(Potential) bugs report:
Rogues in C12x don’t move to any escape point after they’ve looted treasure. They’ll just sit in place on top of last looted chest and get hit by poison.
Had Cath deployed in C14 and she didn’t have 100% chance to grab the Speedwings. Wondering if only Thieves have 100% chance to pick up desert items but not Rogues/Assassin.
Oh, Cath had hilarious growth and her knife had was basically a silver axe wyrmslayer. fun detail most of the dragons delt magic damage, and an auto leveled cath had nearly capped res, waiting to recruit her until the last possible map gave you a Athos who basically was magic proof.
Astolfo and Chad got the normal knives which had 1-2 range, and better availability.
As far as the whole snowballing thing, again that’s more of PE’s fault, since to be honest most of FE6 cast were ass. The very first thing PE did was alter roy’s growths to be actually useable.
As far as the whole snowballing thing, again that’s more of PE’s fault, since to be honest most of FE6 cast were ass. The very first thing PE did was alter roy’s growths to be actually useable.
Well…see there’s a difference between making characters not-so-ass vs. changes like this:
(20+ in every relevant stat already not to mention skillsys and I only gave Sophia Body Ring as well as the Angelic Robe she joined with. Oh and she got a Prf).
(Didn’t invest any statboosters in her yet iirc)
(Didn’t invest statboosters into Bors yet either)
(Don’t remember Thea being anywhere near THIS broken in vanilla either. I might have given her an Angelic Robe but that’s it. Also, why is her Res so low relative to her Def when she’s in the Pegasus Knight tree? PE doesn’t have skillsys so the 10% Res growth on Thea couldn’t have been to compensate for Warding Blow. Oh yeah and Thea got a Prf as well…)
(Mag seems low vs. his other stats but he still ORKOs most things. Opportunist adds +4 dmg if not retaliated against and Glacies adds skill% chance for Res damage. So 22% chance for 16 extra dmg for current Lugh…)
And I would have more screenshots to share of OP characters if they didn’t die in my Ironman run lol.
Meanwhile…
(This is Marcus after 1 Energy Ring. I deployed him for fun in midgame even though he quickly became useless)
(Zelot died in my run already but kinda same story)
(This is Elffin after 2 Angelic Robes. The same character who is the most limited in terms of weapons/staff access in the game, only having access to Light Magic. His offense is still pretty terrible relative to other magic users in the latest patch and two of his skills are proc based (i.e. unreliable). He has a Prf now, which is a step in the right direction, but he’s still undertuned and more importantly, many characters are overtuned).
There’s other undertuned characters which I already mentioned earlier so I don’t wanna beat the dead horse too hard. Another one I noticed in this run though is Garrett who has 13 Spd in his join chapter, which means he gets doubled by all enemies, and he joins later than and has no clear niche vs. Lot, Wade, Bartre, Geese.
As for what I like: There are a few characters that feel more balanced and/or in line with vanilla FE6 like Klein, Ogier, Igrene. Lot and Wade now feels like not-trash but also not OP/you still have to be careful using them, which is nice. Elen was buffed from vanilla (massive Mag, can promote to Valkyrie now, her skillset allows her to lure 1 enemy on EP and self heal) but doesn’t feel broken either. The Etrurian generals statwise aren’t broken, just broken skills in Galeforce, Tome Range +1. At least it makes some sense since they are characters that lorewise are famous for their combat. Noah and Treck also don’t stand out as OP or UP. Roy got buffs (warranted since he sucked so much and he’s the main character) but he’s more-or-less fine where he is.
Problem is the balanced characters are far and few between compared to ones who are not.
I think how much ZeN copied from PE in terms of character balance is irrelevant at this point. Either way, the character balance needs a lot of work imo.
Well, overall fe6 has always had a messy unit set ups, as for units like Garret you need to remember there are no hard mode bonuses by default in FE8 so him, percival, and a few others are worse by default due to it.
Just because I can now, lets compare your Sophia and Gwendolyn from this against my Project Ember Sophia and Gwendolyn.
Over all not much of a difference other than mine having slightly more health but worse defences. The tome was also a carryover but I don’t know if has the same effectiveness.
Now lets compare Gwens.
One of the things PE did was each Knight class characyer had different weapon access to work with, Bors had Lances and Swords so he wasn’t boned while in Axeland. Barth had Axes and Lances due to being flanked by a lot of lance users on spawn. while Gwen here had Lances and Bows, so she could safely poke enemies to gain her first few levels to pick up some steam.
Honestly the truth of it is this will never truly be fully balanced in any satisfying way due to how many powerful skills are in play.
Personally I don’t mind it and just plan to deal with it as it comes.
One of the things PE did was each Knight class characyer had different weapon access to work with, Bors had Lances and Swords so he wasn’t boned while in Axeland. Barth had Axes and Lances due to being flanked by a lot of lance users on spawn. while Gwen here had Lances and Bows, so she could safely poke enemies to gain her first few levels to pick up some steam.
Bors isn’t ideal in Axeland, but he can still be used to lure due to sheer tankiness even if he can’t reliably hit on the counter.
My take on Barth is he is worse Bors. But he’s good enough at his role, so I’m not really complaining about him. It’s more like Bors needs to be toned down than Barthe needs to be hard buffed.
Gwen doesn’t really need Bows in C8. In ZeN’s hack she starts with Short Spear which is better than Bows because she can EP with it (and because Short Spears haven’t been nerfed yet).
this will never truly be fully balanced in any satisfying way
Tbh I feel like this is kind of a cop-out mentality. Not looking for “perfect” balance, but just something less egregious. Between two comparable characters, one shouldn’t have like 3-5 advantages over the other, for example. And there should just be less power creep in general, to maintain the feel of Binding Blade Hard Mode. When people compare different FE games, usually Fates: Conquest on Lunatic, Binding Blade Hard, and SD/NM Lunatic are thought of to be among the best in terms of hard, but fair difficulty. This is FE6’s main schtick and appeal for fans like me. Even in a remake of FE6 in the FE8 engine, I hope it can maintain what made it memorable in the first place.
Well that’s the rub, Fe6 has a lot of really questionable decisions in it that heavily mar it. Your lord doesn’t promote till like chapter 23, there are two route splits that are determined by arbitrary and obfuscated means that are normally completely hidden to the player. Two entire classes aren’t properly flagged for effective weaponry. An just about every single prepromote is better then any of the default cast.
Not to mention the borked hitrates, axes being almost completely useless and all the ambush spawns. The one mechanic that the FE community seems to unanimously consider completely and unabashedly bad design that is unacceptable under any circumstances.
Well that’s the rub, Fe6 has a lot of really questionable decisions in it that heavily mar it. Your lord doesn’t promote till like chapter 23, there are two route splits that are determined by arbitrary and obfuscated means that are normally completely hidden to the player. Two entire classes aren’t properly flagged for effective weaponry. An just about every single prepromote is better then any of the default cast.
Not to mention the borked hitrates, axes being almost completely useless and all the ambush spawns. The one mechanic that the FE community seems to unanimously consider completely and unabashedly bad design that is unacceptable under any circumstances.
I feel like you’re going on a tangent/strawman here. I never complained about Lord early promote. Never complained about buffed hit rates either (although I am not sure if ZeN took Intimidate into account) nor removing ambush spawns. I think there are many good changes made by PE/ZeN that fixed yes things that were unanimously disliked about vanilla. But like I mentioned before, there are some things that can still be improved (greatly).
As I replied to you in PM:
“I feel like we’re both beating the dead horse. You keep telling me there’s a reason PE/ZeN buff things and a lot of characters used to be trash and they wanted them to be viable, and I get all that and I encourage making units not trash. I played vanilla. Even if the last time I played vanilla was years ago, I remember enough about which characters were trash and should be made better. But what I keep trying to say is that PE/ZeN made changes apparently without thinking about how it affects other characters’ viability and the gameplay as a whole. They just didn’t do a good job. The good news though is that that’s fixable with time/even feedback to ZeN, provided he listens.”
yeah, we’ve kinda hit an impasse.
most of my tanget was actually refering to this particular comment, largely do to my irrational distain for some people and how they fellatiate certain games in the franchise. namely the ones that actually are either filled with new mechainics that hinder the player experience at best or are actively hostile to the player at worst (i.e Genealogy and Thracia).
either way i don’t actually disagree with some of your complaints, I’ve mostly just been trying to at least explain where they came from.
(random sidenote we really should have picked a single place to have this back and forth)
Side question, do you have a screenshot of new Zeiss?
Also at least Sophia seems right as she’s meant to be a super growth unit in the vein of Est/Nino and even in PE/Fe6 in 8 shes still a pain to get off the ground. But the theoretical point of her is having a near capped-out unit in multiple stats down the road without having to resort to overt stat boost investment (at best you invest more utility/survival ones like Angel Robes and Body Rings to help round out her growth). Gwen can also be viewed as a pseudo Est.
most of my tanget was actually refering to this particular comment, largely do to my irrational distain for some people and how they fellatiate certain games in the franchise. namely the ones that actually are either filled with new mechainics that hinder the player experience at best or are actively hostile to the player at worst (i.e Genealogy and Thracia).
As someone who fellatiates all the mainline FE games that I’ve played so far, I too disdain people who fellatiate only certain games.
(random sidenote we really should have picked a single place to have this back and forth)
True. Funny thing is seeing this as I’m typing this reply:
Yeah but I’m only just about to start C17 so Zeiss is still kind of fresh. Here he is:
This is my 2nd run of ZeN’s hack btw. First time was with 2/27 version of the hack. 2nd time with 3/10 version (not sure what changes he made between the versions in terms of character balance). My impression of Zeiss so far (from these 2 runs) is he feels pretty close to how he did in vanilla. Once he gets enough Spd, he ORKOs most enemies and he’s a physical tank.
In my 1st run I turned him into Sky Knight (the alternate promotion option with lance + bows) to experiment and it was actually…very good given that not long after recruiting Zeiss, you face a lot of pegasus and wyvern enemies.
Sophia is not right at all. I get she’s supposed to be an Est, but she snowballs way too quickly. Having 23+ in all stats at 20/6, including capped Defense at 20, and having Nihil (negates enemy skills) and Lifetaker and a Prf is not ok. Here’s her vanilla avg stats for comparison from Serene’s Forest:
She did need a buff, but this way too much (her 20/6 stats are now way higher than her previous 20/20 stats other than Res, giving her effectively something like +10 in all stats). She’s one of my favorite characters and I’m disappointed she isn’t harder to train/use.
Same for Wendy, to a lesser extent. Keep in mind that among her skills she has Swift Stance (+4 Spd/+4 Res when under attack, Knight Aspirant which gives +2 dmg, +15 avo when she’s > 75% HP, and Pavise, which has skill% chance to negate physical atk so in the screenshot she has 23% chance to negate physical). At least her Str isn’t monstrous so she doesn’t ORKO everything.
In general, stats needed to be nerfed and more finely tuned taking the addition of skillsys into account.
I think ZeN based Sophia on the Heroes version of her, which is a tankier mage. Also Druid based classes tend to tankier overall. I mean sure maybe a minor Stat nerf in her early stats wouldn’t be terrible but original Sophia wasn’t worth the investment as even maxed trained she fell short on most areas to bloody Niime (which oddly enough benefitted more from item/weapon investment as a prepromote than a true growth unit). At best she could max Mag and Res, come out with decent HP and Skill but her Speed, Con, Luck and Def would always be atrocious. The point of an investment is to get high returns and PE/ZeN Sophia accomplished that and all things considered you still need to spoon feed her a lot of kills in the 3 chapters she comes out to get those gains in useful time
It’s really not that hard to get kills with her anymore. In vanilla I remember it was something like a little under 50 displayed hit rate and she got doubled/ORKO by everything, even after Speedwings, Body Ring, and Angelic Robe (I used to just dump these stat boosters on her asap). It was terrible.
In this hack, she starts at Lvl 7 rather than Lvl 1, along with higher bases. She starts with these stats, which are quite generous:
Her Prf gives her Bracing Stance (+4 Def/+4 Res when attacked), has 5 more Mt than Flux (12 Mt vs. 7 Mt), does not reduce her AS unlike Flux (which reduces her AS by 2), and has 15 more Hit than Flux (95 Hit vs. 80 Hit).
She also starts with Hex (-15 Avo to adj. enemies) and gets Anathema at Lvl 10 (-10 Avo to enemies in 3 tiles).
Oh and you have Roy, who can Rally Spectrum her for another +2 in all stats…
So basically this means she hits much more reliably, doesn’t need enemies as low to kill them, no longer gets ORKO’d nor doubled by enemies.
She doesn’t need 3 chapters to get going. Plenty of fighters to kill in her join chapter if you’re willing to spend a few more turns. By C14x, she doesn’t need to be babysat.
Even if you didn’t want to train her much and super early promoted her (not that you would want to do that) she wouldn’t be awful. Average 10/5 Sophia in this hack would have 31 HP/17 Mag/17 Skl/19 Spd/14 Def/13 Res.
Sorry but looking at the stats/facts, I’m still sticking with my opinion that PE/ZeN went overboard with her.
I think I said that she could do with a minor Stat nerf so I don’t see the disagreement here. Plus with multiple 50+ growths, those stats aren’t that shocking. Also the value of bases is relative to the join chapter and Sophia joins late. At level 7 she only has Hex and her personal skill IIRC. Overall you could maybe go with a 2-3 point deduction in her Speed and up the weight on her Prf so that this version actually plays like mage tank in Heroes
you realize heroes unit comparisons is antithetical to their normal counterparts right?
like most units in heroes play nothing like the actual units.
also, I feel like this is something I should have stated earlier, it is possible ZeN wants some of these units to be busted.
plus I’m certain everybody keeps forgetting the tower exists in this hack, so EXP is a non-issue.
Also the value of bases is relative to the join chapter and Sophia joins late.
Right, I don’t disagree with that.
But when I said generous bases it was:
(a) With respect to how she used to be in vanilla/to point out she’s not that hard to grow. For example, I pointed out that the significance of her new is bases is that she doesn’t get ORKO’d anymore and the combination of bases/Prf/Rally Spec effectively gets her way more kills, with less/no risk.
(b) With respect to how fast she grows and her ceiling in this hack. She has a 400% stat growth in this hack vs. 280% growth in vanilla.
At level 7 she only has Hex and her personal skill IIRC.
I did mention she gets Anathema at Lvl 10. I never said she got it at base/at Lvl 7.
Overall you could maybe go with a 2-3 point deduction in her Speed and up the weight on her Prf so that this version actually plays like mage tank in Heroes
I don’t agree that FEH should be the inspiration over vanilla FE6 for a FE6 remake.
I agree that she could take a small deduction in Spd. Probably in Spd growth rather than base Spd, as we don’t want her to get doubled in her join chapter but we also don’t want her to start doubling enemies too soon, esp. because she has a massive Mag stat. Something like 30 Spd growth → 20 Spd growth. She reliably gets +3 Spd from promotion anyway so she’ll still be plenty fast.
Her Def should be significantly reduced. If it’s a little higher than vanilla I don’t mind, but right now she’s just too good all-around and her Def is ridiculous. She doesn’t need to be a mixed tank. Being a Res tank is fine enough.
Whatever changes are made to Sophia, Raigh and Niime would also need to be looked at, of course. I haven’t taken much of a look at Raigh and Niime yet in this hack yet though, so I can’t say much about them yet.
I don’t think that’s quite acceptable though, there is a point where a growth is too low to usable, at 20% speed growth the stat Calc may say she’ll on average still end up at 21 speed, but you’d likely find she’d have 17-18 on a higher basis due to how variable odds tends to work against averages.
I mean, normally a 30% growth is considered iffy, 25% just barely usable and 20% or lower is unusable.
Niime is kind of irrelevent in this conversation but, tomerange +1 + druid skills, default A in staves and S in Dark and from what little I can see in the builder, Capped magic at base.
Reigh is just slightly worse the Sophia. with a starting Brank in dark.
my question at this point though is “you do realize some people have fun using broken units right?”
edit: for the sake of argument I decided to compare growths in this to their PE growths. wanna know something really funny?
he actually substantially reduced sophia’s speed growth in comarison by about 40%.
2nd edit: I think I’m actually going to compare every units growths for their differences. just tell me if you’re actually curious.
I don’t think that’s quite acceptable though, there is a point where a growth is too low to usable, at 20% speed growth the stat Calc may say she’ll on average still end up at 21 speed, but you’d likely find she’d have 17-18 on a higher basis due to how variable odds tends to work against averages.
Yes there’s variance to consider, but that’s why the bases and promotion gain is important. The worst case Sophia that procs no Speed from Lvl 7 to Lvl XX (where XX is any lvl from 10 to 20) and promotes still has 17 Spd, which is enough not to get doubled by most enemies around her join time. There’s only 3 benchmarks in terms of Spd: Getting doubled, not getting doubled but enemy not getting doubled, and doubling enemy. It’s enough for Sophia to reliably not get doubled, and if you get lucky and/or invest Speedwings, she can double enemies later. You’d have to be really RNG screwed to start falling into “getting doubled” range.
I mean, normally a 30% growth is considered iffy, 25% just barely usable and 20% or lower is unusable.
In Sophia’s case, the difference between something like avg 16/10 Sophia with 30% and avg 16/10 Sophia with 20% growth is 23 Spd vs. 21 Spd. And the difference between 20/20 Sophia with 30% growth and 20/20 Sophia with 20% growth is 3 Spd. 30% vs. 20% just looks bad. Again, gain bases and promotion gains are way more important and you have to take into account the role of the unit. The point is to keep Sophia from doubling too many enemies, too early. But to keep her out of doubling range of most enemies as well.
my question at this point though is “you do realize some people have fun using broken units right?”
Of course I do. But that’s why I have so much problem with some things in PE and this hack. Because I think they appealed too much to the “broken/OP everything is fun” crowd and just doesn’t feel enough like “FE6 in FE8”.
he actually substantially reduced sophia’s speed growth in comarison by about 40%.
That just means PE dun goofed even harder. Well done ZeN.
I think I’m actually going to compare every units growths for their differences. just tell me if you’re actually curious.
I am curious and wonder if we should make a Google doc for it and update it for each update of PE and this hack. But it’s midnight so not gonna get into it today. Already wasted much time here today lol. Good talking to you though.
It was a nice chat, so far (stopped at clarine due to eye strain will continue tommorow) its actually been adding magic/strength for the split, Dieck getting axes and a few units getting either slight buffs, nerfs, or in shana’s case a skill that renders the inspection moot.
Made a personal text doc to keep track of start/stop points and differences of any real substace, and willfully choosing not to note down any str/mag added to opposed unit type if growth added is less that 20% (basically if a physical unit doesn’t gain a magic growth higher than 20% i don’t record it.)
Going back to a previous point, the Peg Knight sisters in FE6 actually have terrible growth rates in RES. Actually of the 3 sets of Peg Knight units only 2 can constitute as potentially viable anti-mage units in Fiora and Syrene, the latter actually having the better odds due to her base 12 RES on a 50% growth. Except FE7 and FE8 both lowered the RES cap of Falcon Knights from 28 to 26, so again their magical tanking capabilities are limited.
Problem is vanilla FE6 just doesn’t provide you with enough material to create niches for your units. You have a cast that is soo bloated (getting 3 of everything, with 4 cavalry units and 4 armor units) that you can’t establish a space for most of them, making the issue of viability boil down to who has the highest stats at the right time in the right spread. FE6 has a major issue with redundancy that can’t be fixed with pure numbers, hence something like the SkillSys comes into play, so taking inspiration on something like Heroes is as good a choice as any.
In Sophia’s case this is double the issue because she doesn’t even fullfill her intended niche of being a late-game investment unit. Same with Zeiss. He gets blown out the water by her sister, despite him being on the niche section of late-game growth units.
PE Sophia was a blast. A not so commented change on PE was that it actually altered the stat caps on alot of units, so female Druids had caps very similar to those of a Berserker with capped 30 MAG and SPD of 27. So in comes Sophia with a 60% SPD growth and once she got into the level 12 mark she had most of her core stats capped including Luck…which combined with her Prf giving her +3 SPD, meant that not only she could double almost anything, but she had the avoid of a Rogue. Her DEF was pitiful across the campaigh i will say. She helped me desintegrate the entire wyvern section of the Binding Blade chapter almost on her own. And funnier still was how once she got the Apocalypse tome and it’s massive +5 MAG, she became Niime on steroids with her staff ranges. I clogged the manakete onslaught of chapter 24 using Bors and Gwen, with Sophia’s cross map Physic heals to keep them both alive.
That’s more of a flaw of FE6, than an issue with PE or subsequent hacks. I get that vanilla FE6 is beloved by many, but there is a damn good reason it’s the number 1 game of the GBA era to get so many reworks/rebalances. It doesn’t feel like FE6, because FE6 is bare-bones in alot of sections.
With that all being said, i think that there’s too much untapped potential in this hack on a concept standpoint. The use of the Skill Sys, the potential for map revamp, the potential for new unit additions. One of the things no hack ever managed to bring forth is making the dragons relevant. Like you’re a military super-power rogue nation that got their hands on what is essencially a dragon broodmother to use as your personal WMD and you only start seeing her War Dragons by the midpoint of the campaign and in only one variety despite the fact that there are multiple dragon tribes. Hell even PE introduced Ice Dragons latter on.
