Ten Tips to Improve Fire Emblem # 2 - Balancing the Classes: Part One - Nerf the Ponies

              Ever notice how the same classes consistently produce top tier units while the same classes also consistently produce bottom tier ones? There’s a reason for that. One of the most important stats in the game is the movement stat. The higher the character’s movement, the quicker they can get to the enemies which means that they get to hog experience and level up faster. Take a look at some of the best units in the series:

Sigurd, RD Haar, Shadow Dragon Caeda, Seth, Miledy, FE 7 Marcus, PoR Marcia

            One of the biggest reasons why these units are so good has to do with their movement. Yes, I’m aware of the fact that there are plenty of other reasons why they’re so good, but it’s not a coincidence that the best units in so many games in the series all happen to be either mounted or flying. This has led me to the conclusion that Fire Emblem is a pretty mount / flying dominated series. Conversely, there are several different classes that tend to get the shaft in terms of usefulness. Archers, thieves, fighters and armor knights usually tend to be pretty bad due to the number of disadvantages that their classes have to deal with.

                    So how do we effectively nerf mounted and flying units while also giving archers, thieves, fighters and armor knights the love that they need? Well I’ll be tackling the first half of that question in this post by addressing how we should go about nerfing mounted units and fliers. My second post will deal with the latter end of the question.

1. Bring back dismounting: As a concept I think that dismounting is a pretty nifty feature in nerfing mounted and flying units. By forcing said units to have 5 movement in certain maps you’ve effectively stripped them of their movement bonus. In the games where dismounting has been implemented (a.k.a FE’s 3 & 5) the units usually have to switch to swords as opposed to using a lance or an axe like they normally do. I don’t think this is necessary and I’m okay with letting these units be able to use their normal weaponry indoors. That being said, I think it would be helpful in nerfing said units. This comes with a caveat however since in order for dismounting to be effective you have to have a significant number of maps be indoors otherwise it won’t do its job properly. I also do not believe that dismounting alone is enough to properly balance said units. The reason why is because Fire Emblem 3 invented the dismounting feature and Palla, Catria and Sirius are some of the best units in the game so clearly more has to be done in order for these to be balanced.

2.  Increase the frequency and quality of effective weaponry:  On paper, high movement units should be balanced out by the fact that there are weapons that are designed to kill them easily. Flying units are weak to bows and wind magic (or in the case of Radiant Dawn it was thunder magic for wyvern riders) while mounted units are weak to anti-horse weapons and in some games each physical weapon type has its own anti-horse weapons. So why don’t veterans bring this up whenever a discussion about units like Haar and Seth come up?  Well for starters, you don’t come across very many bows and anti-horse weapons are even more rare. So this means that fliers and cavaliers can charge through the battlefield without having to worry as much about the consequences. 
   
   
   
   
   

                       Instead of being weak to bows, Haar in Radiant Dawn is weak to thunder magic but who cares about that when he can one-shot most thunder mages (or comes really close in general) and the damage that he takes isn’t even that bad? Also, you don’t come across very many thunder mages either making them less of an actual threat to Haar. Same thing applies to Seth. So let me ask you this: How likely would you be to charge ahead if effective weaponry made enemies capable of one-shotting your fliers and cavaliers? I’m going to go out on a limb and say that you’d be WAY more cautious about your tactics. Now, what if this happened for roughly half of the game? Suddenly, fliers and cavaliers wouldn’t be such tier dominating gods. You could say that nobody would ever use these units because why bother right? To be fair, I wouldn’t advocate going THAT far but I do believe that having effective weaponry should be a legitimate threat to the units it’s supposed to kill and it should be something that the player should have to deal with. This applies to bows as well. I won’t go into as much detail here since I plan on addressing this issue in Part 2 where I talk about how to make archers better.  

3.  Make sure the Rescue mechanic never sees the light of day again: So another mechanic that gave a disproportionate advantage to fliers and cavaliers was the rescue mechanic. The rescue mechanic made it so that fliers and cavaliers had a huge amount of utility just because they were fliers and cavaliers. This is the main reason why frail Pegasus Knights like Florina and Karin (from Thracia 776) are considered as good as they are. Despite being very frail and lacking in offensive parameters their early join time combined with this mechanic gave them a huge edge over most of the units in the player’s army. The ability to para-drop characters like Marcus, Asvel or Seth over large distances is a big freaking deal and veterans of the series like dondon151 exploit the ever-living crap out of this mechanic. The rescue mechanic also led to some insane shenanigans known as rescue-chains that basically let players skip huge portions of various maps. Dondon151 has some pretty insane rescue-chains in his Sword of Seals Hard Mode 0 % growths playthrough that you should check out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKpMIVTByRE

         On the one hand I admire the creativity and intelligence that it takes to come up with stuff like that, on the other hand there’s also a part of me that’s sickened by how much of a map one can skip when stuff like this gets pulled off. Thankfully the rescue mechanic hasn’t been in a Fire Emblem game since Radiant Dawn and personally I hope it stays that way.

4. Shrink the maps and work on the terrain: Big maps favor mounted units over unmounted units. If you want to beat a game full of big maps you basically have to have units with really high movement while units with smaller movement have to spend all-day getting dragged around the map. Sound familiar? Yeah that’s right, I’m talking about Holy War. As much as I love Fire Emblem 4 I have to admit that the gargantuan maps exacerbated the advantage that high movement units had to 11 and made it so that no matter how awesome the combat parameters of your unmounted units were they would always be held back by the sheer fact that they were unmounted units and that it took a million years to haul their butts over from point A to point B. Before you cast stones at Holy War though, remember that this is a problem that most other games have (Sword of Seals for example has a significant number of big maps as well). While I intend to cover this next point in more detail in a later post (spoiler alert) maps with terrain that slow down your cavalry and infantry tend to give fliers a huge advantage since they’re unhindered by something that affects the rest of the cast. Personally I think it would be neat to have some weather effects that solely affected flying units. It would be nice for fliers to have something else that solely affects them, but that’s just me.

                 Moral of the story: If you want to nerf mounted and flying units my advice would be to bring back the dismounting feature, increase the frequency and quality of effective weaponry, make sure the rescue mechanic stays dead and work on the maps so that fliers and cavaliers aren’t given further disproportionate advantages. In my next post, I’ll be addressing the topic of how to make some of the less useful classes better.