TheAxolotl's Analysis Criteria
Over the past year-ish I've been doing these, I've had people both agree and disagree with my opinions, which is great! I don't want everyone to just follow my recommendations blindly. I also have had people ask me why I prioritize some things over others, so I wanted to give a bit more insight into what I look at and what I don't when I write an analysis.
The main thing I look at are the two signature skills. Everything else comes secondary or is not even considered. The reason for this is because the signature skills are what separate adventurers from each other within their roles or party functions. If you're comparing fighters, for example, race and type (element) do have a minor impact on traits in stats. Usually, though, this is pretty negligible. Similarly, no adventurer is made worse by getting a second class, while some adventurers can be made better by it. To that end, I really don't consider the secondary class unless it's a major gain. Livana getting Knight, for example, is extremely synergistic in a way that sets her apart from other Fighter/Knight combinations, which Shelirionach gaining Priest just adds the same utility that other Mage/Priest combinations have.
The signature skills, however, fundamentally impact both the role an adventurer has in a party and what they can provide as inheritance outside of a party. For example, look at Lanavaille. Her two signature skills end up providing a row-wide damage boost for very solid support, as well as a party-wide heal upon victory, which gives incredible role compression. By this, I mean the value she can provide to a single party is quite strong and diverse - her damage boost is welcome in any fight, while her post-victory heal in turn lessens the need to manually heal, thus conserving valuable party resources.
Giving her access to the Fighter class doesn't fundamentally change her role as a predominantly frontline staple in many peoples' parties, but it does improve her role compression by adding extremely solid single target damage on top of it. This combination makes Lanavaille easily one of the best adventurers in the game in terms of pure role compression. That doesn't mean I'll always use her, but that does mean she's almost always a good pick in most peoples' parties.
Similarly, one big thing that I mostly ignore in my analyses, much to the chagrin of many others, is Discipline. I do this for a couple reasons:
- I want my analysis to represent the adventurer to a large majority of the playerbase, which is going to be with Discipline 0 or 1.
- Increasing the Discipline does not fundamentally change the role or value of an adventurer. It can make them a bit better at what they do, but it doesn't have a direct impact on their usefulness.
- In general, I think that while increased stats are good, Discipline itself has extremely small per-dupe gains. A more detailed take on my opinion of Discipline can be found here.
When I'm filling out my party and evaluating adventurers is that I always ask "What can this adventurer bring to the party that is unique?"