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Thoughts about the new weapon system


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Killer weapons aren't the only crit weapons that exist. The Great Club does not have a ton of difficulty getting a Berserker to 100% Crit, and hit penalties can be circumvented (go try out Gazak the Certain Blow Berserker and enjoy your 100%/100%).

Do you even get a Great Club in Conquest??? Anyways, I don't consider it worth using because of its non-trivial downsides. (45 Accuracy? Bleck. -5 crit evade? Screw that noise.) And I wonder why you had to go and mention a unit that people might not even get, either because they didn't bother to marry off Leo (the boss in question is the boss of Forrest's paralogue, right?), or because they didn't train Niles.

Edited by Levant Mir Celestia
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I dislike the new system, I'd rather see weight return and have an effect on hand axes, Steel weapons, silver weapons, etc instead of locked penalties. I also miss the trinity of magic, dislike the removal of thieves, assassins, and warriors, and I despise advanced classes only getting B rank max weapons. Pls give them A rank again. Everything about S rank weapons is perfect. I prefer Awakenings forge system, but this is fine to. Support system and dual system is great. AND FINALLY Dragonstones are no longer worth using... fix it.

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I dislike the new system, I'd rather see weight return and have an effect on hand axes, Steel weapons, silver weapons, etc instead of locked penalties. I also miss the trinity of magic, dislike the removal of thieves, assassins, and warriors, and I despise advanced classes only getting B rank max weapons. Pls give them A rank again. Everything about S rank weapons is perfect. I prefer Awakenings forge system, but this is fine to. Support system and dual system is great. AND FINALLY Dragonstones are no longer worth using... fix it.

I disagree on Dragonstones. Also, personally, I think bringing weight back would likely be a change for the worse. Thieves and assassins are also in the game, just under different names. Also, the trinity of magic did squat for strategy.

Another thing I intended to say earlier: Even if debuffs are more useful for the enemy than they are for the player, I still find them far more useful than I ever found status effects, which tended to do jack for the player, but in enemy hands were devastating.

Edited by Levant Mir Celestia
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I disagree on Dragonstones. Also, personally, I think bringing weight back would likely be a change for the worse. Thieves and assassins are also in the game, just under different names. Also, the trinity of magic did squat for strategy.

Another thing I intended to say earlier: Even if debuffs are more useful for the enemy than they are for the player, I still find them far more useful than I ever found status effects, which tended to do jack for the player, but in enemy hands were devastating.

Returning the Weight System isn't a bad idea in Fates if:

*Tome/Scroll Weight = 50% of the tome/scroll Mt.

*Non-tome/scroll Weight = that weapon's Mt.

The only issue is that some characters suffer from really bad Str growths which results in getting less than the required Str which would make using some very powerful smithed weapons an issue. And considering that the Weight System used the weapon's Weight/Mt. and the user's Str stat...

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If weight returns, IMO it should be simplified. Don't have weight be based on Con and certainly not based on Str. Much as I like the Tellius games, Str as effective Con is a disaster. Early on it gives Str double importance (unless you're a mage), and Str is not a stat which needed help. Later on you get enough Str that weight becomes completely pointless, so heavy weapons (Hammers, etc.) go from unreasonably heavy early on to having no drawback at all later.

In other words, I'd rather see them just have weight as a set penalty. They already flirted with it in this game with steel and javelins/hand axes/etc., not to mention the speed penalties/boosts of beaststones and dragonstones.

I do miss GBA Con a little because it's another way to distinguish between PCs, but in a world of skills it's not really necessary any more (you could always make a personal or class skill that lets a unit use heavier weapons at reduced/no penalty).


Regardless, while I agree that there are always some balance kinks to work out (hidden weapons could indeed be a bit worse, for all that I find them balanced in practice mostly because none of the units with them are OP like Camilla or Ryoma or Xander), I think getting rid of weapon durability is a great change. Quite apart from any questions of balance, which I think work out in the new system's favour (rarity is not an interesting way to balance out silver or brave weapons IMO), it means less time spent managing your inventory and tracking down shops which almost every previous FE except Radiant Dawn made kind of annoying in one way or another.

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I dislike the new system, I'd rather see weight return and have an effect on hand axes, Steel weapons, silver weapons, etc instead of locked penalties. I also miss the trinity of magic, dislike the removal of thieves, assassins, and warriors, and I despise advanced classes only getting B rank max weapons. Pls give them A rank again. Everything about S rank weapons is perfect. I prefer Awakenings forge system, but this is fine to. Support system and dual system is great. AND FINALLY Dragonstones are no longer worth using... fix it.

The magic triangle mattered very little since all mages have very high resistance. There is a lot more variation amongst physical classes so the weapon triangle actually had an impact on strategy.

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I do miss GBA Con a little because it's another way to distinguish between PCs, but in a world of skills it's not really necessary any more (you could always make a personal or class skill that lets a unit use heavier weapons at reduced/no penalty).

The main thing that con/weight did wrong is that it didn't properly account for the PC's so it just added more character imbalances, imo.

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The main thing that con/weight did wrong is that it didn't properly account for the PC's so it just added more character imbalances, imo.

This. Hector shits on Eliwood and Lyn mainly because he has enough Con to wield almost any axe without suffering a major penalty. Also the Con system tended to cripple enemies as well due to their tendency to equip steel weapons nearly all the time.

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The magic triangle mattered very little since all mages have very high resistance. There is a lot more variation amongst physical classes so the weapon triangle actually had an impact on strategy.

Not only that, mages tend to be a minority in both the player's and enemy's armies anyhow. It only really meant something in FE4, where it was used to differentiate armies (story wise; gameplay wise, it was busted)

Edited by Levant Mir Celestia
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If weight returns, IMO it should be simplified. Don't have weight be based on Con and certainly not based on Str. Much as I like the Tellius games, Str as effective Con is a disaster. Early on it gives Str double importance (unless you're a mage), and Str is not a stat which needed help. Later on you get enough Str that weight becomes completely pointless, so heavy weapons (Hammers, etc.) go from unreasonably heavy early on to having no drawback at all later.

In other words, I'd rather see them just have weight as a set penalty. They already flirted with it in this game with steel and javelins/hand axes/etc., not to mention the speed penalties/boosts of beaststones and dragonstones.

I do miss GBA Con a little because it's another way to distinguish between PCs, but in a world of skills it's not really necessary any more (you could always make a personal or class skill that lets a unit use heavier weapons at reduced/no penalty).

Regardless, while I agree that there are always some balance kinks to work out (hidden weapons could indeed be a bit worse, for all that I find them balanced in practice mostly because none of the units with them are OP like Camilla or Ryoma or Xander), I think getting rid of weapon durability is a great change. Quite apart from any questions of balance, which I think work out in the new system's favour (rarity is not an interesting way to balance out silver or brave weapons IMO), it means less time spent managing your inventory and tracking down shops which almost every previous FE except Radiant Dawn made kind of annoying in one way or another.

In the Tellius games, even units with poor to bad Str. Growths got enough Str in promotion to either somewhat or completely overcome the AS loss. Tellius also had one of the more returning balanced systems statistic-wise as a rather huge chunk of your units would no longer suffer from AS losses by the time they hit their final class (PoR) or second class (RD).

If Weight did return, I wouldn't think that IS would implement a speed penalty to weapons via drawbacks considering that you already have to deal with the weapon weight. Beaststone/Dragonstone buffs aren't that much different from when they appeared both prior and in Awakening. The debuffs in Fates makes them balanced so you can't just spam a powerful weapon without any sort of drawback (the Stone+'s have a rather huge buff so the debuff helps balance them out). Not to say that Dragonstone+/Beaststone+ could be treated as A-Rank weapons so the debuffs after each use makes sense. Weight for Dragon/Beaststones could remove the debuff losses.

Remove debuffs from Shurikens and remove them (since enemy CPUs have more advantages to using them than the player does) then return the use of Knives and Daggers for Hidden Weapons (there's nothing really overpowered about these older weapons). Healing staves/rods could have infinite use for players doing Classic Mode on Hard or higher, especially if a game were to go with anything like Conquest where your Gold and Exp. power is much more restricted if you don't do DLC.

Edited by Emblem Blade
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Remove debuffs from Shurikens and remove them (since enemy CPUs have more advantages to using them than the player does) then return the use of Knives and Daggers for Hidden Weapons (there's nothing really overpowered about these older weapons). Healing staves/rods could have infinite use for players doing Classic Mode on Hard or higher, especially if a game were to go with anything like Conquest where your Gold and Exp. power is much more restricted if you don't do DLC.

I don't like that idea because knives and daggers felt like an unceremonious afterthought in RD, with virtually bupkis to make up for their low damage. Who's to say that knives and daggers wouldn't wind up underpowered again?

Edited by Levant Mir Celestia
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I don't like that idea because knives and daggers felt like an unceremonious afterthought in RD, with virtually bupkis to make up for their low damage. Who's to say that knives and daggers wouldn't wind up underpowered again?

Would you want a bunch of weapons that favor the CPUs more than the players themselves (due to how enemy-only skills work) or weapons that can help both help and hinder players and CPUs alike due to their more 'balanced' features? What I'm trying to say is that while the debuff is rather balanced for players when using, enemies have a more favorable match-up since they can abuse certain skills to make things more annoying (they'll either be able to debuff you 'infinitely' or take 50% or no debuff from your own weapons or do two out of the three). It would be nicer if the both sides had an even hand against each other (considering that we can't do anything about enemy-only skills).

Also, considering that in these late games you can forge/smith weapons to make them stronger, 'underpowered' changes by the definition of the word itself. So by 'underpowered' are you referring to how weak they were compared to the other weapons? Because that's not really underpowered so much as having a little selection to choose from out of that particular type of weapon which isn't fun (where you have very few daggers/knives compared to swords/axes/lances/tomes/bows and all their different forms).

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I see durability come up every few posts in this thread and then disappear into it. What would you guys think if durability was brought back but only for high ranking/important weapons (like braves and S-rank weapons) but your typical run of the mill weapon had infinite use?

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What Radiant Dawn knives had going for them was a really powerful pre-promote and being the only early 1~2-range forgeables. They also had the Beast Killer when 3 out of 4 Part 3 maps involve fighting beast laguz. This allows Sothe to pretty much solo most of the DB's stuff as needed. Granted, Heather doesn't make very good use of them, but she's generally not on the team to fight. And Volke is kinda like Sothe, but with better caps and total fail for availability. Hardly underpowered, if you ask me.

Now, PoR knives, those were awful and useless.

I still think the majority of what unbalances them in Fates is the fault of character and scenario design. Don't design ninja with a crazy amount of Str and the player won't get crazy 1~2-range EPs. Be more wary of the positioning and quantity of enemy knife users in a given map and the player units won't be eternally debuffed. And really, to IS's credit, there's not even that many maps (at least in Birthright up to and including 25 and Conquest; haven't touched Revelation yet) that just spam knife users. Most of the time, they're deployed as support for other combat units.

I see durability come up every few posts in this thread and then disappear into it. What would you guys think if durability was brought back but only for high ranking/important weapons (like braves and S-rank weapons) but your typical run of the mill weapon had infinite use?

I think this would just return to one of the big problems that cropped up in previous games. IS cited averting the "too good to use" trope as one of their main reasons for the change. Reverting just the high-power weapons would put them back at or near square one.

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I still think the majority of what unbalances them in Fates is the fault of character and scenario design. Don't design ninja with a crazy amount of Str and the player won't get crazy 1~2-range EPs. Be more wary of the positioning and quantity of enemy knife users in a given map and the player units won't be eternally debuffed. And really, to IS's credit, there's not even that many maps (at least in Birthright up to and including 25 and Conquest; haven't touched Revelation yet) that just spam knife users. Most of the time, they're deployed as support for other combat units.

I agree with this. The debuffs are not so much of a problem to me, more so than the fact that the ninja can K.O. me with strength on par with a Fighter. I do know that, realistically, throwing a shuriken takes some strength but I assume more skill is required. Tone down the strength a couple of notches and I can work with it.

How I feel the hidden weapons should have been done can be best described by a quote by Kaze, "A ninja's shuriken may not cut deep, but it can sap you of your strength. Your death need not come all at once."

What is the point of debuffs when you get bodied by fast, strong as hell ninja, anyways?

Edited by SaiSymbolic
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Would you want a bunch of weapons that favor the CPUs more than the players themselves (due to how enemy-only skills work) or weapons that can help both help and hinder players and CPUs alike due to their more 'balanced' features? What I'm trying to say is that while the debuff is rather balanced for players when using, enemies have a more favorable match-up since they can abuse certain skills to make t ree). It would be nicer if the both sides had an even hand against each other (considering that we can't do anything about enemy-only skills).

Also, considering that in these late games you can forge/smith weapons to make them stronger, 'underpowered' changes by the definition of the word itself. So by 'underpowered' are you referring to how weak they were compared to the other weapons? Because that's not really underpowered so much as having a little selection to choose from out of that particular type of weapon which isn't fun (where you have very few daggers/knives compared to swords/axes/lances/tomes/bows and all their different forms).

And yet we see people wanting status staves back, which favor the enemy far more than shurikens ever did. Regardless, as far as Tellius was concerned, knives and daggers, for the most part, reeked of being tacked on for the sake of having more weapon types - a shallow reason, if you ask me.

Edited by Levant Mir Celestia
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I agree that the developers underestimated range in their balancing. Tomes and Daggers are both really good. It seems to me that the intended trade-off for tomes was the hit rate and the intended trade-off for daggers was strength. But when you consider that daggers get debuffs on top of that... I think they should have taken a bit more away. I don't even think it matters much how they do it -- they could lower the debuffs, decrease their hit rate, decrease their power... just a little nerf in any one of those areas would put the daggers on par with the other weapons, I think.

Honestly, I don't mind staves having limitations, but I think some staves are too limited. They added some really great and interesting options with the Freeze staff and others. However, because I only get around 2/3 uses a pop (and because I can't purchase them), I never want to use them. My brain goes into must-conserve-for-when-I-really-need-it mode, and then I end up playing through the Endgame without using them. <_< I get that Freeze, for example, is really good and it probably shouldn't have 15 uses. But the developers should come up with other ways to stop it from becoming abuseable. One way is to not allow the staff to be used on consecutive turns (like a charge/recharge system). Another way is to have especially powerful staves debuff the unit that uses it after each use. If my unit suffers -3Def/-3Mag/-3Spd after using Freeze, I'd have to incorporate that into my strategy.

Anyway those are my nitpicks. I really like just about everything else about weapons in this game. Love the new weapon triangle, the new types of weapons, less abuseable weapons... They did put a lot of thought into it. They just could have gone a teeny bit further.

Edited by Volo
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I liked that with this new weapons system, we had different type of swords, axes, and lances. I hope this continues because it was nice to have some variation to your typical broadsword/longsword style swords, or basic one headed axes. I would love to see something like Flails in the next one.

I liked that we had debuffs and buffs on different weapons. It made each weapon useful in different situations. I didnt find the silver weapon debuff to be that much of a problem. I mostly used it when i needed to finish off an opponent that round, or one characters like Benny who could take the debuff and not run the risk of getting killed during enemy phase. I hope it sticks around rather than switching back to durability, it has more strategy to it this time around rather than walking around with 50 silver weapons stocked up for when the next one breaks. It also made Forging and the special weapons more useful since they dont break.

I thought the royal weapons, outside of the Yato and Leo's tome were too powerful. Especially Takumi's bow. Why would you use any other bow with Takumi when he has that thing? Same problem with Xander and Ryoma. Why would you use any other weapon with them? I like having the strategy of deciding what weapons to use when, and the Royal's weapons completely undo that. I dont have a problem with special weapons, but it would be nice if we toned them down a bit next time.

I also think if we are going to have stat debuff staves, we need restore staves back as well. The staff that cuts a characters hit points in half pretty much turns a character into pair up fodder for the rest of the map because I dont have a way of fixing it, and it doesnt have a timer on it. We either need a limit on the amount of time it will work, or we need restore staves back if we are going to continue with them.

Edited by Tolvir
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I thought the royal weapons, outside of the Yato and Leo's tome were too powerful. Especially Takumi's bow. Why would you use any other bow with Takumi when he has that thing? Same problem with Xander and Ryoma. Why would you use any other weapon with them? I like having the strategy of deciding what weapons to use when, and the Royal's weapons completely undo that. I dont have a problem with special weapons, but it would be nice if we toned them down a bit next time.

I find it funny you mentioned Takumi's bow, since personally, I find it the least useful out of the brothers' personal weapons - the Acrobat effect is nice, but the accuracy, not unlike most other Yumi, leaves something to be desired...

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What Radiant Dawn knives had going for them was a really powerful pre-promote and being the only early 1~2-range forgeables. They also had the Beast Killer when 3 out of 4 Part 3 maps involve fighting beast laguz. This allows Sothe to pretty much solo most of the DB's stuff as needed. Granted, Heather doesn't make very good use of them, but she's generally not on the team to fight. And Volke is kinda like Sothe, but with better caps and total fail for availability. Hardly underpowered, if you ask me.

Now, PoR knives, those were awful and useless.

I still think the majority of what unbalances them in Fates is the fault of character and scenario design. Don't design ninja with a crazy amount of Str and the player won't get crazy 1~2-range EPs. Be more wary of the positioning and quantity of enemy knife users in a given map and the player units won't be eternally debuffed. And really, to IS's credit, there's not even that many maps (at least in Birthright up to and including 25 and Conquest; haven't touched Revelation yet) that just spam knife users. Most of the time, they're deployed as support for other combat units.

I think this would just return to one of the big problems that cropped up in previous games. IS cited averting the "too good to use" trope as one of their main reasons for the change. Reverting just the high-power weapons would put them back at or near square one.

The issue with this idea of not making Ninjas with good strength is still a problem though.

For starters, that would mean that Corrin should not be allowed to be a Ninja at all, or becoming a ninja would nerf your strength so hard that you'd never want to be a ninja-- which would defeat the purpose of ever wanting to really be an ninja class branch, and instead, you'd merely want to be a Butler/Maid (assuming those didn't have terrible growths as well). Which would mean that you'd be nerfing entire classes / characters simply to make sure a weapon isn't too strong-- which simply demonstrates why the weapons are too strong in the first place. The other weapons have drawbacks, but the knives don't outside of "low might." If we make them do fixed damage, then we have a problem with the ninja unit not being able to damage very well. However, if knives DID do fixed damage we might have something going here.

IE, knives come in varieties that instead of getting stronger, they do a fixed percentage of damage to the enemy if they hit, and they debuff different status effects depending on the knife equipped. You could do this for 1-2 range knives. And then have 1 range knives function like standard weapons-- they could still give debuffs, but they could only do it from 1 range now.

As for forging, instead of having forges be the way they are, they should make each gemstone up a different stat. Like say Garnets up the might of the weapon, but Sapphires up the critical chance of a weapon. That way, trading in isn't such a colossal pain when you want a specific weapon.

Weight can come back if it wants, but they should perhaps make it based off of the class itself rather than the character. IE, ALL mages have 4 con instead of this one male mage has 7 con while the female has 3. If everyone wants unique con, then they need to make weights less ridiculous. Especially for dark magic... Like what...?

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I've actually had a bit of difficulty adapting to the fact that there's no longer a durability issue. It's nice, but at the same time I'm more of a nostalgic person. I'd rather sit down and have to plan out my loadouts carefully than just click "optimize" and win. As for skills, forgery, etc., I kinda think that's broken too. I've seen the strategies people put with Charlotte, almost always scoring critical hits. I've also been known to use strategies like this. >Killing Edge, Dragon Fang, critical activation. The game needs to be severely nerfed.

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I like many things about the new system. The things I don't like:

1) Forging. For most of the reasons stated, makes Iron weapons far too good. With Museum Melee, Lottery, random finds in the Castle, and stealing from unused units you don't even have to buy all of them. You also don't have to get all the way to +7. +3 and +4 weapons are fantastic, like the holy weapons. Even +1 and +2s of rare weapons work wonders. For example, Peri's Lance on a Wary Fighter tank. With weapon durability gone I understand why they didn't use the old system. But I think they need to go back to the drawing board for the next game.

2) The primacy of daggers/shuriken and magic (i.e. ranged weapons). Nerfing Hand Axes and Javelins was a good idea, but they went too far.

3) Drawbacks on higher ranked weapons. All that accomplished for me was to ensure that I never used them and did everything I could to find iron stuff to forge.

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I've actually had a bit of difficulty adapting to the fact that there's no longer a durability issue. It's nice, but at the same time I'm more of a nostalgic person. I'd rather sit down and have to plan out my loadouts carefully than just click "optimize" and win. As for skills, forgery, etc., I kinda think that's broken too. I've seen the strategies people put with Charlotte, almost always scoring critical hits. I've also been known to use strategies like this. >Killing Edge, Dragon Fang, critical activation. The game needs to be severely nerfed.

First bold: And Awakening wasn't a game where you could just click "optimize" and win?

Second Bold: You ask me, relying on TWO luck-based things to go in your favour is terrible strategy.

Edited by Levant Mir Celestia
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