Personally I feel like Berserk should be an enemy only buff staff that raises attack but lowers defense and avoid.
But that’s me.
What I really dislike is some hacks have put status staves on maps before you can even have a restore staff and think giving me a single pure water on that map makes it balanced.
Ya agreed may be giving restore same range as beserk staff just suggesting any contradiction? How broken o bad will it be
Well, honestly I think there should be some skills that interact more with the various status effects in odd ways.
A few ideas I’ve had are:
Toxicology: unit is poisoned but all weapons inflict poison.
Rock Hard Muscle: when Petrified Unit can only be damaged by Hammers.
Focused Rage: while berserked unit moves toward whatever inflicted it with said status.
Silent Chant: unit can still use tomes while silenced.
Stuff like that could make playing around/with status conditions at least somewhat more interesting imo.
I don’t think they are strictly bad, its a tool like anything else and what it makes the player feel will depend on the map design and availability of countermeasures, but even then at its best its still pretty annoying.
Status staves as a whole have the issue of not being particularly proactive mechanics, any map where you deal with a berserk, sleep, silence etc, usually the best counterplay is to tank every hit and just let the staff break, which can cause a whopping 3 turns of doing nothing but restoring. Its worse with berserk because you can choose to just leave a unit asleep/silenced and still push through the map, but its borderline impossible to do that with a berserked unit. It creates a role in making a dedicated staff/restore user, but that roles need is arguable.
Even as a player tool its pretty lame, at its best it can be kind of fun but ultimately ends up as a novelty that can only be used a very limited number of times (the same goes for sleep but I’d say silence is still a bit more interesting than both of them). Also not a main thread point but i’d just say that buff/nerf staves that have more uses but less polarzing effects are overall better balanced than status staves.
EDIT: Adding this as an addendum but honestly I think a strong reason for why status staves can suck is the fact restore staves are 1 range lmao, even buffing it to 3 or making it magic based (like in Sun God’s Wrath) would make them 10x less cubersome to deal with
My opinion was stated last time, so I’ll write an addendum today.
Berserk and NPCs should not be combined.
This is because the NPC’s turn is after the enemy turn.
Often the enemy will Berserk an NPC and that NPC will stab the player in the back.
Therefore, on stages with NPCs with large armies (especially NPCs with fast-footed units such as horses or pegasuses), do not let the enemy have Berserk.
This can lead to unreasonable deadlock, so be careful.
On stages with lots of NPCs, make sure they have non-Berserk staff.
It can vary by the targeting of the staves. For example, it would be the most devastating if it hits a low RES unit with high attack power…
Except, in vanilla FE6 (The Binding Blade), they instead target based on the unit deployment order (in similar way how specific enemies often move first before other enemies), so you can set a unit with very high resistance at the end… With a relatively low attacking power, but such units are almost nonexistent (usually, the closest thing you get to them are your own Bishops or Clerics). In FE6 itself however, the Manakete, Fae, makes enemy status staff hit rates look pathetic on her.
A berserked General is the next “least worst” case for Berserk target, as usually they won’t have the movement to reach your units, and they can take punishment when charging into most enemies (bar any enemy with Armorslayer/Hammer/Heavy Spear or charging into lots of mages at once).
Of course, the worst case is the unit getting affected is a glass cannon, especially if they are mounted (more movement). Berserk can also prevent your staffer from doing staff things as well just like Silence/Sleep/Stone. (And no, trading is disabled for berserked units, meaning if they’re the one holding the only Restore staff you have, then there’s no way to cure their condition early. This might result in some FE players being paranoid enough to bring more staff users and buy more Restore staves if a game is infamous for this status.
In my opinion, though, it was made to make players be wary. And I think it was meant to make you be prepared to have an answer for anything. The problem is that they tend to be used at the worst chapters and paired often with hard-hitting enemies that look fragile enough to be seen as a kill target for the berserk’d unit.