Speed growth: how valuable is it, compared to other stats?

[Goblin King]

It's unclear to me how valuable speed growth is.

My understanding is that speed is more valuable later in the game. Early on you are probably better off increasing ATK / MND / DEF / RES / etc as these totals start out relatively low. However by the end game these stats are really high anyway due to equipment, and there is nothing really increasing SPD much.

For example if you level the Demon Knight from level 1 to 50, you get

ATK: 339 (+6 per level), 501 with Reaper scythe (+162 atk)
SPD: 132 (+0.67 per level)

If you instead level as Assassin for level 1 to 50, you get

ATK: 252 (+4.25 per level), 414 with Reaper scythe (+162 atk)
SPD: 178 (+1.47 per level)

Without equipment, the Demon Knight has about 35% better ATK than the Assassin, and the Assassin has 35% better SPD than the Demon Knight. A rather fair comparison!

However with the Reaper scythe on, the Demon Knight only has about 21% better ATK than the Assassin.

So speed does get better, however even then the difference between the slowest unit (Demon Knight) and the fastest one (Assassin) isn't as huge as you'd think.

[Conan The Librarian]

Speed is important at any point in the game because this game used an initiative system. More speed = more turns over the course of a battle.

[Goblin King]

My point is that endgame equipment can mitigate lowish ATK, MND, DEF and RES, but not SPD. Hence, investing in raw SPD becomes more and more effective as the game goes on.

[Mechalibur]

Speed differences become more noticable in the late game. It's not uncommon later in the game for someone like Katja to take 2 turns per enemy turn. Early game, it's not really possible to get that massive of a speed difference since everyone is still pretty close to their base speed.

[Ishan451]

Originally posted by Guillaume:

My point is that endgame equipment can mitigate lowish ATK, MND, DEF and RES, but not SPD. Hence, investing in raw SPD becomes more and more effective as the game goes on.

You can take this a step further, given that there are skills in the game that make you immune to spells... and attacks that will not even need any scores. Such as the Deals 1/3 of the characters health damage or the "deals damage as much you have lost"

So if you want to look at it like that, you could build high health and Speed characters that deal damage according to the health they have lost, with a counter that makes them immune to a specific attack or gives them rebirth.

[wolff_laarcen]

Speed differences seem very noticeable the further you go in the campaign but even early it's advantageous to level in a fast class as often as you can IMO.

I restarted at one point because of badly built characters that were consistently getting 'lapped' in the turn order. Once I understood how to level characters with respect to optimal speed scaling, things became somewhat easier.

Min/maxing speed probably isn't necessary to finish the game, but you'll definitely feel the difficulty spikes more acutely with slower characters.

This might help: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1866575410