Griffinlwgameplayer

Well yeah but there is a whole character archetype based around the idea of a character being very bad at the start and then becoming better than most characters over time. It's called the Est Archetype, Donell is one of those, and I heard they were supposed to be fairly popular in the Fire Emblem community.

Unless you are playing on Lunatic, everyone and their mother, son, father, and daughter are completely viable, as long as you give them some training. Maybe it's because I'm a casual player, but even Donell, you know the weakest bases in Awakening, can work out perfectly fine if you get him past the early area where he has trouble. In fact because of the way awakening works unless you are playing on lunatic you can train any unit you want into becoming the destroyer of worlds with 100% accuracy and enough speed to dodge people with a weapon triangle advantage against them. That's because Awakening had the highest growth rates in FE in years. It doesn't matter where someone started as long as they could win a battle you just had to get them a few levels and chances are they would level out, since the lowest character growths in the game still exceed 300% growth rate total

How come unique weapons that have lasted centuries break very easily as soon as they get in your unit's hands

This would be a wonderful idea if it wasn't for the way FE is going right now In the old games that would be perfect, characters with different personalities and stat spreads having alternate class changes based off of those, for example, a myrmidon focusing on speed changing to a swordmaster while one focused on power becomes a Great Knight. It would add even more of a unique flavour to the characters as you weigh the pros and cons of the class changes along with their potential and stat growths. In Awakening and Fates everyone has at least 6 or 7 classes at their disposal through second seals, heart seals, etc. This makes their stats and skills very versatile and often encourage creating builds relying on a mix of skills and stats through careful use of class changes. Making the class changes specific to different people would make each character more unique stat wise.... but after the changes in Fates and Awakening the lack of versatility would be a huge sticking point to a lot of people. I would appreciate it greatly but I'm sure there are others who would hate it for taking away the adaptability of making your mages into priests and fighters into myrmidons and knights into cavaliers.

I mean from a gameplay perspective it mainly makes sense that they would have limited durability, or come super late into the game (Ragnel from Path of Radiance comes to mind, since you get it soon before the boss fight with the Black Knight, which isn't far off from the end of the game) but from a story perspective the weapons should either be completely unbreakable, or last a very, very long time. The holy weapons from 4, in particular, seem like they should have neverending durability considering they have lasted generations, but they are also able to be repaired by going to town and getting their blacksmith to repair it. The legendary weapons in Blazing Blade also seem like they should last a very, very long time. But all of them have 20 uses, meaning they can be broken in as many as ten battles assuming all of them were double attacks. Which is quite pathetic to think about really. From a gameplay stance, it makes sense that Lyn's wouldn't be infinite given that it was given to her so early, and both Katti are said to not truly be legendary blades. But while the Mani Katti sorta makes sense, what with being sealed and all for a long time, how come the Sol Katti lasts a shorter amount of time? It's supposed to be the superior weapon but it lasts a shorter amount of attacks and is gifted to you at the final chapter where it makes sense for it to last forever. Can we add dragon stones to the mix? Why do they break? According to the lore in some of the games, a dragon stone is the power of a dragon condensed into a small stone, allowing them to maintain human form, and still release their power by activating the stone. So.... if it breaks does that mean they lose all that power inside the stone and themselves? do they change back to full dragons until they make a new one or do they lose the power to become dragons? Basically, durability doesn't make sense for stones, or legendary weapons

Getting to level 20 is statistically the best way to go about promotions. It ensures that each character gets every chance they can to raise their stats along the way which means that someone promoted at level 20 is superior to someone promoted at 10 with the only exceptions being due to RNG. Of course, this mostly applies in games where growth rates are high and stats are of great importance. the Telius series and Fates for example. In the older games the stats are so low that promotion can afford to come early, and in Awakening, stats are literally endless as long as you are willing to class change and re-promote your units Strategically though there are a lot of reasons to promote someone before they reach level 20. Either because their most important stats are so high they don't need the extra levels, or because of something they get at promotion being more important than a couple 40% chances of raising something by 1.

I think you might be onto something. People loath to lose units in Fire Emblem unlike games where your units are generic. Because of this in some strategy games losing a unit isn't a big deal because you can buy, build, or train a replacement. But our gaming instinct tells us that when we have a limited number of units which are unique characters that we can like or dislike, we want to keep them alive As they became less of a resource and more of a party member the growth rates have more or less increased along the way

Generally, games with higher numbers in their combat systems are more exciting than lower numbers. Depending on the game sometimes the max HP or damage is as low as 99 or as high as 999,999,999. The problem is that a lot of these higher numbers are pure inflation. Instead of making the game more interesting or complex they slap a few 0s to the end of a stat to make it appear more interesting. Fire Emblem has largely avoided this but at the same time stats have been getting larger as the games go on, and I feel that at a certain point they went over the bell curve and it started doing more harm than good. I liked growth rates as they were in the GBA and Tellius games. A little low in places but all the same you could tell a unit's strong suits and weaknesses based on their stat growths. They were very good at what they were good at and sometimes fell a bit in their weak spots. Because of this numerous characters were solidly built but had problems they would have to work with. This made interesting wrinkles in your strategy depending on the strengths and weaknesses of your chosen team members Awakening and Fates ruined the balance I think. Most characters have such high growth rates that they can be modified into almost any class configuration, especially if you used a second seal to move them into another class with different growth modifiers. You can eventually create characters entirely lacking weak points by abusing second seals, even then certain characters could be raised to crush anything in their path without drawbacks even without them. Like the child characters.

On one hand I dislike durability because weapons have to be constantly replaced in order for your troops to keep fighting. This is especially frustrating in some games where unique weapons are breakable, and therefore should be hoarded until certain battles. On the other hand I understand that being able to buy 3 killing Edges to last you the entire game could perhaps break the difficulty of the game, and Infinite use unique weapons are often so good that there is no reason to use any other. So it's a complicated problem

In most games towards the end you get a couple strong units, just in case your old units are dead. In some games you even get one at the very end before the final boss, just in case

In some Fire Emblem games, you have the freedom to return to previous maps and fight additional enemies to train your units and possibly acquire more money and weapons. In others, your EXP and item count is limited by the number of maps in the game, which you can not return to. This creates different playstyles between these games. In some, you can grind and class change to raise stats or replenish weapons, allowing a more Build style of play where you train your units to reach certain benchmark levels and stats. In the others what you have is what you get and training and item grabbing is important as many items are so rare you might only get a few across the whole game. Which do you prefer?

I think that putting something between Classic and Casual is a pretty good idea. On one end playing Casual is a good way to avoid the dreaded permadeath and reduces the number of resets to only if something goes horribly, horribly wrong. On the other playing, Casual makes it too easy to accomplish secondary objectives because there is no sacrifice to be made, it allows for reckless moves because dying actually has no consequence. On the other hand, Classic makes you play to the best of your ability, which for people new to the franchise or lacking in strategic savvy can sometimes bee too much. I think it's a good idea because while it has a consequence for failure that makes you not want to let them be defeated, while at the same time making it significantly less crippling when it does happen

Which is another way of bypassing their mastery skills, killing them from a distance/where they can't attack before they can do anything drastic

Well eclipse has a 40% chance of activating and Ire has 18%. Black Knight is a duel with Ike so he could very easily die to it if he doesn't kill him fast or have Nihil. The Dragon King is a battle against like.... 20-30+ dragons depending on difficulty, with him standing around in the middle ready to attack you. Attacking from range is a big help but also kinda sucks because it limits you to the ranged weapons, of which most are weaker than melee weapons. Also in the same chapter as the black knight you face someone with Impale, a chance at dealing four times the shown damage based on their skill. Plus both of the holy men in the tower have Corona, which has a chance of nullifying a person's resistance which can also be pretty bad Basically mastery skills suck when you go up against them and there have been times where people had to cherry pick who to give Nihil to

He's definitely on the tougher but slower side of the other two soldier options in the game. By a pretty wide margin actually It actually makes a lot of sense for Pirates, Barbarians, and Fighters to be pretty fast, since they have little to weigh them down other than their axes. Boyd and Nolan, in particular, are crazy fast (although I think Boyd is a little slower in the second Tellius game he's still fast)