On a side note, i always thought it weird why in chapters like River of Regrets and Last Hope, the entirety of enemy units is still human…lore-wise most of Formortis human forces came from controlling Grado, but at this stage, Vigarde is dead, Lyon has abandoned his homeland, and Renais controls Grado mostly.
It’s made doubly weird because of how, in Last Hope, Riev reffers to his assault force as his “pretties” and he’s known for controlling the monster side of Formortis’ army. Why not change the units all into promoted monsters? Maybe throw in some Druids, Summoners, Dark Knights in the mix, if you want to show corrupted humans. It would make more sense given the point where the story is and it would add more monster chapters in a monster-based story.
Also, maybe use the system that Code of the Black Knights used to make enemy Summoners actually summon things. Just a thought.
Oh, and don’t forget the few dragons on the last few floors that all have…whichever shield skill prevents damage outside of 1 range, making most of the cast and any of the monster slaying bows, unless using Innes, say it with me now completely pointless.
Also I played on hard and only really got my butt chaffed on the latter half of the ruins, where some things just kind of got hard for the sake of being frustrating rather then challenging.
However I made those criticisms way back before the Lite update was ever mentioned and he skill changes were even a thing so…
That’s so sensible… I never paid attention to such a crucial overlook. Even Selena wouldn’t fight on if Vigarde was dead. Maybe there should be an army called “cultist” and it’s leader being Riev. It would make a lot of sense that an evil cultist group of Druids and Dark knights want to revive Demon King. And Riev, the Dark Druid is their leader.
Uhm, didn’t the current patch only have 1 single Fire Dragon who is the only dragon with towershield+ (which was renamed to Dragonskin) so it should not be that big of an issue?
Please note, my Comment (comment number 400#) in which I originally complained about this was made back in June of last year.
Well before the more recent patch, which I haven’t touched, and in what vague memory I have it was every boss dragon in floors 6-9 that had them, the dragon (fe7), Idunn, jahn, and a few one-off dragons smattered around a few different floors that all had it. It also made it so only high strength characters could even remotely try to kill them.
So there is that.
Edit: after spitballing some ideas with ReturnOfTheBlackKnight I ended up with the idea of altering the effectiveness of the sacred weapons to kind of better fit some of their intended uses and the story at large.
To quote what I said exactly:
Sieglinde is effective against Dragons and gargoyles due to her difficulties and stuggles with Valter.
Siegmund being effective against cavs and beasts due to all of his time using guerilla warfare while on the run.
Vidofnir being effective against armor and horses since it is a winged lance and all.
Audhulma being effective against some forms of footsoldier due to ice making their footing poor allowing for easier kills.
Garm being effective against Cyclops, Dragons, Spiders and Armor since it’s mostly used as a “wall” breaker.
Excalibur primarily being effective against all fliers, incuding dragons and mogals.
Ivaldi still being effective against all monsters since ya’ know the whole “purge the darkness with a flood of light” thing.
And Gleipnir having less might but being effective against all magic users. Due to it’s darkness swallowing the magical energies of it’s targets.
Now ReturnOfTheBlackKnight further refined the exacts down and here’s his part.
He also agreed with Gleipnir but that quote involves talking about messing with weapon might and so I’ll leave that out.
We also considered swaping The twin Sieg’s stat boosts around since erika doesn’t need the Res and ephram doesn’t need the defense wile also making most of the 1-range sacred weapons 1-2 range using their wielders magic stat for balance purposes.
Wait, aren’t the Twin siblings Sacred Weapons the ones that gave +5 STR? What did I miss?
Audhulma has RES+5 and Vidofnir is the one that gave DEF+5, but those aren’t twin legendary weapons, at least not between themselves. Audhulma was paired with Excalibur, and Vidofnir with Nidhogg (speaking about it, it’s +5 Luck makes it only worse than Gleipnir, which is quite sad)
Hmm, that bit may have still been pertaining to our private talks. It’s been a bit since I’ve played through vanilla sacred stones so its all up in the air.
We were mostly trying to find a good way to balance the sacred weapons being unbreakable.
Here’s where the basis of that particular comment was from.
The only one we weren’t able to really figure out was Latona, since it being unbreakable makes enemy phase irrelevant but I think the map wide cleanse is more valuable then the heal, which is why I have wondering if there was a way to make latona only heal status since they are so prominent in the ruins.
Then I ended up devising the altered effectiveness and he figured that was a shockingly good way to mitigate these weapons from being too overpowered and give them particular nieches for their users.
I mean it all sounds nice…except for Glepnir not having effective damage…that was one of the stupidest decisions made in vanilla…so what if it’s a Dark weapon, it’s still part of the weapon set designed to hurt and kill monsters and the Demon Lord.
EDIT: That would be the same as Forblaze not dealing effective damage against the War Dragons, because both are fire types.
If Audhulma has its might nerfed this much with its stat boost changed to luck I would say to at least raise it’s critical chance
Garm is the best out all of them, 18 might, Speed +5
I’d say to even the might of Siegline and Siegfried, 16 might should still be fair to both of them, specially when Eirika has a lower offensive stat cap
Ivaldi should probably have 14 might at least, 12 is too low.
Anything besides that I’ve got no complaints
Basically my idea with the Sacred Spells was to boil down their idea’s and units to a. Single point and work from there.
Anima: no real weakness except so add a few more effectivness to winged creatures to cover the dragons in the ruins (apologies i tend to use dragon and wyvern interchangeabily) as well and anything else that flies. Since flyers tend to rush them anyway.
Light: since Bishops are literally monster slayers just keeping Ivaldi effective against monsters and dragons seemed fine. If anything it just didn’t really need changed all that much.
Dark: since dark magic is always seen as this corrupting force of negative energy that kills the flow of natural magic and dark mages tend to be slower then their Anima and Light counterparts I figure making it a MageSlayer tome would work since this is dark magic with diving providence meaning it wouldn’t corrupt magic it would devour it.
@UncleDrAgN , we were also making effective against infantry so that ment, fighters myrms, soldiers, mercs, and their respective footlocked promotions with him adding Bonewalkers/mights and revenants/entombed, While also giving it Ice magic at range.The lower might was to reign in it’s power while still letting it be useful.
The underlying idea being a sacred ice sword has to be putting off enough cold to make the ground slippery causing most footlocked combatants lose their footing and be slaughtered by the blade much more easily.
Under it all I also considered what an “intended target” was for each weapon. With Erika and Ephraim having their weapons suited to fighting their more direct foes based on the narritive.
Ephraim was stuck in guerilla warfare for awhile and had to adapt to fighting cavs and avoiding tracking hounds.
Erika had Valter to deal with, and the whole mess with Cormag and Glenn whom are all Wyvern units so I figured making Sieglind a “Scalepiercer” worked fine thematically.
Ultimately all of these are still just ideas shared between two people more as a “how would you do it then?” kind of thing. The would all still of course still be effective against the demon king and all but that should be a given.
I mean the single point of the Sacred Weapons is their effectiveness against monsters and the Demon King…also having a weapon be effective against the king of monsters, but null against the regular foot soldiers is kinda contradictory, even if it had a shifted focus…for that to even be effective you’d need a crowd of corrupt mages on enemy armies to justify the value of shifting the effectiveness.
I think the issue lies more with the fact that the game doesn’t have a big enough crowd of monsters in it’s chapters, nor are their defensive stats in the late game high enough to really sell the effectiveness of the weapons over other generic, high-powered weapons…even the zombie dragons can get killed easily enough with a dragonpike or wyrmslayer. Maybe if the monster portions of the enemy armies were stronger and more abundant in the latter stages of the game, the value of the weapons would go up. That being said, some tweaks to their bonus values and might would be nice.
Also, Elder Magic isn’t just pure evil or corruption or consuming things…it’s the way it is due to it’s primordial nature. It also has ties to things like science, experimentation and progress. Most shamans are prone to scientific or scholarly work. So yeah your viewpoint isn’t wrong, but it is kinda narrow.
Well, my view is also skewed by many hacks using the basis of player dark mages literally going “oh I use dark magic, but don’t worry I’m not evil like those guys”. this even applies to knoll, who even says most of grado’s magic users are willingly being evil here.
Plus you forget “magic users” includes Mogol and Lamia, so again, I thought of that.
And until I think the last two-three maps you actually face a crap ton of shaman/druids in FE8, if I remember the reinforcments on River of Sorrow are exclusively druids a few paladins and Wyverns.
My Idea also actually has a few different ways of explaining this oddity.
1: its a side effect of the stones being destroyed.
2: the blessings on the weapons have weakened somewhat over time hindering their effectiveness against the rank and file monsters while retaining their strength against the demon king.
3: The weapons tailor themsevles to their users strengths, and considering you have two viable dark magic users (one if you made ewan a mage) normally it works.
4: Possible side effect of lyon’s experiments on the dark stone causing monsters to gain resistance to the elemental charge of certain sacred weapons.
You’ve also gotta remember there were human followers of the demon king originally, so it stands to reason some of the sacred weapons would be devoted to dealing with the “infused” soldiers to hamper their march.
A weapon isn’t made to do only one thing, these weapons should be able to effect other things besides the monsters while some of the monsters should be resistant to certain elemental effects.
I found a visual bug in chapter 8 of this hack:
where there are 5 knights guarding a chest 1 of those knights still have the vanilla visual instead of the new visual
You’re not wrong there. Even I felt that Audhulma was kinda underwhelming. But not only is it ranged, it’s pretty accurate too. With that small luck boost and Joshua’s high skill and speed combined, he will be hitting almost everything.
I think weapon crit should be raised by 5. But let’s see if Blood agrees with this.
Besides Ivaldi, Gleipnir is the only weapon effective against Gorgons and Mogalls. And Dark Mages with that +5 defense will be pretty broken too. I did this with Ivaldi and Gleipnir because they will target Mage’s high res. That will balance the damage.
Maybe some more cultists should appear at Chapter 20, because it’s Riev’s final stand.
I always supported that. Monsters need to be a bit threatening than humans. Not give them some insane skills… Perhaps just buff their stats to match the legendary weapons.
While I was setting those stats on weapons, I kept in mind that literally every monster should have either 20+ def or res.
Edit : By the way, all weapon’s effectiveness should be reduced from double effectiveness to 1 and half.
There was a lot of characters, specifically on the magical side of things that had their growths nerfed on the localization version. Off the top of my head it was Artur, Lute, Ewan, L’ Arachel and there was also Amelia. Also I think Colm had some base Stat nerfs
Would be a good thing to reset then to their original value?
Oh wow, lots of new comments here.
I’d like to say that I’m part of the group that thinks the sacred weapons should indeed be unbreakable, given their lore and importance to the story. I eventually settled on keeping them breakable because of balancing reasons, but @jackofblades1991 listed some great suggestions on how that scenario could work. Now I’m not sure what to do :x
Edit: I also like the idea of Riev leading a cult after Grado’s fall.
I mean, technically speaking Riev as a Dark Druid should be a cult leader since his promotion to a Grado General. We see a few scenes of him scheming and leading the darker forces of Grado even in vanilla. In all honesty it’s just a convenience to justify putting more and stronger monsters into the main campaign.
At this stage you might as well put up a preview list for the next update given how many people have thrown suggestions xD
EDIT: Here’s an idea. Shave off 2-3 skirmish locations and maybe 2 Tower floors (poll it to get a pulse for the people’s reaction) and use that to get some extra ROM space for features like extra dialogue, enemies and cutscenes. Pretty sure no one will mind that.
If we’re talking about buffs, then I think Garcia is the one who deserves it the most. That man is a beast lore-wise but his speed and defense suck in the main game. I know he’s old and all. But look at other old characters from other FE games, Rudolf for example. I think Garcia should at least be strong enough to set an example for Ross (He always wanted to surpass his father.)
I don’t see a problem with removing the entire Tower of Valni. If I remember correctly it’s supposed to be an ideal post-game content maybe for farming supports because the main game’s so short.
If we’re planning to increase the main story chapters then I don’t see a reason why would player go there unless he wants to farm exp. Lagdou Ruins can always fill the part of the post game content. But let’s see what people agree with.
EDIT :
For example @jackofblades1991 just gave an another amazing idea. I always felt that the last floor of Tower felt like a defense map. Maybe, Blood could do an actual story chapter in there where players protect the Sacred Stones in a survival map and that same map could be used for, you know farming purposes.