RPGDL 2012 Season 3 Week 4: Mostly... actually interesting matches. Huh.

[Cmdr_King]

Godlike

Yu Narukami (Persona 4)- ii vs Thanatos (Secret of Mana)- iiii
Terra Branford (Final Fantasy VI)- iiiiiiii vs Jade (Breath of Fire)- iii
Claude Kenni (Star Ocean: The Second Story)- i vs Rubicante (Final Fantasy IV)- iiiiiiiiiiiii
Seymour Guado (Final Fantasy X) vs Cid Raines (Final Fantasy XIII)- iiiiiiiii

Heavy

Jowy Atreides (Suikoden II)- i vs Ivan (Golden Sun)- iiiiii
Maya Schroedinger (Wild ARMs 3)- iiiiii vs Queen Zeal (Chrono Trigger)- iii
Alfina (Grandia III) vs Alicia (Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria)- iiiiiiiiiii
Nina (Breath of Fire)- iiiiiiii vs Clarissa Arwin (Wild ARMs XF)- i

Middle

Palom (Final Fantasy IV)- iiiiiii vs Elaine (Suikoden III)- iii
Hippopressor (Mega Man X: Command Mission)- iiiiiii vs Rouge (SaGa Frontier)- iiiii
Blanca (Shadow Hearts: Covenant)- iii vs Peter (Shining Force II)- iiiiii
Cleo (Suikoden)- iiiiiiii vs Etna (Disgaea: Hour of Darkness)- iii

Light

Rhys (Fire Emblem Series) vs Tia (Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals)- iiiiiiiiiiiii
Ilyana (Fire Emblem Series) vs Zhuzhen Liu (Shadow Hearts)- iiiiiiiiiii
Chemist (Final Fantasy Tactics)- iiiiii vs Tricia (Soul Nomad & The World Eaters)
Rinoa Heartlily (Final Fantasy VIII)- iiiiiiiii vs Milich Oppenheimer (Suikoden)


Godlike

Thanatos (Secret of Mana) vs Terra Branford (Final Fantasy VI)
Rubicante (Final Fantasy IV) vs Cid Raines (Final Fantasy XIII)

Heavy

Ivan (Golden Sun) vs Maya Schroedinger (Wild ARMs 3)
Alicia (Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria) vs Nina (Breath of Fire)

Middle

Palom (Final Fantasy IV) vs Hippopressor (Mega Man X: Command Mission)
Peter (Shining Force II) vs Cleo (Suikoden)

Light

Tia (Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals) vs Zhuzhen Liu (Shadow Hearts)
Chemist (Final Fantasy Tactics)  vs Rinoa Heartlily (Final Fantasy VIII)

Special Note- If you've played anything in the data gathering section since the last DL season, please post any updates there for proper record keeping going into the ranking season.

Similarly...

Please post up to 3 games you'd like to include for data gathering/ranking consideration in the next ranking session.

[Dhyerwolf]

Godlike
Rubicante (Final Fantasy IV) vs Cid Raines (Final Fantasy XIII)

Heavy

Ivan (Golden Sun) vs Maya Schroedinger (Wild ARMs 3)
Alicia (Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria) vs Nina (Breath of Fire)- God the horrors. Both have infinite healing (I think Nina regens MP somehow?) and both will never get close killing since Alicia blocks Paralyze.

Middle

Palom (Final Fantasy IV) vs Hippopressor (Mega Man X: Command Mission)- I would imagine. Magical nuke should work pretty well.
Peter (Shining Force II) vs Cleo (Suikoden)- Goes and halves Fire. He should still 2HKO (gut check) and evade may stall him a little, but she won't have the damage.

Light

Tia (Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals) vs Zhuzhen Liu (Shadow Hearts)- He has time to status her out since he resists all of her time (being all ice/water and fire)
Chemist (Final Fantasy Tactics)  vs Rinoa Heartlily (Final Fantasy VIII)- Right, she wins via self mutilation

[Nephrite]

Godlike

Thanatos (Secret of Mana) vs Terra Branford (Final Fantasy VI)
Rubicante (Final Fantasy IV) vs Cid Raines (Final Fantasy XIII)

Heavy

Ivan (Golden Sun) vs Maya Schroedinger (Wild ARMs 3)
Alicia (Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria) vs Nina (Breath of Fire)

Middle

Palom (Final Fantasy IV) vs Hippopressor (Mega Man X: Command Mission)
Peter (Shining Force II) vs Cleo (Suikoden)

Light

Tia (Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals) vs Zhuzhen Liu (Shadow Hearts) - No.
Chemist (Final Fantasy Tactics)  vs Rinoa Heartlily (Final Fantasy VIII) - No.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Godlike

Thanatos (Secret of Mana) vs Terra Branford (Final Fantasy VI): Probably Thanatos, unless I decide she reduces sleep to turn 2. Otherwise, sleep/spell/repeat forever wins. Terra has a 2HKO here and I'm willing to buy her going first, but go first AND dodge turn 1? It's a bit much.
Rubicante (Final Fantasy IV) vs Cid Raines (Final Fantasy XIII): 4HKOs even accounting for Cid's durability push at mid-health, I don't think Cid 4HKOs back since two of those hits will be weaksauce.

Heavy

Alicia (Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria) vs Nina (Breath of Fire): Idle tilts things in her favour. Not certain she can win, but she can last forever and will do more damage in the resulting infinite fight due to always hitting and getting more turns. EDIT: Okay, Alicia with better damage can probably win this. Not 100% sure how I feel about that but average of interpretations certainly seems to favour her now.

Middle

Palom (Final Fantasy IV) vs Hippopressor (Mega Man X: Command Mission): FF4o and all that.
Peter (Shining Force II) vs Cleo (Suikoden): Peter halves fire, 2HKOs.

Light

Tia (Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals) vs Zhuzhen Liu (Shadow Hearts): EDIT: oh right, that final armour.
Chemist (Final Fantasy Tactics)  vs Rinoa Heartlily (Final Fantasy VIII): Chemist's only hope is to hit Rinoa with Doom, but that won't work because Rinoa can hit herself into limit and Chemist has no way to threaten her as she does so with a piddly Assassin Dagger (does ~10%). Doom, if it connects, lets Rinoa get limits at a reasonably high probability at ~40% HP.

[Random Consonant]

Godlike
Thanatos (Secret of Mana) vs Terra Branford (Final Fantasy VI) - Too many judgment calls needed for Terra to take this than I'm willing to make.

Heavy

Ivan (Golden Sun) vs Maya Schroedinger (Wild ARMs 3) - taste pew pew

Middle

Palom (Final Fantasy IV) vs Hippopressor (Mega Man X: Command Mission) - Palom is probably better equipped to handle this than Rouge was.  Maybe.
Peter (Shining Force II) vs Cleo (Suikoden) - Yep.

Light
Chemist (Final Fantasy Tactics) vs Rinoa Heartlily (Final Fantasy VIII) - oh man assassin knife hype that is rich

[Dhyerwolf]

Tia (Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals) vs Zhuzhen Liu (Shadow Hearts): I'll just trust Dhyer, Zhuzhen wins this with status or not at all and if Dhyer doesn't respect that status enough, chances are I won't either.

You know, I had to re-google at this (because I did not remember that SeeThru Cape is casino), so I had discounted it for that reason, and also because I thought Tia might just outslug....but Zhuzhen reduces all her damage. Yeah, switching my vote on that I think (Casino...it was costly right? Like beyond what you would consider when she would leave?).

[Pyro]

Godlike

Thanatos (Secret of Mana) vs Terra Branford (Final Fantasy VI)
Rubicante (Final Fantasy IV) vs Cid Raines (Final Fantasy XIII)

Heavy

Ivan (Golden Sun) vs Maya Schroedinger (Wild ARMs 3)
Alicia (Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria) vs Nina (Breath of Fire): Nina, even if she does nothing but get crits, can't overcome Alicia's healing. Alicia... I guess she can't win even theoretically while being constricted to a midgame weapon while everyone else uses endgame stuff, but I've never been okay with that. So I think she just keeps Nina in a heal lock (Nina has ~80% Pdur? Fort can make that ~90% but Alicia's damage is probably above average with an endgame weapon due to the PWSing thing?) and keeps herself healed as need be. Any offense doubles will be extremely rare occurrences for Nina. So Alicia probably has more pressure.

Looking at it closer, Nina sacrifices 15% of her damage to use that AP-restoring rapier, and it only heals 3 AP at a time. Cura3 (full for Nina) costs 15 AP while Cura2 (50% healing for Nina) costs 6 AP. Alicia can probably keep enough pressure to drain those resources compared to the number of attacks Nina can get off (Nina can't heal/attack at the same time). So while Nina's LoyalRP resources are theoretically infinite, they may not be in practice due to the need to attack twice for every 50% heal (or 5 times for every full heal), which often just isn't an option for her and I don't think is here.

Middle

Palom (Final Fantasy IV) vs Hippopressor (Mega Man X: Command Mission): Abstain, FF4o only.
Peter (Shining Force II) vs Cleo (Suikoden): Hippopressor for champ, clearly.

Light

Tia (Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals) vs Zhuzhen Liu (Shadow Hearts)
Chemist (Final Fantasy Tactics)  vs Rinoa Heartlily (Final Fantasy VIII)

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

Godlike

Thanatos (Secret of Mana) vs Terra Branford (Final Fantasy VI) - I guess. This is such a wet dream of a season for Dark Lich, apart from him dying horribly in the finals.

Heavy

Alicia (Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria) vs Nina (Breath of Fire) The horror.

Middle

Palom (Final Fantasy IV) vs Hippopressor (Mega Man X: Command Mission) - UM. I suppose.
Peter (Shining Force II) vs Cleo (Suikoden) - Kills in three at the very worst, doesn't get 3HKOed himself. Peter isn't bad in Middle at all!

Light

Tia (Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals) vs Zhuzhen Liu (Shadow Hearts) - Uhhhh. Doesn't Drowsy kinda troll the heck out of Zhuzhen?
Chemist (Final Fantasy Tactics)  vs Rinoa Heartlily (Final Fantasy VIII) - 2HKOs Chemist, which means he's not really making any headway in time. Crits force him to heal twice even if AP works, and if he tries to go damage, he's getting -murdered-. Pressure is kind of a bitch, DS ain't working very well when he's so often forced into the defensive. EDIT: Oh wow, self-mutilation makes this so one-sided. >___________>

[Dark Holy Elf]

Pyro: What weapon would you see as equivalent to Blue Gale/Durandal? Those are both storebought before you go in to Yggdrasil IIRC, and at that point, the best 1H sword you're likely to have is still the aforementioned "midgame sword", the Holy Sword. I suppose you could allow the Sword of Silvans which you get shortly thereafter, but do note it's still a fair bit behind Durandal and Blue Gale. 1H swordsmen do have weaker weapons, a quick analysis of the shop list of VP2 shows this pretty decisively. The Holy Sword is, for what it's worth, actually an exception; it's unusually strong at the time. So for a "midgame weapon" it's actually pretty good, and in fact the DL does take a snapshot of the in-game weapon situation in mid chapter 5.

You could allow all IC items (even the ridiculously expensive ones) which would make the best 1H sword the Moonflax. This is still weaker than the corresponding greatsword and bow although the gap is closer. However I find those weapons pretty unreasonable to get myself.

Anyway, the point is that no matter what you do, 1H swords are going to end up worse than other weapon options. As such I really doubt Alicia ends up with damage high enough to 2HKO Nina, and to make matters worse she's blinded, so her "needs two hits to heal lock" becomes "needs four, on average". Toss in Nina getting significantly more turns and she can easily regenerate the MP she needs.


Also, I don't think Drowsy is good enough here. It hits about half the time and takes away two turns. So you can imagine this an an alternation of Zhuzhen getting an attack (and losing 1 SP) with Zhuzhen losing two turns (and 2 SP). This means that Zhuzhen still gets an attack off every 3 turns he gets, so lands his turn-4 paralysis around his tenth to twelfth turn... still plenty of time to finish off Tia from there.

Then again, SH1 status, so I'm not sure. I heartily lol at Gift being 75% ID for instance when my own tests painted it at about a third of that, but I forget what I noted for Zhuzhen's status... don't think it was much worse. He kinda needs it to be turn 5 at worst here, though.

[Talaysen]

Godlike

Thanatos (Secret of Mana) vs Terra Branford (Final Fantasy VI)
Rubicante (Final Fantasy IV) vs Cid Raines (Final Fantasy XIII)

Heavy

Ivan (Golden Sun) vs Maya Schroedinger (Wild ARMs 3)
Alicia (Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria) vs Nina (Breath of Fire) - Well, can't Alicia get a lucky string of hits (+crits?) to outpower Nina's healing?  Even if she's not doing that on average, it only needs to happen once if Nina can't do something like that first.

Middle

Palom (Final Fantasy IV) vs Hippopressor (Mega Man X: Command Mission)
Peter (Shining Force II) vs Cleo (Suikoden)

Light

Tia (Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals) vs Zhuzhen Liu (Shadow Hearts)
Chemist (Final Fantasy Tactics)  vs Rinoa Heartlily (Final Fantasy VIII)

[Dark Holy Elf]

VP2 crits barely do more damage. I guess if the fight actually is infinite though, an insanely long chain of hits from Alicia (hundreds in a row) will happen and wear down Nina's resources? Not sure what I think of things that are probably somewhere around 10^-50 probability of occurring winning fights. Probably not much. Granted, I do think Pyro should keep his vote on Alicia since this will happen in a... somewhat sane amount of time for him probably (just a few ten thousand rounds or so~) assuming a 3HKO.

[Pyro]

I think I'd use the Gram for the Light Swordsmen honestly. Ignoring the crazy IC and rare drops, you'll have available to 4 Light Swordsmen at endgame: Holy Sword, Sword of Silvans, Gram, and Glance Reviver. Gram is closes to the average of those. Similar logic doesn't really do much for Heavy Swordsmen (Claimoh Solais is higher attack power than Durandal but only 1 and is 2x attack instead of 3x). Archers... Ehdre's Fingertips is awesome but only 1, and Crescent Arrow is on par with the Blue Gale except not ITE so worse in practice probably. Mages probably deserve the Unicorn's Horn? Light Swordsmen are improved a lot with this weapon, as it more than doubles damage. The Sword of Silvans is more like a 50% increase, if it were left to that.

Light swordsmen are bad for damage, but the horribleness in the DL is very much a function of using a weapon much less than half as powerful as the other fighter classes, despite such weapons being available to them.

But yeah. The kicker is that Nina really has no way to win that I can see ever, so Alicia has all the time in the world. Even if it takes till the next Mayan Apocalypse.

[SnowFire]

Thanatos (Secret of Mana) vs Terra Branford (Final Fantasy VI)
I really want to drop a holistic vote for Terra here, as Terra is pretty close to SoM Girl (healing, holy damage) which is who owns Thanatos in-game.  However she either needs a Pearl OHKO or for MBlock to still work while Balloon is in effect (and I think that SoM Phys Evade MIGHT have still been in effect under Balloon.  Might.) + recovering from lvl. 6 Balloon before Thanatos's damage gets her + getting some crucial MBlocks off to complete a 2HKO.  I *think* Thantos's Balloon is just the spell, not attached to an easily evaded beam (unlike Frosty)... but yeah, chain status from Thanatos is still rough.  And Thanatos is tanky enough + FF6 Pearl unimpressive enough that the OHKO is kind of a stretch.  Abstain for now I suppose.

As a side note, since it came up in chat, I usually enforce damage caps only on the offensive side; once the damage leaves the attacker's home game it turns into generic DL damage and then hits the defender's rules, defenses, etc.  I see damage caps as essentially a defender's attribute (Kuja hype?!).  This matters for, say, Garnet vs. Tidus or Steiner vs. Marle or the like.  Tidus has crappy MDef in-game in FFX and that matters, Garnet should get a damage boost vs. him and not just be stuck at the damage cap; same with Marle's bad PDef vs. Steiner.  (Or, hypothetically, Celes's Ice3 vs. Rubicant, for all that Celes lol immunes Rubicant's game anyway with Minerva.)  So I have no problem letting Terra's Pearl be awesome despite the fact that against an FF6 Pearl-weak enemy, it'd just hit the FF6 damage cap.

Rubicante (Final Fantasy IV) vs Cid Raines (Final Fantasy XIII)
Rubicante like 7HKOs at best here so no.  EDIT: Rubicant's FF4o damage was better than I kneejerked, though I still don't give the full stat topic hype of 2 PCHP damage.  So it's more like a 4-5HKO!  Which still ain't enough.

Heavy

Alicia (Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria) vs Nina (Breath of Fire)
Alicia needs some truly, truly, truly impossible luck to get a win here - repeated chains of criticals and not missing, enough to force Nina to heal aggressively enough to slooowly run out of AP, so yeah.  Even with less Idle=Blind respect from here, it's an amazing long shot.  A few tiebreakers off the top of my head:
* More damage: Not clear, Alicia's damage is getting tanked even more than usual thanks to spamming Heal + Idle misses screwing up Soul Crushes.  Not a huge fan of this metric anyway.
* Plot power: Endgame Alicia is undead, Nina1 invokes Final Fantasy rules to kill her with healing / revival or something.  Or Nina turns into a giant bird, picks Alicia up, then drops her into the ocean.  Flip side, Alicia uses her "manifest Rufus for no good reason despite Silmeria being removed from her" power to spawn a helper(s).  Uh.  Call this a draw I guess.
* Alternate forms: Nina1 > Valkyrie, I think.  Nina2 conditionally beats Alicia depending on ID blocking legality, too.
* Player fatigue: Over a long fight, just like Shadow Hearts characters start missing hits on their combos, Alicia starts getting impatient and screwing up combos, missing Heals, etc.  I think she's the more button-mashy "would give up and concede first in a long boring stall" character to control, Nina1 is pretty much on auto-pilot.
* Level-up: Neither game allows you to level-up in battle a la Fire Emblem (shame, that'd totally tip this), but if this somehow happened to both sides...  I think this favors Nina?  Nina gets a bigger and bigger pool of AP to have to drain, and Bleu's spells & Ryu's dragons are static damage if you grind to super-high levels, so Nina's relative damage improves a bit.  I didn't play the VP2 Seraphic Gate though, so maybe Alicia gets something broken there.

I think most of these favor Nina, so yeah.  Let it not be said I'm not fair, though; if Alicia can win by the time of the end of the 13th Baktun of the Mayan calendar, I will change my vote per Pyro on the Mayan apocalypse.  She hasn't won yet and it happened 2 weeks ago?  'k.

Light

Tia (Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals) vs Zhuzhen Liu (Shadow Hearts)
Chemist (Final Fantasy Tactics)  vs Rinoa Heartlily (Final Fantasy VIII)
Self-mutilation at worst.  What was Death Sentence's hit rate anyway?  It needs to be like 100% for there even to be an argument, though, really.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Death Sentence triggers 25% of the time off a successful hit from Assassin Dagger, after which the target gets two more turns then dies on the third.

EDIT: And in the interests of full disclosure, you can stop it the dying part (though not the countdown) with death immunity, which IIRC you allow for FF8.

[Pyro]

I went ahead and calc'd what Light Warrior damages would be with the Gram instead of the Holy Sword. It's an endgame weapon on par with the stuff the Archers/Heavy Swordsmen/Mages get (well, I gave the Mages a better staff in the Unicorn Horn but it doesn't make a difference for them <_<). I also threw in Might Reinforce into the averages for those who had it (Lenneth, Rufus, and a bunch of Einherjar). The result is a higher damage average, but a few Light Warriors have good damage, Alicia being one.

A 4473 damage average with the changes, and Alicia herself sports 5805 damage (2908 if healing that round). That's a 2HKO and definitely tilts the match against Nina. I'd suggest people go by this weapon interp, as sticking folks with a midgame weapon when there are several better options that are perfectly reasonable to take isn't really a necessary hit.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Honestly upon thinking on it I'm inclined to agree. Alicia's damage looks too high (she does not outdamage Phyress in-game) but eh, benefit of that turn-1 soul crush I guess. Alicia has other in-game advantages which don't translate so I see little point in begrudging the turn 1 SC, and the curve looks fine to me once I mentally adjust for that. LWs still sliiiightly overrated probably but not by enough to be much of a bother, and this actually is what the in-game weapon situation looks like in Valhalla. (with the GR taking care of the "well what if I wanted to use two LWs in chapter 6" thing)

[Talaysen]

Not sure what I think of things that are probably somewhere around 10^-50 probability of occurring winning fights.

It's better than a zero probability, which is what Nina has...

[074]

Godlike

Rubicante (Final Fantasy IV) vs Cid Raines (Final Fantasy XIII) - Kneejerking Rubicante.  Cid's damage comes fairly slow.

Heavy

Alicia (Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria) vs Nina (Breath of Fire) - Not entirely certain on how I interpret VP2 speed, but it's definitely way better than 50% CTB speed.  That aside, Alicia's got the better offense and the ability to heal and attack at the same time.  I'm imagining either she'll kill first or Nina will run out of resources.  Longer slapfight than Kresnik vs. Kyra.

Light

Tia (Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals) vs Zhuzhen Liu (Shadow Hearts) - ...man, I don't remember either of these two.  At all.
Chemist (Final Fantasy Tactics)  vs Rinoa Heartlily (Final Fantasy VIII) - best match ever, part 2.

[Cmdr_King]

Godlike

Thanatos (Secret of Mana) vs Terra Branford (Final Fantasy VI)- No vote.
Rubicante (Final Fantasy IV) vs Cid Raines (Final Fantasy XIII)

Heavy

Ivan (Golden Sun) vs Maya Schroedinger (Wild ARMs 3)- Blah.
Alicia (Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria) vs Nina (Breath of Fire)

Middle

Palom (Final Fantasy IV) vs Hippopressor (Mega Man X: Command Mission)
Peter (Shining Force II) vs Cleo (Suikoden)

Light

Tia (Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals) vs Zhuzhen Liu (Shadow Hearts)
Chemist (Final Fantasy Tactics)  vs Rinoa Heartlily (Final Fantasy VIII)

Rankings

Fire Emblem: Sword of Seals
Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon
The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky

[Lance]

Godlike
Thanatos (Secret of Mana) vs Terra Branford (Final Fantasy VI)
Rubicante (Final Fantasy IV) vs Cid Raines (Final Fantasy XIII)

Heavy
Alicia (Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria) vs Nina (Breath of Fire)

Middle
Palom (Final Fantasy IV) vs Hippopressor (Mega Man X: Command Mission)
Peter (Shining Force II) vs Cleo (Suikoden)

Light
Tia (Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals) vs Zhuzhen Liu (Shadow Hearts)
Chemist (Final Fantasy Tactics) vs Rinoa Heartlily (Final Fantasy VIII)


Ranking Ideas:
Pokemon Black/White 2
Final Fantasy Legend II
Lufia 3

[SnowFire]

Dark Holy Elf: Yes, but was just mildly curious since I was pretty sure Rinoa doesn't even need status blocking hype to win it.

Alicia/Nina: I don't think there's a meaningful difference between "might end after a number of rounds comparable to the atoms of the universe" and "is a draw, figure out some other tiebreaker."
Let's say that each round is 20 seconds (remember that Alicia needs to go to the menu and cast Heal, and is also slow-rolling her combos some of the time to let her use Heal.)  If Alicia plays for 8 hours a day over the course of a 10 year lifespan of her PS2, then that gives her 10*365*8*60*(60/20) = 5.2 million rounds to win in before the PS2 craps out from such abuse.  Probably less really, 1 million is a nice round number.

That said, better Alicia damage hype can help of course, especially if it's enough to win in <1000 rounds rather than 10^50 rounds.  I do agree that Light Warriors always seemed unfairly screwed over, and double-checking...  holy crap, yeah, Holy Sword is really ancient, it's a game with only 4 party slots, that is far too harsh.  That said, I also dislike games with huge useless casts inflating their good duelers a little too much (Suikoden games at least has a party size of 6 and tend to force you to mix it up...  Radiata Stories is really the famous offender here), and have usually applied a fudge factor upward for most VP2 averages anyway (Never quite bought MR'd Lenneth beign quite as insane as the stat topic claimed for Djinn's Dungeon run for example, not that knocking .1-.2 PCHP off it mattered that much).   VP2 also has the fact that you can't even get all the Einjergar in a single runthrough, not that it really would matter vs. the various uber unique characters available.  As a super-rough actual math result, do not take over-seriously, averaging the 6 best damage-dealers in each class + Arngrim (since he isn't one of the 6 most damaging Heavy Warriors) via Pyro's numbers gives a damage average of 15440.  Of course, Alicia still has above-average damage here w/ 17415...  but that Soul Crush is a big part of it, which is exactly what Idle is screwing up, and Nina1 is not really frail and will also be casting Fort, so yeah, 3HKO at best that drops to a 4HKO usually.

Mmf.  I think if Idle is ~20% miss rate or so, Alicia will get lucky often enough to generally maintain pressure on Alicia, so she might have it after all despite that 3HKO.  If Idle is the 50% miss rate as hyped by Dark Holy Elf, with Alicia being so multihit centric...  yeah, she just isn't getting continuous chains of hits to even maintain a 3HKO long enough and Nina will be aggressively vamping the AP back.  Closer than I thought, since I'm skeptical of the 50% miss rate...  still leaning toward tiebreaking for Nina, though.

[Dark Holy Elf]

I'm not sure why you're skeptical of the -50% hit rate. Have you used Idle? That's what it does; everything I tested it on had ~40% hit rate at best thereafter. The blind effect is completely independent of the speed down (it was tested both against Myria who loses 200 speed and other enemies who lose 20).

If you have some tests of your own to contradict this then feel free to share.

(Not trying to influence your vote necessarily, this is just a "for future reference" thing... Idle's good.)

[SnowFire]

Okay, that's what I wanted to hear, I was always hearing Idle vs. Myria hype which has the buggy "goes to 0 speed" effect which I figured also affected the hit rate.  If you or someone else actually tested it vs. other enemies and it worked just as well for a blind effect there...

Well, tiebreak vote stays on Nina then.  Alicia has so many hits in her regular string that having them all hit, repeatedly, just requires bonkers luck that doesn't happen within a million rounds.

[Pyro]

Once you land a hit in VP2, I think the rest of the combo keeps right on hitting despite evade?

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

Wrong. Hits on a string can be dodged even after the first connected. I've seen the miss message appear on a juggled enemy when the attack clearly didn't whiff the hitbox.