I wouldn't say they were utterly useless. They allowed me to have my Medic actually me useless in regular battles rather than smacking a monster for some tiny amount of they allowed me to make use of his high magic stat to actually lay down some good damage.
Pity the system was so complex and muddy to use.
It's not even really that complex, though. I mean, I don't know the
exact rules it works on since I didn't design it, but it's largely just dice rolling. That's not complex or muddy. Some observations from simply playing the game:
Basics:
- Character must have a Grimoire Stone equipped to be able to get Grimoire Chance.
- Random, low chance for a Grimoire Chance during character's turn in a battle.
- Random, medium chance for a Grimoire Chance to produce a Grimoire Stone.
- Skills on a newly created Grimoire Stone are randomized from the character's current skills,
including skills on their currently equipped Grimoire Stone
- The level of skills on new grimoires will be random; 1-4 is highest chance, 5-9 is lower chance, 10 is lowest chance (more on this below).
- The number of skill slots will be random, but typically higher level skill -> fewer skill slots and lower level skills -> more skill slots.
So it's pretty simple really, just dice rolling.
A few other things factored in:
- Rare Breed enemies (especially FOEs) greatly boost the chance for Grimoire Chance to occur during battle.
- Using a specific skill during a Grimoire Chance seems to give a better chance of that skill being imprinted on a new stone created during that battle. Using Boost seems to also help getting that specific skill on the new stone, and also seems to help make sure it is a higher level (I have no spreadsheet of data to back this up, but I've farmed a ton of stones and it seems true).
- Enemy skills have high (highest?) priority to be included on a new stone. Thus if you are farming stones to duplicate skills you already have, you want to fight enemies with no skills.
- Three types of farmable items let you manipulate the system somewhat.
- Enhanced snacks from Rosa (or other mansion buffs) can be used to make rare breeds appear more often (more natural Grimoire Chances) or give 100% stone creation rate on
any Grimoire Chance (including those triggered by the item Hunting Horn).
- A character must have about 70 skill points sunk into skill trees before they have a chance of making an FL (skill level 10) grimoire, so you cannot Rest a character and only spend points on a skill you want to duplicate at level 10 (you will just get it at low rank even if the character is lelve 99 and has the skill at 10).
I know that's a lot of text, but it's really not that complicated. Now, if we're talking about the Seven Kings grimoires, then yeah I think "muddy" is a fair criticism lol, I had to dig up info online for that stuff. So obscure. Won't mind if that doesn't make a comeback in EOII remake.
Sub-classing is much more sensibly done.
No argument there, I'd rather have subclassing than grimoires, but I think re-balancing the first two games for subclassing would have been a lot more work, so I can (at least think I) understand why they would have not tried to put that system back in for EOI and II remakes.
I hope that if they do remake III, it's just subclassing with no grimoires.
