Opinion on Knives

[Renall]

Okay, I still don't get it.

Why does a thief even need to compete with a fighter?

He is supposed to steal, open locks, lower bridges and and all that stuff. Fighting is just a bonus.

Volke only competes with Sothe. Mia competes with everyone else.

I suppose the point being raised here is that, if a unit isn't supposed to be fighting in favor of other stuff, why even arm them at all, or why give them a special weapon type when swords + sucking suffices to discourage using them as a killer unit? Dancers and Thieves were armed with Swords for quite a while. Dancers lost the ability to attack at all in the GBA games and were hardly seen as any worse off for it. Matthew was never going to rock a Sword like Raven, but he didn't need a special category for it.

I suppose if you want to look at Knife weapon triangle neutrality a certain way, it's a buff to Thief survivability. Swordlock in FE9 would certainly have disadvantaged Sothe and Volke against the numerous Lance-wielding enemies in the game. However, giving Knives to Sages pretty much made no sense at all and seemed a completely pointless afterthought. And I'm not really sure what they were doing in FE10.

Edited October 19, 2012 by Renall

[Axie]

Thieves are not as nearly as awful at combat as dancers, though, so while removing weapons from them wouldn't make them useless at all, they don't need to actually do it - I think thieves are fine with subpar but usable combat, be it with swords or knives.

[BrightBow]

I suppose the point being raised here is that, if a unit isn't supposed to be fighting in favor of other stuff, why even arm them at all, or why give them a special weapon type when swords + sucking suffices to discourage using them as a killer unit? Dancers and Thieves were armed with Swords for quite a while. Dancers lost the ability to attack at all in the GBA games and were hardly seen as any worse off for it. Matthew was never going to rock a Sword like Raven, but he didn't need a special category for it.

I suppose if you want to look at Knife weapon triangle neutrality a certain way, it's a buff to Thief survivability. Swordlock in FE9 would certainly have disadvantaged Sothe and Volke against the numerous Lance-wielding enemies in the game. However, giving Knives to Sages pretty much made no sense at all and seemed a completely pointless afterthought. And I'm not really sure what they were doing in FE10.

I guess that would make more sense.

But honestly, no matter how often I go through them, all of his posts essentially still seem to me like he laments that thieves can't keep up with dedicated combat units because of the low might of daggers.

Anyway, personally I would keep them if just for the reason that Thieves wielding broad swords would look silly. I don't want swords to transform into dual daggers again.

And the whole argument could be made for any weapon type since it only makes a difference for the units who can choose between several weapon types. Otherwise we only need a melee type, bows and a magic type.

But if nothing else, since you never know what you can buy, you need to make sure that you have lots of different goods in stock.

And I actually think, knives are more unique then most weapons, let alone swords. They have low charges and can only be bought extremely rarely. It emphasizes them as emergency weapons and forces you to plan ahead and tempts to buy several of them for later use.

Also, they have no rank, so they don't need the thief to be regularly involved in combat to use them. And since a thief might want to steal weapons, you might not want them to carry too many of them to make up for the few uses.

And in the sequel, they became a lot more useful anyway, because of the addition of easily available throwing versions. Ranged swords were rarer, lower on charges and couldn't be forged.

Knives on sage are beyond redemption though. But that's why they took that option out.

And dancers would never choose to fight over refreshing a proper fighter to do the job. But if thieves don't have stuff to do, they might as well help out in combat.

Edited October 19, 2012 by BrightBow

[Shadow Mir]

Ranged swords were rarer, lower on charges and couldn't be forged.

The Silver Knife only has 15 uses - lower than any ranged sword.

[BrightBow]

The Silver Knife only has 15 uses - lower than any ranged sword.

Well, okay.

But you were still able to buy and forge all kinds of them regularly while you were stuck to buy unforgeable Wind Swords.

[CT075]

Even without assembly, impressive things are possible. IIRC, Arch's hack only needed assembly to replicate FE5 FoW.

funnily enough fe5 FoW was quite literally the only request arch has given me that didn't require any assembly hacking

not that i expect this to be common knowledge but i still find it kind of amusing

there are a few things that arch wanted done but i can't remember if i actually finished any of them

[Anouleth]

funnily enough fe5 FoW was quite literally the only request arch has given me that didn't require any assembly hacking

Oh, ok, I guess I was talking out of my ass then.

[Snowy_One]

I don't think the WTN aspect of the knives in FE9 is really worth all that much. Your thieves won't fight (making the MT loss pointless) and have a high chance of being really underleveled compared to other combat units so dodging will be difficult even if they had a WTA.

[Prax]

remind me not to sit on my hands waiting for your masterpiece then

XD I would never ask my loyal fans to wait so uncomfortably for my masterpieces~! Instead, enjoy your lives and when/if it comes out, expect to be awesome'd~?

And totally expect for knives to be very useful and useless at the same time. Like a necessary accessory and you will likely never be able to horde gold if you want to not die like a bunch of poorly outfitted conscripted bums.

do you honestly think that someone is going to make this for you

let me tell you, i'm pretty good at events and text and just making a chapter takes hours upon hours of work. it's not going to be faster with the program that you described.

Yes. Someone. Go make this for me (and by extension, for everyone!)! Make everything easier, dang it!

I am mostly an artist--and not even a sprite artist. I am the type that will do story scripting and make lists of weapons and systems and world-building, but I don't have the patience to be learning coding on top of that. So obviously my only avenue is to complain until someone else does it for me or makes it easy enough so I stop complaining. Obviously!

ASM is short for assembly language: a low-level programming language used by game modders to make moderate-to-advanced changes to the game. In layman's terms, it's the way hackers tell the game what they want to change. The "low-level" bit means that it's a language more suited to computers and moving data around in hardware (or emulated hardware) and less suited to humans and their weird, inexact ways of communicating. Assembly language is hard to learn and understand, most ROM-hackers here on SF only have a basic understanding of assembly, but you need to learn it to make any changes more complicated than swapping items around or fiddling with numbers.

I think what I've said is accurate

OT: I always like more types of stuff to play around with but knives have seemed redundant, especially in FE10 where they were basically swords but not as good. My favourite idea for fixing them that's been suggested here is that they halve enemy defence, that way they have a niche but aren't too overpowered, especially if Thief str is kept low. I was also surprised in FE10 that their crit was so low, it would be a good stat for Thieves and would basically make them exaggerated Myrmidons: reliant on criticals for any decent level of damage but more likely to get them.

So.. REAL coding. xD Yeah, that I am probably not going to bother doing. Copy-pasting pieces of CSS and javascript or PHP and making sense of that is enough of a headache. I rest my case. More UI-based easy-to-do-fire-emblem-makers needed. Thanks!

I will now stop my complaining about being too lazy to properly hack or use the existing software/coding solutions to create my own Fire Emblem game. You're welcome. xD

Anyway, I still really like knives, and I want them back on mages. But in order for that to be useful, knife-wielding mages need to be special somehow. If it means doing to extra burst of elemental damage on top of knife damage (which bypasses half of the defense and half the resistance), then so be it! In essence, it could be half magic damage, and half physical damage.

That is my compromise from status effects. But I still like status effects better because I don't think they get used enough in the games and I like seeing enemies going nuts with poison or confusion and stuff!

And whatever benefits mages get from the knives, thieves can get some of it (bypass defense stuff), so they'll always be useful to have around to shank other thieves or defend their treasure rooms. The low weight of a knife will probably also be useful for all beginner thieves who would be crippled by even an iron sword (or maybe all swords should get a weight increase--would make sense!).

[Shin]

Anyway, I still really like knives, and I want them back on mages. But in order for that to be useful, knife-wielding mages need to be special somehow. If it means doing to extra burst of elemental damage on top of knife damage (which bypasses half of the defense and half the resistance), then so be it! In essence, it could be half magic damage, and half physical damage.

That is my compromise from status effects. But I still like status effects better because I don't think they get used enough in the games and I like seeing enemies going nuts with poison or confusion and stuff!

And whatever benefits mages get from the knives, thieves can get some of it (bypass defense stuff), so they'll always be useful to have around to shank other thieves or defend their treasure rooms. The low weight of a knife will probably also be useful for all beginner thieves who would be crippled by even an iron sword (or maybe all swords should get a weight increase--would make sense!).

Mages can already attack from range, use staves, walk through sand and hit res, I don't think they need a built-in win button. Thieves open doors and chests, that's kinda it. It can be really helpful, but it's not like mages can't do anything. Plus, status effects don't work well on enemies, since most of them die in a turn anyway. Most mages have terrible strength, I'm sure one of the Mageknights from FE5 would probably have better luck with them.

I like the idea of knives. If they had one or two less might than their counterpart sword, they wouldn't be too bad. Sure they'd be pretty weenie, but WTN is preferable to facing WTD to lances. Maybe thieves to could promote to use swords too, no idea. Knives being weak, light, accurate and cheap might not be too bad,

[Rehab]

A bonus to armor penetration (perhaps in action skill form), a thief-unique flanking bonus, or a combination or something for daggers would be neat, imo. I think this is one point where making the game a little more complicated than the typical fe game would actually make sense.

[Snowy_One]

Mages can already attack from range, use staves, walk through sand and hit res, I don't think they need a built-in win button. Thieves open doors and chests, that's kinda it. It can be really helpful, but it's not like mages can't do anything. Plus, status effects don't work well on enemies, since most of them die in a turn anyway. Most mages have terrible strength, I'm sure one of the Mageknights from FE5 would probably have better luck with them.

I like the idea of knives. If they had one or two less might than their counterpart sword, they wouldn't be too bad. Sure they'd be pretty weenie, but WTN is preferable to facing WTD to lances. Maybe thieves to could promote to use swords too, no idea. Knives being weak, light, accurate and cheap might not be too bad,

Unfortunatly the only way I can see them continuing to exist is as 1-2 range weapons for swords.

[Prax]

Mages can already attack from range, use staves, walk through sand and hit res, I don't think they need a built-in win button. Thieves open doors and chests, that's kinda it. It can be really helpful, but it's not like mages can't do anything. Plus, status effects don't work well on enemies, since most of them die in a turn anyway. Most mages have terrible strength, I'm sure one of the Mageknights from FE5 would probably have better luck with them.

I like the idea of knives. If they had one or two less might than their counterpart sword, they wouldn't be too bad. Sure they'd be pretty weenie, but WTN is preferable to facing WTD to lances. Maybe thieves to could promote to use swords too, no idea. Knives being weak, light, accurate and cheap might not be too bad,

Well, differentiate / specialize mages more if anything. I don't like how mixed and overlapping they are anyway (how everyone just uses staves in the end). Something like this:

Elemental mages stay as elemental mages, and they can use knives. Maybe they can upgrade into mage-fighters and use lower-level swords after. NO STAVES. High magic cap, low defense cap.

Light magic users could also use knives. Maybe they can upgrade to also use lower-level staves. High skill cap, low speed cap.

Dark magicians/druids would also be able to use knives. Maybe they can upgrade to use lower level anima magic. NO STAVES. High defense cap, low speed cap.

Healers can use staves and possibly upgrade to light magic. NO KNIVES. High resistance cap, low defense cap.

Thieves would use knives and maybe also throw them. And I'd let them be able to promote to use lower-level swords. Seems reasonable.

Flanking's never been a real "thing" in FE, so I'll just leave that out, since that will necessarily include direction-placing and stuff.

What could work is if knives activated an extra defense bypass IF used during a dual attack (ala Awakening). That way, thieves would become a pretty nice sidekick type of role.

Edited October 26, 2012 by Prax

[Axie]

I do agree that only having Mage > Sage and Priest > Bishop is boring, but I think the Jugdral games did a pretty good job of differentiating mage classes. FE13 brings that back to a certain extent but it could be expanded on.

However, the key to further differentiation between mage classes is actually a further differentation between the magic types themselves. In your cases, the classes with access to staves would always be superior to classes with no access to staves, because staves are almost always awesome and knives would probably be inferior in every instance compared to magic no matter what properties they had, unless when facing mages (which could be dealt with by a melee fighter with good RES).

On the other hand, if Fire, Thunder and Wind were actually different, whether by making the anima triangle important in battle or by creating differences beyond Wind blasting fliers and might/hit/weight differences (elemental resistances are unnecessary though), a class with access to two or three of the anima types could be as good as a class with access to only one of those but also staves. Either way, I don't think knives are actually good for differentiating mages.

[Prax]

But what if I just like mage fighters and stabbing people THAT MUCH?

Plus, if only healers and light mages could use staves in their final class promotions, and they would easily be killed in a skirmish from low speed or low defenses (and only light magic, which is readily beaten by anima magic in the magic triangle), then how much greater would they really be than any other mage units who can wield knives? Not by much, I'd say. I'd totally keep them in the back to heal or support while the other mages could be thrown in the frontlines.

But yeah, totally differentiate the different anima elements too. That would be nice.

The more variety, the better. I don't even mind if it leads to some classes or characters being totally useless or redundant in the grand scheme. Balance that out with great characters/supports or something. lol

Edited October 26, 2012 by Prax

[Axie]

But what if I just like mage fighters and stabbing people THAT MUCH?

I'm not saying the option shouldn't be there at all. I'm saying it would never work as a way to balance or improve a mage class so if you included the option, its only "utility" would be the coolness of it all. Which doesn't bother me actually.

[BlueLore]

I think knives don't need to have their weapon rank,because there aren't that many units who can use them and there are also not so many where it would make sense to add the ability to use knives.

However I don't think they should leave out the knives at all.

I think it would be a good idea to make knives more or less a sub-category of swords,that can only be used by thieves and maybe dancers(similar to how some swords are exclusive to the myrmidons in Awakening),I wouldn't say that all sword users should be able to use them as I can hardly imagine a paladin using a knive.

The big use of knives could be either high crit chance,more range,armor piercing attacks or it could simply a very light weapon(which suits these classes as they rely on their evasion to survive attacks)

[Comet]

I think FE 10's knives were pretty good, exept for only volke and part 1 Sothe using them successfully. Oh, and I don't even speak of Heather. In FE 9, they stink.(that's just my opinion, I don't want to start a war about the utilities of knives) They have ridiculously low power and come with low strength classes.