I think armor knights should definitely retain their low movement as a defining trait because this isnt what makes them bad as a whole.
The two essential issues with very bad armor knights throughout the fe series are their lack of stat/performance dominance over enemies and the stat jump from one difficulty to another. You can gauge with reliable accuracy whether any unit will be good or bad as soon as their joining chapter, specifically early on and it is the easiest with armor knights.
A good example would be opposing these two boys on their respective hard modes :
You would draw two conclusions from that :
Oswin seems to be able to take on most, if not everything of what will come to him without being put in danger.
Bors cant handle enemies 1 on 1 so it is better to only draw finishing blows with him.
Because it is obvious that the first statement should be how they work, the only thing early joining armor knights need is the edge over the physical enemies they will face, and is also probably what they are supposed to do for the whole game. Not by any means invincible, but at least able to be thrown around some physical threats without effective weapons, which is almost never the case with them or generals that join later in the game. Another way of adding reliability is through the access to a second weapon type.
However, this stat balance can be hard to maintain from one difficulty to another, as Bors performance on his normal mode is the following :
Which leads me to think that if you really want an armor knight to perform well in your game, you may find easier to balance it around only one difficulty.
I think this could also be tied with most 2 range locked archers issues where the early ones are pretty bad while midgame snipers can find some use because their stats and weapon rank allow it. Solutions to this are either buffing bow power, range, said archer bases, or the three.
Ultimately, my very dumb answer is : to make an armor knight good, make him feel like an actual armor knight. A somewhat tanky thing who wont like being hammered.
l was under the impression Wallace was both the second and third armor unit you get. This isâŚtechnically true since heâs a Knight in Lyn mode, but a General in the main modes. My memories got confused there. :b
as has already been stated knights and generals are very heavily built around being used by the enemy, a lot like how gen 1âs pokemon were more so built around being in enemy trainers hands [from what ive allegedly heard] then in the players. so when balancing them theres that to consider, not just how the class will work in the players hands but also what those buffs will mean for the enemy knights encountered. thats why ive never agreed with just a mov buff, because it gives players less breathing room around them.
fe9 ch 7 for instance throws a large glut of knights eager to attack you at the player, and at that point of time their generally tanky enough and hit hard enough to threaten your still somewhat fragile and weak units if too many attack at the same time. that arent as threatening as they could be however because their lower mov slows them down enough to stop them from attacking at the exact same time as the squishier soldiers that litter the map [something that might make an interesting mid or late point challenge but would be inappropriate in early game].
so what to do? honestly i would turn to feh for advice on that manner, because to atleast some extent feh has been the best showing for armour movement in fire emblem to date. which is not to say that their op, just that i feel feh does a lot right for armours.
smaller map sizes. and im not even talking about how standard feh maps are 6wx8l, im talking proportionally. my best guess would be that feh is fe designed at about 2 1/2 to a third of the size of regular fe, which would put feh maps at about 15x20 to 18x24 tiles in a regular fe context. i would again guess. this certainly does provide an overwhelming net benefit to mounted units, but i would argue it gives armoured units some extra life too.
highest bst totals of each gen, often times by a long shot. theres the obvious benefit of giving them more raw numbers to work with obviously, especially since mounted units by comparison have some of the lower bst totals, but theres also the added benefit of giving them a lot more raw bulk to work with and throw around. generic feh knights for instance, according to the feh wiki, have 55 hp, 38 atk, 16 spd, 40 def, and 19 res at level 40 âbaseâ as it were. certainly a glaring weakness to magic attacks but definitely a hefty enough bulk to punish attackers with a hard single hit.
strong tools to compensate for low spd/doubling potential. bold fighter, vengful fighter, odd fighter, alot of the better follow up skills are locked to the armor class in feh as it were that give them strong tools for specific circumstances, vengful fighter for instance being a good enemy phase skill to have that makes it more risky to attack well bold fighter makes the armor unit a more dangerous enemy to try and bait out of static defensive positions and other such stuff like that.
so, with atleast those points in mind, what could be done to improve knights as a class? my choices would be:
if class based skill acquisition is going to continue then let generals keep wary fighter and give knights obstruct. their both skills that really fit the knights defensive role and could have interesting utility and application in the players hand
give knights a bst edge over other classes, str and skill especially i would recommend [in a hacking sense] since those tend to be somewhat low on knights for their role. res im iffy on personally since i feel knights having a mage weakness is a good niche for mages, but if ya want knights to be super bulky and difficult to kill in general then i say go for it and increase the res
nerf mounted units, such as giving them lower overall bst or less options in the kit to work with as it were. you dont have to nuder them, but maybe consider it atleast [id like to also add that i love how feh gives flyers less mov then cavs and feel that should be universal in fe going forward]
not required but smaller or more compact maps will always feel more at home for armours then large sprawling ones.
but overall, id say its not so much that knights need a buff but more so that cavs need a nerf as it were.
Have you played Vision Quest? Look into what they did in Vision Quest to Larisa - sheâs hands down the best unit in the game, and sheâs an armor knight. The other armor knights that you can get throughout are pretty decent as well.
Make having high DEF valuable. Armor Knights should have a high DEF growth and cap to the point where theyâre a sizable distance ahead and are capable of taking single digit damage even late game. High DEF can be made valuable by generally having an enemy roster with good hit rates and high ATK or strong weapons. Armor Knights, while slow and easily hit and doubled, should have the niche of being able to survive several rounds of combat by taking little to no damage. In order to keep this niche, their promotion also needs a good DEF cap so they can keep doing this even to lategame lvl 20 enemies with silver weapons.
The niche of Armor Knights is to be able to survive multiple accurate enemies. Dodgy units like Swordmasters or Assassins can survive multiple enemies normally without too much RNG rigging, but against enemies with good hit rates, accurate weapons, WT advantage or the lack of a favorable RNG system, dodgetanking is no longer viable. Some levels should have open areas with large amounts of enemies, some of which have good hit rates, as well as little terrain to make dodgetanking hard and make the player resort to facetanking attacks with high-bulk units. Things like cavalry and flier swarms.
Therefore, level design and enemy strength should encourage facetanking regularly throughout the game to encourage the player to train up a unit for that purpose. An Armor Knight would have the stats to do that for physical threats (and youâd need like a bishop for mage swarms on the same grounds).
the main issue has always been movement, so i guess some more movement range could probably help.
other than that, thereâs always other factors that could be taken in consideration, like secondary weapons and promotions.
would be nice to see some hybrid class like Dark Knight or Paladin from Final Fantasy XIV, using either dark tomes like Nosferatu for tanking, or staffs to support allies.
that way they would actually become more interesting, plus itâs been ages since iâve seen classes similar to Barons from Genealogy.
I feel it warrants pointing out that itâs possible to buff playable Knights in ways that donât also affect enemy Knights, which is important because chapters in FE are nearly always asymmetrical such that it doesnât always make sense to balance enemy units the same way youâd balance player units of the same class.
That said, I am, regrettably, in the âdonât buff Knight movementâ camp. Having less movement is a part of what makes them unique, and also allows them to be used as less-mobile enemies the player can skirt closer to than usual before provoking. My thought, and I know this is controversial, is to give Knights, as a class, complete or near-complete weapon triangle control, along with buffing the stats of the playerâs Knight characters specifically, such that theyâre strong, versatile fighters held back by their low movement. Their focus should still obviously be on durability, but this setup would at least give them something that their low movement is a counterbalance to.
Part of the problem, I think, is that Fire Emblemâs extremely simple and rigid damage calculations make Defense (and Resistance) a very hard stat to properly balance, at least when it comes to making a character or class that specializes in it. A character whose defense gets too high becomes effectively invincible versus a large chunk of physical attacks, but not letting their defense get high enough makes it hard for the player to really capitalize on it. Another idea might be, actually, to buff Knightsâ HP to be closer to what GBAFE did with Fighters, but not quite that high. FEs 7 and 8 already did this, actually, and giving Knights some more HP to play around with does help them capitalize more on their durability without making them unkillable by physical enemies. This on its own is obviously not enough, though.
I donât really claim to have a complete answer, so I guess these are more just thoughts Iâve been entertaining. Ultimately, I donât think there really is or can be one single panacea for Knights that doesnât come at the cost of their uniqueness as a class. The problem kind of boils down to Knights being specialized in a role thatâs less valuable than what Knights âgive upâ in order to have that level of specialization, which makes it tricky to make them truly valuable to the player without effectively just replacing them with a different class. A Knight with standard infantry movement is just a bulky Soldier with an effective weakness. I donât think thatâs a real solution, personally.
I agree with those who have said that armors are built around being an âenemy classâ as their natural habitat tends to be blocking entrances and hallways in indoor maps. Itâs what theyâre good at and there are fewer instances where blocking a path is as important to the player as it is to part of the enemy level design. And often, the player can have another moderately tanky unit out in front without necessarily needing an armor.
Armors are also kind of a go to class for bosses. FE4 and FE5 have barons, which are almost exclusively bosses parked on a seize point, and even afterwards, important enemies and NPCs are often portrayed as the general class, such as Uther, Murdoch, Vigarde, and the Black Knight in FE9. And I can say as a hacker that the Baron class is really convenient to have as a standard âBoss Classâ that I can give just about any weapon and not worry about its caps when setting the bossâs stats.
So I agree with those who say it isnât so much that armors are bad as what they offer isnât often as valuable to the player as what other units offer.
