Today I’m doing a trio of units from Lord of The Seas
I’d like to give the title of this break down:
How Lord of the Seas teacher us to spice up out healers!
As with my previous post, I really love these hacks where a certain weapon type or class is elevated not just because of itself but considering its environment and hack mechanics itself. Avanni isn’t great because she’s just a stat giants but because the game she exists in makes bows good.
Lord of The Seas is a recently completed hack by captainfisting. If there is one word that can describe this hack is that it is “experimental” There’s so many tools, new concepts like for example naval combat that gives the fe experience a new life but which is still simple enough for the average fe player to understand.
In particular I’d like to highlight how this hack manages to fix 2 things which I’ve spent a lot of time thinkin about:
- How to make daggers work in a hack
- How to make healers interesting
We’ll start with 2 since healers are more common than daggers. Healers… are boring. Lets face it how many generic cleric have we seen in fe? and how many more do we really remember? Fe early clerics are very hard to make interesting because not only are they foot locked, their exp growth is severly lacking. Grinding lvls with staff use sucks lets face it and because they are staff locked they usually don’t have impressive stats anyways before promoting.
The usual cleric promo line to bishop is fine for the most part but I wouldn’t call it spicy, the most interesting thing about the class is them getting slayer in fe8, which gives them a niche for the endgame maps of that game. However this would of course hinge on the context that there are enough monster enemies to “slay”
Now problem 1, When asked about what daggers should do often the answer is they should debuff enemies, but while this worked okay in fates I feel as if this is a lacking niche for daggers in the gba meta. The problem is that most enemies in hacks will almost always die in a hit or two so these debuffs feel quite unimpactful. The worst case scenario for daggers are that they are lower might swords, which I personally think is the most basic way they can work but not excel, like a basic tuna sandwich, it will fill you up but you won’t think it’d great.
So what happens when you give your healers and thieves daggers? Well you get LOTS healers. Now I should clarify, while daggers do give debuffs here I personally don’t think it’s their main appeal, what makes the a viable weapon type is the fact that they pierce defense. Essentially your dagger units have luna always on their attacks.
This fixes both problems with daggers and healers, the piercing damage will mean that your healers can always contribute in not only healing but also damage and daggers become this reliable damage source from 1-2 range. Plus they have the chance to level up through combat exp, making feeding kills to them plausible.
But DAT that would be OP!! and you would be right my friend IF it weren’t for LOTS’s great balancing for this. In general every dagger class has very low str caps. When have we ever seen caps used as a balancing tool? and every dagger unit has very little str growth. Now you might think this would hinder the viability of daggers but for people like me I saw this as a challenge, these low growths (15-30) min to max means that you get a shot of dopamine everytime your dagger unit gets str. Here’s a short interaction between me and captain fisting in LOTS’s thread:
As you can see the dream is indeed real, this is the first ever cleric I have ever lvl 20 promoted and she hit her cap of 10 str before, In short eat yer heart out captain fisting!!
TL/DR: Daggers are cool, give your healers ways to contribute outside of healing, level caps and growths can be a niche balancing tool for cool stuff