Skills, skills and skills

Community
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I’ve always been interested in ‘skills’ as part of Fire Emblem, and recently I’ve seen quite the diversity of opinions regarding skills in Fire Emblem, which range from anywhere between ‘skills bad’ and ‘many skills good’, so I’m interested to get some kind of wider perspective on what others think about it.

My personal view is preferably 1 or 2 personal skills on player units, to give some odd gameplay niches or combinations, but nothing that would require too much effort on the player’s part.

As per the custom have a poll.

  • 0 skills
  • Only few skills for specific units
  • 1-2 skills for all player units
  • 3-4 skills for all player units
  • 5-6 skills for all player units
  • Other

0 voters

In fact, have two polls. This poll is about implementation.

  • No skills on anyone
  • Skills tied to weapons only
  • Personal skills only
  • Class skills only for player units
  • Class skills for player and enemy units
  • Class and personal skills for player units
  • Class skills for player and enemy units, and personal skills
  • It’s 9pm, some other option my tired brain hasn’t thought about

0 voters

Well this a bit messy. I’m happy to hear any opinions you’d like to share.

Edit: Turns out I had made a topic regarding specifically generic units before that I just forgot about it since my brain is small, but I guess this is a broader extension.

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Here is my opinion.

Skills should, in general, only be like so:

1-2 skills for specific classes. These skills are merely to ‘theme’ the class. Thieves get two skills, but only technically. Stealing and using lockpicks are just what they do, but it’s good to represent that niche with skill icons.

Then, players and boss units also get ONE skill. This makes each character unique, even when they share classes.

NO personal skills for enemies, except for commanders and bosses.

This is basically how FE9/10 did it, and I think it’s the superior method. Skillfests are frigging annoying. It’s too much to check and makes the otherwise simple combat troublesome.

Additionally, for those class and personal skills, I would rather have a few impactful skills than a bunch of minor, number-boosting or stat-boosting skills. These amount to rounding errors a lot of the time and I just find them exhausting.

Example: One of my least favorite skills is Quick/Slow Burn. QB gives +15 hit/avo at the start of the battle, declining by -1 per turn. Not only do you need to calculate this boost into the combat data, but it changes over time, forcing you to check the turn number to remember exactly what the boost is. Also, it’s impactful enough that you can’t entirely ignore it, yet sometimes also annoying enough that if you do ignore it, it probably won’t matter too much.

I like skills that have a serious impact on the battle. They feel ‘chunky’ and make checking for them feel more rewarding, like you’re a big brain. Ex: That one skill that makes units not double each other in combat. It’s a good skill to give armor knights, and it can work in other contexts as well.

TL:DR, money is important; don’t use too many skills or your weapons will rust.

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That’s about similar to how I would want skills FE to go. Of note is how I think character skills should shape a unit’s playstyle, some I like are savage blow which has you further consider where your unit should engage from and to attack first with them, and spur skills which make optimal positioning of units a bit more important.

I’m of the opinion that pass a threshold of number of skills, everything starts to blur together and I stop bothering to make all the calculations. I think this may be partially due to the UI, and how the effects of skills cannot be shown on the battle screen, and requires a few seconds of scrolling, which doesn’t seem like much, but really adds up over time.

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I personally believe that not only should there be class skills and personal skills for both players and enemies, but as well that the affinity of a unit should also count as a skill. This is the only way to create fun and engaging gameplay.

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Load the player up with skills, give bosses skills, and give generic enemies stats to compensate for the player characters’ skills. Makes player characters unique while not making it a cake walk.

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I for one prefer skill emblem. Player units, bosses, weapons and even selected mobs should’ve skills (see: Conquest, Berwick saga). Skills add a much needed flavor to the FE gameplay imo.

Only skills i am not a big fan of are %proc skills. Passives, trigger condition and combat arts are always welcome, imo.

Also i think most skills should be personal rather than class based, with a way to un/equip non personal ones ala Radiant Dawn.

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I don’t mean to hijack my own thread, but this inspired a never seen before gameplay mechanic.
I present: the affinity heptagon. +/- 30 hit and effective damage.
Now if only there was an easy way to see unit affinity… perhaps a modular minimug designed for affinities, but that would be ridiculous.

I do agree,I think it’s beneficial to have enemy units have higher stats in some areas, particularly str/mag.

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I don’t generally like skills, primarily because I dislike skill emblem a lot, and how they’re handled there, but I think that what Klok said would be my favorite approach. Give player units/named bosses and enemies personals that help to give them their own identity as units, but keep that stuff away from generics, please. Usually, I’ve got my hands full from checking out their stats and my own, I find it really annoying to also have to start checking skills on generics.

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I think skills are best used very sparingly. Give maybe one or two units a skill, perhaps a few weapons and bosses get skills, but that’s it. There are already plenty of ways to differentiate units in vanilla. Skills give an extra avenue for this, but when you start giving skills to everything, they aren’t special anymore. And the same is even more true for bosses, I feel. My lategame boss with Resolve wouldn’t be anywhere near as cool if all the bosses had skills too.

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This is the main reason why I always thought the Tellius skill system was the best. By allowing the player to shuffle non-personal skills between their units (and imposing some sort of limit on the number of skills any given unit can equip at once) you turn skills into another resource to managed wisely rather than this static entity, which leads to some really interesting gameplay decisions imo.

For example, do I give my desperation scroll to my fast but frail mage or to that strong but slow mercenary who has a personal skill that lets him automatically double in some certain situations? The latter example also ties into another reason I enjoy un/equippable skills so much: S Y N E R G Y.

Also by making skills non-permanent, it allows you to be more flexible and change up your strategies between chapters. This is different to something like statboosters, where once you’ve given them to a unit there’s no way to get them back. This adds weight and impact to the decision of who gets them (which is a good thing in statboosters’ case, I think), but for skills I feel that flexibility is more fun.

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My current implementation is player gets multiple personal skills, kinda like the FE4 or 5 approach, along with some standard class skills like crit boost. About 0-3 personal skills and 0-2 class skills. The amount of skills can vary because classes are not created equally, myrms probably need 3+ skills to be good and flashy, but a cav can function with no skills at all.

My enemies get a different set of class skills, mostly meant to counter certain types of units in order to diversify the player’s team.

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On a traditional skill system, I would do what coincidentally most people are agreeing on, or something close to it:

  • Fundamental skills such as Lockpicking, Canto and Crit Boost.
  • One Skill gained at promotion. These would grant buffs/debuffs and/or conditions that are either permanent or have consistent requirements, such as Seals, Vantage, Breakers, etc.
  • Personal Skill(s) for all PCs and Bosses. This is where all RNG based/proc skills would go to reduce the random factor against the player, like Re-Move or Aether. Most characters would only have one, with possible exceptions being a gimmick-based character and the final boss.
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It depends on what sort of gameplay experience you want.

If you’re trying to create “difficult but fair” type of experience, where you want the player to win through precise strategies and epic number crunching, you probably want to mitigate the additional amount of skills available. At least those that require additional math.

If your difficulty is more up in the air, and your focus is to make something a little more zany, I think including skills is fine.

From my own experience, I pared down how skills worked in VQ throughout it’s development, changing skills that each class got (2 class + 1 personal to 1 of each), and removing skills that had a random percentage activation.

My view more and more on many skills is that they create additional cognitive load for the player and more for them to consider. It also depends on what kinds of skills you refer to (something like reposition is very different from aether).

However, I think with proper thought and balancing, you can make them work in an interesting way that will appeal to a broad spectrum of players.

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Say no more.
LastHeavenlyThrone-28

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I’m a proponent of 0-1 personal skills per unit with each one tied noticeably to the unit’s personality, hopefully without exaggerating a single personality trait to the extent that they’re one-dimensional.

Some examples I’ve been toying with:
The cavalier having Savior because his HORSE is STRONG
The mage having Acrobat because her superior connection to the elements allows them to navigate any terrain
The soldier having Miracle because he really doesn’t actually want to be here and just wants to live and make it back home to his wife
The priest having Inspiration because his face is nice to look at and grants passive combat buffs

I’ll admit the last one appears to be some modern FE nonsense but the pretty monk idea goes back to at least Lucius in FE7 if not earlier so it is at least FEGBA nonsense. It’s made for a fun character design exercise, if nothing else.

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Here’s a hot take: the question is not “how many skills”, but rather “Why do I need skills (in the first place) and what do I as a developer hope to accomplish by adding skills to my project?” It doesn’t matter if your units have 1 or 5 skills if the implementation of skills is outright terrible or even half-baked.

One of the things to consider when implementing skills is the question of how visible or relevant you want them to be. If your project requires or expects a good use of skills, then you’d do well to instill the habit of using those skills on players. A great example of this is the first map of Souls of the Forest. Although there are no other skills but Canto+, the opening map does a stellar job demonstrating how to use it. You attack an enemy and use the remainder of your move to escape some other enemy unit’s attack range. It’s simple but effective. From the second map onwards it’s the player’s job to figure out where and how you use Canto+ the best. Similar approach should be adapted with any other new unit and their skill(s): when you introduce new player characters, you also effectively introduce at least some new skills. The joining chapters of your new units should then also teach how their skills are used. And once again, from that point on it’s on the player to figure out where and how to make use of those characters and their skills.

If your skills are more on the background so to speak, then it’s imperative that you don’t punish players for not figuring out where or how to use certain skills - instead, you reward them for figuring that out for themselves. I don’t think the reward needs to be anything substantial: being able to beat a chapter more easily or simply creating a unit that is fun to use is a reward in on itself. While Gamble Volke might not be the best unit in RD even with 100% crit, or even among the best candidates for Gamble, I still had fun using him in the endgame maps.

There is one other thing you should take notice of: Synergy (which already was mentioned by other users). I’ll probably over-simplify this a little, but there are mainly two types of synergy:

  1. Synergy with the unit’s other skills

  2. Synergy with other units and their skills

While you are not very likely to achieve 1 with just one skill per player unit, you can reach 2 to an extent. It could be something as simple as:
An archer deals chip damage on enemy merc > a knight kills merc and protects archer from enemy myrm > archer has a skill that buffs adjacent allies > knight can now one-shot myrm on EP.
The more skills you have, the more important it is for them to synergize. Not every single skill in the game needs to, but generally the more they do, the better. Skill synergy is something that can be taught to players through gameplay, but it might not be the best idea to outright require players to utilize weird or complex 4+ skills synergy strategies to beat a map.

Having too few skills can make your skills feel irrelevant and obscure, while having too many skills can make it feel like you’re using them haphazardly and/or just to fill the quota of 5-6 skills. The right amount of skills is dependent on what you hope to accomplish and how you want to reach that goal, hence the question I presented in the beginning of this post.

8 Likes
17

In my current project, player characters get a personal skill, one at T1 Lv 7 (you auto promote at 11) and one at T2 Lv 2 that depends on which T2 class you promoted into (almost everyone gets 3 options) for a total of 3 skills. There are a few instances of synergy within skills, I was really trying to make it so each character was customizable as heck.

Don’t like skills?

Alternatively, if you aren’t a fan of skills or the particular skill the character will gain, you can instead opt for a 15% buff to a predetermined growth rate (including MOV, for shits). For example, the only playable Wyvern chooses between Imbue and +15% RES at T1 Lv 7.

I’ve seen a lot of people talk about how they dislike proc skills and I can totally understand, so I opted to turn the proc skills into chargeable skills. Cancel sucks on archers (looking at you Leonardo), but cancel doesn’t suck on an archer if you can choose when to proc it, now my archer can chip jav/hand axe users without worrying (but only sometimes).

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I think there’s a lot you can do with skills and there’s no one “right way” to do it. But a sentiment I’ve seen crop up again and again, even among those who love having lots of skills, is a dislike a proc-based skills. I can totally see why, they’re unreliable and can feel like dead skills when you’re planning out your turn because you can’t count on them doing anything on any given turn. That said, there’s something I can’t help but like about proc skills- they’re just so audacious.

Fire Emblem is, at least in part, a game of risk management: of continually being forced to balance efficiency and risk. Randomness in a strategy game, things like hit rates and critical hits, serves a number of purposes- it keeps gameplay from being too formulaic, forcing the player to revise their plan to account for a miss and giving a rush of excitement when one of your units scores an opportune critical hit or dodges an otherwise lethal strike. As the player gets further and further into the game, it is expected that their skill at risk management will improve. Then, just as you think you’ve got the hang of it, WHAM! Here come these totally unpredictable proc skills, blundering about and making a mess of everything you’ve learned. Suddenly, it’s like you’re back at square one trying to account for this new random variable. I can’t help but love it, it makes progression more than just a simple linear experience, but actually fresh and exciting. Of course, it has the potential to just be frustrating, but eh; nothing ventured, nothing gained.

I do think there are a lot of design challenges proc skills presents, however. First of all, they’re a lot less interactive then the other random elements of the game. For example, your hit % can be modified by the unit’s skill, your chosen weapon, your foe’s speed, the weapon triangle, and so on. Proc skills, on the other hand, are pretty much just a function of the unit’s skill stat. Making proc chances work more like hit rates might be an avenue to remedy that- and why the predictability of a FEH style “charge” system or implementing them as Combat Arts are popular alternatives.

Furthermore, there’s a bit of a disconnect between some proc skills and their actual impact. If an Aegis proc saves your unit, it’s usefulness is obvious, but the experienced player won’t put themselves in those kinds of situations as often. Then, the odd Pavise, Aegis, or Sol proc simply exists to preserve your HP- which may permit you to be more aggressive with them on future turns, but there’s a lot of distance between cause-and-effect in that scenario. Offensive proc skills are more immediate in their impact when they secure a kill, but given their randomness you’ll not always have set yourself up to capitalize on it.

One of my favorite memories of using a proc skill was actually the FE14 Ballistician’s Opportunity Shot. For those unfamiliar, at the start of the player phase there’s a chance the Ballistician will fire a shot at a random, nearby enemy. It was still a random proc skill, but because it happened at the start of the turn, the impact of it was immediate and visceral. I could plan my whole turn around it when it activated. That’s another design space I’d like to see played around in.

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Personally, I think the “too much information” argument for having skills is a little ridiculous in practice, at least with the scope of things that most people are doing with tools that people are using. We’ve conditioned ourselves to learn Sol, Aether, Luna, Pavise, Gamble, Vantage, Adept, etc. over time, so anyone can learn what the skills that will be used can do. Now, Skill bloat is a different side of that coin, as is how the skills function (RNG proc percentage is completely different than Lex Talionis’s charging skills, as those you just have to keep track of the timer for them to be relevant versus always having to be alert in case a skill randomly triggers).

In the scope of what’s presently “standard” for hacking/game creation, I do tend to think the basic Lex Talionis approach is probably the smoothest. Giving each class a skill or two and having the selectable Feats system to offset it is quite nice since you can plop those extra stat points into areas where your unit might be falling behind or just to customize them more towards your playstyle or even the headcanon lore you might have for the character. I always like the idea of Personal Skills (more on that in a bit), and that’s easy enough to do with LT. I’m presently planning a small-ish project that’s going to use LT and I’m aiming for 1 Personal Skill (player units and named enemies), 1 T1 Class Skill (Lv 1, includes Stealing, etc. type of “innate” properties), 1 T1 Assist Skill (Lv 3, Shove, etc. type of skills), 1 T2 Class Skill (Lv 2 Promoted), and 2 Feat selections (Lv 9 Base, Lv 4 Promoted).

I do think that items should add skills of varying degrees as well in their effects - more common stuff like a Fire-based magic attack adding Seal Def or switching the randomness of Killer weapons to convey the effect through a charge-based skill on one end of the spectrum, and things like a “legendary” weapon granting access to Resolve or Aether on the other - either way, I don’t see what’s wrong with having these on top of units having their own skills.

That said, were I designing something from scratch for a full project not using an existing engine, I think I’d look to Valkyria Chronicles to incorporate some ideas and blend it with a Path of Radiance / Awakening hybrid. Each unit would have a handful of Personal “Skills”, but usually things with weaker effects in the vein of VC’s Country Bred or Scout Killer, in order to give them some personality and “uniqueness”. Their “class” would carry any traits that it might need - Flight, Canto, something akin to Daunt or Colossus for large, imposing characters/class types, etc., and none of these would be removable.

Then, you tack on the regular Skill system (level-based learning, manuals, etc.) with PoR’s Capacity system and Awakening’s skill equipping. Skills are permanently learned but you aren’t forced to completely lose a skill if you get rid of it like in PoR - it just goes into your unequipped list. This way, an individual unit has flexibility like you might have in Radiant Dawn, but without the abusable nature of being able to pass skills around between characters like candy and it limits how many busted skills you can stack as equipped at the same time since they would all have Capacity values, unlike Awakening. (Kicking around the idea for more traditional skills to be allowed as part of a unit’s Personal “Skills” loadout so that they’re not counted towards the Capacity and are clearly in a spot where they can’t be unequipped, i.e. skills akin to say, Tormod having innate Celerity or Nephenee with Wrath, etc.)

It’s an era where data limits and video resolution aren’t really issues any longer and while too much information can be hard to retain, if you’ve got the information right in front of you and can easily pop up a full description of what something does at basically any time, I don’t necessarily see the problem with a more in-depth skill system, especially since this is a strategy series. (Yes, yes, Fire Emblem loves its simplicity and that’s great and all, but I’d like things that are a little more involved sometimes.)

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Did someone say skills?

Charge skills w/ command activation are blessed. Make everything a charge skill or have combat arts replace proc skills. Together, we can prevent proc skill resets and put power back into the player’s hands.

As far as skill bloat goes, I think there are steps that fan game designers can take to mitigate that. One is to have a very consistent defined structure. Such as “one T1 skill, one T2 skill, one ‘mastery’ skill, and one personal skill.” Multiple level-up skills per tier are pretty chaotic, in my opinion. Keep it simple. Where T1 skills are fairly basic (such as passive abilities present in GBA or, for classes who don’t have them, some kind of battle stat boosting skills or something else simplistic). I like how FE7x has the same T1 skill used by multiple classes, the way BwdYeti executes it is very intelligently designed and minimalist (if I recall correctly he also has most T1 skills learned at Level 5 to better pace out the introduction of skills as part of the gameplay progression). T2 skills to differentiate classes more effectively. Mastery skills (if you want) so that units get access to new tools late-game. Personal skills (for PC’s and major enemies maybe) to make each character unique even if classes are duplicitous. That’s a maximum of 4 skills per unit.

Combat arts GBA :soon:.

3 Likes