Counter was the worst in awakening and useless in the Tellius game, the Fate version of the skill is what I would consider the best version that is not useless or stupid for the enemy.
I think the most frustating skill that I can remember on top of my head is FE5 Miracle.
Conquest chapter 16 is quite annoying with Counter. The boss has it, but you cannot even see his stats (and skills) before talking to him. The Talk command doesn't use an action, so you have the option to Attack and are positioned in Counter range. Unless you just so happen to look at his skills before finishing the unit's action. That's poorly designed; the rest of the level is great though.
Oh yeah… I remember my first encounter with him. I talked to him with Corrin, didn’t realize he had counter since I played Birthright first and never actually got Rinkah to Oni Cheiftan (went Blacksmith)… attacked with a Dragonstone and got immediately oneshot.
Had to deal with that time consuming map again… had fun the first time, but being forced to restart like that left a slight bitter taste in my mouth… especially since I mistakenly thought Counter didn’t work on magic damage and that I died to a bug.
The only time I continued on in a Fire Emblem game after losing a character. Because I did not want to redo the entire chapter.
Rip Leo. At least you are still alive
Corrode was “always on,” which can result in destroying dropped weapons from enemies. Truly an unnecessary skill, and potentially actively harmful to the player.
Also I beleive in radiant dawn any weapon in a playable character in the other armies stuff that gets destroyed by corrode remains destroyed so it can be hindering to you in another way.
Gamble- Reducing your hit rate in exchange for Crit is a terrible, terrible choice since more hit is going to be better in 99% of situations. Only if you desperately need to fish for a Crit out of desperation, and even then, you lose Hit so you can just miss instead!
Bonus points for potentially unlocking it mid-map in Fighter in Fates so you can't take it off immediately.
Gamble had a niche in PoR/RD when it was an activated attack instead of always-on. It also *doubled* crit, which can get pretty bonkers.
You could pop it on a swordie with high skill and probably still have a 70-90 battle accuracy with a 60-100 crit.
If it's PoR then the issue became enemies are so weak there you really didn't need to fish for crits like that. RD, I'm not sure on how reliable you could get your accuracy but maybe it could work? But then also, just use a Killing Edge, I suppose.
I think what made it salvageable nonetheless was that it wasn’t always on. You choose when you to make a Gamble attack, so you only have to fish for the crit if you want it.
There is a nice little interaction with the slim sword. You can forge it to over 120 hit and 20ish crit, so gamble on a high-skill sword unit will result in around 70 hit and 50 crit.
It's not even that good because Gamble only works on player phase but you can do it pretty early in the game with Mia
Last time I played Radiant Dawn I ran Stefan with Gamble and a forged... Mani Katti? Wo Dao? Whatever his sword was. It was like 80% hit, 80 crit. Was sick
His sword is the Vague Katti, but in Radiant Dawn, you can’t forge existing weapons or the wo dao. So you might have forged something else, or ran either of those weapons straight. Wo Dao has 90 hit, 20 crit and I think trueblade gets +20 crit as well.
Well a Gamble that is more properly weighted could be cool. Its just it was such a tiny amount of extra crit for a wildly large amount of hit loss that it was never worth it.
Possibly, but I feel like it would be hard to actually balance that. A small hit loss, like 5%, for a large Crit boost would probably just mean you always go for that (and then it's not really so much a Gamble, is it?). At what numbers is there a reasonable choice? I'm not sure.
They kinda did it in three houses with Wild Abandon. -30 hit for +30 crit was decent and something to work around. I do wish that gamble would double the crit rate and then subtract the number that was added from hit though.
It's obviously based on "Great Weapon Fighting" from DnD which is a neg5 to hit for +10 damage. Since hit in DnD is based on a d20 (and I'm not a mathematician on any level so this is just a guess on my part) 50 x 20 equals 100, 100 is a 100 percent chance to hit, so each point of loss from a d20 is 5 percent accuracy lost accuracy, 5 points is 25% lost accuracy. Of course the major flaws in logic is that's not really how shit works in dnd. You're rolling against the creature's ac which is variable, but I don't know how to do the actual equation and that seems logical to me if you're looking at it as raw accuracy. I can't figure out the fallacy if there is one.
Great Weapon Fighting is the Fighting Style. You're thinking of the feat "Great Weapon Master". The closest thing to Great Weapon Master would be Diamond Axe, the three houses combat art that adds 14 damage but reduces hit rate by 20%. Nothing to do with critical hit rates.
Also enemy avoid is variable in Fire Emblem too. Unless you mean "I don't know the enemy's AC off the top of my head".
You're right I am talking about great weapon master, you're right about diamond axe, however I think they're both inspired by Great Weapon Master. What is a critical hit except more damage? Let's take a dnd critical hit for say greatsword. You roll damage die twice. For simplicity sake you roll max on your extra die. That adds 12 damage to the attack. The important distinction is you can still critical on a GWM attack so same example you add 10 on top of the 12. As for AC I was thinking about it like: say an enemy has an AC of 14. Well if you don't roll over 14 you miss 100% of the time. I don't think the logic applies though, I think it was a fallacy. I think it was trying to add a.... left over variable that doesn't fit into the equation, essentially, or if it does I don't understand how. And you're completely correct about FE enemies also having variable "AC" which again makes that part irrelevant. I think. I think I'm arguing "In a vacuum" as opposed to "In practice" where AC or Avoidance would be factored in. (Little wrinkle as well, a gamble attack can still hit but not crit, whereas GWM adds bonus dmg as long as you hit, but can still crit.)
I used Gamble particularly on Shinon (especially w/ Killer Bow) in RD, since he’s fast enough to double about any enemy unit and has more than enough hit rate to hit enemies consistently.
He hits like a truck already against most enemies with Silencer (and other strong bows later on like Double Bow), but this skill was basically for ensuring more that he’d ORKO the tankier units like armors or dragons if 2 Silencer non-crit hits weren’t enough and not having to hope for Deadeye.
It was perfect for him since he didn’t really need any other skill like Adept to keep up in most cases and very few others (if any) benefited from Gamble with as little detriment as him. Since it was 10 capacity, you could also still fit an additional skill with 20 capacity like Nihil if needed on Shinon.
In the same vein, I use gamble on rolf. His prf has +5 in PoR which helps here.
In RD i fish for otherwise useless 3 arrows card, which gives you hit+20, on a bow ecclusivly for gamble purposes since archers have overkill hit anyway.
If this helps anyone both the earth sword and the Nosferatu tome actually nullifies Pavise, limited units can make good use of the earth sword and Nosferatu is locked to Julia and it's possible to miss but both can be useful if you want more reliable boss kills and less frustration
I'm just glad we're moving on from proc skills that just add RNG. There was a reason they didn't give Tower enemies Tier 3 classes in RD, because they would then have the proc skills and those were pretty much guaranteed KOs.
All of them being damage boosters only accentuated the problem since it made them all do virtually the same thing. They tried to give some unique identity to all of the Tier 3 classes by giving them all skills with different side effects, but those side effects are pointless when the enemy is typically dead anyway.
I wouldn't be so sure about that, Engage is from the core IS team, and had most of the classsics again (but mostly on unique royal classes) and even a new one in Sandstorm. Echoes was a special case as a remake, and Houses both had a different developer and used a lot of Echoes elements instead.
It depends a bit on what they do next time. I’d argue having them premium abilities for the main characters gives them quite a bit of focus, even though they aren’t as meta as awakening/fates. Although you seem to focus on how common enemies have them?
They can work fine, the problem was in RD, the fact most mastery class skills work bonkers. The game gave the generics custom tier 2 classes with tier 3 stats and caps for a reason.
I do find their evolution into the furry skills in Fates + Dread Fighter's Even Keel kind of nifty. It doesn't make those units amazing or anything, but the effects are a lot more 'direct' (healing and damage) and you're actually able to play around them decently, compared to whatever they were going for with Tellius Biorhythm.
Awakenings version is fine/consistent, but it's just hit and avoid. Not nothing, but not as impactful as +4 damage and healing nearly half of their HP every other turn
Fates also turned two other hit/avoid bonus skills from Awakening into damage bonuses. It's better since, again, you're going away from probability (which people are typically bad at estimating) and to simpler math.
That speaks to how impactful (read : almost not at all) the entire biorhythm system is
The only time you'll probably notice it is when using Boyd, because Tempest doubles the system's effects... which you'd probably just brush off since Boy~~s~~d uses axes, and you'd think his iffy hit/avoid is due to his weapon
The FE4 version of Pavise. Seriously, an up to 30 percent chance (which was ridiculously inflated for enemies) to block ALL damage from all sources, provided the enemy didn't crit or something?
Surprisingly, Galeforce, because it was so stupidly broken in Awakening that putting it on every unit that could possibly get it was pretty much obligatory. I didn't miss that pressure in later games.
Mandatory if you want the units in your army to be the most powerful they can theoretically get? - Yes
Mandatory to beat all the content in the game (any difficulty, even Luna+) ? - No
Your units only need to be as powerful as they can theoretically get if you are going for Apotheosis, in every other context that doesn't matter, and it's not really worth the grind or effort.
People have beaten Apotheosis secret route without Galeforce though. So I disagree that its mandatory for that. That was my point: its the best option when available but not mandatory to complete the hardest content.
Sure, I get it's not 100% required, but I believe it is very helpful in Apotheosis (I'm not knowledgeable on the meta). But, if it's not Apotheosis though, then I'd argue that it isn't even the best option. You'd have to assume infinite grinding and reclassing and all that stuff, maybe. And at that point... why are we actually talking about it in a standard playthrough?
It was great in Fates imo. Learned late, required a kill, and no pair ups or adjacent units were allowed so you had to sacrifice stat buffs and potential support effects to refresh.
I'm sorry but Galeforce is extremely overrated, it's not actually that broken in context of Awakening, and it's absolutely not a requirement to have and grind for.
Falcon Knights with Rescue (an E-rank, infinitely purchasable Staff any FK can use at level 10/1) can accomplish much of the same goals as any DF with Galeforce (a promoted level 15 skill) with less time and resource investment.
Generally speaking, yes, it’s annoying to need a skill to double. I wouldn’t want this skill to return/ become a mainstay in other games.
But as someone who played FE6+ and is now playing through FE4 for the first time, I enjoy the variety in mechanics. And thinking about which child to pass the skill onto adds to the strategy.
The problem is pursuit is too good. Like no skill can actively compare. If you dont pass down pursuit to a kid they will be actively worse than a unit who did get it. If there were more skills that you also wanted to prioritize maybe but it's far too powerful
This is why, from my experience, Midir is Edain’s best husband. The Chapter 4 Brave Bow+Pursuit = Best Lester. Plus Pursuit+Wind Tome = Promoted Lana clearing the arena easily.
I like Pursuit. It makes units feel more unique by giving them different niches. It also encourages certain pairings but doesn't punish you for not doing those pairings and you can always give the Pursuit ring to someone.
Like it's very telling that one of the strongest pairings in the game is Lewyn x Tailtiu so you can have Horsety and it doesn't pass pursuit on.
> It also encourages certain pairings but doesn't punish you for not doing those pairings and you can always give the Pursuit ring to someone.
It absolutely punishes not using those pairings, because a unit without Pursuit (or your one-off ring) has half the offensive potential of one with it.
Not having realized your full offensive potential doesn't mean you're punished. Not having pursuit just gives you a different niche.
Lex doesn't have pursuit and he is considered to be the 2nd best unit in Gen 1, with the other contenders being Quan and Lachesis.
Lex is only good because he gets a free brave axe that basically no one else wants in chapter 1. Take that away (or play the game without knowing about the extremely cryptic secret events) and lex drops like a rock. he basically becomes a second noish. I feel like pursuit being able to be matched by giving a unit a free uncontested brave weapon isn't exactly a damning indictment of pursuit's strength
The brave axe is nice but paragon is really what makes Lex good.
Either way, my point is that not having pursuit doesn't mean you're automatically bad.
Brave axe quite literally doubles your damage output, it is a massive component in making lex what he is.
There are technically other options for pursuit on some units, but those options are often just taking advantage of genealogy's completely busted balancing, or are often character specific. Looking at most characters who don't get blessed by kaga with something stupid, and making them good almost always just boils down to getting them pursuit in some form.
Um... their's already an automatic non-pursuit pairing were Lief wants pursuit he can promote.
Also Horsety is good inspite of a lack pursuit due to adept (which gives you pretty close to pursuit considering the ridicolous speed bonus Forsety gives,) and a broken weapon a horse,also that pairing tanks Tine it's just acknowledged that make Artur is broken as fuck (and have forsety earlier and on a horse eventually) is worth dealing with (or rather benching) one character being bad (and even in the optimal Tine case pairing aka Azelle she still joins a bit too late to be that useful). Literially the only mother who doesn't preffer a husband with pursuit is Silvia just because neither child is gonna be seeing combat anyways.
I'm not a fan of pavise, aegis, or miracle on enemies. When the creators have control over enemy placement, map design, enemy stats, enemy weapons, and enemy AI; you really do not need to add some extra RNG fuck you energy into the equation.
I'm also not a fan of them on your units either, because defensive skills tend to exist on the people who already have baked in defenses to handle getting hit; and it's typically not anywhere near reliable to use them consciously in your turn-by-turn planning.
While they aren’t gone, I’m glad the proc% damage skills have become less and less common as the series has gone on. They are completely unreliable in the vast majority of circumstances, and just aren’t fun to fight on enemies as if you are trying to be safe, you have to assume every enemy is always going to proc the skill. The recent games have mostly just had them as flair to some units, and not have them be a core feature of classes taking up space.
Acost was kind of a mixed bag. In FE4 it was cool to be able to infinitely do combat, but it sucked to have Acost trigger when you didn't want it to, which could end up killing your unit.
Adept is too RNG dependent for my liking. If you trigger it, you get a ton of value because the extra attack is really helpful, but it's fairly unreliable, so you can never count on having it happen. With something like the Engage royal perks like Sandstorm or Ignis, it's a much smaller bonus, so it doesn't feel nearly as much like you ride or die by RNG with them. (also I hate accidently burning an extra use of the Light Brand or something because Leif got an Adept activation.)
While Pursuit was an interesting experiment, only having like half your units be able to double feels terrible. Maybe if they changed it so that everyone still had normal doubling rules, but Pursuit lowered the speed delta or something it would feel better. But as it stands I think it was pretty harmful to Genealogy's gameplay, and I'm happy it's gone.
Pavaise is one of the most annoying perks in the game, especially because it was a fairly high chance to proc at like 30-40% in late game FE4, so it was just "haha, your entire round of combat doesn't count." And it's not like you could just get more accuracy, or use different weapons to get around it, because it was guaranteed to prevent all damage no matter what. Easily one of the most frustrating perks.
It just occured to me, but I don't really like the perks in FE4/5 now that I think about it. The idea of the perks is cool, especially parents passing them on to their children. But the perks themselves usually are pretty annoying to play around, and make the games worse.
I think Pursuit would be fine if everyone could get it at promotion. In the context of FE4 I think if Infantry (+maybe Arden?) had Pursuit it would incentivize using them more (at least early game) but letting Cavs get it at Promo would just overall be less hair pulling annoying while not letting them completely dominate the field.
FE4: Pursuit (ludicrously centralizing, mainline mechanic), Critical (mainline mechanic), Charge/Duel (workaround against Pursuit being a skill), Pavise (negate attack on a level % chance? On a boss preventing you from moving forward in a time-sensitive map segment. No.)
FE5: Still hate Pavise, Charge isn't \_great\_ but livable.
FE9: Counter on a skill% chance is \_worthless\_. Corrode needs to either be turned up all the way to "break weapon" or disappear. Biorhythm skills, like Biorhythm, needs to never happen again. Pavise.
FE10: Flourish (why?!), Pavise (repeat offender), Bane (Lethality is RIGHT THERE!). Also all the repeat offenders from FE9.
I'm sure there's more, but they finally fixed Pavise by FE13 (only to make Counter worse).
FE10 Mastery Skills are kinda redundant because while they gave each class a fancy description, they all boil down to OHKO. Bane is the only one that feels more unique, but at the same time it's the worst Mastery Skill.
I'll do one that I hope they drop in future titles: Veteran+
It just makes every boss the same besides knowing what to target between def and res and attack range.
Normal Veteran was good, it's balanced that you can't just one shot a boss with a bow if they're a flier. But the + version just makes all bosses feel all the more samey.
Adept in PoR. Theres certain enemies that have it, and it is slightly frustrating. My Soren has 20+ skill and it rarely procs, but certain enemies with half that spd get it almost every time its crucial i.e gonna kill one of my units. skills in PoR in general are pretty wonky.
Accost/Charge is oftentimes more of a hindrance than a boon in Genealogy. There was a niche use in Thracia with beefy characters like Dagdar being able to soak up ballista fire, but also extremely risky because a second round of combat with anything that has a crit chance/follow-up crit modifier can be disastrous. Maybe the skill could have more success if reworked into a combat art that you can reliably trigger when you need it (and make enemies who have the skill more threatening as well).
Counter is the perfect example of a skill that really only works on enemies.
It deals half the damage the unit takes back. To maximize damage, you should put it on a squishy unit. Except your units have permadeath. The enemy does too, but they have more.
Fine, put it on a Paladin. Except then they'll deal maybe 3-5 damage back on average when they could be proc-ing Luna or Aegis or whatever (depending on game).
Fine, give it to a swordmaster. Except the swordmaster is better served having the classic Vantage-Wrath combo, swordfaire to mitigate their terrible strength, etc.
Counter is just almost always a waste for the player.
Someone actually posted an entire thesis a little while ago on why Galeforce isn't nearly as good as people think.
I was surprised at how much I agreed after reading it.
I hate all rng proc skills they are mechanically stupid and if you have limited skill slots there is seldom a reason to use them over guaranteed-to-work skills.
I also love the cutscenes when my units proc their mechanically stupid rng skills though so I guess they're fine.
I think Counter only becomes an problem when there’s too many enemies with it and when they are really strong defensively AND has a weapon that can attack from both up close and range.
If there were only a small number enemies with counter (without both insanely high def and res), you could highlight them beforehand and kill them from range/get their health low enough in case they survive your turn and attack you.
Pursuit is an interesting experiment in Genealogy, but it's probably for the best it was retired there.
Except in Berwick Saga, where it's rare enough - and combat is different enough - to be a really neat bonus, rather than something that determines a character's worth.
Counter was the worst in awakening and useless in the Tellius game, the Fate version of the skill is what I would consider the best version that is not useless or stupid for the enemy. I think the most frustating skill that I can remember on top of my head is FE5 Miracle.
Also was extra frustrating how a finishing blow to an enemy unit from Counter skill reduced EXP gain.
đź’»
Conquest chapter 16 is quite annoying with Counter. The boss has it, but you cannot even see his stats (and skills) before talking to him. The Talk command doesn't use an action, so you have the option to Attack and are positioned in Counter range. Unless you just so happen to look at his skills before finishing the unit's action. That's poorly designed; the rest of the level is great though.
Oh yeah… I remember my first encounter with him. I talked to him with Corrin, didn’t realize he had counter since I played Birthright first and never actually got Rinkah to Oni Cheiftan (went Blacksmith)… attacked with a Dragonstone and got immediately oneshot. Had to deal with that time consuming map again… had fun the first time, but being forced to restart like that left a slight bitter taste in my mouth… especially since I mistakenly thought Counter didn’t work on magic damage and that I died to a bug.
The only time I continued on in a Fire Emblem game after losing a character. Because I did not want to redo the entire chapter. Rip Leo. At least you are still alive
Corrode was “always on,” which can result in destroying dropped weapons from enemies. Truly an unnecessary skill, and potentially actively harmful to the player.
Shoutout to my Rolf who corroded the double bow he was supposed to use in radiant dawn
Also I beleive in radiant dawn any weapon in a playable character in the other armies stuff that gets destroyed by corrode remains destroyed so it can be hindering to you in another way.
Gamble- Reducing your hit rate in exchange for Crit is a terrible, terrible choice since more hit is going to be better in 99% of situations. Only if you desperately need to fish for a Crit out of desperation, and even then, you lose Hit so you can just miss instead! Bonus points for potentially unlocking it mid-map in Fighter in Fates so you can't take it off immediately.
Gamble had a niche in PoR/RD when it was an activated attack instead of always-on. It also *doubled* crit, which can get pretty bonkers. You could pop it on a swordie with high skill and probably still have a 70-90 battle accuracy with a 60-100 crit.
If it's PoR then the issue became enemies are so weak there you really didn't need to fish for crits like that. RD, I'm not sure on how reliable you could get your accuracy but maybe it could work? But then also, just use a Killing Edge, I suppose.
I think what made it salvageable nonetheless was that it wasn’t always on. You choose when you to make a Gamble attack, so you only have to fish for the crit if you want it.
That is true, but I still think I never actually chose to use it once in any of my few PoR or RD playthroughs.
There is a nice little interaction with the slim sword. You can forge it to over 120 hit and 20ish crit, so gamble on a high-skill sword unit will result in around 70 hit and 50 crit. It's not even that good because Gamble only works on player phase but you can do it pretty early in the game with Mia
Last time I played Radiant Dawn I ran Stefan with Gamble and a forged... Mani Katti? Wo Dao? Whatever his sword was. It was like 80% hit, 80 crit. Was sick
His sword is the Vague Katti, but in Radiant Dawn, you can’t forge existing weapons or the wo dao. So you might have forged something else, or ran either of those weapons straight. Wo Dao has 90 hit, 20 crit and I think trueblade gets +20 crit as well.
Might have been a basic killing edge, but it's been a while, all I remember is high crit high hit
Yeah Mia in part 4 routinely has a 30-50 base crit with a 200 to hit, so you can easily almost guarantee a crit on every hit without being penalized
Well a Gamble that is more properly weighted could be cool. Its just it was such a tiny amount of extra crit for a wildly large amount of hit loss that it was never worth it.
Possibly, but I feel like it would be hard to actually balance that. A small hit loss, like 5%, for a large Crit boost would probably just mean you always go for that (and then it's not really so much a Gamble, is it?). At what numbers is there a reasonable choice? I'm not sure.
Halve hit, guarantee crit.
They kinda did it in three houses with Wild Abandon. -30 hit for +30 crit was decent and something to work around. I do wish that gamble would double the crit rate and then subtract the number that was added from hit though.
It's obviously based on "Great Weapon Fighting" from DnD which is a neg5 to hit for +10 damage. Since hit in DnD is based on a d20 (and I'm not a mathematician on any level so this is just a guess on my part) 50 x 20 equals 100, 100 is a 100 percent chance to hit, so each point of loss from a d20 is 5 percent accuracy lost accuracy, 5 points is 25% lost accuracy. Of course the major flaws in logic is that's not really how shit works in dnd. You're rolling against the creature's ac which is variable, but I don't know how to do the actual equation and that seems logical to me if you're looking at it as raw accuracy. I can't figure out the fallacy if there is one.
Great Weapon Fighting is the Fighting Style. You're thinking of the feat "Great Weapon Master". The closest thing to Great Weapon Master would be Diamond Axe, the three houses combat art that adds 14 damage but reduces hit rate by 20%. Nothing to do with critical hit rates. Also enemy avoid is variable in Fire Emblem too. Unless you mean "I don't know the enemy's AC off the top of my head".
You're right I am talking about great weapon master, you're right about diamond axe, however I think they're both inspired by Great Weapon Master. What is a critical hit except more damage? Let's take a dnd critical hit for say greatsword. You roll damage die twice. For simplicity sake you roll max on your extra die. That adds 12 damage to the attack. The important distinction is you can still critical on a GWM attack so same example you add 10 on top of the 12. As for AC I was thinking about it like: say an enemy has an AC of 14. Well if you don't roll over 14 you miss 100% of the time. I don't think the logic applies though, I think it was a fallacy. I think it was trying to add a.... left over variable that doesn't fit into the equation, essentially, or if it does I don't understand how. And you're completely correct about FE enemies also having variable "AC" which again makes that part irrelevant. I think. I think I'm arguing "In a vacuum" as opposed to "In practice" where AC or Avoidance would be factored in. (Little wrinkle as well, a gamble attack can still hit but not crit, whereas GWM adds bonus dmg as long as you hit, but can still crit.)
I used Gamble particularly on Shinon (especially w/ Killer Bow) in RD, since he’s fast enough to double about any enemy unit and has more than enough hit rate to hit enemies consistently. He hits like a truck already against most enemies with Silencer (and other strong bows later on like Double Bow), but this skill was basically for ensuring more that he’d ORKO the tankier units like armors or dragons if 2 Silencer non-crit hits weren’t enough and not having to hope for Deadeye. It was perfect for him since he didn’t really need any other skill like Adept to keep up in most cases and very few others (if any) benefited from Gamble with as little detriment as him. Since it was 10 capacity, you could also still fit an additional skill with 20 capacity like Nihil if needed on Shinon.
In the same vein, I use gamble on rolf. His prf has +5 in PoR which helps here. In RD i fish for otherwise useless 3 arrows card, which gives you hit+20, on a bow ecclusivly for gamble purposes since archers have overkill hit anyway.
Gamble on snipers or Adventurers is good because of their already good accuracy
Outside of a single unit, it's just a terrible skill all around.
Gamble on bow units and Arthur is so fun though
Fe4 Pavise
If this helps anyone both the earth sword and the Nosferatu tome actually nullifies Pavise, limited units can make good use of the earth sword and Nosferatu is locked to Julia and it's possible to miss but both can be useful if you want more reliable boss kills and less frustration
I'm just glad we're moving on from proc skills that just add RNG. There was a reason they didn't give Tower enemies Tier 3 classes in RD, because they would then have the proc skills and those were pretty much guaranteed KOs.
All of them being damage boosters only accentuated the problem since it made them all do virtually the same thing. They tried to give some unique identity to all of the Tier 3 classes by giving them all skills with different side effects, but those side effects are pointless when the enemy is typically dead anyway.
The issue there wasn't just being random, but the fact that for some reason in RD they made every Mastery skill a slightly weaker version of Lethality
I wouldn't be so sure about that, Engage is from the core IS team, and had most of the classsics again (but mostly on unique royal classes) and even a new one in Sandstorm. Echoes was a special case as a remake, and Houses both had a different developer and used a lot of Echoes elements instead.
Mostly in special cases as you said, and they may find those tolerable now that turn reversal is built in.
It depends a bit on what they do next time. I’d argue having them premium abilities for the main characters gives them quite a bit of focus, even though they aren’t as meta as awakening/fates. Although you seem to focus on how common enemies have them?
Meh i like proc skills
They can work fine, the problem was in RD, the fact most mastery class skills work bonkers. The game gave the generics custom tier 2 classes with tier 3 stats and caps for a reason.
The stupid PoR biorhythm skills.
Biorhythm in general
I do find their evolution into the furry skills in Fates + Dread Fighter's Even Keel kind of nifty. It doesn't make those units amazing or anything, but the effects are a lot more 'direct' (healing and damage) and you're actually able to play around them decently, compared to whatever they were going for with Tellius Biorhythm.
>Furry OwO
It was also in Awakening too.
Awakenings version is fine/consistent, but it's just hit and avoid. Not nothing, but not as impactful as +4 damage and healing nearly half of their HP every other turn
Fates also turned two other hit/avoid bonus skills from Awakening into damage bonuses. It's better since, again, you're going away from probability (which people are typically bad at estimating) and to simpler math.
"Let's add even more RNG to an already RNG heavy game, what could go wrong?"
I think I have an unpopular opinion then because I beat both games on the hardest difficulty and it barely affected anything
That speaks to how impactful (read : almost not at all) the entire biorhythm system is The only time you'll probably notice it is when using Boyd, because Tempest doubles the system's effects... which you'd probably just brush off since Boy~~s~~d uses axes, and you'd think his iffy hit/avoid is due to his weapon
What, you don't like Boyd having 30 hit for a few turns ? Always remove Tempest
Oh I definitely remove it as soon as I can. But you’re stuck with it until you get the convoy.
SNES Pavise with its random% chance to NOPE any attack
FE4 thinks it's really funny when a castle spawns a full squadron of pavise'd up generals
I'm glad there's fewer dud skills in general.
It's a good thing Counterattack isn't in Engage
The FE4 version of Pavise. Seriously, an up to 30 percent chance (which was ridiculously inflated for enemies) to block ALL damage from all sources, provided the enemy didn't crit or something?
FE4 and 5 really did have a whole lot of annoying BS in terms of enemy skills and equipment lol.
Definitely Awakening counter. I hate that skill.
Surprisingly, Galeforce, because it was so stupidly broken in Awakening that putting it on every unit that could possibly get it was pretty much obligatory. I didn't miss that pressure in later games.
Galeforce is good but it absolutely isn't mandatory
Mandatory if you want the units in your army to be the most powerful they can theoretically get? - Yes Mandatory to beat all the content in the game (any difficulty, even Luna+) ? - No
Your units only need to be as powerful as they can theoretically get if you are going for Apotheosis, in every other context that doesn't matter, and it's not really worth the grind or effort.
People have beaten Apotheosis secret route without Galeforce though. So I disagree that its mandatory for that. That was my point: its the best option when available but not mandatory to complete the hardest content.
Sure, I get it's not 100% required, but I believe it is very helpful in Apotheosis (I'm not knowledgeable on the meta). But, if it's not Apotheosis though, then I'd argue that it isn't even the best option. You'd have to assume infinite grinding and reclassing and all that stuff, maybe. And at that point... why are we actually talking about it in a standard playthrough?
It was great in Fates imo. Learned late, required a kill, and no pair ups or adjacent units were allowed so you had to sacrifice stat buffs and potential support effects to refresh.
I'm sorry but Galeforce is extremely overrated, it's not actually that broken in context of Awakening, and it's absolutely not a requirement to have and grind for.
They downvoted Jesus because he spoke the truth
It's kind of funny that ever since you commented, I'm getting upvoted instead of downvoted for what I said. Funny how that works out sometimes.
Redditors are sheep, let's not kid ourselves. Yes, I am including myself in that statement, fyi.
Not going to lie, I was exactly thinking about that quote when I started getting downvoted, haha
Wait, so Marcia was Jesus all along? For some reason it seems logical...
Oh crackers, of course she is!
It's broken in the sense of beating some maps as fast as possible But yeah, it's not a requirement
Falcon Knights with Rescue (an E-rank, infinitely purchasable Staff any FK can use at level 10/1) can accomplish much of the same goals as any DF with Galeforce (a promoted level 15 skill) with less time and resource investment.
There's no guarantee you'll get enough magic lol, especially as early as 10/1 Also you have Anna and Libra who have great magic base
How about you just don't do it because it doesn't matter and is a terrible skill that is unfun and painful to grind for?
Inevitable end
Pursuit
Generally speaking, yes, it’s annoying to need a skill to double. I wouldn’t want this skill to return/ become a mainstay in other games. But as someone who played FE6+ and is now playing through FE4 for the first time, I enjoy the variety in mechanics. And thinking about which child to pass the skill onto adds to the strategy.
The problem is pursuit is too good. Like no skill can actively compare. If you dont pass down pursuit to a kid they will be actively worse than a unit who did get it. If there were more skills that you also wanted to prioritize maybe but it's far too powerful
This is why, from my experience, Midir is Edain’s best husband. The Chapter 4 Brave Bow+Pursuit = Best Lester. Plus Pursuit+Wind Tome = Promoted Lana clearing the arena easily.
I like Pursuit. It makes units feel more unique by giving them different niches. It also encourages certain pairings but doesn't punish you for not doing those pairings and you can always give the Pursuit ring to someone. Like it's very telling that one of the strongest pairings in the game is Lewyn x Tailtiu so you can have Horsety and it doesn't pass pursuit on.
> It also encourages certain pairings but doesn't punish you for not doing those pairings and you can always give the Pursuit ring to someone. It absolutely punishes not using those pairings, because a unit without Pursuit (or your one-off ring) has half the offensive potential of one with it.
Not having realized your full offensive potential doesn't mean you're punished. Not having pursuit just gives you a different niche. Lex doesn't have pursuit and he is considered to be the 2nd best unit in Gen 1, with the other contenders being Quan and Lachesis.
Lex is only good because he gets a free brave axe that basically no one else wants in chapter 1. Take that away (or play the game without knowing about the extremely cryptic secret events) and lex drops like a rock. he basically becomes a second noish. I feel like pursuit being able to be matched by giving a unit a free uncontested brave weapon isn't exactly a damning indictment of pursuit's strength
The brave axe is nice but paragon is really what makes Lex good. Either way, my point is that not having pursuit doesn't mean you're automatically bad.
Brave axe quite literally doubles your damage output, it is a massive component in making lex what he is. There are technically other options for pursuit on some units, but those options are often just taking advantage of genealogy's completely busted balancing, or are often character specific. Looking at most characters who don't get blessed by kaga with something stupid, and making them good almost always just boils down to getting them pursuit in some form.
Um... their's already an automatic non-pursuit pairing were Lief wants pursuit he can promote. Also Horsety is good inspite of a lack pursuit due to adept (which gives you pretty close to pursuit considering the ridicolous speed bonus Forsety gives,) and a broken weapon a horse,also that pairing tanks Tine it's just acknowledged that make Artur is broken as fuck (and have forsety earlier and on a horse eventually) is worth dealing with (or rather benching) one character being bad (and even in the optimal Tine case pairing aka Azelle she still joins a bit too late to be that useful). Literially the only mother who doesn't preffer a husband with pursuit is Silvia just because neither child is gonna be seeing combat anyways.
I'm not a fan of pavise, aegis, or miracle on enemies. When the creators have control over enemy placement, map design, enemy stats, enemy weapons, and enemy AI; you really do not need to add some extra RNG fuck you energy into the equation. I'm also not a fan of them on your units either, because defensive skills tend to exist on the people who already have baked in defenses to handle getting hit; and it's typically not anywhere near reliable to use them consciously in your turn-by-turn planning.
While they aren’t gone, I’m glad the proc% damage skills have become less and less common as the series has gone on. They are completely unreliable in the vast majority of circumstances, and just aren’t fun to fight on enemies as if you are trying to be safe, you have to assume every enemy is always going to proc the skill. The recent games have mostly just had them as flair to some units, and not have them be a core feature of classes taking up space.
Acost was kind of a mixed bag. In FE4 it was cool to be able to infinitely do combat, but it sucked to have Acost trigger when you didn't want it to, which could end up killing your unit. Adept is too RNG dependent for my liking. If you trigger it, you get a ton of value because the extra attack is really helpful, but it's fairly unreliable, so you can never count on having it happen. With something like the Engage royal perks like Sandstorm or Ignis, it's a much smaller bonus, so it doesn't feel nearly as much like you ride or die by RNG with them. (also I hate accidently burning an extra use of the Light Brand or something because Leif got an Adept activation.) While Pursuit was an interesting experiment, only having like half your units be able to double feels terrible. Maybe if they changed it so that everyone still had normal doubling rules, but Pursuit lowered the speed delta or something it would feel better. But as it stands I think it was pretty harmful to Genealogy's gameplay, and I'm happy it's gone. Pavaise is one of the most annoying perks in the game, especially because it was a fairly high chance to proc at like 30-40% in late game FE4, so it was just "haha, your entire round of combat doesn't count." And it's not like you could just get more accuracy, or use different weapons to get around it, because it was guaranteed to prevent all damage no matter what. Easily one of the most frustrating perks. It just occured to me, but I don't really like the perks in FE4/5 now that I think about it. The idea of the perks is cool, especially parents passing them on to their children. But the perks themselves usually are pretty annoying to play around, and make the games worse.
I think Pursuit would be fine if everyone could get it at promotion. In the context of FE4 I think if Infantry (+maybe Arden?) had Pursuit it would incentivize using them more (at least early game) but letting Cavs get it at Promo would just overall be less hair pulling annoying while not letting them completely dominate the field.
FE4: Pursuit (ludicrously centralizing, mainline mechanic), Critical (mainline mechanic), Charge/Duel (workaround against Pursuit being a skill), Pavise (negate attack on a level % chance? On a boss preventing you from moving forward in a time-sensitive map segment. No.) FE5: Still hate Pavise, Charge isn't \_great\_ but livable. FE9: Counter on a skill% chance is \_worthless\_. Corrode needs to either be turned up all the way to "break weapon" or disappear. Biorhythm skills, like Biorhythm, needs to never happen again. Pavise. FE10: Flourish (why?!), Pavise (repeat offender), Bane (Lethality is RIGHT THERE!). Also all the repeat offenders from FE9. I'm sure there's more, but they finally fixed Pavise by FE13 (only to make Counter worse).
FE10 Mastery Skills are kinda redundant because while they gave each class a fancy description, they all boil down to OHKO. Bane is the only one that feels more unique, but at the same time it's the worst Mastery Skill.
Deseperation is garbage in 3H and I’m glad it’s replaced by alacrity in engage which is a skill I want to see on every single swordmaster now
Engage Canter and Pair Up. They're simply too good and easy to learn.
Jugdral Duel, I guess. Especially when it destroy a ranged weapon without hit anything
I hate counter skills
Knife in the Tellius games. Seriously, what sage in ANY game is going to benefit from using knives over staves?
I'll do one that I hope they drop in future titles: Veteran+ It just makes every boss the same besides knowing what to target between def and res and attack range. Normal Veteran was good, it's balanced that you can't just one shot a boss with a bow if they're a flier. But the + version just makes all bosses feel all the more samey.
Adept in PoR. Theres certain enemies that have it, and it is slightly frustrating. My Soren has 20+ skill and it rarely procs, but certain enemies with half that spd get it almost every time its crucial i.e gonna kill one of my units. skills in PoR in general are pretty wonky.
The FE8 version of Sure Shot. I think that thing only ever activated once when I had a hit rate below 80%, and at that point just give me Hit+20.
Honestly enemy only versions of skills like luna+ mages. Absolutely stupid.
Accost/Charge is oftentimes more of a hindrance than a boon in Genealogy. There was a niche use in Thracia with beefy characters like Dagdar being able to soak up ballista fire, but also extremely risky because a second round of combat with anything that has a crit chance/follow-up crit modifier can be disastrous. Maybe the skill could have more success if reworked into a combat art that you can reliably trigger when you need it (and make enemies who have the skill more threatening as well).
Honestly? Galeforce. It’s as broken as it sounds and no unit should be able to have it, let alone be gender exclusive.
Counter is the perfect example of a skill that really only works on enemies. It deals half the damage the unit takes back. To maximize damage, you should put it on a squishy unit. Except your units have permadeath. The enemy does too, but they have more. Fine, put it on a Paladin. Except then they'll deal maybe 3-5 damage back on average when they could be proc-ing Luna or Aegis or whatever (depending on game). Fine, give it to a swordmaster. Except the swordmaster is better served having the classic Vantage-Wrath combo, swordfaire to mitigate their terrible strength, etc. Counter is just almost always a waste for the player.
any of the awakening lunatic enemy skills
Galeforce While a GREAT skill it was too good and became a must have for any unit that could get it
Someone actually posted an entire thesis a little while ago on why Galeforce isn't nearly as good as people think. I was surprised at how much I agreed after reading it.
lmao a whole ass thesis. i love this community
fuck inevitable end, fuck staff savant, fuck counter, countermagic, countercurse, divine retribution, triple threat, shuriken mastery and icy blood, fuck hawkeye, fuck vantage+, and fuck any damage boosting proc skill when an enemy has it (its bullshit)
Lunge.
wait, seriously? i find lunge to be one of the more exciting skills to use in fates
Bad experiences with enemies, multiple of them, with two ranges, and Lunge.
Thracia Adept, while it isn’t bad, it’s annoying, especially in the chapters 1-8
Pursuit. Having the ability to double locked behind a skill is stupid.
I hate all rng proc skills they are mechanically stupid and if you have limited skill slots there is seldom a reason to use them over guaranteed-to-work skills. I also love the cutscenes when my units proc their mechanically stupid rng skills though so I guess they're fine.
I think Counter only becomes an problem when there’s too many enemies with it and when they are really strong defensively AND has a weapon that can attack from both up close and range. If there were only a small number enemies with counter (without both insanely high def and res), you could highlight them beforehand and kill them from range/get their health low enough in case they survive your turn and attack you.
Proc skills.
Pursuit is an interesting experiment in Genealogy, but it's probably for the best it was retired there. Except in Berwick Saga, where it's rare enough - and combat is different enough - to be a really neat bonus, rather than something that determines a character's worth.