It does also mean that, especially coupled with Fates not having stat variation between the same enemies, it means that doubling thresholds between a Steel Axe Fighter and an Iron Axe Fighter are the same, which simplifies calculations. Silver lining.
@@VeXJL One thing Fates suffers from is that it can't really adequately fit all of the relevant information on the tiny DS screens. It's not a large amount of information if you're familiar/experienced with the game, but when you're new at it it's really a lot to remember, especially with how unintuitive some of it is (like one-way speed penalties/bonuses). One thing I remember really getting thrown off by is Corrin being a dragon-type unit in any class, because nowhere is a unit's "type" (like cav/beast, flying, etc.) actually displayed.
Yeah but even base Benny can double the fastest enemies in the game with the amount of speed boosting you can do. Avoiding being doubled is never really a concern you are concerned about losing your double
I think Three Houses has my favourite form of durability, where you can repair weapons with another limited resource, with the more powerful and legendary weapons requiring rarer and rarer materials. It also adds a bit of additional strategy to the gameplay, as breaking monster's shields will give you bonus materials I think it could be balanced a little better, from my time, its pretty liberal with the materials it gives you aside from agarthium and mythril, so it's pretty easy to keep the heroes relics (except Aymr, probably for good reason Imao raging storm) at high durability, if any system deserves a second shot its this one imho
I'm fine with the system for the rarer weapons. But since the smithing materials for the non unique weapons is available for purchase pretty early, that section feels pretty pointless. Since money in 3H isn't exactly scarce, it's just extra steps.
Honestly on higher difficulties it’s kinda hard to use the Heroes Relics bc the materials are too annoying to get and kinda heavy and inaccurate. Legendary weapons I think should have a durability of like 15, but they restore after each battle. With their prf combat art being 5 uses. That way you don’t completely abuse the combat art that makes them so special
Another thing I like about 3H's system is the free repair you get at the timeskip. Huge incentive not to hoard your relic uses. 3H is also my favorite when it comes to weapon management.
My favorite system is normal durability except for the generic / iron weapons are infinite durability because I find buying iron weapons to be the least interesting thing you can do in a fire emblem game.
@@timotheebrasseur6188 Yeah, but the killer bow is kind of a secret weapon that you would never get without using a guide or someone telling you. Also I don't think IS understood how strong it was.
The best durability system I've seen was on "Banners of the Maids". It's extremely low (the basic weapon is barely above 10), but it entirely restore after every battle. It's also why I like FE4's system in theory (being able to repare every broken weapons for a fee), even if the implementation isn't great.
@@actuallizard I love spells in 3H because I can think about it on a map-by-map basis (very nice for playing blind) but there's still consideration for uses. I understand the appeal of it carrying over in a long campaign, but it's not my thing really.
Yes! Banner of The Maid (despite its other issues) solves this problem really elegantly. I hate the tedium that traditional FE durability brings, and as Lizard said in the video, I often end up hoarding weapons for no good reason. In Banner, it's awesome to use all my most powerful weapons every map, but it's also fun to strategize when the best time to use them in that map would be. Best of both worlds. Would love to see a FE game (or romhack) take this approach in the future.
And some weapons have their uses decreased by weather, but than can be bypassed with an ability ... A very expensive ability that is a meaningful investment!
Yeah me too. Though I get it because that's a Warrior Hack and Slash so it would have been crap if traditional. But an interesting concept using this in a future FE (I'd love a mix of 3Houses AND Engage weapon handling. Such as Engage regulating Weight & Trade off to User's Build Stat & Weapon Weight to affect the SPD stat. And for 3houses Weapons didn't IMMEDIATLY disappear from your inventory when they broke and you could repair them. Though I did hate how you had to find out how to get some rare materials on your own instead of maybe a hint...found out some by sheer accident.) I feel SOME should have durability, Or it should be regulated to Combat Arts that I feel should make a return. Weapons don't break unless you use Combat Arts related to them. Basically making them unlimited for regular use. Tomes would still use them when casting spells, but will recharge after the battle sans two parter battles. Staves need no changing or you could make the charges for those be something that you use resources to recharge. Making rarer staves (like how Nodus was in Engage) worth using (though hefty cost to avoid abuse)
Honestly, I feel like there could be a note to take if they ever want to do a Echoes or Three houses style system with combat arts again. I could see a middle ground with durability only going down if you use combat arts with some enemies having reduction to non combat art attacks.
@@icecreamorc It's why I have the idea of just using Durability for Combat Arts only! (I have a comment somewhere as I commented after I made my previous reply to this original comment explaining my idea) Duability is lower then usual on alot of the weapons. But it's not used up when attacking or defending. Rather instead it's drained from using Combat Arts (only the ones that use the weapon, now stuff like Swap, Shove, ETC. I want to use BLD like CON and similiar to Path of Radiance those are NATURAL command abilities. Shove can only be used if character's BLD is higher then the one their Shoving, while it's SMITE if BLD to the target is HIGHER! Similar to having 6 more SPD then the opponent allows you to Follow up attack). You can't use a Combat Art if durability Cost can't be met (can't use a 10 Cost if you only have 9 uses) or to change that, you CAN but it will be at lesser quality for each Use missed (like Vengence is WEAKEN depending on how much Durability has to be made up! Such as make it a 5 cost, and you're HP of 50 is at 10 and the weapon only has 3! Then if the bonus to the damage would be 20 extra from the lost HP. then it's weaken a BIT while if the use was 1, then it's weaken by a decent amount!) and when it has 0. It will be a Broken weapon like in 3Houses which makes it near worthless or maybe MAJOR debuff to it till you repair it. Weapons would have their own unique Combat Arts to them mixed with you being able to learn them as you did in Echoes/Three Houses (a mix of both systems if you will) Spell Tomes would still have Durability as Charges. And special Combat Arts connected to the Tomes that let you do unique attacks with them (Especially the Tier 3 like Excalibur attacking four times like a weaken Astra for magic, or making Bolganone into a BLOODY Nuke but the amount of Charges for it is HUGE! Of course as I mention with the Weapons, if you use them without the right amount of charges, each point of charge MISSING from the Cost weakens the effect. Thoron would also have a SNIPER Combat Art allowing it to either have MORE range, or even turn it and Bolganone into SIEGE tomes for still a large cost) but after battle (minus Two Part Chapters) they will recharge (Two parts would recharge them ABIT for balance). Staves are still those that have charges that WILL not regenerate. But the Hammerne Staff which disappeared would be a shop function (Enchanter or something like that! Depends if you still want Enchanter as a Class! I like it and wish for it to be REFINED and stay in the series! Do what they did with the Villager in Fates where it went from a Trainee Class to an Actual Class with an Advanced Class or make a Base Class for it! Just make it a LEGIT Class to use! But basically a MAGICAL Blacksmith for upgrading Tomes with Material, Repair/refill charges for Magical Weapons like the Radiant Bow/Flame Lance/Levin Sword you get the idea! I want to seperate upgrading and repair/recharge durability with Blacksmith and Enchanter by instead making the upgrades end at +1 or +2 with a +3 for Legendary/HIGH TIER that's VERY Special to replace Engraving! Hell Engraving is a more weaken but BETTER version the Enchanter Blacksmith can add to weapons for additional effects and such beyond Stat modifiers and as the Lizard pointed out, Would be nice to let us NAME them!) And oh yeah, make Material gathering NOT something like the Dogs that RUINED what they were trying to do with the "Pets" in Engage! No point in the others when dogs are all you need as cooking is not noteworthy (I want to make it AKIN to Three Hopes and have some use! No party member swipes. Just a dedicated NPC Cook so I can CONTROL who I bring in to eat it! And unique dialogue for party members who have a history with each other AND depends on their Support level! IT was funny when certain Support levels in Three Houses changed the Meal dialogue, like Mercedes and Annette if they have B Support as that one ended with a fight between the two that they feel AKWARD as they are still coming to terms with their argument. But are like SISTERS only majorly Once it's resolved at A! AND would give stat bonus, STRONGER for those in the dialogue if you made the meal right, not RANDOM CHANCE or at least you KNOW you're chances of making it good) Sorry if I went on a Tangent! I just have a LOVE/HATE with Three Houses and Engage. Engage for fudging up stuff that Three Houses did right but you can see they could have made it work and Three Houses for it own stuff (still love em though) It's funny how a WARRIORS Musou game (Three Hopes) had everything I wanted in 3Houses and am SURPRISED no one in Engage's team chose to keep much of the good stuff in for Engage?!
I think a better idea, since combat arts probably won't be in every game, is to have durability just tied to that battle and between battle everything is automatically repaired as your characters repair and maintain their weapons. So powerful weapons having fewer uses but having those uses every battle. A balancing concern I could see is the most powerful weapons just being used to kill every boss so bosses need to be pretty powerful like in Engage. I think FE4 has my favorite system where every character kind of has a prf since for the most part their inventory and weapons are just theirs. You also could repair all your weapons pretty easily.
My favorite version of weapon durability it it existing but you have the ability to repair weapons out of battle. It allows you to actually be able to use the cool toys the game gives you
Arena grinding aside, that's why I love Genealogy's repair system. Better weapons cost more to repair, so you have an incentive to manage resources, especially with the Holy weapons, but also get to enjoy them without worrying about running out. It also builds stars with every kill that increase crit chance, which means that using a weapon builds up its power, and that in turn meshes well with the inventory system, so you can basically create and then pass down your own legendary weapons, like Sigurd's silver sword or Finn's brave lance. 3Houses used a similar repair system, but the required materials made it much less intuitive when you would and wouldn't be able to repair, so it felt like you were never sure exactly how much you had left.
Worst part is the fomo aspects and how you can lock yourself out of using them as every attack feels like a waste That's why I also don't use the dragon units much as I rather keep the orb. If the older games gave more hammer staff to fix things I would be able to do stragety around them Though it also is cool when a break game has a weapon that never breaks like falchion and such. It makes the weapon feel special and a carry.
Yeah, I always use tons of Basic Iron Weapons (and Hand Axe/Javelin), and nothing else. Which means I end up overtraining them to compensate. Which just runs all the fun, but otherwise, I'm missing out (FE7 is the worst at this, because I'm losing so much money everytime I use one of the best weapon.)
@@shytendeakatamanoir9740if we had the 3 houses system but just gold not material based in older games I'd have a small army with very strong iron weapons to make the difference. It's be way more fun that way too.
that's where chad fe3 comes in and makes you only consume a dragon stone use when you transform so you can attack as many times as you want until you untransform after like 5 turns
The issue I find with most weapon durability systems is how you lose the weapon entirely if it breaks. Most other systems do have repair options, but those that don't also really suck. It's very easy to get caught in the "I'm storing 10000 potions to use at the right moment" mindset, particularly when you know that resource can just be gone forever with no other method to get it again if you use it. It's primarily an issue with personal items, I find. Silver weapons and i.e. Killing Edge aren't that much of a victim of this because their exclusive traits are consistent no matter the targer, which makes them easier to use because they can always be consistently expected to do that. It's much harder with personals and stuff that is designed to deal bigger damage to particular targets, because there's always that nagging feeling in the back of your head that something more threatening that you need that bonus specifically to beat will come up. Overall, I'd really like it if personals or conditional weapons either degegerated (sort of like how Fallout 3 works) and/or had an unusable broken form than breaking outright, and with the ability to repair them. Common items breaking outright is ok, because even though it costs you resources you can always get them again. With the ability to repair those weapons, the same principle can be applied without introducing the fear to the player that they'll lose the item they can't get anywhere else. Edit: To address the potential strength problem, you could also have those weapons get weaker with each repair so the player can't abuse them to steamroll, or make sure their repair cost is high enough that it's an actual sacrifice to keep them maintained.
SoV with a very interesting approach to it's weapon system. I know people are pretty low on it's gameplay overall due to map design, but I really do like the weapon system. Without the DLC grinding chapters, it's the ultimate example of making decisions with who gets what, what to forge and when to forge it. It can make or break a unit's viability, but there's not enough to go around for everyone
Fates legendary weapons have such high drawbacks for using them, despite the fact they're available for few chapters - 2 in Conquest, 3 in Birthright, in Rev they're available sooner but most of their regular users won't have the required weapon ranks by the time you get them - and in all routes very few units that can even reach S rank in regular playthrough. Like who can reach S swords? Ryoma, Hana or Hinata. Ryoma already has Raijinto and other 2 take a lot favouritism to get there. Legendary bow? Takumi (doesn't need it), Setsuna or Mozu with the latter two needing a lot favouritism. This trend is omnipresent with the only exception being legendary shuriken, since all 3 ninjas have pretty good shot at getting to S rank without too much favouritism. All of that was they were perceived to become too powerful with infinite durability. And of course legendary weapons are outclassed by forges. My favourite system by far though is FE4 - weapons break, but you can repair them without having to hoard them until you get Hammerne.
I find three houses and fe4 both have interesting spins on weapon durability. In fe4 it’s very easy to repair weapons, but with the restrictions on trading and gold sometimes you have to consider whether a unit can afford to repair a certain weapon. In three houses instead the limiting factor is repair materials, but weapon arts and how many times you can use them in a single map is another consideration. Maybe you can destroy any enemy you come across with swift strikes on your Lance of ruin, but eventually you will have more enemies left than weapon uses, depending on the map.
I totally get what you mean with Engage's forge/engrave system letting you create your own legendary weapons. In my run that was "Amber's Silver Greataxe", which racked up an impressive tally of oneshots over the course of the game. (It also started as a Steel Greataxe, making its "journey" even more special) Actually, Engage's forging system letting you turn weapons into different ones (usually higher tier, but sometimes into niche or magical ones) is a really fun mechanic, as there's "meaningful decision making" in whether you spend resources to get strong weapons like Silvers and Radiant Bows earlier than the story hands them to you, or use those resources on other things and wait.
I once played a fe6 hack without durability as well as empty shops It turned item management into an interesting aspect and gave you an incentive to use weaker units with unique weapon types like lugh to have forblaze access
I was hoping somebody would make a video about this! Im currently working on a Fire Emblem inspired TTRPG system, and I've read a few discussions about durability to get some ideas of what I should or shouldnt do, but videos honestly help me a lot more
I'd say Engage has a few other tricks to balancing its weapons beyond just competition for forge resources. Firstly, in the early game weapon weight is a factor. You may decide to cheaply forge a lighter weapon instead of switching to a heavier one in order to avoid being weighed down and still hit kill thresholds. This is particularly notable with the knives, as they receive 2 points of might per forging. A forged Steel knife can end up staying relevant even after Silver ones show up. Secondly, in the late game another competitive resource is unit inventory. With only 5 item slots in a game where the weapon triangle matters, outfitting each unit becomes a competition in itself, just one in which the Iron and Steel weapons generally don't play a role. Instead, the Silver weapon has to compete with the extra range option, the Killer option, the effective weapon, the Brave weapon, the magic weapon, the Smash weapon, the weapon triangle coverage, the vulnerary and the utility item. And sure, for some units it could still get centralized like with Pannette's love of Killer Axes, but I do believe that even that is a matter of trading off each unit's immediate choice range for a range of pre-prepared builds. All in all, I really enjoy Engage's approach of ditching excessive durability concerns and focusing on the fundamentals instead of loading the weapons up with complicated text to try and keep the starters viable. The one thing that does concern me with this is the question of "legendary weapons". Engage mostly resolves this by putting them on Emblems, limiting their "uptime" to when the Emblem is present and also preventing techniques like trade-swapping from applying to them, but Emblems as a whole are not a mechanic that should be expected to return as is. I wouldn't be opposed to durability being present in a limited fashion (that is, with a 3H-esque repair option) for some higher-end weapons, but I do believe that the line shouldn't be drawn at Silver but rather at truly top-tier picks. For example, Engage's weapon rank system allows units to use Silver weapons immediately, but their weight and low hit makes them liabilities in the hands of weak units. The Brave weapons, by contrast, are greatly undertuned in Engage to compensate for their lack of durability, to the point where they're rarely worth bothering with. And having durable common weapons can actually make it possible to make rare weapons even more fragile, making each use more impactful in comparison.
One thing that is important is the amount of enemies you have to fight. For example, if in one game your weapons have durability, but you have to face 100 enemies vs another game that also has durability but you face 200 enemies.
Radiant dawn vs awakening. Basicly, both have durability, but one sees difficulty through improving the enemy stats to the point there is no tactics. Vs radiant dawn later maps of hords of dudes being thrown at you, trying their best to make sure ike is high enough level to kill the black knight.
A little bit late but for me the 3 Games that does durability very well are : - Tharacia 776 a lot of units have its personal weapon , you get by with what you have , and hell you can even capture enemies and take their weapons lmao - FE6 have one of the peaks on using gold. Example is like if you are on the Western Isles , you spend a lot for killer weapons with what you have or you keep on hoarding , this is like this because after the western isles , you wont get killer weapons until the end game. - Radiant Dawn does it well with weapon forge , and having the “Shop” thing where special items will appear at a high price and you wont see them again until mid-late game. There are also special weapons for some characters, the Dawn brigade trifecta lmao , Elincia with Amiti , Ike with Ragnell , powerful weapons that others can use like the tempest sword , etc. And Radiant Dawn enemies are tanky and difficulty wise is so skewed that you are just better off using your resources from the get go.
As weird as this might sound, I always thought of Weapon Durability as Fire Emblem's version of MP in most turn based JRPGs. I know that it's not exactly the same thing but they share a similar idea in where spamming stronger attacks will run out of uses for them during battle very quickly. They both also share the same issue where once you get a ton of money, (which is very likely in both) you tend to hoard a bunch of things to make sure you don't run into the problem of running out of your strong tools. I personally don't mind the weapon durability system in most games personally as I like to have really powerful tools that can be used as a limited resource even if said resource becomes less finite when you get a ton of money. I prefer it over debuffs for using strong weapons anyday.
As a Super Robot Wars fan, I've always really like how those games handle their version of "weapon durability". In SRW, attacks use one of two resources: 1) Ammo: This works broadly similar to durability in FE, but functions on a per map basis rather than for the whole campaign. If you completely empty a weapon's ammo it doesn't break or become permanently used up, you just spent all your uses for that chapter and have to make do with other attacks for the rest of the map. The solves the "but I might need it later" problem you see in FE with items like the warp staff and legendary weapons: it becomes a case of "how do I best make use of my 2 uses of this weapon this map" rather than "how do I make best use of my 20 uses of this weapon this run". 2) Energy: Energy functions a bit like a stamina meter in other genres of games, in that it's a shared resource pool that is pulled on by all of the unit's EN-consuming attacks and abilities. This forces you to consider how much EN you're willing to spend on a given turn and on what. For example, a unit might have a barrier effect that greatly reduces damage taken but consumes a large amount of EN. If you make heavy use of that unit's high damage, high EN cost attacks you risk depleting their Energy, which would shut down their barrier and cause them to take significantly more damage on enemy phase, possibly resulting them being shot down. Some units will rely entirely on ammo for their attacks, some entirely on energy, and some use a mix of the two. Ammo-based units give you the flexibility to simply pick whichever attack is most suited for whatever you're currently fighting without worrying about how it will impact your other weapons, as well as freeing up your EN meter to be used purely for abilities and defensive effects. Energy-based units often have higher raw damage output, but require you to more closely manage your resources or risk the unit completely stalling out when their EN hits 0. As a result they become much more attracting targets for any effects that increase a unit's max EN or provide EN regeneration that you may have access to. As another layer on top of this, a unit's most powerful attacks will not only have a lower ammo count or higher EN cost, but will generally also be locked behind a certain minimum morale. Morale is a whole other system, but broadly speaking it works sort of like the engage meter in that it's something a unit builds up over the course of a map by taking part in battles, and hitting a certain threshold unlocks additional abilities and/or attacks for the unit. This means that even if a unit has a really strong weapon they can't simply stomp the entire map with it, as they have to start out relying on their weaker attacks first until their morale builds to the point that it comes online. In addition, while there are ways to restore a unit's EN and ammo mid-battle, they almost always come at the cost of lowering that unit's morale which then has to be built back up again. This means such restore effects don't invalidate a unit's EN and ammo requirements, but force you to think about when the best time to refill their resources is based on the overall state of the map. But yeah, SRW has a bunch of really cool ideas, and I think more FE fans should at least take a look at it. Especially if you're someone who's interested in mechanics and game design, as they often end up with very different solutions to similar problems.
I agree with your take on the Engage weapon mechanics! There's really hard decisions to make about how to invest your forging materials and engravings, especially before Chapter 10, because the Marth, Sigurd, and Leif engraves drastically change how a unit performs in combat. There's a lot of missed opportunity with that system, though. Like, some of the engravings are outright bad (Roy) or feel like they have no impact (Celica). And having some weapons be only accessible while you Engage is a cool idea, but in practice, most of the weapons are outright bad save Mercurius, Parthia, Mulagir, and (lategame) Seraphim. I still have a lot of fun with the resource management aspect despite the missed potential.
Roy is good on Thunder tomes ONLY if you have Olwen's S Ring. I feel if you refine Engage's weapon system, bring back Combat Arts and regulate durability to them (using them normally doesn't use durability. If it breaks it will become a weak broken weapon till repaired via a 3Hhouses like system. You can ONLY upgrade a weapon two times as that 5 times crap I rarely used. Maybe when I immediately got Liberation to 5 and forever put Marth engraving on it I did. But most sans Slim weapons maybe I ever went beyond 2-3 sometimes with a few 4. 3Houses you just could make some a +1 and that was that) but BLD and Weapon WT of Engage with some refinement was a better Idea in keeping it simple compared to how 3houses handled it where Mages didn't benefit much because it was STR focus (Had to have my mages and mage Knights get Weight - to at least mitigate higher magic and Magic weapon weight)
Possibly my favourite thing to do with weapon durability is in Radiant Dawn. Throughout Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn, you come across a few weapons with infinite uses blessed by the goddess (Amiti and Ragnell). Indeed, during my playthrough of Radiant Dawn, I referred to Amiti as my 'Infinite-use Brave Sword' as that is essentially what it is. And then you reach the endgame. All those really cool, unique forged weapons you made in preparation for the final push? They are all getting blessed now, and when that happens, they gain infinite durability. You are literally seeing the moment that these weapons become the relics that will be passed down through royal families. It's the point where they are no longer a 'forged silver lance', they are a legendary weapon. It is one of the best implementations of story and gameplay integration I've ever experienced.
I definitely prefer the older style of durability and the item management layer it adds throughout the playthrough. Never really cared for the balancing effects they tried to go for with the infinite durability games. They aren't bad, just not my preference.
I might be a bit biased bc i like conquest so much but I like its durability system the most. Even tho forges are almost always better than just buying a better weapon the silvers do still sometimes have their use cases and such. Plus whenever an enemy or a chest/village gives you an item you are always happy bc its something cool like the dual club from ch10 or a blessed lance from ch13 instead of getting the gagillionth iron sword from a random ass enemy.
I’m a bit surprised there was no mention of genealogy or three houses systems for durability. I wouldn’t say it’s my favorite style, but I’m curious to see what they might try in the future since it’s a mix of how gaiden/SoV and how games with typical durability work. Although it’s less about the durability of the weapon itself and more the limited amount of each type of weapons you can acquire at any given point. But still, a very unique way of limiting your powerful resources. I think nearly all iterations we’ve had of durability have their ups and downs and each one entices me to play most games in the series depending on what I’m looking for at any given time. I hope they continue to experiment with durability, effects, forging, etc as it makes each new entry have a unique feel despite being very similar on paper.
Point at 9:00 isn't really true because you can swap ores. When you get 5 of ore you can swap it for 1 of another kind, invalidating the issue. You can also manipulate the starting mineral based on your Corrin Second Class (just make sure to not use the skip to ch6 function as that takes the mineral/food from your previous save)
Shoutout to Radiant Dawn for the blessings at the end giving infinite durability to your favorite weapons, those last few chapters give very heroic feelings
I've been working on my own fe styled game and it's been fun to consider weapon durability and balancing. The solution I've come up with is to have the majority of weapons have infinite durability, but much higher weight with each new weapon rank. You also can't negate weapon weight, so there's always a reason to come back to the much lighter earlygame weapons. I'm also considering making really strong weapons like killer ones have durability anyways just to add a little bit of resource management. It's lots of fun to try balancing it all out.
Picked up romhacking for fun again yesterday and was wondering what to do about the durability system then l saw this, you summed everything up pretty well! I think my favorite weapon system is Engage's because it does have that resource management aspect to it with choosing which weapons to forge up and engrave, but without the hassle of buying the same weapon. I remember my Sacred Stones playthrough around mid-game l saw how much gold l had and thought "Welp, nothing to do but buy javelins and hand axes". Similar thing happened with 3Houses, l just bought a bunch of cheap lances to Tempest Lance 24/7. lmma mimic the Fates' Shadow Dragon idea for now, sounds like a good middle ground. Everyone is so intuitive and can come up with new solutions ;A;
So, before I give my two cents, a bit about my background with the series. I got heavy into the series when I picked up Engage ten months ago. And ever since, it's been the focus of my idle thoughts. I've finished Engage and Fates (all three routes) on Maddening Casual and Lunatic Classic (except I use savestates as Divine Pulse At Home) (and also Conquest endgame defeated me) respectively. I'm currently in the early game of Awakening and the early-mid game of Three Houses. *However* , long before all of that, I gave Blazing Blade a try back when it was newish. I was big into Advance Wars at the time and thought Fire Emblem would also click with me. For some reason...it just didn't. I had a few too many small complaints, and durability was one of them. (I have since come to realize that ALL of my complaints were unfounded.) With that said, I definitely prefer no-durability systems. Micromanaging all your units' weapon durability between chapters gets really tedious. It's not nearly as bad as I seem to remember though. Awakening does one thing right; you can "restock" a weapon (or any staff or item with multiple uses), which transfers uses from one weapon to another identical one. Personally, I don't see a problem with old, low-tier weapons becoming obsolete later in the game. This is not a new concept to RPGs. In, say, a Final Fantasy game, you'll quite often find a new weapon that's strictly better than what you have now, whereupon you'll equip it and perhaps sell the old one. That doesn't mean the old one was useless; it served you up to this point. A weapon doesn't need to be useful for the whole game; as long as it's useful at some point, it serves its purpose. The Fates Shadow Dragon approach sounds very interesting though. On paper, it sounds like it's an effective mix of the best parts of both approaches. I'm intrigued and will probably be trying it at some point.
Not that it's particularly good at balancing weapon durability, but I actually have a lot of fun with Awakening's weapon durability because of how I play the game with no-grinding/no-pairup. The early game throws you a lot of valuable weapons pretty quickly, but if you dont plan your moves well you're going to end up wasting their usages a ton. And even when you can purchase copies of weapons later, it starts to inhibit your ability to buy items from Anna's shops. The thing that holds this system back is how useless and whatever weapon ranks feel in this game. They make reclassing really annoying without grinding but past that they just dont matter since your units will level weapon experience very quickly. Still, I like it better than in GBA Emblem or Tellius because no, I dont think stocking up on Iron/Steel weapons for the millions of cannon fodder is very engaging.
I tend to flip flop a lot on this concept. I've never played that rom hack you mentioned, but that does sound appealing. I also think what's missing are more ways to repair weapons. Hammerne is great for example, but why is that the only way. I find that whenever I play a FE game blind for the first time, I typically don't use any good weapons because I'm afraid of needing them in the end game and sure enough finish my game with plenty of uses left. The fear of losing a weapon forever is simply a mental barrier for many players. But on the other hand, no durability takes away a lot from the gameplay and strategy. It's like this game's version of a magic / PP / FP etc..
The only example where i think durability hurts the game design is three houses with the heroes' relics. Most have very little durability and the items required to forge them are pretty rare. This is compounded with how they tend to have higher weight and lower accuracy it hard to double consistently because the intended use for them is to use their unique combat arts. However since combat arts cost durability, you can't afforde to use them very often on the relics. The only relics i used often were the three house leaders, because they have ridiculously strong combat arts. Thunderbrand is pretty good also, but i never really used Catherine.
Personally I prefer weapon durability over no durability. Aside from maybe Aymr (because of raging storm), I never really completely avoid using a weapon out of fear of not having it later, it just makes me only use it when necessary. Whereas in fates I basically never used weapons that came with stat penalties, out of fear that that penalty will be just enough to get my unit killed on enemy phase. I like the extra decision making that weapon durability adds to combat, vs in fates and engage where its just making the best weapon you can in the hub and spamming it all battle. I also enjoy how weapon durability gels with the combat art system. I understand why some people prefer the reverse, but sometimes I see people talking like no durability is /obviously/ /objectively/ better, which frustrates me
In fates stat penalties for using silver weapons and others only apply if the unit is the primary attacker. This makes them good to use with offensive pair up, since you get to use a better weapon with no penalty. They are also heavily designed for player phase use, so it is good to equip something else by trading prior to enemy phase if the unit using one is exposed to attacks. Then there are weapons like Waterwheel, where the huge penalty doesn't matter because of how ridiculously good the weapons attributes are. Even bronze weapons remain useful due to the extra crit avoid and the abillity to prevent you from getting a crit that would leave a unit exposed to additional attacks. If you can get past any initial reservations about the penalties, there is plenty of fun stuff you can pull with these weapons. It always feels like there are more factors to consider when choosing which weapons to use and when in Fates, even though durability is absent. In what other Fire Emblem game would you deliberately use the weakest tier of weapon over Silvers and Braves?
@@turtersvongenbu That is a great tip about using them for offensive pair ups, I never considered that! And to your last point: I actually think games with weapon durability encourage use of a wider variety of weapons than Fates. As mentioned in the video, because of the forging option in Fates, you can create a bronze or iron weapon that is just as good as silver weapons without the drawbacks (in theory you could forge silver weapons to become stronger but bc of their high cost its not usually worth it). So in my experience most of my units end up wielding forged bronze/iron weapons, and pretty much only ever using those weapons (I'm sure this isn't perfectly efficient play, but avoiding using the strong weapons out of fear of penalties is the FOMO equivalent for this no-durability system). Whereas in games with weapon durability, every combat I have to decide if I can accomplish my goal using a weaker weapon or if I need to burn a use of a stronger weapon. I think this works especially well in 3H maddening, where the tighter economy and combat art system make training and iron weapons extremely useful for their low price and high durability. In games with durabilty a unit might use each of their different weapons in their inventory throughout a battle, whereas in Fates for the most part it's whatever 1 strong weapon I forged for them. I don't even think the Fates/Engage way of no durability and forging is bad, I know some people really enjoy crafting powerful weapons fitted for their units. I just personally prefer the resource management aspect. Tbh I hope they don't settle on either no durability or durability for future games, it keeps gameplay fresh to keep bouncing around
@@mjuno2909 While I don't disagree with your point about uber forging (especially so in engage), I tend to view castle resource grinding in Fates as akin to experience grinding. It's fine to do, just not everyone is going to want to do it. If one decides they don't wish to, then the high tier weapons provide a much needed power boost for some units. Another thing to consider is that with the imminent 3DS WiFi shut down, resource procurement is going to become much more obnoxious. You can either wait for your castle to generate a ridiculous amount of your primary ore to use for ore swap, or you can rely on the lottery and Keaton's personal skill if available.
You know I've been thinking about it recently and I feel like Fates without online could kind of meet that sweet spot for weapon balance in a no durability environment. There'd still be stinkers like the Wyrmslayer and the Kris Knife and the Blessed Lance that promise a poweful effect and do theoretically provide that effect but never do so in a situation where it's very valuable, but if your forging is as limited as it is when you're playing on a real 3ds, suddenly, buying a Silver Dagger for Kaze becomes a lot more appealing and instead of selling all your steel weapons, you might find yourself hanging onto them. The Arena and the Ore Swap mechanic mean that even if your forging is super limited, you could theoretically still get the forges that you REALLY need (bronze forges for units that suffer a lot of enemy crit against them or have really low hit rates), while still keeping it fresh. Just a thought.
As a mianly gba player I was only semi aware that there were other systems to the gba durability option, so i hadnt thought of this even beung a discussion, but it was super interesting to hear your breakdown of the different systems. Love the video :)
My personal favorite game is Echoes, and I love how they handled the durability there. The weapons don't break but there's only one inventory slot for each character, period. During the first few chapters I hated this system, why would the game be so limiting with the inventory? But as I played the game it was really fun, each weapon I gave to a unit felt like their own and they usually stick with that weapon for a while and unlock some cool skills for that specific weapon. And there were times I had to consider risk vs reward if I really needed one of them to heal themselves, they'd have to temporarily trade their weapon with Alm's convoy for some food, but then they'd only have the default weapon for that turn. Echoes also convinced me to try the forge for the first time and it felt worth it because each weapon I forged felt special for that character 🙂
Now I want to see whether a system where PRF weapons get a per-map number of uses would work. You could even make them like, gain extra charges over the course of the game to represent them powering up, like, chapters 1 to 5 you can only use them once per map, but nearing the endgame it's closer to five uses. That way they get to feel special, the resource management aspect still exists at least on a per-map basis, and you get to use them throughout the game rather than hoard them or be given them only for the endgame.
This isn't quite the same but in the SRPG Banner of the Maid, they did all durability on a per map basis, so you get to use the strong weapons every map, but only 5-10 times. I thought it worked pretty well there. Cool idea!
During the course of the video one thing I thought about was "what if you made cheap weapons infinite use to reduce the bookkeeping aspect?" I was pleasantly surprised to see you bring up a romhack at the end that does exactly that. Games with early silver weapons or strong prf weapons give solid arguments for how durability can add to a game, but then you look at 3H's durability system which is just constant busywork of checking which weapons need to be reforged, and money isn't scarce enough for you to care about the cost of buying smithing stones. I would actually go a step further and say that *forging in and of itself* should remove the durability limit on weapons, but make forging expensive and/or resource constrained. After all, if the most interesting aspects of durability come from early game decisions, and in most games you don't really think about durability by endgame outside of bookkeeping, then let's just take out the middleman and make it take care of itself. In general, I think I prefer systems without durability, because you can still design weapons that are useful in some situation over another. Like in engage, you typically have your main 1-range weapon, a 1-2 range weapon, one or more effective weapons, and maybe a smash weapon to abuse engage attacks. Then you realize most classes have access to multiple weapon types and you're already running into inventory space issues as soon as you try to add another weapon type to your inventory. I think engage could have done more with weapon triangle than it did to better incentivize using different weapon types (you don't really care if you attack into WTD, as long as you don't *get* attacked), but there's a solid foundation here for meaningful decisions.
you make some good points and i definitely understand if people prefer weapon durability but to me personally the whole weapon management stuff isn't really something i like i prefer no weapon durability personally i always get anxious about it and yes i'm one of the guys who end up with all of there uses left on there legendary weapons because of that so yeah I prefer no durability.
Really refreshing perspective. As someone who hates durability in games I do like the resource management it can bring. My favorite solution (besides axing it entirely) in theory is in three houses where you can repair weapons. Although Hero's relics suffer the worst from durability due to being made of paper and combat arts being costly, and the repair material being a bit too rare for my liking.
Meanwhile in Berwick Saga we have Weapon Condition. The more used up a weapon is,the more a chance it has to randomly break. Theoretically you can infinitely use a weapon even in the red but you want to roll the dice?
With the way engage attacks work, there's way more incentive to favor 1) multiple weapon types in your inventory (due to the break status) 2) anti cav, armor etc weapons (override a line of cavs vs armors etc) So with the Panette analogy I think it still gives enough reasons to want to keep others on hand besides the killer axe
I really like awakening’s take on durability too; there are some very powerful uniques that don’t have a huge amount of uses, and fairly expensive forges on generic weapons so you’ll run out of cash fast fully forging every hand axe or javelin. On top of this the armsthrift skill stretches uses on these weapons further (and can completely negate durability at a high enough luck stat) so units able to make use of it can find a more unique role when built to take advantage that; safely taking on large groups of foes with powerful and interesting weapons. It made using Inigo a lot of fun as a swordmaster; he has probably the highest luck in your army, with natural access to armsthrift, and can use the /very/ limited 1-2 range unique swords without nuking their uses in a single chapter. Armsthrift isn’t super common a skill, so you won’t have it on everybody and skill slots are limited so it’s not a free gimme. Awakening also does the opposite of the rom hack mentioned; where Chrom and Lucina’s Falchions have unlimited durability, which I think is also a good call (and in chroms case is powered up significantly later in the game like corrins) since legendary weapons breaking in 20 hits and being lost forever feels pretty silly, especially for the ones in-universe that have plot significance.
The ROM hack solution is something I've seen in other games that I think can be really elegant. Less tedium with resource management and a guarantee to also have a weapon, but still plenty of incentive to upgrade and be wise about spending money and the use of higher-value equipment.
FE Fates (Conquest) is my absolute favorite FE game, gameplay wise. The durability system is an enormous part of that. Not needing to worry about saving uses of weapons for "when I really need them" is exactly why I'm allowed to use the great and oddball weapons whenever. And that game sure has some oddball weapons, like triangle-reversing scrolls, magic shurikens, you name it. The fact they went back to a more traditional weapon durability is probably part of why I did not enjoy Three Houses as much.
Never in my entire life I have even played a Fire Emblem game. Always wanted to, but never got a chance. This channel is so interesting and covers topics (which are already interesting and unique) in such ways now I really wanna play this series
Great video. I’m a staunch advocate for weapon durability, and The Marcus Silver Lance is exactly why. However, there’s another good reason, in that I love weapon variety, and I enjoy using whatever I can get my hands on. I’ve felt this a lot in games when money is more scarce and I have to get by with weapons given in chests or from drops, and also I think if instead shops had a limited supply of certain weapons regardless of how much money you have then it’d make it so you have to make do with whatever that shop might have. Maybe it has 2 Steel Swords and a Killer Bow, but you’re out of uses on your iron stuff. Now you’re forced to use those things, but you want to do it sparingly.
I love fe4's system and imo it has one of the best inventory management systems in the series. Holy weapons locked behind chapter barriers or specific pairings, better weapons costing more to repair and buy/trade, the personalization of non-holy weapons through the kills system and the reward of being able to toss a 50 crit weapon across your army to be used most efficiently
I love ur vids lizard its always a blessing to see ur vids make my day, i love how u look into deep research of broken weapons in fe, i love how 3h handles it cuz it can still be used
I've already seen a couple of comments about this but I also find Magic/Battalions in 3Houses to be a really nice system. You'll never exhaust your supply of Fire spells unless your mage is soloing a map, but things like Meteor on Dorothea have 3? uses maximum, plus that one gives units in range a support buff if you don't use it. Lysithea has a range of magic that have different use cases, but five of her spells have 3 durability or less (Luna, Dark Spikes, Hades, Warp, Abraxas). The other big thing I wanted to mention is that you haven't really mentioned weapon rank in this discussion - It's a way to limit users of certain weapons etc and I think that helps make them extra special. If only one archer in your army can use Parthia, then it means part of the way the weapon is balanced can be based on the stats of the user. It's just like how Jeigans fill a special niche you can't fill with christmas cavs in the earlygame. Engage ties weapon rank to classes, so the fact that _only_ swordsmen can wield a certain weapon makes it a lot more interesting. I can't quite remember the details but I'm sure Longbow is class-specific in a few games too.
In my own perfect FE game, there would be weapon/tome durability and Combat Arts. Tome durability gets used up as normal (when they land an attack), but weapon durability only gets used up when landing an attack on an enemy with weapon triangle advantage, as well as when using Combat Arts. I imagine this would make buying new weapons less of an annoyance as you’d really only ever have to do it because of the type of tactics you would be employing.
I have never played fire emblem nor do I really want to start playing those games (tho tactical games are right up my alley just don't want to invest the time and money atm) But you have a very calm and nice demeanor it is a joy to listen to you on the side.
I personally prefer weapon durability, I like the feeling of sparingly using my powerful weapons and then hitting that point in the story where I can take off the limiters and just let my archer use thar Silver or double bow. I enjoy the thrill of switching to a killer Lance and to get the kill only to have enemy phase drain 60% of it's uses and now I have to REALLY consider how to best use those last 4 uses.
I was a fan of Fates use of the weapon system. Forging did kinda take away what made it got for sure. The maid with her personal weapon was awesome! I also like how 3 Houses did their magic system as well (for durability purposes).
Those are pretty much my thoughts on Fates' durability system. One issue I didn't consider, but the video explains well, is the pricing deincentivizing steel and especially silver weapons. If Steel and Silver were similarly priced to iron, that would incentivize experimenting with them much more. They would still be locked out of the early game, as you can't buy silver until the weapon shop is upgraded. The weapons already have drawbacks, so they don't need to be priced as signficantly more expensive than the base versions. Likely that change would have to come in tandem with tweaks to how forging works. But I think a better-balanced version of Fates' weapons would be my ideal durability system. I'm also a sucker for the gimmicky weapons dropped in My Castle, which can have some interesting properties (the Nohrian blade gives extra defense, but reduces avoid; other weapons trade off defenses for the sake of speed, Beserker weapons act a bit like the Life Orb in Pokemon, there are even unique magical weapons available through My Castle drops). The problem is that "serious" playthroughs of Fates typically ignore these, because the randomness cannot be planned for ahead of time. I wouldn't do away with random castle drops entirely, but I'd love for there to be a system to 'buy' these weapons in limited supplies. Perhaps after every Castle Invasion clear, or every 6th Seal you buy, you get a 'voucher' for one free weapon from the My Castle drops. The Fates system works best in encouraging you to use a variety of situationally correct weapons, and having weapons on-hand with these unique properties would play into that well.
i think my favorite durability system for fire emblem is three houses you can repair your weapons but it still will cost you resources so its up to you if that broken weapon is worth repairing
Great video, mirrored many of my thoughts on the game. I’m kind of a hoarder in games saving all my powerful items to never even use them but it’s something I’ve taken an active approach to try and be better at. Even still, it’s hard for me to use legendary weapons knowing they will eventually break Lmao. I do like durability but perhaps having a system that makes repairing legendary weapons for gold or some other resource would help me use them.
If I'm able to finish learning to code, I want to make a FE style game, and the idea I had for weapon durability is just have infinite use weapons, but to remove a majority of weapon shops. Instead of buying weapons, you acquire upgrades through the progression of story and side quests that let you create new weapons. It would get rid of the mundane issue of buying basic weapons constantly, and instead focus the resource management into what to make with the limited upgrades, and who to pass those weapons to.
I didn't like how Fates managed the Durabitity problem, I did use Steel and Iron weapons more often than not and never used the Silver weapons, I did ended up using the Brave Lance because I gave it to the tanky unit of my party, so that's something I guess, they did dirty on Silver weapons and the Forge system is too OP.
Weapon durability has an important related mechanic: inventory space. I think a system Fire Emblem should try is one based off Path of Radiance. You have weapon inventory, item inventory, and maybe equipment inventory, for things like the Delphi Shield. Then you give more limited slots for weapons and make weapons a little more specialized in function. The choices become "what do I think I need for this map?" This provides more meaning to taking a killer weapon as it crits reliably but might have bad base damage or be unable to double.
Id say a more ideal system would be for weapons to be reparable after they break, but for it to take multiple chapters for them to become available to use again. That way you'll still not use them all the time but wont be be too afraid to use them till the he end.
Idk if FE6’s legendary weapons pretty much always being fully intact by end game is a good example of hoarding. Since they’re famously locked to the good ending, they’re often just not used as to not accidentally break one and lock yourself out of a few chapters.
I think both are fair. One thing though is removing durability does is better encourage you to use weapons where they're best used. I find I use the uncommon stuff like the Levin Sword far more often in Fates or Engage than the Levin/Light Brand in the games with durability. One thing with durability is the psychology of not knowing the 'right time' to use something in a 1st playthrough. You don't know if using up a Hammer , or a Levin Sword in an early chapter on Armoured Knights may screw you if there's a chapter with lots of Generals later. You may let the ideal moment in a playthrough to use a weapon pass you by conserving rare weapons for a 'later time 'that may never come lol. It's very much the Elixer problem where players can become hesitant to use rarer resources if they're limited. Even playing the games since the early 2000s I underutilise resources in thr durability games still.
TL;DR Logistics Ultimately the issue is that durability is a strategic variable but the gameplay is tactical. It can’t be managed beyond some crazy calculus of damage output/potential hits/weapon cost. You can’t decide when to buy stuff or choose your battles. Durability makes sense if the player can manage how long they go between shopping trips, ie you have an “overworld” strategic layer to the gameplay. The player needs some control over the course of the campaign, basically it would have to be a 4X/grand strategy kinda game to an extent.
I think weapon durability is great normally, it makes unit inventory management a bit more important, makes new regular weapons a useful small reward, and keeps convoy total inventory manageable. You also get more niche benefits like an extra incentive not to lean too much on your Frederick and neglect putting XP on other units. Where I don't think it works is legendary weapons. Durability is fine on your silver and brave weapons only because you know you can get more of them if you need to, either because you've already unlocked them in the shop or because you can judge from the previous pattern that you'll unlock the ability to buy them a few maps from now. This makes durability a limit within battles, but not so much a limit across the campaign. With legendary weapons though, you usually feel like you're not going to get any more of them, so you often end up just not using them at all. You also get a situation like Awakening where a skill that just reduces durability consumption can be one of the best in the game simply for letting you use these high power weapons, and in turn it can feel like units without armsthrift are even less permitted to use them. In my own fire emblem-like, I'm giving legendary weapons lower base durability, but making their durability refreshable between battles, so you still get the effect of wanting to be careful about how you use these items, but you don't need armsthrift to use them at all because you aren't going to permanently lose them when durability runs out. Another part of this problem is how battles have been balanced around weapon strength. The way that FE works, strength and defense more or less keep up with each other for most units across levels, but HP increases, increasing unit durability, and that's matched by increased weapon might and increased skill-related damage, and increased proc rate for your Lunas and such. This means that the way you'd design a map changes dramatically depending on how you expect the player to be interacting with weapon durability: In a game where durability is used to keep silver and brave weapons rarely used even towards endgame, you need enemies to be more sparse because it's going to take more attacks to kill any given unit now than it did at earlier levels when HP was lower. In a game where you want battles to become more enemy-dense over time, you need players to continue being able to one-round a lot of enemies, which means you're going to be viewing the core weapons as more of a quality treadmill than a set of options, eg after stage 15, every unit should be using silver weapons as default because continuing to use primarily iron or steel is causing their time to kill to be too high, and previous tier items essentially no longer exist (except for your Nosferatus and Hammers and such). The third important issue for newer FE games is that the way that Fire Emblem broadened its audience was by trying to offer more to fans of RPGs, and what that's resulted in is a sizeable portion of the playerbase being people who aren't just going to play through a campaign, get to the end and then start fresh, but who are instead going to make a save before the final map and then play completionist, grinding all their favourite units up to "perfect" states. For these people, the game doesn't really have an end, so there's always another battle which means there's always another occassion you might need to save your legendary weapons for, and so there is no level of acceptable durability use during the campaign itself, and so the campaign has to be designed with these players in mind and can't expect use of legendary weapons unless there's a promise that the weapons will still be available after the campaign.
This was a nice video going into durability and weapon balance, though I think you were remiss to not talk about weapon weight and how that affects your weapon choices (especially in Engage where you spend most of the game getting weighed down by stronger weapons).
its kind of funny that the games without weapon durability are those where i would mind it the least. the tedium of buying weapons is significantly reduced by being able to do so outside of a map. i found replacing weapons in 3h to be much less tedious, albeit it still falling into the endless iron replacing/repairing trap
A hybrid approach seems good. We don't want to bother just buying a million javelins, but having limited resources is a plus. Just making weak weapons unbreakable is one approach. But I think we can actually do better. Here's my idea. There are a few types of base weapons with limitless durability. None of them are strictly better than the others. Iron is weak, Steel is heavy, Silver is expensive. The armory sells base weapons, but also offers an engraving service. The engravings are finite (only 3 killer engravings available in a specific shop) and the engrave effect durability determined by the base weapon type. Iron gets 3x durability, Steel 2x, Silver 1x. A killer engraving may have something like: Mt -2, Crit +30, 10 base durability. Make in Iron Killing Edge, 30 durability. Silver, 10 durability. There are of course, a variety of approaches. But I think this one would be cool.
Maybe it would be cool to have a forge that automaticly repair your weapons. For example: you get a forge in the mitgame that repairs your common weapons after a fight Lategame you could get a forge +1 that repairs your special weapons (killer or sliver or hammers etc) And right before the end you get a forge +2 that repairs even legendary weapons. In that way you could use your good gear end get it again for the end And with game progression in will be more normal to use better equipment
Fates Shadow Dragon sounds like a great system. Maybe the number of infinite durability weapons could increase over the course of the story? Like your army’s weapon rank goes up from E to D to C etc. Just spitballing
The fan game “Sun God’s Wrath” is for me personally very enjoyable in particular due to the capture mechanic. This makes it so that a lot of good weapons CAN be obtained if you plan accordingly, but are not given to you for free. This for me makes it very rewarding when I do obtain special weapons since I had to actually plan for it. Ofcourse the game has some problems where some things can be exploited. But the idea that you can min max your strategy to obtain a better reward with planning makes it very rewarding for me.
I like the decision making that comes with weapon durability, but if it can be bypassed with a non scarce resource, like money often is, it just becomes tedious. The ROM hack sounds exactly like what I had in mind as a fix. Give us weak infinite durability weapons (and late game, maybe some medium to strong infinite durability weapons) and low use stronger weapons to use when needed.
They're diametrically opposed, but Banner of the Maid and Engage's approaches were both enjoyable for me. Banner of the Maid's super limited uses made it so you still need to equip and use 'iron' muskets and cannonballs even by endgame as filler shots, because the silvers are so limited in terms of use. When you do use a silver or special weapon, it's for a crucial engagement. It feels satisfying works well with the smaller maps of that game. Engrave was a simple, nice experience. I didn't mind gradually shifting from irons to silvers over the course of the game. Also it balanced weapons through other ways than durability. Limited engravings, but also weight and accuracy. I often preferred using steel axes and hand axes over silvers and tomahawks because the latter were too heavy or inaccurate for particular engagements. It's a good tradeoff for doing away with the annoying micromanaging. Fates was of course their first time experimenting with no durability, but that system was just a miserable experience for me. Steels don't feel nice to use, silvers and legendaries are stupidly punishing with their debuffs, and javelins and hand axes feel unsatisfying because you can't double.
As someone who doesn’t like weapon durability here’s a few ideas. 1. Make have same base stats but have different bonuses silver gives +2 resistance,steel gives +2 attack and Iron gives +2 defense this allows you to cover a particular unit’s weakness. 2. Make the weapon triangle much more impactful meaning matching the appropriate weapon is more important and perhaps bring back Fates weapon triangle. 3. Find a middle ground with a system similar to Shadows of Valentia giving every unit a generic weapons that they can use but special weapons like killer weapons still have durability but much more expensive and rarer.
I would like to see a FE game adapt the durability aspect into a hybrid of the current systems. Have weapons that can't be lost, but have a durability stat. If they "break", keep them in inventory, but unusable until repaired. This opens up a lot of balancing options as you can tweak the costs as needed, especially for forged weapons, and maybe even have grinding rewards like an expensive upgrade to make it unbreakable. Lower tier weapons can be made unbreakable from start, and mid tier can be cheaper. It fills a niche that there's no "permanently lost" items, but you can't just use the best without bleeding your funds.
I'm personally most fond of fe4 and 3h's systems, where durability is included, but the ability to repair weapons decentivizes just hoarding your unique weapons bc "what if I need them later", and yet at the same time they discourage going overboard with using the best weapons via either expensive repair cost (fe4) or requiring rare materials to repair them (3h)
I kind of hated weapon durability until I played FE1. In a game with so many items and truly awful inventory management tools I achieved enlightenment - weapon durability allowed me to free up my units inventory space and use new items at a reasonable pace. It got to the point where I _loved_ breaking weapons. and now, to this day, I still enjoy weapon durability, I really think the way weapon durability systems encourage cycling through weapons, and even units and generally guide the player towards really fun ways to enjoy fire emblem... it just requires you to attain true enlightenment. "If you encounter a Buddha on your path, use it until it breaks"
I personally think a mixed system could be really nice, with no durability on *basic* weapons. Use something like Fates' trade-off system for these, because to me it works well enough. All you'd need to do is tune the costs and use cases properly to ensure proportionality. Legendary weapons, relics, etc, can have durability and special repair conditions, but if I can buy it in the shop, I want infinite durability.
I'm kind of surprised that two things weren't brought up: Armsthrift (Awakening) and Combat Arts (Three Houses) just because they both do fascinating things to durability. For Armsthrift, how it allows you to mostly ignore durability at the cost of a skill slot and Combat Arts (specifically with Hero Relics) being a choice between an extremely powerful effect at the cost of 1/5 of your weapon's durability.
One thing to note with Durandal and FE6 in general is how the game will literally lock you out of the final three missions of the game and the other 2 endings if even a single one of the legendary weapons break. That on top of the mere 20 uses each legendary weapon gets, just majorly discourages you from ever using them until the last 3 chapters. But then the second to last chapter is full of manaketes so may as well save them for that chapter right? And at that point you have made these legendary weapons you've had all game, only usable in a single chapter.
I never like weapon durability in games unless there's ways around it or if it makes sense. I think the only games I really don't mind it in (off the top of my head) are the summon night swordcraft story games, where it not only makes sense (your character for all intents and purposes is a blacksmith, so you can just reforged then if you have enough materials) and there are ways around it and it's implemented in a way that makes it not annoying. In the first game, durability refilled outside of battle, while in the second game it's almost like a secondary health thing where you get plenty of different items that can replenish durability. Plus I both games you can equip up to 3 weapons so durability doesn't usually become make or break and even if you have a rough battle and break all 3 of your weapons, you can still fight with your trusty hammer. Interesting video though. You brought up a lot of good points.
I always really liked Fates' weapon system, and as was said the video, I think if you took away, or at least reworked forging to not require multiple copies, i think it would be the perfect system. It makes every weapon feel valuable and like it has a purpose, and allows for different builds and play styles on the same unit. I also don't think the gold economy makes that big of an impact outside of forges, since most of your weapons in Fates come from chests or enemies. Having your weapons come mostly from drops also allows them to remain a resource by making them more valuable as side objectives.
FE4's weapon system is my favourite. It allows you to use any weapon that you want, but the weapon breaks, and the weapons are limited (only 2 brave swords per playthrough). To repair the weapon, you need gold, and the better the weapon is, the more gold you need to spend to repair that weapon. Of course the issue with FE4 is that you can't easily trade weapons for some stupid reason.
I'd love a system where higher tier weapons give you different skills, like you could make it so silver weapons gave you provoke so you then have to deal with enemies targeting you down in their turn.
Tbh, usually by the end game my units only have killer, iron, steel, and 1-2 range weapons and maybe a legendary weapon or something. I usually find that iron weapons do the job just fine for me so i never devote the effort to buy the higher might weapons
I think that not having a weight stat was a big part of what made Fates' weapon balancing so messed up. Some of the more powerful weapons (namely silver and S rank weapons) feel awful to use because there isn't much else to balance them. Engage fixed this, but its problem is that it went back to just using the series staple weapons so there isn't a lot of variety once you get to late game. Engraving helped alleviate this somewhat, but it was still quite limited. What makes Fates weapons interesting is the huge variety of cool choices. You've got weapons that heal, weapons that double power on enemy phase, weapons that increase speed or defense, the return of the reaver weapons, etc. In the future, I'd like to see a game that uses the colorful weapon design of Fates, but with weight as an added balancing factor. You could also add something like engraving into the mix, but maybe a bit toned down. Adding 30 crit to whatever weapon you want is a bit much.
I think the rom hack is a step in the right direction for durability. It doesn't have to be this one or the other thing and a combination of all the adjustments they've made to the weapon durability system could work the best. They could make all the lowest tier weapons have unlimited durability so there's no annoyance of having to constantly stock up on iron weapons and also use engages weapon upgrade system of collecting materials to upgrade to steel then silver which can also have unlimited durability to give a sense of weapon progression as you upgrade them through the game. Give all the specialized weapons like Killer, Brave, and all the -bane weapons durability so they can only be used sparingly and won't need to be nerfed to account for unlimited uses. That allows for more strategic use of the stronger specialized weapons throughout the game and makes them more special instead of every character running around with an inventory of the best weapons they can have with unlimited uses all the time.
I tend towards having durability, to an extent. I like the limited resource aspect of it, but hoarding issues created by the permanant loss at 0 durability make for a major annoyance eg. a 20 use super weapon, will likely be a never use once it gets below 5 for fear of loss but feels too healthy to spend one of your three uses of Hammerne. Adjustments I like include the ability to merge depleted wapons (eg. 4 and 7 use Javelins into one 11 use Javelin) to reduce inventory bloat, and some method of restorIng uses to key weapons. Of the suggestions seen in the thread, per battle or slow recovery between chapters both have merit (of course 0 durability weapons must be kept or at least sent back to convoy in this case).
I always like durability because it makes sense logically. A real sword gets dented, chipped, and bent over time, and without maintenance, will quickly become useless. I appreciate that the game reflects this. I particularly like it in three houses where you can do that maintenance to repair weapons, so you get both ends of the equation.
The Steel weapons in Fates actually can’t get you doubled. The speed penalty is only one way. Because that is very intuitive
Pinned because correct! Thank you for the correction ❤️
The Virgin Legendary Axe Hans vs The Chad Steel Axe+5 Camilla
It does also mean that, especially coupled with Fates not having stat variation between the same enemies, it means that doubling thresholds between a Steel Axe Fighter and an Iron Axe Fighter are the same, which simplifies calculations. Silver lining.
@@VeXJL One thing Fates suffers from is that it can't really adequately fit all of the relevant information on the tiny DS screens. It's not a large amount of information if you're familiar/experienced with the game, but when you're new at it it's really a lot to remember, especially with how unintuitive some of it is (like one-way speed penalties/bonuses).
One thing I remember really getting thrown off by is Corrin being a dragon-type unit in any class, because nowhere is a unit's "type" (like cav/beast, flying, etc.) actually displayed.
Yeah but even base Benny can double the fastest enemies in the game with the amount of speed boosting you can do. Avoiding being doubled is never really a concern you are concerned about losing your double
I think Three Houses has my favourite form of durability, where you can repair weapons with another limited resource, with the more powerful and legendary weapons requiring rarer and rarer materials. It also adds a bit of additional strategy to the gameplay, as breaking monster's shields will give you bonus materials
I think it could be balanced a little better, from my time, its pretty liberal with the materials it gives you aside from agarthium and mythril, so it's pretty easy to keep the heroes relics (except Aymr, probably for good reason Imao raging storm) at high durability, if any system deserves a second shot its this one imho
I'm fine with the system for the rarer weapons. But since the smithing materials for the non unique weapons is available for purchase pretty early, that section feels pretty pointless. Since money in 3H isn't exactly scarce, it's just extra steps.
Honestly on higher difficulties it’s kinda hard to use the Heroes Relics bc the materials are too annoying to get and kinda heavy and inaccurate. Legendary weapons I think should have a durability of like 15, but they restore after each battle. With their prf combat art being 5 uses. That way you don’t completely abuse the combat art that makes them so special
I like the 3H system on paper, but in reality I feel it pushes the “chore” aspect through the roof.
Another thing I like about 3H's system is the free repair you get at the timeskip. Huge incentive not to hoard your relic uses. 3H is also my favorite when it comes to weapon management.
@@g.n.s.153and the sword of the creator also gets a free repair in chapter 10!
My favorite system is normal durability except for the generic / iron weapons are infinite durability because I find buying iron weapons to be the least interesting thing you can do in a fire emblem game.
I like that in SoV the weapons get better the more you use them in a kinda reverse of durability
Genealogy too !
Problem is, once you find the good weapons, you don't use anything else. (for exemple the killer bow)
@@timotheebrasseur6188 Yeah, but the killer bow is kind of a secret weapon that you would never get without using a guide or someone telling you. Also I don't think IS understood how strong it was.
Jagen Levin Sword my beloved
The best durability system I've seen was on "Banners of the Maids". It's extremely low (the basic weapon is barely above 10), but it entirely restore after every battle.
It's also why I like FE4's system in theory (being able to repare every broken weapons for a fee), even if the implementation isn't great.
You know I almost brought up banner of the maids durability system. It is neat, it reminds me of spells in three houses
@@actuallizard I love spells in 3H because I can think about it on a map-by-map basis (very nice for playing blind) but there's still consideration for uses. I understand the appeal of it carrying over in a long campaign, but it's not my thing really.
Yes! Banner of The Maid (despite its other issues) solves this problem really elegantly. I hate the tedium that traditional FE durability brings, and as Lizard said in the video, I often end up hoarding weapons for no good reason.
In Banner, it's awesome to use all my most powerful weapons every map, but it's also fun to strategize when the best time to use them in that map would be. Best of both worlds.
Would love to see a FE game (or romhack) take this approach in the future.
And some weapons have their uses decreased by weather, but than can be bypassed with an ability ... A very expensive ability that is a meaningful investment!
Ah this is what I went with in my comment lol
I liked Hopes durability system where weapons didn’t break but durability was instead used for combat arts and spells.
Yeah me too. Though I get it because that's a Warrior Hack and Slash so it would have been crap if traditional.
But an interesting concept using this in a future FE (I'd love a mix of 3Houses AND Engage weapon handling. Such as Engage regulating Weight & Trade off to User's Build Stat & Weapon Weight to affect the SPD stat. And for 3houses Weapons didn't IMMEDIATLY disappear from your inventory when they broke and you could repair them. Though I did hate how you had to find out how to get some rare materials on your own instead of maybe a hint...found out some by sheer accident.)
I feel SOME should have durability, Or it should be regulated to Combat Arts that I feel should make a return. Weapons don't break unless you use Combat Arts related to them. Basically making them unlimited for regular use. Tomes would still use them when casting spells, but will recharge after the battle sans two parter battles. Staves need no changing or you could make the charges for those be something that you use resources to recharge. Making rarer staves (like how Nodus was in Engage) worth using (though hefty cost to avoid abuse)
Honestly, I feel like there could be a note to take if they ever want to do a Echoes or Three houses style system with combat arts again. I could see a middle ground with durability only going down if you use combat arts with some enemies having reduction to non combat art attacks.
@@icecreamorc It's why I have the idea of just using Durability for Combat Arts only! (I have a comment somewhere as I commented after I made my previous reply to this original comment explaining my idea)
Duability is lower then usual on alot of the weapons. But it's not used up when attacking or defending. Rather instead it's drained from using Combat Arts (only the ones that use the weapon, now stuff like Swap, Shove, ETC. I want to use BLD like CON and similiar to Path of Radiance those are NATURAL command abilities. Shove can only be used if character's BLD is higher then the one their Shoving, while it's SMITE if BLD to the target is HIGHER! Similar to having 6 more SPD then the opponent allows you to Follow up attack).
You can't use a Combat Art if durability Cost can't be met (can't use a 10 Cost if you only have 9 uses) or to change that, you CAN but it will be at lesser quality for each Use missed (like Vengence is WEAKEN depending on how much Durability has to be made up! Such as make it a 5 cost, and you're HP of 50 is at 10 and the weapon only has 3! Then if the bonus to the damage would be 20 extra from the lost HP. then it's weaken a BIT while if the use was 1, then it's weaken by a decent amount!) and when it has 0. It will be a Broken weapon like in 3Houses which makes it near worthless or maybe MAJOR debuff to it till you repair it. Weapons would have their own unique Combat Arts to them mixed with you being able to learn them as you did in Echoes/Three Houses (a mix of both systems if you will)
Spell Tomes would still have Durability as Charges. And special Combat Arts connected to the Tomes that let you do unique attacks with them (Especially the Tier 3 like Excalibur attacking four times like a weaken Astra for magic, or making Bolganone into a BLOODY Nuke but the amount of Charges for it is HUGE! Of course as I mention with the Weapons, if you use them without the right amount of charges, each point of charge MISSING from the Cost weakens the effect. Thoron would also have a SNIPER Combat Art allowing it to either have MORE range, or even turn it and Bolganone into SIEGE tomes for still a large cost) but after battle (minus Two Part Chapters) they will recharge (Two parts would recharge them ABIT for balance). Staves are still those that have charges that WILL not regenerate.
But the Hammerne Staff which disappeared would be a shop function (Enchanter or something like that! Depends if you still want Enchanter as a Class! I like it and wish for it to be REFINED and stay in the series! Do what they did with the Villager in Fates where it went from a Trainee Class to an Actual Class with an Advanced Class or make a Base Class for it! Just make it a LEGIT Class to use! But basically a MAGICAL Blacksmith for upgrading Tomes with Material, Repair/refill charges for Magical Weapons like the Radiant Bow/Flame Lance/Levin Sword you get the idea! I want to seperate upgrading and repair/recharge durability with Blacksmith and Enchanter by instead making the upgrades end at +1 or +2 with a +3 for Legendary/HIGH TIER that's VERY Special to replace Engraving! Hell Engraving is a more weaken but BETTER version the Enchanter Blacksmith can add to weapons for additional effects and such beyond Stat modifiers and as the Lizard pointed out, Would be nice to let us NAME them!)
And oh yeah, make Material gathering NOT something like the Dogs that RUINED what they were trying to do with the "Pets" in Engage! No point in the others when dogs are all you need as cooking is not noteworthy (I want to make it AKIN to Three Hopes and have some use! No party member swipes. Just a dedicated NPC Cook so I can CONTROL who I bring in to eat it! And unique dialogue for party members who have a history with each other AND depends on their Support level! IT was funny when certain Support levels in Three Houses changed the Meal dialogue, like Mercedes and Annette if they have B Support as that one ended with a fight between the two that they feel AKWARD as they are still coming to terms with their argument. But are like SISTERS only majorly Once it's resolved at A! AND would give stat bonus, STRONGER for those in the dialogue if you made the meal right, not RANDOM CHANCE or at least you KNOW you're chances of making it good)
Sorry if I went on a Tangent! I just have a LOVE/HATE with Three Houses and Engage. Engage for fudging up stuff that Three Houses did right but you can see they could have made it work and Three Houses for it own stuff (still love em though) It's funny how a WARRIORS Musou game (Three Hopes) had everything I wanted in 3Houses and am SURPRISED no one in Engage's team chose to keep much of the good stuff in for Engage?!
I think a better idea, since combat arts probably won't be in every game, is to have durability just tied to that battle and between battle everything is automatically repaired as your characters repair and maintain their weapons. So powerful weapons having fewer uses but having those uses every battle. A balancing concern I could see is the most powerful weapons just being used to kill every boss so bosses need to be pretty powerful like in Engage. I think FE4 has my favorite system where every character kind of has a prf since for the most part their inventory and weapons are just theirs. You also could repair all your weapons pretty easily.
@@quickpawmaud I like this idea too 👍
My favorite version of weapon durability it it existing but you have the ability to repair weapons out of battle. It allows you to actually be able to use the cool toys the game gives you
Arena grinding aside, that's why I love Genealogy's repair system. Better weapons cost more to repair, so you have an incentive to manage resources, especially with the Holy weapons, but also get to enjoy them without worrying about running out. It also builds stars with every kill that increase crit chance, which means that using a weapon builds up its power, and that in turn meshes well with the inventory system, so you can basically create and then pass down your own legendary weapons, like Sigurd's silver sword or Finn's brave lance.
3Houses used a similar repair system, but the required materials made it much less intuitive when you would and wouldn't be able to repair, so it felt like you were never sure exactly how much you had left.
I actually really like 3h's because the rarity of the materials used to repair the best weapons gave you incentive to think about when to use them
Worst part is the fomo aspects and how you can lock yourself out of using them as every attack feels like a waste
That's why I also don't use the dragon units much as I rather keep the orb. If the older games gave more hammer staff to fix things I would be able to do stragety around them
Though it also is cool when a break game has a weapon that never breaks like falchion and such. It makes the weapon feel special and a carry.
Yeah, I always use tons of Basic Iron Weapons (and Hand Axe/Javelin), and nothing else. Which means I end up overtraining them to compensate. Which just runs all the fun, but otherwise, I'm missing out (FE7 is the worst at this, because I'm losing so much money everytime I use one of the best weapon.)
@@shytendeakatamanoir9740if we had the 3 houses system but just gold not material based in older games I'd have a small army with very strong iron weapons to make the difference. It's be way more fun that way too.
that's where chad fe3 comes in and makes you only consume a dragon stone use when you transform so you can attack as many times as you want until you untransform after like 5 turns
honestly Binding Blade gating the best ending behind not breaking a prf weapon has mentally scarred me.
@@zhoufang996 it would also be nice if they could go to the convoy when you have them on someone and dies, fe3 did this years ago with the star shards
The issue I find with most weapon durability systems is how you lose the weapon entirely if it breaks. Most other systems do have repair options, but those that don't also really suck. It's very easy to get caught in the "I'm storing 10000 potions to use at the right moment" mindset, particularly when you know that resource can just be gone forever with no other method to get it again if you use it.
It's primarily an issue with personal items, I find. Silver weapons and i.e. Killing Edge aren't that much of a victim of this because their exclusive traits are consistent no matter the targer, which makes them easier to use because they can always be consistently expected to do that. It's much harder with personals and stuff that is designed to deal bigger damage to particular targets, because there's always that nagging feeling in the back of your head that something more threatening that you need that bonus specifically to beat will come up.
Overall, I'd really like it if personals or conditional weapons either degegerated (sort of like how Fallout 3 works) and/or had an unusable broken form than breaking outright, and with the ability to repair them. Common items breaking outright is ok, because even though it costs you resources you can always get them again. With the ability to repair those weapons, the same principle can be applied without introducing the fear to the player that they'll lose the item they can't get anywhere else.
Edit: To address the potential strength problem, you could also have those weapons get weaker with each repair so the player can't abuse them to steamroll, or make sure their repair cost is high enough that it's an actual sacrifice to keep them maintained.
SoV with a very interesting approach to it's weapon system. I know people are pretty low on it's gameplay overall due to map design, but I really do like the weapon system. Without the DLC grinding chapters, it's the ultimate example of making decisions with who gets what, what to forge and when to forge it. It can make or break a unit's viability, but there's not enough to go around for everyone
Fates legendary weapons have such high drawbacks for using them, despite the fact they're available for few chapters - 2 in Conquest, 3 in Birthright, in Rev they're available sooner but most of their regular users won't have the required weapon ranks by the time you get them - and in all routes very few units that can even reach S rank in regular playthrough.
Like who can reach S swords? Ryoma, Hana or Hinata. Ryoma already has Raijinto and other 2 take a lot favouritism to get there. Legendary bow? Takumi (doesn't need it), Setsuna or Mozu with the latter two needing a lot favouritism. This trend is omnipresent with the only exception being legendary shuriken, since all 3 ninjas have pretty good shot at getting to S rank without too much favouritism. All of that was they were perceived to become too powerful with infinite durability. And of course legendary weapons are outclassed by forges.
My favourite system by far though is FE4 - weapons break, but you can repair them without having to hoard them until you get Hammerne.
I find three houses and fe4 both have interesting spins on weapon durability. In fe4 it’s very easy to repair weapons, but with the restrictions on trading and gold sometimes you have to consider whether a unit can afford to repair a certain weapon. In three houses instead the limiting factor is repair materials, but weapon arts and how many times you can use them in a single map is another consideration. Maybe you can destroy any enemy you come across with swift strikes on your Lance of ruin, but eventually you will have more enemies left than weapon uses, depending on the map.
I totally get what you mean with Engage's forge/engrave system letting you create your own legendary weapons. In my run that was "Amber's Silver Greataxe", which racked up an impressive tally of oneshots over the course of the game. (It also started as a Steel Greataxe, making its "journey" even more special)
Actually, Engage's forging system letting you turn weapons into different ones (usually higher tier, but sometimes into niche or magical ones) is a really fun mechanic, as there's "meaningful decision making" in whether you spend resources to get strong weapons like Silvers and Radiant Bows earlier than the story hands them to you, or use those resources on other things and wait.
I once played a fe6 hack without durability as well as empty shops
It turned item management into an interesting aspect and gave you an incentive to use weaker units with unique weapon types like lugh to have forblaze access
this just sounds like earlygame silver lance marcus goes brr lol (link though)
I was hoping somebody would make a video about this! Im currently working on a Fire Emblem inspired TTRPG system, and I've read a few discussions about durability to get some ideas of what I should or shouldnt do, but videos honestly help me a lot more
Oooouuu this is relevant to my interests. Let me know how it goes!👍
If you ever need a composer to make music for that fire emblem inspiration you’re working on, I’d love to help!
oh dang, i'm also working on a fire emblem ttrpg system!
i wouldn't mind sharing ideas if you're down
@@ScootyD I wouldn't be opposed. Do you have Discord? Chatting through TH-cam comments is kind of a pain
@@juicyjuustar121 sure
I'd say Engage has a few other tricks to balancing its weapons beyond just competition for forge resources.
Firstly, in the early game weapon weight is a factor. You may decide to cheaply forge a lighter weapon instead of switching to a heavier one in order to avoid being weighed down and still hit kill thresholds. This is particularly notable with the knives, as they receive 2 points of might per forging. A forged Steel knife can end up staying relevant even after Silver ones show up.
Secondly, in the late game another competitive resource is unit inventory. With only 5 item slots in a game where the weapon triangle matters, outfitting each unit becomes a competition in itself, just one in which the Iron and Steel weapons generally don't play a role. Instead, the Silver weapon has to compete with the extra range option, the Killer option, the effective weapon, the Brave weapon, the magic weapon, the Smash weapon, the weapon triangle coverage, the vulnerary and the utility item. And sure, for some units it could still get centralized like with Pannette's love of Killer Axes, but I do believe that even that is a matter of trading off each unit's immediate choice range for a range of pre-prepared builds.
All in all, I really enjoy Engage's approach of ditching excessive durability concerns and focusing on the fundamentals instead of loading the weapons up with complicated text to try and keep the starters viable. The one thing that does concern me with this is the question of "legendary weapons". Engage mostly resolves this by putting them on Emblems, limiting their "uptime" to when the Emblem is present and also preventing techniques like trade-swapping from applying to them, but Emblems as a whole are not a mechanic that should be expected to return as is.
I wouldn't be opposed to durability being present in a limited fashion (that is, with a 3H-esque repair option) for some higher-end weapons, but I do believe that the line shouldn't be drawn at Silver but rather at truly top-tier picks. For example, Engage's weapon rank system allows units to use Silver weapons immediately, but their weight and low hit makes them liabilities in the hands of weak units. The Brave weapons, by contrast, are greatly undertuned in Engage to compensate for their lack of durability, to the point where they're rarely worth bothering with. And having durable common weapons can actually make it possible to make rare weapons even more fragile, making each use more impactful in comparison.
One thing that is important is the amount of enemies you have to fight. For example, if in one game your weapons have durability, but you have to face 100 enemies vs another game that also has durability but you face 200 enemies.
I swear there's more enemies in a regular endgame map than in all of FE3...
Radiant dawn vs awakening. Basicly, both have durability, but one sees difficulty through improving the enemy stats to the point there is no tactics. Vs radiant dawn later maps of hords of dudes being thrown at you, trying their best to make sure ike is high enough level to kill the black knight.
I like durability, and I like the exp scarcity in FE games overall. Makes me cherish them more.
A little bit late but for me the 3 Games that does durability very well are :
- Tharacia 776 a lot of units have its personal weapon , you get by with what you have , and hell you can even capture enemies and take their weapons lmao
- FE6 have one of the peaks on using gold. Example is like if you are on the Western Isles , you spend a lot for killer weapons with what you have or you keep on hoarding , this is like this because after the western isles , you wont get killer weapons until the end game.
- Radiant Dawn does it well with weapon forge , and having the “Shop” thing where special items will appear at a high price and you wont see them again until mid-late game. There are also special weapons for some characters, the Dawn brigade trifecta lmao , Elincia with Amiti , Ike with Ragnell , powerful weapons that others can use like the tempest sword , etc. And Radiant Dawn enemies are tanky and difficulty wise is so skewed that you are just better off using your resources from the get go.
As weird as this might sound, I always thought of Weapon Durability as Fire Emblem's version of MP in most turn based JRPGs. I know that it's not exactly the same thing but they share a similar idea in where spamming stronger attacks will run out of uses for them during battle very quickly. They both also share the same issue where once you get a ton of money, (which is very likely in both) you tend to hoard a bunch of things to make sure you don't run into the problem of running out of your strong tools.
I personally don't mind the weapon durability system in most games personally as I like to have really powerful tools that can be used as a limited resource even if said resource becomes less finite when you get a ton of money. I prefer it over debuffs for using strong weapons anyday.
As a Super Robot Wars fan, I've always really like how those games handle their version of "weapon durability".
In SRW, attacks use one of two resources:
1) Ammo: This works broadly similar to durability in FE, but functions on a per map basis rather than for the whole campaign. If you completely empty a weapon's ammo it doesn't break or become permanently used up, you just spent all your uses for that chapter and have to make do with other attacks for the rest of the map. The solves the "but I might need it later" problem you see in FE with items like the warp staff and legendary weapons: it becomes a case of "how do I best make use of my 2 uses of this weapon this map" rather than "how do I make best use of my 20 uses of this weapon this run".
2) Energy: Energy functions a bit like a stamina meter in other genres of games, in that it's a shared resource pool that is pulled on by all of the unit's EN-consuming attacks and abilities. This forces you to consider how much EN you're willing to spend on a given turn and on what. For example, a unit might have a barrier effect that greatly reduces damage taken but consumes a large amount of EN. If you make heavy use of that unit's high damage, high EN cost attacks you risk depleting their Energy, which would shut down their barrier and cause them to take significantly more damage on enemy phase, possibly resulting them being shot down.
Some units will rely entirely on ammo for their attacks, some entirely on energy, and some use a mix of the two. Ammo-based units give you the flexibility to simply pick whichever attack is most suited for whatever you're currently fighting without worrying about how it will impact your other weapons, as well as freeing up your EN meter to be used purely for abilities and defensive effects. Energy-based units often have higher raw damage output, but require you to more closely manage your resources or risk the unit completely stalling out when their EN hits 0. As a result they become much more attracting targets for any effects that increase a unit's max EN or provide EN regeneration that you may have access to.
As another layer on top of this, a unit's most powerful attacks will not only have a lower ammo count or higher EN cost, but will generally also be locked behind a certain minimum morale. Morale is a whole other system, but broadly speaking it works sort of like the engage meter in that it's something a unit builds up over the course of a map by taking part in battles, and hitting a certain threshold unlocks additional abilities and/or attacks for the unit. This means that even if a unit has a really strong weapon they can't simply stomp the entire map with it, as they have to start out relying on their weaker attacks first until their morale builds to the point that it comes online. In addition, while there are ways to restore a unit's EN and ammo mid-battle, they almost always come at the cost of lowering that unit's morale which then has to be built back up again. This means such restore effects don't invalidate a unit's EN and ammo requirements, but force you to think about when the best time to refill their resources is based on the overall state of the map.
But yeah, SRW has a bunch of really cool ideas, and I think more FE fans should at least take a look at it. Especially if you're someone who's interested in mechanics and game design, as they often end up with very different solutions to similar problems.
I agree with your take on the Engage weapon mechanics! There's really hard decisions to make about how to invest your forging materials and engravings, especially before Chapter 10, because the Marth, Sigurd, and Leif engraves drastically change how a unit performs in combat. There's a lot of missed opportunity with that system, though. Like, some of the engravings are outright bad (Roy) or feel like they have no impact (Celica). And having some weapons be only accessible while you Engage is a cool idea, but in practice, most of the weapons are outright bad save Mercurius, Parthia, Mulagir, and (lategame) Seraphim. I still have a lot of fun with the resource management aspect despite the missed potential.
Roy is good on Thunder tomes ONLY if you have Olwen's S Ring.
I feel if you refine Engage's weapon system, bring back Combat Arts and regulate durability to them (using them normally doesn't use durability. If it breaks it will become a weak broken weapon till repaired via a 3Hhouses like system. You can ONLY upgrade a weapon two times as that 5 times crap I rarely used. Maybe when I immediately got Liberation to 5 and forever put Marth engraving on it I did. But most sans Slim weapons maybe I ever went beyond 2-3 sometimes with a few 4. 3Houses you just could make some a +1 and that was that) but BLD and Weapon WT of Engage with some refinement was a better Idea in keeping it simple compared to how 3houses handled it where Mages didn't benefit much because it was STR focus (Had to have my mages and mage Knights get Weight - to at least mitigate higher magic and Magic weapon weight)
Possibly my favourite thing to do with weapon durability is in Radiant Dawn. Throughout Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn, you come across a few weapons with infinite uses blessed by the goddess (Amiti and Ragnell). Indeed, during my playthrough of Radiant Dawn, I referred to Amiti as my 'Infinite-use Brave Sword' as that is essentially what it is.
And then you reach the endgame.
All those really cool, unique forged weapons you made in preparation for the final push? They are all getting blessed now, and when that happens, they gain infinite durability. You are literally seeing the moment that these weapons become the relics that will be passed down through royal families. It's the point where they are no longer a 'forged silver lance', they are a legendary weapon.
It is one of the best implementations of story and gameplay integration I've ever experienced.
Huh, I didn't think about it in that way.
I definitely prefer the older style of durability and the item management layer it adds throughout the playthrough. Never really cared for the balancing effects they tried to go for with the infinite durability games. They aren't bad, just not my preference.
I might be a bit biased bc i like conquest so much but I like its durability system the most. Even tho forges are almost always better than just buying a better weapon the silvers do still sometimes have their use cases and such. Plus whenever an enemy or a chest/village gives you an item you are always happy bc its something cool like the dual club from ch10 or a blessed lance from ch13 instead of getting the gagillionth iron sword from a random ass enemy.
I’m a bit surprised there was no mention of genealogy or three houses systems for durability. I wouldn’t say it’s my favorite style, but I’m curious to see what they might try in the future since it’s a mix of how gaiden/SoV and how games with typical durability work. Although it’s less about the durability of the weapon itself and more the limited amount of each type of weapons you can acquire at any given point. But still, a very unique way of limiting your powerful resources.
I think nearly all iterations we’ve had of durability have their ups and downs and each one entices me to play most games in the series depending on what I’m looking for at any given time. I hope they continue to experiment with durability, effects, forging, etc as it makes each new entry have a unique feel despite being very similar on paper.
Point at 9:00 isn't really true because you can swap ores. When you get 5 of ore you can swap it for 1 of another kind, invalidating the issue. You can also manipulate the starting mineral based on your Corrin Second Class (just make sure to not use the skip to ch6 function as that takes the mineral/food from your previous save)
Shoutout to Radiant Dawn for the blessings at the end giving infinite durability to your favorite weapons, those last few chapters give very heroic feelings
I've been working on my own fe styled game and it's been fun to consider weapon durability and balancing. The solution I've come up with is to have the majority of weapons have infinite durability, but much higher weight with each new weapon rank. You also can't negate weapon weight, so there's always a reason to come back to the much lighter earlygame weapons. I'm also considering making really strong weapons like killer ones have durability anyways just to add a little bit of resource management. It's lots of fun to try balancing it all out.
Picked up romhacking for fun again yesterday and was wondering what to do about the durability system then l saw this, you summed everything up pretty well! I think my favorite weapon system is Engage's because it does have that resource management aspect to it with choosing which weapons to forge up and engrave, but without the hassle of buying the same weapon. I remember my Sacred Stones playthrough around mid-game l saw how much gold l had and thought "Welp, nothing to do but buy javelins and hand axes". Similar thing happened with 3Houses, l just bought a bunch of cheap lances to Tempest Lance 24/7.
lmma mimic the Fates' Shadow Dragon idea for now, sounds like a good middle ground. Everyone is so intuitive and can come up with new solutions ;A;
So, before I give my two cents, a bit about my background with the series. I got heavy into the series when I picked up Engage ten months ago. And ever since, it's been the focus of my idle thoughts. I've finished Engage and Fates (all three routes) on Maddening Casual and Lunatic Classic (except I use savestates as Divine Pulse At Home) (and also Conquest endgame defeated me) respectively. I'm currently in the early game of Awakening and the early-mid game of Three Houses. *However* , long before all of that, I gave Blazing Blade a try back when it was newish. I was big into Advance Wars at the time and thought Fire Emblem would also click with me. For some reason...it just didn't. I had a few too many small complaints, and durability was one of them. (I have since come to realize that ALL of my complaints were unfounded.)
With that said, I definitely prefer no-durability systems. Micromanaging all your units' weapon durability between chapters gets really tedious. It's not nearly as bad as I seem to remember though. Awakening does one thing right; you can "restock" a weapon (or any staff or item with multiple uses), which transfers uses from one weapon to another identical one.
Personally, I don't see a problem with old, low-tier weapons becoming obsolete later in the game. This is not a new concept to RPGs. In, say, a Final Fantasy game, you'll quite often find a new weapon that's strictly better than what you have now, whereupon you'll equip it and perhaps sell the old one. That doesn't mean the old one was useless; it served you up to this point. A weapon doesn't need to be useful for the whole game; as long as it's useful at some point, it serves its purpose.
The Fates Shadow Dragon approach sounds very interesting though. On paper, it sounds like it's an effective mix of the best parts of both approaches. I'm intrigued and will probably be trying it at some point.
Not that it's particularly good at balancing weapon durability, but I actually have a lot of fun with Awakening's weapon durability because of how I play the game with no-grinding/no-pairup.
The early game throws you a lot of valuable weapons pretty quickly, but if you dont plan your moves well you're going to end up wasting their usages a ton. And even when you can purchase copies of weapons later, it starts to inhibit your ability to buy items from Anna's shops. The thing that holds this system back is how useless and whatever weapon ranks feel in this game. They make reclassing really annoying without grinding but past that they just dont matter since your units will level weapon experience very quickly.
Still, I like it better than in GBA Emblem or Tellius because no, I dont think stocking up on Iron/Steel weapons for the millions of cannon fodder is very engaging.
I tend to flip flop a lot on this concept. I've never played that rom hack you mentioned, but that does sound appealing. I also think what's missing are more ways to repair weapons. Hammerne is great for example, but why is that the only way. I find that whenever I play a FE game blind for the first time, I typically don't use any good weapons because I'm afraid of needing them in the end game and sure enough finish my game with plenty of uses left. The fear of losing a weapon forever is simply a mental barrier for many players. But on the other hand, no durability takes away a lot from the gameplay and strategy. It's like this game's version of a magic / PP / FP etc..
The only example where i think durability hurts the game design is three houses with the heroes' relics. Most have very little durability and the items required to forge them are pretty rare. This is compounded with how they tend to have higher weight and lower accuracy it hard to double consistently because the intended use for them is to use their unique combat arts. However since combat arts cost durability, you can't afforde to use them very often on the relics. The only relics i used often were the three house leaders, because they have ridiculously strong combat arts. Thunderbrand is pretty good also, but i never really used Catherine.
Personally I prefer weapon durability over no durability. Aside from maybe Aymr (because of raging storm), I never really completely avoid using a weapon out of fear of not having it later, it just makes me only use it when necessary. Whereas in fates I basically never used weapons that came with stat penalties, out of fear that that penalty will be just enough to get my unit killed on enemy phase. I like the extra decision making that weapon durability adds to combat, vs in fates and engage where its just making the best weapon you can in the hub and spamming it all battle. I also enjoy how weapon durability gels with the combat art system. I understand why some people prefer the reverse, but sometimes I see people talking like no durability is /obviously/ /objectively/ better, which frustrates me
In fates stat penalties for using silver weapons and others only apply if the unit is the primary attacker. This makes them good to use with offensive pair up, since you get to use a better weapon with no penalty. They are also heavily designed for player phase use, so it is good to equip something else by trading prior to enemy phase if the unit using one is exposed to attacks.
Then there are weapons like Waterwheel, where the huge penalty doesn't matter because of how ridiculously good the weapons attributes are.
Even bronze weapons remain useful due to the extra crit avoid and the abillity to prevent you from getting a crit that would leave a unit exposed to additional attacks.
If you can get past any initial reservations about the penalties, there is plenty of fun stuff you can pull with these weapons. It always feels like there are more factors to consider when choosing which weapons to use and when in Fates, even though durability is absent. In what other Fire Emblem game would you deliberately use the weakest tier of weapon over Silvers and Braves?
@@turtersvongenbu That is a great tip about using them for offensive pair ups, I never considered that! And to your last point: I actually think games with weapon durability encourage use of a wider variety of weapons than Fates. As mentioned in the video, because of the forging option in Fates, you can create a bronze or iron weapon that is just as good as silver weapons without the drawbacks (in theory you could forge silver weapons to become stronger but bc of their high cost its not usually worth it). So in my experience most of my units end up wielding forged bronze/iron weapons, and pretty much only ever using those weapons (I'm sure this isn't perfectly efficient play, but avoiding using the strong weapons out of fear of penalties is the FOMO equivalent for this no-durability system). Whereas in games with weapon durability, every combat I have to decide if I can accomplish my goal using a weaker weapon or if I need to burn a use of a stronger weapon. I think this works especially well in 3H maddening, where the tighter economy and combat art system make training and iron weapons extremely useful for their low price and high durability. In games with durabilty a unit might use each of their different weapons in their inventory throughout a battle, whereas in Fates for the most part it's whatever 1 strong weapon I forged for them.
I don't even think the Fates/Engage way of no durability and forging is bad, I know some people really enjoy crafting powerful weapons fitted for their units. I just personally prefer the resource management aspect. Tbh I hope they don't settle on either no durability or durability for future games, it keeps gameplay fresh to keep bouncing around
@@mjuno2909 While I don't disagree with your point about uber forging (especially so in engage), I tend to view castle resource grinding in Fates as akin to experience grinding. It's fine to do, just not everyone is going to want to do it. If one decides they don't wish to, then the high tier weapons
provide a much needed power boost for some units.
Another thing to consider is that with the imminent 3DS WiFi shut down, resource procurement is going to become much more obnoxious. You can either wait for your castle to generate a ridiculous amount of your primary ore to use for ore swap, or you can rely on the lottery and Keaton's personal skill if available.
You know I've been thinking about it recently and I feel like Fates without online could kind of meet that sweet spot for weapon balance in a no durability environment.
There'd still be stinkers like the Wyrmslayer and the Kris Knife and the Blessed Lance that promise a poweful effect and do theoretically provide that effect but never do so in a situation where it's very valuable, but if your forging is as limited as it is when you're playing on a real 3ds, suddenly, buying a Silver Dagger for Kaze becomes a lot more appealing and instead of selling all your steel weapons, you might find yourself hanging onto them.
The Arena and the Ore Swap mechanic mean that even if your forging is super limited, you could theoretically still get the forges that you REALLY need (bronze forges for units that suffer a lot of enemy crit against them or have really low hit rates), while still keeping it fresh.
Just a thought.
As a mianly gba player I was only semi aware that there were other systems to the gba durability option, so i hadnt thought of this even beung a discussion, but it was super interesting to hear your breakdown of the different systems. Love the video :)
My personal favorite game is Echoes, and I love how they handled the durability there. The weapons don't break but there's only one inventory slot for each character, period.
During the first few chapters I hated this system, why would the game be so limiting with the inventory? But as I played the game it was really fun, each weapon I gave to a unit felt like their own and they usually stick with that weapon for a while and unlock some cool skills for that specific weapon. And there were times I had to consider risk vs reward if I really needed one of them to heal themselves, they'd have to temporarily trade their weapon with Alm's convoy for some food, but then they'd only have the default weapon for that turn.
Echoes also convinced me to try the forge for the first time and it felt worth it because each weapon I forged felt special for that character 🙂
You don't need to trade your weapon with food. You can get next to Alm/Celica and eat from the menu.
Now I want to see whether a system where PRF weapons get a per-map number of uses would work. You could even make them like, gain extra charges over the course of the game to represent them powering up, like, chapters 1 to 5 you can only use them once per map, but nearing the endgame it's closer to five uses. That way they get to feel special, the resource management aspect still exists at least on a per-map basis, and you get to use them throughout the game rather than hoard them or be given them only for the endgame.
This isn't quite the same but in the SRPG Banner of the Maid, they did all durability on a per map basis, so you get to use the strong weapons every map, but only 5-10 times. I thought it worked pretty well there. Cool idea!
During the course of the video one thing I thought about was "what if you made cheap weapons infinite use to reduce the bookkeeping aspect?" I was pleasantly surprised to see you bring up a romhack at the end that does exactly that. Games with early silver weapons or strong prf weapons give solid arguments for how durability can add to a game, but then you look at 3H's durability system which is just constant busywork of checking which weapons need to be reforged, and money isn't scarce enough for you to care about the cost of buying smithing stones. I would actually go a step further and say that *forging in and of itself* should remove the durability limit on weapons, but make forging expensive and/or resource constrained. After all, if the most interesting aspects of durability come from early game decisions, and in most games you don't really think about durability by endgame outside of bookkeeping, then let's just take out the middleman and make it take care of itself.
In general, I think I prefer systems without durability, because you can still design weapons that are useful in some situation over another. Like in engage, you typically have your main 1-range weapon, a 1-2 range weapon, one or more effective weapons, and maybe a smash weapon to abuse engage attacks. Then you realize most classes have access to multiple weapon types and you're already running into inventory space issues as soon as you try to add another weapon type to your inventory. I think engage could have done more with weapon triangle than it did to better incentivize using different weapon types (you don't really care if you attack into WTD, as long as you don't *get* attacked), but there's a solid foundation here for meaningful decisions.
you make some good points and i definitely understand if people prefer weapon durability but to me personally the whole weapon management stuff isn't really something i like i prefer no weapon durability personally i always get anxious about it and yes i'm one of the guys who end up with all of there uses left on there legendary weapons because of that so yeah I prefer no durability.
Shoutout to berwick saga which made durability entirely rng based so your weapon can just break after 5 uses if youre unlucky.
Really refreshing perspective. As someone who hates durability in games I do like the resource management it can bring.
My favorite solution (besides axing it entirely) in theory is in three houses where you can repair weapons.
Although Hero's relics suffer the worst from durability due to being made of paper and combat arts being costly, and the repair material being a bit too rare for my liking.
Meanwhile in Berwick Saga we have Weapon Condition. The more used up a weapon is,the more a chance it has to randomly break. Theoretically you can infinitely use a weapon even in the red but you want to roll the dice?
With the way engage attacks work, there's way more incentive to favor
1) multiple weapon types in your inventory (due to the break status)
2) anti cav, armor etc weapons (override a line of cavs vs armors etc)
So with the Panette analogy I think it still gives enough reasons to want to keep others on hand besides the killer axe
I really like awakening’s take on durability too; there are some very powerful uniques that don’t have a huge amount of uses, and fairly expensive forges on generic weapons so you’ll run out of cash fast fully forging every hand axe or javelin.
On top of this the armsthrift skill stretches uses on these weapons further (and can completely negate durability at a high enough luck stat) so units able to make use of it can find a more unique role when built to take advantage that; safely taking on large groups of foes with powerful and interesting weapons.
It made using Inigo a lot of fun as a swordmaster; he has probably the highest luck in your army, with natural access to armsthrift, and can use the /very/ limited 1-2 range unique swords without nuking their uses in a single chapter.
Armsthrift isn’t super common a skill, so you won’t have it on everybody and skill slots are limited so it’s not a free gimme. Awakening also does the opposite of the rom hack mentioned; where Chrom and Lucina’s Falchions have unlimited durability, which I think is also a good call (and in chroms case is powered up significantly later in the game like corrins) since legendary weapons breaking in 20 hits and being lost forever feels pretty silly, especially for the ones in-universe that have plot significance.
The ROM hack solution is something I've seen in other games that I think can be really elegant. Less tedium with resource management and a guarantee to also have a weapon, but still plenty of incentive to upgrade and be wise about spending money and the use of higher-value equipment.
FE Fates (Conquest) is my absolute favorite FE game, gameplay wise. The durability system is an enormous part of that. Not needing to worry about saving uses of weapons for "when I really need them" is exactly why I'm allowed to use the great and oddball weapons whenever. And that game sure has some oddball weapons, like triangle-reversing scrolls, magic shurikens, you name it. The fact they went back to a more traditional weapon durability is probably part of why I did not enjoy Three Houses as much.
Never in my entire life I have even played a Fire Emblem game. Always wanted to, but never got a chance. This channel is so interesting and covers topics (which are already interesting and unique) in such ways now I really wanna play this series
I definitely recommend it! I really think these games are something special and I bet you'd enjoy them :)
Great video. I’m a staunch advocate for weapon durability, and The Marcus Silver Lance is exactly why. However, there’s another good reason, in that I love weapon variety, and I enjoy using whatever I can get my hands on.
I’ve felt this a lot in games when money is more scarce and I have to get by with weapons given in chests or from drops, and also I think if instead shops had a limited supply of certain weapons regardless of how much money you have then it’d make it so you have to make do with whatever that shop might have. Maybe it has 2 Steel Swords and a Killer Bow, but you’re out of uses on your iron stuff. Now you’re forced to use those things, but you want to do it sparingly.
I love fe4's system and imo it has one of the best inventory management systems in the series. Holy weapons locked behind chapter barriers or specific pairings, better weapons costing more to repair and buy/trade, the personalization of non-holy weapons through the kills system and the reward of being able to toss a 50 crit weapon across your army to be used most efficiently
I love ur vids lizard its always a blessing to see ur vids make my day, i love how u look into deep research of broken weapons in fe, i love how 3h handles it cuz it can still be used
Me who doesn't use the S ranks in FE6 until Chapter 24 for fear of accidentally breaking one (and because I'm skilled enough at FE6 to not need them)
I've already seen a couple of comments about this but I also find Magic/Battalions in 3Houses to be a really nice system. You'll never exhaust your supply of Fire spells unless your mage is soloing a map, but things like Meteor on Dorothea have 3? uses maximum, plus that one gives units in range a support buff if you don't use it. Lysithea has a range of magic that have different use cases, but five of her spells have 3 durability or less (Luna, Dark Spikes, Hades, Warp, Abraxas).
The other big thing I wanted to mention is that you haven't really mentioned weapon rank in this discussion - It's a way to limit users of certain weapons etc and I think that helps make them extra special. If only one archer in your army can use Parthia, then it means part of the way the weapon is balanced can be based on the stats of the user. It's just like how Jeigans fill a special niche you can't fill with christmas cavs in the earlygame.
Engage ties weapon rank to classes, so the fact that _only_ swordsmen can wield a certain weapon makes it a lot more interesting. I can't quite remember the details but I'm sure Longbow is class-specific in a few games too.
In my own perfect FE game, there would be weapon/tome durability and Combat Arts. Tome durability gets used up as normal (when they land an attack), but weapon durability only gets used up when landing an attack on an enemy with weapon triangle advantage, as well as when using Combat Arts. I imagine this would make buying new weapons less of an annoyance as you’d really only ever have to do it because of the type of tactics you would be employing.
Really good video; you laid everything out really well. Definitely going to learn from this in my fe-lite game im working on.
I have never played fire emblem nor do I really want to start playing those games (tho tactical games are right up my alley just don't want to invest the time and money atm)
But you have a very calm and nice demeanor it is a joy to listen to you on the side.
I personally prefer weapon durability, I like the feeling of sparingly using my powerful weapons and then hitting that point in the story where I can take off the limiters and just let my archer use thar Silver or double bow.
I enjoy the thrill of switching to a killer Lance and to get the kill only to have enemy phase drain 60% of it's uses and now I have to REALLY consider how to best use those last 4 uses.
I was a fan of Fates use of the weapon system. Forging did kinda take away what made it got for sure. The maid with her personal weapon was awesome! I also like how 3 Houses did their magic system as well (for durability purposes).
Those are pretty much my thoughts on Fates' durability system. One issue I didn't consider, but the video explains well, is the pricing deincentivizing steel and especially silver weapons. If Steel and Silver were similarly priced to iron, that would incentivize experimenting with them much more. They would still be locked out of the early game, as you can't buy silver until the weapon shop is upgraded. The weapons already have drawbacks, so they don't need to be priced as signficantly more expensive than the base versions. Likely that change would have to come in tandem with tweaks to how forging works. But I think a better-balanced version of Fates' weapons would be my ideal durability system.
I'm also a sucker for the gimmicky weapons dropped in My Castle, which can have some interesting properties (the Nohrian blade gives extra defense, but reduces avoid; other weapons trade off defenses for the sake of speed, Beserker weapons act a bit like the Life Orb in Pokemon, there are even unique magical weapons available through My Castle drops). The problem is that "serious" playthroughs of Fates typically ignore these, because the randomness cannot be planned for ahead of time. I wouldn't do away with random castle drops entirely, but I'd love for there to be a system to 'buy' these weapons in limited supplies. Perhaps after every Castle Invasion clear, or every 6th Seal you buy, you get a 'voucher' for one free weapon from the My Castle drops. The Fates system works best in encouraging you to use a variety of situationally correct weapons, and having weapons on-hand with these unique properties would play into that well.
i think my favorite durability system for fire emblem is three houses you can repair your weapons but it still will cost you resources so its up to you if that broken weapon is worth repairing
Great video, mirrored many of my thoughts on the game. I’m kind of a hoarder in games saving all my powerful items to never even use them but it’s something I’ve taken an active approach to try and be better at. Even still, it’s hard for me to use legendary weapons knowing they will eventually break Lmao. I do like durability but perhaps having a system that makes repairing legendary weapons for gold or some other resource would help me use them.
If I'm able to finish learning to code, I want to make a FE style game, and the idea I had for weapon durability is just have infinite use weapons, but to remove a majority of weapon shops. Instead of buying weapons, you acquire upgrades through the progression of story and side quests that let you create new weapons. It would get rid of the mundane issue of buying basic weapons constantly, and instead focus the resource management into what to make with the limited upgrades, and who to pass those weapons to.
I didn't like how Fates managed the Durabitity problem, I did use Steel and Iron weapons more often than not and never used the Silver weapons, I did ended up using the Brave Lance because I gave it to the tanky unit of my party, so that's something I guess, they did dirty on Silver weapons and the Forge system is too OP.
Weapon durability has an important related mechanic: inventory space. I think a system Fire Emblem should try is one based off Path of Radiance. You have weapon inventory, item inventory, and maybe equipment inventory, for things like the Delphi Shield. Then you give more limited slots for weapons and make weapons a little more specialized in function. The choices become "what do I think I need for this map?" This provides more meaning to taking a killer weapon as it crits reliably but might have bad base damage or be unable to double.
Id say a more ideal system would be for weapons to be reparable after they break, but for it to take multiple chapters for them to become available to use again. That way you'll still not use them all the time but wont be be too afraid to use them till the he end.
Idk if FE6’s legendary weapons pretty much always being fully intact by end game is a good example of hoarding. Since they’re famously locked to the good ending, they’re often just not used as to not accidentally break one and lock yourself out of a few chapters.
Correct. You have to save all of the Elibe Divine Weapons in that game in order to find Idunn.
I think both are fair. One thing though is removing durability does is better encourage you to use weapons where they're best used. I find I use the uncommon stuff like the Levin Sword far more often in Fates or Engage than the Levin/Light Brand in the games with durability.
One thing with durability is the psychology of not knowing the 'right time' to use something in a 1st playthrough. You don't know if using up a Hammer , or a Levin Sword in an early chapter on Armoured Knights may screw you if there's a chapter with lots of Generals later. You may let the ideal moment in a playthrough to use a weapon pass you by conserving rare weapons for a 'later time 'that may never come lol.
It's very much the Elixer problem where players can become hesitant to use rarer resources if they're limited. Even playing the games since the early 2000s I underutilise resources in thr durability games still.
TL;DR Logistics
Ultimately the issue is that durability is a strategic variable but the gameplay is tactical. It can’t be managed beyond some crazy calculus of damage output/potential hits/weapon cost. You can’t decide when to buy stuff or choose your battles.
Durability makes sense if the player can manage how long they go between shopping trips, ie you have an “overworld” strategic layer to the gameplay. The player needs some control over the course of the campaign, basically it would have to be a 4X/grand strategy kinda game to an extent.
I think weapon durability is great normally, it makes unit inventory management a bit more important, makes new regular weapons a useful small reward, and keeps convoy total inventory manageable. You also get more niche benefits like an extra incentive not to lean too much on your Frederick and neglect putting XP on other units. Where I don't think it works is legendary weapons. Durability is fine on your silver and brave weapons only because you know you can get more of them if you need to, either because you've already unlocked them in the shop or because you can judge from the previous pattern that you'll unlock the ability to buy them a few maps from now. This makes durability a limit within battles, but not so much a limit across the campaign. With legendary weapons though, you usually feel like you're not going to get any more of them, so you often end up just not using them at all. You also get a situation like Awakening where a skill that just reduces durability consumption can be one of the best in the game simply for letting you use these high power weapons, and in turn it can feel like units without armsthrift are even less permitted to use them.
In my own fire emblem-like, I'm giving legendary weapons lower base durability, but making their durability refreshable between battles, so you still get the effect of wanting to be careful about how you use these items, but you don't need armsthrift to use them at all because you aren't going to permanently lose them when durability runs out.
Another part of this problem is how battles have been balanced around weapon strength. The way that FE works, strength and defense more or less keep up with each other for most units across levels, but HP increases, increasing unit durability, and that's matched by increased weapon might and increased skill-related damage, and increased proc rate for your Lunas and such. This means that the way you'd design a map changes dramatically depending on how you expect the player to be interacting with weapon durability: In a game where durability is used to keep silver and brave weapons rarely used even towards endgame, you need enemies to be more sparse because it's going to take more attacks to kill any given unit now than it did at earlier levels when HP was lower. In a game where you want battles to become more enemy-dense over time, you need players to continue being able to one-round a lot of enemies, which means you're going to be viewing the core weapons as more of a quality treadmill than a set of options, eg after stage 15, every unit should be using silver weapons as default because continuing to use primarily iron or steel is causing their time to kill to be too high, and previous tier items essentially no longer exist (except for your Nosferatus and Hammers and such).
The third important issue for newer FE games is that the way that Fire Emblem broadened its audience was by trying to offer more to fans of RPGs, and what that's resulted in is a sizeable portion of the playerbase being people who aren't just going to play through a campaign, get to the end and then start fresh, but who are instead going to make a save before the final map and then play completionist, grinding all their favourite units up to "perfect" states. For these people, the game doesn't really have an end, so there's always another battle which means there's always another occassion you might need to save your legendary weapons for, and so there is no level of acceptable durability use during the campaign itself, and so the campaign has to be designed with these players in mind and can't expect use of legendary weapons unless there's a promise that the weapons will still be available after the campaign.
This was a nice video going into durability and weapon balance, though I think you were remiss to not talk about weapon weight and how that affects your weapon choices (especially in Engage where you spend most of the game getting weighed down by stronger weapons).
note how the two games with some of the best actual gameplay, engage and fates, don't have durability. Coincidence, I think not!
5:59 There, right there is the cause of all my suffering in FE6, when I got my second silver spear I still had the first one, with some good uses left
its kind of funny that the games without weapon durability are those where i would mind it the least. the tedium of buying weapons is significantly reduced by being able to do so outside of a map. i found replacing weapons in 3h to be much less tedious, albeit it still falling into the endless iron replacing/repairing trap
Weapon Durability was removed in Fates but they added side effects like inability to double attack, lose speed, etc.
A hybrid approach seems good. We don't want to bother just buying a million javelins, but having limited resources is a plus.
Just making weak weapons unbreakable is one approach. But I think we can actually do better. Here's my idea.
There are a few types of base weapons with limitless durability. None of them are strictly better than the others. Iron is weak, Steel is heavy, Silver is expensive.
The armory sells base weapons, but also offers an engraving service.
The engravings are finite (only 3 killer engravings available in a specific shop) and the engrave effect durability determined by the base weapon type. Iron gets 3x durability, Steel 2x, Silver 1x.
A killer engraving may have something like: Mt -2, Crit +30, 10 base durability. Make in Iron Killing Edge, 30 durability. Silver, 10 durability.
There are of course, a variety of approaches. But I think this one would be cool.
Maybe it would be cool to have a forge that automaticly repair your weapons.
For example: you get a forge in the mitgame that repairs your common weapons after a fight
Lategame you could get a forge +1 that repairs your special weapons (killer or sliver or hammers etc)
And right before the end you get a forge +2 that repairs even legendary weapons.
In that way you could use your good gear end get it again for the end
And with game progression in will be more normal to use better equipment
Fates Shadow Dragon sounds like a great system. Maybe the number of infinite durability weapons could increase over the course of the story? Like your army’s weapon rank goes up from E to D to C etc. Just spitballing
The fan game “Sun God’s Wrath” is for me personally very enjoyable in particular due to the capture mechanic. This makes it so that a lot of good weapons CAN be obtained if you plan accordingly, but are not given to you for free. This for me makes it very rewarding when I do obtain special weapons since I had to actually plan for it. Ofcourse the game has some problems where some things can be exploited. But the idea that you can min max your strategy to obtain a better reward with planning makes it very rewarding for me.
I like the decision making that comes with weapon durability, but if it can be bypassed with a non scarce resource, like money often is, it just becomes tedious.
The ROM hack sounds exactly like what I had in mind as a fix. Give us weak infinite durability weapons (and late game, maybe some medium to strong infinite durability weapons) and low use stronger weapons to use when needed.
They're diametrically opposed, but Banner of the Maid and Engage's approaches were both enjoyable for me.
Banner of the Maid's super limited uses made it so you still need to equip and use 'iron' muskets and cannonballs even by endgame as filler shots, because the silvers are so limited in terms of use. When you do use a silver or special weapon, it's for a crucial engagement. It feels satisfying works well with the smaller maps of that game.
Engrave was a simple, nice experience. I didn't mind gradually shifting from irons to silvers over the course of the game. Also it balanced weapons through other ways than durability. Limited engravings, but also weight and accuracy. I often preferred using steel axes and hand axes over silvers and tomahawks because the latter were too heavy or inaccurate for particular engagements. It's a good tradeoff for doing away with the annoying micromanaging.
Fates was of course their first time experimenting with no durability, but that system was just a miserable experience for me. Steels don't feel nice to use, silvers and legendaries are stupidly punishing with their debuffs, and javelins and hand axes feel unsatisfying because you can't double.
As someone who doesn’t like weapon durability here’s a few ideas.
1. Make have same base stats but have different bonuses silver gives +2 resistance,steel gives +2 attack and Iron gives +2 defense this allows you to cover a particular unit’s weakness.
2. Make the weapon triangle much more impactful meaning matching the appropriate weapon is more important and perhaps bring back Fates weapon triangle.
3. Find a middle ground with a system similar to Shadows of Valentia giving every unit a generic weapons that they can use but special weapons like killer weapons still have durability but much more expensive and rarer.
I would like to see a FE game adapt the durability aspect into a hybrid of the current systems. Have weapons that can't be lost, but have a durability stat. If they "break", keep them in inventory, but unusable until repaired. This opens up a lot of balancing options as you can tweak the costs as needed, especially for forged weapons, and maybe even have grinding rewards like an expensive upgrade to make it unbreakable. Lower tier weapons can be made unbreakable from start, and mid tier can be cheaper. It fills a niche that there's no "permanently lost" items, but you can't just use the best without bleeding your funds.
I'm personally most fond of fe4 and 3h's systems, where durability is included, but the ability to repair weapons decentivizes just hoarding your unique weapons bc "what if I need them later", and yet at the same time they discourage going overboard with using the best weapons via either expensive repair cost (fe4) or requiring rare materials to repair them (3h)
I kind of hated weapon durability until I played FE1. In a game with so many items and truly awful inventory management tools I achieved enlightenment - weapon durability allowed me to free up my units inventory space and use new items at a reasonable pace. It got to the point where I _loved_ breaking weapons. and now, to this day, I still enjoy weapon durability, I really think the way weapon durability systems encourage cycling through weapons, and even units and generally guide the player towards really fun ways to enjoy fire emblem... it just requires you to attain true enlightenment. "If you encounter a Buddha on your path, use it until it breaks"
I personally think a mixed system could be really nice, with no durability on *basic* weapons. Use something like Fates' trade-off system for these, because to me it works well enough. All you'd need to do is tune the costs and use cases properly to ensure proportionality.
Legendary weapons, relics, etc, can have durability and special repair conditions, but if I can buy it in the shop, I want infinite durability.
I'm kind of surprised that two things weren't brought up: Armsthrift (Awakening) and Combat Arts (Three Houses) just because they both do fascinating things to durability. For Armsthrift, how it allows you to mostly ignore durability at the cost of a skill slot and Combat Arts (specifically with Hero Relics) being a choice between an extremely powerful effect at the cost of 1/5 of your weapon's durability.
Houses didn’t have armsthrift, but Hopes did.
Great video! and thanks for using my track!
One thing to note with Durandal and FE6 in general is how the game will literally lock you out of the final three missions of the game and the other 2 endings if even a single one of the legendary weapons break. That on top of the mere 20 uses each legendary weapon gets, just majorly discourages you from ever using them until the last 3 chapters. But then the second to last chapter is full of manaketes so may as well save them for that chapter right? And at that point you have made these legendary weapons you've had all game, only usable in a single chapter.
I never like weapon durability in games unless there's ways around it or if it makes sense. I think the only games I really don't mind it in (off the top of my head) are the summon night swordcraft story games, where it not only makes sense (your character for all intents and purposes is a blacksmith, so you can just reforged then if you have enough materials) and there are ways around it and it's implemented in a way that makes it not annoying. In the first game, durability refilled outside of battle, while in the second game it's almost like a secondary health thing where you get plenty of different items that can replenish durability. Plus I both games you can equip up to 3 weapons so durability doesn't usually become make or break and even if you have a rough battle and break all 3 of your weapons, you can still fight with your trusty hammer. Interesting video though. You brought up a lot of good points.
I always really liked Fates' weapon system, and as was said the video, I think if you took away, or at least reworked forging to not require multiple copies, i think it would be the perfect system. It makes every weapon feel valuable and like it has a purpose, and allows for different builds and play styles on the same unit. I also don't think the gold economy makes that big of an impact outside of forges, since most of your weapons in Fates come from chests or enemies. Having your weapons come mostly from drops also allows them to remain a resource by making them more valuable as side objectives.
FE4's weapon system is my favourite. It allows you to use any weapon that you want, but the weapon breaks, and the weapons are limited (only 2 brave swords per playthrough). To repair the weapon, you need gold, and the better the weapon is, the more gold you need to spend to repair that weapon.
Of course the issue with FE4 is that you can't easily trade weapons for some stupid reason.
I'd love a system where higher tier weapons give you different skills, like you could make it so silver weapons gave you provoke so you then have to deal with enemies targeting you down in their turn.
Tbh, usually by the end game my units only have killer, iron, steel, and 1-2 range weapons and maybe a legendary weapon or something. I usually find that iron weapons do the job just fine for me so i never devote the effort to buy the higher might weapons
I think that not having a weight stat was a big part of what made Fates' weapon balancing so messed up. Some of the more powerful weapons (namely silver and S rank weapons) feel awful to use because there isn't much else to balance them. Engage fixed this, but its problem is that it went back to just using the series staple weapons so there isn't a lot of variety once you get to late game. Engraving helped alleviate this somewhat, but it was still quite limited. What makes Fates weapons interesting is the huge variety of cool choices. You've got weapons that heal, weapons that double power on enemy phase, weapons that increase speed or defense, the return of the reaver weapons, etc. In the future, I'd like to see a game that uses the colorful weapon design of Fates, but with weight as an added balancing factor. You could also add something like engraving into the mix, but maybe a bit toned down. Adding 30 crit to whatever weapon you want is a bit much.
I think the rom hack is a step in the right direction for durability. It doesn't have to be this one or the other thing and a combination of all the adjustments they've made to the weapon durability system could work the best.
They could make all the lowest tier weapons have unlimited durability so there's no annoyance of having to constantly stock up on iron weapons and also use engages weapon upgrade system of collecting materials to upgrade to steel then silver which can also have unlimited durability to give a sense of weapon progression as you upgrade them through the game.
Give all the specialized weapons like Killer, Brave, and all the -bane weapons durability so they can only be used sparingly and won't need to be nerfed to account for unlimited uses. That allows for more strategic use of the stronger specialized weapons throughout the game and makes them more special instead of every character running around with an inventory of the best weapons they can have with unlimited uses all the time.
I tend towards having durability, to an extent. I like the limited resource aspect of it, but hoarding issues created by the permanant loss at 0 durability make for a major annoyance eg. a 20 use super weapon, will likely be a never use once it gets below 5 for fear of loss but feels too healthy to spend one of your three uses of Hammerne. Adjustments I like include the ability to merge depleted wapons (eg. 4 and 7 use Javelins into one 11 use Javelin) to reduce inventory bloat, and some method of restorIng uses to key weapons.
Of the suggestions seen in the thread, per battle or slow recovery between chapters both have merit (of course 0 durability weapons must be kept or at least sent back to convoy in this case).
I like Three Houses' take on weapon durability
I always like durability because it makes sense logically. A real sword gets dented, chipped, and bent over time, and without maintenance, will quickly become useless. I appreciate that the game reflects this. I particularly like it in three houses where you can do that maintenance to repair weapons, so you get both ends of the equation.