What would you add to an additional difficulty mode?

[Fabulously Olivier]

The game currently does a good job of difficulty during your first few playthroughs, and transitioning that to an additional playthrough or two leveling from 60-120 in Maddening. What it doesn't offer is a mode designed to be difficult at max level in NG+++.

 

So what would you do to design such a mode? In addition to just increasing enemy levels and aggression, I mean.

 

I've got a few ideas:

 

* Spawn additional enemy officers.

* Spawn ambushes at priority forts and important npcs, at least once per side mission and several times per main mission. Make use of those defend and guard passives, and healing bonuses!

* Increase enemy weapon triangle advantage against you by one tier.

* Increase costs of CAs/Spells, and/or decrease their damage output. 

 

As for rewards, new weapon attributes should do it. Maybe even three attribute weapons or a new tier of weapon. Perhaps Relic/Sacred weapon scrolls like the first FEW had. Stat boosters are also an option.

[ZanaLyrander]

Additional enemies and more attacks on your bases would be a definite plus, especially the latter one. There really aren't enough objectives that involve defense, you're almost always on the attack, and I personally have always enjoy hold the line scenarios. Plus, as you say, it'd be good to get some more use out of the defense unique tactical abilities. 

I'm a bit less certain about the other two suggestions though, especially nerfing CA/Spells. That sounds more like a rebalance of the game than something you'd tack on to a specific difficulty setting. Going through Easy, Normal, Hard, Maddening, and then having them suddenly change the rules for the last difficulty setting sounds unpleasant. 

Other than that... honestly, it's hard to think of things I'd like to see added that aren't just changes I'd like to see to the whole game rather than just one difficulty setting.

[Outlander]

I would love more of a necessity for defense and healing. I remember that being a big part of the first FEW and wish they could capture that magical balance again that some of the best maps in that game had.

[Sire]

Sadly, I think Maddening is already the cap, or at least late-game Maddening.
-- Enemies are already aggressive and carry maxed out forged weapons.

I guess the argument can be made for a pure "Post-Game, Maxed Stats" difficulty, that basically makes every battle similar to the Gatekeeper Paralogue (Maddening) in terms of difficulty.
-- One easy addition aside from increased stats is to increase the enemy weapon advantage by a tier, as already suggested. It may even be interesting to see important characters get a "battalion" of their own, so they get an extra advantage that may not be related to their primary weapon. // The downside is that this mostly just punishes players who use battalions to negate disadvantages, as those who play who keep the weapon triangle in mind (seeking advantage wherever possible) won't really see much change with this.
-- However, the question is if this mode is even worth the development time to make. How many people are going to play through all routes and make sure all characters are maxed out? Most players may just play through one route and call it a day.

As for adding more enemy officers/enemy attacks, this would be nice to see. At the moment, going pure offense is the way to go and there's no real need to be defensive. // The only real counterpoint for this is the S-Ranks for time, and a more drawn out battle of "Back and Forth" of capturing strongholds may be undesirable for some. Also, I don't think many of the maps are designed with a "back-and-forth" conflict in mind.
-- I know they already have a system in place to spawn officers from strongholds (some missions a trio of Bandits spawn, others spawn allied officers to help, and so on). The main difficulty here is going on a scenario-by-scenario basis and setting everything up. // Is it every enemy stronghold that spawns foes, just the main HQ, is it map-specific?...
== For a small rant, there aren't any real good defense missions as I've seen maps where enemies just suddenly take over a stronghold without fighting for it as soon as a certain unit reaches the area, as well as some "defense missions" going off of a timer instead of the health of the defending stronghold officer. (Actually, the Defend Edelgard mission may be one of the better ones, but that's guarding a character, not a location.)
-- However, there is another question here regarding development time. If this is related to a new difficulty, does one go back and mess around with each scenario to make these spawns work? Personally, a new route where these mechanics are the norm may be a better use of time instead of trying to force it onto existing scenarios.

Now, for making Combat Arts/Magic weaker/more expensive, I am against.
-- I'm on the mindset of making enemies stronger is a better way to handle difficulty, instead of nerfing the player. I personally dislike it when games make a higher difficulty and then say "Oh, your attacks now cost more stamina than normal too, have fun!" (Dragon's Dogma)

[Pie Burritos]

I'm not especially opposed to specific difficulties harshly limiting your resources, but I am against it being a NG+ thing. I feel like with NG+ you should always just be getting more and more and losing something during the transition to NG+ just feels weird. Of course, this is just a sentiment rather than anything concrete, but I feel that most people would probably share that sentiment.

That being said, combat arts and magic are just way too strong and honestly kind of kill the game for me. Ok, killing the game is a bit of an overstatement but I'd like the game better if it were more combo centric with arts to supplement rather than just letting arts destroy everything with combos as the supplement. I'd love to see them nerfed into the ground. But it would be weird to have them nerfed for just the last difficulty for NG+ so I wouldn't actually want to see it happen.

[Armchair General]

Needs more aggressive AI. I'm playing on Hard and all it takes to kill them is to stay off to their sides or directly behind them.

[Fabulously Olivier]

1 hour ago, Pie Burritos said:

I'm not especially opposed to specific difficulties harshly limiting your resources, but I am against it being a NG+ thing. I feel like with NG+ you should always just be getting more and more and losing something during the transition to NG+ just feels weird. Of course, this is just a sentiment rather than anything concrete, but I feel that most people would probably share that sentiment.

That being said, combat arts and magic are just way too strong and honestly kind of kill the game for me. Ok, killing the game is a bit of an overstatement but I'd like the game better if it were more combo centric with arts to supplement rather than just letting arts destroy everything with combos as the supplement. I'd love to see them nerfed into the ground. But it would be weird to have them nerfed for just the last difficulty for NG+ so I wouldn't actually want to see it happen.

It's not that different to gold/xp being reduced in harder difficulties of mainline FE, or auxiliary battles being limited in Three Houses. It's a similar principle of a resource limited for the sake of gameplay.

 

Edit:

Warriors Orochi 4 actually lets you do custom challenge toggles including reduced or removed elemental effect procs, for example. And would increase rewards for it.

Edited August 3, 2022 by Fabulously Olivier

[Morgan--Grandmaster]

Give all enemies higher-ranked weapons and equipment, reorganize enemy squads, and implement a Mirror mode

Edited August 3, 2022 by Morgan--Grandmaster

[Dark Holy Elf]

38 minutes ago, Fabulously Olivier said:

It's not that different to gold/xp being reduced in harder difficulties of mainline FE, or auxiliary battles being limited in Three Houses. It's a similar principle of a resource limited for the sake of gameplay.

 

I would consider those a bit different. Auxillary battle limits basically make it harder to grind, since grinding is basically a "get out of difficulty free" card in most RPGs and games that take after them. Reducing exp from enemies is generally a change that is just meant to offset the fact that you fight more enemies; it rarely ends up making the player be significantly lower-levelled / less powerful. Your proposed nerfs would be more similar to, for instance, halving spell uses and weapon uses for PCs across the board, which would definitely have a different feel. Or, to take something FE has actually done, reducing your deployment slots as in FE7's hard modes. I hated that, and apparently many other people did too, since it never came back.

That said I don't think your proposed idea is a bad one, necessarily, for the simple reason that spell/CA uses are clearly balanced around the first playthrough, and it's supposed to feel satisfying that you get more and more methods to extend them as the game goes on. In particular, there's that core choice of "do I forge weapons for power or durability". Obviously by the time you have heavily forged weapons in the +50 to +100 range, along with the cooking effects which reduce them and the fact that CAs themselves go down in cost as they level up, you're suddenly going to have way more uses than what the earlier stretches were balanced around. So arguably a mode designed around maxed-out characters could afford to rebalance this.

I don't really have too much interest in this mode myself, simply because I think balancing things for NG+ is a bit of a fool's errand on average, especially with the power ceiling this game has. Additionally, I feel very confident in saying that there are far more players who like grinding for the feeling of being more powerful than grinding with the goal of still finding challenges at the end of said grind, so I expect we'll get a raised ceiling for player power (higher level/stat cap, etc.) and that will make it even harder to balance a difficulty.

[Archeleon]

I would focus on making the combat more difficult and leaving the other aspects of the game out of it, as it would just be a chore. Giving enemies abilities that make them more threatening, higher weapon advantages, more varied enemy types, maybe making monsters more common.

[IonicAmalgam]

On 8/3/2022 at 8:57 AM, Archeleon said:

I would focus on making the combat more difficult and leaving the other aspects of the game out of it, as it would just be a chore. Giving enemies abilities that make them more threatening, higher weapon advantages, more varied enemy types, maybe making monsters more common.

Friendly AI is pretty terrible at fighting monsters as is, not sure if increasing it would increase difficulty per say.