Emperor should have been able to use magic

[Shadow Mir]

On 11/19/2019 at 8:26 PM, LoneRecon400 said:

And Magic Weapons / Magic Weapon Artes most certainly use the Magic Hit Formula. Here's some proof: https://imgur.com/a/Hbiwe9x

That makes the Bolt Axe and Crusher even shittier than I thought they already were... which is pretty damn terribad.

[LoneRecon400]

51 minutes ago, Shadow Mir said:

That makes the Bolt Axe and Crusher even shittier than I thought they already were... which is pretty damn terribad.

Why? If anything it makes those weapons better since they ignore Avoid bonuses from terrain and overall lowers the avoid on enemies since enemies have lower luck than they do Speed.

[Shadow Mir]

19 minutes ago, LoneRecon400 said:

Why? If anything it makes those weapons better since they ignore Avoid bonuses from terrain and overall lowers the avoid on enemies since enemies have lower luck than they do Speed.

60 base hit that cannot be shored up easily. And that's on top of their already existing problems (1 range and being tied to someone who has no business using it at all for Crusher, and 15 weight for the Bolt Axe).

[LoneRecon400]

12 minutes ago, Shadow Mir said:

60 base hit that cannot be shored up easily. 

Uh, yes it can? This game is the most flexible game in the series in terms of hit rates.

From Battalions, Combat Arts, Accessories, Link Attacks, Adjutants,  - Breaker skills, and skills such as Rally Dex and Speical Dance, there's no shortage of ways to get Accuracy to acceptable levels

Edited November 21, 2019 by LoneRecon400

[Jotari]

I don't know precisely how the formulas work, but I can't think of a single instance where a magical option for hit rate was lower than a physical one.

[LoneRecon400]

22 minutes ago, Jotari said:

I don't know precisely how the formulas work, but I can't think of a single instance where a magical option for hit rate was lower than a physical one.

There actually are a couple example of this earlygame where enemies get weighed down.

The Magic Formula uses Speed/2, not AS/2. So against something like the Thieves with Steel Swords, Physical units would have slightly better Hit Rates than Mages. But it's so slight and for a short period of time that it really doesn't matter. 

Edited November 21, 2019 by LoneRecon400

[MasterSlayerX]

I mean she’s one of the few that can actually use black magic . The game makes any mage class Able to use all spells which I kind of wish they had changed . Having emperor only able to use the black magic only would of been pretty cool and I don’t think it would of been broken . There again while dimitri lord class is cool and all I kind of wish he was horse back in his final promotion . 

[Etrurian emperor]

On 11/19/2019 at 2:23 PM, Flere210 said:

Intsys lives under the delusions that armored characters are fine as they are even if there is an overwhelming amount of evidence that there aren't.

When thinking about Armor Knights I always suspect its a dev team's attempt at balancing gone way to far. I think Kaga and Co were a bit worried a unit with such high defence would be broken and so they kept tossing every possibly downgrade they could find at the general class which ended up working a bit too well .

At the end of the day the poor armor classes just have far too many weaknesses to make their strength worth it. They have so slowly that they have a hard time keeping up with your other units, they are always slow enough to get doubled by everything, they are allergic to all kinds of magic and there's a fairly common weapon that always does massage damage to them. Having a ton of defense hardly matters if they never make it to the front line and if just about any mage can easily kill them if they do. And sadly that's possibly how they were designed. 

[Flere210]

12 minutes ago, Etrurian emperor said:

When thinking about Armor Knights I always suspect its a dev team's attempt at balancing gone way to far. I think Kaga and Co were a bit worried a unit with such high defence would be broken and so they kept tossing every possibly downgrade they could find at the general class which ended up working a bit too well .

At the end of the day the poor armor classes just have far too many weaknesses to make their strength worth it. They have so slowly that they have a hard time keeping up with your other units, they are always slow enough to get doubled by everything, they are allergic to all kinds of magic and there's a fairly common weapon that always does massage damage to them. Having a ton of defense hardly matters if they never make it to the front line and if just about any mage can easily kill them if they do. And sadly that's possibly how they were designed. 

I have a similar idea, but instead i think they are designed around not being too annoying to deal whit as red units, and in particular as iverlevelled general bosses. The game does not know whatever your mages are still alive or not, or whatever you have used up all your armorslayer or not, so they feel like they need to give you as many workaround as possible to avoid a player being unable to outdamage the throne regeneration or doing so only by 1 or 2 points. 

[Interdimensional Observer]

Edelgard not being able to fully benefit from her Hidden Talent is the fault of dividing Reason into Black and Dark, which wasn't necessary. Magic weapons outdoing spells themselves when it comes to all but range (which might not even be a significant case if Thyrsus works with them), is itself another gameplay fault. Perhaps KT thought the limited uses of magic weapons would curtail them enough?

-And, I don't think KT, or IS, designs their classes/weapons/units knowing their failures in practice. They build them around some naïveté that should've had a place for Magemgard.

Whilst I like having a Halberdier for once in a while Dimitri too, him having a horse would've been more symmetrical. Edel is Armor, Claude is Flight, if Dimitri was Horse, then it'd leave Enlightened One Byleth as Infantry- all class types would have a lord.

 

2 minutes ago, Flere210 said:

The game does not know whatever your mages are still alive or not, or whatever you have used up all your armorslayer or not, so they feel like they need to give you as many workaround as possible to avoid a player being unable to outdamage the throne regeneration or doing so only by 1 or 2 points. 

Doesn't this game let you buy infinite Hammers and Horseslayers at some point? It even has that cheaper and weaker Mace buyable in infinite quantities I know. You can't run out then unless you run out of money, and in this game, if you run out of cash. This would also require you not train any mages and their long-term infinite spells. Meaning you didn't play with any notion of strategy in a strategy RPG. You DESERVE TO FAIL if you got to that point.

 

25 minutes ago, Etrurian emperor said:

When thinking about Armor Knights I always suspect its a dev team's attempt at balancing gone way to far. I think Kaga and Co were a bit worried a unit with such high defence would be broken and so they kept tossing every possibly downgrade they could find at the general class which ended up working a bit too well .

Draug, the very first Armor Knight ever, had only a 10% Def growth, when everyone else in FE1 Chapter 1 had 20%, barring Jagen and Wrys. They gave Darros and Ogma's Fighters 40% and 50%, and Julian, Palla, and Catria all got 30%. But, no Armor Knight in FE1 got more than 20% Def growth.

And, FEs ever since usually, until Awakening and Fates, had Def growths be overwhelmingly lower on average than most other stats. A 30% Spd is glacial in GBA FE, but it's almost unrivaled to have 30% Def.

Shall I mention how FE12 when making Kris made the Def boosts always give less than picking it for another stat? Noble's Child (Skl and Spd) gives +2 base and +5% growth, while Clergy's Child (Def) gave +2 Def with no growth. Likewise, the Def Present 5% less growth boost of a boost than of the non-HP options. And the Def Future gives 5% less growth than everything but Res again. Not to mention Def traits boost only that stat and no other, despite every other stat other than HP being paired with another, so your total boosts are in a way halved (even if you're not likely using both Str and Mag when you pick a Str & Mag trait).

So yes, FE has disliked massive Def before, and it dislikes it again. Because too much Def all fear would lead to a "Tink!"fest, a big, glorious stream of high Def units Tinking everything.

I liked Fates, Effie and Benny were such good Armors. Effie had a big Spd growth that almost compensated for the class's poor base, and she had big Str too. Benny on the other hand had no Str, but Wary Fighter meant he didn't care about Spd, and he actually had moderate/good Res, a dual wall able to take hits but with the price of not being able to deal them so well- not unheard of in the Pokemon metagame, but a rarity in FE.

[Flere210]

44 minutes ago, Interdimensional Observer said:

Edelgard not being able to fully benefit from her Hidden Talent is the fault of dividing Reason into Black and Dark, which wasn't necessary. Magic weapons outdoing spells themselves when it comes to all but range (which might not even be a significant case if Thyrsus works with them), is itself another gameplay fault. Perhaps KT thought the limited uses of magic weapons would curtail them enough?

-And, I don't think KT, or IS, designs their classes/weapons/units knowing their failures in practice. They build them around some naïveté that should've had a place for Magemgard.

Whilst I like having a Halberdier for once in a while Dimitri too, him having a horse would've been more symmetrical. Edel is Armor, Claude is Flight, if Dimitri was Horse, then it'd leave Enlightened One Byleth as Infantry- all class types would have a lord.

 

Doesn't this game let you buy infinite Hammers and Horseslayers at some point? It even has that cheaper and weaker Mace buyable in infinite quantities I know. You can't run out then unless you run out of money, and in this game, if you run out of cash. This would also require you not train any mages and their long-term infinite spells. Meaning you didn't play with any notion of strategy in a strategy RPG. You DESERVE TO FAIL if you got to that point.

My point was more general than speciphic on three house, most games allow you to stockpile hammers at some point, but considering how much of an idiot i was in my first playtroughs i see a person ending up whitout those(i basically got carried by regal blade and wolf beil back then)

As for the rest of the argument. Most fire emblem enemies hit def. An unit whit sky high strenght and speed can still be eventually overwhelmed, an unit that takes 0 by everything on the map is a cheat code. Personally i'd just bring back the minum 1 damage like in Jugdral and allow units to have monstrous defense.

Edited November 22, 2019 by Flere210

[Jotari]

2 hours ago, Interdimensional Observer said:

Edelgard not being able to fully benefit from her Hidden Talent is the fault of dividing Reason into Black and Dark, which wasn't necessary. Magic weapons outdoing spells themselves when it comes to all but range (which might not even be a significant case if Thyrsus works with them), is itself another gameplay fault. Perhaps KT thought the limited uses of magic weapons would curtail them enough?

-And, I don't think KT, or IS, designs their classes/weapons/units knowing their failures in practice. They build them around some naïveté that should've had a place for Magemgard.

Whilst I like having a Halberdier for once in a while Dimitri too, him having a horse would've been more symmetrical. Edel is Armor, Claude is Flight, if Dimitri was Horse, then it'd leave Enlightened One Byleth as Infantry- all class types would have a lord.

 

Doesn't this game let you buy infinite Hammers and Horseslayers at some point? It even has that cheaper and weaker Mace buyable in infinite quantities I know. You can't run out then unless you run out of money, and in this game, if you run out of cash. This would also require you not train any mages and their long-term infinite spells. Meaning you didn't play with any notion of strategy in a strategy RPG. You DESERVE TO FAIL if you got to that point.

 

Draug, the very first Armor Knight ever, had only a 10% Def growth, when everyone else in FE1 Chapter 1 had 20%, barring Jagen and Wrys. They gave Darros and Ogma's Fighters 40% and 50%, and Julian, Palla, and Catria all got 30%. But, no Armor Knight in FE1 got more than 20% Def growth.

And, FEs ever since usually, until Awakening and Fates, had Def growths be overwhelmingly lower on average than most other stats. A 30% Spd is glacial in GBA FE, but it's almost unrivaled to have 30% Def.

Shall I mention how FE12 when making Kris made the Def boosts always give less than picking it for another stat? Noble's Child (Skl and Spd) gives +2 base and +5% growth, while Clergy's Child (Def) gave +2 Def with no growth. Likewise, the Def Present 5% less growth boost of a boost than of the non-HP options. And the Def Future gives 5% less growth than everything but Res again. Not to mention Def traits boost only that stat and no other, despite every other stat other than HP being paired with another, so your total boosts are in a way halved (even if you're not likely using both Str and Mag when you pick a Str & Mag trait).

So yes, FE has disliked massive Def before, and it dislikes it again. Because too much Def all fear would lead to a "Tink!"fest, a big, glorious stream of high Def units Tinking everything.

I liked Fates, Effie and Benny were such good Armors. Effie had a big Spd growth that almost compensated for the class's poor base, and she had big Str too. Benny on the other hand had no Str, but Wary Fighter meant he didn't care about Spd, and he actually had moderate/good Res, a dual wall able to take hits but with the price of not being able to deal them so well- not unheard of in the Pokemon metagame, but a rarity in FE.

I was actually surprised to discover Dimitri didn't get a horse on promotion. I naturally assumed he did. I only learned his class is infantry when I went to write this thread (despite having fought him as an infantry unit in verdant wind). As originally I was going to make s longer point about how we could have given Edelgard lances for double emperor reference and swap Dimitri for axes. Mounted Dimitri with axes would have been cool as we've never had an axe cavalry lord, while we've had several lance cavalry (most as secondary weapons albeit. Only Ephraim was primarily axe cavalry).

Edited November 22, 2019 by Jotari

[Silly]

6 hours ago, Interdimensional Observer said:

Draug, the very first Armor Knight ever, had only a 10% Def growth, when everyone else in FE1 Chapter 1 had 20%, barring Jagen and Wrys. They gave Darros and Ogma's Fighters 40% and 50%, and Julian, Palla, and Catria all got 30%. But, no Armor Knight in FE1 got more than 20% Def growth.

And, FEs ever since usually, until Awakening and Fates, had Def growths be overwhelmingly lower on average than most other stats. A 30% Spd is glacial in GBA FE, but it's almost unrivaled to have 30% Def.

Shall I mention how FE12 when making Kris made the Def boosts always give less than picking it for another stat? Noble's Child (Skl and Spd) gives +2 base and +5% growth, while Clergy's Child (Def) gave +2 Def with no growth. Likewise, the Def Present 5% less growth boost of a boost than of the non-HP options. And the Def Future gives 5% less growth than everything but Res again. Not to mention Def traits boost only that stat and no other, despite every other stat other than HP being paired with another, so your total boosts are in a way halved (even if you're not likely using both Str and Mag when you pick a Str & Mag trait).

So yes, FE has disliked massive Def before, and it dislikes it again. Because too much Def all fear would lead to a "Tink!"fest, a big, glorious stream of high Def units Tinking everything.

I liked Fates, Effie and Benny were such good Armors. Effie had a big Spd growth that almost compensated for the class's poor base, and she had big Str too. Benny on the other hand had no Str, but Wary Fighter meant he didn't care about Spd, and he actually had moderate/good Res, a dual wall able to take hits but with the price of not being able to deal them so well- not unheard of in the Pokemon metagame, but a rarity in FE.

This is mostly a balance decision. Defense is a stat that "snowballs" on itself, in the sense that the more defense a unit has, the more valuable additional points of defense become.

For a brief example, say we have a unit with 20 HP, and are being attacked by an enemy with 15 attack. This is what our bulk looks like at varying levels of defense:

At low levels of defense, gaining additional points doesn't really change all that much. Sometimes it lets you survive one extra hit, but often times it doesn't. However, as player defenses increase relative to enemy attack power, you see that each additional point of defense translates to more and more actual bulk. In our example, a 12 defense unit gaining a single point of defense is the equivalent of it surviving THREE additional attacks, which is much more significant than 1 defense was on the lower end of the spectrum. For this reason, I can see it making sense for developers to make sure defense growths are not super high, and for them to be especially wary of giving units that already have very high base defenses high growths as well. Such a situation could lead to defense snowballing out of control.

The other two most important stats, strength and speed, do not really suffer from this problem, and are therefore safer to boost growths in. Strength actually scales in reverse, it doesn't take very much extra strength to turn a 5HKO into a 4HKO, but turning a 2HKO into a OHKO takes a lot of extra strength. Speed is a very binary stat that doesn't really scale at all. Either you have enough speed to double/not get doubled, or you don't, and any additional points of speed outside of those two specific breakpoints are not very significant.

[Dark Holy Elf]

20 hours ago, Silly said:

The other two most important stats, strength and speed, do not really suffer from this problem, and are therefore safer to boost growths in. Strength actually scales in reverse, it doesn't take very much extra strength to turn a 5HKO into a 4HKO, but turning a 2HKO into a OHKO takes a lot of extra strength. Speed is a very binary stat that doesn't really scale at all. Either you have enough speed to double/not get doubled, or you don't, and any additional points of speed outside of those two specific breakpoints are not very significant.

Speed does have the added significance of affecting avoid. It's a pretty big deal in, say, the GBA FEs; either you're overcoming various doubling thresholds (at lower speeds, since GBA enemies are pretty slow) or you're piling on avoid points, and avoid has the exact same issue as defence: the more you have, the better it becomes, until you're invincible. It's a bit less potent in this game since it's only 1 point of evade per speed, of course, but still not neglibie. (It says everything about how impotent Dex is as a stat that Spd essentially has a parallel role which is so secondary you can overlook it like this.)

This is only a minor nitpick, I liked your summary otherwise. Defence is an odd stat to balance. I definitely think it ends up less important than strength and speed in most FEs (certainly including this one), but the way it snowballs means that the game designers have to keep ways of stacking it in mind, and this is especially true in more recent games where there are more ways to do just that (batallions, shields, food, etc.).

[Ari Chan]

I'd say the only game where armor units don't feel like crap to have on your team is Fates  thanks to the pair up system so having 4/5 mov sucks a lot less for them and Wary Fighter solves their massive speed issue and allows them to actually tank reliably. Not no mention if you look at units like Benny he actually has high growths on every other stats to compensate for the lack of Speed which is arguably the most important stat in the game.

[Shadow Mir]

On 11/20/2019 at 6:20 PM, Jotari said:

With that logic, why have mages at all?

Aside from what was stated earlier, I just don't think making Emperor into a half-assed hybrid class would be any improvement at all. We already have Mortal Savant for that, except it has Tomefaire in addition to Swordfaire... and it STILL sucks.

On 11/21/2019 at 9:40 AM, LoneRecon400 said:

Uh, yes it can? This game is the most flexible game in the series in terms of hit rates.

From Battalions, Combat Arts, Accessories, Link Attacks, Adjutants,  - Breaker skills, and skills such as Rally Dex and Speical Dance, there's no shortage of ways to get Accuracy to acceptable levels

Be that as it may, it's still a big-ass case of "Awesome But Impractical", considering the Bolt Axe's 15 weight, and the Crusher's being range locked, which is no bueno when the user is a mage.

[Sid Starkiller]

Even if it wouldn't actually improve the class mechanically, I still think it would be a nice way of making the class hers. But I am the kind of guy who enjoys Awesome But Impractical stuff, so make of that what you will.

[msterforks]

Magic does not fix Emperor, as other people stated. Just because Edelgard has some interesting magic traits doesn't mean she should be a magic user. Honestly, I think every unit getting magic is mostly fan service/RPG immersion rather than a practical gameplay mechanic, and strange mixes like Edelgard are just a byproduct.

What I'd really like to see is the armor knight line (and by extension, Emperor) do their job: tank physical hits. There are plenty of ways to buff tanking capabilities without breaking the game with extremely high defense. Fortress Knight getting the guard adjutant effect, and Emperor disabling enemy follow up attacks seem pretty fair for Maddening difficulty without affecting the lower difficulties.

[KelluPato]

Well to be fair, Edelgard is the only character in the game to fully be able to utilize all 3 class skills of the Gremory class...

[Shanty Pete's 1st Mate]

1 hour ago, KelluPato said:

Well to be fair, Edelgard is the only character in the game to fully be able to utilize all 3 class skills of the Gremory class...

I'd like to go with Gremory Edelgard on a future playthrough, but getting that Faith to A-rank (or at least B, for a chance) sounds... daunting, let's say. Dark Knight would probably be more practical for her (and she'd take advantage of both tomefaires... which actually isn't any better than just using one or the other, LOL).

[Shadow Mir]

1 hour ago, KelluPato said:

Well to be fair, Edelgard is the only character in the game to fully be able to utilize all 3 class skills of the Gremory class...

The problem is, she's weak in Faith, which would render it impractical outside of NG+.

[SSbardock84]

Yeah, it bothers me that Edelgard can't use dark magic in her special classes. It feels like a waste that it's one of her assets. Maybe there'll be a cool class in the future that'll work well for her, but I doubt it.

[Jotari]

46 minutes ago, SSbardock84 said:

Yeah, it bothers me that Edelgard can't use dark magic in her special classes. It feels like a waste that it's one of her assets. Maybe there'll be a cool class in the future that'll work well for her, but I doubt it.

Yeah, I doubt they're going to buff Emperor in such a drastic way at this stage. But something I think we could see them doing is a DLC Skill that lets anyone use magic regardless of their class. That would actually be really cool. Aside from Edelgard, using magic on flying units would be pretty awesome.

[Interdimensional Observer]

EDIT: I changed my mind, delete this post please!

Edited December 12, 2019 by Interdimensional Observer

[Jotari]

2 minutes ago, Interdimensional Observer said:

Ummm.... DATAMINE SPOILERS!:

  Hide contents

They've added a flying magic class to the game's data already. It'll probably be implemented at a later date as part of the 4th DLC wave.

 

Spoiler

Oh. Well that's nice. Makes the possibility of a skill giving any unit magic seem slight superfluous now, still it could happen. I don't think it's a bad idea for DLC skill for this kind of game set up.