Hey y’all! Had a question about my own hack design but thought it could be an interesting topic in general so I’m making it more broad I guess. How early should the player get two staffers and what staves do you think should be accessible early?
Mostly asking because I’m unsure on how to do this myself, as I have a bit of a conundrum. I want one of my two lords to be a light/staff unit, but I also want the Jagen to have staff access (lance/staff cav similar to Engage’s Royal Knight) so that they can still be a support unit after they fall off in terms of their raw stats. The issue is that I don’t think having two healers super early will be easy to design, so I was considering heavily limiting the amount of accessible staves in the first few chapters (e.g. the Jagen would not start with any staves but the lord would have a heal staff so the player would only have one healer at the beginning despite two characters capable of using staves which would depend on which character you decide to put the staff on since staves wouldn’t be purchasable until later).
That being said, I think it’d also be interesting to talk about what staves should/shouldn’t be accessible to the player, like early warp/rescue or keeping them until late game. Personally I think they might be a little too broken early but I also know that some hacks do it pretty well so it might be dependent on map design.
there is no real definitive way to handle these things, some hacks give you a lot of strong tools early while others are more typical fire emblem
something to avoid though imo is giving staff jagens high staff rank especially if that is not their main purpose, early staffers can be made much more interesting in many ways including skills prfs and stats though, random example i thought up but imagine a more bulky early staffer vs a squishy staffer with better rank or magic
a lot of fangames opt to nerf warp by making it fixed range or keeping it vanilla but not giving any particular ways to repair it or get more even if you get it early
depends on the implementation, but heal is probably the only one early.
this feels a bit redundant, you would probably need to give the lord some kind of prf staff, otherwise the jagen (especially if you’re having them mounted) is going to be better at healing due to the utility they have innately.
if the only reason you want the jagen to have staves is for utility, you could give them some kind of aura or something instead and leave the staves to the mc
up to you ultimately though, i don’t know any context
warp and rescue in general are broken; imo they shouldn’t even exist
I think Early Game Rescue staff, like Awakening, can give the player a lot of freedom. And can prevent Game Overs. I would also recommend an early barrier and unlock staff to grind some EXP on your healers.
Yeah I hear you, I wasn’t planning on either of them having high staff rank. I think the main thing I’m realizing is that the healer lord might have too much role compression right now tho because atm he’s the only magic unit for several chapters but also the main healer so it becomes a bit awkward. That being said, I really don’t want to just make him a staff bot until he promotes because that’s going to be fair amount of time so I think maybe having them both be D rank staves at the start might be nice.
You aren’t wrong but also I feel like that might be okay? I might change my mind later but I’m thinking that if I force a situation where only one of them can heal early on, but they both can also do combat, I can have the player choose which of the two they want to be their main early healer. I’d probably have to design maps and the rest of the cast around it but I think it could still work because Jagens are kinda supposed to be strong early, right? The decision would be like, that you either use your Jagen in combat and not as a support or you have a magical attacker. My other idea is potentially to just have an umpromoted Jagen who can become a staffer but I don’t really like that idea tbh due to the character I’ve been planning to make the Jagen being a veteran (so I feel like it’d make sense for them to be promoted?)
Noted. I think I want to stick with staves, though, as they provide a lot more options than an aura and require investment. I think my stance is that I want the Jagen to be strong early and fall off late due to bad growths, but if the player really wants to keep using them they have options as long as they put in the effort to invest in them that isn’t just a ton of stat boosters, if that makes sense?
Didn’t even consider this so I’m glad you brought it up (I have a tendency to not really use most staves that aren’t healing or movement related, trying to break the habit tho).
This would actually be pretty cool, especially since I’m planning on having several magic enemies.
I like to have access to healers from the earlygame. I think if you want to have 2 right away, try to give them a different niche. Like a tanky armour staffer with poor mag vs a typical high mag fragile one. Also 1-2 range staves are really nice
Teraspark’s fancy items ASM: It allows you to get a bunch of new staff effects. I would say of these, some staves that could be good for the early game could be the light rune staff (obstruct staff), and the steal staff.
Also, you can just assign the Dancer Ring effects to staves, if you have IER enabled.
True! They would definitely be pretty different, as it’d be a light/staff infantry unit vs a lance/staff cav, and I might make the Jagen (the cav) have lower magic (although maybe give them an actually decent growth in it) so you could transition from physical combat unit to magical utility unit as the game goes on. who knows, though.
Ok, so. Basically: imagine a staff, that has Physic range, and when used, it places a Light Rune at a distance. You can do that as an early game staff. Light rune functionality still exists in FE8
The easiest way to design would be to implement it, playtest, and see if you have fun.
I’ve designed the early stages of my hack around having an overpowered bishop w/o magic as a healer from the get go, and a dancer that can use staves a few chapters later. May sound stupid, but I’ve grown to enjoy having my main healer in the middle of things and not having to worry, and having the additional option of healing instead of dancing, if needed.
Breaking the mold is not bad design. Go for it. Implementing new staff types like others have said would help, also being generous with giving the player special staves. I found lowering the durability of staves (3-use physic, 1-use fortify, 3-use sleep, etc.) but handing them out much more frequently improved the experience for me, instead of getting one or two 15-use physics all game, or one 5-use sleep staff, staves that you have to cherish because you know you won’t be getting anymore anytime soon, if ever. It gives the player more options early and encourages them to use those special staves, but still prevents them from abusing/spamming them because they have much less uses per staff.
I worry that a light / staff lord wouldn’t feel too impactful on the turns they use up healing an ally. I’d want my lord to be in thick of the action, fighting enemies. It might be fun to give the lord the powerstaff skill, so they get another action (like galeforce) the first time they use a staff each turn. That way they can heal and attack in a single turn. Would make the lord highly flexible and your most mobile character. Granted, you’d want to balance this by keeping the lord’s stats a little low, at least at the start, or make them generally fragile so they might be mobile but you can’t throw them into the open undefended. That, to me, feels like a fun light / staff lord unit design.
I find one healer early (at the prologue or shortly after it, like chapter 1 or 2) is pretty important. Healing is a vital source of utility. ‘Wasting turns’ with everyone eating vulneraries can feel tedious after a while. A second healer early is totally fine. I do agree making a distinction between the healers is a great idea. If you lord is a mobile, fragile healer (per my comment above), maybe have your second healer but an armor-priest (4-move, high defense, high-magic staff user)? That could be awesome! Tanks hits, heals allies.
Lance / staff Jagen is also a great idea. An absolute utility king (or queen) that will stay useful and effective even after their stats fall off a bit.
It’s super common for hacks to have 2 early healers, since it allows your army to split up easier. Playing any of the 2024 releases should give a good idea of modern hack sensibilities.(Dream of Five or Cerulean Coast would be my personal recommendations).
It’s pretty common for hacks to nerf the range of staves so they can be used earlier in the game. Hacks also tend not by shy about handing early status staves. A sleep stave is basically just a worse longbow in terms of how it engages with the enemy. The best way to silence an enemy is by killing them lol. It’s also not uncommon to see a custom stave here or there, a few hacks have a Fortune staff that greatly increases hit.
As others have mentioned, it isn’t abnormal for a hack to have multiple early staff units. It allows for some flexibility in tackling maps where you’ll want your army in multiple places at once.
This is actually a really sick idea, not sure if it fits the design I have in mind atm but I’ll definitely keep it in mind because I’m definitely one of those people who just doesn’t use non-healing staves because I’m too scared to use up their uses (and then they simply don’t get used). Wonder if there’s a way to implement a restock mechanic where they have really low durability but get to replenish all of their uses after the map, similar to Cerulean Crescent’s Prfs or Embrace of the Fog’s staves.
I think to be fair on this (and it’s admittedly something I didn’t mention) but there are gonna be two lords and the second one is going to be significantly more geared towards combat. Powerstaff is definitely a good idea though and not one that I considered before this (and I was trying to figure out what personal skills could be, as I want to do a low skill hack with 1 personal, 1 base class, and 1 promoted aside from stuff like canto)
This was the exact mentality that led me to go down that route, haha.
Honestly good point and I feel a little dumb because I played both of the hacks you mentioned and have no memory of this for some reason? It’s been a hot minute but damn how did I forget about that
Good idea. Might make things really fun while not being overpowered. Could maybe try to do several tiers of staves so later on you can actually get good range on your staves but you can still get the fun effects early?
Good point. I haven’t really tried my hand at designing any maps yet so that does free things up. Thanks.
As many other people in this thread have said, there are plenty of good ways to approach the matter of lots of early staffers. Personally I like when healing is pretty scarce earlygame, if you wanted to appeal to me specifically you would just give 1 early heal staff that you have to trade around as needed. But with that said, whenever I’m faced with a conundrum like this, I like to look back at other games that tackled similar concepts and see what solutions they came up with.
I really like the way that Tearring Saga handles its staffers. There, most staffers get a special fun staff that only they can use, but Lee, an early prepromoted bishop, doesn’t have a personal staff, presumably because he has really good combat. So, maybe you want to have a fun staff (like rescue, I think rescue’s really fun) on one of your lord or jagen but not the other, so their staffing utility feels as different as their combat does.
But that’s not to say that it’s objectively correct to give the lord a cool prf and give the jagen nothing, you could really go either way. The player has to make a great sacrifice to take their jagen away from combat in the earlygame, maybe a cool personal staff could make for a more interesting push and pull with that unit’s action economy; or if you want to attach more narrative signifigance to staffing ability, then maybe the lord would be the prime target to give the prf to. You could make it a hard locked personal staff, or just a staff that’s gated by a high weapon rank requirement; there’s tons of ways to take this concept, all of which are both valid and interesting, so try things out and see what you like!
For two early game staff users is kinda hard to get a correct answer. I mean, it always has been Troubadour > Cleric (except in FE8 because L’Arachel takes her sweet time to join you). It also depends what staffs are avaible to you. Early game you normally give the player Heals and Restores at best.
Another good point to take account is how you desing your maps. If the map requires the player to split their army, then the 2 healers have something to do. But that’s kinda hard to do in early maps…
A Jeigan with staff utility sounds cool, but it really hampers the role and uses of any early game staff unit (which already struggles a lot because they gain so little EXP).
A workaround I was thinking about a really long time ago it was the give the staff user acces to magic, dark magic, and also give she a personal tome. This is were comes the trick: You need at least D rank to use Flux, and she starts with E. Her personal weapon is weak, and also don’t give any Weapon EXP preventing her to gain acces to broken stuff like Luna. This is solved when she promotes, of course, as she will gain D rank in promotion. Until then she will be like a some sort of shaman trainee, that can heal, but can’t properly fight.
I don’t know if that really solves the problem with your situation, but I always liked the idea if X character greatly outclasses Y character, then give Y character something unique to differentiate itself.