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Cysx

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Posts posted by Cysx

  1. That'd be my backstory, yes

    ... well not specifically computer games, but my brother randomly traded a few of our Sega Saturn games for two imports, one of them a First person J-RPG called Shining the Holy Ark, fully in english. I was obsessed with it, and wanted to play it so bad it basically taught me the basics at 7-8 years old. Then as my household got access to the internet, I repeatedly got frustrated at how lacking french resources clearly were compared to english ones (also, video games still came to France in their english version back then, so I had to either deal with it or not play them). Since I could interact with the latter unlike most french kids my age, I just did. To this day this still keeps me well practiced on a daily basis, as I otherwise exclusively communicate with people in my life in french.

    The game in question has a relatively straightforward battle system, but unlike most current games of this sub-genre(now called DRPGs) it has an actual story, and puzzle elements that required me to understand the text to progress.

    School also did its part, however, since I had learned to read it, but nothing else.

     

  2. 3 minutes ago, Jotari said:

    Slightly, but it does still give some more insight. In that he genuinely does believe in powerful monarchy and not just powerful monarchy in which he's at the top. It would come around better if he had some post Part 2 relevance and actually came around to seeing Elincia as a strong monarch with her own way of dealing with things. But as it happens, he just vanishes from the plot entirely with his last line actually being before Lucia's attempted execution. Nothing after wards.

    It is a pretty big shame. I've been thinking recently that for all the talk of FE villains being same-y and made of tropes, part 1 and 2 of RD had pretty good ones. Jarod starts out simplistic but by the end there's a lot going on with him, and Ludveck does come off as a really strong character as well with a genuinely well thought out plan.

  3. 2 minutes ago, Jotari said:

    What do you mean by good and not so much? Morally good or in terms of writing quality? And what first or second line are you referring to? The individual first two lines of the first posted text or do you mean the entirety of both texts?

    The entirety of both, sorry for the confusion. And what I mean is that I think the first quote strengthens his character while the second one pushes saturday morning cartoon vilainy.

  4. He's definitely a pretty big opportunist, so he'd likely pick the winning side of the war and backstab Gallia. Which would potentially result in the enslavement of the Gallian laguz since Begnion has Naesala and Daein in its pocket, most of Phoenicis is out of the picture, and the dragons would likely do nothing.

    ... in actuality, that'd awaken Ashera and they'd all be turned to stone (except the branded ?). Plus, it is unlikely that the Greil Mercenaries would let things go, or the Crimean Royal Knights for that matter. And indeed, Renning would be its own can of worms, but then again, he needed the galdr of rebirth to be healed, and I'm not sure how that would happen.

     

    Incidentally, Ludveck is one of the characters getting the biggest amount of additional dialogue from the extended script. Here are some pretty important lines :

    “If I wanted you killed, it would be maddeningly simple to do so. Your Majesty is not cautious, in the slightest, of anyone and easy to get close to. I could just hide a blade or perhaps prepare some poisoned wine, while saying some pleasing words to you, slowly befriending you. Yet if that were the case… I fear even at death you wouldn’t have suspected a thing and would just smile happily at me. Moreso, Crimea would enter another time of turbulence. The nearby nations would declare me a traitor and use it as an excuse to invade Crimea. To prevent this scenario from happening, I had to have Your Majesty abdicate out of your own free will and then appoint me as the new king.”

    and

    “Ha, such naive reasoning. What is wrong about using civilians!? Without even lifting a finger, civilian numbers will rise by themselves. Human live are as cheap as grass, isn’t that the truth? These small insignificant bundles of life don’t have any impact on the country’s well-being. However, a king is different. Without a king, a country cannot stand. A country needs its king. It needs a powerful king!”

    Aka he doesn't actually want to kill Elincia, and he's not actually a populist at all. It's also funny how the first line is really good and the second one, well not so much imo.

  5. On 12/28/2023 at 4:00 PM, Barren said:

    That’s certainly a possibility. I just don’t know exactly what they want to do with the franchise at this point. I mean people want a FE4 remake for the longest time.

     

    Also if there is an interview regarding their xenologue dlc I’m interested in knowing the thought process was behind this.

    I don't believe there is, at the moment.

  6. On 12/7/2023 at 8:40 PM, Barren said:

    I think that Intelligent Systems wants to move on from Engage at this point. Especially with how they should be embarrassed for seemingly rushing the xenologue dlc and implementing it poorly (or maybe not who knows).

    It's possible, but at the same time, we're also getting more interviews over time than usual, they're even getting into the nitty gritty of development (seeing raw 3D renders, to my knowledge, is almost unheard of for a Nintendo-affiliated company). Plus we're at the end of a console cycle for Nintendo, and even Zelda, which was a massive success, has been promptly moved on from.

    While they tend to have slow starts every year (the "Furukawa touch", it would seem), even by their standards there's remarkably little to look forward to in 2024. Maybe IS were simply told by the motherbase to focus on providing material for the next system. Maybe.

  7. I've also noticed this, but I think it mostly holds true for people who don't play a lot of games in general.
    I, uh, I don't know where to start for me.

    ... actually I just remembered I made a top 100 list, recently, I knew this would be useful at some point. I'll only do series with over four games I've played or so, otherwise I'll be here forever.
     

    Spoiler

    Fire Emblem :
    First : Blazing Blade
    Favorite ? : No, it's Radiant Dawn

    Castlevania :
    First : Harmony of Dissonance
    Favorite ? : No, Aria of Sorrow

    Shining Force :
    First : Shining the Holy Ark
    Favorite ? : Yes !


    Zelda :
    First : Zelda 1
    Favorite ? : No, either Oracle of Ages or Majora's Mask

    Phantasy Star :
    First : Phantasy Star 2
    Favorite ? : No, either Phantasy Star IV or Phantasy Star Online I & II

    Megaman :
    First : Megaman 2
    Favorite ? : I like Zero 3 a bit more, but as far as classic Megaman goes, yes.

    Mario :
    First : Mario 1
    Favorite ? : No, Mario Odyssey is

    Mario RPGS :
    First : Superstar Saga
    Favorite ? : Yes

    Metroid :
    First : Metroid Fusion
    Favorite ? : Probably Metroid Prime but it's kind of a four-ways tie up there

    Super Smash Bros :
    First : Melee
    Favorite ? : It was for a long time, but I gotta give it to Ultimate, I think.

    The King of Fighters :
    First : '99
    Favorite ? : No, it's XIII

    Dead or Alive :
    First : DoA 2
    Favorite ? : Almost, but it's 5.

    Tales of :
    First : Symphonia
    Favorite ? : It's up there, but Graces F wins.

    Sonic :
    First : Sonic 2
    Favorite ? : Just like with Mario I vastly prefer 3D so this format doesn't really work. But unlike Mario the first 3D one I've played, Sonic Adventure, is still my favorite.

    Final Fantasy :
    First : FFIX
    Favorite ? : Absolutely.

    Resident Evil :
    First : Resident Evil Remake
    Favorite ? : No, it's RE4.

    Nintendo Wars :
    First : Advance Wars
    Favorite ? : Somehow all four Advance Wars are kinda tied for me, so in a way yes ?

     

    TL;DR : It varies.

    Merry christmas 🙂

  8. I'm more curious to see what they do after this one, considering most people can agree that post SA2 is when it all started falling apart and continuity became an even bigger afterthought, Sonic 06 aside. But if they do 06, well... good luck to them.

    What I'll say is that those guys have made a lot of correct decisions thus far. The movies I'd qualify as aggressively mediocre overall (with some really nice surprises here and there), but they've been very successful, which is what matters really. I'm not expecting them to now botch the one where they have next to no writing to do.

    ... I say that, but they have to shoehorn the human characters somehow I suppose. Also movie 2 Sonic is still decidedly a child unlike Shadow I expect, so their rivalry could get awkward.

  9. 5 hours ago, samthedigital said:

    Are you suggesting accounting for player skill or something? It doesn't make a lot of sense to do that to me; I'm interested in how good a strategy is and not on a player's ability to execute that strategy.

    Not particularly, skill does not correlate with fast thinking necessarily. Can't say I have a clean solution to propose for this one either.

    5 hours ago, samthedigital said:

    The reason I brought it up in the first place was to show that it's possible to have efficient play in mind without necessarily caring whether a strategy takes a few more turns to complete since you mentioned "turncount murder".

    Just to address this, that was strong wording for sure. In the case of an Awakening solo, chapters tend to be quite short, so taking 2-3 or more turns to boss feed properly tends to be fairly meaningful proportionally.

    5 hours ago, samthedigital said:

    For all the differences in how we approach class ratings we still come to roughly the same conclusion with regards to Awakening right? Mage/Sage is a class with good skills, class utility, and has a niche for certain carries. I would also add that it has additional value on Lunatic+ early on because of Pavise+ for the sake of being a little more thorough even though you don't have any opinions on that difficulty.

    Yeah, I think that boils it down pretty well. It's not a bad class.

  10. 11 hours ago, samthedigital said:

    I could say the same thing about optimizing for turn counts or any other kind of system for unit/class/etc evaluation, so I guess I'm not sure why you're making that specific point.

    I'm just being coy. Because it goes without saying that you in particular should play how you like and I don't want to sound like I'm arguing against that, etc. Within the scope of this applying to more than yourself however (which may not be what you're going for in the slightest), one cannot be this strict, the way the game is actually played has to be a major factor. Which is also why I'm not really for ignoring decision time. It's... a good 70-90% of playtime with animations off.

    I'm also hesitant about the variable duration of enemy phase being a factor, since that is unconditionally when the game isn't being played. It can be optimized still, by making choices that limit its length, but in general, it's out of the player's hands.

    Clearly we don't have the same approach here, which is fine. Also Imma moderate myself from here because I'm reaching a new level of off topic. Good talk !

  11. 4 hours ago, samthedigital said:

    the amount of people that speedrun Fire Emblem is really low; 1/1000 is... generous.

    Lowballed it a bit liberally because the point was made regardless, yeah. Although I wasn't necessarily speaking of going for leaderboards per se. More so about anyone who makes a priority of optimizing time spent, in general.

    4 hours ago, samthedigital said:

    The water trick doesn't necessarily have to be considered inefficient even if I would compare it to grinding to some extent. It might be that the water trick saves time overall; it certainly makes it easy to get Robin to start snowballing as soon as possible. The same can be said for staff spamming for a Sage. I just don't see the difference between getting it done while my carry is getting kills and grinding at the end of a map in a real time setting is all.

    I guess that'd be the difference between approaching (turn) efficiency as a mean to an end, as opposed to a ruleset ?

    4 hours ago, samthedigital said:

    Just as an aside I played through a few chapters of Awakening to see where Chrom would end up assuming I skipped more enemies. Chrom was a level 7 Sniper by chapter 18. I stopped playing because Fred just didn't have the stats to continue since I skipped so many enemies. This is while employing the Chrom kills a few enemies here and there strategy.

    All right, noted.

  12. 1 hour ago, samthedigital said:

    FE13 has the enemy phase skip feature and has more route maps. I wouldn't say that it's a lengthy process either; the point was to show why I don't necessarily value turn counts rather than critiquing things like the water trick and the like.

    I guess one could make the argument that 20 seconds can fit three turns in Awakening, but... that is a pretty restrictive line to draw. Similarly, the water trick isn't particularly long to perform.
    I'm not against the concept of real time efficiency in FE(even though I'm like, the worst at it, everything I do takes ages), but just like turncounts don't assume LTC, imo it shouldn't assume what I can only describe as speedrunning considerations. Otherwise you're ultimately talking about a way of play that reflects less than, say, 1/1000th of players. These are games about thinking, thinking takes time.

    1 hour ago, samthedigital said:

    Maybe I am underselling Sorcerer's ability to kill Grima a little bit since you originally showed me a strategy that assumes Chrom will do nothing at all. We are still only talking about the Grima kill right?

    Yeah yeah, that's what I meant.

  13. 1 hour ago, samthedigital said:

    To be absolutely clear I care more about the real time implications of spamming staves. If it's better to get my unit to some specific level then it doesn't matter to me when that happens. It's a more obvious difference in Awakening compared to say FE6 where there's a stronger correlation between time and turns. Practically speaking though I don't see it making much of a difference since most people are pretty lax about what they consider to be efficient  anyway.

    I don't really get what you mean. The turn/time correlation seems mostly the same between FE6 and FE13 to me, and what I'm talking about isn't a lengthy process at all. Takes 20 seconds per turn, give or take ?

    1 hour ago, samthedigital said:

    Are you also factoring in Prescience and any skill stat booster that the carry might not need? In my Fred solo (where I could have fed Crom for free a lot more than I did since I didn't really go into it with much planning) he went from 10(Lord)>10>10(Sniper)>10>1 or something like that where I got at most 1 child paralogue run done if I did any of them. I'd have to see what he would look like if I skipped more enemies... Maybe I'll look into it a little later when I'm not busy.

    Ah, you're right, I did forget about Prescience. That definitely helps a lot.
    Not gonna lie, I still think you completely underestimate Sorcerer, but you're kinda selling me on this now.

    Edit : Oh wait, I just realized this wouldn't work on Grima's turn. Or enemy phase in general, throughout the game.
    ... well... that's still pretty good.

  14. 7 hours ago, samthedigital said:

    and I consider staff spamming in an ETC like context to be similar to something like water trick in Awakening or grinding in general.

    Just to make it clear because I'm not sure I have, when I speak of staff spamming, I do mean doing it strictly while the carry(ies) is clearing the chapter, hence why it's a multi chapter process. In that regard I completely disagree that it must fall under that spectrum to make a difference. Don't think the water trick would be contentious in the slightest if it didn't take dozens of turns either. Just taking advantage of terrain, which we do all the time, especially with fliers, and is a big part of clearing chapter 2 at that.

    I also actually don't care about turncount that much either, I couldn't tell you how low people go in any particular game. I just think/know it's an effective rule at keeping the games balanced. As balanced as they're gonna get, anyway.

    7 hours ago, samthedigital said:

    just going Archer>Sniper>Paladin/etc probably works, so the backpack exp alone might be enough.

    Depends on child paralogues. Also on whether you one turn most of the late midgame or not, as doing it can genuinely skip hundreds of fights. If you don't, from my experience 10->10->10->1 should be very narrowly possible in a pure solo with him as the backpack.
    However, his stats will still likely not be good enough to have reliable(tm) accuracy, even with Hit +20. Though with Hex/Anathema in play he can likely roughly reach 75% Hit with that amount of exp, which isn't bad in 2RN.

    7 hours ago, samthedigital said:

    From what I've been told Grima attacking first might have a little bit of randomness associated with it, but I don't remember exactly.

    I believe it's really simple actually, but I haven't done super extensive testing or anything. If any enemy present can ORKO any unit present(without crits mind you), they'll act before. Otherwise Grima always acts first. That's what generally makes 1 turn setups possible, you get to fight Grima twice in a row without anything else happening.

  15. 7 hours ago, samthedigital said:

    If you're interested in what works and what doesn't this might be accurate. I've gotten my information primarily from talking to people though, so I'm not sure if there's an actual resource for it.

    Yay, so many old faces. Well I guess Tables' still around, in other places.
    All right then, not sure how they knew, but that's enough for me.

    7 hours ago, samthedigital said:

    It's just a matter of giving Chrom the boss kill; there isn't any grinding involved. The Longbow is useful primarily so that Chrom doesn't have to worry about facing a counter. You don't have to do too much more than that. Chrom gets a lot of exp just from being the backup and will get any stat booster that the main character doesn't need. I don't really see it as work.

    Idk, the carry ORKOs the bosses usually(on Luna, anyway), even with really weak weapons. The boss bonus is also fairly low in FE13, but maybe I just ought to give this a go sometime.
    ... you can't really deny that it's not the most straightforward of procedures, and that the Grima kill ends up luck based regardless. Doesn't sound too different from relying on Vengeance, and that doesn't require training anyone but the carry.

    7 hours ago, samthedigital said:

    The specifics of the carry aside though we probably have differing opinions when it comes to turn counts, grinding, etc. I'm not sure if I should go down this particular tangent though.

    Eh, I think that's an aspect of... efficient play, that generally works with Awakening still; don't hang around in a chapter for longer than you need just to get an advantage. So it's doesn't really have to be about your opinion or mine.
    That being said, yeah, probably no the place anyway.

  16. 1 hour ago, samthedigital said:

    We might have discussed this in another thread, but I go down the Archer>Sniper line specifically for this. It also helps Chrom get a little more boss exp with the Long Bow.

    Yeah, I guess we have to an extent, I don't think we got into the numbers though.
    I don't really do boss feeding as you've guessed since the setup tends to double as turncount murder, but... the Longbow thing you've mentioned then as well, kinda sounds like boss grinding even ?
    Either way, I guess Hit +20 would help quite a bit (I assume it works for pairups, though to be honest... proc skills don't, so I'm kinda wondering), but man, that's so much work.

    1 hour ago, samthedigital said:

    I would mostly consider those kinds of runs to be inferior to carries with units that support Chrom in general if I'm being honest since it's more work to keep Chrom safe over the course of the playthrough if he isn't the backup, and he provides some Dual Guard protection if he is.

    It's one big factor among others as far as I'm concerned.

  17. 56 minutes ago, samthedigital said:

    A Brave Bow is definitely ideal as you mentioned, but failing that I'd go with any Brave Weapon with decent starting damage paired with Chrom or Lucina in the back to help with Dual Strikes.

    The problem is that due to Grima's 80% Pavise+, even at something really high like 85 Atk, they only deal 60% of their damage on average, aka 9.

    As for Lucina and Chrom, they unfortunately have massive accuracy issues against Grima, as all pairups do, unless they're at a very high level. That's especially true without Anathema and Hex, which are in play for Sorcerer. Grima has 90+20 Avo, the Falchions all have 80 Hit, so with around 20 Skl&Lck, they have... 10+5(because Charm) displayed Hit on Grima, in a two RN game. That's the low end, but it's a long way to 60+ Hit, and reliability even more so (there's also the dual strike rate to consider, especially for those who cannot S-rank Chrom).
    Usually at best they're a complete coin toss, not damage output you can count on.

    Edit : Also, the main problem with the Brave Bow is that it's A rank, and that raising Bow rank is a pain unless you get lucky with Arms Scrolls on merchants.

  18. 12 hours ago, samthedigital said:

    If Rally Mag and/or Tomefaire are in the picture it does support the argument that Sage is not a completely redundant class at the very least. Personally though I tend to assume that the only units that will get any exp are the carry, Chrom, and Fred, so I would probably not have any convenient Rally other than Basilio's. In that context Chrom is likely to have some decent damage numbers against Grima himself provided he's getting stat boosters and a few kills here and there.

    Sage is definitely not redundant, it's the best pure staffing class in the game that all three of Lissa, Anna and Libra can access. It's mostly Sage's combat that doesn't really matter.
    I've said as much elsewhere, but staff users are really easy to raise once Rescue is buyable. It tends to give around 30 exp a pop, so 60 a turn with Olivia (who can incidentally be the rescue target). As a result, putting Lissa through Sage and Falcon for Rally Magic and Speed is genuinely super simple.

    12 hours ago, samthedigital said:

    It's probably doesn't matter if you're looking for good enough, but I'm not sure that it's a 100% reliable setup since there are a few failure points.

    I'm curious what qualifies as good against Grima to you, then. Other than Brave Bow Warrior, which genuinely doesn't need much to reach 79 Atk(and Bowfaire Sniper isn't too far behind). Chrom needs 113 Atk to 2RKO, which even with a 45 mt Prf, is a lot, and he has to deal with Grima's 80% Pavise+ rate.
    Everyone else, Sword, Axe, Lance, non Sorcerer magic(assuming no Celica's gale), everything struggles against Grima. Sorcerer is among the very, very few builds that can down him reliably in one turn.
    People really do tend to say that Sorcerers are bad against Grima, and so did I for a long time... but looking at the actual numbers and testing it out, it just feels like one big misconception.

    12 hours ago, samthedigital said:

    but I have no opinions on what should be the way.

    Frankly I don't think many people have for the last ten years or so.

  19. 6 hours ago, samthedigital said:

    I'm talking about Sage for Tomefaire earlier on and for the kill if you use Renown or luck into it (otherwise just use Sorc with Tomefaire). It's a little more consistent than Sorc, but magic really isn't that great against Grima from what I remember; I've always gone with a physical set-up when given the opportunity.

    I've heard the sentiment, not entirely sure where it comes from. Bows have magic beaten for sure, and so do Falchion users, but beyond that... One'd think Waste has hit issues against Grima, but it narrowly doesn't, and magic users have barely worse numbers and don't have to deal with Pavise+ at all. And, Sorcerers can reach 100% vengeance rate fairly easily, which boosts their outptut significantly, as long as they get damaged by Grima or something else.
    Mostly Robin in particular has the issue of usually having Chrom in the back, so no +Mag pairup, and their Mag modifier usually being neutral or -1. Even then it's doable with them pretty reliably. Miriel on the other hand can reach the magic 79 Atk number which enables a clean 2RKO, though you generally need rally mag and either spectrum or tomefaire. Failing that, any help from Vengeance basically seals the deal.
    Either way, Celica's Gale has 6 less mt than Waste, so even with Tomefaire and the +2 Mag cap of Sage, they're pretty much the same.

    6 hours ago, samthedigital said:

    I'm not going to pretend that I have a lot of experience myself; I've played through once, and I know that there are people that have finished ironmans of it and the like. I would say that it is harder though, yeah. Counter is incredibly oppressive on its own, and I don't know that having Robin press start to win the game is possible given that and several other nasty skill combinations. That's not to say that it's impossible to juggernaut; it just requires smarter play and positioning with a few more unit types for different skill combinations. I can definitely see myself being wrong about this to some degree though as I haven't done a lot of research on the Lunatic+ meta outside of watching Kuroi and a friend of mine play.

    I might be a bit too laser-focused on base Lunatic at times. Just feel like it's the best the game has on offer. But yeah, I think the amount of children paralogues you did on that run made raising more people a lot more realistic. I guess with how easy the game is to solo, people usually don't bother and even I have gotten into the habit of assuming most of them aren't unlocked.
    Should it be the way though, no clue.

    6 hours ago, samthedigital said:

    I forgot to reply to this. I agree, I should have said that they can rely on sheer stats up to a certain point which gives them room to inherit skills.

    Oh yeah, absolutely, in fact I think all "clean" solos do that to some extent.

  20. 1 minute ago, samthedigital said:

    The way I beat Lunatic+ was by using 2 gen 1 combat pairs, kids, and a few Rescue bots; that's more or less my frame of reference for that difficulty. That being said all of the Veteran units capped their relevant stats, and more than one unit was necessary to deal with different skill combinations, so a single unit snowballing didn't happen. Maybe I was playing wrong, but I'm not sure.

    Well of course not, but it does depend on whether you're playing with kids or not, at least I think. Really this whole idea of unlocking paralogues with S-ranks muddies the waters, even though it's cool on paper. How many kids was that ?
    Also I lack Lunatic+ experience, for the record. Juggernauting I guess is harder there ?

    5 minutes ago, samthedigital said:

    It's not that it's boring exactly; it's just that if we're using that as our way of ranking classes in Awakening I'm not sure why Valkyries would be compared to Sages or why Miriel even enters the conversation at all. I'm mostly talking about Lunatic carries here; I haven't experimented with Lunatic+ enough, but there's really no reason for a carry to go into Valkyrie, and there is if Robin is trying to kill Grima with a magic build. On that difficulty Robin can sustain through sheer stats, but Sol or stacking defensive skills works; but I've only ever tried the latter with Fred. I'm just assuming it works with Robin for obvious reasons.

    I actually agree that Sage/Valkyrie combat isn't highly relevant in that game. Miriel can carry though, as a Nosferatank, after a good bit of favoritism. Also Robin still wants Sorcerer for a Grima magic kill, unless you lucked out with a Celica's gale. Unless you meant for pairup, in which case I'd still favor just sticking with Chrom.

    The lategame cannot really be survived through sheer stats in my experience. Every solo I've actually tried the unit would just die.

    11 minutes ago, samthedigital said:

    Well, if you want to talk about a specific style of play then I'm sure there are ways of finding good approximations. I had originally assumed that you said this because it's difficult to gauge how someone is playing, but I'm not so sure now.

    Oh, no, I'm just not really of the stance that you can speak of thresholds in Awakening past the midgame, because things get too unpredictable. That's largely all I was saying.

  21. Mareeta will never counter Eyvel, and vice-versa, so your strategy's fine. Mareeta also cannot capture, so since Thracia's invulnerability flag (which Evayle has) can only be breached by capturing, I believe Mareeta is 100% incapable of killing in that situation.

    The main problem is that if Mareeta goes under a certain HP% she'll get physic'd, so I think Nanna hits too hard, and she can also randomly crit if you're unlucky. I'd just attempt to capture with Eyvel alone over and over until it works.

  22. 54 minutes ago, samthedigital said:

    If we're talking about predicting levels for other players then I agree, sure, but it is more or less possible to reasonably approximate a unit's levels in your own playthrough.

    I guess, but... I'm not sure what that accomplishes for conversation.

    54 minutes ago, samthedigital said:

    The latter is definitely easier, but I'm not sure that a discussion should be focused on how well a class can help solo the game either.

    I shouldn't have used the word team, even for simplicity. Said as much in the past, but it is a bit of chimera to keep a quantity of units worthy of that word competitive in Awaks Lunatic and up. Though children paralogues do help a lot, so it depends if you're optimizing pairings to get as many as possible (I've done it once, that was one long playthrough). Mostly I meant one or two other carries and a few staffers keeping them all alive.

    More to the point though, on top of exp being spread thin, it is also very difficult to stop singular units from blowing up out of control. When I think of solos, I generally think of a player making a choice to play the game that way... except when it comes to Awakening, where players have to stop the game from pushing one of their units leagues above the rest, to a point where there's no strategical sense not leaning on them more and more. Then before long, no one else can do combat well but them.

    So all I'm saying is, I can sympathize with it being boring to discuss solos, but... the game is kinda tying our hands and all. If you can extract a genuine conversational baseline out of it, more power to you, I sure can't.

  23. It's pretty difficult to predict stats or levels in Awakening. In most games you can say "oh, chapter 17, that means promoted level 5 to 10, roughly". But in Awakening ? By chapter 17 units can be anywhere from the end of their first loop through promoted classes to the middle of their third or even fourth(well that's mostly Robin, but I'm pretty sure staff spam can bring anyone there without turtling much). It's very possible for Miriel to ORKO most everything with a Wind tome, tomefaire or not, while taking very low damage during the midgame thus not caring about reinforcements at all, or she can be struggling to make a difference with the best equipment you have to give her.

    That being said, past that point caps and enemy uber forges tend to mean you need some form of sustain, or a good team to back you up if you don't. Sage not having the former really is kind of a problem.

  24. 12 hours ago, SnowFire said:

    Cysx: I was abbreviating things in my head there some, but yes, that sentence had an implicit "bring at least a few staffers to the Tower" in there in my head, just not written on the page.  Whoops!  Anyway, I consider the marginal value of more combat units to start dropping some, and even a low-ranked staffer who also has 1-2 offense has some value.  (And to be clear, RD Sages are still getting a "Below Average" rating here, just I don't consider them hyper-terrible garbage, hence the somewhat defensive tone of "nah it's okay you can use one or two.")

    I think I'd be a bit harsher, but that's fine. Mostly I really don't think you bring archsages in the tower for staves, in fact you barely need more than one staffer in the tower at all, since you get a free Fortify right before it starts. And now that I've replayed totally remembered that you can't shop at all once you've set foot in there, and how much money you'll be getting from the dozens of now useless weapons you should be selling... yeah, getting Micaiah to S with a bought Arms Scroll (shop sells 5 at that point) is really no problem at all. 

    The 5 uses of that Fortify on Micaiah, plus Lehran, that can legit cover the vast majority of your needs without having to deploy additional staffers. If you want one more, Elincia will almost invariably bring more to the party than an Archsage, and your Saints have their own siege tome on top of not needing to pay for staff rank. Really Sages just... aren't very good in the tower, even without the Laguz kings taken into account.

  25. 17 hours ago, SnowFire said:

    And you need to bring at least a few staffers along anyway, and as already discussed the Bishop/Saint crew isn't great in this game, so why not a Sage?

    Well that'd be because Sages can't use staves until tier 3 in RD, and start at E. Only Sage with decent staffing is good old Bastian(oh, and Pelleas, but he doesn't qualify really).

    ... which is ironic, considering PoR.

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