How's the Difficulty of 3H?

[BergelomeuSantos]

(Yes, I know..Another Three Houses Topic from me..Well, I can't help it but feel hyped even more after seeing everyone playing!)(Today I even learned that some guys at the Upper Class already have the game..which somehow made me even more excited about this game!)

Today's question is a pretty easy one (I guess): How's the Difficulty holding up? (And if it's not much trouble, would you mind naming a second FE with a similar difficulty? That should help a lot)

(Like always, no surprise spoilers, please)

Edited July 29, 2019 by BergelomeuSantos

[timon]

Playing on Hard/Classic, chapter 7, and to be honest, I was hoping for something more challenging. There were some difficult ones, but I had the most trouble with side quests, the main story has yet to give me a real challenge. Chapter 6 had me on edge, but that's just because I wanted all the chests with only one thief that also had to steal an item from the boss, and with a turn limit, but the battles are quite easy tbh. The units all hold up even if they're slightly under leveled, the only thing that can be annoying early on are archers, because they hit at 3 range and you don't have that.

tl;dr: I hope it picks up, because as of now it's fairly easy and straightforward (btw I should mention I chose the battle option only 2 times).

Edited July 29, 2019 by timon

[Spectrum]

I've finished the Black Eagles route on Hard/Classic and now on Blue Lions chapter 6. The pre-timeskip chapters are fairly easy. However, after the timeskip, the game starts to get more challenging. It's fine. Not too difficult, but not that easy either. It mostly depends on how much you grind. 

[Taho]

I'm playing classic hard BE, chapter 6, and so far, it's been much easier than I expected. I don't feel stupidly OP but I met no real challenge. Never used divine pulse and didn't get hit once by the demonic beast in chapter 5. Hoping it'll pick up in later chapters.

[Nébulya]

It depends ; i'm playing on hard since the beginning. Some maps were challenging, some weren't at all. The only time where I needed to start over, was the last chapter of the Black Eagle. 50 turns! It took me 4 hours to finish it ; a first time in the serie. So yeah ; don't worry the game is going to be challenging ; honestly I had more trouble on this one than others in the past. But the power to go back in time is there so that's why I've restarted only once ; yet sometimes you can use it very quickly ! Honestly, one of the best Fire Emblem game imo.

[ralphiet]

 I'm on chapter 11 classic/hard blue lions route. And i found the earlygame to be a pretty good challenge. I used divine pulse 3 times during the earlygame. But by the time i got to chapter 6 or so (a bit after the beasts were introduced) i noticed it got a lot easier. Now (i think) I'm in the midgame and it's so easy. Maybe I've picked Battles too many times, but i don't think i have. I'm hoping the difficulty ramps up a bit, as i find the midgame is usually the easiest part of fire emblem games. 

[BergelomeuSantos]

Well, so in summary...The beginning of the game has it's ups and downs and the post-game is significantly harder? This looks like a pretty solid line.

I also noticed that most of BE players had a easier time than BL. Is there someone who played (a little of) both routes to affirm this?

Also..I was hoping for no ''After the Beast in Chapter X'' or things like that since this is a No-Spoilers but I'm too dumb to remember any of this, so..I'm not going to complain.

[dragonlordsd]

They've confirmed that additional difficulty will be added in a coming update, so that should fix it.

So far, I've found the map designs to be good in terms of scale and number of enemies, but the enemy stats to be lower than I'd like. Also, it's a little silly that at chapter 6 you're still encountering enemy healers with no offense, but that's not super common.

I'd put it at easier than Fates Conquest, but harder than Birthright. About Sacred Stones level?

Edited July 29, 2019 by dragonlordsd

[Zapp Branniglenn]

Been playing Hard/Classic and I have to say the difficulty was enjoyable at first with enemies consistently at or above your skill level. Enemies also have superior movement due to being in higher tiered classes. You had to really size up the enemy strength and surround them with attacks. Some students lose more than half their health when hit while others get doubled and placed in critical health if one enemy is still alive on enemy phase.

But this difficulty fades quickly as you learn how units can grow and be optimized. I'm at Chapter 7 at the moment and I can afford to get pretty thoughtless, especially on the training/side quest maps. Main missions have better designed challenges but my only rewind thus far was to try and save a Green unit, which only confirmed for me you can't reroll the RNG, that crit will always be a crit. Still, Hard mode is the best we've got at the moment and it's not bad. Can't speak for Normal mode from experience, but I can imagine that difficulty would be among the easier or easiest tier of Fire Emblem games.

Edited July 29, 2019 by Glennstavos

[timon]

54 minutes ago, Glennstavos said:

Been playing Hard/Classic and I have to say the difficulty was enjoyable at first with enemies consistently at or above your skill level. Enemies also have superior movement due to being in higher tiered classes. You had to really size up the enemy strength and surround them with attacks. Some students lose more than half their health when hit while others get doubled and placed in critical health if one enemy is still alive on enemy phase.

But this difficulty fades quickly as you learn how units can grow and be optimized. I'm at Chapter 7 at the moment and I can afford to get pretty thoughtless, especially on the training/side quest maps. Main missions have better designed challenges but my only rewind thus far was to try and save a Green unit, which only confirmed for me you can't reroll the RNG, that crit will always be a crit. Still, Hard mode is the best we've got at the moment and it's not bad. Can't speak for Normal mode from experience, but I can imagine that difficulty would be among the easier or easiest tier of Fire Emblem games.

You CAN rewind crits/misses and even bad level ups, but you have to "change" the RNG, instead of going back an action, go back 2 or 3 and change the order you did things, it will change the outcome.

This also works for class exams btw, it's a bit of a pain because you have to repeat a week of instructing, but it does work (I got Byleth to mage with a D+ in Reason, third try of messing with the instructs). Or if you have to promote a few people at the same time change around the order you do the exams, though I'm pretty sure this might not work as the RNG is probably set the moment you hit sunday.

EDIT: if you get crit at the very start of the battle you can even reload and change the starting position of units on the map and it changes your rolls.

Edited July 29, 2019 by timon

[Zapp Branniglenn]

1 minute ago, timon said:

You CAN rewind crits/misses and even bad level ups, but you have to "change" the RNG, instead of going back an action, go back 2 or 3 and change the order you did things, it will change the outcome.

Right, that's what I should have said, but I got caught up on the details. That crit was unavoidable on that turn because the green unit, who moves after enemies move, initiated combat and got crit. And I was curious if just replaying an encounter rerolled the RNG, as I'm pretty sure it did in Echoes.

[Errorik]

Some maps are kinda hard. 2/3 of the maps are EZPZ. Later in the game for BL, the win condition is kill the commander on most maps. This makes it super super ez. Reclass Dimitri to paladin, rally the Boar King, warp the Boar King, Boar King kills commander with 250+ dmg atrocity crits. All that's left is to laugh at the weak fools who think Dimitri won't crush every single one of them under his boot!

[De Geso]

I've just cleared chapter 5 on Hard. I've had to divine pulse a couple of times due to careless mistakes and not understanding how a particular enemy behaved (my own fault), but I haven't lost a unit otherwise. It's not too tough yet.

I'm looking forward to the higher difficulties.

Edited July 30, 2019 by De Geso

[Nébulya]

I can just say without spoiler than the last two chapters of the Black Eagle are tough as hell. And I've played every Fire Emblem. :p 

[dragonlordsd]

5 minutes ago, Metakirby said:

I can just say without spoiler than the last two chapters of the Black Eagle are tough as hell. And I've played every Fire Emblem. 😛

That's good to hear!

Yeah, even though a lot of the maps have been rout or kill commander, I have really liked the designs better than fates/awakening. 

[Moonlit Knight]

Playing through Golden Deer on hard, I’ve found the difficulty to be just about right. The first two chapters were painful, but once you get your bearings (and everyone starts getting into better classes), it gets better. Some thought is required into how you’re going about things, but there’s nothing really unfair.

GD specific - Claude’s love for schemes shines through post-skip as just about every other map involves a trap or gimmick other than just “see enemies, kill enemies.”

[Disclaimer]

Unlike a lot of Fire Emblems that have an inverse difficulty curve (harder in the beginning and easier once your units gain statistical momentum), Three Houses seems to have a more natural difficulty progression whereby it eases players in. 

The first half-ish of the game can be approached (on Hard) with basic bait strategy, outside of a handful of exceptional situations. I'm probably a little over halfway, doing Blue Lions, and the last few maps have genuinely been fairly challenging, complex, and epic. 

[Lord of Riva]

Just scream "here is something to believe in" before you kill an enemy Fortress knight, Wyvern Lord or gigantic monster with a fist to its face as

Spoiler

Fire Emblem Jesus

tbh, in the BE route both my Byleth and Edelguard are basically untouchable. Edelguard, while slow af takes barely any damage (even against magic, i got very high res with her...) at all while Byleth never gets hit and both have self-healing capabilities...

Edited July 30, 2019 by Lord of Riva

[NegativeExponents-]

I'm playing GD on hard/classic and it honestly feels like one of the hardest FEs I've played. Just one step below Conquest. Although to be fair I believe that most of the other Fire Emblems I've played are considered as some of the easier ones (PoR, SS, Blazing) so maybe that's why this one feels difficult to me seeing as so many others are finding it easy.

[Burklight]

15 hours ago, timon said:

You CAN rewind crits/misses and even bad level ups, but you have to "change" the RNG, instead of going back an action, go back 2 or 3 and change the order you did things, it will change the outcome.

This also works for class exams btw, it's a bit of a pain because you have to repeat a week of instructing, but it does work (I got Byleth to mage with a D+ in Reason, third try of messing with the instructs). Or if you have to promote a few people at the same time change around the order you do the exams, though I'm pretty sure this might not work as the RNG is probably set the moment you hit sunday.

EDIT: if you get crit at the very start of the battle you can even reload and change the starting position of units on the map and it changes your rolls.

 

I actually don't think you can reroll bad levels with pulse. I played around with the rng for that a little and I think each character has it's own pool of rngs specifically for levels that isn't used for other things like combat. For example, a character got a on turn 2 will get the same level if they get it on turn 5 or turn 10, regardless of what actions are taken in between them. I haven't messed around with retreating or anything, but I'm fairly sure divine pulse won't do anything.

[Humanoid]

Claude route, third month on Hard/Classic. It was tricky up to the completion of the first non-story battle in that month, which was labelled level 6 while my squad was of average level 4. Previous to that, I lost Lorenz in the mock battle (he's hopeless for me so far, as is Ignatz) and had to chug plenty of vulneraries in the chapter 2 story map, however I haven't had occasion to use the Turnwheel yet.

Then I decided to do another battle later that month because Exploring a third time that month seemed pointless, and was handed the exact same map (it's random, my sister got two different maps, and they both were different to the single map I got). It was very easy, with the enemies as far as I could tell being identical while my average level was probably 5.5. The other change I made was to equip the entire squad with battalions for the stat bonuses, noting that I haven't used a single gambit yet. The previous time, I only had the three freebie battalions equipped.

I wonder if the story map difficulty is tuned around doing one random map per month and I'm overlevelled, or two a month and I'm where I should be. I'll find out tomorrow when I tackle it.

[bufkus]

It's an incredibly easy game with almost no challenge.

That said, I don't care about difficulty in a non-Kaga FE game, so I am still enjoying it a ton largely thanks to the monastery system.

Edited July 30, 2019 by bufkus

[Taho]

The paralogues are a bit harder. 

Just played through both paralogues of chapter 7 and I had to start again once and use Divine pulse a couple times (stupid Caspar with 40HP getting insta killed by a wyvern rider, didn't expect it to double)

[Colino]

I'm closing in on Chapter 8, Hard Mode with Black Eagles and to be honest I'm stunned at how easy it's been. A part from a few units who were under-levelled early on, everyone can easily survive just about anything. I'd have to go out of my way to get anyone killed.

I'm mostly just enjoying things until I can NG+ into Lunatic mode which is hopefully coming in the not too distant future.

[timon]

2 hours ago, Burklight said:

I actually don't think you can reroll bad levels with pulse. I played around with the rng for that a little and I think each character has it's own pool of rngs specifically for levels that isn't used for other things like combat. For example, a character got a on turn 2 will get the same level if they get it on turn 5 or turn 10, regardless of what actions are taken in between them. I haven't messed around with retreating or anything, but I'm fairly sure divine pulse won't do anything.

yeah that could be, I haven't tested divine pulse on level ups. I'm sure that reloading does work though, as I just did that (restarted map for a bad turn 2 level up, changed stuff up a bit and got a good one instead).

btw I also just did the chapter 7 paralogue with the wyverns, they're definitely a challenge, but as I said in another thread, having 2 pegasus knights with bows simply breaks the game. It's in fact an advanced class at level 10 that can move anywhere, if you give them range it's just over.

The thing is, I want harder difficulties, but I already know that harder difficulties come with strict turn limits, and I deeply HATE turn limits in Fire Emblem maps, I want to take my time.