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3DS games and hp management


mangasdeouf
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Hi,

I wanted to see if people were thinking the same as me, so I went to look on the net for topics on it, but I didn't find any.

Awakening and Fates, the latter even more, are stupid in early game, especially in early game. Why? Because.

BECAUSE...:

EARLY GAME units simply don't come with any kind of healing items, while ennemies hit as hard if not harder than ever and your units have low bulk and trash avoid, + terrain bonuses went through axe nerfs (literally cut forest avoid bonus in two). You have like 1 potion, 3 uses on 10 hp regen, for 3 chapters, and weak ass healers to patch up for this when heal staves have also been nerfed with an axe in their skull and a stick in their ahole. You have to waste gold on potions if you want some just because you don't get any before long.

Remember GBA FEs? 80% of the playable units came with a healing item, sometimes 2 (usually potion+elixir). Were the games easy? NO. You literally need the jaegan in FE6 on the highest difficulty if I must believe people who played it, and he's needed for FE7 (another easy FE) on HHM. SO potions can be given in numbers to the player without lowering difficulty, and actually LET THE PLAYER position his units as he wants, because he doesn't have to protect a weak ass healer who get 2HKOed by E-rank weapons from the 1st chapter till the end of the game. Canto even let your mounted units use items and move again!

The game is so malicious it even gives you mid-game skills that you want at any cost in order to change this, because you can't waste much money on healing items when you have to use it after each EP on chokepoints (it also makes it safer than using healers who can be targetted by 2 range ennemies). This is especially true for conquest, where you can't buy 1-2 range staves without visiting castles.

In previous games, the sole accumulation of free hp recovery items allowed you to go on without needing to buy any most of the time, meaning: 1. you could heal without putting anyone in danger; 2. you could use your money to buy weapons that broke instead of costing your arms and legs for being unbreakable while having hp recovery; 3. you could still buy it when you were short on it but it was rare. You could also keep a 6 man or more team fully deployed wihout needing to dance for healers to keep up with everyone's 2 hp.

Another point is that, unlike in previous games, Fates is NO HP EMBLEM. Which means, seal def or 1 shuriken hit and you're gone within 1 or 2 turns without an ELIXIR. Hell, previous FE games gave you a second healer with a tier 2 staff that had 20 base hp recovery, but Conquest gives you only basic staves forever (I'd gladly trade my 4 uses freeze and 2 uses rescue for 2 tier 2 healing staves any time! ANY TIME biatch! freeze is useless if it can't hold those groups of 3 ennemies coming all at once and abusing attack stance on my 10-14 def units with 17-23 damage EACH, not even talking about the absurd seal def faceless that come from the beginning even in hard difficulty in chapter 7).

If I had to compare with my most played game, the easy TSS, it would be like this:

<< Hey guys, my Franz has been def blessed! he has 9/10 def at level 5 on chapter 2/3!

- Don't be too full of yourself, fool. The ennemies in the next chapter hit for 15 damage with 95 accuracy and drop your def by 5.

- WHAT THE F!!!

- Not a game for casuals, sorry noob! >>

All this while forcing you to waste your ridiculously low initial gold into potions if you want to play differently than just going out of your way to protect your healers who have to heal 3 units from all sides of a little but bush heavy map which helps both you and your ennemies tank more hits while being a pain for your healers to keep up while not dying themselves.

Final point, promise: 3 uses potion. 2 uses concoction. 1 USE ELIXIR!!!!

(Intelligent systems, whoever may have designed the game this way, fire him/her, make them GTFO of your designer team.) It's only FAKE DIFFICULTY and it's already said that fake difficulty is a piss poor way to give the player some challenge (like having 3 difficulties with a crazy jump between each to the point we wish there was 1 more difficulty between normal which is a walk in the park for the most part and hard which can make you tear your hair apart. Not even talking about lunatic I think it's nonsense in any 3DS game but hardcore gamers seem to like it so call it "Hell mode" or "Armageddon mode" or anything cool from Diablo 1/2/3 instead of lunatic (a lunatic person has good moments and bad ones, FE lunatic has bad moments and very bad ones).

What are your thoughts on this topic guys? Open debate!

Edit: more readable, corrected some mistakes.

Edit 2: Also, forcing you to waste gold to reach stat thresholds just to survive is also fake difficulty and a poor design where you could just buff a little the base stats for your units not to need 1000 gold of tonics per chapter per unit to stay healthy enough not to be in death range for the whole chapter (like in chapter 10 conquest, children paralogues in FE 13 and 14 and Donnel in his paralogue in Awakening).

Mages don't have to suck for us not to use them for soloruns. They can just be good but not gamebreaking. Have a little def could let them play like they are average physical units (not knights like FE13 dark mages) but not just plain useless because of 0 accuracy or 0 dodge or 0 avoid or 0 hp etc. Mage balance is a great work of Fire Emblem and it still has to find a good state. Just ask for my opinions on mage balance and you would have the same classes as physical in magic (magic myrmidons, magic knights, magic cavaliers etc.) or just let every cass be hybrid so you can halve your work on classes and use the time gained to balance units instead (Odin vs Xander, most obvious garbage balance example, or RD Tormod vs RD Haar, or Micaiah vs Ike).

Edited by mangasdeouf
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Honestly, in the first nine chapters of Conquest Hard, I only need one or two uses of a single Vulnerary, and that is in Chapter 4, while fighting the Faceless (and only to save some turns, for the little sister can heal you for free.) Anything else is solved by Elise, who always hits L10 in Ch 8 or Par 1, for her only mission is to heal on every turn, no matter the damage.

From Chapter 9 and onwards, you have enough money to buy like 40 Vulneraries in a single purchase. (Not that you need them, mind you, but you could, if you need to ease your anxiety.)

You might need to reorganise your positioning in Conquest. One does not need that many healing items as long as Elise is with you (and I do not even use the servants.)

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. . .the hell is this topic?

Fire Emblem, at its core, is a strategy game.  You are given various tools to make your life easier (well. . .as easy as Conquest Chapter 10 is).  It's up to you to leverage them properly.

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On 22/01/2019 at 1:21 AM, eclipse said:

. . .the hell is this topic?

Fire Emblem, at its core, is a strategy game.  You are given various tools to make your life easier (well. . .as easy as Conquest Chapter 10 is).  It's up to you to leverage them properly.

Please develop, you could say that about any game of this type.

"Honestly, in the first nine chapters of Conquest Hard, I only need one or two uses of a single Vulnerary, and that is in Chapter 4, while fighting the Faceless (and only to save some turns, for the little sister can heal you for free.) Anything else is solved by Elise, who always hits L10 in Ch 8 or Par 1, for her only mission is to heal on every turn, no matter the damage.

From Chapter 9 and onwards, you have enough money to buy like 40 Vulneraries in a single purchase. (Not that you need them, mind you, but you could, if you need to ease your anxiety.)

You might need to reorganise your positioning in Conquest. One does not need that many healing items as long as Elise is with you (and I do not even use the servants.)"

Except you have too many units for 1 or 2 healers to heal them all, especially in CQ10 where your units are 20 tiles away from each other so it takes 3 turns to a healer to go from one group to another. Def threshold for this chapter is absurd, since you need to wait for ninjas to debuff you in order to be focused instead of ennemies trying to avoid you, and then put tonic to be able to keep up with the 15-20 damage per EP from all these dumbasses coming to crash on your debuffed def. Meanwhile, a ninja with a pair up lancer or oni could kill Niles in 1 or 2 rounds, if Niles is already debuffed 1 round is enough for him to die.

As much as I like challenge and tactics/strat I think balance is a real issue. And when ennemies rush altogether to you in high numbers, it's Awakening level of bad design. Especially when they can just ognore your tanks and go to your squishier units.

Want good design? MMO tanks, FE hacks with skills (especially PROVOKE, best skill to have on a tank, in FE randomizer it's the default skill of knights and it's amazing, especially when you have a good res or hp unit with provoke against early bolting shenanigans because they're gonna focus him/her forever and you could let low hp units in range of ennemies as long as you have a provoke tank also in range and accessible. That's what RD tried to do but provoke and shade were underwhelming in that game, I don't know how they were coded but it seemed to be the wrong way. If you have a tank, of course he should have a way to provoke ennemies or fear them or anything that can forbid them from targetting squishies.

Positionning is the only way to manage ennemy aggro in FE, and it's wrong. But maybe you like it.

I'd like to be able to use these FE editing tools to make my own hack/mod with skills to include provoke mostly and some other skills like amaterasu and bond which would be placed on healers, hell it could even replace staves completely when stacked (it's a renewal aura). With provoke, renewal and amaterasu+bond aurabot close, I could even amplify overall damage because ennemies would target the tanks which would heal back what they lost. dragonshields would be needed on them and nobody else would have to pile up defence so other classes could ba balanced around speed, str/mag, etc. and archers would finally not need to be able to retaliate on EP. And you would have a reason to play knights over any other bulky class.

Edited by mangasdeouf
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47 minutes ago, mangasdeouf said:

Except you have too many units for 1 or 2 healers to heal them all, especially in CQ10 where your units are 20 tiles away from each other so it takes 3 turns to a healer to go from one group to another. Def threshold for this chapter is absurd, since you need to wait for ninjas to debuff you in order to be focused instead of ennemies trying to avoid you, and then put tonic to be able to keep up with the 15-20 damage per EP from all these dumbasses coming to crash on your debuffed def. Meanwhile, a ninja with a pair up lancer or oni could kill Niles in 1 or 2 rounds, if Niles is already debuffed 1 round is enough for him to die.


Then you must be doing something weird, mate. I am not being pretentious, it is all cool. But I just played the map over the weekend on a new campaign (in Hard), and all my units needed five uses of Vulneraries (that is, in total, five heals of 10 HP.) Jakob is forever benched and Elise only healed two or three times on this map (and one case was just to earn Experience, on Turn 11.)

In any case, I do not want to make it personal. I am just telling you this because your experience might be very different from that of other users, and therefore your points might not make much sense for others.
In my experience, the defensive thresholds in Conquest are not that difficult to reach, and I do not even use Xander or Camilla, and only field ten units per map. I thus disagree with your arguments, at least about Conquest.

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16 minutes ago, starburst said:


Then you must be doing something weird, mate. I am not being pretentious, it is all cool. But I just played the map over the weekend on a new campaign (in Hard), and all my units needed five uses of Vulneraries (that is, in total, five heals of 10 HP.) Jakob is forever benched and Elise only healed two or three times on this map (and one case was just to earn Experience, on Turn 11.)

In any case, I do not want to make it personal. I am just telling you this because your experience might be very different from that of other users, and therefore your points might not make much sense for others.
In my experience, the defensive thresholds in Conquest are not that difficult to reach, and I do not even use Xander or Camilla, and only field ten units per map. I thus disagree with your arguments, at least about Conquest.

How much defence did your units pack? speed? which units on which chokepoint? a lot of things can vary a lot between two runs. I used dread fighter Odin on top-left, Niles on bottom ballista, Effie on bottom-right chokepoint, Haitaka rallying def for Effie or Arthur/Niles, MU rallying (spd and res at that moment, no wyvern yet for rally def) before she was forced to go hunt those annoying pegs and finish off some ennemies for a safer chokepoint. Arthur was bottom left with hand axe and sometimes he and Niles were in attack stance.

I just got overwhelmed by the non stop spawning reinforcements, at the end of the chapter I had only MU (falcon knight), Odin, Pigtails 1 and 2 and Azura who miraculously survived an attack unscratched. I lost Arthur Niles Effie Camilla (to a random arrow in a mess of ennemies) Nyx Beruka (or maybe she was one of those who survived I don't remember, just having 5 units left at the end) and Silas (who was sent to the top-right corner).

I didn't use tonics because my Effie had 17 def, 21 with rally def, but it wasn't enough still...like should I have her reach 25 def for this chapter or what...

Also Camilla is great aganst mages but she lacks physical bulk (maybe another royal weapon would remedy that, like Ryoma who's average but is carried by his pref and Xander that can stay relevant at base solely because of insane pref +4 def being absurd, +2 with tonics and +4 with rally ending at +10 with little effort). If stats debuffing wasn't a thing, I wouldn't complain since I wouldn't have any problem clearing it even with 0 grinding, but stats debuffing IS a thing and you choose between killing these retard ninjas or healing, either choice leads you to bad situations. Also I didn't use javelin on Effie because she had 7 speed and I didn't want everyone to double her (that's why ninjas didn't get killed automatically but also why onis didn't kill her, she died on turn 10 I think because surrounded).

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The only person you can blame for not using every single thing you're given is yourself.

I'm willing to tell you one of the pieces you're missing.  But in return, I'm locking this topic and suspending you for a week so you can concentrate on actually playing Fates, instead of complaining about it.  Deal?

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Well, at the moment I'm playing FE8 randomizer with which you can randomize the game yourself (seeds) so I'm not focused on Conquest or Fates, it's a side activity like it has always been. I'm a casual player after all. Still I think some things (namely mechanics like seals and shuriken/daggers debuffs) are wrong and don't bring anything good into the series (just remove stat debuffs and tonics and compensate with base stats buffs where needed like on GBA level base stats for magic units, but with much less personal bonuses than in GBA games where your mages had some good stat bonuses like +5 spd +4 mag etc. to make up for class's weakness).

Of topic but to give you an idea of my current occupation and lack of focus on Fates: I'm enjoying my 4th run (the first 3 stopped between 5X because of trash comp vs multiple boltings and chapter 7 where I didn't want to bother anymore wih bad units) and going Ephraim's route on 100% random growths, chests and events, thieves are randomly given too for the lulz and I've got a strong comp for everything except heavy magic but I can restart the chapter if it happens, 57 hp 15/1 death gargoyle Gilliam with 13+2 spd, 21 str and def and 5 res is carrying me and Kyle is a close second with swordmaster Seth. Eirika was trash mage but 30 base hp allowed her to abuse some weaklings to promote at 10 into mage knight (because she has acrobat and 0 base mag and barely more of anything else except 6 spd and 7 skl alongside 0-5% growths across the board and 15% hp 20% skl so I went for mobility and horse aid and let her out because priest Ephraim has good growths and good base spd and luck and this run gave me 150+ accuracy E weapons and some good other weaponswhile most usually strong weapons are either <50% acc or not dealing any damage or having 20+ weight XD, spiders have 25 MT claws with 160 acc but weighing 35 XD).

Yeah I'm completely of topic, but it shows you I care more about this specific randomized FE8 run than Fates which bores me after annoying me enough and having either no map design or extremely annoying map design alongside too many niche units I want to use but they just don't become good and abe to handle themselves (at least in CQ). Hoshido becomes a solorun most of the time after I get bored of giant maps full of mixed ranged and melee ennemies with all kinds of weapons and effective weaponry mixed in.

Samurai Kaze into MoA is great BTW, infinitely better than ninja's more shaky str and lack of HP. Seal strength just rendered Xander unable to deal more than 7 damage or so to Kaze's 13-ish def who was just slowly killing him with +1 auroral katana or whatever it's called (20 avoid bonus weak MT). MoA Kaze 7 was better than Ryoma by a good margin BTW (same def or close with nearly 3x more res and attack doesn't really matters when he tanks or dodges everything with MU B-support as a backpack). This is on hard mode (samurai only run, well only falcon knights are allowed for healing purposes, but since ch10 BS it went into Kaze+Rinkah replaced with MU to build A-support solo.

And if you ask, it's not having to check ennemy weapons and skils that bothers me, it's poison strike, trample, lunge, pass, stat seals, daggers and shuriken, randomness of forge components instead of paying money to upgrade gear like in older FE with forge and in any RPG and MMO. This and the fact you have to attack people on thrones while when you defend you don't get any throne or elevated terrain advantage since it's not Radiant Dawn's great or quite good map design so you're never getting the advantage in the whole part of the game I've played (until ch 18 I think, then it's a major jump for ennemies who get promoted, high stats sometimes higher than your units even counting royals, etc. I prefer playing TSS endgameon hard mode 10x in a row than 1 chapter of Fates past 18 or 19 on normal mode casual or even phoenix).

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. . .yeah, I think I'm going to close this.  Fates may not be the absolute best-designed in terms of difficulty (that goes to FE12 IMO), but it lives up to the promise of offering a challenge.  Unless you're willing to learn and adapt, Conquest will kick you around.  And THAT is on you.

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