The previous stat topic had Side Kick's damage as below average (even banning the aftergame skills). Yours has it not only above, but ridiculously above, with no explanation given for the massive change. Ditto Roger, to a lesser extent. Actually, if you could explain what's up with the huge changes in damage figures between the two topics, I'd appreciate it, especially since the previous stat topic was the combined work of several people who understood the game well, and seemed pretty good to me. (I personally used many of the combos it listed and hand-confirmed some of its calculations, IIRC, though it's been years.)
My apologies if the change wasn't fully explained; it wasn't that the old topic had most of the mults wrong (the mults are fine for the most part; There are a few that were actually off by a multiplier of 10 as they were taken from a faulty FAQ and not tested. If that FAQ was right, Fayt would have been even better as he would have had almost as much HP damage and could pair it with absurd MP damage..off of CHARGE of all things (Before I figured out that Charge levels don't effect damage anyways)), it's that the old topic took ignored a whole grouping of massive things that can be boiled down to:
--The old topic assumes that literally every single hit of a combo would connect. So it ignored: hits flat out missing (ala Side Kick at times), knockdown completely messing up a combo (making it extremely difficult to get most of the damage in as the enemies were down; aka: Ahahahahahaha Faerie Friend was quadruple chained into itself in the old averages), Guts blocking (due to hits not coming quickly enough or due to knockdown as well) and whether some combos were really even viable (some moves just are baaaaad at comboing due to above factors, or lag, or distance issues. Ethereal Blast and Faerie Friend are grevious offenders).
So I tested (every potentially relevant combo I could at all think of) against a wide array of 12 enemies pretty thoroughly (as noted, centered around medium size enemies. Side Kick doesn't actually need huge enemies to get amazing, just a little bigger than average. As noted, it's not bad before that anyways), then I averaged the effective hits rates based on how reliably a particular combo could get in all of it's hits based on the above mentioned factors. Best was IIRC, Ice Daggers, coming in an almost 90% hit rate (2.67 of 3). Side Kick was very good at 6.33 of 80 (79%; As noted, Side Kick's great strength is that even when it misses, invincibility frames are great for keeping the combo going and avoiding a Fury backlash; Not perfect, but definitely the premier tech in the game for that effect. It's definitely why it came out number 1 in damage). I'm not next to my notes, but another example is Air Slash (67%, 6 of 9; main problem: not good at breaking guard; You can a short weak and a long strong generally. I generally have notes for comboability for all moves to some degree in the topic). Generally 65% was probably something pretty normal for DL passable combos (gut-check).
DL Combos normally were generally noted like this:
Weak Long->Magic Hook->Faerie Friend (L6/L2, 15 CP,
0.5/0.7): First tech hit 0.5 times of it's max, second hit 0.7 (Needless to say, Faerie Friend was certainly a balance to someone like Fayt to bring that hit rate to the 65% area because that's approaching 30% hit rate territory).
Other Changes:
--Factored in realistic levels for techs based on how spammable a tech was and how long you had it (This in particular was a great boon to Side Kick as there is no move that is around for that long, is that chainable, and has such low Fury cost). This change seems pretty clear cut for allowing.
--I also included +500 Attack for just a better reflective in game balance (since you can stack attack boosts to so many levels, but 500 is a very midrange between utterly breaking the game in a way that generally needed very, very large piles of money and some very specific knowledge given SO 3's crafting system and doing nothing). Taking this out doesn't particularly move the barometer for Fayt either way, but does make averages look higher than in the previous topic.
I will also note that the average OK did with Berserk got Berserk's effect wrong (it says 30% Fury reduction and appears to be just factoring 30%?! This should also be beneficial to Side Kick because it's so cheap that it means he gets in a good number extra at 300% mult). I also wouldn't be surprised if there were just better combos that OK didn't check, but I don't care enough to check that. Either way, boils down to once that topic had the mults in, it just made a bunch of assumption to just gloss over in game effectiveness (Which we always knew to some degree since I've been questioning FF hit rate forever; the key was becoming less lazy (the process did end up being fun as fuck though, unlike say...testing XS 1 crit rates). Hopefully that wasn't too much of a wall of text.
