Top 10 Most Busted Mechanics in Fire Emblem: # 10 & # 9

# 10: Paragon and Veteran

Kickstarting the list would be two skills that it make it easy for a unit to rapidly accumulate experience: Paragon and Veteran. The reason why they're on this list is this: Rapidly accumulating experience lets certain units gain level-ups, and by extension gain stats, in a quick period of time. Robin is considered so insanely powerful in Awakening because of this skill. Just Pair Up Robin with a powerful partner, and this skill will allow them to rapidly accumulate experience to the point where they break the game in half with it. If we're being technical, there are other reasons why but Veteran is typically a huge reason why Robin snowballs so fast, and why Awakening is considered an easy game to break.

Paragon's less notorious, but operates under a similar line of logic: Doubling experience means that a certain unit can snowball until their stats are so high that they can easily obliterate enemies. It's a great idea for characters that start under-leveled so that they can catch up, but outside of that these skills are a recipe for easy juggernaut creation.

# 9: "Powerful Weapons": Forging / Holy War Weapon Kill Crits / "The Nosferatu Effect"

When asking people's opinions about busted mechanics, I saw different opinions about mechanics that can ultimately be described as "really busted weapons". Since I think all three of these should be included, I decided to group them all together. This will not be the only entry on the list where multiple mechanics will be grouped together. Started off the "busted weapons" list is forging. 

Since there are multiple different varieties of the forging mechanic, I thought I'd specify as essentially two different kinds:

• DS Forging 
• Japanese Path of Radiance forging.

DS Forging

Why is Caeda so powerful in Shadow Dragon? Easy: Her forged Wing Spear lets her kill a huge number of enemies in a single hit. How is that possible? Forging. What makes the DS Fire Emblem games version of forging so powerful is that you can take weapons that are already powerful, and make them even stronger. 

Weapons that deal effective damage and Brave Weapons can get a huge buff in damage and in critical hit rates which makes for some stupidly powerful weapons, and some silly results. Awakening took this to a whole new level when 

This isn't to say that there aren't other imbalanced versions of forging too. Case and point...

Japanese Path of Radiance forging.

The main reason why Japanese Path of Radiance forging is on here is for one simple reason: The Japanese version has an unusual error where, if a weapon with five base crit (Slim Sword, Slim Lance, or Thunder) is forged to have 0 crit, the value wraps around and gives the weapon 255 crit, effectively giving its user a perfect critical hit chance in battle. All localizations of Path of Radiance correct this error. 

(Source: https://fireemblemwiki.org/wiki/Forge#Fire_Emblem:_Path_of_Radiance)

So while I doubt very many people have experienced this, I do think it's worth mentioning that a weapon that allows perfect critical hit rates in a game with notoriously weak enemies (although Path of Radiance Maniac Mode actually has enemies that are bulkier than usual) sounds like a recipe for hilariously busted shenanigans. 

Since I'm on the topic of forging, I would like to say something about other forging systems. As one poster in fire emblem reddit brought up: 
     "Fates' idea of requiring multiple copies of weapons is nice on paper but leads to cheaper items becoming a bit too dominant as they can be forged up to the same Mt as higher tier equivalents (up to a certain extent) while also having more hit, no penalties and, in the case of bronzes, a useful +10 dodge bonus. On top of that, the way forging materials are tied to the my castle stuff requires you to waste time on online features or just save edit 99 of them into the game and call it a day, which is what most people who invest a lot of time into Fates end up doing."

(Source: "Docaccino - https://www.reddit.com/r/fireemblem/comments/14vlcsh/comment/jrdmvkd/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) 

I would also like to argue that on principle, I don't like how Fates, Echoes, and Engage don't have weapon durability but still have forges. It makes forging that much better, and provides no downsides to using forges. So it turns into a game of "find your best weapon and spam it". It reinforces the idea that weapon durability is a great mechanic.

The only forging mechanic I can think of that's actually balanced comes from Berwick Saga:

But that's a different topic for a different day. Moral of the story: Forging is broken.

Holy War Weapon Kill Bonus

So in Fire Emblem 4 there's a mechanic where a weapon's kills are stored and counted by the game. Once a weapon gets over 50 kills, it gets the ability to land a critical hit. "For every kill that the weapon makes afterward, its chances of landing a critical hit improve. The bonus caps out on 100 kills or 50% bonus." (Source: https://fireemblem.fandom.com/wiki/Weapon_Kill_bonus) 

Scylla actually did a great job breaking down why this mechanic is super busted: 

        "There is no way to get crit avoid in FE4, and because of the way crits work in FE4 where the damage is doubled but enemy defense is only applied once, FE4 crits start to deal more damage than average crits when enemy defense gets high which is what you'll start encountering in gen 2. As a result Brave weapons with 100 kills have crit rates in about the ~77% area and will out damage Holy weapons while being far cheaper."

Keep in mind, Holy Weapons have 30 might and give stat boosts as outrageous as + 10 or + 20! The fact that those super busted weapons aren't considered the most powerful in the game goes to show how ludicrous the Weapon Kills mechanic is!

"The Nosferatu Effect"

Last, but not least, we have "the Nosferatu effect". This is basically  any weapon that allows you to recover HP based off of the damage that you deal. This makes enemy phase tanking pretty easy, since Nosferatu makes the ability to survive really easy.   

I can potentially see someone mentioning how the Nosferatu tome was weak in this or that Fire Emblem game, which is true, but I think there's a catch to discussing Nosferatu and how powerful it is:

1) Either the weapon has to be bad so that Nosferatu doesn't break the game 

OR 

2) Nosferatu becomes the best weapon in the game, or among the best weapons in the game.

The fact that this "viability binary" comes across so much proves that giving the player access to healing HP while dealing damage should be a cause for concern.