The thing with a fates-level amount of skills is that there are a significant amount of people just don’t have or want to use the extra mental capacity to fully engage with the system. It’s great when you do, but if you don’t then it will just be an unfun aspect that you can’t avoid. Unfortunately doing this sort of thing yourself will mean there will be a crowd who likes your work and another who really doesn’t. Also, a gba hack can’t really do this skill system justice without the same methods of reclassing that fates had. Heck, fates had a lot of good mechanics. Leveling up after promoting actually still mattered because of strong skills to learn, unlike many FEs where a unit’s growth is usually near done once they’re promoted. Supports actually mattered a ton for once, as they allowed units many more reclassing options to gain more skills. The only sort of reclassing we have in gba currently is split promotions, which just isn’t enough for a heavy skill-focused hack.
Unrelated to my above point, something people seem to forget is that there is an easy solution to not having enough decent skills for every character to have a personal skill.
Don’t give every character a personal skill.
A unit doesn’t always need a skill to be unique. Units also don’t have to be wildly different from each other.
Honestly i think it can be pretty fun, but some skills are clearly a bit overpowered and made me even think of a few that work like the gamble skill having it’s own command. Sadly i have no idea how to even begin to try actually making them or where to suggest the idea.
if anyone cares
Chipped Fangs: almost identical to Double Lions but either with halved might or locked to a maximum of 7 damage with a -20 hit.
Barrage: Astra but for bows, you only get 1 batch of 5 hits (excluding brave bows) but can only do 3 damage per hit with a maximum hit chance of 75%
for example: if the skills would be applied like they were in Path of Radiance/Radiant Dawn, then i see no problem with that, as long as there’s not an overload of those on specific units.
basicly, keep it simple and clean, like 2 or 3 skills maximum available per single unit.
then again, getting class skills upon promotion should already be fine enough.
stacking stuff like skill scrolls, however, usually tends to break the game, so those needs to be planned carefully.
if the system would be more similar to Awakening/Fates, then i would have to say no.
in my opinion, Genealogy is probably the only one that handled skills inheritance in a “decent” way by putting limits on available personal/class skills based on unit type, although that too wasn’t perfect either because you also had Crusader/special weapons with passive skills.
Honestly, i think a good idea for a middle ground would be every one has 1 personal skill and 3 class skills, but can learn 4 skills. The extra skill is converted into a class scroll that can either be used to swap around skills or transfer skills between units as a character scroll.
Really i just think genealogy has the worst version of skills since you also had rings and logistics you had to account for on top of its bassackwards skill decisions, skill inheritance, weapons with skills, killer conversion, tedious map design and over reliance on mounted units.
After some advice, my class skill lines had a little tweak(WIP)
A typical unit learns still two skills in T1 at 5 and 12, and then learns a new one upon promotion, and learns the last one at T2 Lv6. Different T2 Branches have different T2 skills. Player Units and Bosses have still their personals.
I generally just assign skills based off of what fits a units general average stats and could make them more useful or interesting. And then class skills I hand out conservatively to classes, such as certain blow on Archers/snipers, etc.
