How should FE games approach a unit's growth rates?

[Zerxen]

Do you prefer units whose growth rates are higher or lower? In earlier FE games, growth rates were, on average, far lower. By Awakening, growth rates reached a point were it was difficult to NOT max out a unit's stats before Level 20, though Fates toned it down a little.

[Zerxen]

Do you prefer units whose growth rates are higher or lower? In earlier FE games, growth rates were, on average, far lower. By Awakening, growth rates reached a point were it was difficult to NOT max out a unit's stats before Level 20, though Fates toned it down a little.

[Michelaar]

I don't really mind anything, except VERY LOW growth rates, like in gaiden.

[Thinks Their Own Way]

As long as they distributed in a way that doesn't make me go, "what the fuck were they thinking"; I'm cool. I prefer higher/average, I like gaining at least 3 or 4 ideal stats when leveling up.

[Flee Fleet!]

I guess lower, if I want a challenge. Otherwise, average/high is fine.

[Magical Glace]

About GBA level, I guess.

Gaiden, for instance, was way too low, in general, with 20 generally being the standard.  Whereas Awakening level I feel is too high, I feel like I'm gaining almost everything every level I get.

GBA has around 3-4 stats per level usually, and I feel that's a nice comfort zone.

[Nobody]

FE7 level growths were the sweet spot for me. High enough to give you the satisfaction of seeing stats grow, but low enough that bases still can carry you if you get a bit below average.

I'm fine with any growth rate range, though, as long as enemies are balanced accordingly, which they tend to be.

Edited May 13, 2017 by Nobody

[Slumber]

Somewhere in the middle.

Games like Gaiden/SD/FE1 made progression feel slow and boring, making it a chore to build up characters. Games like Awakening/Fates had stats so ridiculously high that it took away from a lot of the excitement of seeing a unit gain stats.

Total growth rates being between 270-330 is generally the sweet spot(Depending on how many stats there are to level up in).

[Hawk King]

0% is the only way to go.

 

I think the GBA games and PoR were the sweet spot.

I still can't believe that some people think a 35% Def growth nowadays is low. 

 

Some more extreme variety would be nice though. Like instead of christmas cavs having very similar bases and growths, one of them could have noticeably higher bases with much lower growths and the other could have lower bases with much higher growths.

[Shoblongoo]

I think its less important to say growth rates should be pegged to any particular level. And more important to make sure that whatever level you have them at, enemy growth rates and map difficulty scales appropriately.

Like--on paper FE7 supposedly had "balanced" growth rates. But it really didn't. Because the enemy growthrates were so low and the endgame enemies were so janky that the Ravens and the Oswins of the game still turned into walking Gods.

Whereas Conquest on paper has absolutely broken growth rates. But the enemies are so strong--a character with single-digit base stats running around with 20+ strength, defense, and speed by the midgame isn't really "broken."

...just something to keep in mind...  

Edited May 13, 2017 by Shoblongoo

[Zerxen]

22 minutes ago, Shoblongoo said:

I think its less important to say growth rates should be pegged to any particular level. And more important to make sure that whatever level you have them at, enemy growth rates and map difficulty scales appropriately.

Like--on paper FE7 supposedly had "balanced" growth rates. But it really didn't. Because the enemy growthrates were so low and the endgame enemies were so janky that the Ravens and the Oswins of the game still turned into walking Gods.

Whereas Conquest on paper has absolutely broken growth rates. But the enemies are so strong--a character with single-digit base stats running around with 20+ strength, defense, and speed by the midgame isn't really "broken."

...just something to keep in mind...  

Good point. I am replaying FE7 right now and I am beginning to realize the abundance of unpromoted ebemy units late game. As for Conquest, I thought IS did a great job at scaling enemies with the player.

[Interdimensional Observer]

Enemy scaling does matter very much indeed when it comes to growths. Victory or Death- the grand penultimate battle in FE7- features far too many unpromoted units. Why, I think the only chapters in the game where unpromoted don't show up are Genesis (barring the four magical/physical baddies that drop weapons), HHM Value of Life (not sure about HNM), and Final.

That said, if you're playing FE7 on Hard Mode with S Ranking the game in mind, then things might be more balanced. You can't promote many units due to the Funds rank requiring you hoard most of your promotion items and stat boosters. Yet you can't stick to a small elite team either, for to get enough experience to 5-star EXP, you apparently need to get every unpromoted unit to ~15. If the enemies were much stronger, this would be almost impossible.

I will also agree that Conquest was good on the enemy scaling. Plus Enfeeble, Seals, Hexing and Poison Strike all cripple your stats/bypass them. On the one hand this is cheap, but on the other by making stats less than the sole determinant of victory forces on the player the need to think strategically.

Awakening on Hard was generally good with level scaling too. Birthright had a glaring midgame stagnation, with a sudden spike at Shura's chapter. Revelation had no sense of scale- it threw promoted units around like candy far too early. C11 had several Master Ninjas (C12 Berserkers), and every chapter thereafter featured at least a few promoted units. While you could view them as a good source of exp for your army of underleveled units, more often than not they were just nasty and unnecessary.

[Zapp Branniglenn]

I definitely would prefer a game balanced around higher growth rates. More stat ups on level up directly enhance my enjoyment of using low level characters. If you just put Awakening growths in a GBA Fire Emblem, the game would become even easier than it already is, since enemies don't scale past their level 1-10 selves until the final chapter. The Fates reduction of health combined with enemies pairing up made for interesting challenge, but altogether too punishing. And I think dropping unit HP growths wasn't done early in the game development, seeing as how the enemy units have far more health than your units. It just feels like that wasn't considered for their balancing mechanisms for high MT weapons and skills like Life and Death.

And low growths to the point of Gaiden don't make for a fun game. It enhances the feeling of getting a new promotion with (comparatively) massive gains, but that's all it does for the game. There are other RPGs with stat growth rates on level up, like the Mother series, and those games are typically worse off for it compared to a fixed system. Speaking of, I really want fixed growth rates as an optional setting in future Fire Emblem games. FE9 locked it away until a second playthrough, and Fates locked it away for only Lunatic mode. Both of these stink, have the setting available at the start for all difficulty modes. I hate losing challenge runs to getting RNG screwed, there's nothing I can do about it.

[Refa]

7 hours ago, Nobody said:

FE7 level growths were the sweet spot for me. High enough to give you the satisfaction of seeing stats grow, but low enough that bases still can carry you if you get a bit below average.

I'm fine with any growth rate range, though, as long as enemies are balanced accordingly, which they tend to be.

This.  If I could pick the general growth range, I would pick FE7.  However, I'm not inherently dissatisfied with others as long as they work within the game.

[Sias]

There are a lot of good points made so far, but I think in addition to enemy scaling determining how high growth rates should be, it's also important to take a look at whether reclassing is present in a game or not. Cause if the former is the case, we need not only high enough personal growth rates to differentiate between units in the same class, but also high enough class growth rates to distinguish someone who's a Cleric from the same character as Knight. Which leads us to higher growth rates in total invariably.

Of course you could also try to create the distinction between my examples through high variation in base stats, but the balance of growth rates and bases is another topic entirely.

1 hour ago, Gustavos said:

Speaking of, I really want fixed growth rates as an optional setting in future Fire Emblem games. FE9 locked it away until a second playthrough, and Fates locked it away for only Lunatic mode. Both of these stink, have the setting available at the start for all difficulty modes. I hate losing challenge runs to getting RNG screwed, there's nothing I can do about it.

Did Fates really have fixed growth rates though? I know that the Lunatic's stat gains are determined for all following level-ups as soon as you get a character, but are they actually fixed to recreate the statistical average every time? I'm pretty sure that this isn't the case as I distinctly remember having a Leo with barely any Mag gains, so it should still be possible to get RNG screwed, you just can't reset to avoid it anymore.

4 hours ago, Interdimensional Observer said:

Awakening on Hard was generally good with level scaling too. Birthright had a glaring midgame stagnation, with a sudden spike at Shura's chapter. Revelation had no sense of scale- it threw promoted units around like candy far too early. C11 had several Master Ninjas (C12 Berserkers), and every chapter thereafter featured at least a few promoted units. While you could view them as a good source of exp for your army of underleveled units, more often than not they were just nasty and unnecessary.

It's obviously a matter of preference, but I actually enjoyed these somewhat early prepromotes. They added a nice layer of challenge imo, and I even liked the more unpopular bosses like Kotaro or Revelation Ryoma/Xander. They really felt like bosses - unlike a good bunch of other losers in that the game who are terribly easy to abuse because they start out range-locked.

And even then, is chapter 12 all that early for regular prepromote enemies? Awakening started to hand them out from chapter 11 onwards iirc, though it's kind of hard to compare Fates to that due to its weird pacing ("real" game starts at chapter 6 etc).

[Nightmayre]

I may be in the minority here but what I want is for growth rates to actually be... stable.

Like, they don't have to be the same each time for each level up obviously, but just... have them round up to the same numbers at the end of the road. Having to keep restarting chapters due to a streak of abysmal growth rates or just resigning yourself to them has always been one of my biggest disappointments when playing FE. Though I know a lot of people actually praise the variance as a good thing.

That aside, while it's fun to play with bigger numbers, I think that at least until halfway to promotion, units should receive relatively small boosts per level up. That should lead to less frustrating accidental deaths when trying to level them up against higher-levelled enemies. As the game passes its midway point, growth rates could also scale up to enhance the experience of levelling up your units. Of course I feel enemies should also grow accordingly to provide a challenge. But this is, I feel, as much an issue with class balance than with growth rates. I've always felt myrmidons or mages were equipped with just the right stats to slaughter through a horde of enemies single-handedly, with little to no penalty since they could typically one-shot their targets or kill them from afar.

[Dark Holy Elf]

I don't really mind. I've never played a FE whose growth rates I consider "too high" and few that I felt were "too low" though yeah some of the earlier games can get there. Shadow Dragon is around the boundary of what I consider acceptable (gaining levels has to feel like it matters). As others have mentioned, the important thing is balancing the enemies accordingly.

One thing I would like to see is for growths to be made public within the game. I can't be the only one who frequently looks up growths online but I shouldn't have to do this. Especially with how current class can change them, it'd be nice if the game's interface would just show you the growth rates your unit has (or is about to have in the case of reclassing).

[Zerxen]

Would lower growths and lower caps to stats be better for gameplay? Don't get me wrong, it feels good to see a unit level up with several stat gains, but higher growths overall make gameplay rely too much on it, especially since enemy stats are designed after unit's averages. Keeping growths low but not too low would increase variance to gameplay and give each run a fresh experience. The growths of the newer games make stats so inflated that the only way to control it is via pair ups and stat boosters.

Edited May 19, 2017 by Zerxen

[MisterIceTeaPeach]

My answer is simple: Depends on the growthrates of the opponents
If they match the growths of the allies, it's absolutely fine.

Also caps shouldn't be generic but fitting to each own class like it's the case in the latest FE parts.


 

[Camus The Dark Knight]

Ideally I like FE9's fixed growths mode, but it must not have been popular since it never returned. As for stats, I say make average growths like 500%, but do the same for enemies of course. Nothing irks me like "LEVEL UP!!!... +1HP" (or worse, nothing).