Fire Emblem - Page 171

On February 24 2023 00:20 chocorush wrote:
Cleared my first run yesterday on hard. Gives a lot of leeway to experiment with skills, and hit a better balance than three houses. I'm still not a fan of the extended castle/base system in the new games, and it felt like I was sinking more time into it as I figured out the system. I'm hoping that being more efficient with crystal use rather than just messing around with shit will fix more of the problems, but finding out that you could get a ton of crystals from fishing was a real disappointment in the part of the game where I ran out of crystals experimenting with emblems.

I did enjoy the process for the most part. I ran out of various resources including gold at multiple points in the game, which almost never happens in older games. This is probably close to the the peak that modern skill/reclass focused FE game design will get you. I almost thought at one point that this might be one of my favorites in the series, but after the new game excitement wore off, it has a lot of problems that I never got over.

They tried, really, really hard to nerf mounted units, and failed. I'm mostly all right with the bad weapon combinations that mounted classes get. What really made the game worse though was removing Rescue and dropping mount range. Not being able to set up rescue chains to move around your lesser mobile units removed a great deal of positional play for pretty much no benefit other than make people think that they should just use more foot units.

I think it made having 6 movement even better than 5, since having more base movement was now the only way to get into better positions. They were clearly trying to push you towards having your support units chip away at everything at a slow pace, but I found it better to just be able to keep up with the 6 move carries that could ORKO things that were moving even further ahead with canto.

The game really fell off in the end when it became less about the maps and more about squeezing out as much damage as possible through skills. I guess I'll have to see how hard it is to hit benchmarks on lunatic but mechanics like the weapon triangle/break just didn't feel like they mattered at the end since there were so many ways to bypass it, and there were just too many maps where you moved your max move every turn and killed everything on the way to the boss (especially the (12!) paralogues). It was more interesting to just warp 10 units on turn 1 and byleth dance. I kind of found it hilarious that the fe6 paralogue was one of the more infamous maps, but it was no joke that you can't rescue drop characters over the rivers like you could in the original.

The music was good and I even liked the story after it picked up.

On March 05 2023 06:40 chocorush wrote:
Wrapped up my run on maddening. Mostly applied conventional fe theory and the game went smooth and quick.

In some ways it felt easier than the run on hard because i knew that you can skip every pseudo objective the game throws at you and i got some slicker warp skips. In general my warp skips were more effective because my carries were stronger so i was one turning annoying chapters instead of 2 turning them. For example, kagetsu was able to orko ch 25 boss and kill her twice in player phase after a dance and she killed herself in the beginning of enemy phase before the rest of my team could be wiped out.

The couple of rout maps were a bit rough with stuff happening in all directions but i don’t think you can realistically build more than 2 carries with reasonably fast play. Game gives you plenty of staves to work with so you can just go crazy.

I was able to confirm for myself that backup units are kind of a gimmick. Great knight kagetsu orko’d everything until endgame with a tomahawk and is more dominating in enemy phase than conquest xander. There was pretty much no situation where it would have been worth it to slow the pace down and let chain attacks do their thing at 80% chance to chip. 6 mov >> 5 plus chain attacks.

I used saphir and unbenched goldmary for my final team though for a little added value on the rout maps.

The most interesting decision is probably who to invest in pre ch10. I think realistically only one character can carry into the late game when you can pivot into eirike but you have to funnel most of your exp so they stay ahead of the curve on speed. I think chloe is the most reasonable option but lapis and diamant seem doable in theory. I tried diamant this run bit i think lapis might have a slightly longer shelf life because of her higher speed and attack bases after reclass.

Unless there’s some other major source of damage I’m missing, i don’t know if anyone other than kagetsu has high enough bases to carry without eirike or dlc. Maybe magic user + lyn but the game seems hard enough without having a tank that can kill. I’m sure the answer is to somehow skip even more stuff.

Speaking of skipping stuff. Speedtaker is so obviously a trap at this point. You just don’t kill that many things in player phase when you’re clearing maps in 4 or 5 turns on average, and most of the dangerous fast stuff is in the beginning of the map. To make things worse, the 2000 sp drought without value would be devastating when +3/4 speed would have helped a lot mid game and definitely helps endgame when you’re warp skipping.

Finally, donations matter a lot. It greatly boosts your ores for upgrades, and is the only way to get significant value out of your early money. Dlc giving you all that free gold and extra rings looks like it just completely breaks the game as far as the core resource allocation problem goes.

On March 28 2023 06:26 chocorush wrote:
So the patch adding the ancient well changes surprisingly little. Short of the small chance of getting some staves early, it turns out that there aren't really particularly good uses of SP other than Canter, speed +3 and reposition. It's almost purely a qol change that gives you more options for casual play.

I would also adjust my emblem rankings from last time a little.

The truly transformational emblems are Micaiah, Byleth, and Lucina. Then Sigurd for movement and Celica as an honorable mention for early game movement.

Then you have the stat sticks, Eirike, Lyn, Ike, Roy, in that order I think. Lyn and Ike are almost equal because you can make slow strong characters fast and fast weak characters strong, but Lyn has added utility for pulling bosses and shadows.

Movement is the best stat, and honestly, you can probably run the whole game with just flyers.

On March 29 2023 06:59 chocorush wrote:
Kind of wonder what a good ruleset for drafting would be. All the emblems and reclassing would probably make them feel really samey.