How does Effective Dmg work in this game?

[lemurmoo]

I've often noticed that units, especially in Maddening, that do very little damage will not find themselves do a whole lot more damage with effective weapons. At most some unit that does like 3-4 dmg to an armored unit will do like 13 dmg with an armorslayer. Of course Wind magic against the generally magical tanky fliers basically do very similarly low dmg to any other magic. 

I'm talking mostly in feels because I haven't taken any note of actual numbers, and I will try to experiment unless an answer is handily out there. So does anybody know for sure as to how Effective Damage works?

The only real mention I've seen is that in the regular damage calc, you do (wep might * effective multiplier) without specifying what that multiplier is.

[hdawgsizzle]

19 minutes ago, lemurmoo said:

I've often noticed that units, especially in Maddening, that do very little damage will not find themselves do a whole lot more damage with effective weapons. At most some unit that does like 3-4 dmg to an armored unit will do like 13 dmg with an armorslayer. Of course Wind magic against the generally magical tanky fliers basically do very similarly low dmg to any other magic. 

I'm talking mostly in feels because I haven't taken any note of actual numbers, and I will try to experiment unless an answer is handily out there. So does anybody know for sure as to how Effective Damage works?

The only real mention I've seen is that in the regular damage calc, you do (wep might * effective multiplier) without specifying what that multiplier is.

Effective Damage triples weapon might. On Maddening, so many of the enemies are so tanky that that's often not enough to one shot, considering that most of these weapons unforged only start with 8 or 9 mt.

The one that really stands out is the Radiant Bow, which unforged starts with 19 mt, and can go all the way up to 24 mt - that's going to kill most fliers, even coming from units with low mag. The caveat is that because it runs on magic, there's not that many units that can really make that much use of it long term. 

The other one with a ton of mt is the Hurricane Axe, which starts with 20 mt, though it's a smash weapon that runs off magic and doesn't have the best hit - in other words, it's hard to find a unit that actually wants to wield it. 

Some of the effective weaponry from engages actually have a decent amount of mt on them - weapons like Mulagir from Lyn and Ike's Hammer can actually put a pretty good dent in enemies

Hope this helps!

[lemurmoo]

Nice, I guess the answer was a lot simpler than I thought. 

Yes, Radiant Bow is basically the only thing keeping Fogado relevant for me. He actually has magic stats, and he seemingly exists to carry Radiant Bow and genuinely destroy majority of the non-effective resisting fliers in the game.

On the topic at hand, tripling might is definitely not as good as it sounds, generally because money is limited, and merely criting potentially ends up being more damage >.>. Gonna have to think hard about forging up a halberd though. Magic destroys armor units, but horse units don't always have a weakness

Edited February 14, 2023 by lemurmoo

[hdawgsizzle]

21 minutes ago, lemurmoo said:

Yes, Radiant Bow is basically the only thing keeping Fogado relevant for me. He actually has magic stats, and he seemingly exists to carry Radiant Bow and genuinely destroy majority of the non-effective resisting fliers in the game.

That's basically how it was for me - a forged Radiant Bow can keep him relevant for a very long time, and only started to catch up with him ~Ch 24, where he stopped being able to one shot the high res Griffin Knights. Warrior Anna is really the only other unit that comes to mind as a good Radiant Bow user, though I'm sure someone will play around with it and find some other unit that can do it

I would be interested if they ever made a specifically anti-cavalry/flier/armor/dragon/etc class or unit - give them a skill that adds 2 or 3 extra points of mt, or maybe a skill that does 3.5x mt instead of 3x... there's a few ways they could implement and balance it

[BloodRonin]

To add, as someone who is on their 3rd maddening run (which RNG runs for level ups are really fun btw)

The magic weapons in general are crazy good in this game. Levin sword and Radiant Bow are just too good, even on units with little magic.  Magics in general seems really strong in this game. My 3rd run is currently magic only classes. 

To add another, true damage skills really make a big difference in this game. I started to really choose where I place certain units to proc their personal or class skills. 

[Shadow Mir]

6 hours ago, hdawgsizzle said:

Some of the effective weaponry from engages actually have a decent amount of mt on them - weapons like Mulagir from Lyn and Ike's Hammer can actually put a pretty good dent in enemies

On that note, IMHO the only good effective weapons in this game are the ones you get access to when engaging. Look at Sigurd's Ridersbane vs the normal one for an example.

[Ragnell17]

On hard mode, I find that enemy armors high defense really hurt the armorslayer and hammer. They'll still chunk out damage, but seldomly ORKO unlike tomes and magic weapons which is the way to go. Micaiah's Thani is great if you're using Micaiah on someone without high magic. A bit overkill on dedicated mages tho.

The Ridersbane however I find still useful as most Calvary's def isn't quite as good as armors. However it isn't always necessary to use as normal weapons can still take care of them fine.

Wyrmslayer is a lot more niche but nice to have for wyvern riders and the big dragons. Though often a bow is better for fliers, still nice to have for swordies.

 

[FashionEmblem]

Characters who can double with the Ridersbane get mileage out of that one, but it's heavy to make that difficult to pull off. Hammers and Armorslayers have a tough time killing because armor defense is obscene in maddening, but they actually do SOME damage in case your mage can't one round them. It's pretty easy for a magic weapon, even off a mediocre magic stat, to do more damage than an armor effective weapon.

Thing that makes effectiveness annoying to me is on enemies the UI only displays attack stat instead of MT. In the convoy I know you can toggle between those, but I don't think you can on the enemy details screen? Me sitting here with a calculator trying to tell if my character can survive one round of combat.

[lenticular]

My experience with effective weapons is that they are pretty decent in the early game, but fall off heavily.

As an example, consider a poleaxe. That has 8 base might, which means an effective 24 might against cavalry. Your best regular weapon at that point might be a steel axe, with a might of 13. The poleaxe is giving you an extra 11 points of might. That's pretty good.

But then as the game progresses, you upgrade steel to silver, you forge your weapons, you engrave them. A silver axe +3 with a Marth engraving (for instance) has a might of 21. You're only getting +3 might from using the poleaxe, which is much less enticing. And in return the silver axe has 25 more hit, 10 more crit, 5 more avoid, and 5 more dodge. And it's far better against non-cavalry units in the subsequent enemy phase. And it doesn't cost an inventory slot.

And sure, it is possible to upgrade the poleaxe as well but it's never felt worth it to me. The highest might possible would be to upgrade it to +5 and give it an Ike engraving, which would bring it to 16 might, which is 48 effective might against cavalry. And that's pretty great. Except that I really don't want to be spending all of those resources on a weapon that's only going to be good against a fairly small subset of enemies. Which means that most of my effective weapons aren't improving from when I first get them, whereas my other weapons are and so are the enemy units I'm fighting.

[FashionEmblem]

I want to add on that Poleaxes are the worst effective weapon in my experience. They are inaccurate similar to Hammers, but Hammers are targeting low speed low avoid armors. My hit rates on Jade with a Poleaxe against cavalry were like mid 60's when she joined (Chapter 10). One tier of refinement would have raised this to low 70's, but why bother when you can promote her to Great Knight and replace it with a Ridersbane in a couple of chapters. Regarding that Ridersbane, Wyvern!Chloé has built up enough build and speed to double and easily one-round with Ridersbane in Chapter 17 while Jade, Amber, and Rosado all do near 1HKO (i.e., would be 1HKO with a little refining, or just some chain attack(s), but I have been using it to set up kills as well).

Regarding investment, I'd say it's cheap and worthwhile to refine all these weapons to +1 to improve their hit rate by 5. Beyond that I haven't really bothered—I think 3-range, killer, steel, silver (including tier-3 tomes), and non-axe magic weapons are a better place to sink ingots into. I'm still carrying around some anti-armor weapons because armors have very high HP and mages sometimes leave them with a sliver of health and non-effective physical weapons often do literal 0 damage. I imagine this is to encourage chain attacks, or maybe it's a sign that I need to refine my tomes and other weapons more.

Edited February 15, 2023 by FashionEmblem

[Galap]

To start with, Im playing on Maddening, and I don't really know how this translates to other difficulties.

Refining the effective weapons I think is a pretty good idea-- every might point you put into them translates to 3 extra against their favored enemy, and they tend to not be so expensive to refine. I didn't go really far with them but did bump a couple of them up a notch or two.

That said, I have a bit of a mixed opinion on the anti-armor weapons. The armor guys have such high defence that the armorslayer and hammer will still not even do that much damage against them, while their bad resistance and speed will let them usually get oneshot by magic. That said, their really high defence  means that the armor weapons are really the only way for physical attackers to damage them at all. 

The anti-horse weapons on the other hand are more important. the horse units tend to be a lot faster and have a lot more resistance, while still having really high defence (the dog riders are even worse). Basically they're pretty tough enemies in general, and the ridersbane and pole axe are the thing that bites into them the most. The pole axe indeed suffers from poor accuracy but there are a lot of maps that throw a TON of mounted units at you (for example, chapter 19, Ike paralogue, Leaf paralogue, Lyn paralogue) and you'll be happy to take anything you can get.

[Shadow Mir]

1 hour ago, Galap said:

while their bad resistance and speed will let them usually get oneshot by magic.

I'm not sure about that - I've been watching some maddening runs on Youtube, and one-rounding armors with magic doesn't happen often. Heck, I'm only on hard, and Celine doesn't even come close now after I got jacked. (But last I checked, she only has 10 magic at level 12 or so, so maybe I just got screwed.)

Edited February 16, 2023 by Shadow Mir

[link16hit]

On 2/16/2023 at 12:46 PM, Shadow Mir said:

I'm not sure about that - I've been watching some maddening runs on Youtube, and one-rounding armors with magic doesn't happen often. Heck, I'm only on hard, and Celine doesn't even come close now after I got jacked. (But last I checked, she only has 10 magic at level 12 or so, so maybe I just got screwed.)

10 magic at 12? screwed. Base magic is 9 and she got like 40% magic growth (lvl 5). My Celine could double if she use Celica echo ability (she gain a 10% bns dmg) or close to Alear. mine has mag 11 lvl 11 but I play maddening in fixed mode...

[CompteSecours]

His Celine is not that screwed tbh.

Lvl10 on Maddening, she only has 11.