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What are the actual differences between the hard modes?


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I'm pretty sure the difference between the hard modes is just in the enemies' stats, especially for the bosses.  For example Gazzak has a strength stat of 8 on Hard 1 but a strength stat of 14 on Hard 5, yet he has literally the exact same inventory.  Maybe sometimes they'll have forged weapons (e.g. Chapter 10's boss on Hard 5 has a javelin with 11 might and 90 hit), but even in this regard I think they are still the same weapons except with added buffs.

Also, and I think this applies to other FE games as well (any that have enemy growth rates), I'm pretty sure the stats are semi-randomized.  I've done a couple tests of the first chapter on Hard 5 and all the enemies except Gazzak seem susceptible to a 1 point difference in some of their stats.  I have to assume there's a mixture of internal calculation of growth rates and hard coded base stats for each class.  Of course I think someone would need to test further (and by "further", I mean "beyond chapter 1"), though I'll add that the level of consistency leads me to believe the different hard modes do have differing base stats for the enemies.  With that said I am pretty sure the hardline base stats of the enemies are the same as listed here (because in my tests of Hard 1 some of the pirates had the exact same stats as the base stats listed for their class, others with only a one point variance in a few of their stats), and outside of Hard 1 they just manually adjust their stats to better fit the difficulty modes.

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29 minutes ago, Ertrick36 said:

, and I think this applies to other FE games as well (any that have enemy growth rates), I'm pretty sure the stats are semi-randomized.  I've done a couple tests of the first chapter on Hard 5 and all the enemies except Gazzak seem susceptible to a 1 point difference in some of their stats.  I have to assume there's a mixture of internal calculation of growth rates and hard coded base stats for each class. 

I'm fairly certain that how it works is:

Every class has base stats. I.E, let's say mages have base 5 magic and base 5 speed.

Personal bases, (which almost every playable unit possess) are added to class bases to get overall bases-I.E, a mage with personal base stats of three magic and four speed will have eight magic and nine speed.

However, every class also has growth rates-Which enemies use. I.E, if mages have a 100% growth in both magic and speed, a generic enemy level 5 mage will have 9 in both stats.

Not sure about DSFE, but in the GBA era, unless I'm mistaken, hard modes grant bonuses to units by adding EXTRA levels that you cannot see-Hector Hard, for example, adds 9 hidden levels to unpromoted enemies and 19 to promoted ones-A generic level 5 mage in Hector Hard with the growths/class bases I talked about above would have 19 magic and speed.

Generic units, at least in the GBA era, are actually just regular units who don't have any portraits, dialogue, etc, and therefore may have personal bases too. Not really relevant, but I felt like it'd be worth pointing out.

TL;DR the stat variance is caused by enemies using generic growth rates, and can be stat-screwed or blessed as such. Hard modes add extra hidden levels to their stats to increase them, rather than a flat boost to bases. It's similar to how, in Three Houses, units poached from the other classes, use their class' growths to determine their stats.

Edited by Benice
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Hard mode exclusive reinforcements are a thing too. And in Mystery of the Emblem they lock off some items from the player on harder modes, most noteably warp (which puts the Tiki dragon stone secret shop out of commission entirely unfortunately).

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The main differences are that enemies get hidden extra levels (but with 0% Def/Res growth) and that reinforcements appear at the beginning of enemy phase.

Enemy equipment also improves faster: on Hard 5; it's unchanged at first but enemies all carry steel starting chapter 5, they upgrade to silver in chapter 10, and again to braves in chapter 20. Enemies with killers, javelins or effective weapons keep those but they start carrying +4 mt/+20 hit forges from chapter 10 on. The final chapter (if you play it straight) sees +4 mt/+20 hit forged braves/Thorons, and +8 mt/+20 hit forged everything else.

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1 hour ago, Mars of Aritia said:

and why they even bothered with H2-H4. Does anyone ever play those?

Yes-H5 isn't really fair, and I'd say that H3 is actually very a well-balanced difficulty aside from the ambush spawns. H2 is also a good challenge that is more or less fair. H5 is kinda more to flex and say you've done it, from what I've heard.

1 hour ago, Mars of Aritia said:

Now I'm wondering why none of this is explained in game,

I believe they say that enemy stats are higher, don't they? As far as I'm aware, no difficulty mode in the series really tells you the changes very well. (IIRC Sacred Stones is the first to have a description at all.)

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12 hours ago, Benice said:

I believe they say that enemy stats are higher, don't they? As far as I'm aware, no difficulty mode in the series really tells you the changes very well. (IIRC Sacred Stones is the first to have a description at all.)

All it says is more stars means stronger foes along with vague names for the difficulty levels. How is someone supposed to know which difficulty is suitable without going through chapter 1 five times?

And every other game at least gives you a good idea who it's for. Even FE10 where the idiot translates messed up the difficulty names still tells you that Easy(U) is for new players and Normal(U) is for people who know their way around the game.

They really should've just cut down the difficulties to Normal, H2/3 & H5. Though they really should've done a lot of things with this game, but lets not get into that.

 

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23 minutes ago, Mars of Aritia said:

All it says is more stars means stronger foes along with vague names for the difficulty levels. How is someone supposed to know which difficulty is suitable without going through chapter 1 five times?

I mean, how is one supposed to know how hard Hector Hard mode is? (Or heck, literally every hard mode in the series pre-FE13?) It is vague, but the various degrees of difficulty do cover various fields-I don't know much about SD, but when I played it for the first time, I had a pretty good impression that something like H5-3 would be way outta my league-More player choice is a good thing, in general.

Anyways, I'm kinda off-topic now. Sorry!

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1 hour ago, Benice said:

I mean, how is one supposed to know how hard Hector Hard mode is? (Or heck, literally every hard mode in the series pre-FE13?) It is vague, but the various degrees of difficulty do cover various fields-I don't know much about SD, but when I played it for the first time, I had a pretty good impression that something like H5-3 would be way outta my league-More player choice is a good thing, in general.

Anyways, I'm kinda off-topic now. Sorry!

The difference with hector hard mode is that it is unlocked after you complete the game. so naturally, you would already know how the game works and what to expect. And they actually changed things around instead of just buffing stats and weapons by vague amounts.

I just played the first chapter of H2 & H3 and honestly I could barely tell the difference. the only one i noticed was gordon is doubled now.

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4 hours ago, Mars of Aritia said:

The difference with hector hard mode is that it is unlocked after you complete the game. so naturally, you would already know how the game works and what to expect. And they actually changed things around instead of just buffing stats and weapons by vague amounts.

I just played the first chapter of H2 & H3 and honestly I could barely tell the difference. the only one i noticed was gordon is doubled now.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm like 65% sure you need to beat normal mode before any of the Hard modes are unlocked in Shadow Dragon.

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  • 4 weeks later...
On 9/15/2020 at 7:50 AM, Jotari said:

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm like 65% sure you need to beat normal mode before any of the Hard modes are unlocked in Shadow Dragon.

Oof, that's like 80% for a 2RN game.

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  • 6 months later...

I strongly disagree with a lot of what was said here. At the top of the list is the idea that "H5 is unfair." It's a challenging difficulty mode for those who want a challenge. It's nowhere close to unfair. Some anecdotes: people have defeated it with 0% growths, people have defeated it without resetting, and my first FE game experience was Shadow Dragon H5 and I made it to chapter 10 before restarting to try something else.

The extra difficulty modes are there to be enjoyed by the player. Normal is for beginners. H1 is for those with light experience. H3 is like a traditional hard mode. H2 and H4 just fill in the gaps between H1, H3, and H5. H5 is the challenge mode, for being challenged. Tactics in H5 are also the richest and most diverse out of any of the difficulty modes because you have to utilize your units better to survive.

Not seeing the difference between two adjacent difficulties in the first chapter doesn't say a lot. The first chapter is pretty homogeneous. There are stat thresholds that aren't necessarily going to change within one enemy type from difficulty to the next but over the course of an entire game the higher difficulty is is going to put up a little more resistance which is why it's higher.

I also don't like reducing the difficulties to Normal - H2/H3 - H5. Normal mode is more like a casual mode for total beginners. If we're reducing the game to three difficulties then something like H1 - H3/H4 - H5 makes more sense. H1 is the normal mode. H3/H4 is the hard mode. And H5 is the challenge mode, like lunatic. The gap between H4 and H5 is the biggest in terms of difficulty as far as it appears to me. The pirates in H5 on chapter 1 can be overwhelming for a lot of players but in H4 they're far more manageable. However I won't say that H1 - H3/H4 - H5 is the best. I just think it makes more sense. This is really just an extra paragraph to argue something but it's the first three paragraphs where I strongly disagree. 

The game sold over half a million copies so I'm sure lots of people have played H2 - H4 difficulty levels. In fact those are some really important ones because that's the range of "traditional hard" for this particular game, which is what a lot of players like to tackle on a second playthrough. 

Edited by tacticsfan999
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