What are your thoughts about the FE8 Skill System?

Dunno man but i found it in @circleseverywhere SkillSystem so i guess it’s him.
About Sureshot and Lethality i heavily modified from this https://serenesforest.net/forums/index.php?/topic/81101-fe8-skill-activation-animations/

Good that there are at least something out there.
I tested it out, they look nice but these animations still needs a little more work.
I’ll suppose i’ll take the Sure Strike recolors if i had to. Thanks anyway.

TBH I don’t prefer using the Skill System but I understand why people like using it.

The reasons why I personally avoid (not dislike) it:

  • Various other essential things don’t work with it
  • Not all skills work properly or are just bugged
  • It degenerates the FE combat and strat into a shallow skill comparison, something all modern games do since FEA while in FE4 and FE5 these were supplementary to class and char individuality and not meta core where you have to min-max 5~6 top tier skills.
  • A lot of them just lay another layer of RNG (which is also another problem of the recent games)
    Would be better if those were command skills or situationaly ON or OFF
    where players have full control and responsibility for their actions.
  • Everyone and their grandma uses it.
    Since the skill patch there has been a creative recession
    with many creators avoiding to originalize their work.
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What essential things don’t work with it?

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Skills are barely relevant at all in Awakening. Stuff like Galeforce is neat but a very far cry from necessary. Even with games like Conquest, msot skills are irrelevant and only a handful actually matter. If anything the skills system is woefully under utilised in main game FE, it only really has any significance in Conquest Lunatic. Awakening Lunatic and Lunatic+ too I guess but no one plays that, stat inflation is a bigger concern.

I didn’t have easy mode and lack of DLC in mind.

In a normal environment without challenge DLC sure it doesn’t really matter for any game.

Dunno if Lunatic and Lunatic+ are really considered the standard difficulty for Awakening anyway. Pretty sure they’re not in the same sense Manaic Mode isn’t.

They aren’t but even Hard isn’t Normal either.
In Awakening it was either too easy or too broken hard. Especially the first chapters of the game.

Hard is super easy. I’ve never paid any attention to enemy skills there and have done just fine.

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That’s what I meant…
It goes from easy (Hard) to broken (Lunatic). It has no Normal

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Whoops, I thought you literally meant Normal, Hard and Lunatic. Not sure what you mean about degeneracy in regards to combat however. Raw stats are still the main determining factor for most match ups. Nor are you hunting aggressively for skills unless your name is 1st Fates Servant. I guess some people in Awakening appreciate Sol/Luckthrift/Galeforce while in Sorcerer but that’s about it.

  • Please make reports on github?
  • Please make reports on github
  • That’s on the hacker using the skill system
  • Don’t use the rng skills in your project if you don’t like them
  • From what I have seen, that has always been true, what hurts originality is not the skill system, it’s just the ammount of unexperienced people there are, FEBuilder lowered the entry barrier a lot (even though it was VERY low for hacking) so it’s now worse than ever, you need to let people familiarize with the basics before they can produce anything that goes away from it
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Not specifying bugged skills and non-compatible essentials makes this complain quite shallow though, doesn’t it?

The hell? I haven’t played FE5, but I’m the biggest fan of FE4 and you’re telling me not having Pursuit wasn’t a dealbreaker? Astra is straight up Skl% x5 damage in a game where durability almost doesn’t matter, Luna is Skl% of completely negating enemy def and Adept has AS+20% chance to proc! Skills in FE4 absolutely make or break a character, the only reason it doesn’t feel that way is that there are gameplay elements that make or break a character even harder (mainly mounts and holy weapons); also I’m not going to defend Awakening of all things, but the Skill System in Fates in super well balanced: the best characters like Ryoma, Xander and Camilla are not strong because of their skills but because of a combination of good mov, good 1-2 range and good stats (as has always been the case in FE), Paladin is one of the best classes as always and only learns 1 good combat skill, the Ninja line gets 1 good skill in Poison Strike and another one in Shurikenfaire except you can’t really expect to reach lv.15 2nd tier skills in time for endgame anyway and I could go on all day; being a good unit in Fates main-game absolutely does NOT involve “min-maxing 5-6 top tier skills” and most skills can be considered decent perks at best

I count around 24 RNG related skills in the Skill System, including proc skills, skills that increase crit and skills that increase proc chance; 24 out of 191! That’s 167 skills available that do NOT add any layer of RNG (stances, spurs, rallies, breakers, utility skills etc…) and whose effects are absolutely predictable and which therefore only add another layer of strategy to the game by bringing about situations where players absolutely DO have full control and responsibility for their actions

Anyway, I realize I haven’t properly answered to the questions:

  1. I feel they have led to greater things and could lead to even greater things
  2. They’re way more than gimmicks and are capable of completely changing the way a unit plays out
  3. Of course I would, it would be neat to have a tutorial for newbies and/or decently experienced ASM hackers I think
  4. Stances are way too strong for the average GBA FE where a stat above 20 or 22 is super good and I feel they shouldn’t give more than 2, 3 or 4 bonus points

I think this is an important point to make. If you don’t like a class of skills, it’s very easy to avoid them and just give different ones. The skill system has a ton of stuff in it. Use the parts you like, leave the rest. The reason there’s so many skills is because people want and like different things.

Personally, I like proc skills (on player units at least, they should be rarer on enemies). They’re cool, and while they are RNG reliant, they’re not really the end of the world. I could go on a bit more about why I think proc skills are okay, but that’s kind of away from the point. However, I loathe rallies - I don’t think active buff skills belong in fire emblem whatsoever. I also dislike spurs and in general make very sparing use of ‘buff aura’ skills.

So my hack has proc skills and no rallies. Hate proc skills but love rallies? Well, you can have what you want. The default settings aren’t the skill system, the skill system is whatever you make of it.

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Think about when we reach the skill limit, there will be a point where there are more skills than the game can handle at once, at that point people will be forced to pick and choose, we certainly won’t be stopping just because there are 255 skills or whatever, it will be each person’s job to determine which ones they want in and which ones they want to remove.

I love the skill system. Not in every hack, or as an addition to regular FE8, but rather as a symbol of how far we’ve come as a community.
The public release of the Skill System marked the start of a new era in the Fire Emblem hacking community. I’m excited to see what will become of GBAFE Fire Emblem hacking in the next three years because it doesn’t seem to going away any time soon.

I’d love to develop my own skills at some point. However, most bases seem to be covered right now.
Personally, I’d like to see most skills nerfed so that they can be used more effectively on generic enemies, but that’s just a personal opinion. In many cases, they work fantastically as they are now.

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You don’t really need much knowledge of asm to edit the skills yourself if you feel needs be. It’s pretty easy to find whatever value it is you want to edit, e.g. 4 to 2, if you need to nerf something. Don’t feel like you need to settle with the original stats for skills.

The one thing I would add is charge skills, (Moonbow exists but doesn’t work if I remember correctly) since I dislike the RNG combat skills (Sol, Luna, etc.) and would rather have them as chargeable skills.

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We may actually be able to finally fix charge skills with Expanded Modular Save. Set up something spooky for them.

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1 year late, but I think skillsystems should support both versions of capture depending on what one wants in a hack. Other than that, I do not really have many objections except for some purely subjective first world-issues like me being bad with asm and needing to somehow ASM edit the pursuitskill to work like in FE4 because I need that skill for a hack. It is really good imo.