If you could change one thing about FE6, what would that be?

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I’ll preface this one by saying that I genuinely love FE6. Binding Blade is one of my favorite games of all time, and easily my favorite vanilla FE. But, I also think the game is incredibly devisive, and for plenty good reason! There’s a lot of stuff to love about it, and just as much to hate. As such…

What would you change? Small things like making one character viable? Big changes like the all-important improved hitrates? Lemme know! I always think about rebalancing FE6, so who knows, some of this may come to pass eventually, even.

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Reduce AVO bonus on thrones / gates.

Have Roy promote once Etruria is saved (just before Sacae / Ilia).

Otherwise, it’s perfect.

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Agree and agree. I will make Roy promote there.

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add kaga canto

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I’m working on an fe6 rebalance of sorts, and I hope I can finish it in 2026, and my biggest target for improvement is…

Character balance.

There are many problems.

  1. Earlygame units are overcentralising

The sooner you can get strong units the better. Enemy level scales high in fe6, experience is abundant from enemy spam and the xp formula for kills still gives you between 6-8 xp all the way up to 13 levels higher than the enemy. It’s to the point where if you get all the xp you can have a team of lv15 units into western isles (a bit silly), and 20/4 units in Arcadia.
Fates xp formula would help set a proper level ceiling, prevent lowmanning and make midgame units better by comparison.

  1. Hard mode bonus units are overcentralising

Oh, Rutger. Oh, Milady. Oh, Percival. How very overpowered and naff you are. Can you think of an unpromoted midgame unit without HM bonuses that is considered good? I can’t. Sure this means your team isn’t entirely earlygame units, but this is bandaid solution. The actual solution is a functioning xp formula as described before. If you don’t want units to be weaker you could buff the stats of midgame units (but this comes with its own problems) or nerf the enemies at points to preserve the difficulty (this is its own problem).
Reject hard mode bonuses, return to actual unit balance.

  1. Units that are worse versions of other units

Bors beats Wendy, Raigh beats Sophia, Sue/Shin (not HM bonuses again!) beat Wolt/Dorothy, Clarine beats Saul/Elen.
I’m fine with units starting weak and becoming strong (or even relatively on par with your other units), but I don’t want units that are worse than a contemporary in every way.
This isn’t a problem of them being “unusable”: Bors/Wolt have many soldiers and archers to eat and Bors still has at least 60 hit against axes, and can use slim lance. Sophia can train up in 14x if you don’t (or can’t) skip it, and the map after has steel lance cavs. Wendy can abuse the top-left chokepoint in ch8 (I’m removing that), and has an entire map in 8x to train, and can reliably kill with triangle attack.

  1. Promotion item situation makes certain units a non-starter

Archers having to share with nomads, knights having to share with cavs, priests having to share with Clarine and Lugh, fighters having to share with Dieck and Rutger.
You could say this is a problem of the units/classes being outclassed and if you buffed those it would be fine. Myself? I think it’s a problem of classes sharing promotion items at all.
I am heavily considering having each promotion item promote one class (except for ocean seal promoting brigands and pirates). This encourages more class variety, and classes with different roles shouldn’t be competing for promo items imo. Also have you noticed how classes in fe6 usually have a pair of units attached? Sue and Shin, Shanna and Tate, Dorothy and Wolt, etc etc etc. This simplifies unit balance also, because now it is basically X unit vs Y unit and making sure they are balanced relative to other classes.

  1. Sniper/Sage syndrome (aka. Igrene/Pent syndrome)

This is a personal concept I have that mostly applies to classes with very specific roles (but could probably apply to more).
Snipers are basically good for dealing with wyverns and doing chip at range and that’s it, and effective damage makes them good at it pretty much regardless of stats.
What then is the point of training Wolt or Dorothy, when Igrene and Klein do that just fine? You don’t need more than 2 snipers, and making Igrene or Klein bad at their job would defeat the point.

The solution then is to give Wolt and Dorothy unique utility by making them Ranger and Adventurer. Ranger in FE8 was a great idea by IS.

  1. Class imbalance

To FE6’s credit classes would be fairly balanced (since swords and bows are pretty good) if there weren’t unit-specific problems like bases and promotion items. However cavaliers absolutely should not have 2 weapons, and knights shouldn’t only have lances, and crit bonus classes might be too strong. I will do monotype cavs and give knights axes too.
Paladins and Generals are both really strong in their own ways and I probably need class limitations on them (maybe their promotion items cost more from secret shop than others).
Pegasi are in a weird spot in vanilla, since Shanna as a longterm unit is polarising (and needing to train her for Ilia doesn’t help; I’m just making Ilia/Sacae a manual choice), and Tate has HM bonuses which makes her by default a strong longterm unit, and Juno is Juno.
I’m buffing female aid so falcos are better support units and double mercs, but also nerfing them by making killer weapons more expensive and money more scarce.
Troubadour and Valkyrie are way too good so I’m nerfing it to 6/7 mov respectively and giving them light magic (Aureola Cecilia anyone?)
Wyverns are just better pegasi in vanilla but at least there are enough elysian whips to go around.
Milady and Zeiss basically need a complete rework.
Wolt and Dorothy are more comparable to Sue and Shin with their new promoted classes so it’s a matter of stats now.

  1. Con

Makes no sense. Complete overhaul (but also to facilitate steel weapons being good on high con units)

  1. Unit feel

Treck is probably the worst offender, being a FOURTH cav who doesn’t stand out (and adding monotype cavs puts him in even more of a corner). Treck is now a soldier because it’s funny, but promotes to Great Knight for that zero to hero arc.

Thanks for reading my “one thing” I’d change about FE6.

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Lmao. This feels much more like an overhaul than what I have in mind. Mostly because, well… I like the base feel of FE6, and wouldn’t really wanna change that to the degree you seem to want to! Not that it’s a bad thing, Project Ember does that as well, and that’s a fantastic hack. Still, I do feel like I can rebalance FE6 without going quite as far. In particular… well, I don’t feel like every unit needs to be exactly as good as every other unit! Weirdly enough, I actually like Roy being so weak. I’m a weirdo, lmao.

Anyway, I suppose I’ll put it in my own thread, but my one big change would be to make hammers, brave axes, halberds, and horseslayers have 10 more hit. All of them are pretty much fine in terms of other stats, but they really do feel just a little inaccurate for what they’re supposed to be. Also fixing the horse effectiveness thing to work on all mounts, not just paladins and cavs.

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I agree, effective weapons should be reliable and vanilla brave axe makes me sad. I’d keep the halberd and hammer locked to foot axe users.

Weapon changes

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Perfect balance won’t happen because people always find metas, it’s better to focus on making units feel distinct while being roughly equal, it just happens that having very obvious differences in power level (see HM bonuses) helps accomplish this. You don’t want units feeling homogenous.
And yes I won’t turn Roy into a god of war like my previous hack lol

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I would only change the presentation a bit, have blinking portraits, more Illustrations on key events, and stuff like that to put make the story presentation more memorable.

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increase all probability-based statistics by 1.

Just 1. Out of 100.

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Increase throne bonuses.

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Playable Guinevere (in campaign not like new game + after you played it 7 ish times)

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Nothing.

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The one thing I find more nonsensical (and hilarious) than any other mechanic in this one, is the Magic Triangle(or the magic balance in general). Basically only Anima Magic matters for most of the game, because playable units who use AM are reasonably common, while Dark Magic Users are rare and Light Magic might as well not even exist. Only one unit can use LM upon recruitment and he joins near the end of the game! Even funnier however, is the fact that LM is a strictly worse version of AM in every way, other than the small handful of moments where the Magic Triangle comes into effect. AM has at least two decent units who actually use their magic. While DM has merely one good unit with Niime, but she is mainly used for Staff Warping, rather than Magic Combat, Raigh is mediocre at best due to his Mid Stats+Jointime and lastly theres Sophia, who barely crosses the line of being usable. LM isnt even usually a thing, cause a Base Class for LM doesnt exist. Only the two Staff Users(Saul being the good one insert BCS Meme here) can eventually use LM after very slowly leveling up to that point. And after all that, grinding his Magic Weapon Level to Max, so he can use the Legendary Weapon isnt even worth it, cause youll still mainly use him for his Staff utility, just like Niime! Its like they were actively trying, to ruin the concept of a Magic Triangle, which I find genuinely hilarious. Although maybe they just ran out of time they needed to flesh this concept out. Since in the latter GBA Games, for as flawed as the Magic Triangle still is, they at least tried to make the Thirds a little more equal. Feel free to Copy&Paste this Wall of Text, to anyone who wants to learn about Binding Sword and Sealing Blade Magic. They should have brought back the Bowgun, that just makes everything better!

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Light magic having not great accuracy feels apt, they are non-combatants being made to fight (though this is much less of a problem if you promote closer to 20, since promoting halves your xp gained from staves and weak bishop combat isn’t worth much, Saul pays off more later and can reach A rank without promoting). The bigger problem is Clarine.

It’s only really viable to get one of Clarine, Elen or Saul to 20/1 (when you do depends a lot on how much of the xp you get), and Clarine is the best option in every way, it’s not even fair. If you want warp for 14x, using staves 100 times on Clarine and promoting is a very workable task with dedication and the help of torch. Can’t really say the same for Moulder with FE8’s shorter maps and fewer total maps.
Given this it’s a bad choice to pick up a light magic user at all, although Saul has surprisingly good 20/1 stats that are much better than Elen’s for whatever reason.
Aureola needs someone who can use it (wink wink)

Cecilia also comes along to fit the role of second healer very well.

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I would get rid of all siege weaponry. That being both status staves and siege tomes. I find that they really suck the enjoyment out of the late game for me as they force me to slow down and do a lot of turtling to draw them all out so that someone doesn’t just die.

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Ambush spawns are cringe. Thankfully, there’s a patch that converts most of them into player phase spawns (scroll down to the “BugFixReduxVers” part), with only the ones that were difficult to convert due to technical reasons excluded.

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I think Merlinus should replace Roy

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Rutger gang and the right side wyverns in ch21 are notably bad, but I find removing all ambush spawns turns a lot of them into degenerate camping sessions (ch13 being the worst, also ch6)

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I would increase the hit rate of hammers and halberds by 10 and buff Dorothy and Wolt by increasing their base str/skl by +2. These are just minor things that help the scrubs contribute more in the early game, which would make it easier. Lot/Wade would actually be more reliable w/ the effective weapons and Dorothy/Wolt deal with the Chapter 7 wyverns better along with having stronger/more accurate chip before then.

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