” of hitting the opponent, for example, as opposed to both units taking damage. But that’s how the effect works in all Fire Emblems, so we have that expectation set already.

If there is a question about it, this is the best possible use case for the already in-game Guide function; a suitable place for players who have questions to find answers in a format where one can be as long form as you need without having to futz with short descriptions.

[Alice]

@2WB

I do not believe the description implies this; but that’s because I take “moves devil reversal to opponent” as transfer of the effect (“31-Lck% of hit self”) and that effect coincidentally scales on the stats of the unit suffering from it.

The original description reads:

Devils Luck Inmune to Devil Reversal.
Gives Unit’s Devil Reversal to the enemy.

On that second line, the word choice there makes me think it means it’s taking YOUR devil chance, and applying that to the enemy (So if you have more luck than the enemy, the enemy woud have less chances of getting a backfire than if they had their own devil effect active)

Thankfully, NOW I know that’s NOT the case. But still, that description is VERY misleading.

@2WB

But the problem comes in how there are multiple skills of a similar nature and it will always be a bit difficult to reconcile how This and That and Other all interact with one another - my personal favourite example being “how does having multiple proc skills actually work” - Because the answer is “it rolls each one successively”.

Now THIS, I feel is a completely separate issue. We’re talking about multiple skills being “active” simultaneously. And I don’t think it’s that beig of an issue, because I think most people would assume that you can’t activate multiple proc skills in a single hit of a round of combat. I think that falls in what you said about intrinsic trust.

[Aeroponce]

Did i cause this?

[Vesly]

I have no idea why there were so many tl;dr messages about this, lol.

[MercenaryVictor]

Hey Vesly I have been trying to insert the growthgetter.event
Do I need to do something first

[Vesly]

That’s part of a buildfile. Are you using makehack_full.cmd? Or are you running a custombuild? If you’re using insert ea, it won’t work.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230924162521/https://dw.ngmansion.xyz/doku.php?id=en:en:guide:febuildergba:skillsystems_custombuild

[Mokha]

@rain

Use FEB patch in ClassChgExpa to configure expanded promotion list, it reworked on trainee auto promotion

[rain]

This is a small issue, but quotation marks appear to be broken in my copy of the game, with the Skill Systems patch as the only major addition. Additionally, exclamation marks (only) do not display in chapter titles (only). If I use a standard quote character, I am able to get closing but not opening quotes. [OpenQuote] and [CloseQuote] both produce garbled characters.

Version used is commit cad6f499b… etc.

[Sme]

Is the quotation marks one this issue?

UTF-8 Opening Quote menu character needed

Titles from chapter text doesn’t appear to have an exclamation point in its font, so it wouldn’t work:

[Vesly]

[OpenQuote] breaking is my fault with utf8 transition. Comment it out in config until I fix it.

Looks like Dragz brought this up a while ago. Sorry!

[rain]

Thanks for letting me know. I’ve been working on the hack for a bit; is there an easy and safe way to reconfig without starting fresh? I’ve tried running MAKE_HACK_FULL on the ROM, but obviously it’s not exactly “clean”.

[Vesly]

Skillsys is a buildfile: you’re intended to edit .event files to build a rom from the clean version, not edit the resulting rom with febuildergba. If you want to use febuildergba, it has a 2 year old version of skillsys as a patch. Sorry.

[rain]

Thanks again!

Incidentally, I have an issue that applies even to a ROM with only the skills patch, one not modified with FEBuilder: when I enter a skirmish in Za’ha Woods at the start of Ephraim’s route, it replays the chapter associated with the region, where Artur is recruited. He’s even labelled as mandatory, and the village is there. I couldn’t find an issue about this on Github though!

[Vesly]

I think because of this part:

FireEmblemUniverse/SkillSystem_FE8/blob/21799860cac1eff85026083e6afada846b987285/EngineHacks/_FE8EssentialFixes.event#L23

Perhaps this should be made into a config option.