You are the next game designer for Heroes. How would you fix current content or what new stuff you'd add?

[Arcphoenix]

Retire some modes for a while and maybe bringing them back sometime later. Introduce new modes with similar purposes but with fresher formats and gameplay.

Four-Star availability of Guard and Quick Riposte.

Find a better solution for the arena than introducing rare modified HP+5 A-skills.

Perhaps slightly increasing the rate at which divine dew can be obtained. It’s painfully slow

[Ice Dragon]

2 minutes ago, XRay said:

I prefer stifling competition where players can use whatever they want than arbitrarily favoring certain units and punishing players who do not use those units.

Basketball would be a really damned boring game to watch or play if scoring were capped at 10 points for each side such that every game was a 10-10 tie.

 

7 minutes ago, XRay said:

I would not call the current Arena competitive either.

Trying to earn more points than other people is inherently competitive. It ceases to be competitive when literally everyone earns the same number of points and ties for first.

The gameplay itself to earn those points has no necessity to be competitive in itself.

[XRay]

4 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

Trying to earn more points than other people is inherently competitive. It ceases to be competitive when literally everyone earns the same number of points and ties for first.

The gameplay itself to earn those points has no necessity to be competitive in itself.

If they want to make Arena competitive, I rather have the competitiveness come from battle tactics than from an arbitrary scoring system that throws battle tactics out the window. It is like signing up to play basketball but you are also being judged by how many dribbles and passes you can do before you get the ball through the hoop. The Arena is basically like that for Fire Emblem Heroes, where players are not judged on pure tactics.

[Shiki]

21 hours ago, Ice Dragon said:

Except those non-matching experience cards are better used on other characters that match the class. It's inefficient to use non-matching cards when you have other characters in line to be leveled.

That's completely irrelevant if you're measuring the time to level up one Servant to 90. If you're trying to be efficient with EXP distribution (which is imo futile) then you're taking account of multiple Servants which obviously takes more time. Never mind that you don't even have a choice with Extra classes and arguably Berserkers.

21 hours ago, Ice Dragon said:

And then there are events that prevent me from spending time grinding experience because the events themselves are grindy as all hell.

Which have Gold EXP in their shop, so it balances out somewhat. Not much, but it's guaranteed All-type cards.
There is also the thing that nobody forces you to buy out the shop or even participate in the events. Some shop items aren't worth the grind because you have an abundance of them (Fous, specific Ascension materials). Especially the newer Gold mats are not in high demand and those tend to eat most of the event currency.
Events in FGO are grindy that's true but I take that over whatever mundane task FEH tries to push on you.

21 hours ago, Ice Dragon said:

Note that my viewpoint is heavily biased by the fact that I have roughly two or three 5-star characters in my backlog for each of the standard classes at any time, not to mention anywhere from a handful to a dozen 4-stars in each class waiting, too.

I don't understand how you can spend so much money on multiple Gachas even though you don't have the time to commit to them. Like what can anyone say other than "you played yourself"?

20 hours ago, daisy jane said:

Only because Virion gives you Astra at 4* and I'm trying to build an Oboro

1. You know that you're more likely to get Astra from the low-rarity pool than the current one, right? Never mind that Cordelia also can give you Astra.
2. 220 feathers are the amount you get from doing all the daily quests. The difference between 3* and 2* and lower is miniscule.
3. Astra on Oboro? You should go to a corner and re-evaluate your life.

[daisy jane]

12 minutes ago, The Priest said:

3. Astra on Oboro? You should go to a corner and re-evaluate your life.

you don't have to be rude. 
what i said was. I am trying to build an Oboro, and Virion has astra. 
no where in that statement did i said I am giving Oboro, Astra. 

 

[XRay]

8 minutes ago, The Priest said:

3. Astra on Oboro? You should go to a corner and re-evaluate your life.

I gave Reinhardt Watersweep.

[Shiki]

Just now, XRay said:

I gave Reinhardt Watersweep.

Absolutely disgusting.

Let me guess; Blárblade & LnD, reaching 44 Spd for the Spd check?

[XRay]

1 minute ago, The Priest said:

Absolutely disgusting.

Let me guess; Blárblade & LnD, reaching 44 Spd for the Spd check?

No, it was back in the day when dragons just got beefed up with Refined Lightning Breath. I had trouble killing Nowi with Brave Bow BH!Lyn, and Reinhardt cannot kill her without eating Moonbow to the face if she was built as a ranged tank. I thought of trying to out Spd Nowi with Phantom Spd, but Spd tank Nowis would just kill Reinhardt since he was not running Heavy Blade so it would just miss the kill by a few HP. I eventually gave up trying and went with Firesweep Bow on BH!Lyn instead.

[Roflolxp54]

Another thing I'd add:

Add a reshuffle button for summoning sessions. It's always terrible to waste 5 orbs/free summon to enter a session only to be forced to pull a stone of the color you don't intend to pull at all simply because the colored stones you're looking for didn't spawn in the session (ie. you enter an all-blue Focus banner only for the session to spawn only colorless stones). Of course, the option to reshuffle would only be present if the player has only entered the session and hasn't summoned a unit yet.

[Ice Dragon]

1 hour ago, XRay said:

If they want to make Arena competitive, I rather have the competitiveness come from battle tactics than from an arbitrary scoring system that throws battle tactics out the window. It is like signing up to play basketball but you are also being judged by how many dribbles and passes you can do before you get the ball through the hoop. The Arena is basically like that for Fire Emblem Heroes, where players are not judged on pure tactics.

No, Arena is like signing up to play basketball and actually playing basketball, but you really wanted to play football instead. Arena isn't tricking you about what it is. You just want it to be something that it isn't.

 

FGO-related responses in spoilers:

Spoiler

1 hour ago, The Priest said:

That's completely irrelevant if you're measuring the time to level up one Servant to 90.

The experience farming nodes work for two classes at once so it's just cut in exactly half. You can train 2 5-stars to level 90 in 5 hours of straight grinding assuming 3-minute runs and enough stamina restores. Plus like a quarter of a Berserker.

Still slow and a pile of effort.

 

1 hour ago, The Priest said:

Which have Gold EXP in their shop, so it balances out somewhat. Not much, but it's guaranteed All-type cards.

The equivalent of 133 4-star experience cards (100 4-star cards and 100 3-star cards) for a typical event. When you need almost triple that to max level a 5-star.

 

1 hour ago, The Priest said:

I don't understand how you can spend so much money on multiple Gachas even though you don't have the time to commit to them. Like what can anyone say other than "you played yourself"?

I spend approximately twice as much money on Heroes compared to FGO, yet FGO demands at least 5 or 10 times more time investment. Something is clearly off about that.

(And I'm not counting reading the story in FGO. Just the gameplay.)

 

1 hour ago, The Priest said:

3. Astra on Oboro? You should go to a corner and re-evaluate your life.

Astra is great for breaking through high-HP enemies in Abyssal difficulty.

Edited November 6, 2018 by Ice Dragon

[Baldrick]

Hero Battles

I'd introduce alternate win conditions rather than rout. If I could retroactively change LHBs to be a single tough enemy with a "immune to out-of-combat damage" seal, I'd do that.

Forging Bonds

More conversations and less grind, featuring older units, commenting on current story events or just bonding on shared interests (Baldo doesn't count as a shared interest)

Blessed Gardens

As it goes on, I'd increase the number of battles but  cap them at level 40. That way, it encourages people to use blessings, even on 4-star filler units.

Summoning Pool

Drop the 3* launch units into a separate 1-2* pool. I'd also take the opportunity to clean up the 5* exclusive pool; every time there's a New Heroes banner, there's a new focus for the 1-2* pool, dropping 5* exclusives into the separate pool as 3* focus units. The quantity of the 5* exclusive pool would remain steady, but the quality would increase.

[Shiki]

6 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

The experience farming nodes work for two classes at once so it's just cut in exactly half. You can train 2 5-stars to level 90 in 5 hours of straight grinding assuming 3-minute runs and enough stamina restores. Plus like a quarter of a Berserker.

So you're leveling up 2 (and potentially more) 5-stars. Your original post, however, says:

Quote

For example, it costs 377 4-star experience cards to get a 5-star character to level 90 if you are unlucky and do not get any bonus successes, which is approximately 100 runs of the experience card farming node. That's 5 hours of straight farming (at 3 minutes per run) if you have enough stamina restores, but that's equivalent to 2 weeks' worth of natural stamina regeneration (not even counting the fact that the farming node for a particular class is only available 2 days of the week due to the daily rotation).

That's a completely different scenario you're describing.
Also just because you only get EXP from 2 classes doesn't mean you're hard-locked into spending the EXP on those two classes.

6 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

When you need almost triple that to max level a 5-star.

I said it was not much but I don't see why the game has to give you enough EXP to max a 5-star during an event because that's what the average player won't do.

7 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

I spend approximately twice as much money on Heroes compared to FGO, yet FGO demands at least 5 or 10 times more time investment. Something is clearly off about that.

If anything that means that players are treated equally in regards of effort. I don't see why you're entitled to be faster compared to other players just because you spent more money. You already have 3x as many SSR Servants compared to the average F2P or goldfish player.

Heroes is the only outlier among other gachas where you can instantly get a maxed out character based on available skill inheritance and due to no effort leveling. If anything it shows which one is more predatory as a gacha in terms of optimization.

I don't understand how you didn't drop the game after getting some of your first SSRs because by that point you would understand the nature of the game and it's apparent you don't like it.

[Ice Dragon]

FGO things in the spoilers:

Spoiler

2 hours ago, The Priest said:

That's a completely different scenario you're describing.

No, it really isn't. All I did was not count the off-class experience cards the first time around.

100 runs of the experience farming node gives you about 400 experience cards for two different classes plus a few dozen Berserker experience cards.

That's 5 hours for 2 characters plus a quarter of a Berserker, which is still a lot of time, considering a character absolutely needs to be decently leveled just to be usable (whereas they can have all skills at level 1 and still be usable).

 

2 hours ago, The Priest said:

Also just because you only get EXP from 2 classes doesn't mean you're hard-locked into spending the EXP on those two classes.

It doesn't matter because that's less efficient and therefore worse than the "5 hours for 2 characters plus a quarter of a Berserker".

Any cards you get that are extra are exactly equivalent to runs you don't have to run in the future, and if you always use matching class cards, that time in the future is always saved at an exactly 1 to 1 ratio.

Cards spend on non-matching classes lose exactly 1/6 of their experience value, meaning spending those on non-matching classes now saves time in the short run, but costs time in the long run. Any Saber card you obtain now and spend on a Lancer for 5/6 of its value could have been saved for a future Saber you obtain and spent for 100% of its value.

For players that are in a perpetual backlog, there's never a reason to spend experience cards on non-matching classes. And being in a perpetual backlog is most definitely not an exclusively whale thing. All of my free-to-play and minnow friends from work on the NA servers also have a perpetual backlog; theirs is just shorter than mine, but that doesn't change the fact that there's always a character of a particular class next in line.

 

2 hours ago, The Priest said:

I said it was not much but I don't see why the game has to give you enough EXP to max a 5-star during an event because that's what the average player won't do.

That's just the meter stick I'm using for reference.

"The width of your smartphone", for example, is typically a much easier measurement to quickly picture than "3 inches".

"One third of the experience needed to level a 5-star" is also an easier measurement to quickly picture than "133 experience cards" and highlights how small of a value it actually is for people not familiar with the game.

 

2 hours ago, The Priest said:

If anything that means that players are treated equally in regards of effort.

Being equal to other players has nothing to do with my argument.

Being equal to your peers in a downtown high-rise and being equal to your peers in the inner-city slum is still being equal to your peers.

It makes sense that having three times the amount of stuff should require about three times the amount of effort. That's fine when it's the difference between 1 hour twice a week and 2 hours three times a week, but something is off when it's the difference between 2 hours every day of the week and 6 hours every day of the week.

 

2 hours ago, The Priest said:

I don't understand how you didn't drop the game after getting some of your first SSRs because by that point you would understand the nature of the game and it's apparent you don't like it.

I like the game. I like using the characters that I have already leveled. I don't like the fact that three quarters of my box has to sit there being usable because it costs too much time to make them usable.

 

I believe the proper balance is that rudimentary effort should be necessary to make a unit minimally usable, and dedicated effort should be reserved for optimization. FGO's balance problem is that it takes dedicated effort to make a unit minimally usable and dedicated effort again for optimization.

Again, hopefully, the upcoming 5-star experience cards will help reduce the problem a bit if they aren't too hard to obtain.

 

I'm not too sold on dropping units to 1 or 2 stars in a separate pool. Sub-3-star rarities are an outdated relic of borrowing a mechanic from other games that doesn't work very well in this game.

Characters pulled out of the 3-to-4-star pool should just remain 3-to-4 stars in their new pool.

 

EDIT: One thing I'd like that I remembered while driving home.

Make pitybreakers only reset the 5-star summon rate, not also the focus summon rate. Pulling a focus character should still reset both, though.

 

EDIT2: @The Priest

I think you're vastly overestimating my perceived severity of the issue I'm describing. It's an inconvenience and annoyance for me, but it is far from being a deal-breaker.

Edited November 7, 2018 by Ice Dragon

[Shiki]

3 hours ago, Ice Dragon said:

considering a character absolutely needs to be decently leveled just to be usable

3rd Ascension gives you complete skill access, anything beyond that is raw stats gain in HP and Atk. That is only necessary for challenge quests but only a bonus for farming and regular quests.
That's only Level 70 for SSR Servants, the same effort as maxing out a R Servant. You're vastly exaggerating the amount of work here that you need to do.
Or do you have every single character in Heroes at 5* rarity?

3 hours ago, Ice Dragon said:

For players that are in a perpetual backlog, there's never a reason to spend experience cards on non-matching classes. And being in a perpetual backlog is most definitely not an exclusively whale thing.

While I don't disagree this can be fixed by choosing your backlog carefully instead of running the mentality "let's have everything max-leveled because reasons". Which leads into:

3 hours ago, Ice Dragon said:

I don't like the fact that three quarters of my box has to sit there being usable because it costs too much time to make them usable.

Because you can't invest the time to make them useable. That's obvious if you try to reach max-level everything.
Like your complaint isn't really a complaint for me. It's basic logic to pick priorities and set aside the others.
You treat your backlog as annoyance, I only see more potential which one can commit to once you're done with your current projects.

3 hours ago, Ice Dragon said:

but something is off when it's the difference between 2 hours every day of the week and 6 hours every day of the week.

Just because one job only lasts 2 hours doesn't mean something is wrong with the 6 hour job.
You dislike the 6 hour job only because it takes longer which you are free to do so.

3 hours ago, Ice Dragon said:

dedicated effort should be reserved for optimization. FGO's balance problem is that it takes dedicated effort to make a unit minimally usable and dedicated effort again for optimization.

Effort? Throwing money at a game like FEH is effort? I take FGO's grinding as effort then, thank you very much.
More effort doesn't equal wrong.

3 hours ago, Ice Dragon said:

I think you're vastly overestimating my perceived severity of the issue I'm describing. It's an inconvenience and annoyance for me, but it is far from being a deal-breaker.

Funny because the way you describe your experiences makes me question why you didn't dump it.

Guess I don't understand your whale mentality then. Might as well drop this before eclipse passes by with the scythe.

Edited November 7, 2018 by The Priest

[Ice Dragon]

5 minutes ago, The Priest said:

Or do you have every single character in Heroes at 5* rarity?

I'm past 90% of the cast, at least.

 

Spoiler

7 minutes ago, The Priest said:

It's basic logic to pick priorities and set aside the others.

What exactly makes you think I'm not doing this? Having priorities gives structure to the task, but doesn't make it go by any faster.

 

16 minutes ago, The Priest said:

Because you can't invest the time to make them useable. That's obvious if you try to reach max-level everything.

Where I'm at, there's no point in not max-leveling things when my box already has so many max-leveled characters. I'm almost at the point where I have 3 single-target and 3 multi-target 4-star-or-higher characters of every standard class, which means anything new that I level is there to give me more choices rather than to fill holes.

I'm never going to pick a non-max-leveled character over a max-leveled character for anything other than Setsubun or event bonuses. Where I'm at, I'm better off finishing off each character I start instead of half-assing the entire rest of my box.

 

8 minutes ago, The Priest said:

Just because one job only lasts 2 hours doesn't mean something is wrong with the 6 hour job.
You dislike the 6 hour job only because it takes longer.

I dislike the 6-hour job because it's exactly the same as the 2-hour job, but three times as long and just as boring.

It wouldn't be a problem if it were enjoyable or even just engaging, but triple NPing glowing hands for 2 hours straight is horrendously monotonous. At least the Special Training maps in Heroes actually make me do something and even occasionally make me strategize my moves to prevent my babysitters from stealing kills. I don't mind spending 2 hours straight of running Special Training maps (though 6 hours is probably still too much).

 

18 minutes ago, The Priest said:

Effort? Throwing money at a game like FEH is effort? I take FGO's grinding as effort then, thank you very much.

When the hell did I ever mention Heroes?

No, I know exactly where you're pulling this out at me from. You probably didn't bother to read any of my posts from before you got involved with this argument and you assume that I think Heroes's optimization requirements are better than FGO's. They're not.

To save you the trouble, I'll just quote myself for you here:

On 11/5/2018 at 1:18 PM, Ice Dragon said:

The second is due to what I see as a poor balance between luck and effort in advancing through this game, and this is somewhat influenced by my experience with Fate/Grand Order (which kind of has poor balance in the opposite direction). One of the problems I see with Heroes is the fact that "advancement" in this game hinges on a player's ability to obtain new characters and new skills to teach those characters. What makes this a problem is that both of these are tied to the gacha mechanic. No amount of effort will allow you to obtain more skill fodder once you've exhausted all of the game's permanent free orbs; you simply have to wait until more free orbs become available (or buy more orbs).

FGO has too much reliance on effort for making characters usable and should either reduce leveling requirements or increase the availability of experience cards. Heroes has too much reliance on luck for making characters optimized and should implement means of allowing players to use effort to acquire skill fodder.

 

There was something else I felt the need to mention that's actually on-topic in this thread while I was hanging out in the new banner thread, but typing up this post has made me forget what it was. I'll remember what it was eventually... I think.

[Sayyyaka]

On 11/5/2018 at 2:11 PM, Jingle Bells said:

Still wondering why there isn't a 5* card for more than 3 years?

Funny that this was mentioned but they actually just added 5* exp cards to the game, supposedly having triple the experience as a 4* card.  

While I do prefer FGO's method of doing things, as it gives a sense of progression I feel FEH heavily lacks, I would not recommend dropping that on the playerbase seeing as it would alienate most involved.

But onto the topic at hand: The first thing I'd do is add an actual decent reason for friends to exist, an FP/support point system.  In FGO and similar games you gain points when you use a friend's Servant that you can use to roll in a FP gacha full of low rarity characters and items.  Not only could you add more obsolete/low priority fodder units into this gacha, but it could clear up the pool of characters that we use orbs on.

Also DEMOTE MORE UNITS.

The summoning pool is easily one of my least favourite things about FEH.  It makes you forget that this game has otherwise good rates when you spend a whole month rolling for Halloween Myrrh only to get 4 off-focus red units and no Myrrh.  I'll be honest and say I don't actually know if the awful red rates are due to the diluted summoning pool, but it's my biggest guess.

It's even worse because character progression is locked behind skills that you have to roll for.  Even IF you get that one unit you always wanted, your journey doesn't end there.  There are certainly good f2p fodder that IS have given us, but with modes like Blessed Gardens asking you to have multiple teams of fully built units, that doesn't leave much room to fodder anyone. Skill Inheritance is the meat of this game and it's severely limited by IS' (admittedly clever) decision to lock everything behind an orb paywall.

Seriously though IS, who the hell is whaling for Luke and Gray so hard that makes you want to keep them at 5* so badly?

[Icelerate]

On 05/11/2018 at 6:19 PM, Florete said:

• Introduce a new unit type: Cavalry armor. Has properties of both cavalry and armor with 3 move and can move over terrain unhindered. They have 200 BST, can be merged up to +20, and the summon rate for them is locked at 1%, no pity rate. They also have two seal slots.
• Demote all male units to 3-4* except Reinhardt, who is now 5* locked.
• All new units added to the game are female, including the above-mentioned cavalry armors, the first of which is a new Lyn alt.
• Replace orbs in quests with feathers, medals, badges, etc.
• New feature: summoner crowns can now permanently remove a 3-4* unit from your summoning pool. However, it is impossible to remove every 3-4* unit from the summoning pool to prevent players from only have 5* units left.
• Summoner crowns can also be used to purchase individual manuals of any 3-4* summonable unit.
• Start adding crossover characters from other mobile games like Fate/GO, Granblue Fantasy, Millennium War Aigis, Kantai Collection, etc.
• CYL3 will only feature characters who are already present in Heroes. While we won't say it, this is because we are not planning on adding any more old units to the game, instead adding only alts of existing characters and new female characters from upcoming games.

That's all for now, but I think this is pretty solid.

The scary thing is that some of these points might actually be implemented in the future, at least to some extent. 

[Lord-Zero]

How about “Paid Gacha” banners? You use paid orbs and you’re guaranteed to get a focus units. It could also be taking a step further and have the paid banners for very focus unit kinda like Danmemo so...let’s say that you just want Mikoto, fork over $20 worth of orbs on her paid banner and you can get her with neutral IVs guaranteed. It’d be available only once so once you paid for it, the banner will be gone but at the very least you got your Mikoto. 

Also, free Reinhardt for everyone. Know that when things get tough, The Reinhardt has your back. 

[XRay]

4 minutes ago, Lord-Zero said:

How about “Paid Gacha” banners? You use paid orbs and you’re guaranteed to get a focus units. It could also be taking a step further and have the paid banners for very focus unit kinda like Danmemo so...let’s say that you just want Mikoto, fork over $20 worth of orbs on her paid banner and you can get her with neutral IVs guaranteed. It’d be available only once so once you paid for it, the banner will be gone but at the very least you got your Mikoto. 

That is a good idea, so it is like free Focus for Brave units, except it is not free but you can pick all Focus units?

[Lord-Zero]

10 minutes ago, XRay said:

That is a good idea, so it is like free Focus for Brave units, except it is not free but you can pick all Focus units?

Similar. You can only pick one as a guaranteed Focus unit. They could go and have a “paid” banner for all 4 units but that would be a little too generous. 

[XRay]

7 minutes ago, Lord-Zero said:

They could go and have a “paid” banner for all 4 units but that would be a little too generous.

Maybe they should do some market research and see if doing that will bring them more or reduce revenue.

I skip a lot of Foci because I do not want to waste Orbs obtaining certain units because it is not guaranteed and I rather just have them pity break me down the line instead. However, if they gave me the opportunity to get one that is guaranteed, I think I will spend $60 or $80 just to get a copy of each of them.

Like for example, I am not going to spend any money on the upcoming Adrift Focus, but if they gave me option to spend $80 to obtain a copy of each Focus unit, then I think I might actually spend money for that.

If $20 for each character is too low, I think I am willing to pay up to around $40 or $50 each for a guaranteed copy.

Edited November 7, 2018 by XRay