Basing WEXP Gain off of EXP Gain?

What the heck, while I’m making up for the past year of not posting, I may as well toss out some silly request that wouldn’t be useful to anyone else, for old times’ sake~ [EDIT: I say that but that’s like 80% of what I do in FEXNAchat lol]
(*shot*)

Basically what the title says, ignoring a weapon’s WEXP stat and just giving WEXP of the equipped weapon type equal to EXP gained divided by some number (probably 2, but it’d be nice to know where it was in case I want to tune it later or someone else decides to use the system but has a higher level cap in their game) (I say divided by some number because I imagine it being easier but if multiplication by a decimal is easier then sure)

(Maybe using the weapon’s WEXP stat as a multiplier or something, but I don’t imagine that would be very major)

I like that idea conceptually; the problem with such a system is that WEXP for a weapon type is stored as a single byte, so it can only be between 0 and 255. So if you added EXP/2 to WEXP after each battle you’d very quickly hit the cap.

That said, if you could combine this with @jjl2357’s weapon type hack there might be enough space freed up to have two bytes per weapon type in RAM, which would give a max WEXP of 65535 - more than enough.

What badness would happen upon hitting the cap? I haven’t looked into this, but in normal play, with getting 1~16 wexp per hit, doesn’t it just stop letting you gain wexp in that type, which would still be true? That’s why I say it maybe should be made to be divided by some number, so people making a game where it’s expected that units will be getting more than ~5 levels by endgame can make it so people aren’t all A-ranking their weapons by Chapter 4.

What if you used the difference in Class Relative Power instead of EXP?

Hmmm, actually, that would probably work too, since the idea for me is more to make promoted units gain less wexp than making you gain less wexp from fighting weaker enemies, but I just went with using exp for it since it’s a bit more tangible to the player and it seemed easier to process (thinking what it’d be like to add it in FEXNA)

Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but wouldn’t using EXP gain as a basis basically make weapon levels grow at an even higher rate? Your average combat usually results in an EXP gain of around 10, so dividing that by the initially proposed number of 2 would give you approximate 5 WEXP for a round of combat where you don’t defeat an enemy.

Outside of the Devil Axe, using a Ballista, Eclipse, Purge, or most Staves, without defeating an enemy, the maximum WEXP a unit can get is 4 (using a weapon with a WEXP value of 2 and double attacking), while the minimum is just 1 (single attack using a 1 WEXP weapon, obviously).

When you factor in defeating an opponent, outside of those fringe higher WEXP weapons, the best WEXP gain is 6 (2 + 2*2 for a fatal blow on the second hit) with the minimum being just 2. However, units, on average, are usually gaining approximately 30 EXP for defeating a unit (assuming similar level), meaning that dividing that number by 2 would give you a whopping 15 WEXP, possibly for only one strike with what was previously a 1 WEXP weapon. And then, you have to consider combat with bosses or Entombed (if vanilla FE8) which can yield up to 100 EXP, giving an astounding 50 WEXP…

It just seems like having an accelerated Weapon Level gain, especially outside of combat where the enemy survives, kind of makes the Weapon Level system less meaningful. If everyone maxes out their weapon levels so quickly, what’s the point of anyone having weapon ranks at all?

You would raise the amount of WEXP needed for each level, obviously. The problem is that WEXP is capped at 255.

No, as far as I can tell you didn’t misunderstand the system at all~

But that’s on purpose, making people gain WEXP (and WLVLs) quickly, for me at least. I actually have all my weapons set to have a base WEXP gain of 10 right now. If everyone were getting enough WEXP to S-rank by chapter 10, that’s totally fine, because my entire game is 6 chapters long. A unit joining in chapter 2 with an E rank still needs to level at least once per chapter to max out that weapon by endgame, which I think is pretty much on par with what happens in most small-to-mid-sized chapters.

Of course a 20 chapter game would want to give less WEXP or make WLVLs further apart, probably the latter so you can give WEXP at a 1:1 with EXP?

Personally I’d go with EXP/10, because you’d still be gaining an average of 30EXP/3WEXP (*2 if you hit twice?). That’s accelerated enough from standard GBAFE, but gaining 10 WEXP per swing seems like it’d be pretty rapid with a cap of 255.

#TwoCents

Yeah, that’s why I suggested making it fairly easy to slow the system’s WEXP gain. I might go down to EXP/3 for my game, but I can 100% see it being pretty useless to someone with a full-length game at that speed. 3 WEXP for a finishing blow at equal levels sounds pretty fair, especially if you round down, since in normal FE, player units tend to outlevel enemies fairly quickly.

I know what I said means people will gain weapon ranks very quickly, and that’s 100% intentional, because my game isn’t anywhere near full-length.

At the rate of exp/2, everyone would s-rank mid-chapter 3

So I hadn’t tested anything when I thought, “exp/2 sounds pretty fair”, but everyone seems kinda caught up on how blazingly fast everyone would cap all their weapons almost instantly, so I went and tried out the first 2/3rds of my game (through chapter 4), hanging around and killing everything on the map, taking note of exp gains, and I’ve found that…!

Exp/3 maybe, but exp/2 really is a pretty comfortable level for people to be able to get a decent rank by endgame if you don’t overuse the Jeigan and don’t promote too soon. Yes, for a longer game, larger chapters, etc, absolutely, make it lower, but (assuming I can make staves not give super tiny amounts of exp) exp/2 would totally work for a small number of small chapters.

Or like, I can actually implement this instead of playing splatoon for 4 hours straight.

B-but gay squids! (I BLAME AEO) (I uh don’t really understand why that particular part was quoted?)

So that you can directly test it instead of taking note of exp gains.

Ah, right, makes sense. I am kinda glad everyone expressed concerns about the pace of weapon rank progression though, since now I know to keep an extra-close eye on it and stuff.