Hello. This is a new idea I’ve had, that I don’t think any hack has used before.
The idea is simple: standard, limited use weapons, but they’re usable by units that wouldn’t normally have access to that weapon type. And the weapon has just enough uses to grant an E-rank for that weapon type.
You might think this would require ASM, or that it must be impossible to do. But it’s actually quite simple. You simply have to change the weapon’s level to 0, which makes it usable by every class in the game. Aditionally, you could still limit who can and cannot use these weapons by making them locked to specific classes or characters.
This Idea came from a trick that you can already do in vanilla FE8. By triggering the Enemy Control Glitch in Chapter 18, You can get the Stone item from a gorgon, and later use it in combat. Stone is classed as Dark Magic, and it does give weapon EXP. And since it has a weapon level of 0, it can be used by any unit. And eventually, those units will be able to use regular Dark Magic tomes.
I would love to see this concept used in future hacks.
I think the only downside to this is an aesthetic one, which is probably having some sort of animation gap unless you are super dedicated and make an animation for like everything.
But it would be a pretty dope way to customize for sure. The other necessity would probably be patching “E” rank to be a value greater than 1 so that you don’t just get the weapon knowledge after one swing (or training weapons can be single use lol).
Yeah, that’s why I sugested to limit which units can use them by class locking. As an example, you could have a Dark training tome that’s locked to magic users, so thy can just use the spell animation.
As for regular weapons, there’s plenty of custom animations of classes using other weapons in the Graphics Repository. So that wouldn’t be a huge problem.
There are, however, decidedly not animations for everything. So, if you wanted to make this a universal feature that any unit in certain class brackets could use, you would need to make sure that, say, a Pirate had a lance animation in order for a training lance to actually be useful, which that class doesn’t actually have an animation for. It is decidedly easier to do this for magic than for physical weapons. (Unless you don’t care about animations and just do map animations, which I’m sure some people wouldn’t be opposed to.)
The lore implication of being able to learn a weapon type and level it up is cool, especially if going the Three Houses-esque route of being an academy or some other story where a group is being trained, but I think there are practical reasons why people haven’t really attempted something like this yet.
(Personally, I would rather take what Three Houses did and extend it and strip away classes entirely from the weapon system and just let units have their own weapon proficiencies, starting them out at E in anything that they didn’t have experience in and letting the player choose what to give them, but then that brings in the issue of animations as well as how do you know what enemies are and what weapons they might have if their class doesn’t determine that, so I can see why this also hasn’t really been something that has had traction.)
I don’t think I like this idea. If training weapons can be used by anybody, then you can just slap them on your best units. Imagine, say, giving Seth axes or something. And if you limit training weapons to specific units, then why not just give them base E in whatever weapon rank it is? Needing training weapons just to make specific units get up to E rank sounds like an unnecessary extra step.
You’re right, there are not animations for everything. That’s why I want to emphasize the fact that these weapons could be class-locked.
So, in your example, the Pirate wouldn’t be able to use the Training Lance. But, they would be able to use the Training Sword (there’s a custom Pirate sword animation).
Or someone that might want to use this concept might make the animation for their hack.
All things considered, I belive that these Training Weapons shouldn’t be 100% universal. Not only because of the animations effort, but also because it could cause glitches if a unit has more than 4 different weapon ranks.
If they’re not going to be universal, then I think Krash has the right idea. If you’re going to limit what classes can use what weapons after training by the virtue of what additional animations they have available, then, outside of preventing classes from having too much coverage at base, it really is just an extra step to those classes having access to it*. And, honestly, I feel like the problem is more easily solved by just starting them at E and rebalancing the weapon ranks so that even if, for Krash’s example, Seth had E in Axes, he wouldn’t have access to the Steel Axe or the Hand Axe right away to break things even more.
*That said, I do like the thought of having a unit using, say, the Ephraim T1 pack and starting with Lances, and the player gets the FE9-like option of what additional weapons to fill the character out with via Training weapons up to a limit. But, it really only works for classes that already have such a wide array of animation options where that freedom of choice can really be put to use and you can’t simply get everything that’s available. (And it’s only “freedom” if the choices are actually not skewed such that there are better options to have a meta loadout, i.e. how picking Axes is basically the best choice for Cavaliers when promoting to Paladins in FE9.)
Well… Ideally, you’d have a limited amount of these weapons in the game, probably just one of each.
So, while you could give Seth access to axes, it’d be a better investment to give that to Eirika, who needs it much more, since she can only ever use swords.
An if I were to implement them into a hack, I’d make all E rank weapons D rank instead. Because having E rank right away would be a bit jarring. And IDK if there’s a way to raise the minimum weapon level for E rank weapons.
Why would Eirika be a better investment than Seth for axe access? She’s super weak at base and even when trained, her strength and bulk aren’t very good, and she doesn’t get to promote until super late. Meanwhile Seth is the best unit in the game, and axe access would make him even better thanks to Garm and hand axes.
In general, when you give the player access to tools like this, they’re generally better used on units who are already good rather than on units who struggle. Making a bad unit okay is going to be less useful than making a good unit great.
And that brings me back to why I think training weapons that can only be used by certain units is pointless. If only some units can use them (i.e. if you restrict them to units who struggle), why not just give them base E ranks? Needing a training weapon just to reach E rank is an unnecessary extra step for units who already struggle/need extra work.
Well… First, I’d make it so that the lowest weapon rank is D instead of E, so it takes more than 1 use to “train” a unit.
And like I said, I wouldn’t make Training Weapons locked to a certian character, but to certain classes. So if you have 2 Mages in your party, you could use a Dark training time on one of them, and then when promoting that Mage, you could have either a Sage with access to all magic types (effectively an Archsage), or a Mage Knight with both Anima and Dark magic access. And the time wouldn’t be locked just to Mages, but to all Magic classes who don’t already use Dark magic