How do you feel about weapons being breakable in most games? Do you think it’s a good mechanic that balances weapons and provides interesting decisions, or just a tedious chore to keep track of before every battle? Do you think weapons should have more uses (i.e. +10 uses across the board)? Assuming unbreakable weapons were balanced correctly, would you prefer that system?
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I like breakable weapons except when you have like 5 uses left and it becomes an annoyance to have a battle without doubling
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Ignoring magic I’m making every weapon except 1-2 range and strong weapons have unlimited uses because buying iron weaponry from the fe8 armory to replace the almost broken iron weaponry over and over again really is a chore, and you can have interesting choices about whether to use a strong weapon or not without the basic stuff breaking… I want the game to be about conserving your 1-2 range so you can spend money on other nice things from the fe8-style armory like brave weapons and physic
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I’m ok with it if there’s a way to repair it (aside from the Hammerne) or combine uses, because it’s annoying to have a bunch of partially used weapons around.
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I like the idea of weak unbreakable weapons like unbreakable slim weapons but I think I prefer everything else as breakable weapons, it requires yiu to think out your moves more to account for weapon usage and, if there is no world map then you have to take one of your units out of the action to go buy weapons, while that may seem bad the reality of it is that it forces the player to make difficult decisions and that is a good thing at the end of the day.
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Yeah this is basically the best way to handle it, i think. I do enjoy having a limited but powerful resource in, say, the one armourslayer you get early on, trying to decide when to use and when to conserve it. But for iron swords and such, they’re cheap and plentiful enough that you’re never in danger of breaking something, it’s just busywork swapping them out or repairing them between maps.
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It’s a chore that was never really balanced or done well imo. The only time i ever had to be careful with durability was part 3 RD, and that’s it. And making legendary weapons break after a low amount of uses makes no sense story wise.
It’s one mechanic i honestly want gone from the series and for IS to search for a different way to balance weapons. I highly prefer the Fates, Gaiden/SoV and 3H systems over general FE systems
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Breakable weapons are fine. They’re a necessary counterbalance to give actual merit and reason to use a weaker weapon instead of exclusively using the strongest things you get for every battle.
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I think the story will change depending on whether or not your game supports capture.
Also, even if you can’t capture, the story changes depending on whether the enemy drops the weapon.
I think that weapons should be able to last a long time.
However, I don’t like only unbreakable weapons.
I think Hammern staff is useful because even the strongest weapons can break.
If the weapon is absolutely unbreakable, then the meaning of this staff is lost.
I think stores should be placed as much as possible so that players don’t get stuck.
Preferably, most maps should have stores.
It is important to be considerate of the fact that first-time players will not know if there are stores ahead.
If the map will be without stores for a while, you should warn players.
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I’m mostly against durability. One, it encourages hoarding and discourages weapon experimentation and combat. Two, replacement of almost broken weapons is tedious, and kills the momentum that pre-battle dialogue can create. Three, it makes manaketes useless once the dragonstone runs out. I’ve spent a really long time thinking about ways to balance unbreakable weapons better than Fates did, and this is my latest iteration for physical weapons:
Mt Hit Wt Notes
Iron sword 6 95 6
Iron blade 8 85 8
Steel sword 10 80 10
Steel blade 12 70 12
Silver swd 14 85 8 Def/Res -5
Silver bld 16 60 16
Brave sword 9 80 12 Spd -5
Runesword 12 65 11 Only 1 copy in the game
Light brand 9 70 9 Only 1 copy in the game
Wind sword 9 70 9 Only 1 copy in the game
Kill. edge 8 50 9 45 crit
Lancereaver 8 60 8
Iron lance 7 85 7
Steel lance 11 70 11
Silv lance 15 75 9 Def/Res -5
Javelin 3 70 11
Short spear 5 65 13
Spear 7 60 15
Kill. lance 9 50 10 45 crit
Brave lance 10 70 13 Spd -5
Axereaver 9 55 9
Iron axe 8 80 8
Steel axe 12 65 12
Silver axe 16 70 10 Def/Res -5
Hand axe 4 70 11
Tomahawk 8 60 15
Killer axe 10 50 11 45 crit
Brave axe 11 65 14 Spd -5
Swordreaver 10 50 10
Swordslayer 8 50 15
Iron bow 8 95 6
Steel bow 12 80 10
Silver bow 16 85 8 Def/Res -5
Killer bow 10 50 9 45 crit
Brave bow 11 80 12 Spd -5
Longbow 4 75 10
Rationale:
- Killer weapons: Low hit/high crit means high risk/high reward. Players who use killer weapons in vanilla already bet on high risk/high reward, the risk in those games being losing durability or letting the enemy retaliate.
- Reaver weapons: Good hit against the weapon they’re good against (+30), but bad hit against everything else.
- Brave weapons: Users don’t normally want to quadruple, just hit twice without taking retaliation. High weight minimizes quad hit for units with low to average con, and the speed penalty does the same for units with high con who otherwise could quadruple more than skinny units. Not sure if both high weight and speed penalty is too much for skinny units.
- Blades: The middle option in might, hit and weight compared to its sword counterparts.
2 Likes
I’m pretty much on the same page but my only question is how you handle siege tomes and status staves? Would these have durability or not exist at all?
They could be limited per map, or a game limit for super powerful ones
I consider siege tomes and status staves to be pretty annoying when in the hands of the enemy. If I were to give players some, they would keep the vanilla durability (5 for tomes, 3 for staves).
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I’m for the FE4 system where weapons are unbreakable but there’s a scarcity of them.
I think of it in D&D terms.
The DM doesn’t keep telling us to go buy more short swords when he rolls a 97-100 on a D100 roll each time that i try stabbing that fire dragon that murdered our Cleric three rounds ago, causing the short sword to get stuck between his scales and become unretrievable as my limbless corpse gets yeeted three miles by its tail swipe.
Instead, he tells us to go buy more magic items that might have cool effects but won’t stick around forever, like the cool thunder bow i’ll never get to use as I’m now dead
completely unrelated to what event my current party will inevitably get into
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The issue with removing weapon durability is that without it, it’s difficult to have reasons to not just use the strongest weapons available. You could go for Fates’s arcane system of nonsensical debuffs, which are difficult to keep track of and make it difficult to design unique weapons (because these weapons need to either have complicated debuffs or be overpowered without them), or just lean into how a lot of older JRPGs do it and simply tell the player to use the strongest gear they can get their hands on, which also makes it difficult to design unique weapons (because these weapons are either quickly replaced by better ones or overshadow counterparts).
Really, what I’m getting at is this: Limiting the player’s long-term access to resources like effective, unique, and legendary weapons over the course of the game vastly increases the strategic depth of placing and using those resources. Take FE6 Durandal. Without durability, now you can just have Rutger spend the entire game shredding everything with an overpowered sword. With durability? Now it’s interesting.
TL;DR: Durability is good because it makes it so you shouldn’t just mindlessly pick the strongest weapon available.
The DM doesn’t keep telling us to go buy more short swords when he rolls a 97-100 on a D100 roll each time that i try stabbing that fire dragon that murdered our Cleric three rounds ago, causing the short sword to get stuck between his scales and become unretrievable as my limbless corpse gets yeeted three miles by its tail swipe.
D&D is actually a pretty solid example for this. At least in 5E, it’s full of abilities and items that you can only use a limited number of times per day, or at all. You may not be at risk of losing your sword, but you still need to decide when best to use Action Surge, or when and how to activate a single-use wand of spider summoning or whatever.
5 Likes
While I’m personally in agreement with the camp that durability is a good thing (at least for non-basic items), I think the potential option as a counterpoint to this would be to either remove weapon shops entirely (and only spend gold on items like Vulneraries, Mines, etc.) and give out weapons in specific quantities and at specific times to control things being overshadowed by better replacements (and then it becomes the player’s choice in distributing those items to their units how they see fit) OR jack the cost on goods way up a la FE5 (and prevent Arena usage) and make the player have a hard choice with what they want to spend their money on at any given time - for example, they could immediately upgrade to Silver/Killer Lances for two of their units that had Steel Lances or they could grab 3 Hand Axes for ranged utility but weaker power on their axefighters or they could buy a single siege tome (but make it have debuffs when used to prevent overusage) to allow their mage to deal with threats from a distance, but not all of the above.
To use your Durandal example, while in FE6 it makes sense to get it there, I don’t think you could (or should) just retrofit removing durability onto FE6 in general and certainly not with allowing access to it. The easy “cop-out” answer there is just that the story is rewritten such that, until Manakete dragons start showing up, Roy is told not to use any of the weapons for fear of what happened in the past with the Ending Winter further warping reality.
There are options when it comes to considering this without simply taking Fates’ approach of tossing around debuffs and effects when using non-basic weapons as a means of balance, it just depends on what the goal and design approach are planned around and if those have really been thought through and implemented in a way that makes sense from the ground up for the project.
I think this solely depends on the scope and length of the project, not a general case. If it’s a short story type of project, more standard durability uses (limit around 40 for basic, 20 for special, etc.) makes sense. If you’re doing something in the vein of FE5, maybe even smaller durability numbers might be appropriate. Or, for something like Radiant Dawn where it’s a continent-wide conflict, maybe larger numbers would make more sense. It’s not really a black-and-white, yes-or-no type of question.
3 Likes
Durability makes resource management more engaging. It’s even better if it’s handled like in Berwick Saga, where weapon (and shield) has this special durability system in which the more you use them, the more likely they are going to break (RN based durability after some uses), which encourages the player to bring multiple weapons even more than ever (or make them consider crippling enemies to rob them) just in case one of them breaks too soon.
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The answer to the probelm of “just use the best weapons” is:
Remove Shops/Make Shop stock limited
That’s not hard.
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