What stats would you say are ideal for the standard armor/horse/dragon-slaying weapons? I’m trying to rebalanced them for my hack, and am at a bit of a loss, despite heavy testing. I feel they tend to be either under-powered or over-powered in vanilla, based on the stats they tend to have, but finding a good middle ground has been challenging.
One the one hand, they need to be fairly heavy and somewhat inaccurate, so the player is incentivized to only use them against the enemy they are effective against. At the same time, they need to be strong enough against said enemies to be worth an item slot for the chapter, despite that limitation.
They also need to be dangerous when wielded by enemies, but I also get frustrated in games where they nearly or outright one-shot a player unit. In my own hack, I hold off on using them against the player until their units start promoting, since by then they have enough HP for that to be less of an issue.
I should note that I’m hacking FE8, so they have X3 effectiveness. I think that’s how it should be, since they feel weak with only X2 unless you give them really high base MT, which makes them too good to use against non-effected enemies.
if this is a bad thing, i somewhat question what their purpose is to you - to me, an effective weapon should have kill pressure on the thing it’s threatening, otherwise it’s not doing its job. this is why fe7’s effective weapons are a joke. the solution to dealing with them (to me) is not having enough HP/def to tank them, but to avoid fighting them with the ‘wrong’ unit.
i don’t think this is really that necessary of consideration given poor durability does the job without making the weapon feel like it’s not actually very good vs the thing it’s supposed to beat. alternatively, they could have higher hit rates vs whatever unit type they’re supposed to beat or be like those breaker skills in feh.
again, low durability will always make this a poor option; i don’t really think you need to worry too much about whether or not a player is using them ‘perfectly’. if they blow their first horseslayer on mercenaries and struggle vs a paladin as a result, they’ll learn from their mistake
You make some good points, especially your one about the player using them perfectly. Giving them fewer uses will have the same impact as giving them slightly worse stats than other weapons. As for why I don’t like them to be too good vs the player, it can limit their options more than I’m really comfortable with. If a hammer using enemy is so good it single-handedly shuts down the player’s armor knight, then that throws out entire strategies. I don’t even like the restrictions bow users put on early-game fliers very much, as necessary as it probably is to balance that ability.
An idea I had was to give effective weaponry low might but 4x effectiveness. This way, they’ll still be outclassed by common weapons when used against regular enemies. However, against horse and armor units, it can still have a great scale of lethality that you can accurately tune. I like to compensate the low base might with decent-to-good accuracy.
Of course, this change does make the effective weapons’ power more swing heavy in practice. If the player have to use the effective weapons in a pinch, they can atleast be a decent substitute. Like Trapinch said, this is why they have low durability, to discourage spamming them in every situation.
I have played to the end of my hack with my effectiveness changes and I liked how it felt. Of course, that is subjective and it’s up to you to figure out the balance that you like.
i think its pretty simple. If a class that’s being hit on effective is a particularly strong one or otherwise has very polarizing matchups, it stands to reason that effective weapons would be a much more necessary “check” for them. This is why a lot of hacks make cavalry effective weapons extremely punishing to get hit by, most of us recognize that cavalry have an inherent advantage compared to footlocked units if left unchecked.
I think effectives being potential one shots is fine, it’s supposed to be the thing that keeps certain classes in line. If effectives weren’t strong, there wouldn’t be a reason to really fear them on their own.
Making effective weapons inaccurate is a mistake, IMO, and can lead to them being worse at killing the unit type they’re designed to kill than non-effective weaponry are. IMO, effective weapons are best when they’re heavy, accurate, and have enough MT to OHKO when effective. This creates a dynamic where if you use an effective weapon vs. the “wrong” enemy type, you’ll take more damage due to being doubled (or at least deal less damage due to failing to double), but if you use it vs. the “right” enemy type, you’ll take no damage because you’ll OHKO before your target can counter.
Firstly, I think that making them actively bad against classes they’re not made for killing isn’t necessary; making them Just Okay against other enemy types is probably good enough, since the player will already have plenty of other options that work just as well or better against those enemies without being as rare or hard to replace as effective weapons generally are. It’s also not the end of the world if the player occasionally uses an effective weapon against a class it doesn’t specifically target. Part of the nature of games like Fire Emblem is that sometimes the player is gonna find themselves in tight situations with a suboptimal set of tools and just have to make the best of what they have, even if it means using things in ways other than their “intended” purpose.
Generally-speaking, my personal mental image of an effective weapon has a little more Might and Weight and a little less Hit and durability (and I do mean a little; nothing drastic, save for durability!) than a Steel weapon of the same type, and is generally within one weapon rank of Steels, as well, if not outright the same. I’m also a strong proponent for erring higher rather than lower for effective damage multipliers. Vanilla’s usual 3x is in a really good spot, I think, letting effective weapons OHKO frailer members of their targeted classes and take massive chunks out of the HP of hardier ones without becoming essentially an unconditional delete button for whatever classes they’re effective against. No matter what, I definitely think effective damage bonuses should be such that an effective weapon deals substantially more damage if aimed at vulnerable classes; the weapon type made specifically to do X thing should, actually, be genuinely very good at doing X thing, in my opinion, and making the weapons relatively fragile and kinda mid in other circumstances is an appropriate trade-off for that.
Er, an addendum: Remember that, when balancing Might in particular, 1 extra base Might = n extra effective Might, where n is whatever number you’ve set the effective damage multiplier to! Look at, for instance, how busted forging effective weapons is in the DS games and Awakening. You really don’t need to add that many points to their Might in the forge before they start just ripping their targeted class types apart!
