Othin

The thing is, if you blow it all on one map, you have to wait 5 chapters "saving up" to use it at full again. I think that cost can be more important than a money cost to do the same, depending on the situation. I've already played through FE4, FE5, and Berwick Saga in Japanese, as well as parts of FE3, FE6, and FE12, so yeah. Berwick Saga has even less information than TRS, but I was able to track things down by arming myself with an online translator to learn things from Japanese sites. (It helped that I completed most of my database on this site when I was halfway through.) TRS definitely has a lot of events to miss; for example, you need to have Runan visit a specific house in Ch3 to trigger events to recruit four more characters later. I restarted my first playthrough after Ch9 due to missing that and a bunch of other things and actually started looking at the recruitment data page after that point; it's not so bad with at least getting the recruitments right.

My current plan is to allow 10 resets, preferably saved for Game Overs or other utter catastrophes. For that map, the main issue is one particularly troublesome enemy that I could bait by sacrificing a weak character and make things much easier, that and on my current playthrough I'm trying to move fast to save some NPCs but it's really not necessary, so I can slow down a bit next time. It probably won't be so bad. That's the same as what I've heard; I don't know anything about details or where to find them, though. Is floating even an issue?

Sort of. The amount of actual repairing you'll likely do is close to the amount in FE5 if you repair weapons instead of Warp staffs, but you can split the repairs to repair two weapons halfway instead of one all the way. And yeah, I'll have to do that, although right now, I've been playing through TRS, and I want to get through it for once before proceeding with other things. I'm also likely going to need to set up a couple of things to upload the videos properly. And then there's finishing the last few maps of my current playthrough, on which I am resetting, and quite frequently in the beginning of Ch12 (Map #36 with my chosen progression)... I dread doing this map on a limited resets run.

Yeah, and it's an interesting one. Instead of a staff with a fixed number of uses, there are these items called Repair Stones you can get throughout the game; you can get three without much trouble, but the last two are a pain. (The final one is right at the end of the game anyway, so it's not too useful.) Each of them have 10 "uses", but consume a number of uses to repair a weapon based on the type of weapon and how much durability it's lost. The rarest weapons typically cost up to 7-8 points to fully repair, but partial repairs are also viable, so you can figure out how to distribute those uses to extend the use of various weapons. (Or just burn most of them on Reese's Lord Gram, an absolutely personal weapon the main character gets a few chapters into the game.) There are some oddities, though. The Repair Stones won't work on magic, but the rare spells are generally the ones that self-repair over time anyway. Also, broken personal weapons stay in characters' inventories to be repaired like in FE3/4/5, but other weapons don't for some reason. And for some stranger reason, Reese's second personal sword, Succeed, won't stick around if it breaks at all. (It's also the only physical weapon that recovers durability on its own.)

Sigurd's ability in general to set up a ridiculous start for Celice is fantastic and makes for a great reason to use him heavily, to get a number of great items and the money to buy more. Alone, he's the best unit ever, but on top of that, he can create a clone of himself as early as the start of Ch7.

His base AS with a Silver Sword is 9. That's enough in most circumstances already.

I think Ruins enemies change with difficulty level, but not with route. The same should be true for Valni and everything else from Ch17 on. (Ch15 and Ch16 still have substantial differences.) STOP

Crash is right; this system would mess so much with how weapons are used. You said Silver weapons would have like 5 uses. Say I give a Silver Sword to a Hero, have them attack something and kill it in two hits, then on the enemy phase, an enemy attacks, the Hero counters and kills in two hits, then a third enemy attacks... oh, whoops, out of hits. 5 hits, or 10 in the case of a Brave weapon, isn't much; it can disappear incredibly fast even as an incidental cost of just one time you actually want to use it - especially if other characters can't trade with them to make them unequip the weapon for enemy phase. Meanwhile, you're still getting to use the weapons a ridiculous number of times throughout the game, so increasing the uses per chapter isn't an option either. It's just not practical; with a system as simple as the weapons repairing themselves entirely each chapter and for free, there's no way to strike a balance for the good weapons between being used too little per chapter and too much overall. If you want some sort of system for making weapons last, just take FE4's weapon repair system entirely, so the weapons can be used more often each time but it gets managed by the cost. Or use the mechanic Berwick Saga applied to a few personal weapons, where they regain 20% of their maximum durability each chapter, shown here. So applying it to other weapons, you could have Silver Swords get 10 uses but recover just 2 uses per chapter, which would manage the total number of uses you could get while still letting you use a decent number at once when you want to. I don't think I would favor a large-scale version of this, but it's certainly much more feasible.

I can't imagine getting through Gen 1 without hitting 50 kills on the Silver Sword. Are you guys having him use other weapons or something?

When I soloed Gen 1 with Sigurd, it was easier than it had ever been using any other characters. I think that says all that needs to be said. 10/10

I was referring to effects. Kngt and bottlegnomes were both speaking from the perspective that these skills would not be promotion-specific and evaluating the effects, so clearly that's not what they meant. As for being permanently locked to the character, I think we all know well enough to regard that as a given for skills that are intended to matter. There are many things a combat skill can do; FE4/5/9/10 barely scratched the surface of the possibilities between the four of them. Certainly, they were worlds away from any limit other than IS's imagination. There is so much more that combat skills can do without being dictated by randomness, and there are so many more relevant possibilities for non-combat skills.

Indeed: the later you get a skill, the less relevant it is. However, with all of this in mind, I can't say I understand why you keep saying "mastery". We've dismissed the FE10 masteries because they were idiotic, and there's nothing else that would associate any particular content for such a skill, therefore all we're talking about is ordinary skills that aren't "mastery-like" any more than they are like any other sorts of skills. Presumably, most if not all of them are good, relevant skills, but that's just because we want this to matter. Like Kngt, you're assuming something about the skills we're discussing based on absolutely nothing. Many FE4/5 characters had personal skills from early in the game, which helped define them, and didn't necessarily make them too strong. Some of them did, and the pool of skills was rather limited, but there's no need to limit our considerations to that. Another way to balance prepromotes is simply to give them less skills. Again, Berwick Saga makes for a good example. Ward is the game's Jagen and joins much higher leveled than other characters, and from the start, he's much more powerful. He also has the skill Guard, activated by command to provide reliable protection to other characters, but that's about it. Other characters have or gain other skills and more of them, giving them an edge in terms of combat even without needing to fully catch up to him in level, stats, and weapons. Meanwhile, Ward stays ahead in his own ways for quite a while and retains his defensive utility, even having a permanent niche as the only mounted Guard user. With raw combat, characters that get ahead have an easier time staying ahead just because they can fight so much more. There aren't many good ways for characters to catch up in a situation like that to beat a character that starts ahead at their own game, whether it's a regular character vs. a Jagen or an Est vs. a regular character. Jagen's pitiful growths worked to keep him from going anywhere, but that was so limiting.

Indeed, there is a place for skills to be learned later. But that doesn't mean all such skills have to be learned at that point later. I'm not saying the system should be limited one way or the other. Yes, make some skills learned later, such as sometimes at Tier 3. But there's no reason to force everything to conform to that exact mold.

All that means is that we should see more relevant skills, including class skills. Making it so that every class has to get one right at third tier only serves to limit the system.

In that case, they're more like just class skills (or class-specific skills) implemented in a limiting manner.

And if you get a second Hammer? Or, if there's only one in the game, if you miss it or lose it somehow? Or if you use your every-chapter Hammerne use on it? There are merits to having some special weapons restore some durability between chapters, but applying it to every weapon and making them restore the durability all the way just has so many absurd implications, as dondon pointed out. And all for what? So players don't have to deal with uncertainty, resource/risk management and the consequences of their actions? Fuck that. If a player uses up their Hammers early, they can fight the Black Knight with Ragnell just like how they're supposed to. Players shouldn't be able to do everything perfectly on their first playthrough without foreknowledge; bonus strategies like that are just that: bonuses.

Masteries are terrible anyway and should never be seen again.

Always make backup real saves. This will surely save you more time than this in the future.

Gonzales is a Brigand, not a Pirate. Are you thinking of Geese?

They can be bought, but that doesn't mean they can be used by every bow user and all the time. A level lead only eclipses the relevance of factors that change with level. This is the point I have been trying to make; it's why small statistical differences don't matter. Making bows the only physical range 2 weapon? That can't be changed by just gaining more levels. Hell, making it impossible to double attack with thrown weapons, whether through a simple restriction against it or through a 20 AS penalty like in the earlier games, would work to establish bows as having a role other weapons couldn't match. However much you level up Franz, he can do a lot of things, but he can never use healing spells. Moulder, on the other hand, can never match Franz's movement, at least not on his own. (And never the Canto part.) Neither one can steal or open locks without keys. There are many more possibilities, but not so many exist in recent FE games. Franz can do many things Joshua can never do, but what can Joshua do that Franz cannot? Not a whole lot. Tactical skills add more possibilities. Delmudd and Nanna grant bonuses to nearby characters in FE4/5; other characters may give the bonus to one or two characters, but most cannot get more than that without hogging a unique item. Lachesis can learn to use Lex's axes, but she cannot learn Ambush to attack first on the enemy phase. But FE4/5 only scratched the surface of the possibilities.

The discussion was ignoring reality without that element. Let's look at FE12's weapons, since those are supposed to be the best balanced. A Javelin has 3 Mt and 70 Hit. A Steel Bow has 8 Mt and 80 Hit. So at range 2, the Steel Bow has +5 Mt and +10 Hit to make up for its lack of melee. Sounds good, right? It's very plausible that that could make a difference in how long it takes to kill an enemy. Now let's say the Javelin user has ~5 more Str than the Steel Bow user, for whatever reason. That's not too strange of a situation; there are plenty of ways it can happen. In that case, the Javelin user won't often take longer to kill things than the Steel Bow user at all. As a result, the bow's advantage is largely gone, unless the bow user upgrades all the way to Silver Bows. These small statistical differences can matter sometimes, but they can disappear so easily; a level lead or luck with stat gains can eclipse the relevance of other factors.

That wasn't an answer; that was a question. I have to be picky because you're talking about ideals that can be incongruous with possible realities.

You could say the same thing about any goal in any game. Anything that encourages you to try something new is good. Skirmishes only make sense for monsters, and they should always be kept that way, regardless of the limitations. It's easy to justify just going and slaughtering hordes of random monsters that show up for no reason. Not so easy to do that for people. Being able to easily keep your characters stocked with weapons eliminates the cost of skirmishes in exchange for the Exp. This is especially true if it applies to skirmishes in the main story. Of course, for postgame skirmishes, it makes sense that there should be some way to get more money and weapons, but there's no reason for it to be as simple as just having the money handed to you.

That's not an accomplishment. How often should that extra damage and accuracy make the difference between three-rounding an enemy and two-rounding an enemy, or two-rounding an enemy and one-rounding an enemy? That is an accomplishment. More accuracy and more damage won't accomplish anything if the characters one-round everything with 100% accuracy regardless; that's not a significant difference at all.

If an objective is meaningless in terms of the events of the game, it doesn't make sense for it to result in any ingame reward. But things don't have to be nearly that arbitrary. Say enemies are carrying a bunch of minor items you want to steal for some event, or there's some reason you don't want to (or can't) deploy the Jagen in a given mission. There can be ways for these things to make sense.