Hey! Just finished this on the v3.3 patch - Shadowgift was a pretty fun little addition to the game and certainly less overpowered than Galeforce was.
3 major suggestions from me when I played through everything:
1. The wind line of tomes (excluding Blizzard/the siege tome and the A-ranked tomes) felt pretty much pointless since they just did so much less damage than the thunder line up. Not sure how/if you'd want to fix something like this, but the easiest one may be to poach the crit bonus from the Thunder line and shift it to the Wind line instead. Or perhaps the wind line could do bonus damage but to mounted units (the horse symbol)/armored units? They could even take a further might nerf and retain their vanilla flier effectiveness but as they stand there's no reason to use them at all.
2. There's still some ambush summons and one of those (specifically the ones in chapter 21 - Five Gemstones where you get caught in the Plegia castle) is really irritating - they were irritating in the main game too tbh but the combination of 2 x normal Sorcerer, Assassin + the Tomebreaker siege people make it so some units can just get deleted without warning with the lowered caps and higher bow strength. Honestly, not sure if it's possible to just have some sort of warning before they popped up, or if there could have been a physical/magical reinforcement split on alternate turns?
3. I think all of the reinforcements in Chapter 11 (Mad King Gangrel) got deleted? That chapter now somehow feels really, really empty which is sort of thematic and all, but really anticlimatic given this is the end of arc 1 in the game. Arcs 2 and 3 are both great, with Walhart and the Grimleal's chapter doing pretty well.
Couple of additional notes:
I'm aware this is probably asking for too much, but if we could have a couple more reinforcements popping up at the end of the enemy phase rather than at the beginning that'd be absolutely awesome.
I don't think I could have laughed any harder than when I realised that you replaced the Dread Fighter class with Olivia's Swordmaster class and so the Dread Scroll promotes people into it and the sprite work is great for units like Donnel with the classic female swordmaster + his little pot on the head.
1) Is there a way to swap out the terrible nerfed Ragnell with the variant that Priam uses when you beat his paralogue (the only difference is durability anyway), unless you already did, didn't feel like grinding through that nonsense more than once?
2) The most difficult chapter in the game for me was probably chapter 12: The Seacomers since you get literally 0 turns of downtime to heal up between the 3 + boss waves of paladins, cavaliers and knights rushing in, which means you just have to rely on the classic awakening strategy of juggernauts via Robin/Chrom/whatever else has enough defense to get hit by more than 4 units at a time. An additional beast killer or armorslayer would have been appreciated a ton I think
3) Overall, while the difficulty curve is significantly improved throughout the game, the endgame chapters still feel substantially easier than the earlier ones (with some exceptions - this is mostly on awakening map design & enemy designs though, also the fact that I recently finished all of Conquest and the back half of Path of Radiance just makes Awakening's maps seem much more lacking) but I have no clue how you can help this without turning the game into random delete-a-thon late game which the dark fliers certainly did to slower units anyway
Overall
Awakening's writing really fell off a cliff after the first act (with all it's internal consistency issues in supports - exactly why does Lucina seem to remember quite a bit of Chrom but people like Cynthia don't even know what he looks like, especially if he's both of their dads?) and the gameplay is strangely unbalanced overall. However, your changes helped a ton and the increased amount of options throughout (stronger bows + more accessible siege tomes + much less nonsensical stat inflation) do help alleviate some of the duller or more annoying parts of it.
Love the siege tome bosses (Excellus! Such a good fit) actually, and I had a bunch of fun going through all of it (certainly so much more fun than my vanilla hard or lunatic playthroughs) and thank you for making it and making Awakening much more playable overall.
