Suikoden III Character Tiers

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highwind44029
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Re: Suikoden III Character Tiers

Post by highwind44029 »

So even with the overkill optimization setup on Kenji, the only thing that ever put him over Chris was the Double-strike rune, something that isn't acquired until super late game. As mentioned earlier, Chris's right hand slot is open for a vast amount of time so if she equips Double-strike she'll have an 8+ modifier, so that along with her survivability still makes her notches above him overall. In fact, any calculations that factor in Double-strike will likely have little bearing on my list considering it doesn't come in abundance until chapter 5, and by then the game is practically over.

The conditions of the Adonis Attack definitely makes it a lot less appealing.
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Punkaiser
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Re: Suikoden III Character Tiers

Post by Punkaiser »

double strike is already available in geddoe 1, chris 2 as soon as they can fight the blue mantix. I'm getting tired here, live with your belief, i dont care anymore.
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Sasarai10
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Re: Suikoden III Character Tiers

Post by Sasarai10 »

Why you rank Nicolas so low?

I know he has no rune slots,but he can almost repel every physical attack. He was very useful at the battle against Yuber in Ceremonial Site. Ok he's not good as Geddoe or Sasarai,but goodness not in the same place with the 5 dogs. :|


Oh btw,you ranked so low,his team-mate Elaine,too....she is worse than Duke? What can i say? :|


edit: keep in mind that if Nicolas had at least one free rune slot,then he would crash the game. Because people would occupy it with Firefly Rune :wink:
highwind44029
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Re: Suikoden III Character Tiers

Post by highwind44029 »

Punkaiser wrote:double strike is already available in geddoe 1, chris 2 as soon as they can fight the blue mantix. I'm getting tired here, live with your belief, i dont care anymore.
highwind44029 wrote:it doesn't come in abundance until chapter 5, and by then the game is practically over.
yw! You get a few of them early game, you're gonna stick them to the person that can make the most of it. Kenji is not that person. lol
Sasarai10 wrote:Why you rank Nicolas so low?

I know he has no rune slots,but he can almost repel every physical attack. He was very useful at the battle against Yuber in Ceremonial Site. Ok he's not good as Geddoe or Sasarai,but goodness not in the same place with the 5 dogs. :|


Oh btw,you ranked so low,his team-mate Elaine,too....she is worse than Duke? What can i say? :|


edit: keep in mind that if Nicolas had at least one free rune slot,then he would crash the game. Because people would occupy it with Firefly Rune :wink:
You're right, Nicolas isn't dog material, but his purpose as a tank is easily trumped by that of Fred, Twaikin, and Mua, and his damage is dwarfed by that of Hallec and Leo. Moving him up to Tier 3 though.

The problem with Elaine is that she gets locked with two magic skills, and neither of them are her best affinity so the game almost forces you to use those. Even if you stick her with a Lightning Rune, that would mean you'd have only three other skills for her physical combat abilities, which leaves her with either no damage or no defense. If you commit to making her a pure mage, she is easily outclassed by a lot of characters (Fire - Estella, Joker, Lucia; Lightning - Estella, Geddoe, Mel, Piccolo; Water - Rody, Salome, Sasarai) who either have higher magic rating or affinity. Duke also has the advantage of Heavy Damage, two rune slots, good physical base stats, and enough skill slots to make him a solid physical fighter offensively and defensively.
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Sasarai10
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Re: Suikoden III Character Tiers

Post by Sasarai10 »

highwind44029 wrote:

You're right, Nicolas isn't dog material, but his purpose as a tank is easily trumped by that of Fred, Twaikin, and Mua, and his damage is dwarfed by that of Hallec and Leo. Moving him up to Tier 3 though.

The problem with Elaine is that she gets locked with two magic skills, and neither of them are her best affinity so the game almost forces you to use those. Even if you stick her with a Lightning Rune, that would mean you'd have only three other skills for her physical combat abilities, which leaves her with either no damage or no defense. If you commit to making her a pure mage, she is easily outclassed by a lot of characters (Fire - Estella, Joker, Lucia; Lightning - Estella, Geddoe, Mel, Piccolo; Water - Rody, Salome, Sasarai) who either have higher magic rating or affinity. Duke also has the advantage of Heavy Damage, two rune slots, good physical base stats, and enough skill slots to make him a solid physical fighter offensively and defensively.

I have to play S3 for almost a year and i don't remember very well how many free rune slots Elaine has. But as i remember she is a sword-mage like Geddoe,but she is less powerful than him both in physical attacks and magic. So if she has 3 free rune slots,it's better to attach her a water rune to do the healing,and add her 2 combat runes. Otherwise if she has 2 attach her only 1 CR,and let her water rune.
highwind44029
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Re: Suikoden III Character Tiers

Post by highwind44029 »

She only has two rune slots. Lucia's a better fighter-mage than her with an extra rune slot, better offensive stats (PWR, weapon, damage skill), better defensive stats (MDF, HP, repel skill, magic repel skill, only thing Elaine has on her is the ability to equip armor, but even Lucia has a better Armor Protect skill) and better magic stats (base MAG, Fire affinity, Elaine's only advantage is Precision/Magic Rationing.)

I might have to do some testing to see several characters' potential with Sword of Magic. It's something I haven't really considered, but I think Rhett and Lucia get some pretty good boosts from it.
eldrasidar
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Re: Suikoden III Character Tiers

Post by eldrasidar »

Lucia actually has top tier magic stats exactly on par with Joker, along with the exact same fire magic skill rank, and if you choose to farm them, you can get her all the magic rings she needs to be as good as Estella in Fire or Lightning magic, should one choose to set her up that way. Elaine has just average stat growth across all of her stats, but is likely that she is one of the most versatile and well balanced characters with 2 free rune slots, 4 free skills slots, lots of B+ ranks in both physical and magic stats, and an A in holy dash and a very rare A in Lightning(the only other characters with A's or better in lightning are Estella, Geddoe, Piccolo, and Mel). Assuming one is not power gaming, Elaine is a probably the best of the second tier characters. Like with top tier characters, she requires very little time investment farming special items like magic rings or special runes to make good, and you can set her up in several different mage knight roles and have her be effective. Particularly when you get to the end of the game and need to split up into 3 teams of 6, Elaine's versatility can be quite handy once you distributed your top tier peoples around.

As to heavy damage and criticals, what I'll say is that you've severely overestimated the actual damage increase. First off, criticals don't factor into most unites and command runes. Secondly, the character with the best critical rate, Yuiri, still doesn't critical 50% of the time, which with her two attacks, and if her critical rate was exactly 50%, she'd only be adding 25% damage overall, compared 50% for fury, or 100% for double strike. Unfortunately, her rate isn't quite that good, and everyone else's substantially worse even with Killer. And of course having worse critical rates, and more attacks in many instances, decreases the overall amount of damage added until you're looking at about 3%-15% increase in damage over time.

Luckily for Yuiri, she happens to have 2 other runes slots to fill with double strike and fury. For every other heavy damage character though, who have at most 2 rune slots, you'd be best to go double strike first, then fury, then sword of magic, and then killer. Since Double strike and sword of magic are runes you can buy, there's really no reason you should ever be equipping a killer rune. Getting criticals is of course always nice, but they don't really add up to significant amount of extra damage in the long run, and really aren't worth trying to improve beyond maxing out the skill, since quite frankly, giving any character a double strike, fury, or sword of magic rune, has already improved a character's average damage more than any amount of tweaking to a character's critical rate would.

Continual Attack is honestly far more useful than Heavy damage, even though only 7 (okay 9, but one is a dog, and the other is Lulu) characters have it, since 5 of those characters have A's or better in it, with those A's translating to a 70% chance of getting a whole second round of attacks, which is far more effective on average than an A in heavy damage. For Joker, Kenji, Nash, Lucia, and Juan especially that is pretty handy. Joker, Nash, Kenji, and Lucia can also take good advantage of the chain attack ring and I believe also the dragon scale armor, which would combine to boost them up to match Juan's S rank and with it a 90% chance of getting a second round of attacks. That this requires no rune boosting is even better.

Sword of Magic is a amusing thing to play with, and if the character has at least a B+ in it, it is guaranteed to add more damage than killer or warrior. Unfortunately, you need an A+ in it for it to be better than a fury rune, and comically the only character with that high a skill in it is Rody, and there is no way for you to improve on anyone's skill in it. So for a character like Lucia, it could make sense for her to take it on as her third rune, after double strike and fury. Unfortunately, there's not many characters it would make great sense to give it to, either because they don't have at least 2 rune slots(knocks out 40 of the 74 combat characters, not counting the destroyers or lulu), at least a B+ in sword magic(knocks out another 25), until there is just 9 characters to consider: Edge, Elaine, Geddoe, Lucia, Mel, Melville, Rhett, Rody, and Sharon. Elaine, Geddoe, Lucia, Mel, Rody and Sharon can all be arguably better used with other runes, so then you are really just left with Edge, Melville, and Rhett. If you choose to use Melville primary for his Unite, then he also wouldn't gain anything from sword of magic(the damage wouldn't add). And so then you'd be left with Edge and Rhett, who if you didn't have fury runes for, would enjoy sword of magic as a reasonable back up to a fury rune.
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ninjaluc79
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Re: Suikoden III Character Tiers

Post by ninjaluc79 »

Since Edge is the bearer of the SDS in this game, one would think they could have made him at least A+ in Magic Sword (or even better, Rank S instead of Rody). Now imagine if Edge has an S rank in Magic Sword...

But anyways, when I determine character tiers in Suikoden 1 and 2, I separate them into three lists: Fighter or Damage Dealer, Tank, and Mage. What I felt bad about Suikoden though is that physicals always trump magic (unless you are Lazlo in Suikoden Tactics). Not fun since I am a HUGE fan of spell spamming, and pressing Auto-Battle every single time gets pretty boring.

The FF series offers some examples of games (particularly FF4 and FF5) where offensive mages are still useful by the end game, unlike in Suikoden where mages are relegated to support roles since physical attackers far outdamage them.

I really liked Magic Sword in Suikoden, it has the same principle as FF5's Spellblade, but only a bit weaker since you can't instantly kill enemies with it (Suikoden's Magic Sword). However, people say Magic Sword in S3 sucks compared to S5. That I can live with. At least I don't have to select Auto-Battle all the time.
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eldrasidar
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Re: Suikoden III Character Tiers

Post by eldrasidar »

Thankfully for ninjaluc, Bioware produces a bunch of games where spell spamming is the broken way to playthrough the game.

I would point out though that while mages do not have the same high threshold for damage as fighters do, they can still be useful to the end of the game. Indeed, I have played all of chapters four and five using only mages without any difficulty. Remember, doing 5000+ points of damage in a single attack is mostly pointless when only a handful of enemies have more than 1500 HP. Yes, it's very sad that you cannot one turn kill the Water Dragon or Windrincar using just magic, it's a terrible tragedy that it will take you a whole 2 turns instead.
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Re: Suikoden III Character Tiers

Post by KFCrispy »

in terms of ranking physical damage, i think you guys forget that critical hits ignore defense. it would be a good idea to come up with some standard enemy PDF value to better evaluate whether someone's regular attacks with high crits is better than using a 2x or something rune/unite attack.
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Re: Suikoden III Character Tiers

Post by Noraibah »

Unfortunately I can't help with the S3 gameplay topics since the PAL/NTSC version for the the Old PS2 drive is too glitchy and flimsy[jam times are frequent especially in all of Hugo's Chapter Arcs]. :( .............
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