How should the series become harder?

[Espinosa]

Pretty sure Ryan's accuracy with the Steel Bow is a lot worse than that in the early chapters. Even Iron Bow often whiffs Caeda or Athena.

It does make the game harder. Enemies ignoring your one invincible fighter / ORKOer move away, for example threatening your healers and fragile units who are way behind. It also makes routing the map a lot more difficult.

[JSND Alter Dragon Boner]

forge

He usually face 80s which is worse

And then the enemies hit Arran at 64% rate. Fuck logic

Edited August 12, 2013 by I have a Dragon Boner

[Snowy_One]

Pretty sure Ryan's accuracy with the Steel Bow is a lot worse than that in the early chapters. Even Iron Bow often whiffs Caeda or Athena.

It does make the game harder. Enemies ignoring your one invincible fighter / ORKOer move away, for example threatening your healers and fragile units who are way behind. It also makes routing the map a lot more difficult.

Conversely, that pushes players to avoid using squishy units as they'll always be targeted. Not saying that's 'bad' (there SHOULD be a problem with using squishy units), just something that needs consideration.

Also, puzzle-bosses. Imagine a boss that has an auto-immune shield that prevents all damage and the only way to disable it is to destroy two pillars on opposite sides of the map that bring the shield down until the end of the EP, except that minons keep spawning by the shields meaning you'll need to split your force into three smaller forces to take out the boss.

[dondon151]

puzzle bosses would be so bad. puzzle-anything is pretty annoying in fire emblem because you usually end up doing one thing in like 2 turns and the other one in 6, and there ends up being a lot of waiting around.

[Espinosa]

Do any of these count as puzzle elements:

- Getting to Zephiel in C22 (FE6)

- Getting Falchion for Marth

- The Radiant Dawn endgame with the shoves

[dondon151]

i think snowy's interpretation of what constitutes a "puzzle" is different to mine.

[Anouleth]

I liked the final boss in FE10, I guess she counts as a "puzzle boss". It was nice to see a final chapter where you don't just use one unit.

FE5's last level probably counts as a "puzzle" too, by that count.

[X-Naut]

I don't think we need puzzle bosses as much as better boss diversity so that you have to do more than just send in your designated boss-killer. Like, for example, a General boss could have Wrath or some other counter-attack based skill, a 1-2 range weapon and simply refuse to attack anyone he can't kill. If you've been relying on a Swordmaster to kill off bosses up until now you're going to have some issues. At the very least adding curveball bosses would force players to train more than one boss-killing unit.

Anyway, another thought I had is to make activation skills that must be manually activated, need a charge-up time between uses, and are standard on all units of that class. By removing the element of randomness you make these skills less abusable for the player while also giving the enemy something you need to work around. Lethality Assassins among enemy ranks sound like BS? Not so much when you can see exactly when they're capable of pulling it off and can plan around it. Think you can tank a horde because your unit has Sol? Better not expose them too much, because you're activating it once at most. On Normal Mode these skills on enemies might not show up until late in the game, but on harder difficulties they'd show up sooner.

[Snowy_One]

A boss like that wouldn't be fun, it would be brutal. High defenses make physical attacks a poor choice, wrath limits how much you could take counters, but then he also has 1-2 range weapons so even using a mage would result in pain. Aside from siege tomes and, maybe, a strong archer you'd be better off taking some high-DEF tank like a paladin, wyvern, or general and just sticking them in there.

[Momo]

Earlier, somebody suggested for all player mechanics to apply to enemies.

Well, would you support a FE actually doing that? Like say, enemies using Pair Up.

I would really prefer going in the opposite direction, and giving the player less options, at least if they're kept the same way. Pair up makes it impossible to actually plan for anything because by endgame you have like an 80% chance to take zero damage from enemies, and that's just plain unfun to deal with. Letting enemies have the same ability would make the game horrible.

[Phoenix Wright]

A boss like that wouldn't be fun, it would be brutal. High defenses make physical attacks a poor choice, wrath limits how much you could take counters, but then he also has 1-2 range weapons so even using a mage would result in pain. Aside from siege tomes and, maybe, a strong archer you'd be better off taking some high-DEF tank like a paladin, wyvern, or general and just sticking them in there.

IIRC this was the first boss (couple of bosses?) on H5 FE11 (or whatever the hardest difficulty was). No magic users, but they'd die in one shot anyway.

[dondon151]

you recalled incorrectly. LTCers have come up with pretty solid strategies for FE11 H5 earlygame bosses. the worst problem is that they rely a lot on jagen's silver lance and he doesn't have the most reliable hit rate with that.

[Constable Reggie]

What's the strategy for Hyman?

legitimately interested cause that guys a bitch in my playthroughs

[dondon151]

use the savepoint and rig a killing edge crit with ogma, then a successful devil axe attack with barst

so that one's kind of a crapshoot but the savepoint justifies it. it's not reliable in the traditional sense of the word, but it's a universal option.

[Anouleth]

Doesn't Jagen also have like, a 2% chance of being critted or something...

[Snowy_One]

Regardless, doing such a thing would make it basically a crapshoot as to if you get critted or not, which is not where we want to go. We want the player to think and be forced to make decisions that both make him think about his army composition instead of stacking one unit type and punishes him if he does without making the game impossible.

Also, here is another added benefit to balancing out the classes. Since the enemy uses almost all the same classes as the player, except with a larger army, they will gain an edge since they can have people equipped with (likely less impotent) slayer-type weapons balanced out with normal and other weapons. Better balance = Better balanced enemies = harder.