Dark Holy Elf
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Posts posted by Dark Holy Elf
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I will say I was a little disappointed with just how easy Nohr Chapter 21 was. I took everyone out of the team except for Camila, paired her up with Corrin, and flew all the way to the top stoping on all dragon veins along the way. I think I got hit twice the entire time.
Chapter 21 was pretty easy, but I'm okay with a breather chapter because I personally found Chapter 20 the toughest in the game. And while you can do what you described, there's a risk/reward of trying to farm the map for Exp.
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Most things, honestly!
1. Reinforcements appear at the end of the enemy phase.
2. Debuffs are neat. They're both an interesting tactical option and a way for the game to counter low-manning somewhat.
3. On the note of countering low-manning, that exp formula is something I'd been hoping FE would steer towards for a long, long time.
4. Great map design in general. Every map so far has been super-individually memorable, except, like, Paralogue 1.
5. I like how weapons are balanced by interesting tactical decisions of which one is best for a given situation rather than "lol of course the Killing Edge/Rapier/etc. is better, but it runs out". And in general the balances to weapons in general (e.g. Javelins/Hand Axes).
6. I think there are fun things you can do with various seals to get skills, much more easily than in Awakening where skill builds felt like the province of grindy aftergame territory which I have zero interest in.
7. I got this far without mentioning that attack stance and guard stance are great, they use the ideas of Pair Up and hashed it into a system which is both far better balanced and less random. And then give it to the enemies as well.
I'm quite confident this is my favourite FE mechanically, and only its writing failings keep me debating whether it or Radiant Dawn is my favourite FE overall. -
You can deal with enemy Killer weapons by purposefully tanking them with higher-Def (etc.) units, who will survive even if they receive the critical. Since Killer weapons have low might and aren't very common on the enemy end, this is generally easy to do. You don't actually just let enemies with Killers attack people they will kill on a crit, do you?
A unit who has low chance to cause you resets on everything is problematic. There are ways to patch this up, of course (Bronze weapons, supports, Goddess Icons, and in Arthur's case we should specifically mention Percy's personal skill) but at base I don't think "accepting 3% crits to save you turns" is a strategy I'm willing to get behind.Leo's easily S up there with Cam, Corncob, Xander, and Azura tbh. With speedwings and C10 Draco he's basically res-targeting Xander. Physical bulk isn't quite as ridiculous but he has high res and good def along with a huge HP count.
I dunno, I've found that Corrin and Camilla can come pretty close to matching Leo's MAtk with their magic weapons, with similar-to-better bulk (depending on how much we care about Res) and better speed, AND can do many other things besides. (And they don't need valuable stat boosters to do it, either.) The gaps between tiers are arbitrary, of course, so this doesn't prove that Leo isn't an S, but I think he brings convincingly less to the table than the other units people generally consider to be there (with the exception of Effie, who is too different for me to compare directly).
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I agree that Azura must have had help to be in a position to dance at that event, and the most likely helpers are Leo and Camilla.
As for recognising her, do keep in mind that while the camera is close to her, the characters probably aren't. Still, yeah, Corrin should probably have known, even from that distance. I was surprised she didn't voice her suspicions when she was alone with Azura later, but the game does paint her as rather naive.
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Fire Emblem Fates improves on pretty much every gameplay aspect and only falters with some balance issues and certain maps. However, the writing is far worse than Awakening - or any other Fire Emblem game - could ever hope to be.
This strikes me as a great exaggeration. Fates has its strengths and weaknesses on writing just like every other FE (and rest assured, I can list colossal weaknesses of any other FE you can name... while I don't necessarily agree that "all FEs have bad plots", they do tend to all have major problems), and while I tend to agree it's weaker than most (I still like it better than 6 or 7, but I can see why one might differ), I really have a hard time parsing someone legitimately claiming it has a worse plot than Shadow Dragon, which managed to have a cast of characters which felt like cardboard cutouts. I can usually roll my eyes at bad plot points in FE - I'm used to them by now, thanks - but in SD I totally didn't even care when random generic PC #14 bit the dust because it so horribly failed to characterise almost anyone beyond a weak trope.
I slaughtered most of my army to see all the side chapters, there aren't many other FEs I'd even consider doing that in even if they had the same requirements...
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I thought Conquest 19 was a breather map in an otherwise tricky section of the game. The foxes have very, very little answer to tanky wyverns, and if you aren't using wyverns on Conquest you must be playing the game very differently than I did. I'd assume Generals who are high enough level to have learned Defensive Formation would also work well, although their movement is awful.
Conquest 20 I'll grant was nasty, though I totally disagree with it being unfair, since you get to see the wind at the start of each player phase and plan accordingly. It's challenging, and a bit of a puzzle on top of an already challenging map, but this is the kind of thing I've fallen in love with this game for.
My own personal vote is forgetting about enemy dual strikes. I'm still adjusting to that, and little is worse than planning everything out, figuring out that you'll have to expose a fragile or low-HP unit to one hit that they can survive... and then forgetting the dual strike that can kill 'em. But they're entirely predictable and the game gives you a way to counter them entirely so this frustration tends to be one I direct more at myself than the game.
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I imagine most people would rather avoid DLC and similar characters in lists like this. I don't know exactly how the Amiibo characters are implemented, though.
I'm sure some of the traits of one of the best units in the game are having high attack and defence while using staves and using brass lances upon promotion.
This is a problem faced by every other staff user who has no weapons until promotion. I haven't played Birthright yet, but to me Azama being that far below Sakura feels weird, looking at the stats; they have the same move and he has considerably more bulk. Is her better personal skill and easier Falconknight access really worth the tier gap there?
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I've been toying with the math that might lead to turn 75 displyed hit into 82-83 true hit.
FE6-12 use the average of 2 RNs, in other words:
Let A and B each be random numbers from 0 to 99
If (A + B) / 2 < displayed Hit, attack hits
This results in 75 becoming roughly 87.5%... actually 87.75%, because we rounded down. (If A and B were actually random real numbers chosen continuously between 0 and 100, then the more mathematically pleasant 87.5% would be the true probability.) I'm sure a number of people reading this post already know this, but restating it for those who don't.
For Fates, one possibility that jumps out at me right now is the following:
Let A and B each be random numbers from 0 to 99
If (3*A + B) / 4 < displayed Hit, attack hits
What does this do? Well, with 75 displayed Hit, we will see the attack hit if:
A = 99 and B = 0
A = 66 and B = 99
Or in general, for any other points which lie below the line from (99, 0) to (66, 99) on the A-B plane (roughly). This results in an 83.3333% chance of true hit if A and B are continuous variables, which they aren't.
The exact value using discrete variables varies depending on rounding and how the values are chosen, but if we just assume the exact method posited above and rounding down, it's 83.83%. This is slightly higher than the mean of the tested data so far, but well within the last posted confidence interval. Of course, it's possible that some rounding is used besides just rounding down, which would change the numbers slightly... or that the random numbers chosen aren't from 0 to 99, but from 0 to 65535 or something else of that ilk. It doesn't matter too much, there's probably no reasonable amount of testing which can determine the subtle effects of the specifics here. (For that matter, do we even know the rounding specifics of the GBA games via looking at the code, or is at all just from testing?)
One thing that I find attractive about this formula is that Awakening/Fates' programmers have already shown an affinity for using (3*A+B) in their formulas... i.e. the calculations for Hit and Avo. It's also a logical extension of the formula used previously, simply taking the 2RN system and weighting one of the random numbers more strongly in order to create a "compromise" between 1RN and 2RN.
It could very obviously easily be wrong. One other thing I find attractive about the formula is that it's "fair", having a roughly symmetrical effect on 25 Hit as it does on 75 Hit. But there's already suggestion in the data that this might not be the case. If it isn't, we are indeed looking at something completely different. We won't know until we test some low-Hit values extensively. -
That makes sense. I also just realised that some classes have innate modifiers to Crit/Dodge, which I should have noticed previously. Thanks!
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Sorry if this is already known, but I didn't see it anywhere either on the main site or a quick look of the forums.
Does anyone know how Crit% (the displayed value seen in individual fight screens, or in combat previews) is calculated in this game? I've seen many times when it has departed from the usual (Attacker Crit - Target Luck/Ddg) we've seen in previous games, even when just using iron/other normal weapons on both sides. Anyone know what's up?
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One of the clever things about Path of Radiance's system is they could have a minimum chapter requirement built in. I wouldn't mind seeing that return.
The Ranulf thing isn't a spoiler at all; that's when the game chose to tell you (whether or not you like that narratively), and I thought it made a lot of sense. Ranulf obviously knows, the game teases us with this, and he reveals it to Ike when he worries he might not see Ike again. There's no logical reason for him to keep it a secret longer, and holding that secret to right before the battle itself would seem kinda cheesy on the game's part. Also anyone who is genre-savvy knew that twist before then anyway.
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It's a bit disappointing to hear that about Revelations; I'm playing Conquest and have found its map design to be the best in the series, so it's a shame if it doesn't carry over. I don't really care about bad plot (please, it's Fire Emblem; except for parts of FE8-10 I think all of them have bad plots) but slow maps sound potentially irksome.
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I found Nyx with a +Spd pairup who could double and ORKO many of the less fast enemy types in Hard chapters 9-13 or so, which is useful. Yeah her defence is hopeless, and I dropped her when Leo came around, but this felt dramatically more useful than anything Odin could do, unless you got really lucky with his speed growth.
Charlotte I didn't use much myself, but like Arthur she seems good as a potential pairup unit. +Str/Spd is so, so much more valuable than +Mag/Res.
Mozu of course has a good case to be the worst unit in the game, but I wouldn't expect her to be the lowest on a democratic tier list, because for certain playstyles that slow down and grind a lot, she will be extremely useful due to her growths.
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Why's Odin dead bottom? We're talking about Conquest, not Revelations. He's not amazing, but he's competent enough to obtain an S support without being a liability.
Who would you rank below him?
Gunter? Legitimately useful in a small handful of maps.
Nyx? Similar character with a better stat build due to actually having speed.
Mozu? I can see it, but she has potential to be really good for certain playstyles.
Arthur? Goodness no, his pairup value is far greater.
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I haven't played Birthright yet, but from what I've seen + feedback from my partner and other friends who have, Takumi being in S does seem weird to me, due to a lack of enemy phase and whatnot. Shinon was (similarly?) overrated right after Radiant Dawn came out; we're all just too used to archers being bad I think. If a character is going to have such limited enemy phase and unexceptional durability/utility then he'd damn well better kill most of what he's pointed at!
Conquest tiers look generally pretty reasonable to me, caveats about Jakob/Felicia being messed with by 1st/2nd joining concerns aside. I certainly don't think Leo and Effie are as good as the other S ranks, but they're quite possibly still better than everyone else sans Azura and the 1st of Jakob/Felicia, so since the tier lines are arbitrary I can't say I disagree with them there. If the characters are ordered within tiers, I'm a bit surprised Camilla isn't #1 since she seems pretty dramatically better than everyone else but I'm not done the game yet so maybe it spams archers at the end or something.
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Yeah, in Pokemon, a Level 100 pokemon is ~25 times as durable as a Level 20 one, so it doesn't matter if you skip a turn or two before you use your gross overkill attack (which is in effect ~25 times as damaging as that of a Level 20 pokemon).
Being able to import characters from other save files or other players is something which exists in various games and is an obvious thing you can just ignore, and indeed should if you want to take a strategy game literally, I would argue. Many people, myself included, have no trouble ignoring such mechanics. You might as well say that Chrono Trigger (and various other RPGs like it) is broken because you can grab a copy someone has already beaten and play it on New Game Plus, crushing everything in your path.
On the other hand I think Awakening's broken mechanics are much harder to ignore. Pair Up is broken, but it's a fundamental piece of gameplay, too... (And I like Awakening! But the claim that Fates is "more broken" just... doesn't hold water for me at all.)
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I don't see the problem with leaving it to the imagination at all. It's most likely something rather grotesque, and we don't need to hear about it explicitly. The in-game text implies juuust fine what sort of terrible things it might have been. :(
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I don't have much to add, except to thank you for doing this. I was definitely wondering if we had 1 RN or 2 RN this time (or something else).
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I'd be very happy for them to include more gay romance options, as long as they don't do the DA2/Bethesda thing and make everyone bisexual (I hate it when Devs do that).
If you ask me, the best thing to do would be to have a total of 8 same sex characters in the game; 2 male and 2 female bisexuals, 2 male and 2 female homosexuals (plus the Avatar).
I will note that the idea that everyone in the army (even of just one sex) is willing to marry the avatar is already at least as ridiculous as everyone being bi, as far as this sort of relationship pandering goes... but I agree with your conclusion anyway. A small number of homosexual and bisexual characters feels realistic and the way to go.
I'd love it if we got a few more same-sex pairings next time out, and certainly not just ones involving the avatar. FE still has a ways to go in this regard but it's nice to see them catching up.
While I have no particularattachment to the kids, I don't think they need prevent gay marriage from becoming a thing, should FE choose to continue having children in future FEs. Surrogate mothers and sperm donors do exist! And about the only thing passed down which has to be genetic is manakete/beastperson/etc. blood... which as long as you assume the manakete parent is the biological parent, isn't a problem. Everything else which gets passed down (stats, skills) could just as easily be nurture as nature, and I'd argue makes more sense as the former, in fact. This is far, far less mental gymnastics than the mechanics needed for the kids to fight alongside their parents in the first place.
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It's not necessarily a money issue, it's principle. Sell me a finished game, not 3 parts of a game with DLC. Blazing Sword had two campaigns, but it was all sold together.
Eliwood/Hector mode aren't nearly as different as Birthright/Conquest; if memory serves there are only two maps unique to Eliwood, and six unique to Hector (and that's generously including 19xx). By contrast, Birthright/Conquest each have... 21? 22? unique maps, as well as a host of new characters (and thus, supports) which is easily worth $20. Heck, that's already as many maps as Sacred Stones has.
I really can't see Fates as an unfair deal. Don't want to spend much money? Just buy one campaign for now, that's already a complete game with only slightly less content than Awakening (at worst), and far more than Shadow Dragon. Want more? $20 for a second campaign is a great deal.
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I tried to come at the choice from a roleplaying perspective and I chose Nohr, though with some reservations. I get why some people are saying Hoshido is "obvious", and if I were an impartial third party I would also counsel Corrin to side with Hoshido. But... in his/her shoes? There's no way I could betray the siblings I had spent my entire life growing up with and close to (and the game sells you very well on the bond they share). I would want to stay with them and protect them, and if my dad were super-evil, well, we'd try to do something about that I guess. I'd probably even want to see if I could get through to my dad and make him be less evil. Seems easier to accomplish if all five of his children worked together.
Having said that, for all that I'm on Team Nohr, I don't really have a problem for the game judging you for it. It's an in-character choice to make, for sure, but it's arguably not the "right" one, and if that choice leads to more bloodshed/bad things for the world (seems possible; I'm only at chapter 9!), then Corrin feeling guilt about the choice seems immensely believable!
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The best trueblade in FE10 is either Zihark or Mia, and they're difficult to compare. Both are quite good on their own paths (Zihark really good at first), so it depends if you value Zihark helping out on a harder route more, or the fact that Mia will be stronger going into part 4/endgame. I could see voting either way on this one.
Edward isn't even in the conversation. As has already been observed, his "greater potential" is a myth; he beats Mia in nothing beyond a barely-relevant amount of concrete durability, and that's it. Even Zihark, who has worse stats, is probably better at Endgame due to earth supports, since the stat disadvantage is only slight and earth affinity is far better than light affinity for a swordmaster (or almost anyone, really). And of course, both crush him at every point before Endgame.
Re the FE9 discussion which has randomly spiralled off, I think Mia vs. Zihark is a decent fight but not one worth caring about given that both are mediocre and generally inferior to Ike, Makalov, and Stefan as sword-users. -
I don't like Knights much but pair up makes Kellam better than many of his predecessors (not amazing or anything, but okay enough), since he can pair up with someone more mobile and then they can switch to him when his tanking is needed. Works best with someone who already has good speed but could use more Str/Def, e.g. Sumia (would be an amazing combination if they could support), Sully, Cordelia, etc. Obviously he's not as good as Frederick but there's no shame in that.
As a character, I find his gimmick pretty funny. *shrug* -
Like a couple other people here, the elder Nohr royals are my favourites appearance-wise, honourable mentions to Leo, Nishiki, Belka, Rinkah.
I'm also sad at how much of a minority my opinion is... :( I find Camilla to be very ugly and Xander to be ugly too.At the risk of stating the obvious... there's no reason to feel sad about having differing opinions on which characters (or people, for that matter) are attractive! Different people have different tastes and that's okay.
So what in fates is the most rage inducing for you (gameplay wise)
in Fire Emblem Fates
Posted
It's remarkable how many of the tricky points in Conquest can be dealt with by Camilla one way or another.
That said, if you want to do 21 in a way that actually gets Exp, I recommend using the freeze points strategically: decide at the start of each player phase if you're going to activate this turn or not, then plan your positioning to keep squishier units out of stoneborn range accordingly, and/or decide to kill them accordingly. Yeah, you can't double them, but they still go down to magic reasonably quickly. Support attacks can help! Also watch out for which group of Faceless has which "Breaker" skill and plan accordingly.
I agree with Chapter 10 being great fun. Defence maps are some of my favourites (when they're not stupid and time-wasting like Sands of Time in FE7), and I really liked Conquest 10 in particular... it reminds me of Elincia's Gambit, another personal favourite; both throw waves of competent enemies at you from multiple fronts and encourage you to use your dancer to refresh the more powerful units and get them to wherever the trouble points are. Then Conquest 10 has that beautiful twist in the middle...
Although I do feel like its difficulty is a touch overstated. It's tougher than 9 or 11, sure, but not that much, I didn't think. I see the point about 11 being "choose the right person to position to deal with each room", but still each room presents its own little puzzle, and I'm not ashamed to admit I screwed a couple of them up my first time.