Veyle should have joined in the mid-game

[AnonymousSpeed]

This post/opinion is made entirely with gameplay considerations in mind and with absolute disregard for the narrative. I'm not posting a spoiler warning because Veyle's veil is very thin.

The main reason is really just because of Dragon-type Emblem bonuses. With Alear being your only potential dragon for most of the game, you have no way to use those bonuses if Alear has been reclassed. There are also some Emblem effects which just aren't good on Alear. Celica has really interesting type bonuses with dragons, but you won't get to see these for very long because Alear has such poor magic.

What I'm basically saying is that having a second dragon with a different stat-line makes for more interesting and complete utilization of the type-bonus system once Veyle actually does join, and I would like that to start earlier on.

Maybe the DLC fixes this, I don't know. This post is for vanilla.

[Armchair General]

3 hours ago, AnonymousSpeed said:

Maybe the DLC fixes this, I don't know

It actually does, provided that you clear the xenologue

[MisterIceTeaPeach]

Unfortunately Veyle was a walking target in my playthrough (on lowest difficulty).

Her low speed and defense made it possible to be 1RKO's by enemies with physical weapons.

She was a great finisher, but no unit I wanted to carry through the rough endgame.

...Still I couldn't resist her cuteness and so used her anyways.

[Saint Rubenio]

There are a few things in the game that feel like DLC bait to me. Stuff like all Emblems disappearing in chapter 11 but the DLC bracelets remaining, or DLC giving you proficiencies that you can't obtain for half the game, or experience gains being low but the DLC giving you 7 free maps worth of experience that, unlike the base game paralogues, scale to your level.

I hadn't thought of this, but... yeah, this does feel like one such case. Veyle works well from a story and metagame perspective as the final unit, but the only other dragon is Alear, and Alear's starting class is godawful and doesn't even feel tailored to them and their nonexistent magic. Want them out of it? Well, go ahead and reclass! Just pick up the DLC characters and you'll get another dragon! Not only that, proper dragon that can transform! With dragonstones! Buy the DLC today for only 30 moneys!

I'd have Engage listed as my favorite FE in a heartbeat if it wasn't still missing from the list (mods when am I gonna get to do that) but I hate how it handles the DLC. So much of it feels like unbalanced pay2win garbage, and there are certain bits of the base game's design that feel directly intended to make you buy the DLC - or rather, the DLC feels intended to nullify certain bits of the base game's design. Especially the uneven proficiency distribution. It's too arbitrary to work as a balancing measure, and Tiki giving arts (which are otherwise locked to Byleth all the way in chapter 15) even though it makes absolutely no sense for her to do so is pretty blatant.

Tl;dr: Yeah they want you to buy the DLC.

[Fabulously Olivier]

39 minutes ago, Saint Rubenio said:

There are a few things in the game that feel like DLC bait to me. Stuff like all Emblems disappearing in chapter 11 but the DLC bracelets remaining, or DLC giving you proficiencies that you can't obtain for half the game, or experience gains being low but the DLC giving you 7 free maps worth of experience that, unlike the base game paralogues, scale to your level.

I mean, I have no idea what Maddening is like (no thanks!), but my experience on Hard is that exp felt perfectly distributed. I felt like my units were keeping up nicely with no grinding, and the dlc actually overleveled them. I haven't been able to say that for any game in the series since Awakening reintroduced grinding maps.

[Saint Rubenio]

36 minutes ago, Fabulously Olivier said:

I mean, I have no idea what Maddening is like (no thanks!), but my experience on Hard is that exp felt perfectly distributed. I felt like my units were keeping up nicely with no grinding, and the dlc actually overleveled them. I haven't been able to say that for any game in the series since Awakening reintroduced grinding maps.

Oh don't get me wrong, I find the base game's progression in most aspects to be pretty excellent (except for, again, the proficiency distribution). I'm going through my first maddening run right now, DLC-less (with a minor allowance of, guess what? DLC Emblem proficiencies) and while I do feel the low EXP gains, it still feels well balanced. Heck, it's not stopped me from maintaining my memetastic High Priest Vandad in the team up to chapter 20. If he can be made to kill things and contribute long-term, anyone can!

That's why I said the DLC feels designed to nullify some parts of Engage's design rather than the other way around. Yeah, experience gains are fine because the game is designed with them in mind... But then the DLC just gives you the option to overlevel at any point of the game. Usually that's what skirmishes are for, but they are so insanely hard (and limited, in maddening) that they don't serve that purpose. You wanna steamroll, change the difficulty to normal or pay up!

I understand there are people who enjoy having the option to break the game and juggernaut to their hearts content (which, by the way, I find perfectly fine as long as it's only an option), but it feels really scummy to lock it behind a paywall, alongside the ability to freely reclass or change Alear's class without losing dragon bonuses until chapter 23.

[Jotari]

10 hours ago, AnonymousSpeed said:

This post/opinion is made entirely with gameplay considerations in mind and with absolute disregard for the narrative. I'm not posting a spoiler warning because Veyle's veil is very thin.

The main reason is really just because of Dragon-type Emblem bonuses. With Alear being your only potential dragon for most of the game, you have no way to use those bonuses if Alear has been reclassed. There are also some Emblem effects which just aren't good on Alear. Celica has really interesting type bonuses with dragons, but you won't get to see these for very long because Alear has such poor magic.

What I'm basically saying is that having a second dragon with a different stat-line makes for more interesting and complete utilization of the type-bonus system once Veyle actually does join, and I would like that to start earlier on.

Maybe the DLC fixes this, I don't know. This post is for vanilla.

Alear actually does have good magic. Their natural growth is 20% which is only slightly lower than most mages who hover between 25%-30% (Citrene is the minax outlier at 40%)....the problem is the Divine Dragon class, which gives 0% in magic despite giving 10-15% in everything else (well only 5% build). It's a general jack of all trades class that just misses an entire suit 😞

In other words Alear should make a pretty okay mage if you're in the mood for reclassing...but since the dragon type is attached to the class and not character it means you're out of look if you want to make use of Celica's dragon bonuses on Alear.

[BloodRonin]

Since Alear is a "dragon" in my opinion the dragon bonuses should be toed to him on any class he goes. 

[Jotari]

5 minutes ago, BloodRonin said:

Since Alear is a "dragon" in my opinion the dragon bonuses should be toed to him on any class he goes. 

It'd be kind of interesting if Alear couldn't get the class type bonuses of other classes because Dragon is used instead. Though that would completely kill flying in particular.

[BloodRonin]

7 minutes ago, Jotari said:

It'd be kind of interesting if Alear couldn't get the class type bonuses of other classes because Dragon is used instead. Though that would completely kill flying in particular.

I don't think it would kill flying. He would still gain the movement and bow weakness/lose terrain. But it would allow for some really great class combos. 

I personally wish they would have gone the awakening route and allowed you to customize him more similar to Robin.

[Jotari]

4 minutes ago, BloodRonin said:

I don't think it would kill flying. He would still gain the movement and bow weakness/lose terrain.

Yeah, but, like...bow weakness and losing terrain isn't exactly good.

[BloodRonin]

3 hours ago, Jotari said:

Yeah, but, like...bow weakness and losing terrain isn't exactly good.

Yea, but besides the movement, what does flying do for alear in terms of flying bonuses? The dragon bonuses are way better than flying imo

[lenticular]

6 hours ago, Fabulously Olivier said:

I mean, I have no idea what Maddening is like (no thanks!), but my experience on Hard is that exp felt perfectly distributed. I felt like my units were keeping up nicely with no grinding, and the dlc actually overleveled them. I haven't been able to say that for any game in the series since Awakening reintroduced grinding maps.

Interesting. That wasn't my experience at all. I found the experience curve on hard (without DLC) very wonky. It started off reasonably, but then once we started recruiting pre-promotes, they were vastly outclassing my older units, and I felt that I had to constantly be cycling out my old units for the new ones whether I wanted to or not, just to scramble to keep up. But then as the game progressed and paralogues started to be available, I got enough xp from clearing them that I ended up getting over-levelled and the late game was a snooze-fest. I wonder what differences in play-style or approach led to such wildly different experiences.

7 hours ago, Saint Rubenio said:

Tl;dr: Yeah they want you to buy the DLC.

I definitely had that feeling too. Just various little points of friction that feel like they were there on purpose just so they can be "solved" by the DLC. It has the opposite effect on me, since it just makes me not like the game as much and not want to buy anything else for it. I'm sure it works overall, though, since game publishers continue to do it.

As for the possibility of earlier Veyle, I think that my preferred solution would just be to make Alear (and their unique class) better. My solution would be to make a bunch of different versions of their promoted class so you can choose their weapon. We have three different versions of Wolf Knight, General, etc. but only one version of Divine Dragon. Instead let me choose to get any weapon I want when I promote. Add in a decent class magic growth as well, and Alear would be far more flexible.

[Saint Rubenio]

1 hour ago, lenticular said:

I definitely had that feeling too. Just various little points of friction that feel like they were there on purpose just so they can be "solved" by the DLC. It has the opposite effect on me, since it just makes me not like the game as much and not want to buy anything else for it. I'm sure it works overall, though, since game publishers continue to do it.

I don't think it has ever been this blatant before in FE. You can point to multiple design choices in the base game and find a part of the DLC that blatantly nullifies it.

Fortunately, whether they did it intentionally from the start or later conceived the DLC as a cheat pack of sorts, I find all these oddities, for lack of a better name, of the base game to work in its favor for the most part. Really, it just needed better proficiency distribution and I honestly would argue the DLC does nothing but worsen the experience.

1 hour ago, lenticular said:

As for the possibility of earlier Veyle, I think that my preferred solution would just be to make Alear (and their unique class) better. My solution would be to make a bunch of different versions of their promoted class so you can choose their weapon. We have three different versions of Wolf Knight, General, etc. but only one version of Divine Dragon. Instead let me choose to get any weapon I want when I promote. Add in a decent class magic growth as well, and Alear would be far more flexible.

In fairness, thinking about it some more, I get the feeling that the dragon bonuses are precisely the reason they made Alear's base class underwhelming. Those bonuses can be really powerful, so it makes sense that very few units can get them and need to stick to underwhelming classes for them. Alear in their base class is a unique support unit, and a fine one at that. I had her run Corrin in my first run and she was a great asset. Did get a bit of RNG blessing, but she never was primarily a combat unit.

Then the DLC just gives you two dragons that can actually transform and renders the point moot, but we've been over that.

[lenticular]

12 minutes ago, Saint Rubenio said:

In fairness, thinking about it some more, I get the feeling that the dragon bonuses are precisely the reason they made Alear's base class underwhelming. Those bonuses can be really powerful, so it makes sense that very few units can get them and need to stick to underwhelming classes for them. Alear in their base class is a unique support unit, and a fine one at that. I had her run Corrin in my first run and she was a great asset. Did get a bit of RNG blessing, but she never was primarily a combat unit.

I think that was probably the intent, but -- for me at least -- I don't think they really stuck the landing on it. Most of the dragon bonuses just don't feel particularly special. Like, sure, it's nice to have 2 extra attacks on Lodestar Rush but it isn't something that's going to make a big difference most of the time or something that I'm going to build around. It doesn't make Alear feel super powerful nor does it make them super fun to use. I think that the two Emblems with the best dragon bonuses are Corrin and Byleth, but even with them, there's an argument that you get more by putting Corrin on a covert and Byleth on a mage, so you're still not getting a huge benefot from the dragon type. Basically, if they wanted to make the dragon bonuses the big unique selling point for the class, I wish that they'd made them more impactful than they are.

[samthedigital]

1 hour ago, lenticular said:

It doesn't make Alear feel super powerful nor does it make them super fun to use. I think that the two Emblems with the best dragon bonuses are Corrin and Byleth, but even with them, there's an argument that you get more by putting Corrin on a covert and Byleth on a mage, so you're still not getting a huge benefot from the dragon type.

I originally really liked sticking Byleth on a dragon for the bonuses. It's something that sounds really good on paper, but in practice I don't find that the stat buffs are necessary, not anymore anyway. I never found Corrin to be good on a dragon type because the primary utility is Draconic Hex and Dreadful Aura. Those skills are best utilized by a unit that has good movement to maximize the effective range. The only dragon specific thing that appeals to me is the Soren ability that buffs their crit rate, but it's locked behind DLC.

 

10 hours ago, Fabulously Olivier said:

I mean, I have no idea what Maddening is like (no thanks!), but my experience on Hard is that exp felt perfectly distributed. I felt like my units were keeping up nicely with no grinding, and the dlc actually overleveled them. I haven't been able to say that for any game in the series since Awakening reintroduced grinding maps.

Maddening is actually quite tame when compared to the last few installments in the series even without the DLC. lenticular mentioned something to the effect that towards the end of the game we got too much experience on hard mode and the game became really easy after that, and that was my experience too. Maddening fixes that, and the experience penalty is sufficient in preventing units from getting overleveled for the most part. The DLC ruins the balance though; the maps scale to the party's levels, and there are enough maps that it's possible to get about 10 levels above the curve without a lot of effort. That's without considering the fact that certain maps were designed with only a few emblems in mind, so having a lot of emblems really feels like breaking the game sometimes. The only thing that the DLC had going for it in my opinion were the SP books, but the well fixed that too even though I'm not in love with the solution. Just in general I have a lot of problems with it, but maybe that's best saved for another topic.

[Jotari]

6 hours ago, BloodRonin said:

Yea, but besides the movement, what does flying do for alear in terms of flying bonuses? The dragon bonuses are way better than flying imo

My point is if we're not having the flying type on a flying unit then what does that mean? If it means your unit looses all things unique to a flier, ignoring terrain bonuses, ignoring terrain penalties, bow weakness and extra movement, then why go flier when you just go Hero or something. If the extra movement would still come without the other stuff then you're still probably going to be better as a dragon cavalier. Fliers whole utility (when they're not op stat dragonlord stat balls) is their ability to fly over terrain you couldn't otherwise and get to inaccessible places. If you don't have that on flier then why are you a flier? This isn't the same for the other type bonuses; avoid boosts, dual attacks, break immunity and whatever cavaliers get (is it just the movement boost, if so they're kind of in the same bed?)

[AnonymousSpeed]

Oh yeah, and another thing.

Veyle's personal skill is just Elise's personal, which is supposed to work in parallel to Camilla's (Alear's). It's kinda weird that you only work with one half of that coin for most of the game, whereas in Conquest you have the option to use both from fairly early on and those options were a boon to the experience. I know Engage does less aura/modifier stacking in general, but still.

15 hours ago, Saint Rubenio said:

There are a few things in the game that feel like DLC bait to me. Stuff like all Emblems disappearing in chapter 11 but the DLC bracelets remaining

the DLC feels intended to nullify certain bits of the base game's design

I get two different impressions from the first and second statement here. I get the feeling that the original curated experience was to have your emblems stripped away and that the DLC exists in indifference to that. Not that there'd really be a better way to do it.

11 hours ago, Jotari said:

It'd be kind of interesting if Alear couldn't get the class type bonuses of other classes because Dragon is used instead. Though that would completely kill flying in particular.

1 hour ago, Jotari said:

My point is if we're not having the flying type on a flying unit then what does that mean? If it means your unit looses all things unique to a flier, ignoring terrain bonuses, ignoring terrain penalties, bow weakness and extra movement, then why go flier when you just go Hero or something.

I'm a little confused here as well. Weren't you guys originally talking about Alear being a flying class, but getting the dragon type bonuses even when he's in a different class?

[Jotari]

6 minutes ago, AnonymousSpeed said:

I'm a little confused here as well. Weren't you guys originally talking about Alear being a flying class, but getting the dragon type bonuses even when he's in a different class?

Maybe there was some miscommunication. I was talking about Alear's dragon typing overwriting the natural typing of other classes if reclassed. So a Thief Alear would be Dragon/Thief not Covert/Thief. If it's a case where the dragon type remains with the original typing, so you become Dragon/Covert/Thief you have the situation where reclassing is kind of just objectively superior to remaining in Divine Dragon, unless Divine Dragon is changed to be a Backup or something so it's Dragon/Backup/Divine Dragon.

[Saint Rubenio]

8 hours ago, AnonymousSpeed said:

Oh yeah, and another thing.

Veyle's personal skill is just Elise's personal, which is supposed to work in parallel to Camilla's (Alear's). It's kinda weird that you only work with one half of that coin for most of the game, whereas in Conquest you have the option to use both from fairly early on and those options were a boon to the experience. I know Engage does less aura/modifier stacking in general, but still.

Yeah, that weirded me out as well, but Engage is the kind of game where you'd rather have Camilla's personal anyway.

8 hours ago, AnonymousSpeed said:

I get two different impressions from the first and second statement here. I get the feeling that the original curated experience was to have your emblems stripped away and that the DLC exists in indifference to that. Not that there'd really be a better way to do it.

Indeed, that's exactly it. The game works well enough that I don't believe it was designed with selling the DLC in mind, or at least not primarily. Later on they simply added the option to break that design for the meager sum of 30 buckarinos!

[Fabulously Olivier]

There always exists option 3, and I find it the most likely. The game was meticulously designed to function as it does, and is balanced without dlc. However due to how much time they had with the delays, the dlc could be explicitly planned to "fix" difficult parts of the game from their playtesting.

[BloodRonin]

12 hours ago, AnonymousSpeed said:

dragon type bonuses even when he's in a different class?

This is what I thought the conversation was, but I suppose I misunderstood the OP.

[Saint Rubenio]

5 hours ago, Fabulously Olivier said:

There always exists option 3, and I find it the most likely. The game was meticulously designed to function as it does, and is balanced without dlc. However due to how much time they had with the delays, the dlc could be explicitly planned to "fix" difficult parts of the game from their playtesting.

The DLC was 100% done at release (I mean dataminers found literally all the content in the DLC before wave 2 even came out lol), so this is probably correct.

Edited April 30, 2023 by Saint Rubenio