Persona 3 Ranking Discussion (VERY LIKELY SPOILERS)

[Talaysen]

The thing is, Minato's damage is so much farther outside the norm that it breaks the averages over his knee. Though I can see your point in removing other grossly outdamaging characters from averages. Perhaps instead of taking account of the mean, we should take into account the median.

Well, if you start using the medians for every other game as well, that's cool with me.  Though I imagine most people would be extremely against that idea.  But if you do it for only P3, that's bad.  (For the record, I used to take averages with taking out the top and bottom 25% of the characters, which would also work in this case.  Probably better than the median at least.  I don't do that anymore, though.)

Me mentioning S. Links for Aigis was simply just me bemoaning the fact that I have to work to get my Persona up those levels to get their skills instead of fusioning and getting free experience for being nice to the fat kid or whatnot. She can still get the Max S. Link Persona, in fact, she may have an easier time of it, since she doesn't have to do cross, pentagram, or hexagram spreads to get them.

Fair enough.  I haven't actually finished The Answer so I didn't know for sure if she could even get those personas.  Would be kind of silly for the developers to leave them out, but they DID take out the compendium for no reason, so it wouldn't surprise me...

(More muttering about The Answer taking out the only remotely nice things about P3 here.)

If Minato's not ranked, doesn't that preclude him from the damage averages in and of itself? I mean, do people include all the FE characters in the FE averages? What about S4? Do people include Monster damage in SaGa averages?

Excuse me as I rant here.  This isn't directed at you, though.

Taking only the ranked people in the averages basically makes the ranked people change divisions depending on WHO YOU RANK.  As Tonfa said, FWs become average in everything.  It also adds bias to the ranking process.  "I like X character by ranking Y, Z, and W make X worse so I'm going to DNR them."  Yeah, no.  This just does not work at all.

That being said, I sure as hell hope people include the not ranked people in averages for FE, S4, etc.  SaGa at the moment does NOT include non-ranked people, but I believe super is fixing that.  Will be interesting to see what happens.

[superaielman]

Saga's a bit of a fucking headache for other reasons. It's one of the few games where I could completely understand just using a ranked average thanks to how stupid some of the  mechanics are. That said I generally agree, full cast averages are the way to go.

[Cmdr_King]

In SaGa's case, we ranked the high end characters (Red, Asellus, and T260G kinda own everyone else statistically due to uniqueness) and didn't rank the filler (cough monsters), so if anything the averages are currently inflated.

And while I'm sympathetic to the damage Minato can do to the average in P3 (he deals 200+ more than Mitsuru's damage with the likes of Surt and Odin, and she's got a sizable lead over most of the cast as-is...), finding some way to include him would be best for the sake of consistency.

[Niu]

I am pro throwing Minato out of the average. Armaggedon is one thing, he has no default states is another. even you restrict his selection, there is still Messiah and Thanatos to choose from.

I'll make more sense if we do a average of all Personae at level 70 instead just Minato.

[RadLink5]

I don't have much to add other than my opinion. Don't include Minato in the averages, and I'm one of the few who supports Minato being as a High Godlike since Armageddon isn't going to beat multi-part bosses or Jade, so he's not totally broken.

Just my two cents.