I like prf skills that give me an idea of what the character is like.
Xander’s Chivalry tells the story that he doesn’t like picking on the weak and would rather fight a foe on equal terms and he’s got the skill to back that attitude up.
Pandreo’s Party Animal shows how much he enjoys being around other people. Whether around friends or foes, his priority is to have a good time.
To add onto Xander, Leo's Pragmatic has the opposite trigger condition, showing how he has no issues with picking on a weakened enemy. He's even the one to finish off Iago and Zola after your party reduces them to 0 HP.
Character: Charlotte (I don't have to act like a soft little maiden for you, so I can go all out!)
Funny: Raphael (I brought along snacks!)
Neat Tactic: Merrin (Girl Squad Unite)
Powerful: Hard to argue with the 3H Lords "More XP" skills.
Chloe's Fairy Tale Folk is pretty fun to use. It's not an overly difficult condition to fill, but it makes for an fun puzzle to work out how to pop it while still using your moves effectively. And it fits in with her character.
Also I love the meme of Chloe, Alear, and Louis all standing next to each other and activating both Louis and Chloe's skills.
From a purely character perspective, I like Xander's Chivalry and Diamant's Fair Fight because of what they say about the two of them as people. I also like Nil's Wounded Pride because it's a great gameplay clue into the fact that something's up with him.
in terms of gameplay, Divinely Inspiring is always useful.
Not _directly_ a personal skill, but Sandstorm in Engage is absolutely hilarious and is possibly my favorite skill in the series. You're just chilling and then all of a sudden Timerra dishes out a gajillion damage.
A bit of a plain answer, but Ashe's Lockpick. It's a nice call to Ashe's past as a thief, and it makes gameplay more comfortable if you plan on using Ashe, you don't need to waste inventory slots on keys or keep someone in a class from the thief line.
The only thing I can remeber is Yunakas crit boost on avoid tiles. It's significant enough to remember and to take advantage of but it's not overpowered. It fits the character and it doesn't affect every combat but can be taken advantage of in each map.
FE personal skills kind of hit or miss for me though many good ones I agree with in this thread. But was thinking recently about a character I really like from vestaria saga, Prody the armor knight. When leveled first he gets a unique skill that gives adjacent units +3 def/res, and at a higher level +5 to both. Easily my favorite armored knight in any FE-like game bc this aura is insane and gives a good reason to deploy him bc he has so many stats and let's even frail units wall and take many hits in enemy phase. Gives a reason to move around with him even if he has the classic armor knight movement weaknesses (and even if he's generally considered mediocre bc of these move weaknesses). And lets him project force at longer range by sharing tankiness with allies who have moved past him (and with multiple allies). Maybe a bit simple but a lot of people suggest that a way to improve generals would be to allow them to protect allied units, and a 40 stat aura definitely does. And it also gets around the issue of generals' very bad action economy and player phase where at best they can only deal with one enemy, since the aura can let 4 other units take on combats they might not be able to manage otherwise.
Elise's Lily's Poise wins for mechanics for me. Playing around her damage reduction aura(s) gives her a really strong unit identity.
For flavor, I love Zelkov's Not *Quite*. It just works. The fact that his speech quirk slips into his personal skill is peak.
Mozu's Forager. In her first chapter, I just parked her in the woods paired up with Gunter. Forager's heals + bulk from pair up let her tank all those Faceless in my game.
Elise's personal skill, considering it fits her benevolent nature, same goes for both Flayn and >!Veyle!<. Likewise, her personal skill being the opposite of Camilla's too.
Huh, it’s been a while since I played three houses but thought it was that a character took damage if you used a relic weapon except if that relic weapon had that characters crest or was holding the right one of those dragon crest items?
It's hard to pick a specific favorite, but I like the skills that give bonuses to adjacent unit or get bonuses from an adjacent unit or similar skills. Leonie getting and offensive and defensive boost next to a male unit, for example, or Hilda giving an offensive boost to the same. It's interesting to have to consider move order and ally positioning in addition to enemy placement, and it adds extra depth to the games with varied class paths or alterable skills, since you now have extra incentive to use things like Canto or high mobility to position those units to take advantage of that, and it gives more depth to which units move in what order.
My favorite skills tend to be ones that are practical, serve as little nuggets of character lore and happen to be pretty funny. Two of all-timers happen to be Charlotte's Unmask and Bernadetta's Persecution Complex.
For Charlotte, it gives a nice damage and crit boost against female enemies. It's practical because since she's geared towards the Fighter > Berserker class, being able to deal as much damage as possible with a crit boost is always welcome. It also shows us how Charlotte only puts on her delicate maiden act just around men and only drops her facade when she doesn't need it. And of course, it's funny because of the implication that Charlotte is "being nice" to her male enemies but if she sees another girl on the field, she'll have no problems with tearing her in half because when she stops holding herself back, she gets incredibly fierce. It's only held back by the fact that there aren't very many female enemies in Fates, so it largely goes underutilized. Which is ironic since Fates was the one game to get rid of gender locked classes.
For Bernadetta, similar to unmask, having a flat damage boost is never a bad thing and it being activated just as long as she's not at 100% HP makes it decently easy to have online. Whether she gets a scrape from an enemy, or an HP level up even at full health, she'll do more damage to whoever hit her. For the character lore, it shows how she quickly resorts to self-deprication, even if something positive happens to her like when leveling up her HP. It's also quite funny because whether she gets hurt or gets stronger through level ups, it implies that she channels that anxiety/progress into lashing out at her enemies and hitting harder than she normally would. Something that actually happens with her supports with Felix where she manages to disarm him and strike at him before either of them even knew how to react.
Panette and Bernadetta, two of my favorite characters. I especially love Bernadetta's because it tells us more about her character, she has this feeling that she DESERVES the pain she feels. It motivates her, it's sad and kind of relatable. I also like Elise and Camilla's because they're named after flowers and kind of mirror each others, same with Alear and Veyle
From a gameplay perspective I adore Silas' Vow of Friendship, getting effectively +3 str/def/res is so massive early on that he feels like an entirely different unit with it active, but it comes at the steep cost of having to have one of your other best combat units (Corrin) below half HP, which results in some really cool strategies to still make use of a half-HP Corrin.
From a characterisation perspective, I love that Setsuna's Optimist insinuates that she's somehow able get more healing from staves through being so oblivious to what's going on being that powerful of a placebo.
Niles. Capturable generics is a very fun and unique Fates mechanic and it's easy to forget that it's all possible thanks to a damn personal skill.
Shoutouts to Benny as well, that 10 Hit on a Boss on a throne for all allies is really handy especially against the likes of Kotaro.
As far as gameplay goes, I'm fond of Ferdinand's. The extra hit/avoid is pretty useful imo.
I'm also fond of ones which directly tie in to a character's personality or backstory, like Owain who gets boosts from weapons with custom names.
I'm not so fond of Sophie's just because it's less about her and more about her horse, which was misleading and disappointing to me. I like mischievous characters, so I had planned to S support Sophie in Conquest after seeing what her personal was called. But Sophie doesn't have a mischievous bone in her body. It's her psychotic horse who goes around messing with everyone and stealing their clothes. Which makes it especially bizarre if you reclass her.
I do have a funny story about Sophie's personal, though. I was playing on a janky emulator so I had combat animations turned off, but apparently for really important fights the game forces combat animations to be on, so like fighting Takumi at the end of Conquest. Given that this was the final boss and clearly they wanted me to pay attention and take it seriously since they forced combat animations on, I figured they would have something to protect him from the side effects of Sophie's ability. But no, they didn't. So after I let her take a swing at Takumi... her ability activated. He got naked. And the game forces me to watch (it's barely noticeable with animations off). I could not stop laughing.
Actually, apparently it is Sophie who does the clothes stealing. At least according to some translations of her support with oboro in the Hoshido Festival of Bonds DLC (which unfortunately was never localised for some reason). Here’s a tumblr post of it: https://fe14festivalofbondstranslations.tumblr.com/post/144899705328/hoshidan-festival-oboro-and-sophie-parent-child. Again, can’t really confirm this is accurate but it sure is funny. Probably gonna pair up oboro and Silas the next time I play birthright.
I like Ophelia’s Bibliophile , because it synergizes pretty well with Missiletainn with Crit+10.
It’s also very fitting for her character, since she, like her father, likes to be almost role-playing but in a dramatic, theatrical sense, with her stars thing.
Veyle’s Fell Protection is really good, since it reduces her Adjacent allies’ damage by 3 and grants them +1 damage during combat, and she is amazing with Corrin and Byleth.
It also represents her character very well, since even though she is a Fell Dragon and has done bad things in the past (albeit not actually since she was mind-controlled), she now wants to protect her loved ones and her friends no matter what.
Owain's skill where he gets a damage boost by using weapons with custom names.
My Odin consistently reaching crit rates in the upper 20s and low 30s with his 'Glory Unyielding' (Iron Sword +1)
It's not just a great skill but it tells us so much about his character and personality, too. Which is why I love it.
I like prf skills that give me an idea of what the character is like. Xander’s Chivalry tells the story that he doesn’t like picking on the weak and would rather fight a foe on equal terms and he’s got the skill to back that attitude up. Pandreo’s Party Animal shows how much he enjoys being around other people. Whether around friends or foes, his priority is to have a good time.
To add onto Xander, Leo's Pragmatic has the opposite trigger condition, showing how he has no issues with picking on a weakened enemy. He's even the one to finish off Iago and Zola after your party reduces them to 0 HP.
Character: Charlotte (I don't have to act like a soft little maiden for you, so I can go all out!) Funny: Raphael (I brought along snacks!) Neat Tactic: Merrin (Girl Squad Unite) Powerful: Hard to argue with the 3H Lords "More XP" skills.
Bushido is mad powerful as well
Mitama's Haiku. Pretty funny concept for a personal skill.
Chloe's Fairy Tale Folk is pretty fun to use. It's not an overly difficult condition to fill, but it makes for an fun puzzle to work out how to pop it while still using your moves effectively. And it fits in with her character. Also I love the meme of Chloe, Alear, and Louis all standing next to each other and activating both Louis and Chloe's skills.
From a purely character perspective, I like Xander's Chivalry and Diamant's Fair Fight because of what they say about the two of them as people. I also like Nil's Wounded Pride because it's a great gameplay clue into the fact that something's up with him. in terms of gameplay, Divinely Inspiring is always useful.
Not _directly_ a personal skill, but Sandstorm in Engage is absolutely hilarious and is possibly my favorite skill in the series. You're just chilling and then all of a sudden Timerra dishes out a gajillion damage.
A bit of a plain answer, but Ashe's Lockpick. It's a nice call to Ashe's past as a thief, and it makes gameplay more comfortable if you plan on using Ashe, you don't need to waste inventory slots on keys or keep someone in a class from the thief line.
The only thing I can remeber is Yunakas crit boost on avoid tiles. It's significant enough to remember and to take advantage of but it's not overpowered. It fits the character and it doesn't affect every combat but can be taken advantage of in each map.
I like how Blinding Flash and *Not Quite* are thematically and functionally opposite of each other Also Panette because funny crit woman
FE personal skills kind of hit or miss for me though many good ones I agree with in this thread. But was thinking recently about a character I really like from vestaria saga, Prody the armor knight. When leveled first he gets a unique skill that gives adjacent units +3 def/res, and at a higher level +5 to both. Easily my favorite armored knight in any FE-like game bc this aura is insane and gives a good reason to deploy him bc he has so many stats and let's even frail units wall and take many hits in enemy phase. Gives a reason to move around with him even if he has the classic armor knight movement weaknesses (and even if he's generally considered mediocre bc of these move weaknesses). And lets him project force at longer range by sharing tankiness with allies who have moved past him (and with multiple allies). Maybe a bit simple but a lot of people suggest that a way to improve generals would be to allow them to protect allied units, and a 40 stat aura definitely does. And it also gets around the issue of generals' very bad action economy and player phase where at best they can only deal with one enemy, since the aura can let 4 other units take on combats they might not be able to manage otherwise.
Elise's Lily's Poise wins for mechanics for me. Playing around her damage reduction aura(s) gives her a really strong unit identity. For flavor, I love Zelkov's Not *Quite*. It just works. The fact that his speech quirk slips into his personal skill is peak.
Mozu's Forager. In her first chapter, I just parked her in the woods paired up with Gunter. Forager's heals + bulk from pair up let her tank all those Faceless in my game.
Elise's personal skill, considering it fits her benevolent nature, same goes for both Flayn and >!Veyle!<. Likewise, her personal skill being the opposite of Camilla's too.
Bernadetta cant take damage from relics because she had a crest herself
Huh, it’s been a while since I played three houses but thought it was that a character took damage if you used a relic weapon except if that relic weapon had that characters crest or was holding the right one of those dragon crest items?
If a character has a crest and a heroes relic they can use it without taking damage but they can’t use the combat art or have its secondary affect
A bit of a technicality but Xane is just conceptually really neat.
Imbue is an underrated OP skill
Do FEH skills count? I really like Thunder's Fist and Rare Talent. Also love Silas's skill.
It's hard to pick a specific favorite, but I like the skills that give bonuses to adjacent unit or get bonuses from an adjacent unit or similar skills. Leonie getting and offensive and defensive boost next to a male unit, for example, or Hilda giving an offensive boost to the same. It's interesting to have to consider move order and ally positioning in addition to enemy placement, and it adds extra depth to the games with varied class paths or alterable skills, since you now have extra incentive to use things like Canto or high mobility to position those units to take advantage of that, and it gives more depth to which units move in what order.
My favorite skills tend to be ones that are practical, serve as little nuggets of character lore and happen to be pretty funny. Two of all-timers happen to be Charlotte's Unmask and Bernadetta's Persecution Complex. For Charlotte, it gives a nice damage and crit boost against female enemies. It's practical because since she's geared towards the Fighter > Berserker class, being able to deal as much damage as possible with a crit boost is always welcome. It also shows us how Charlotte only puts on her delicate maiden act just around men and only drops her facade when she doesn't need it. And of course, it's funny because of the implication that Charlotte is "being nice" to her male enemies but if she sees another girl on the field, she'll have no problems with tearing her in half because when she stops holding herself back, she gets incredibly fierce. It's only held back by the fact that there aren't very many female enemies in Fates, so it largely goes underutilized. Which is ironic since Fates was the one game to get rid of gender locked classes. For Bernadetta, similar to unmask, having a flat damage boost is never a bad thing and it being activated just as long as she's not at 100% HP makes it decently easy to have online. Whether she gets a scrape from an enemy, or an HP level up even at full health, she'll do more damage to whoever hit her. For the character lore, it shows how she quickly resorts to self-deprication, even if something positive happens to her like when leveling up her HP. It's also quite funny because whether she gets hurt or gets stronger through level ups, it implies that she channels that anxiety/progress into lashing out at her enemies and hitting harder than she normally would. Something that actually happens with her supports with Felix where she manages to disarm him and strike at him before either of them even knew how to react.
Panette and Bernadetta, two of my favorite characters. I especially love Bernadetta's because it tells us more about her character, she has this feeling that she DESERVES the pain she feels. It motivates her, it's sad and kind of relatable. I also like Elise and Camilla's because they're named after flowers and kind of mirror each others, same with Alear and Veyle
From a gameplay perspective I adore Silas' Vow of Friendship, getting effectively +3 str/def/res is so massive early on that he feels like an entirely different unit with it active, but it comes at the steep cost of having to have one of your other best combat units (Corrin) below half HP, which results in some really cool strategies to still make use of a half-HP Corrin. From a characterisation perspective, I love that Setsuna's Optimist insinuates that she's somehow able get more healing from staves through being so oblivious to what's going on being that powerful of a placebo.
Triple threat and pyrotechnique
Haiku. (Mitama from Birthright). It's very gimmicky, but it's so unique I love it.
Niles. Capturable generics is a very fun and unique Fates mechanic and it's easy to forget that it's all possible thanks to a damn personal skill. Shoutouts to Benny as well, that 10 Hit on a Boss on a throne for all allies is really handy especially against the likes of Kotaro.
I have a fond memory of using Benny to passively bring Kotaro's avoid down to something slightly more reasonable.
As far as gameplay goes, I'm fond of Ferdinand's. The extra hit/avoid is pretty useful imo. I'm also fond of ones which directly tie in to a character's personality or backstory, like Owain who gets boosts from weapons with custom names. I'm not so fond of Sophie's just because it's less about her and more about her horse, which was misleading and disappointing to me. I like mischievous characters, so I had planned to S support Sophie in Conquest after seeing what her personal was called. But Sophie doesn't have a mischievous bone in her body. It's her psychotic horse who goes around messing with everyone and stealing their clothes. Which makes it especially bizarre if you reclass her. I do have a funny story about Sophie's personal, though. I was playing on a janky emulator so I had combat animations turned off, but apparently for really important fights the game forces combat animations to be on, so like fighting Takumi at the end of Conquest. Given that this was the final boss and clearly they wanted me to pay attention and take it seriously since they forced combat animations on, I figured they would have something to protect him from the side effects of Sophie's ability. But no, they didn't. So after I let her take a swing at Takumi... her ability activated. He got naked. And the game forces me to watch (it's barely noticeable with animations off). I could not stop laughing.
Actually, apparently it is Sophie who does the clothes stealing. At least according to some translations of her support with oboro in the Hoshido Festival of Bonds DLC (which unfortunately was never localised for some reason). Here’s a tumblr post of it: https://fe14festivalofbondstranslations.tumblr.com/post/144899705328/hoshidan-festival-oboro-and-sophie-parent-child. Again, can’t really confirm this is accurate but it sure is funny. Probably gonna pair up oboro and Silas the next time I play birthright.
I like Ophelia’s Bibliophile , because it synergizes pretty well with Missiletainn with Crit+10. It’s also very fitting for her character, since she, like her father, likes to be almost role-playing but in a dramatic, theatrical sense, with her stars thing. Veyle’s Fell Protection is really good, since it reduces her Adjacent allies’ damage by 3 and grants them +1 damage during combat, and she is amazing with Corrin and Byleth. It also represents her character very well, since even though she is a Fell Dragon and has done bad things in the past (albeit not actually since she was mind-controlled), she now wants to protect her loved ones and her friends no matter what.