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samthedigital

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Posts posted by samthedigital

  1. 1 hour ago, Revier said:

    Don't know enough about Thracia 776 to comment on its balance.

    They're more balanced in Thracia than in most games for whatever that's worth. The main culprit is the fact that they are forcibly dismounted indoors. It helps that Warp has unlimited range too.

  2. 28 minutes ago, SnowFire said:

    I will grant that having at least a passable hit rate is important if you're doing Vantage/Wrath.  Enemy phase sweeping is not a playstyle I consider very fun so I don't do it myself, but yeah, needing to roll a hit over repeated enemy attacks, and being at low HP to set it up, exaggerates the impact of Skill. If you're doing player phase strats, then a disastrous miss is just 1/10 of your time crystal charges and move on with your life, no big deal.

    Come to think of it a lot of the examples I'd give are very enemy phase focused, but they aren't all necessarily Wrath/Vantage related. That 4% hit rate bump can make hitting say 10 attacks in a row 20% more likely for example, and that sort of scenario is fairly common in GBA FE; it really increases the productivity of a unit. GBA FE is kind of funny though since it's possible to rig everything, and even in that context it's important to get skill to make some strategies work.

  3. 10 minutes ago, Uscari said:

    The non-prepromote cavalies in PoR pretty much are all better statistically than the prepromoted ones you get when trained.

    I'm not talking about the prepromotes here; just the statistical differences between the unpromoted cavaliers and mages.

    11 minutes ago, Uscari said:

    You might think these advantages don't matter, but I'm coming from the perspective of someone who played PoR Maniac Mode in an Ironman, and I found that the differences did matter. They probably don't matter in NA PoR in Hard Mode, but I found them pretty noticeable in Maniac.

    Remember that I have also played and finished MM. I don't have the same experience as you. I definitely have not done an ironman of the game (PoR EP is too slow for me to have any interest in that sort of thing personally), but it's only one of many ways that the game can be played, and my guess is that someone else could do an ironman in a completely different fashion from you and still have similar success.

  4. 37 minutes ago, Uscari said:

    I mean building the team with the strongest stats/skills/supports by the endgame. PoR rewards you much more for training growth units because there are very noticeable differences in their endgame potential compared to most prepromoted units. In PoR, Harr is way worse than Jill. Titania is way worse than Oscar. Bastian is way worse than Soren. The prepromoted units you get in this game are largely there to save you resources that you otherwise needed to invest in growth units.

    41 minutes ago, Uscari said:

    Different options is fun but you only take advantage of different options when there is a real trade-off to choosing them. It's not as fun if you aren't making a strategic decision by choosing a different option.

    What about Soren compared to Tormod or Ilyana or comparing the individual Cavaliers? That's what I'm getting at. Unless I'm doing a speedrun or something (where Titania and Marcia are the best units in the game and Bastian is actually useful lol) the choice barely matters; the reward for picking the "best" option is likely just taking a little less time to kill enemies.

  5. 2 hours ago, ping said:

    I mean, probably? Point for point, I'd say it's somewhere in the middle - less valuable than Str/Mag and Def, maybe comparable to HP, and more valuable than Lck and Res. Spd depends heavily on the circumstances - on a character that doubles everything anyway, Skl is probably more valuable, but if not (or if the character can swap to a heavier weapon with an additional point of Spd), a single point of Spd can be insanely impactful.

    I didn't make that statement with other stats in mind because I find that comparing them is a wasted effort. Skill can be underappreciated too because it's not a flashy stat, but I'll address that with my response to SnowFire.

    2 hours ago, SnowFire said:

    despite the minor impact of each individual point of Skill

    If skill is underappreciated this is reason why, I think. You said that skill isn't very important in Engage, and I would agree to some extent. It certainly isn't as valuable as say Fates/Awakening because skill% skills aren't really relevant and engraving will fix hit rates for most units. If I was going to really try and show how important skill is those are the games I'd choose. That being said if for example I gave Panette 3 less base skill and a 10% lower growth then she suddenly has in the ballpark of like 80% hit and crit against late game enemies like Swordmasters and Wolf Knights. That small loss of skill turns a strategy that is 100% consistent into something that's more akin to a coin flip or worse if there are enough enemies there to attack her. Rewinds can help, but at some point Wrath/Vantage is going to be completely unusable. That's where skill is at its weakest (of the games that I have played extensively) too.

    edit: Another thing that I quickly want to note is that it's more difficult to see what a point in skill is actually doing for you. It's pretty obvious when a point of speed or str allows us to reach a breakpoint. Having an extra few points of skill is going to matter a lot over time, but a point or two of displayed hit are nearly indistinguishable from one another from an attack to attack basis.

  6. 6 hours ago, Uscari said:

    Maybe it was a bit strong language for me to say Maniac Mode "required" training a bunch of growth units. I still think you are strongly rewarded for building the best team possible, but I'll take your point that you aren't "required" to do that.

    Whether I agree or not depends on what you mean by building the best possible team. I never found Maniac Mode to be that strict besides trying to make use of bad classes which isn't something that I'd dock it for necessarily as every Fire Emblem game has this problem. I would likely think less of it if it did feel anywhere close to that though. Fire Emblem is a lot more fun when there are a lot of different options in my opinion.

  7. 2 hours ago, Uscari said:

    Meanwhile there's no doubt in my mind that you could clear RD Hard Mode in a 0% growths Ironman, which is statistically impossible in PoR Maniac.

    I'm not really talking about ironman runs or 0% growths here really. The point was to show that the game is beatable without using a lot of growth units. Having a few definitely helps, but having Titania soak up a bunch of early exp or using resources like stat boosters inefficiently isn't going to kill any kind of playthrough. There's a lot more out there than what I linked too that demonstrates that.

    56 minutes ago, Jotari said:

    Sacred Stones seems like it'd be much more difficult to 0% clear, especially on iron man, as it gives you fewer late game prepromotes.

    It's probably somewhat outside the scope of this discussion, but this one depends on some outside factors because GBA FE RNG manipulation is pretty silly.

  8. PoR used to be my favourite Fire Emblem game. These days I find it hard to go back to just because of how slow enemy phase is compared to just about any other Fire Emblem game I'd want to play.

    On 4/10/2024 at 11:19 PM, Uscari said:

    Maniac Mode requires training lots of growth units and investing resources efficiently so that you have a team strong enough to clear the final chapters.

    It doesn't require this. It has been beaten with 0% growths by multiple people.

    Otherwise I don't really have any strong opinions on your takes. I would disagree with the skill system differences in particular because I don't find that there are many meaningful decisions to be made in PoR, but it's all personal opinion anyway.

  9. 47 minutes ago, Cdijk16 said:

    I see. How hard would you say Birthright Lunatic is relative to Conquest?

    People say that some maps are as difficult as Hard mode in Conquest, but that the vast majority of maps are a lot easier. It's pretty subjective though and depends on your experience with the series. I didn't find that Lunatic was much of a jump from Hard mode in Conquest personally, and when I did eventually get to Birthright I had a lot of Fates experience already which made the game a lot less challenging for me.

  10. I'm probably not best suited to answer these questions, but since no one else has answered yet...

    On 2/28/2024 at 11:32 AM, Shadow Mir said:

    Someone tried to argue Subaki can be a carry in Revelation. But that's something I have a lot of issues accepting, considering Corrin is practically forced to be the early carry in Revelation due to your lack of units (only themselves, Azura and Felicia/Jakob for most of chapter 7, and them plus Gunter for 8; sure, one could get Mozu immediately after chapter 7, but imho it ain't worth it. Also, many of those cannot take hits well). Is there any truth to this, or is this just hot air?

    I don't know that Subaki has the stats to do it really, so my gut instinct is no, but generally speaking people don't care whether something is worth it or not when playing the games, and there is a lot of room for build and character diversity in fates.

    On 3/18/2024 at 8:41 AM, Cdijk16 said:

    2. How hard is Lunatic mode of Birthright relative to other games in the series?

    There are two ways to approach it. If you go in completely blind I'd say that it's on par with something like HHM; it's moderately difficult but nothing compared to something like Lunatic+ in Awakening. If you plan out your builds and use something overpowered it can be a complete cakewalk, but that's just my opinion.

  11. 16 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

    To be clear, I've never tried it either; I was speaking of Chloe and Mage Knight separately in my post. I'm slightly skeptical of Mage Knight Chloe just because I find that the magic benchmark to ORKO most enemies with tomes is reasonably tight; you can do it but you need a pretty good magic stat, or a lot of investment in that direction, but some people seem to have gotten good results (and obviously Levin Sword + Sword Power is always an option).

    If you give her Eirika and the appropriate amount of support through skills and forges she can do quite well assuming you want her to be one of your main damage dealers. Spirit Dust will probably help too. It is something of an investment technically speaking, but it's not something unique to her. Personally I like to transition from Griffin Knight when/if I no longer want her staff utility and give her Corrin instead since I find that the utility role fits her better, but that's just me.

  12. I've always given at least one of them to Alear so that I can have them fly through chapter 11. Otherwise I'll use them on whoever I feel like using at the time, and I've tried every character at least once. If you're just playing through casually it's going to be more important to work out to use your emblems and resources to make the characters that you want to use succeed. If you want Citrinne to be your carry for example work out how to get her to one round enemies (give her resources to double if you don't want to spend time rerolling for bond rings) and go from there. I find that it's easiest to do this with units that have one stat that is really good and one that needs fixing, but realistically you can use anyone to some capacity and have almost any unit be a juggernaut.

  13. 2 hours ago, ARMADS!!! said:

    Don't people consider the gameplay of Fates to be pretty good though?(I never played it myself but I've seen a lot of people saying that Conquest's maps are top tier and among the best in the series). I think Fates is a strongest contender for the FE that gets more hate, not for the most unremarkable one.

    You'll get some mixed opinions, but there are a certain subset of people that absolutely love fates gameplay (myself included), so my guess is that it would be easily disqualified for this reason, at least judging by the typical fire emblem discussion spots.

    I'm going to guess that the answer to the topic is Gaiden.

  14. 34 minutes ago, Florete said:

    It's somewhat dependent on the game (no one cares for Awakening Lunatic+, for example), but the people who care about this kind of thing - unit viability, investment costs, etc. - are the fans who play these games multiple times over and probably end up desiring more of a challenge than normal mode. I rarely see discussions about normal mode if it's not clarified early, and if clarification is asked for, they usually say hard mode, at least from my own experience.

    The context of the playthrough is more important than the difficulty. If I am just looking to beat a Fire Emblem game on the hardest difficulty resource distribution generally isn't that important. That's especially true if I take advantage of things like boss abuse and the like. On the other hand if I were to do a draft/speedrun/LTC/etc. then those resources would be important even on the easiest difficulty. I'm going to assume that lenticular's perspective is more casual (for lack of a better word) to some degree. Otherwise I would disagree with a lot of what was said in the OP.

  15. 1 hour ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

    For what it's worth I wasn't thinking of value as "which one would I rather play the game without".

    I suspected as much.

    1 hour ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

    Admittedly I'm not sure exactly how I would define value. If I had to put it into words in the context of Ryoma: I am impressed by how well Ryoma does what he does without needing much investment, and find that when I try to replicate him with someone else, they either do significantly worse or need a lot more resources to get there.

    Also, to be clear I agree with you for the most part. I'm not sure exactly how much it takes for another unit to replicate Ryoma's performance, but I don't know BR well enough to comment on that.

  16. 7 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

    Beyond that, my opinion is that they're both excellent and measuring which of two units is more valuable in completely different games is rarely going to be easy. On the whole I'd lean toward Ryoma, but a lot depends on how much you dock him for missing Chapters 7-13.

    When you say that you find Ryoma to be more valuable than Rutger does that mean that you would rather play FE6 without Rutger than Birthright without Ryoma? That's how I would personally determine which is more valuable, but it doesn't necessarily correlate to which unit I think is better either; that kind of question is complicated.

  17. 40 minutes ago, henrymidfields said:

    I was more thinking in the lines of how much difference they can make long-term in their respective games, or whether they're redundant due to the (lack of) difficulty of the game. In that sense, Rutger does make certain chapters or bosses from very difficult (or near-impossible like Henning) to more reasonable...

    I'm just not sure that the average player is comparing units across games like this is all. People often consider Seth to be one of the best units across the series despite the fact that Sacred Stones is one of the easier games in the series even without him for example. It's really just a semantics thing though.

  18. How are we defining better/superior exactly?

    edit:

    My guess is that to the casual player what matters is whether a unit can easily carry their game. There are several units that can do that in Birthright, but Ryoma probably takes the least effort to get going. Binding Blade just isn't that kind of game, so Rutger is going to look a lot worse than he should in that kind of context.

  19. 58 minutes ago, SnowFire said:

    So there is a way to play Hard Mode without the bizarre Quality of Life hatred nonsense in the shipped Hard Mode...  for all that it still has the issue that it's just not that different aside from reduced BExp favoring the use of pre-leveled characters over growth characters even more than Radiant Dawn already does.

    This option also works. I'm not sure if it's available via emulation though.

  20. The fun for me is primarily in learning the mechanics and using them to my advantage to beat the games in a variety of ways. I find that Fire Emblem games tend to hit a nice sweet spot where it takes some effort to have a good grasp on everything without feeling like it's impossible to get to that point. Tic-Tac-Toe and Chess would be examples of the two opposite ends of this spectrum. The art style, music, and pacing add something too. I don't like the DS games simply because I don't like their look, and I don't like Three Houses because optimizing units means spending a lot of time doing shit that I don't like or watching a loading screen. The story/characters could potentially add to the experience, but for the most part I don't really care about that aspect of Fire Emblem. The Tellius games have been the only exceptions, and even then I'm not sure how much I value it when it comes to my enjoyment of those games.

  21. On 1/16/2024 at 6:15 AM, Barren said:

    So between the four which do you think is the better candidate for an early heart seal? I’m on chapter 8 currently.

    The real answer is to play through the game 4 times to try out every single option. 😃

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