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How awful are witches (in your personal experience)


Do Witches ruin your day?  

38 members have voted

  1. 1. Do Witches ruin your day?



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Witches are something that I see a lot of people complaining about, yet for me they're rarely ruin my day. Granted they make replaying any given map a bit of a crapshoot as they rarely do the same thing twice to depend on, but the stories of warping in and picking off my weaker units without me being able to do anything simply never seems to happen to me. So I'm wondering what percentage of people this does happen to. We can talk about the viability for Witches as a concept and how they can be improved (or whether they should just be removed), but for the poll please vote based on your personal experience with them and not based on your opinions about such randomness being included in gameplay.

Also I've put this in the Shadows of Valentia forum, but there's no real reason not to include Gaiden in this conversation.

Edited by Jotari
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I don't like the because they're a wild card - they may not pick off anyone, but NOT knowing what they'll do puts a giant wrench in my plans for world domination.  Nor will I like them until I figure out their AI.

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I've had a witch teleport in and kill someone with a crit which is just ridiculous. There was nothing I could do to prevent that (that I'm aware of), all it did was eat a turnwheel use and some of my time. Witches kinda felt to me like they needed to implement the rewind mechanic just to patch over how poorly-designed they are.

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With the safety net of divine pulse, I've never been put out by them. I think one of them landed a kill on my Forsyth exactly once - demonstrating to me what their AI generally goes for. In Echoes, most of my deaths came from getting overwhelmed by summoned/duplicating monsters. When Expel fails to work, it's frustrating, and there's never a "hit rate" for that move to judge if its a good idea or if you need to turtle up.

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Considering they're a crapshoot in terms of their AI and their propensity to just murder your units isn't as high as it would be if they were programmed differently, the fact they're likely to not make a bottom 5 of SoV ruining is a testament to some of the other BS (Tower of Duma intensifies)

That doesn't mean they wouldn't try their dammdest, the map before Nuibaba comes to mind (And not so much the Sonya map, huh).

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just like cantors, i don't find them so annoying, also they're squishy enough to be taken out with 2 hits at most, so no worries for me

Edited by Yexin
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I'm not sure how exactly the Witch AI works, but it seemed they would never take the 3000 chances they have to actually get a kill, and instead they like to teleport and attack someone who won't die, or someone who just kills them on the counter, even.

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All they really do is ruin any chance for me to use knights, which I don't use anyways. Before I figured out their AI they were annoying and I had a couple of deaths due to their teleporting. Now they're just annoying on occasion.

(Except when you get ambushed and can't not deploy your lvl 1 villagers, but that's deadly for more than just witches.)

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Not yet but just becasue I turtle like mad generally waiting for them to come to me, haven't finished the game yet so maybe there is a god awful map that spams you with them.

Someone did argue their better than Ambush spawns, which I do agree with, since at least here I know that I'm going to take some cheap damage and just work on having everyone together and healed up to dog-pile the witch once she appears.

I still don't like them but at least when I see a witch on the map I can just have everyone bunch up and heal each other then wait. (As opposed to someone getting one-shot because a dude popped out of a fort in Chapter 5 of Awakening since I had no way of predicting that, which was so awful it made me drop the series for a while since that was my first time.)

I'd still prefer Ambush spawns that don't move on the same turn (Can we please get an option for Hard mode without annoying move on spawn Ambush spawns already?) but at least with a witch I can kinda go "Okay there's a witch, everyone get in the bunched up formation with low resistance units in the middle."

 

Edited by Samz707
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From my experience the witches will usually warp to one of your units if they are far away from the group. So if you turtle they won't warp, and you can even bait them that way as well, but I might be misremembering. They were annoying the first couple of times, but they were what ever soon enough. 

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4 hours ago, Samz707 said:

Not yet but just becasue I turtle like mad generally waiting for them to come to me, haven't finished the game yet so maybe there is a god awful map that spams you with them.

Someone did argue their better than Ambush spawns, which I do agree with, since at least here I know that I'm going to take some cheap damage and just work on having everyone together and healed up to dog-pile the witch once she appears.

I still don't like them but at least when I see a witch on the map I can just have everyone bunch up and heal each other then wait. (As opposed to someone getting one-shot because a dude popped out of a fort in Chapter 5 of Awakening since I had no way of predicting that, which was so awful it made me drop the series for a while since that was my first time.)

I'd still prefer Ambush spawns that don't move on the same turn (Can we please get an option for Hard mode without annoying move on spawn Ambush spawns already?) but at least with a witch I can kinda go "Okay there's a witch, everyone get in the bunched up formation with low resistance units in the middle."

 

I believe Ambush spawns is the term for reinforcements that move on the turn they spawn. Otherwise they're just reinforcements. 

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The silver lining side of Witches is that they never have very high stats, and like always Fire or Thunder, nothing better. Well, in SoV, TRS gives some 20 Crt Death and 8 Mt Swarm. So in the long term they're weak and deal very manageable damage. And, as others have pointed out, they tend to pick on the isolated and those at the edges of your pack, so you can affect who they target to an extent.

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They don't bother me that much, especially compared to Arcanists and Cantors, which frequently use Mire or even Death, particularly late in the game. The latter tends to be parked on high evade terrain for maximum annoynace.

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Where's the "Not yet, but I'm always prepared for them to" option?

Anyway, I never look forward to fighting witches, but I always just "deal with it" when facing them. Having an overpowered ability be "balanced" by a schizophrenic AI isn't good game design, but their fragility and lack of high level spells keeps them from being as frustrating as they could be. It also helps that with the exception of Sonia's map (that was a nerve-wrecking experience of hoping none of the witches would act and if they did, they would do something stupid) and potentially levels where witches can be summoned, none of the maps go overboard on the quantity side of things.

I never want to see witches return. Yet they're not the worst mechanic in Fire Emblem. An observant player will notice their presence and can prepare to counter them, which make witches better than mechanics such as ambush spawns or fog of war, which require trial-and-error, paranoia, or outside resources to prevent being unfairly screwed over.

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For a moment there I though that the topic was discussing my personal feeling on witches. Well my great aunt was a witches, long story. As for Echoes, witches only bothered me the most in the mid game . Where the slower members of Cecilia's army are straggling behind. Later in the game they are not much on an issue with dread fighters. Since the enemy don't have higher stat count.

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  • 4 months later...

I just finished a Hard mode playthrough, and honestly Witches were the least of my problems. They almost never seem to go for a kill, even when they could. What's more, the Witches summoned (by Marla and Hestia) are simply pathetic, having like 13 Attack and not doubling anyone. Their AI's obscurity annyos me, but the same applies for Cantors - if the enemy were using tools like Conjure and Teleportation optimally, the game would be nigh unbeatable. 

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1 hour ago, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:

I just finished a Hard mode playthrough, and honestly Witches were the least of my problems. They almost never seem to go for a kill, even when they could. What's more, the Witches summoned (by Marla and Hestia) are simply pathetic, having like 13 Attack and not doubling anyone. Their AI's obscurity annyos me, but the same applies for Cantors - if the enemy were using tools like Conjure and Teleportation optimally, the game would be nigh unbeatable. 

Given the overwhelming number of people who actually haven't been screwed over by them judging by the poll, I'm actually willing to go out on a limb and say that witches could be coded specifically not to be used optimally by the AI. As in they've been coded with artificial stupidity to ensure they don't screw over the player except on some rare occasions.

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8 hours ago, Jotari said:

Given the overwhelming number of people who actually haven't been screwed over by them judging by the poll, I'm actually willing to go out on a limb and say that witches could be coded specifically not to be used optimally by the AI. As in they've been coded with artificial stupidity to ensure they don't screw over the player except on some rare occasions.

Y'know, this tracks with them giving up their souls, to become mindless puppets of Duma. As for Cantors, I don't think anyone can stay fully sane with that hat or beard going on.

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Outside of the first encounter with them they're not that threatening, as Shanty Pete's Mate pointed out their stats hold up poorly late into the game and Turnwheel makes their unpredictable AI a lot more bearable. Without that though they'd be a much bigger headache.

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I was under the impression they´d always just bully gang up on whoever got put to the side of the army?

I´d assume intelligent witches would make some units straight up unusable.

Witches that teleport behind you while you are stuck on a swamp/desert map. Now that would be a proper horror story.  

Edited by Imuabicus
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59 minutes ago, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:

Y'know, this tracks with them giving up their souls, to become mindless puppets of Duma. As for Cantors, I don't think anyone can stay fully sane with that hat or beard going on.

Though it's not specified in game, I've heard Cantors are also suggested to be mindless drones in the Japanese version too. Something about using only Katakana in their speech pattern, which is a trait shared with the Witches and is a common way of depicting brainwashed characters in Japanese works.

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 5/29/2020 at 10:44 AM, Jotari said:

Witches are something that I see a lot of people complaining about, yet for me they're rarely ruin my day. Granted they make replaying any given map a bit of a crapshoot as they rarely do the same thing twice to depend on, but the stories of warping in and picking off my weaker units without me being able to do anything simply never seems to happen to me. So I'm wondering what percentage of people this does happen to. We can talk about the viability for Witches as a concept and how they can be improved (or whether they should just be removed), but for the poll please vote based on your personal experience with them and not based on your opinions about such randomness being included in gameplay.

Also I've put this in the Shadows of Valentia forum, but there's no real reason not to include Gaiden in this conversation.

they are wild card yes. but in my one and only playthru of SoV (Hard-classic) i rarely think they ruin my day. Unless you're doing Ironman-run. Obviously because there's Mila turnwheel, or maybe because im grinding a bit. I could totally see why people frustrated tho, since almost everyone in the series charge at you from the front while Witches teleport and possibly aiming at your weakest unit, just like past games ambush spawn.

actually i want more enemy unit that behave unpredictably like that once in a while (not every map, only latter half or endgame preferably) because i've seen many people actually warp to boss to cheese out a map, so why not enemy side use same tactic to at least annoy you

Edited by joevar
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