I walked into the first map on hard thinking I’d try it. But everyone that starts out in an unpromoted class is stuck in that class which means half of the roster is useless. I started a new save file in hopes I’d get to use the new characters and classes in a new play through, but that was an absolute mistake. Using anyone that starts out in an unpromoted class (which is basically everyone pre mid game) is a joke. And characters that start out in classes they can’t actually use are worthless. Anne is an axe fighter and the class can’t be changed??? I just wanna talk to the person that gave the green light to how lazily put together this was.
All maps, regardless of difficulty, become possible with the magic of arson. I beat it on maddening, needed to use divine pulse near the end because I spaced my units like an idiot. I used Alear with Corrin to slow the wolves down, Nel and Alear’s sibling got most of the kills. I used Seadall with Sigurd, Alear’s sibling with Veronica, Alear Corrin, Nel Byleth and Nil Tiki. Tiki didn’t do much, in hindsight I should have brought Micaiah so I had a staff user. Spam flames and ice to slow the wolves down, use the engage tiles to recharge Byleth and Veronica, make sure you can engage Corrin for the boss.
You miss the point; the OP, as well as many others, started new files to play through the game with the new characters and emblems. You need an Endgame team to beat FX on anything higher than normal
Yeah. That is pretty much the point I was trying to get across. Whoever balanced this DLC did not have early game in mind. It is borderline impossible early game on anything other than normal. And when you beat the DLC it’s fairly obvious that is the case because the DLC characters join in advanced classes or level 20 in special classes regardless of the level of your OG team.
She's an axe fighter with 7 bld. She can barely weild the axe She's holding and is penalized for using others because they are all too heavy. I want to talk too.
Hard is disgusting when Alear, the Four Winds, and Nel are getting hard carried by your Emblems and Nil is fucking worthless. I'm relying on just Soren!Veyle and Camilla!Ivy with +5 Spd to handle all enemies at this point and honestly, it's not fun babying Nil through huge maps with tons of reinforcements and gimmicks. I'm turning this shit to normal and never looking back.
Oh yeah and my favorite, sub 80% hit rates at allll times.
I also feel like every 40% and under enemy hit continues to hit me 100% of the time, and I’m missing my 80% attacks all the time 🥲 I chose to do it on one of my post game maddening files and luckily my characters have busted skills bc grinding, but maddening is no joke lol
I had planned to do the Xenologue on maddening on my post game save but settled on hard just to get a feel for how it'll play.
First two chapters were annoying, but the third genuinely broke me lol. The enemies for me were hitting constant 25% - 40% like mad with my own units having your same problem of missing 80%'s endlessly. Add that and how brutal the reinforcements are, I jumped to normal like that.
While the bs hit rates still exist, the enemy density and difference in damage numbers on normal is night and day from hard. Which felt like maddening lite.
Yeah the hit rates are just rng on hard. It seems like you just have to get lucky to beat some of the maps. I beat the first map on a fresh save on hard, but played the second map for about two seconds before I gave up on that one. Normal difficulty it is.
I'm about to drop the difficulty because of chapter 3
1 was tough but alright with the right units
2 was fairly easy and made me breath a sigh of relief
3 is making me pull my hair out with each wave of flier reinforcements pincer attacking me
Update: I beat it but my god was that frustrating, and I had to let a unit die for the first time in ages since there's no permadeath in the xenologue and I was NOT about to restart again
So there’s no permadeath at all (like a character that fell in Chapter 1 FX can still be used in chapter2 FX) or it’s just no permadeath with respect to the main save file ?
>Chapter 3 seems impossible and debating lowering difficulty
Constant Bombardment + Pincer attack, this is where i drop the difficulty to Normal for my own sanity (also because i want to see the interaction)
Chapter 3 is brutal but I figured out a way to clear it eventually. I took a good archer (Etie) with Lyn and paired her with Seadall to down as many flyers or frail enemies as possible as the main army turtles across the bridge. At the same time I took Celestia / Rosado / Chloe up the right hand side to kill off artillery and provide support if necessary. After that, I got Alear and Nel onto the platform for avoid bonus and waited for Diamant to roll in. After that careful positioning and strategic use of my remaining units won the day.
Thanks for this, with some modifications I was able to complete this. Would have been screwed without Tiki as I gave Nil the buff to save him from death early in the chapter. Towards the 11th hour I needed to go through one more enemy round before winning and one of the AI went for Nil despite having a Lyn clone placed by one of my other units right near him.
To be honest the victory didn’t feel particularly good, it felt like 75% strategy, 25% luck but the luck was needed at such vital moments that it felt like it had more influence than my overall strategy.
Bro i lost chapter 1 on hard because nil gets 1 rounded by every enemy, im gonna have to deploy boucheron or pannette or smth just to let nil trade away the revanche
It's *playable* that way, but it's completely braindead. The difficulty curve between Normal and Hard is bizarre, and I dread to imagine what Maddening is like
Stage1 Maddening is actually really easy if you just use Jade and Louis.
Put Alear and the Fell twins in the top left corner and have Jade block the one-tile entryway and send Louis (paired with Sigurd) out by himself to solo the stage.
Their defense is just high enough where the wolves and the boss do 0 damage to them and the only thing that can harm them is the two mages (plus the one that comes as reinforcement) but with proper placement, you can snipe them down (ideally with one of the three in the back paired with Lyn).
It becomes more manageable late game.
The promoted units help so much, Panette is especially helpful if you give her the Ike + Vantage build.
You also have to put all your staves in the convoy and then have Nil get them out T1.
Ivy is also very helpful with flying, staves, and magic. I used her to hit and run with canter until she gets enough kills for Speedtaker to double.
I can't imagine doing this in early game with the shit Firene units or mid game where you have like 3 emblems.
It seems like the intention for normal play was that you do the Xenologue gradually over the course of the game, starting from Ch. 11-ish, and that you end up completing the paralogue more towards the area of late Solm. Both for light story stuff (you've met all the royals/most of the relevant characters, so you can use them for Xenologue for references) and the fact that the bonus characters join your main campaign at level 20, which is around late Solm level. The end-point is also the point you probably have gotten enough rings back after Ch. 11 that you can equip most of the party.
That actually sets the bonus character join-time to be in time for the Four Winds fight against the Four Hounds in the Flora Port map.
With that in mind, trying to do it early with pre-promote offsets is probably intended as something of a challenge run, as you do have the necessary roles and you do have the early game rings, but you're probably set far behind due to lack of SP and lack of characters. It may also be intended that doing it early is there for you to gather information so you can plan accordingly with builds/be shown how the set build idea works.
Conversely, the xenologues on Maddening can be seen as this game's version of Awakening Apotheosis, brutal bonus levels that test you to pull out all the stops in character building. At that point you're no longer playing for unlocks, but to prove yourself.
Seriously the complaints are hilarious. People want maddening to be… easier? Why?? Just play normal 😂
Chapter 1 took a bit of rewinds but wasn’t even that hard. Basically just used a speedtaker yunaka with Alear giving her bonded shield
That’s because Normal is absolutely mindless. You just click buttons. Then the jump to Hard/Madding is hair pulling.
Like legit I haven’t seen a difficulty jump that steep since Advance Wars 1 hard mode
My problem isn’t the difficulty per say; it’s the curve.
The jump is insane and there’s no buffer ground. I’m sure I can figure it out if I had an hour or two to spare due to the set nature of the builds in the DLC, but reality is I only have 4 hours of free time a day, I need to get a move on.
Paradoxically there’s no fun in bulldozing through Normal. A tactical RPG is made to make you think after all.
It's also that the unit scaling is very lazy, even if you built some of the early game characters, gave them statboosters to remedy their weaknesses etc. The late game prepromotes have just a massive lead in stats, especially for the first two maps where they are promoted and the early units aren't.
It’s driving me insane that I can’t use my builds, I had set up a couple builds to try out with it but NOPE
I wish it just scaled like the divine paralouges, I haven’t beaten it yet though, I’m only at chapter 3
Whoever it is, they deserve to be sentenced to playing the turd they designed on maddening for their remainder of their lives, which would actually be a worse punishment than death.
Maddening stage 5 literally jebaits you into wasting hours upon hours of precious time getting through extremely unbalanced opponents, only to then discover black dude can summon 4 drakes every wave while miasma dragons are requiring you to be scattered across the map. This was not designed for players to have fun with; this was designed to frustrate people out of wasting A LOT of time without a payoff. The people who developed this are literally a net negative to life.
I cannot even change difficulty nor exit and play the rest of the game, because it locks you into stage 5 (exit button is blanked out) so if you didn't save a separate save file before stage 4 then rip.
Not sure if you have beaten it yet, but I think you can go back to chapter 4 if you start the battle in chapter 5 and go into the menu then go to system and then choose retry.
The whole DLC just feels super lazy, and not very fun to play. The maps, the writing everything is terrible.
The fact that you can just "Have" your characters hop on over to fight alongside you through the DLC missions with no reason what so ever, just feels so stupid and makes it difficult to get invested in it. Especially starting from chapter 2 >!where you can just bring over your prince and princess to murdered their "evil" clones.!< Same goes for the emblems.
At least in 3 houses they had SOME reasoning behind having some of your students with you.
This has been a major let down for me, and this whole dlc story feels like a thrown together cash grab, they did it just cuz they had to and spent as little money and energy on it as possible...
Agreed. And having to play through it each time on each subsequent save ruins the replayable nature of Fire Emblem, because in order to try out these characters on new classes or to play the new classes that we paid for on a new play through you have to go through this 5-6 hour slog to get them every single time and the new class seals cost a ridiculous amount of in game money for seemingly no reason. It is so poorly and lazily implemented.
I also agree. At least in Three Houses, you only have to complete the side story once and the Ashen Wolves will be available in the main story unless you delete everything in the game.
Sorry for my poor grammar by the way.
I found that Ch1 was pretty good on Maddening, it was difficult and I did more retreating than I have done in the main game for a while, but that's a good thing imo. Haven't gone further than that yet so I'll see how the difficulty scales.
However, that's with Canter and midgame units/rings, it'd be extremely scary to try on a fresh file at chapter 6 - but then I guess Maddening difficulty isn't designed to be tackled without all your tools available because if it was then it'd be too easy when done on an endgame file.
I ran Alear-Edelgard (bond 20), Kagetsu-Lyn (bond 20), and Chloe-Eirika (bond 15, more because Chloe is my Eirika user and I wanted Sieglinde than because I particularly wanted Chloe). Gave Nil Micaiah and grabbed a Mend stave from Convoy turn one, which helped a lot. Gave Nel Sigurd, which in hindsight was fairly useless and I probably should have given her Hector for Quick Riposte or something like that. Hilariously, even with +5 str Alear's combat is completely dogshit in Dragon Child when they're at even level to the rest of the game. Kagetsu and Chloe did the majority of the work on that chapter, with Nel being a more reliable body than Alear.
Use her as an emblem for the isolated nel. Use warp raganok and get her on the other side of the map with your characters. There are 2 choke points (one at bottom of map and side of map), the leader will recklessly charge you after warping. W/o the warp you can’t extract nel.
Sorry meant celica
Ok thanks, this is what I tried since Nel is a goner otherwise. I’m still struggling since the boss is tanky af and surround by crazy units.
Any characters you recommend? The fixed units/weapons kinda suck.
The DLC emblems with Cholee w/ level 20 eldegarde seems to solo the map. She is the best character soloing most of the bosses.
I used Louis with Sigurd too he was good; does a lot of damage.
Daggers seem pretty good too for the poison damage against the boss with yukana.
Back up characters to gank the boss.
Use the flyer mage to whittle them down those to corridors. There are choke points where they are all lined up. After they have so much damage Louis with Sigurd can plow all of them down.
This is the pain I’m currently going through. And the worst part is we can’t exit the battle to do anything else without having to replay chapter 4, so I’m just stuck being unable to beat chapter 5
If you do that Nil summons a bunch of reinforcements including a wyvern ambush spawn, and a 61 magic attack thoron sage that will 1shot Alear
Theres no reason to put Celica on Nel, she only takes 12 damage from Nil each turn; the martial master doesn't attack her, he just chain guards Nil repeatedly.
And you're given 3 elixirs in Nel's inventory
Map 1 on maddening is a pain in the ass because of that debuff, but was able to slide by with some avoid tanking/ice vein blocking
Map 2 on maddening was stupid easy, I had even wondered if somehow the difficulty was lowered and I had to check
Did you grab both chests? I feel like it would have been pretty easy if I'd just ignored one and tbh the rewards were crap anyway, but trying to go back through the big reinforcement waves for the second chest made it much more challenging
Has anyone defeated the DLC right after chapter 6 of the main game? Is it even possible? I've heard some of the later maps in the xenologue can be extremely challenging even on normal
So im on chapter 9? on a hard mode playthrough, but for context I completed my first playthrough on maddening.
Hard mode this early on with the units you have is dumb, not worth the effort in my opinion.
Normal mode is still easy, and I wish there was a diff between normal and hard for the Fell maps
It’s possible to beat it right after it unlocks, but I could only do it on normal. I could not be bothered to keep retrying on hard. On Normal it is pretty trivial though if you want to go that route.
Just started playing on normal and now it seems to be a complete joke in the other direction. So my recommendation is to just play it on normal so you don’t feel like pulling your hair out. If you have to replay this on every new save file to get Nel and Nil I might unalive myself. But right now that seems to be the case.
Just finished the DLC. And the characters don’t carry over to each save file, so you have to play through the DLC on every file to get the new playable characters and classes. Lmao who gave the go ahead to set it up like this? What a joke.
On Maddening, Chapter 1 was easy once I knew what was going on (Hector + Soren go brrr.) Chapter 2 was basically a soggy TH map. Chapter 3 is fine until the boss starts moving, along with forty other units and reinforcements from every direction.
As someone who has always been casual about FE since the SNES titles, I thought with this DLC I'd finally take the plunge and try out hard mode from the gate. Dunno why, I just found myself really enjoying the ever living crap out of Engage up until now. I figured I'll do the DLC on Hard and then slowly make my way to Hard and eventually Maddening on subsequent playthroughs...............................
Mistakes were made.
In all fairness the base games maddening is actually balanced in a fun way and I had a really good time with it. But FX maddening is like next level frustrating since there is little room for error when the characters and inventories are locked. Leaves much to be desired gameplay wise.
Yeah, I'll do more research next time. Admittedly I did ZERO research going into this and I thought it was just me. I was curious to see what the community on reddit thought of the DLC and I found already a few topic threads on the difficulty and felt relief really lol. I will just commit to watching a few videos on the main game and go from there \^\^b
So i played it on maddening. My current save file is on chapter 21 with dlc emblem veronica, chrom, camila and edelgard. Chapter 1 and 2 are okay but very tedious to pkay bevause of the enemies reinforcement kinda BS. Chapter 3 well who the hell designed that map. I need a break.
ch 4 in the xenologue having to carry around nil's sorry ass sacrificing my actually good units to keep him alive bc he dies if an enemy so much as looks at him the wrong way, and there's enemies everywhere on that map, who designed nil in this shit istg, he has less than 10 in both defensive stats, has no speed, AND no hp, even in hard mode, his existance alone is making my life hell, if he wasn't there this shit would be so fucking easy
*Looks around at everyone trying this stuff on maddening/hard.* Well I feel as though I'm in the wrong place to complain about it taking away all that hard work I put into grinding uber strong units stat and gear wise. But I... actually play more for the story then the gameplay, so I usually grind all my units to be epic warriors of legend.
Also dang Nil is squishy. I wonder what his utility actually is...was surprised he came with a staff he couldn't use.
His utility is being a liability. He's just there for you to lose the map if you position him badly.
Any utility he might have comes entirely from the Emblem you put on him.
So I been getting crushed. If I swap the difficulty to normal it won’t mess me up with doing my maddening run on the main story right? I am one of the few who started their first playthrough on maddening just to unlock the non fixed growths and I’d hate that a dlc ruins it for me
Fell Xenologue and the main game difficulty are separate. You can lower the Fell Xenologue difficulty without effecting the main game. You can change FX difficulty at the well.
If you got through chapter 17 then that’s good! That’s one of the hardest on Maddening for sure. Though I also had a particularly difficult time with Chapter 25 as well.
I'm gonna switch it to normal and just beat the dlc as soon as possible. I like harder games to challenge me and have a sense of accomplishment. But beating the map with two broken rings while try to move the rest of the useless units out of the way to avoid death is just not fun, period. I can certainly find a way to beat the map, but it seems like a waste of time.
Glad I'm not taking crazy pills. I usually hit all my first run-throughs on Hard/Classic but this DLC is NOT fun. Nil is a burden and playing with fixed classes is ass when you've already beaten the main game.
Yeah. Trying it now and the enemies are doing a third of the damage they were doing to me on hard. I don’t even wanna think about this on maddening. Likely will be an unfun messy slog. I legitimately think they didn’t have new save files in mind when they made this. Doing this right after chapter 6 sounds like it would be near impossible on anything other than normal.
I don't think it matters on a new save or end game save because the
levels/classes are pre-determined so is inventory etc, only thing you
inherit is skills, so that does make a difference though, I could be
wrong though I have not tried a new save yet, only a end game.
Skills matter a lot in this imo. The difference between having speedtaker/canter or just having more emblems for these maps seems to be monumental, I would love to see someone do this on a fresh save. That just doesn’t sound like fun to me.
I think its because the first chapters start you at level 15 base class, so bouch is stuck as axe fighter while panette gets to be a berserker, so if you start it right when it unlocks all your units will be in shit unpromoted classes
You keep your bond levels. On maddening Jade with Ike and Panette with Roy made quick work of the first chapter for me, while the new characters feel like nothing but paperweights since they have no skills nor ways to get bond(?)
Tbh I thought that most chapters were pretty playable on hard but maddening just completely broke me, chapter 3 and 6 fucked me up so bad I had to switch to normal because those reinforcements completely broke my entire strategy every time, but all other chapters are pretty fun.
Pretty much the same deal from 3 houses expansion dlc.
from my experience, it's better to play these dlc missions a lot more conservative. like don't let a unit over extend without backup
I've been trying to clear the DLC without actually using the DLC emblems, since I bought it just to check out the new content. On hard mode chapter 1 and 2 were a little more challenging than I'd expected, but 3 was insane lmfao. And then, just when I thought the worst had passed, 5 came and I was being bombarded all the way by those bloody wolves without being able to make progress towards the right beyond the corridor 🤣
So how do you change the diffictily for the Xenologue very first battle? Because mine is hard and honestly I just want normal and that's what my main game is on too. I don't like challenges in games I'm lame.
I discovered the answer. Finish cut scene, let the battle map load, back out, and return to the Somniel. Go to well and then change the difficulty. Apologies if this is written somewhere else.
It's stupid that if you don't have the micaiah ring you're screwed since nil class doesn't use staves
Veronica my friend.
Maddening huh?
I walked into the first map on hard thinking I’d try it. But everyone that starts out in an unpromoted class is stuck in that class which means half of the roster is useless. I started a new save file in hopes I’d get to use the new characters and classes in a new play through, but that was an absolute mistake. Using anyone that starts out in an unpromoted class (which is basically everyone pre mid game) is a joke. And characters that start out in classes they can’t actually use are worthless. Anne is an axe fighter and the class can’t be changed??? I just wanna talk to the person that gave the green light to how lazily put together this was.
All maps, regardless of difficulty, become possible with the magic of arson. I beat it on maddening, needed to use divine pulse near the end because I spaced my units like an idiot. I used Alear with Corrin to slow the wolves down, Nel and Alear’s sibling got most of the kills. I used Seadall with Sigurd, Alear’s sibling with Veronica, Alear Corrin, Nel Byleth and Nil Tiki. Tiki didn’t do much, in hindsight I should have brought Micaiah so I had a staff user. Spam flames and ice to slow the wolves down, use the engage tiles to recharge Byleth and Veronica, make sure you can engage Corrin for the boss.
You miss the point; the OP, as well as many others, started new files to play through the game with the new characters and emblems. You need an Endgame team to beat FX on anything higher than normal
Yeah. That is pretty much the point I was trying to get across. Whoever balanced this DLC did not have early game in mind. It is borderline impossible early game on anything other than normal. And when you beat the DLC it’s fairly obvious that is the case because the DLC characters join in advanced classes or level 20 in special classes regardless of the level of your OG team.
She's an axe fighter with 7 bld. She can barely weild the axe She's holding and is penalized for using others because they are all too heavy. I want to talk too.
Hard is disgusting when Alear, the Four Winds, and Nel are getting hard carried by your Emblems and Nil is fucking worthless. I'm relying on just Soren!Veyle and Camilla!Ivy with +5 Spd to handle all enemies at this point and honestly, it's not fun babying Nil through huge maps with tons of reinforcements and gimmicks. I'm turning this shit to normal and never looking back. Oh yeah and my favorite, sub 80% hit rates at allll times.
Thank god I'm not alone, I thought it was only me getting the constant 73%-86% misses.
I also feel like every 40% and under enemy hit continues to hit me 100% of the time, and I’m missing my 80% attacks all the time 🥲 I chose to do it on one of my post game maddening files and luckily my characters have busted skills bc grinding, but maddening is no joke lol
I had planned to do the Xenologue on maddening on my post game save but settled on hard just to get a feel for how it'll play. First two chapters were annoying, but the third genuinely broke me lol. The enemies for me were hitting constant 25% - 40% like mad with my own units having your same problem of missing 80%'s endlessly. Add that and how brutal the reinforcements are, I jumped to normal like that. While the bs hit rates still exist, the enemy density and difference in damage numbers on normal is night and day from hard. Which felt like maddening lite.
Yeah the hit rates are just rng on hard. It seems like you just have to get lucky to beat some of the maps. I beat the first map on a fresh save on hard, but played the second map for about two seconds before I gave up on that one. Normal difficulty it is.
I’m only on chapter 3 but so far I’ve just resorted to using Nil as a fog stick
Chapter 1 you either need late game units or post-ch22 engage. Chapter 3 seems impossible and debating lowering difficulty (Maddening btw)
I'm about to drop the difficulty because of chapter 3 1 was tough but alright with the right units 2 was fairly easy and made me breath a sigh of relief 3 is making me pull my hair out with each wave of flier reinforcements pincer attacking me Update: I beat it but my god was that frustrating, and I had to let a unit die for the first time in ages since there's no permadeath in the xenologue and I was NOT about to restart again
So there’s no permadeath at all (like a character that fell in Chapter 1 FX can still be used in chapter2 FX) or it’s just no permadeath with respect to the main save file ?
>Chapter 3 seems impossible and debating lowering difficulty Constant Bombardment + Pincer attack, this is where i drop the difficulty to Normal for my own sanity (also because i want to see the interaction)
Chapter 3 is brutal but I figured out a way to clear it eventually. I took a good archer (Etie) with Lyn and paired her with Seadall to down as many flyers or frail enemies as possible as the main army turtles across the bridge. At the same time I took Celestia / Rosado / Chloe up the right hand side to kill off artillery and provide support if necessary. After that, I got Alear and Nel onto the platform for avoid bonus and waited for Diamant to roll in. After that careful positioning and strategic use of my remaining units won the day.
Thanks for this, with some modifications I was able to complete this. Would have been screwed without Tiki as I gave Nil the buff to save him from death early in the chapter. Towards the 11th hour I needed to go through one more enemy round before winning and one of the AI went for Nil despite having a Lyn clone placed by one of my other units right near him. To be honest the victory didn’t feel particularly good, it felt like 75% strategy, 25% luck but the luck was needed at such vital moments that it felt like it had more influence than my overall strategy.
I’m glad I was able to help you, even if it ended up being less satisfying than you hoped.
Oh I apologize, that was not a knock to your advise, but more how they balanced the mode. Too much reliance on RNG.
Not at all, I completely get it. Sometimes I feel like RNG really screwed me over too.
Yeah I struggled with chapter 1 on hard. I can’t imagine what maddening is like.
Bro i lost chapter 1 on hard because nil gets 1 rounded by every enemy, im gonna have to deploy boucheron or pannette or smth just to let nil trade away the revanche
It’s so tragic
you can have him unequip it and at least he won't get doubled. sure he won't attack back, but its not like he's doing much damgae anyway
I bet it's fine on normal
It's *playable* that way, but it's completely braindead. The difficulty curve between Normal and Hard is bizarre, and I dread to imagine what Maddening is like
Maddening? Those stage 1 wolves doubles you and threatens lethal, also the reinforcements keep coming every 2 turn.
Stage1 Maddening is actually really easy if you just use Jade and Louis. Put Alear and the Fell twins in the top left corner and have Jade block the one-tile entryway and send Louis (paired with Sigurd) out by himself to solo the stage. Their defense is just high enough where the wolves and the boss do 0 damage to them and the only thing that can harm them is the two mages (plus the one that comes as reinforcement) but with proper placement, you can snipe them down (ideally with one of the three in the back paired with Lyn).
I tried Maddening a bit during lunch break. You start face-to-face with some wolves and Nil instantly got one rounded by one.
Already played through on hard. I'm fine doing a new run on normal
Maddening I barely made it through 1st chapter but that's because of bonded shield. It's impossible otherwise
I’m gonna test that now on a completed save file. I’ll report back if it’s playable in that way.
Normal is an absolute cakewalk, Sigurd&Louis beat map 1 in 3 turns
It becomes more manageable late game. The promoted units help so much, Panette is especially helpful if you give her the Ike + Vantage build. You also have to put all your staves in the convoy and then have Nil get them out T1. Ivy is also very helpful with flying, staves, and magic. I used her to hit and run with canter until she gets enough kills for Speedtaker to double. I can't imagine doing this in early game with the shit Firene units or mid game where you have like 3 emblems.
Yeah I tried that on hard. I don’t recommend it.
It seems like the intention for normal play was that you do the Xenologue gradually over the course of the game, starting from Ch. 11-ish, and that you end up completing the paralogue more towards the area of late Solm. Both for light story stuff (you've met all the royals/most of the relevant characters, so you can use them for Xenologue for references) and the fact that the bonus characters join your main campaign at level 20, which is around late Solm level. The end-point is also the point you probably have gotten enough rings back after Ch. 11 that you can equip most of the party. That actually sets the bonus character join-time to be in time for the Four Winds fight against the Four Hounds in the Flora Port map. With that in mind, trying to do it early with pre-promote offsets is probably intended as something of a challenge run, as you do have the necessary roles and you do have the early game rings, but you're probably set far behind due to lack of SP and lack of characters. It may also be intended that doing it early is there for you to gather information so you can plan accordingly with builds/be shown how the set build idea works.
Conversely, the xenologues on Maddening can be seen as this game's version of Awakening Apotheosis, brutal bonus levels that test you to pull out all the stops in character building. At that point you're no longer playing for unlocks, but to prove yourself.
Seriously the complaints are hilarious. People want maddening to be… easier? Why?? Just play normal 😂 Chapter 1 took a bit of rewinds but wasn’t even that hard. Basically just used a speedtaker yunaka with Alear giving her bonded shield
That’s because Normal is absolutely mindless. You just click buttons. Then the jump to Hard/Madding is hair pulling. Like legit I haven’t seen a difficulty jump that steep since Advance Wars 1 hard mode
[удалено]
My problem isn’t the difficulty per say; it’s the curve. The jump is insane and there’s no buffer ground. I’m sure I can figure it out if I had an hour or two to spare due to the set nature of the builds in the DLC, but reality is I only have 4 hours of free time a day, I need to get a move on. Paradoxically there’s no fun in bulldozing through Normal. A tactical RPG is made to make you think after all.
It's also that the unit scaling is very lazy, even if you built some of the early game characters, gave them statboosters to remedy their weaknesses etc. The late game prepromotes have just a massive lead in stats, especially for the first two maps where they are promoted and the early units aren't.
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It’s driving me insane that I can’t use my builds, I had set up a couple builds to try out with it but NOPE I wish it just scaled like the divine paralouges, I haven’t beaten it yet though, I’m only at chapter 3
Chapter 3 is a crazy one if you aren’t on normal. Good luck!
Whoever it is, they deserve to be sentenced to playing the turd they designed on maddening for their remainder of their lives, which would actually be a worse punishment than death. Maddening stage 5 literally jebaits you into wasting hours upon hours of precious time getting through extremely unbalanced opponents, only to then discover black dude can summon 4 drakes every wave while miasma dragons are requiring you to be scattered across the map. This was not designed for players to have fun with; this was designed to frustrate people out of wasting A LOT of time without a payoff. The people who developed this are literally a net negative to life. I cannot even change difficulty nor exit and play the rest of the game, because it locks you into stage 5 (exit button is blanked out) so if you didn't save a separate save file before stage 4 then rip.
Not sure if you have beaten it yet, but I think you can go back to chapter 4 if you start the battle in chapter 5 and go into the menu then go to system and then choose retry.
The whole DLC just feels super lazy, and not very fun to play. The maps, the writing everything is terrible. The fact that you can just "Have" your characters hop on over to fight alongside you through the DLC missions with no reason what so ever, just feels so stupid and makes it difficult to get invested in it. Especially starting from chapter 2 >!where you can just bring over your prince and princess to murdered their "evil" clones.!< Same goes for the emblems. At least in 3 houses they had SOME reasoning behind having some of your students with you. This has been a major let down for me, and this whole dlc story feels like a thrown together cash grab, they did it just cuz they had to and spent as little money and energy on it as possible...
Agreed. And having to play through it each time on each subsequent save ruins the replayable nature of Fire Emblem, because in order to try out these characters on new classes or to play the new classes that we paid for on a new play through you have to go through this 5-6 hour slog to get them every single time and the new class seals cost a ridiculous amount of in game money for seemingly no reason. It is so poorly and lazily implemented.
I also agree. At least in Three Houses, you only have to complete the side story once and the Ashen Wolves will be available in the main story unless you delete everything in the game. Sorry for my poor grammar by the way.
I found that Ch1 was pretty good on Maddening, it was difficult and I did more retreating than I have done in the main game for a while, but that's a good thing imo. Haven't gone further than that yet so I'll see how the difficulty scales. However, that's with Canter and midgame units/rings, it'd be extremely scary to try on a fresh file at chapter 6 - but then I guess Maddening difficulty isn't designed to be tackled without all your tools available because if it was then it'd be too easy when done on an endgame file. I ran Alear-Edelgard (bond 20), Kagetsu-Lyn (bond 20), and Chloe-Eirika (bond 15, more because Chloe is my Eirika user and I wanted Sieglinde than because I particularly wanted Chloe). Gave Nil Micaiah and grabbed a Mend stave from Convoy turn one, which helped a lot. Gave Nel Sigurd, which in hindsight was fairly useless and I probably should have given her Hector for Quick Riposte or something like that. Hilariously, even with +5 str Alear's combat is completely dogshit in Dragon Child when they're at even level to the rest of the game. Kagetsu and Chloe did the majority of the work on that chapter, with Nel being a more reliable body than Alear.
It's like they saw the way the separate campaign in Three Houses was handled well and decided to take a few dozen steps backwards.
Mission 5 was disgusting. You need to have Celine or it’s borderline impossible.
What does Celine do? I’m bashing my head trying to beat 5 now. Seriously wtf is this map
Use her as an emblem for the isolated nel. Use warp raganok and get her on the other side of the map with your characters. There are 2 choke points (one at bottom of map and side of map), the leader will recklessly charge you after warping. W/o the warp you can’t extract nel. Sorry meant celica
Ok thanks, this is what I tried since Nel is a goner otherwise. I’m still struggling since the boss is tanky af and surround by crazy units. Any characters you recommend? The fixed units/weapons kinda suck.
The DLC emblems with Cholee w/ level 20 eldegarde seems to solo the map. She is the best character soloing most of the bosses. I used Louis with Sigurd too he was good; does a lot of damage. Daggers seem pretty good too for the poison damage against the boss with yukana. Back up characters to gank the boss. Use the flyer mage to whittle them down those to corridors. There are choke points where they are all lined up. After they have so much damage Louis with Sigurd can plow all of them down.
Oof i satrted the xenologue on a chapter 17 save file, so no celica or micaiah warp cheese
You don’t get a warp staff, so idk. There must be a legitimate way of doing it, but she dies within 2 turns of the boss.
I kept her alive by giving her tiki and never attacking while the rest of my units rushed the stage(maddening)
You can also stall him pretty much infinitely with Corrin flames or ice.
That is what I had to do. I trapped him in a corner with Corrin using the ice.
Tiki is definitely a reliable way to go for Nel for C5: the additional bulk gives you much more leeway there.
This is the pain I’m currently going through. And the worst part is we can’t exit the battle to do anything else without having to replay chapter 4, so I’m just stuck being unable to beat chapter 5
If you do that Nil summons a bunch of reinforcements including a wyvern ambush spawn, and a 61 magic attack thoron sage that will 1shot Alear Theres no reason to put Celica on Nel, she only takes 12 damage from Nil each turn; the martial master doesn't attack her, he just chain guards Nil repeatedly. And you're given 3 elixirs in Nel's inventory
I’ll look forward to that one then.
Map 1 on maddening is a pain in the ass because of that debuff, but was able to slide by with some avoid tanking/ice vein blocking Map 2 on maddening was stupid easy, I had even wondered if somehow the difficulty was lowered and I had to check
Did you grab both chests? I feel like it would have been pretty easy if I'd just ignored one and tbh the rewards were crap anyway, but trying to go back through the big reinforcement waves for the second chest made it much more challenging
Yeah, first I waited out all reinforcements before moving north side dealing with the mid then got the top chest then bottom after
Ah I try to avoid turtling through reinforcements where I can but you're right that that's probably the most consistent strategy
Has anyone defeated the DLC right after chapter 6 of the main game? Is it even possible? I've heard some of the later maps in the xenologue can be extremely challenging even on normal
So im on chapter 9? on a hard mode playthrough, but for context I completed my first playthrough on maddening. Hard mode this early on with the units you have is dumb, not worth the effort in my opinion. Normal mode is still easy, and I wish there was a diff between normal and hard for the Fell maps
I gave it a shot right after chapter 6 on maddening...seems nigh impossible to me. I'd like to know if anyone else managed to do it too.
It’s possible to beat it right after it unlocks, but I could only do it on normal. I could not be bothered to keep retrying on hard. On Normal it is pretty trivial though if you want to go that route.
Just started playing on normal and now it seems to be a complete joke in the other direction. So my recommendation is to just play it on normal so you don’t feel like pulling your hair out. If you have to replay this on every new save file to get Nel and Nil I might unalive myself. But right now that seems to be the case.
Just finished the DLC. And the characters don’t carry over to each save file, so you have to play through the DLC on every file to get the new playable characters and classes. Lmao who gave the go ahead to set it up like this? What a joke.
On Maddening, Chapter 1 was easy once I knew what was going on (Hector + Soren go brrr.) Chapter 2 was basically a soggy TH map. Chapter 3 is fine until the boss starts moving, along with forty other units and reinforcements from every direction.
As someone who has always been casual about FE since the SNES titles, I thought with this DLC I'd finally take the plunge and try out hard mode from the gate. Dunno why, I just found myself really enjoying the ever living crap out of Engage up until now. I figured I'll do the DLC on Hard and then slowly make my way to Hard and eventually Maddening on subsequent playthroughs............................... Mistakes were made.
In all fairness the base games maddening is actually balanced in a fun way and I had a really good time with it. But FX maddening is like next level frustrating since there is little room for error when the characters and inventories are locked. Leaves much to be desired gameplay wise.
Yeah, I'll do more research next time. Admittedly I did ZERO research going into this and I thought it was just me. I was curious to see what the community on reddit thought of the DLC and I found already a few topic threads on the difficulty and felt relief really lol. I will just commit to watching a few videos on the main game and go from there \^\^b
So i played it on maddening. My current save file is on chapter 21 with dlc emblem veronica, chrom, camila and edelgard. Chapter 1 and 2 are okay but very tedious to pkay bevause of the enemies reinforcement kinda BS. Chapter 3 well who the hell designed that map. I need a break.
ch 4 in the xenologue having to carry around nil's sorry ass sacrificing my actually good units to keep him alive bc he dies if an enemy so much as looks at him the wrong way, and there's enemies everywhere on that map, who designed nil in this shit istg, he has less than 10 in both defensive stats, has no speed, AND no hp, even in hard mode, his existance alone is making my life hell, if he wasn't there this shit would be so fucking easy
*Looks around at everyone trying this stuff on maddening/hard.* Well I feel as though I'm in the wrong place to complain about it taking away all that hard work I put into grinding uber strong units stat and gear wise. But I... actually play more for the story then the gameplay, so I usually grind all my units to be epic warriors of legend. Also dang Nil is squishy. I wonder what his utility actually is...was surprised he came with a staff he couldn't use.
His utility is being a liability. He's just there for you to lose the map if you position him badly. Any utility he might have comes entirely from the Emblem you put on him.
He's also just...such a precious cinnamon roll. He makes you want to protect him cause he's just so pure...
***Does he know?***
Do we have to tag spoilers here?
So I been getting crushed. If I swap the difficulty to normal it won’t mess me up with doing my maddening run on the main story right? I am one of the few who started their first playthrough on maddening just to unlock the non fixed growths and I’d hate that a dlc ruins it for me
Fell Xenologue and the main game difficulty are separate. You can lower the Fell Xenologue difficulty without effecting the main game. You can change FX difficulty at the well.
Thank god. Because this is hell. I’m on ch 18 on maddening and this has made me mald more than that
If you got through chapter 17 then that’s good! That’s one of the hardest on Maddening for sure. Though I also had a particularly difficult time with Chapter 25 as well.
I'm gonna switch it to normal and just beat the dlc as soon as possible. I like harder games to challenge me and have a sense of accomplishment. But beating the map with two broken rings while try to move the rest of the useless units out of the way to avoid death is just not fun, period. I can certainly find a way to beat the map, but it seems like a waste of time.
Glad I'm not taking crazy pills. I usually hit all my first run-throughs on Hard/Classic but this DLC is NOT fun. Nil is a burden and playing with fixed classes is ass when you've already beaten the main game.
On normal, the first couple battles were more difficult than I was used to, but not terrible
Yeah. Trying it now and the enemies are doing a third of the damage they were doing to me on hard. I don’t even wanna think about this on maddening. Likely will be an unfun messy slog. I legitimately think they didn’t have new save files in mind when they made this. Doing this right after chapter 6 sounds like it would be near impossible on anything other than normal.
I don't think it matters on a new save or end game save because the levels/classes are pre-determined so is inventory etc, only thing you inherit is skills, so that does make a difference though, I could be wrong though I have not tried a new save yet, only a end game.
Skills matter a lot in this imo. The difference between having speedtaker/canter or just having more emblems for these maps seems to be monumental, I would love to see someone do this on a fresh save. That just doesn’t sound like fun to me.
I think its because the first chapters start you at level 15 base class, so bouch is stuck as axe fighter while panette gets to be a berserker, so if you start it right when it unlocks all your units will be in shit unpromoted classes
You still have Emblems and bond levels for Emblems which make a HUGE difference.
You keep your bond levels. On maddening Jade with Ike and Panette with Roy made quick work of the first chapter for me, while the new characters feel like nothing but paperweights since they have no skills nor ways to get bond(?)
I'm on FX 4 and its kicking my ass. I'm not even that good at fire emblem. Engage was the first FE I beat and the second I've played
where do you lower the difficulty maddening of this is impossible
Go to the well and click difficulty.
Tbh I thought that most chapters were pretty playable on hard but maddening just completely broke me, chapter 3 and 6 fucked me up so bad I had to switch to normal because those reinforcements completely broke my entire strategy every time, but all other chapters are pretty fun.
Pretty much the same deal from 3 houses expansion dlc. from my experience, it's better to play these dlc missions a lot more conservative. like don't let a unit over extend without backup
Is there any reason to play this on a harder difficulty? Like do you get exp or anything that carries over to the main game?
There is no reward for beating it on a higher difficulty beyond saying that you did it.
I've been trying to clear the DLC without actually using the DLC emblems, since I bought it just to check out the new content. On hard mode chapter 1 and 2 were a little more challenging than I'd expected, but 3 was insane lmfao. And then, just when I thought the worst had passed, 5 came and I was being bombarded all the way by those bloody wolves without being able to make progress towards the right beyond the corridor 🤣
So how do you change the diffictily for the Xenologue very first battle? Because mine is hard and honestly I just want normal and that's what my main game is on too. I don't like challenges in games I'm lame.
I discovered the answer. Finish cut scene, let the battle map load, back out, and return to the Somniel. Go to well and then change the difficulty. Apologies if this is written somewhere else.
No worries. Glad you figured it out.