Opinion on an item i have planned

So, i’m making a fe8 ROM hack and need opinions on one item i plan to have various types of.

Power crests: crests that don’t do much when used, but when held boost one or more stats while lowering another.
dexterity crest: +5 def and -5 mag when in inventory

life crest: [queue life and death skill description here] when in inventory

Intelligence crest: +5 mag but -5 luk when in inventory

and so on so forth. Any thoughts or criticisms to my idea?

Tweak bonuses as you need depending on your game. The idea can definitely work, it’s a question of 1) are the gains meaningful w/o being broken and 2) do they warrant filling a limited inventory slot?

Good luck.

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Yeah, I think using up an inventory slot is a pretty big cost for a total gain of zero stats. With stuff like that you’re just improving their their stat spread. Which, I mean, people do run Life and Death for a reason, so it’s not useless but there are stats to be missed.

I think if you manage to find a balance to make them not ridiculously underpowered/overpowered, it’d be a neat tool for players to find creative uses for them. Like, -5mag/def is really good on an armor knight, but I’d rather honestly give them an elixir. The exchange values should be something high but not hilariously so. Possibly 8-11 high.

I guess you could make multiple variants to cover a greater range of values, and you can put more potent ones later on in the game.

I think these are fairly neat ideas, and I can actually see circumstances in which they might be worth the inventory slot! If I may, repurposing these items as weapons might be worth considering, as that would make it easier to equip/unequip them on the fly to apply their stat boosts and penalties as necessary.

These sorts of “bonus with an equal penalty” trade-off skills are primarily useful for units who really want to laser-focus on filling a certain role, which is also important to bear in mind. I don’t think it being a “net gain of +0 stats” is necessarily the issue, because, say, pretty much any physical unit who’s going to be tanking other physical units is going to greatly prefer 5 more points of Defense over 5 points of Magic. A magical attacker who’s not going to be doing a whole lot of defending is going to like 5 points of Magic more than 5 points of Luck.

Just some food for thought regarding this! As with anything, how well it will work depends as much on how the game is balanced around it as on what “it” itself is!

I think items like those are fine, but you have to be careful what stats your boosting. In those cases I would immediately use both items. Any non-mage unit can benefit from +5def. Any mage unit won’t care about 5luk when they gain 5-10damage.

I think it can be ok, but rather than something like life and death, I think its more interesting and balanced if you have a unit sacrifice stats they want to make one stat significantly better.

For example, imagine one that gives you +8 atk, a big boost in damage, but -5 skl/ luck, so you have a bad hit rate. Or maybe something that gives you +6 def, but -5 res/atk. Or even making the penalty a point of movement for a strong stat boost, or giving a big spd boost at the coat of atk etc.

I think if you let units min/max by giving offensive boosts in exchange for defensive stats and vice versa you quickly run into balancing problems. A trade off isnt very interesting if you dont give up something of value on your unit imo.

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fine tune the stat additions and if you have a magic and strength split then the fact that magic is being the targeted stat could be taken advantage of