@ZeN2002 @adalvar
That being said, as someone who’s played vanilla FE6 and 7, there is a major difference in difficulty. My go to example is Binding Blade vs Victory or Death. Both are pretty similar chapters in their story placement, but Victory or Death is much easier compared to Binding Blade
Besides the stat differences, there’s also a lack of promoted units in FE7 late game.
Mangs addressed the lack of promoted units but only kind of addressed the stat difference in his balance patch (which, in general, is a great patch). Oddly, he increased hard mode bonuses a ton in VoD but all other levels remain the same (5 level bonus).
I guess the cleanest method to instate a nice scaling difficulty without breaking the whole thing is disable or reduce the pre-promoted autoleveling bonuses in hard mode and just keep the regular hard mode bonuses scaling across the various chapters.
This is what I would have done if I were the dev of PE or this project. Enemies/enemy scaling was already fine in vanilla, with hard mode bonuses increasing all the way to 15/16 levels by endgame. Changing enemy stats drastically just makes it harder to balance since you can’t leverage years of experience of knowing how hard the game felt. Better to keep something static that was already fine and focus on balancing the playable units. Due to skillsys, some stats do need altering to compensate. But for the most part, it could be left the way it was.
EDIT: Side note…Aptitude Shanna is a broken monster…i capped all of my stats except HP by level 15.
Both Shanna and Thea need to be hit with the nerf bat. Wing Spear and Seraph Knight access were already big buffs to them which was already questionable because being fliers, they didn’t really need buffs in the first place (Juno’s the only one that needed any sort of buffs being a very late joiner with bad stats). No need to make them stat monsters as well.
There’s two problems with the balance of this hack imo:
One problem is just general power creep/enemy and playable unit stat inflation. Part of this is due to the extra HM bonuses that jackofblades1991 pointed out, which may have been an accident. Part of it looks to also just be how PE was designed (my understanding is ZeN originally copied a lot of base stats/growths from PE).
Other problem is that certain characters were given a favoritism treatment, turning weak characters into busted characters/butchering their feel completely relative to vanilla rather than just making them not trash, while other characters were given nothing.
ZeN has made some good adjustments in the past month or so (for example I really like how the nerf to Bors in 3/14 patch makes the early game feel), but these are still pretty glaring issues.
As an example, looking at archers/snipers/rangers: Why would someone use Klein when he’s basically vanilla Klein statwise (a.k.a. nothing special) but Wolt has (1) perfect availability; (2) significantly better stats by the time Klein joins. (3) not only has a Prf but it’s a Prf with effective damage to armor/cavs/flying with 40 uses (it used to have 2-3 range and gave +3 Spd as well which was totally absurd but thankfully ZeN removed that in the 3/14 patch) making it a good Hammerne candidate compared to Prfs with worse effects and only ~25 uses. (4) Wolt has Ranger/horse access.
Similar thing with Wolt vs. Dorothy. In vanilla it was comparing trash vs. trash (they’re GBA archers, stats very similar, no skillsys). But in this hack, Wolt got buffed hard and Dorothy got almost nothing. She’s the “strength archer” apparently but that’s not really good at all when you don’t double for awhile and when Wolt has both good strength and speed (unlike Lance and Alen where they really are strength cav vs. speed cav). She also has no Prf. She has a semi-Prf in the Shining Bow due to her Mag stat and growth but Shining Bow only has 25 uses and isn’t really that amazing compared to Wolt’s Bow. She also faces low crit chances off the bat in her join chapter (which Wolt does not face because he has high enough Lk), which is especially bad if you’re trying to Ironman. She has some niche in her personal skill (Drive Strength) but that’s about it. Her advantage of availability and having access to Ranger compared to Igrene/Klein is bogged down by being relatively difficult to train, and Wolt is better than her if you want a Ranger (rather than 2).
Igrene’s stats remind me of vanilla. She got Guardian’s Bow with 2-3 range + high crit and she’s a special/unique class so she can at least do something that Wolt can’t do, albeit Wolt can replicate the 2-3 range with a Longbow and Wolt has Ranger access. Only 6 Con in a promoted class (vs. Wolt, Klein, Dorothy, who have 7-9 Con promoted), so she loses AS using Killer Bows, Steel Bows, Longbows.
So as of the 3/14 patch, it’s something like Wolt (imo still in dev favoritism tier even after the latest nerfs) > Igrene (good but not broken tier. ZeN if you’re reading this don’t change her she’s fine) > Klein (doesn’t cost a promotion item tier–isn’t very bad but doesn’t stand out in any way either) > Dorothy (too much work to train her for the payoff tier/use her because you like her character tier). Klein and Dorothy are my examples here as characters that were overlooked/shafted while Wolt was just given an overkill amount of buffs.
Lilina vs. Elffin is another great example of lopsidedness, this time on the magic side of things. Lilina on promotion has access to Anima, Light, Axes, Staves. Elffin only has access to Light. Elffin has better Spd, but Lilina has better stats all around, including significantly more Mag (Lilina has ~10+ more Mag at same level), Def and Res (Lilina has ~15+ more Res at the same level). Lilina has 2 Prfs in Studied Tome and Bolt Axe. Elffin was recently buffed to have a Prf that is effective against magic units, but with his low HP, low Mag, and low Res he’s not even that good as a magekiller.
The only reasons to field Elffin right now vs. not just Lilina, but any magic user, is (a) to recruit Percival; (b) you like him as a character. Charm is a good skill, and I believe it’s unique to him, but that’s pretty much the only good thing about him right now.
