TBH I don't think weapon triangle is that big a deal as long as you have other ways to differentiate weapon classes. FE3 and TRS play fine without weapon triangle. Things like swords being the only weapon class to have a magic weapon, or certain effective weapons being locked to certain weapon classes make a bigger deal than the weapon triangle. But IS has just slowly eroded these and homogenized the weapon types over time.
Combat Arts aren't a good enough way to distinguish weapon classes because Combat Arts suck 90% of the time so which weapon types get which Combat Arts doesn't matter in the majority of cases. And when Combat Arts are relevant, it usually doesn't matter which one you're using because usually you're just grabbing a +damage combat art against an enemy you can't double.
Incidentally, Echoes happens to do a better job of distinguishing weapon classes than many games with weapon triangle do, simply because of how the fact that weapons aren't buyable creates sharp differences in weapon availability.
This is probably the first time I have ever used the triangle attack for a legitimate purpose (breaking through the immovable one's quick reposte) because I actually have 3 falcons in one run for once.
I haven't watched this whole video yet, but it appears that early speedrunners (non- NG+ obviously) are able to beat the game in around two and a half hours:
Edit: Finished it. There are still clearly plenty of areas to optimize further, and RNG is pretty influential here.
Reaching the end of the blue route, not very impressed with the story thus far tbh. I hope clearing other routes helps piece everything together a bit more.
The way Dedue leaves and returns is pretty meh. I was 100% sure he wouldn't actually be dead but him randomly appearing with some shitty explanation.. lol. Dimitri's character and his motivations are pretty weird too. He goes from rather normal to fully insane maniac and then straight back to normal. No clue how Claude fits in the later story as well. First he appears in chapter 17 to 'help' me but randomly decides to attack me in the fight (??) Then 2 chapters later he requests my help and we promptly set out to help them, okay.
On September 03 2019 00:58 Laurens wrote: Reaching the end of the blue route, not very impressed with the story thus far tbh. I hope clearing other routes helps piece everything together a bit more.
The way Dedue leaves and returns is pretty meh. I was 100% sure he wouldn't actually be dead but him randomly appearing with some shitty explanation.. lol. Dimitri's character and his motivations are pretty weird too. He goes from rather normal to fully insane maniac and then straight back to normal. No clue how Claude fits in the later story as well. First he appears in chapter 17 to 'help' me but randomly decides to attack me in the fight (??) Then 2 chapters later he requests my help and we promptly set out to help them, okay.
Dedue wasn't anything spectacular. You get him back pretty late and then he is probably way behind other people still in levels. You also get Gilbert, who happens to just be better than Dedue entirely in most cases if you go for the armor knight route for Dedue.
Dimitri's character for me was fine. I think he is pretty redeemed in how he goes with how chapter 17 story played out with Rodrigue and Fleche (and how Dimitri saw himself in Fleche with the end of chapter stuff)
The story alludes to Claude wanting to ally with the Kingdom, but before chapter 17 the envoys the Kingdom sends come back brutally murdered (likely by those who slither in the dark to sow discontent between the Kingdom/Alliance). The comments both Dimitri and Claude make in chapter 17 make it pretty obvious they want to ally, but realistically both feel that the other murdered their envoys and an alliance between the two isn't in the cards in that battle. Not to mention Edelgard plays into creating a mass melee where you can't tell who is friend and who is foe (I realize as a top down observer this seems counter intuitive, but oh well)
Guess I'm cancelling my second run. It looks like it's mainly stat inflation, so I doubt it changes the meta for class changes. Maybe swords will be prioritized a little bit more because of attack speed.
On September 12 2019 03:31 chocorush wrote: Guess I'm cancelling my second run. It looks like it's mainly stat inflation, so I doubt it changes the meta for class changes. Maybe swords will be prioritized a little bit more because of attack speed.
It's more than just stat inflation. There's a lot of systemic changes, some good and some bad:
- Enemy density and formations are changed, this is apparent from the first map and becomes more pronounced as the game goes forward - More enemies have battalions, and enemies use gambits more frequently - A lot of enemies have more skills, notably a lot of enemies have breaker skills against their traditional weapon triangle strengths (e.g. Brigands with Lancebreaker) and weaponfaire skills; some ridiculous combinations exist late in the game such as 50+ Spd Quick Riposte Swordmasters - Same turn reinforcements (blegh) - The XP formula is significantly changed, and in general the player gets something like 40-60% less XP than they do on Hard (though this largely just counteracts the increased XP gain from the higher enemy density and levels)
From what I've been able to gather, bows are even more the best weapon type than they are on Hard because having 2- and 3-range chip is hugely important to progressing through all stages of the game. Gauntlets are also much better than they are on lower difficulties.
Going to do a clean maddening run for BL, who should I recruit from other houses? I always like Hilda, (but I only managed to recruit her in NG+), Lysethia (strong powermage+warp love) and Petra (Wyern lord hello). I can probably only get a few so I need to see, should I get some additional Bow knights? Ashe is pretty good, could try to get Ignatz or Bernie.
I usually run Ashe wyvern and Leonie bow knight. Right now I am taking a Leonie down non mounted route for high stat gain and then swapping to bow knight (right now I have a 28 speed leonie at level 24? Cant remember atm). But not having her as a cav all game gives her like a 50-70% spd growth (depending on what class you have her in).
Full recruitment isn't really all that hard on any route, as long as you keep track of who you need to recruit with supports vs. who you can recruit with the stat/skill requirements based on what you're building Byleth toward. Don't waste gifts on people who you know will join you for free, and spam gifts on people who you know you need to reach B to auto-recruit. Keep track of which characters like flowers, and don't waste general gifts on them because flowers only correspond to 1-2 characters each and you end up with a shitload of them just from growing statboosters. Hilda is one of the easier characters to recruit because she's the only character who likes Anemones, and you quickly end up with a giant stack of Anemones by growing Yellow or Pale-Blue Flower seeds. Once you unlock adjutants, always ask for mission assistance from a character you're trying to recruit at the start of the month and assign them to be Byleth's adjutant so that they passively grow support ranks.
Basically the only people that are troublesome to recruit are Ferdinand and Caspar due to their time-locked B supports and annoying recruit requirements (C Armor and C Brawling, respectively).
On September 13 2019 00:41 Alventenie wrote: I usually run Ashe wyvern and Leonie bow knight. Right now I am taking a Leonie down non mounted route for high stat gain and then swapping to bow knight (right now I have a 28 speed leonie at level 24? Cant remember atm). But not having her as a cav all game gives her like a 50-70% spd growth (depending on what class you have her in).
Leonie is a Dope Pegasus Knight. With a Crit ring and a brave bow she's beast.
The greater difficulty makes it more engaging but these maps are so irritating. I started using the divine pulses on the fog map because the sheer number of enemies you have to deal with got too frustrating when you can't even see them.
I'm still struggling with the interface because the added battalions are even harder to keep track of with all the clutter on the screen and only one screen unlike the 3ds games. It's really annoying how skills and battalions are on different menus, and just tedious having to check things in general.I guess I just ignored them on hard mode because they missed most of the time anyways.
Battalion hitrates on Hard aren't bad, but their hitrates are awful initially on Maddening because enemy speed is really high relative to yours, and you need high Cha to have good battalion hitrates.
Torches helped a lot on the fog map, I went north first and cleared from there, let Catherine clear more of west/south.
I got to the end of chapter 5 and the boss just 1shot my blyeth (non monster form). I think I may have to just stride him and surround him with my casters.
Im also trying to find a good balance between explore battle and doing the class room thing. I gotta get my proffessor level up fast.
Seminars aren't worth doing. Activity points are too useful--even if you've maxed out your students' motivation and used faculty training to raise skills on Byleth, you can cook temporary stat boosts that stack over multiple weeks in a month (so you can get like +3 speed for your whole team on a chapter), which is insanely useful on Maddening to get your students' stats up. On top of that every explore day lets you grow another permanent stat booster at the greenhouse.
There was some theorycrafting about seminars being useful in no-optional-battle LTC, but once people figured out how to reliably grow statboosters in the greenhouse, that line of thinking was quickly discarded because every explore day letting you get another +1 permanent statbooster is just way more powerful than what you get from seminars.
If you are going to battle, the best time to do it is the last week of a month. For most months in the game, there's no lectures between the last free day of a month and the first free day of the next month, which means that battling on the last week avoids having battles screw up the cadence of restoring motivation to your students.
EPT
