Ackron64

Even so, this doesn't change my disagreement with this point. If every unit was changed to be more like Nino, then there wouldn't be much unit diversity at all. What I like about the GBA fire emblem games is that units of the same class as other units bring different things to the table. I like the fact that Erk, Pent, and Nino all feel vastly different from one another. If these units were to be made more similar to one another, it would limit the various ways the player can experience the game. And to elaborate on what I said in my last post, lowering the bases and increasing the variability in stat outcomes opens the door to RNG ruining a playthrough. The reason why you have units like Pent and Athos is because the game still needs to be beatable if your units happen to get RNG screwed. Getting rid of high base units eliminates a healthy safety net for players to fall back on, and if you get too carried away with lowering the bases of units, then it might even lead to a player soft-locking their game because their stats are not good enough to progress through the game. Even in less extreme cases, new units should feel enticing to use. Recruiting new units throughout the story would feel kind of pointless if they all had bad bases, because why would you want to use a bunch of units with bad bases when you can continue to use units that you've been training up already? One Nino in a playthrough is enough, but nobody would want to go through the trouble of grinding out several Ninos (unless if it's the Sacred Stones, but Tower of Valni is a poor design choice anyway). In either case, I think it really shows how high-base units are essential to Fire Emblem. It's easy to say that people can simply choose an easier difficulty setting if they don't want the game to be too hard, but the culmination of all the changes you've proposed would give a lot of hard mode players more than what they bargained for.

First of all, your complaint about boss weapons durability is completely arbitrary. Anyone who slows the game down enough to break any boss's weapons are clearly not looking for a challenge as it is, so changing that would change practically nothing about how people experience the game. The next thing I want to touch up on is bases being 'too high'. A simple counter to that is that these games need to be beatable even if the player gets RNG screwed. You're practically proposing for every character to be like Nino, even though Nino is universally considered to be a terrible unit. In order for Nino to be any good, you have to slow the game way down and practically baby her for her to have any use as a unit. If anything, having access to high base low growth units, and high growth low base units gives the player a variety of ways to experience the game. Your idea would make the games feel monotonous, and would basically offer the player no safety net if their level ups go horribly wrong. If a player is put into a position of not being able to beat the game simply because of RNG, that's bad game design. Units with high bases are essential to keep the game beatable under any circumstance. Your proposed changes for stat boosters would also defeat the purpose of having stat boosters. I can maybe agree with +7 hp being too high for angelic robes, but taking it down to 3 is over-correcting. For example, if a unit gets 3 hit KO'd before using an angelic robe, a +3 boost to hp would very likely not do anything to change that. As for all the other stats, I must reiterate that stat-boosters exist for a reason. A +1 change to any stat wouldn't be much of a boost at all. Any instant gratification the player feels from using them would go away, and they wouldn't really make a noticeable difference, and it's not like you get enough stat boosters in the game to make any meaningful difference if they only gave +1. This would practically force the player to invest all of their stat boosters into one unit in order to notice any real difference from using them. For a series that thrives off of being enjoyable in a variety of ways, this would go completely against that model. You mentioned that players can save-scum and continue to reset the game until they get an increase in defense, and then stack that with draco-shields to have high defense, but again, players who resort to methods that slow the game way down are not really looking for a challenge. Weapon durability/cost: in your post you wanted weapon durability to go down, and for weapon cost to go up. If this were to happen, the amount of gold a player would need to spend throughout a playthrough would shoot through the roof, and I'm not sure if even the best players could keep up with that kind of change. Changing only one of these things would make a noticeable increase in difficulty, changing both would be beyond excessive though. Even then, I'd argue that both of those things are fine where they are. First of all, weapon durability is fine where it is. Silver and killer weapons are not cheap at all and have lower durability than most weapons in the game. You're effectively paying around 1,500 gold per 10 enemies you kill with these weapons, and that's a lot of gold for such few enemies. The units who man your front lines will burn through these weapons quickly, meaning you'll need to buy even more which will cost you quite a bit of gold. Maybe you can afford to use Silver and Killer weapons more sparingly with units like Franz, Seth, Cormag, and any other mal cav/flier because they will likely have enough strength and con to consistently kill with lesser weapons. However, female fliers basically require these weapons in order to consistently kill, because the speed penalty of steel weapons is too much for them. Silver and killer weapons are even more important for female fliers like Vanessa, Fiora, and Shanna because their low strength makes iron weapons almost useless for them. So yeah, weapon durability and cost are just fine if you ask me. Also, in FE6 and 7, you don't have access to any sort of overworld where you can purchase high-end equipment at any time, so the player might not necessarily be prepared enough to actually be able to make full use of the shops in the maps. And yes, FE7 dedicates an entire paralogue to a huge supply run, but you only have two chapters after that anyway, so it's not a game-breaking supply run anyway. But before I get too off topic, the main point is that the demand is really high for the weapons that have the least durability and cost some of the most gold in the game, and these weapons will only survive around 10 rounds of combat each before they need to get replaced, and all that adds up quickly. And I'll quickly touch on your point of the games 'favoring the player too much'. I really don't see how this is a bad thing. Videogames should be fun, and a lot of players wouldn't have fun if it felt like they were constantly fighting an uphill battle with the games. Even some of the most skilled and experienced players never seem to get bored with the series, and seem to find an endless amount of ways to enjoy the games. If very skilled players can still have fun with Fire Emblem, then that seems to tell me that the games aren't too easy, and can be enjoyed in a variety of ways. So yeah, to sum it up, a lot of your proposed changes range from removing the variety of ways that Fire Emblem can be enjoyed, to recklessly changing the balance of certain game mechanics. On top of that, some of these changes seem like they're meant to make the game more challenging for players that aren't looking for a challenge. By doing this, you would end up giving something to only a portion of the player base something that they don't want, and would end up affecting the game experience for all the other players in a very unnecessary way. Honestly, I don't think it would be a bad idea to try these changes in a hack as the others have been saying. They are. If they didn't let him have his own opinions, then they wouldn't be telling him any ways or methods for him to actually try out some of his proposed changes himself. Also, this is a forum, not an echo chamber. People would not post their own opinions on forums if they don't want anybody disagreeing with them. The OP won't die from people in the thread disagreeing with him, don't worry.

FE4 to FE5: I'll have to go with Ares on this. I'm saying this purely for story purposes because he would probably break the game. Mystletainn would be even more OP than Finn's brave lance for capturing enemies, and with so many enemy mages in the game, the res boost you get from Mystletainn would end up making things way too easy. But story-wise, Ares makes too much sense. He grew up in Leonster, he's Nanna and Dermott's cousin, and Quan and Eldigan were supposedly really close friends, but they never interact in FE4 and only indirectly show it with how close they act towards Sigurd. Ares in FE5 would help remedy this because him and Leif could fill in the gap that Genealogy left. There's just so much potential here to expand upon the Jugdral characters. FE5 to FE4: Saias is the obvious choice here, though Galzus and Mareeta would also be solid choices. Saias because he could easily offer Seliph more diverse counsel instead of just Exposition Lewyn (Oifey and Shannan should have already been doing this anyway though). Also, with Saias possessing major Fjalar holy blood, it would make for some interesting conversations between him and one of Azel's possible sons, especially when the Duke of Velthomer is determined at the end of the game. While it would probably end up going to Azel's son, I could imagine a pretty cool conversation happening between him and Saias while disputing that, with Azel's son insisting that Saias is the rightful heir. He also has great conversation potential with Arvis, Julius, and Ishtar. Gameplay wise, I think he'd be balanced because his insane utility as a high priest (with the possibility of also weilding Valflame after defeating Arvis) would be offset by being an infantry unit. He just makes too much sense as a Genealogy inclusion As for Galzus and Mareeta, Seliph's army has an abundance of Od's descendants and ties to Isaach, so Galzus and Mareeta would have plenty of people to talk to. The thought of him interacting with Shannan has me fanboying already. Mareeta would probably develop a friendly rivalry with Larcei and Ulster, and there's hilarious conversation potential between her and Shannan, because she'd be all thankful for learning Astra from him (even though she learned it from fake Shannan) while he's standing there being thoroughly confused at what's happening. There's also cool conversation potential for her with Patty and Faval, because her adoptive mother is their biological mother. It could even be something as simple as Mareeta pointing out the resemblance they have with Eyvel (although at this point it would probably make sense for Eyvel herself to be in the game since she's a part of Leif's army and whatnot, but it'd still be pretty cool).

Hello, As you all can probably tell, I'm Ackron. I don't really know what this quota system is, and my very first post was a new topic so I'm a little confused about that, but that isn't important. Awakening was my first game and I really enjoyed it despite how divisive that game is within the fanbase. Since then though, I've expanded my horizons. Games I've completed: Genealogy of the Holy War Binding Blade Blazing Blade Sacred Stones Awakening Birthright Echoes (well, technically not because I struggled with the final map on my first few attempts and haven't picked it up since then) Three Houses (AM, VW, CF) Games in progress: Mystery of the Emblem (not sure if I have the patience to go through this one and will probably play through the DS remakes instead) Thracia 776 Path of Radiance Conquest and Revelation (tbh, Fates exhausted me at this point and I had to just put it down) (And yes, I do passively partake in Heroes as an FTP player) As you can probably see, I'm very bad at seeing games all the way through because there are so many games I want to try out all at once. In fact, it doesn't even end at Fire Emblem. I'm also in the middle of playing Dragon Quest XI, Luigi's Mansion 3, and Link's Awakening just to name a few. It doesn't help that some of the games I'm in the middle of are on my home computer even though I spend most of my time on my college's campus. I joined Serenes Forest because I've encountered many threads that I wanted to reply to, or sometimes I couldn't find a thread for certain topics I'm looking for, so I figured this was a good way for me to be active in the community. As for what I want out of Fire Emblem games, I'm honestly not too picky. Intelligent Systems generally does a great job with most of their games, and even some of the games with glaring/obvious flaws have enough redeeming qualities to be an overall enjoyable experience. There are exceptions of course. The user interface of FE3 for example feels so archaic and clunky that it prevents me from enjoying the actual gameplay. Also with Fates, the amount of contrived plot points and gimmicky map designs wore me down so much that it sucked any enjoyment I had from those games. If you like FE3 or Fates, then I have no problem with that at all, this is just my opinion. Back to the positives though, it feels like most Fire Emblem games bring something new and unique to the table which keeps me engaged with the series. Even the GBA emblems for example, while they all look same on the surface, they all provide you with vastly different experiences. So yeah, that's me. I still don't really know much about this quota system or whatever, but nevertheless being able to introduce myself is nice. Not sure how many people will be bored enough to read all of this, but it still feels nice to do.

Wow, I can't believe it took me this long to realize that this was a part of the game. I'm still not sure why I couldn't find any information about it through my own research, so I thank you for for your service. I ended up leveling Seliph up by killing a level 10 melgen soldier or two. The reason why I grinded Seliph out so quickly is because the pace of your FE4 playthrough is basically determined by how quickly Seliph promotes. Also, I'm not too worried about exp distribution since it's pretty easy in this game. So many generation 2 units have access to staves, and staves give you a ridiculous amount of exp in this game. And even if they don't have staves, everyone can one round basically any enemy in gen 2 if given proper inventory (e.g. Dermott with Sigurd's crit Silver Sword, Fee with the Brave Lance, Arthur with Forseti, etc.) so exp gain for them isn't much of an issue for them either. That doesn't even include Lex's two children, who can promote by only doing arena battles.

The general vibe that I'm getting from the original post is that FE6 still works as a game in spite of some of the 'flaws' that people claim that the game has. So far so good. But then you're taking it a step further and saying that just because FE7 and FE8 don't carry over a lot of the same mechanics as FE6, they are inherently worse. This is where you lose me. Out of all the Fire Emblem games I've played, I can't really look at any of them and think "Yeah, this game would definitely be better if the main lord was nerfed". Change isn't always bad. In fact, Change is quite necessary in order to keep the series interesting. If the series continuously built itself around the same exact mechanics and game play for every entry, it wouldn't be fun at all. And to basically rephrase my point, Marcus going from having bad growths in FE6 to okay growths in FE7 is neither an upgrade or a downgrade. Nothing between the two does anything to distinguish itself as being inherently better than the other. And one final note, a lot of the points you're making really just come down to personal preference, but you're kind of stating it as fact. From an objective standpoint, it's impossible to say whether or not the reduced crit rate of certain units is better or worse because it only affected two classes. If anything, it made crits feel more meaningful, because in FE6 I could basically just throw Rutger at the boss every time and rely on him getting a crit. It's in the very nature of critical hits to be a nice little surprise when playing the game rather than the expectation.

Alright, so I'm on chapter 7 in Genealogy of the Holy War and got Seliph to level 19 after clearing the arena. I was a little bummed out and whatnot, because I really wanted to promote Seliph before actually starting the chapter, but whatever, I'll just feed him a dark mage then return staff him back. The problem is, he just randomly stopped being able to gain experience. What's even more bizarre is that all of my other units are able to gain experience from the very same dark mages, but Seliph is getting absolutely nothing. This has never happened to me in any of my other playthroughs, and I've scoured the forums to see if anyone else has experienced this problem, but nothing. I tried resetting the game, selling the paragon band, waiting several turns, and even loading a save state from chapter 6 to try and fix the problem, but nothing has worked. If anyone has any idea as to how to get rid of this problem, I'm listening. TLDR: Seliph stopped gaining exp at level 19 but everyone else can still gain exp and I don't know what to do.