How much would playable Ballisticians affect the game?

[Emperor Hardin]

So I was thinking, how much would re-adding playable Ballisticians affect Fe12's gameplay, like if Jake and Beck were recruited in their original classes? Their growths may have to be lowered, especially Jake's for balance purposes, but the most OP thing with FE11's Ballistas was the ability to forge them. In FE12, even with their unobtainable state in FE12 Ballistas cannot be forged in anyway if hacked into a player inventory, which would greatly tone down playable Ballisticians ability to cheese powerful foes.

The only maps I can think of where the use of Ballisticians might be too powerful would be chapter 12, 13x (than again the fog), 16x and maybe 20.

Anyone have any thoughts including ideas or opposition to the idea of playable Ballisticians in FE12, I'm all ears?

[Shaky Jones]

FE12 ballisticians...the things I could do with that.

The fact that FE12 isn't designed at all for strats involving 10 range weapons would make many scenarios in FE12 easy to cheese. Like, if Jake and Belf were ballisticians, you could have 4 uses per turn with Xane and Feena. Sure, that'd be overkill, but even using one with a dancer sounds pretty busted imo. Imagine all those zone based ambush spawns that could be entierly mitigated through a ballista shot, like in chapter 13. The dragons and mages don't move until you're within the center island where the seize point is, then reinforcements appear from the top left and right corners of the map, as well as some ice dragons on forts if you don't block them. If you can set up your units in a way where you can take the middle island of enemies fast enough, you could get rid of the boss without worry of reinforcements. With 10 range however, either attacking someone from a distance could let you proc the spawns at a time unintended for the game, or you can just try sniping the boss slowly without consequences. Really, any chapter where killing the boss ends reinforcements (which I think is all of them?) makes the idea of using ballisticians just busted. Even without that, enemies use siege tomes against you quite a few times in the late game. With how frail mages are, it wouldn't take much effort to just snipe them and easily remove the threat they're meant to present. Bring Jake, hit, use dance, hit again, and they're probably dead. Chapter 23 would be miles easier, as the meteor users who are normally very difficult to approach safely could be picked off one by one, and you could bait Gharnef into chasing you without any trouble whatsoever. Chapter 15 would be way easier too. The island is right below you, but rushing below is pretty darn risky on higher difficulties. If I had a balistician, all I'd have to do to handle R lunatic would be to just snipe the bishops with their staves and bolgonone, then flying in with anyone who has the iote shield wouldn't have any problem removing the remaining threat. Or if we're including the thunderbolt weapon, the ballistician enemies themselves would be a piece of cake. In chapter 16, the siege tome users would be a piece of cake, and I could snipe the mage reinforcements that appear with the warriors, so I don't get punished for throwing a general (or big guy Bantu) to tank all the hits, aside from the first warrior with a hammer. Chapter 19 would be immensely easier with how I could snipe the upper castle from a distance, not to mention how helpful an effective 10 range weapon would be against the plentiful of wyvern riders and actual wyverns would be. Maybe I could even say chapter 12 would be much easier, as some turns where enemies try surrounding you in the bridge around Darros would be much easier to navigate through, as you could snipe the enemies while slowly retreating without worrying of being overwhelmed. I feel like I could be wording all this better, but I do seriously believe that playable ballisticians would just break the game, even without forges. Almost every map in the 2nd half of the game present several moments where it's easy to get killed when you don't plan out your moves and take out all the right enemies on player phase or approach the enemy in a tactical manner. To me, a ballistae sounds like an easy way out of any of those turns. Not just for dealing damage, but just baiting out enemies. A lot of them like to only move in the right setting, but a free shot from a distance just destroys that. I would suggest how to get around all that, but I'm on the opinion that the game is best left off without them, even if the idea of it seems fun. I mean, it would be everyone's main weapon of choice in reverse lunatic! Hope I didn't come off as mean or anything here. I think it'd be better to just buff Jake and Beck a bit. Mainly Beck. No one remembers he exists in this game. 

[Emperor Hardin]

2 minutes ago, Shaky Jones said:

FE12 ballisticians...the things I could do with that.

The fact that FE12 isn't designed at all for strats involving 10 range weapons would make many scenarios in FE12 easy to cheese. Like, if Jake and Belf were ballisticians, you could have 4 uses per turn with Xane and Feena.

You mean Beck, right?

2 minutes ago, Shaky Jones said:

Sure, that'd be overkill, but even using one with a dancer sounds pretty busted imo. Imagine all those zone based ambush spawns that could be entierly mitigated through a ballista shot, like in chapter 13.

The dragons and mages don't move until you're within the center island where the seize point is, then reinforcements appear from the top left and right corners of the map, as well as some ice dragons on forts if you don't block them. If you can set up your units in a way where you can take the middle island of enemies fast enough, you could get rid of the boss without worry of reinforcements. With 10 range however, either attacking someone from a distance could let you proc the spawns at a time unintended for the game, or you can just try sniping the boss slowly without consequences. Really, any chapter where killing the boss ends reinforcements (which I think is all of them?) makes the idea of using ballisticians just busted.

Assuming this is true as its been a while since I did a hacked playthrough, I wonder if the enemy AI could be changed with current hacking tools so they move as soon as they're attacked?

Same for the reinforcements when the boss is dead, but if I hacked FE12, I'd definitely buff all those weak General bosses that can be doubled by anyone and oneshotted by any effective weapon.

Good point about the dancer refreshing Ballisticians, I hadn't thought of that.

2 minutes ago, Shaky Jones said:

Even without that, enemies use siege tomes against you quite a few times in the late game. With how frail mages are, it wouldn't take much effort to just snipe them and easily remove the threat they're meant to present.

I feel in that case, the Ballisticians being just as vulnerable to them might make things more even, dancers aside.

2 minutes ago, Shaky Jones said:

I would suggest how to get around all that, but I'm on the opinion that the game is best left off without them, even if the idea of it seems fun. I mean, it would be everyone's main weapon of choice in reverse lunatic! Hope I didn't come off as mean or anything here. I think it'd be better to just buff Jake and Beck a bit. Mainly Beck. No one remembers he exists in this game. 

I remember having fun with Toras when I played a hack a whilst back, but you didn't come across as mean, I liked reading your points.

I actually have a silly idea of a buffed FE11/FE12 where all the "free silver" tier units are all given buffs and pre-promotes are made to be the same strength as they were in the original, in addition to buffing bosses, so I'd love to hear your ideas for improving Horseman Beck.

[Shaky Jones]

7 minutes ago, Emperor Hardin said:

You mean Beck, right?

Ah crap. Not again.

8 minutes ago, Emperor Hardin said:

Assuming this is true as its been a while since I did a hacked playthrough, I wonder if the enemy AI could be changed with current hacking tools so they move as soon as they're attacked?

I feel like that would present many opportunities to to cheese maps with easy bait tactics.

9 minutes ago, Emperor Hardin said:

I feel in that case, the Ballisticians being just as vulnerable to them might make things more even, dancers aside.

Well, the idea is that you could just wipe them out before they get a chance to hit you. Only a handful of siege tomes are placed where you'll basically always be in range of at least 2. And you can always just use barrier to survive a hit.

11 minutes ago, Emperor Hardin said:

I actually have a silly idea of a buffed FE11/FE12 where all the "free silver" tier units are all given buffs and pre-promotes are made to be the same strength as they were in the original, in addition to buffing bosses, so I'd love to hear your ideas for improving Horseman Beck.

Well, for Beck, I always found it interesting that he shows up with a levin sword and 3 magic, with a 5% magic growth. What, do you want me to make him specialize magic? Everyone else might just see it as a free levin sword, but I think there should be a given a reason to see him as someone who should hold on to it. 3 magic is better than 1 or 0, but no one ever bats an eye to it. So, I'd make it a stat like 9. 9+1 from the c rank sword bonus, and then the levin sword's 10 might makes it deal 20 damage. Is it amazing? No. But I don't like good units. I play FE6 and FE12 and love using "meme" units, so what better way to improve ol Beck than to give him something ridiculous? Make his magic growth 25% so it's half of his strength growth, and those who want to reclass him to a sage/sorceror get a 60% magic growth unit. That sounds hilarious!

Realistically, if you want to balance him, you'd also want to add some strength and speed. +2 attack and speed (or 3 speed). Relcassing him to sniper would increase his speed to actually be helpful, but you'd lose his magic bonus. As you can see, I'd rather not try giving the guy 17 strength and 20 speed like many horseman you might have by now, because again, I like the silliness of bad units becoming workable, and giving them too much of something in one class might make them busted in another one.

As for buffing bosses, I urge you to do something about Big Lang. That man is basically the end of an arc. He should be a threat. But the guy has a javelin...with 3 might. Even when forged on lunatic, it looks weak in comparison to the silver weapons the knights around him have. I wouldn't even buff his stats all that much. No one wants a stat bloated early game boss, or else it would just be Kris Emblem. I really would just give Lang a spear, and maybe buff his HP a little. He has good defense with the cancer shard, and the +7 might of a spear would absolutely cover his might issue. You might not want the spear forged in lunatic though, since he'd have 34 might, which is possible for a few units to tank through, but might be annoying to go through with a tanky boss. Unsure about how many other bosses I would want to be stronger. I might get back to you on that.

36 minutes ago, Emperor Hardin said:

I actually have a silly idea of a buffed FE11/FE12 where all the "free silver" tier units are all given buffs and pre-promotes are made to be the same strength as they were in the original

I can respect that idea. Not sure if I would be much help there. I would hesitate to make changes to my beloved ball of garbage units.  

Obviously, the only buff Sedgar and Wolf need is to give them their FE11 growths.

Back to the original topic, I don't think trying to squeeze in ballisticians would be worth the effort. It's a neat idea that FE11 had, but I don't think it would fit in quite as well for New Mystery's design. 

[Emperor Hardin]

41 minutes ago, Shaky Jones said:

I feel like that would present many opportunities to to cheese maps with easy bait tactics.

I suppose, but Ballista weapons wouldn't be an infinite resource, the player could freely squander.

Honestly I feel making playable Ballisticians not broken in Fe12 would be much easier than making playable Manaketes in FE12 worth using.

41 minutes ago, Shaky Jones said:

Well, the idea is that you could just wipe them out before they get a chance to hit you. Only a handful of siege tomes are placed where you'll basically always be in range of at least 2. And you can always just use barrier to survive a hit.

I've been wondering if adding more enemies, as opposed to altering existing enemies, is possible with the current DS hacking tools?

41 minutes ago, Shaky Jones said:

Well, for Beck, I always found it interesting that he shows up with a levin sword and 3 magic, with a 5% magic growth. What, do you want me to make him specialize magic? Everyone else might just see it as a free levin sword, but I think there should be a given a reason to see him as someone who should hold on to it. 3 magic is better than 1 or 0, but no one ever bats an eye to it. So, I'd make it a stat like 9. 9+1 from the c rank sword bonus, and then the levin sword's 10 might makes it deal 20 damage. Is it amazing? No. But I don't like good units. I play FE6 and FE12 and love using "meme" units, so what better way to improve ol Beck than to give him something ridiculous? Make his magic growth 25% so it's half of his strength growth, and those who want to reclass him to a sage/sorceror get a 60% magic growth unit. That sounds hilarious!

Realistically, if you want to balance him, you'd also want to add some strength and speed. +2 attack and speed (or 3 speed). Relcassing him to sniper would increase his speed to actually be helpful, but you'd lose his magic bonus. As you can see, I'd rather not try giving the guy 17 strength and 20 speed like many horseman you might have by now, because again, I like the silliness of bad units becoming workable, and giving them too much of something in one class might make them busted in another one.

I like the idea of units with weird growths, like I was thinking of giving Macellan good resistance growth, so I like this idea.

41 minutes ago, Shaky Jones said:

As for buffing bosses, I urge you to do something about Big Lang. That man is basically the end of an arc. He should be a threat. But the guy has a javelin...with 3 might. Even when forged on lunatic, it looks weak in comparison to the silver weapons the knights around him have. I wouldn't even buff his stats all that much. No one wants a stat bloated early game boss, or else it would just be Kris Emblem. I really would just give Lang a spear, and maybe buff his HP a little. He has good defense with the cancer shard, and the +7 might of a spear would absolutely cover his might issue. You might not want the spear forged in lunatic though, since he'd have 34 might, which is possible for a few units to tank through, but might be annoying to go through with a tanky boss. Unsure about how many other bosses I would want to be stronger. I might get back to you on that.

A Spear would probably work good on Lang. I've also been thinking of a 1-2 range bow for Bosses, but for Lang to have that in chapter 6 might be too early.

What would you think if Lang had a regular General's 15 physical defense , or even 19 defense like he had in the original Mystery of the Emblem? For whatever reason, the developers of the DS remakes, especially FE12, seemed scared of giving unimportant armored bosses good physical defense, even though the game hands out anti armor weaponry like candy and powerful mages still exist.

As such, alot of bosses have a negative personal defense stat and I think thats a little strange.

Also do you have any opinion on all the enemy bishops with just healing staves and nothing else? Personally I'd love to replace them with curates/clerics or at least give even the weakest of them, a single fire tome. There's a specific reason why FE3 enemy Bishops only ever wield a healing staff or tome.

On a similar note, I'd also give the boss bishops more to do, like Willow the meteor bishop having a Thoron or Bolganone tome or Yodel having a physic to heal his troops at Khadein.

41 minutes ago, Shaky Jones said:

I can respect that idea. Not sure if I would be much help there. I would hesitate to make changes to my beloved ball of garbage units.  

Obviously, the only buff Sedgar and Wolf need is to give them their FE11 growths.

one thing to remember, is even with hacks like this, you'll always have the original version with the awesome garbage units more widely available than the balanced version with balanced units. 

I was thinking of that too, as well as most pre-promoted units having low luck and at least one good base stat.

41 minutes ago, Shaky Jones said:

Back to the original topic, I don't think trying to squeeze in ballisticians would be worth the effort. It's a neat idea that FE11 had, but I don't think it would fit in quite as well for New Mystery's design. 

I really liked Ballisticians and I think it could be fun, but I like hearing your input and I'm keeping it all in mind.

What do you think of playable Ballisticians having different weapon variants than the enemy Ballistician, like the player accessible version of hoistflame is 3-7 range like the Berwick Saga ballistas rather than 3-10 range?

Edited March 13, 2022 by Emperor Hardin

[X-Naut]

8 hours ago, Emperor Hardin said:

A Spear would probably work good on Lang. I've also been thinking of a 1-2 range bow for Bosses, but for Lang to have that in chapter 6 might be too early.

What would you think if Lang had a regular General's 15 physical defense, or even 19 defense like he had in the original Mystery of the Emblem? For whatever reason, the developers of the DS remakes, especially FE12, seemed scared of giving unimportant armored bosses good physical defense, even though the game hands out anti armor weaponry like candy and powerful mages still exist.

As such, alot of bosses have a negative personal defense stat and I think thats a little strange.

That could be said about a lot of enemy armors in general. The highest enemy Generals ever go is 17-18 Def in Chapter 20, aside from Nerring who hits 20. Bishops are also like -5 Res on FE3, and many generics have negative base Def up to Chapter 8 on higher difficulties. And let's not forget Roderick and Cecil's negative personal Defs, or the clerics' negative personal Res... I get that the devs wanted to keep defenses on generics low, and that most class bases in DS are awfully bottom-heavy. But constantly dialing back defenses is such an inefficient way to do it. They should have tweaked class bases more like with Fighter/Pirate and given classes that need lower Def lower Def. Even Armors could probably be dialed back provided by scale up better later on. If the extra bulk is too tough to handle then shave some HP off the top of their heaping Hard+ bonuses.

I don't know where you get the idea that General bosses are that slow and frail though. Enemy armors are awfully fast for something with 0/4 base Speed on Lunatic. They tend to be on par with or faster than Bishops. The Chapter 15 boss has capped Speed! Sure you can one-round them with effective weaponry when you double but that's par for course on effective weaponry, you'd need to make a pretty drastic change to fix that. With all that HP you generally aren't one-shotting them on Luantic without a big hammer forge.

 

But on the topic of playable Ballisticians... if balance matters to you then it's a bad idea, unless you can enforce being unable to move and attack at 3-10 range in a single action. There's a reason enemy siege weapons are stationary in half the games (12 among them) and I for one think it should just be baked in already. Even the longbow was apparently too much because you don't get one until the post-endgame... speaking of which, are you gonna add an early longbow? It'd make your unpromoted Archers a bit meaningful vs Hunters with mixed male reclass.

[Emperor Hardin]

9 hours ago, X-Naut said:

That could be said about a lot of enemy armors in general. The highest enemy Generals ever go is 17-18 Def in Chapter 20, aside from Nerring who hits 20. Bishops are also like -5 Res on FE3, and many generics have negative base Def up to Chapter 8 on higher difficulties. And let's not forget Roderick and Cecil's negative personal Defs, or the clerics' negative personal Res... I get that the devs wanted to keep defenses on generics low, and that most class bases in DS are awfully bottom-heavy. But constantly dialing back defenses is such an inefficient way to do it. They should have tweaked class bases more like with Fighter/Pirate and given classes that need lower Def lower Def. Even Armors could probably be dialed back provided by scale up better later on. If the extra bulk is too tough to handle then shave some HP off the top of their heaping Hard+ bonuses.

I don't know where you get the idea that General bosses are that slow and frail though. Enemy armors are awfully fast for something with 0/4 base Speed on Lunatic. They tend to be on par with or faster than Bishops. The Chapter 15 boss has capped Speed! Sure you can one-round them with effective weaponry when you double but that's par for course on effective weaponry, you'd need to make a pretty drastic change to fix that. With all that HP you generally aren't one-shotting them on Luantic without a big hammer forge.

Armors/Generals are scary in the first half, but by the point of chapter 19, where Nehring has a defense of 20 and a speed of 21 just like the Eibel, boss of chapter 15 did, whilst generic DracoKnights have 17 defense and 23 speed, I think thats a little too weak. To a lesser extent, this applies to some of the generic generals, but its not as glaring as Nehring who would be a much tougher boss in any other class.

Lowering the defense of classes that are supposed to be low defense sounds interesting, how would you handle Dracoknights?

9 hours ago, X-Naut said:

But on the topic of playable Ballisticians... if balance matters to you then it's a bad idea, unless you can enforce being unable to move and attack at 3-10 range in a single action. There's a reason enemy siege weapons are stationary in half the games (12 among them) and I for one think it should just be baked in already. Even the longbow was apparently too much because you don't get one until the post-endgame... speaking of which, are you gonna add an early longbow? It'd make your unpromoted Archers a bit meaningful vs Hunters with mixed male reclass.

Do you have any opinion on player ballisticians having access to 3-7 range variants of the Ballista weapons, as opposed to the 3-10 weapons of the enemy units?

Longbows were available freely on the FE12 online shop back when it existed, but I was thinking of making it so Generals could use it as well?

[Jotari]

Shadow Dragon wasn't designed around Ballisticans and it worked well there. I can't see any area off the top of my head where they'd break the game. Indeed they'd probably encourage the final area to be less of a 1 turn warp fest. Baiting in enemies from a far that don't move until attacked? Hell that sounds like a positive more than a negative. So long as they're as weak and inaccurate as they are in Shadow Dragon I don't think they'd trivialize anything. Just give you a strong alternative option for tackling chapters (remember if you're deploying two ballisticans, Xane and Phina, then that's four units, like a third of your deployment, dedicated to one singular tactic). The price and availability of siege weapons is also a way that could balance them.

Edited March 14, 2022 by Jotari