Welcome to an idea I’ve had for quite awhile but I’m really curious to see if this takes off or if it’s been done before in a Fire Emblem Game. So let’s say a new hack had weapons that can level up and they get more stronger the more they are used, would people think this might be a fun addition.
A new bar in the EXP screen to determine the current weapons equipped BEXP
(I know it says WEXP but that’s because I goofed a bit, Just think of W as B)
Naturally if the bar get’s full, it levels up the weapon. You can see current weapon BEXP/LVL in the description of the item.
The formula for Battle EXP I thought of is as simple as
HIT = +5 BEXP
DMG = Dmg/3 = BEXP
CRT = +10 BEXP
WTA = +3 BEXP
WTD = +1 BEXP
This is for hitting once in combat, if you double then you get double the BEXP you would have received. I didn’t want to make it jagens could just easily level up a weapon so that’s why I made the dmg BEXP pretty low. (These numbers are filler)
Onto how level ups would work for this. Level ups would simply add a predetermined bonus to the weapon with the Iron Sword (Let’s say) +1MT +3CRT for a LVL.2 Iron Sword, and a lvl 2 - 3 gives -1 WT +5 Max Uses etc. with a max level of 3 - 5.
Any thought on this? Please let me know. I was wanting to make a hack with this, but I don’t think it’s possible on GBA / Tactile.
It’s possible with a lot of code editing, but you’d basically need to rework how weapons work to add this additional property (both the level up requirement as well as the exp to level up).
Technically yes, both fe4 and TRS have a similar mechanic that adds bonus crit to a weapon the more kills it’s obtained.
It puts me in the mind of how FE4 had a bonus for weapons that received 50+ kills, and to a lesser extent, Batallions in 3 houses (not a weapon per se, but they could be considered a removable and sharable asset between units)
Functionally, I feel like this would work a lot better in an environment where 1) weapons don’t break (a la Gaiden/SoV) or can be repaired, 2) weapons are overall less plentiful in quantity, both in drops and being able to be purchased, and 3) potentially in a system where less weapons would/could be included in a unit’s inventory (in part because of #2).
Unless the bonuses are going to be saved for a given weapon name used by a given unit (i.e. Lyn remembers whatever level an Iron Sword was at whenever she would equip any Iron Sword during the game), then as soon as that particular weapon runs out of uses, you’re going to just be starting all over again from scratch for your next Iron Sword (for example). It feels like it would be more useful to be a little more like a typical JRPG where you would have the weapon for longer / it wouldn’t break (or was reparable) so that you would actually get prolonged used out of the level up mechanic and its bonuses.
Now, that does have both a benefit and a downside to stronger weapons with limited uses in that they can’t be leveled up as much (or at all) before their uses deplete if the traditional GBA-style system was used (instead of the above suggested environment), which keeps them from snowballing into something far stronger, but at the same time acting against why this new system of experience would have been implemented in the first place.
Yeah it would be #1 with repairable or infinite, I wrote this at midnight and was a bit tired and failed to mention for me, I’d only do it in the Tactile engine because I know most about that.
I thought making the weapon itself carry the memory itself was the way to go about doing this, and yeah, maybe making them infinite with rare drops is the right way of doing things in this situation.
Romancing SaGa 1 actually does something very similar to this, where each character has a proficiency level from 0~15 for each weapon in their arsenal, and they learn skills for that weapon at proficiency levels 3, 6, 10, and 15. In fact, Bows are powered entirely by a character’s proficiency with that bow and don’t take any core stats into account at all as far as I’m aware. These proficiency levels are totally reset when a weapon is removed from the wielder’s inventory, though.
I think it’s definitely an idea that could be neat! It could definitely get annoying in a system with neither infinite weapon durability nor weapon repair, though.
For my personal opinion, I think I’d either tie proficiency to the specific individual weapon (retained when it’s traded over to a different character), or to the character and weapon combination, i.e. a unit would gain proficiency in Iron Swords, and that would be shared across any and all Iron Swords that ever enter their inventory. The latter setup, I think, could actually work fine with expendable, non-repairable weapons, since you wouldn’t lose progress when a character’s weapon breaks. It’d take a ton of space in the save data to store each character’s weapon proficiencies with every single weapon in the game, though.
Quite interesting.
I was thinking that instead of an FE4 style Battle XP for your weapons, they would instead progress and change based on their level.
Think of how Echoes turns it’s low level weapons like the Iron Sword into a Steel Sword and then a Silver Sword but instead of using materials, these require you to level them up.
For Example for Bows:
E Rank - Iron Bow
D Rank - Steel Bow
C Rank - Glass Bow
B Rank - Silver Bow
A Rank - Killer Bow
S Rank - Golden Bow
Obviously, this is just an example of what can be done and the amount of XP required for each would have to be properly tweaked based on the game.
You could also have branching paths and have other types of bows such as Blessed, Long or Crossbow.
The other thing for sure would that needs to be managed would have to be weapon durability.
You either make it so that that weapons have infinite durability OR implement it in the same style as FE4 where they can be repaired even when they are broken.
