Did Fire Emblem move in the wrong direction?

[fengaridotdll]

I hope some of the issues (Like no Magic Trinity or Light Magic) get removed entirely and replaced.

The idea of Priests/Clerics promoting into a class that uses Anima Magic EXCLUSIVELY just feels kind of off to me, especially after playing the GBA games

[Box]

I haven't played all the games but I've always thought that the weapon balance in the GBA games was really good. And I think weapon weight with a fixed Con was a big part of that. It means that the weapons have tradeoffs and that there's a reason to bring different weapons for different occasions. Forging, I feel, kind of ruins this because you can just create the kind of weapon you want instead of having to adapt to the weapons available. And offsetting weight with Str instead of Con makes the penalties enormous or non-existent.

Now I don't think it was perfect. Some classes had it rough with weapon weight in the GBA games, but i think that's more of a class/character balance thing.

That, and while this may be a personal thing, I never really found much use for steel weapons. I'd sometimes use steel bows for the effectiveness bonus, but otherwise I felt like they weren't worth using. You pay like twice as much per use for a weapon that's slightly stronger than iron and drops your speed. If they had made steel cost the same as iron for 45 uses then it might have more than situational use.

[Gradivus.]

forging is awesome, have you played lunatic modes or fe11 h5?

and the reason why weight is crap is because using irons is (and IMO, that isn't a problem) really unincentivizing once you got past E or D rank respectively to the game, weapon rank is plain enough to limit how good a weapon can be used. Also, forges make Irons more useful because a forged Iron or Bronze weapon (again, depending on which FE game) is valuable to get a weapon rank starting. you do generally have a reason to use them, but they are outclassed eventually.

Edited January 23, 2015 by Gradivus.

[General Horace]

killer weapons are more op than brave weapons, they're always like C rank (wtf?) and are mass buyable. They're pretty retarded.

I actually liked Con though, it limited some units (like pegasus knights) from just using whatever weapons they wanted, although stuff like Isadora having 6 con was incredibly stupid.

I hope forging is removed or restricted to certain weapons though, it's a totally broken feature. H5 might have been tougher if you couldn't just OHKO the cavaliers with a forged Ridersbane and then OHKO knights with a forged hammer! There go like 80% of the enemies in the game!

Edited January 23, 2015 by General Horace

[Box]

I didn't get FE11 because I heard it sucked when it came out and now it's kind of expensive. I just think it's pointless to have a finely balanced weapon system if you can just use forging to get around it. I don't see how difficulty modes enter into it since a robust weapon system should be able to work independently of difficulty.

And yeah, I guess killers were a little too good in the GBA games once you can buy them. They should probably be more expensive or more limited.

Edited January 23, 2015 by Box

[Gradivus.]

@Horace it actually has been sort of nerfed because +5 forging cap and enemies aren't that susceptible to super-effective OHKOes. you should do a h5 challenge run without forges! to make up for the dropped ltc run

@box download desmume and an fe11 rom to try it by yourself and don't let other guys influence you for what is good or not. forges make many things easier to handle on high difficulties, like on fe12 the dracoknights with a bow forge. I'm pretty sure that IS intentionally threw those dracoknights at us knowing that we'd use bow forges to get around them. and forges cost much for FE12, the forged Iron Bow to OHKO the C2 boss costs about 7000G for instance, so the game can throw you into complicated decisions by encouraging expensive forges. It's not like you can just say "I have a forge, weapon rank system and those things can get off". Silver Lance Access is valuable because you're not gonna forge +4 killer or steel lances and the power of silvers helps much on FE12. on FE11 there's wing spear forge and ridersbane forge and occasionally hammer to kill most, but that's more due to how enemy classes are spread.

[General Horace]

tbh i never really forged in awakening because I never needed it (also I forget it exists most of the time). I don't think I ever forge anything past +5 anyway (other than like a +10 pachyderm forge) in any other game.

it might be harder to do H5 without forges, ridersbanes hit kinda does suck and it nerfs Shiida a bit

there's still warp and stuff though. i've beaten H5 enough that even without forges I don't think i'd find it challenging anymore though, although I think it's just a result of knowing the game too well. The biggest issue would be hitrates though, forges really do improve reliability a lot in that regard.

Edited January 23, 2015 by General Horace

[fengaridotdll]

Fix the poll. I could vote for everything.

[Axie]

@Gradivus: obviously weight would matter earlygame and heavier weapons would be kimda unusable; that's just another point against attaching weight to skill or str. also SMs already grow out of losing AS in the str-based system anyway (but yes skill-based would be even worse)

wrt forging: I don't mind it I guess? if weight came back and forging had limits like Awakening it would be another layer of decision making instead of just maxing Might and putting the rest of the forge in Hit

[Gradivus.]

actually, the more I think about how weight can be circumvented, I'd practically be fine with it returning lol.

[MisterIceTeaPeach]

• Fug of war is a mechanic of real life and it increases the variety of maps;

Dragging real life is not a good idea. FE is not really realistic in the least, what with all the magic, people having a hive mind, being utterly fearless, and fifteen year old kids growing into killing machine slaying ten men at once. FoW is usually pretty annoying in the sense the IA don't play with it at all.

Fug of War is a mechanic, which forces you to more defensively. You don't know, when and where the enemies appear. It's a bit similar to a defend mission at least in the first turns. It's only annoying, if the enemies have lots of fliers, who can burst your defend line.

Chapter 14 in FE6 and chapter 11 Ephraim's route in FE8 are bad examples for FoW maps.

Imo nevertheless a good feature especially in a game with very few defend or survive missions.

• Weapon weight is an own topic for itself. It's hard to come to a compromise. However I still think the best solution is, if the skill stat is the buffer, because it wouldn't disadvanantage several classes:

That's the best solution only because it means weight stop being an issue past a certain point in the game.

Actually that's how, I would like to see.

The weapon weight shall play a role in the first half of the game as it does in FE9 and FE10.

All phyiscal units are be able to use steel or heavier weapons without AS penalty throughout the game. Only mages with long range tomes will still have problems with the weapon weight at least in 9.

Edited January 24, 2015 by The Taninator

[Axie]

I need to ask again why do you want so many mechanics to return because of strategy but not a mechanic that actually adds some strategy (as opposed to fog of war which becomes pointless novelty after the first playthrough)

[Gradivus.]

^biased

FoW adds strategy aswell because you have to reveal enemies before you attack them. that can lead to complications when it comes to LTC'ing maps (which is generally a bigger challenge than turtling). FE12 C13x is a good example, and also FE12 C20x, even though it makes the map such an asshole. how do you find FoW pointless and largely negligible, but weight not?

Edited January 24, 2015 by Gradivus.

[MacLovin]

Why the hell are there so many people bringing up LTC again.

How many of the guys who bring up LTC have actually done it and not stood around watching dondon/interceptor/horace/pkl's videos.

FoW is easily manageable for folks past their first run on a mode. It's only difficult if you do it ,or that mode, since some fe's have difficulty settings that are actually hard, blind.

Fe6 HM FoW desert is tricky the first time, but you're likely to be sort of familiar if you played through it at least once to get HM unlocked.

I can't speak for the DS Fe's since I haven't played much of them.

Edited January 24, 2015 by Howard the Duck

[Gradivus.]

I agree with you, but I was more talking about how Axie compared weight and FoW. FoW at least adds some sort of challenge to a map under certain circumstances (which is going blindly or playing quickly), whereas weight is not that significant of an addition. it will lower the AS of some units but fails to matter as much to affect the strategy. Also, many (almost all things in FE actually) become easier by an extent if you know how to do them.

Besides, I did LTC some games already, but I haven't recorded any videos / haven't uploaded anything about it so it's no wonder that you don't know of it

[KMT4ever]

The thing with weight is that it tends to hurt the enemies at least as much as it hurts you, usually more so (i.e. Steel Lance Peg-Knights). FoW only affects the player, meaning that even though it does become quite manageable after playing through the level at least once it still requires an element of caution to prevent ambushes from a unit you accidentally bypassed.

[MacLovin]

WT was kind of a hit or miss thing for me.

In fe4, it was kind of a mess imo. The best non-sword/magic weapons were hero weapons.

Ikr fe5.

fe6-8 had is kinda wonky with the heavy as fuck steel ones showing up when you can't really use them effectively unless you're the thwomp or fighter.

fe9-10 handled it a bit better imo. Str=wt means that units will eventuall become strong enough to wield heavy weapons.

idr fe13.

[Gradivus.]

while enemies are affected by con!weight too, I don't think that has to be. con isn't an enemy-favoring imbalanced system (which I didn't claim anyway). I think making enemies tougher by removing a both-side unnecessary feature is totally fine when the difficulty is supposed to be harder. FE12!Lunatic Shows that pretty well because it (and FE13 not either) doesn't have weight at all, while the potential enemy AS drop wouldn't affect the gameplay at all beyond making it easier, which would be bad since the player units tend to be enough of a match for the fierce FE12 lategame units either way. IMO, if we suppose con!wt would be integrated into FE12 or 13, it would be thoroughly player-favoring, and I like the challenge more on a challenging mode as opposed to exploiting weight to double an SM here and there (and the big deal about enemy SMs IS that they are hard to double, so this point shouldn't be defeated).

Edited January 24, 2015 by Gradivus.

[Axie]

weight impacts your choice of weapons from beginning to end in the pre-FE9 games where enemies aren't utterly incompetent; if you don't like the limitation then that's subjective, and I'm not saying FE cannot be balanced around the lack of weight because it cab, but weight objectively adds a layer of decision-making that the lack of weight never will

meanwhile fow is pointless because you find out where the enemies are after the first time and after that you just have to use one unit or two to reveal enemies and there is no strategy in that except in very specific playstyles; if enemies did NOT spawn in the same tiles every time in fow maps then it would accomplish what it's meant to

[Gradivus.]

Well, the fact that it (in the case of con) adds a layer of decision-making is evident and from that point both opinions are rather subjective because it's either "like to have higher spd on both side" or "like making sm's and similar low-con units slower with stronger weapons". Either I personally consider it a superfluous layer of decision-making or I don't and it's actually hard to convince someone about that anyway. and the issue about weight is agreedly not con; it's actually a comparatively fair system, but even that has to be balanced around. I personally have only played FE6 of the con-weight games so far, and I think that weight is balanced out well enough in that game, but on str-based wt I just thought "fuck you wt" on the first 6 or something chapters of fe11, then I thought "why does that exist?". I personally think that a lack of weight doesn't have to be balanced out, but the existence of weight has to, which is why it's much less poorly executed in FE6 than in FE11.

[S_Cero]

Regarding the weight discussion, I rather want it to go back to the old days where weight just straight out subtracted speed. It removes the entire con gender issue. (and TRS did a good job of making heavier weapons have their own advantages so it wasn't lightest weapon all the time)

[Gradivus.]

disagreed on no wt buffer at all, the gender issue has been brought up already and for instance, it is availability that sets rutger off of fir. if she were to join earlier, she'd be more useful than rutger.

[fengaridotdll]

At first I was fine with no weight in Awakening. After playing through the older games, I realized that it made Brave weapons ridiculously broken

[Tryhard]

Regarding the weight discussion, I rather want it to go back to the old days where weight just straight out subtracted speed. It removes the entire con gender issue. (and TRS did a good job of making heavier weapons have their own advantages so it wasn't lightest weapon all the time)

This makes it so a myrmidon for example is no worse at using at iron blade as say a paladin, which seems pretty problematic in itself. While I like that it eliminates arbitrary con values, it still seems quite necessary to include a buffer of some kind, though you could abstract it. Something like class based con values instead of unit based?

Either that or just don't have shitty con values.

[fengaridotdll]

Either that or just don't have shitty con values.

Yeah, we don't need any more Sophias