Unit Design 101 - Wyvern Knights
Vložit
- čas přidán 12. 01. 2024
- Welcome to Unit Design 101, where we break down the overall factors that make units useful in Fire Emblem and beyond. Whether you're a romhack creator or merely interested in overall design, this resource is for you.
Wyverns were HARD to figure out. I re-wrote this script about 3 times and STILL didn't manage to fit in everything I wanted to talk about in a way that would make sense. Oh well, I guess that means I get to make a Part 2!
Want to know what the next project is gonna be? Head on down to my Discord and find out!
/ discord
Channel members got access to this video early. Get all my videos as soon as they are uploaded, plus bonus gameplay videos, shoutouts in my videos, and more, by joining the LaguzGuard for less than a dollar a month!
/ @mythrilzenith - Hry
Still trying to figure out this new mic. I boosted it like crazy to get it to be audible at less than max volume for you, but that's causing a ton of background static pickup to the point that I'm not sure if it's even better than my old mic. Looks like I still have some work to do.
Do you think dragons in Fire Emblem look at wyverns the same way humans look at Chimpanzees?
Interesting enough, dragon effective weapons sometimes do and sometimes don't work on Wyverns, and even within game they have selective differences. Fae's divinestone isn't effective vs wyverns in fe6 but the legendary weapons and wyrmslayers are.
All this to say it's definitely some sort of evolutionary side branch.
I heard wyverns are regarded as feral. Like a baby without human interaction but its just a rumor
It would be funny to have a wyvern rider who's wyvern kept its sanity and they argue constantly.
Wyverns in the Archanea timeline (and I guess Jugdral and Awakening) are Dragons that degenerated to a point of animal level intellect. Doesn't explain why the one's in Jugdral suddenly gained 6 limbs instead of 4...
I view chimpanzees with immense fear and apprehension knowing i live only while steel seperates us and its attitude remains apathetic and indifferent so i assume not
Step 1. Name your mount after a character of the same profession as you, regardless of not whether it's the same title as the one you're in.
I do find it funny that Radiant Dawn added Crossbows which can be a legitimate terror to flying units due to how weapon effectiveness is calculated, enough that even Tibarn has to be careful if one is nearby, but also made it so the class that probably needed to be weak to it the most isn't and in fact mostly treats them as a joke.
I really like Wyvern Knights in older games where they were more rare as player units, especially since some of them have the most interesting stories due to many being defectors from the enemy faction, but I am definitely not a fan of how dominant they've become recently.
Yeah they were more balanced because they were rarely given to the player. IS still hasn’t figured out how to keep their class feel intact (while different from pegasus) without just making them the best class.
They should probably just make them flying armoured knights; dump the speed stat (instead of having average or higher speed) and have one less movement than pegasi. Specialize in being strong and tanky, maybe even give them back the immunity to bow effectiveness and weakness to certain magic again.
@@LoudWafflethe speed doesn’t need to go entirely ( though pegasi should have a slight edge) just make their res and maybe hp even worse then armor knights. You know how technically a armor knight can enemy phase a single mage since they usually can live 1 hit and despite being doubled they often can exploit mages low physical bulk and one shot in return. Yeah don’t even let wyverns do that let mages in general one shot them like literally do double their hp bar one shot them. Make magic in general effective vs wyverns would also be a way to do this. Theoretically they can still handle them on player phase but where as normally pegasi are only preferable vs mages wyverns should not be interchangeable with pegasi for a mobile mage killer. Mages are already the intended weaknesses but the ever so slightly lower res doesn’t do it. Let’s crank it up to 11
What might help is giving Wyvern Riders the "anti-Pass" skill, so enemies can run underneath them and fight your squishy units. This is what they did with Larentia in Berwick Saga and it really helps her feel more like a scout and less like a solution to every problem.
I agree with this idea. It's kind of unfair how strong they are in some games, and that change would allow them to be overwhelmed as much as they are overwhelming.
The mutual pass thing really worked in Berwick because the game flow was built with it in mind (hexagon grid, ratio turn system, combat flow changes, etc) combined with the fact that melee units can't target fliers unless they use (mid)-range weapons or are countering a flier's melee no damage/missed attack with a melee attack of their own.
Funnily enough, she essentially has no enemy phase, so its kinda hard to give her level ups which makes the usual feed flier unit kills and make them a juggernaut moot lol.
Taking flier enemy phase away would definitely work, and it makes sense too
I just want to shout out the fact that these unit breakdowns aren't stretched to an hour.
Dean has the coolest pose. I love his stance, but that Minerva art goes crazy. Makes me wish Dean had his wyvern in his art.
Yeah! I could certainly talk for an hour and ramble on the nitty gritty details of every single unit in the class, but I'd run out of interesting things to say a few minutes in and would probably just be repeating myself on most points.
That sort of long-form unit discussion is more the realm of tier lists and true in-depth analysis videos. I'm just doing an overview / primer about the class as a whole and its general trends, which really shouldn't be grossly over-long.
I find it interesting that there is actually one modern FE game which doesn't have dominant Wyverns: 3 Hopes. In contrast, the first FE Warriors has one of the most broken Wyvern class in the entire series due to a single move, but is otherwise pretty bad.
Altena's problem is not even lack of pursuit, since she gets it on promotion after 3 level ups. Rather, her problem is that she joins late, is in the game that is worst for fliers, and has low resistance, which the many fenrir users can take advantage of.
Yeah on Paper she’s actually quite ridiculous. But the game she’s in and the time she joins at just makes her very underwhelming, especially because there is so much magic in the last two chapters and you already have multiple units who can solo armies of melee units without her.
Altenna has the dishonor of being a holy weapon user and sucking at the same time
Fee is a lot better
For Reclassing Emblem,I was thinking of vastly limiting the Reclassing various ways. Shadow Dragon had a unit cap that caps the amount of units of a class you can have depending on who you recruited along with the base. So you cannot Overload your army with 1 unit you don't have enough of. Then there is limiting Reclassing via conditions and/or items. Have it to where in Elibe where you need a specific License for a class you have to work for or find that can be used once to reclass and thus you have to consider who to reclass. You can also make the unlock requirements very stringent like Dark Mages in Three Houses.
I would make it so explicitly, your army has to buy the wyverns. sometimes a recruited wyvern knight is rich and they will say, yeah I'm brining my stable of wyverns, Army wyvern cap +2.
@grauenritter9220 Berwick Saga did it with their horses. The said mounts can die too.
@@ZX-Gear it's like if Nobles and Commoners were actually different lol. My idea has been that a basic foot unit, to promote to cavalier, needs to pay more for a horse, but if they were a noble, they wouldn't.
@grauenritter9220 I dunno. Htere are some nobles/royals who did use mounts. Plus horses were expensive and still are.
I actually really like the idea of a dark seal equivalent for wyverns, they had a similar idea with dancers as in most of the games with reclassing dancers are extremely limited usually only one character or the others ways are connected to resources you can't use constantly like gambits and engages, so you could implement ways to limit wyverns like you can only give one of your units access to the wyvern rider class line and you recruit some other character who has it inherently later on limiting the amount you can have
I feel like wyvern riders just have too many stats. Mobility is such a huge benefit in fire emblem, and things like the Pegasus knight are pretty well balanced with their lower overall stats and specialized role as mage killers/utility support. Wyvern riders, on the other hand, have stats on par with or surpassing other less mobile classes, so there’s not much of a choice here. They’re just tanky, deal a ton of damage, and fast, so there’s not much reason to use other physical attacking classes when you have the wyvern rider as an option.
I think if you give something flying and high mobility, you have to cut its damage output or tankiness to compensate, and fire emblem has miscalculated the benefits of mobility in the last couple games.
I only have experience with older FEs (the most recent game I've played (but haven't beaten) is Echoes, which I don't think has any wyverns at all lol), so this probably doesn't apply to 3H and Engage, but I agree with what you said in the video. Especially on higher difficulties, players will usually opt for the path of least resistance in order to secure victory. Even in higher level play, like Sacred Stones, players will use Seth to steamroll the game, with other units like Vanessa being deployed to help Seth move around the map. That said, for the longest time in Fire Emblem, there was always a desire to have a wide variety of unit classes to tackle a whole host of obstacles in a map. Maybe you bring a falcoknight AND a wyvern lord so that the falcoknight can deal with enemy status staves or siege tomes, while the wyvern lord takes out the reinforcements spawning into the map. Nowadays though, it seems as though that thought process has mostly died down, and it's more than likely due to reclassing. I don't develop these games or design their maps, but I would speculate that IS tries to add new challenges to the game based on the most common strategies used in the previous games. Paladins reigned supreme in most Fire Emblem games, especially in FE4 and Path of Radiance, so in Radiant Dawn, mounted units have reduced movement on indoor maps, and they can't traverse ledges. On top of that, canto is now an unremovable skill with 10 capacity, and so that limits what kind of skills you can put on your Gold/Silver Knights. I would assume that Engage has bosses with multiple health bars to discourage soloing the game with one or two units a la Awakening and at least Birthright(?) (don't know about Conquest or Revelation).
This is also affected by the fact that early FE was (I know it's a meme, but it's still true) anime chess. Each unit had their specific function and role in your army. Draug and Arden will never double, but they can shrug off multiple melee enemies with ease due to their high HP and defense. Lex will almost never quad with the brave axe, but he doesn't have to because he usually two shots everything on the map. Wrys and Aideen are staffbots. But now, in modern FE, there's much more emphasis on player freedom in customizing their army. This isn't inherently a bad thing (after all, FE has, with some exceptions, allowed players to try whatever strategies they can come up with), but I would make the case that restrictions are always necessary to any kind of player freedom. I think Shadow Dragon did reclassing best by having a cap on how many units could reclass into a specific class. I get that could be frustrating for some players, but that's where the strategy comes in. Who would make for the best wyvern rider, paladin, hero, etc. I also think that higher difficulties need to have ways to account for reclassing because, again, players are always going to opt for the path of least resistance, especially on higher difficulties. Another thing they could do is limit the number of second seals in the game. Or design bosses around more specialized units (FE6 comes to mind, where Rutger is great not only because of his damage output, but because he has the best hit rates out of your army against bosses and is fast enough to double most of them).
Anyways, those are my thoughts. Great video as usual!
Lack of any major weaknesses it the issue - at worst they're neutral against other classes. They have bow weakness, but also enough hp to survive it, same with magic and can take down archers and mages in return. Bringing back thunder (or magic in general) effectiveness would be one way to nerf them where they're not always the best solution to almost every problem or make more scenarios where weather conditions make them much less effective - like strong winds vastly limiting their movement. Or buff archers to the point where they're a real threat to fliers, not just an inconvenience.
To be fair, archers have been “buffed” and have actually been quite solid in most of the recent games: Conquest because of excellent balance, 3H and SoV because longer range and close counter (and some broken combat arts), and Engage because pretty good balance (they aren’t amazing here, but using one archer in your army is rewarding).
And even in the two Archanaea remakes they were really good the higher in difficulty setting you were on.
Archers have a bad rep because the more accessible entry games for people have historically also been very easy and enemy-phase focused, while archers tend to perform much better in harder and player-focused titles (unless you buff their range beyond just 2).
Basically the entire GBA-through-Awakening era (almost nobody played the remakes, esp. on higher difficulties) archers were bad for those reasons.
@@LoudWaffle Yeah they got better but just because they're not awful anymore doesn't mean they're good - if you have multiple bow wielding classes, Archer is almost never a first choice. In Conquest you don't fight many wyverns and it has a lot of indoor maps that do not make them any better (or worse) than other classes. In Archanea remakes Archers are mostly useful in the early game before you get access to better options.
Archers have bad rep because they have few upsides, myriad of downsides and they need a lot to go in their favor to be viable.
@@Xertaron. Bow!Mozu is legitimately a great unit even on Conquest. Niles is also consistently great, and Nina is one of the best children. Maybe I'm forgetting some characters but bows are just really solid in Fates, but the other two routes are enemy-phase focused so it's less relevant. And indoor maps are irrelevant to how well bow units perform...
And no, in the Archanaea games on higher difficulties having a handful of archers is extremely relevant, the enemies are FAR stronger than your enemies so the safe chip damage is significant. And on Lunatic+ bows are the only good way to deal damage to units without taking damage first (javelins and hand axes unreliable and low mt). Magic does a similar job but has no effective damage against the VERY threatening enemy wyverns, and any mage dies in one hit from most enemies.
And I don't get how you're separating archers from bows. Aside from the bows, archer statlines tend to be generalist, maybe more often favouring speed and skill. They're not exclusively for dealing with fliers, but also dealing big, free damage to some units, and dealing reliably with mages at maximum range. I don't know what downsides you think archers have that is separate from bows (lack of 1-range counter).
@@LoudWaffle I was refering to wyverns not having major advantages indoors where there's no terrain to fly over. But even for archers, indoor maps have more chokepoints and enemies have less opportunities to run up to them and hit them for free. Yeah bows are pretty good in Fates, primarily due to being the only good source of 2 range physical damage aside from Raijinto and Siegfried.
Archers are not relevant in FE11 after early game aside from occasional Parthia use, in FE12 they are much more relevant on higher difficulties, primarily because forging in those games is so broken allowing them to ignore what I said about wyverns having too much hp for archers to handle.
The downside is that Archers are locked to bows, while classes like Bow Knight are not so if their player phase isn't stellar (and in a lot of cases it isn't) they underperform compared to other units. Unless of course it's a player phase heavy game, in which case it doesn't matter for the most part.
Thank you so much for saying Melady’s name correctly 🙏 amazing videos! I love this series and will be anxiously waiting for the next one.
I just read it how it's spelled, and my translation patch spelled it "Miledy." Saying "Mi-Lady" also just felt wrong though.
I think Engage did a good job of making you not want to fill your entire roster with Wyverns thanks to the class type mechanic. (Though Ironically Hortensia and Ivy end up giving you two wyverns for non-wyvern classes)
Even tho wyverns are strong, you still want to have landlocked units for backup attacks.
they killed the swordmasters and berserkers :( no crit bonus or dodge makes paladins way better units and gives u 0 reason to not use them
@@matiastorres2553 The +1 move movement paladins provide is not worth losing Chain Attack.
Also paladins are kinda just worse armor knights in Engage
@@CSDragon nah, the mov is by far more op than chains atk and the growths are amazing in all stats in paladins, with 1 or 2 heros with brave asist + the lucina user u have enough
@@matiastorres2553 in other games this may be true, but in engage paladins only have 6 move compared to 5 in unmounted classes.
+1 move is not worth losing 20% max hp damage to every enemy in 2 range (hero) or 10% in 3 range (warrior)
As far as growths are concerned, most advanced classes in Engage has ~90 total growth, so Paladin and Warrior are just about even in growths. Hero's growths suck but Brave Assist is worth it.
I'll agree you only want 1-2 heroes, but my point was that you _want_ a mix of unit types in engage including unmounted units because they offer something for your party composition
yeah warriors are op, im talking about swordmasters and heros, and u are asuming u alwayys are in range to make a chain atack btw paladins growths are one of the best of the game@@CSDragon
This series is awesome man! Idk if this is important or not but wyverns are also just freakin’ cool. I, like many others, started with FE8 and Cormag was a great introduction to the class.
Let's be honest wyvern knights are generally busted in most games. Usually only kept in check by the limited amount you recruit and/or strong enemy mages and archers. I feel that FE6 had the best take on wyvern knights overall. You only get 2 but they either start powerful or become powerful with some effort. FE6 Melady comes in at the perfect time to help out your team. She is a legend. Wanna a second wyvern? Gotta train up Zeiss, which isn't a huge pain, and the wyvern siblings can support each other. The enemy wyverns are also a consistent threat that you need to prepare for. Elibe wyverns are native to Bern and perfectly represent Bern's strong militaristic aesthetic.
Radiant Dawn had the "great" idea to make wyverns knights take neutral damage to bows while keeping their super-canto and ability to fly ledges. Now they are only weak to thunder magic, the magic that got nerfed to hell. Jill is among the best units to invest in during the DB chapters while Haar breaks apart the Part 2 and 3 chapters he's available in. They stay strong up until endgame where their speed cap limits them a bit.
Reclassing blows all balance out the wazoo. DS Era had a hard limit on how many units could reclass to WK and their low-speed cap kept them from dominating everything in FE12 hard modes.
Awakening had limits on how many units could reclass into WK due to personal class sets. Awakening was unbalanced in other ways (magic tomes, Dark Flier galeforce etc.), that made wyverns knight stats/combat seem just "good" rather than broken. Still some units were really busted when reclassed to WK such as Panne. She has over 70% strength and speed growths as a wyvern knight!
Fates had also had personal class sets where only some could reclass into WK and stat wise they weren't that busted, but still great. Well except for Camilla, she is busted in more ways than one. Malig knights brought magic options to the wyvern table, increasing the number of units that would want to go the wyvern route.
Three Houses was when everything went nuts. What can I say? You could make anyone a wyvern knight and many physical units want to go that route. Engage kept the free reclassing but at least not every physical unit wants to go WK in this game.
Absolutely loving this series, always happy to see a new episode! As much as I've been loving new FE, open reclassing is a real issue and I'm glad more people are talking about it
Wyvern Knights break the game in all games without large quantities of magic... and thus they ALWAYS break the game, because large quantities of magic means the player can just cut through on player phase. The only counterweight would be to make Wyvern Knights slow or unrefined, but then that would call into question how the heck they're flying.
There is a reason why Wyvern Knights were prepromotes in the first three games.
EDIT: Oh right, siege tomes. STILL, it's easier for a high-Move character to get out-of-range. What are you gonna do? Give Wyverns _negative_ Resistance?
I've found the wyvern creep really boring. I still usually play games with a blend of classes rather than optimizing, its just more fun.
I think 3H does try to limit its Wyvern meta with having most good battalions be grounded, which makes having infantry impactful whether for using support gambits like Retribution, Blessing, Dance of the Goddess etc. or just getting the wider variety of more specialised stat bonuses that grounded battalions have, and the smaller amount of flying battalions does sort of cap how many Wyverns you can run before some start lacking the extra stats and gambits that a grounded unit could have, but the issue is that there are more than enough flying battalions to the point where only those spamming Wyvern to an unreasonable degree, and so neglecting support battalions and other supports like Warp or Physic bots, will ever hit that cap. I think one of the ways that 3H could balance its Wyverns more outside of nerfing the class itself (which should also have been done tbf) would be to cut some of the flying battalions from the game, or even make some battalions locked to some ‘class-lines’, so there could be some flying battalions only usable by Pegasi or Falcon Knights. 3H had so many ways to really cut into Wyvern and increase class diversity and yet it feels they were too afraid to commit to anything meaningful.
It doesn't seem so weird that a soldier and a miniature dragon would perform better in combat than a soldier on foot. One balancing factor in free reclass games could be that you actually need to obtain a Wyvern if you want to turn into a wyvern rider. Right now you can pull mounts out of your ass whenever you reclass. Maybe mounted classes could require a limited number of mounts as reclass items.
BigKlingy mentioned
W video
Queen Minerva paved the way 💖
When it comes to wyverns and keeping them in line without having them throw game balance, Fates is probably the best example of how they're, good but ultimately not the be all end all, at least to me.
While Wyvern is a readily available class to obtain from either friendship or marriage classes, those still take a fair bit of time to get, and may require a lot of key specific pairings that while not unoptimal, can be restrictive even if you did want to min max wyverns.
Even then, minmaxing Wyverns isnt worth it since theyre are plenty of good builds and classes outside of it, to where its not the be all end all, even though they added a magic version of a wyvern, which you'd think would only make it more overbearing since now magic units have use for it too lmao.
You'd think that giving a wyvern mount access to tomes would be game breaking, but because the Malig Knight's magic stat is pretty low and the Wyvern Lord has much better physical stats, both can be viable choices.
Contrast to the faster but frailer Falcon Knight and Kinshi Knight (one with healing / support, the other with anti-air) who are similarly balanced, then factor in the details you mentioned, and Fates is a game with four good flying units and none of them totally overpowered.
As someone with a kaiba complex, I would make entire squads of wyverns even if they weren't the best class.
The fact that they are is just gravy
FE so often makes Wyverns into the flagship class of the main enemy country, so they had to feel much stronger than normal classes, since all units you got were deserters of that country. Which is neat gameplay story synergy.
...
The most balanced they've feel is definitively Fates, where they are strong, bulky and accurate axe fighters, lacking in almost every other stat. This means, as a class, they pretty much perform like an armor knight, but with axes and movement.
Funnily enough, there's still a huge incentive to get as many units to reclass into wyverns, since they get Str +2 and later Trample.
Summing up a +7 attack, which is the highest attack boost a class line gets, without drawbacks like L&D, without depending on weapon like the faires and without phase dependancy like quick draw or quick ripost.
...
Anyways, a flying tank isn't the only way they could be balanced. I think a unit with high defense, strenght and speed but almost nothing on everything else would be fun and a perfect fit for wyverns. They'd be like reckless hit and run units!
Another thing is that Engage specifically has overall weak archer enemies and a ring that can literally make a squad of same typed units immortal.
I will pretty much always defend the reclass system due to how fun it is, but I can't help but miss the charm that the wyverns had in older games. They were rare and designed to be among your best units, even in canon they are the most hyped up class, in fe12 Jagen warns Kris about how strong dracoknights are. And I feel that nerfing the wyvern line would shatter the magic of the class, they are the elite soldiers in most fire emblem games. But if you don't, balance will inevitably go to hell.
It's a difficulty situation to handle for sure
I can tell you what is happening: the summary is that Dragon Knights are basically Armor Knights that fly and move far. I believe they're a little less extreme with the stats, but beyond that, the balancing was clearly not thought out.
Particularly worth mention is Dragon Knights, thanks to their focus on Strength and Physical DEF, actively working with Fire Emblem's usage of subtraction defense. It says much when Bow class weapons need high enough Might values to achieve significant damage via the effectiveness bonus, but Dragon Knights can keep their attacks from being blunted just fine. Armor Knights warranted having poor mobility for this, but Dragon Knights have no such weakness. I can especially bring up about subtraction defense after my recent handling just today with the Shogun enemy in the Super Mario RPG remaster, which to be fair has multiplied damage attacks such as the Carni-Kiss attack that Shogun uses, but Bowser's Physical DEF Ally Buff is so good against regular Shoguns by effectively being a party-wide free timed Geno Boost, keeping in mind that Geno Boost's own defense boost heavily contributed to the Peach/Geno team being so good (and note that the remaster didn't even nerf either Peach or Geno directly, but DID give them actual competition with Bowser and Mallow), should tell you something about how big a deal subtraction defense is.
Dragon Knights need competition within the player's options for balancing. To be sure, Dragon Knights could stand -1 Movement Power compared to Social Knights and Pegasus Knights to emphasize the latter's elegance without overtuning THEM, and they should become susceptible to anti-Armor weaponry, not just anti-flier weaponry, but this wouldn't be enough, and we don't want them to be weird Glass Cannons. I can argue that the real problem that spikes Dragon Knights' capability, is the foot units' issue with competing uniquely well with things like Canter on mounted units.
You mentioned on chat about how overfavoring specialists risks excessive demand of the specialists. I believe, however, that the likes of Myrmidons getting enough options to cover enough acceptable scenarios would evoke the sort of balancing that Kirby Super Star and its successors involve. It's not implausible if we have JRose11 having his solo runs of Pokemon Red/Blue showcasing like Electabuzz and Farfetch'd steamrolling Rival Fieval, while still involving character weaknesses that can even lead to shocking trouble with Cashier Surge and even Bruno; that sort of thing showcases about how there's different strengths and weaknesses to involve. Social Knights and Dragon Knights being good out of the box is still going to be fine, as long as the "commoners" get added options to help bring up Dragon Knights having subpar Speed, because come on, we already see what happens with Altena in Genealogy because she can't double things and the bulk of the key bosses in Chapter 10 and Epilogue are magic users with non-negligible durability.
I've already come up with the idea of having foot units provide passive stat boosts to adjacent allies. Dragon Knights are obviously not foot units, eliminating any need I have for getting into details about the idea right now. We also have Engage immunizing Armor Knights to Break, so Armor Knights immediately enjoy an advantage that Dragon Knights won't have by default.
Methods of addressing Dragon Knight dominance don't have to be direct; they just have to let the player enjoy viable and rewarding alternatives.
School's in session!
one of the big reasons i prefer games with no/limited reclassing
wyvern riders are always good, but are balanced around the fact that you only get a couple of them per game
also, story wise i find them really entertaining since almost always the wyvern riders you get are enemies that decide to join your cause. them being an almost enemy-exclusive class gives them an added cool factor wich i feel gets lost when you can reclass anyone into one
Another factor making them feel overpowered is that there is an easy way to beat Wyrmslayer. With Swordbreaker, modern Wyvern Knights can easy dodge enemy sword units equipped with Wyrmslayer.
Yeah, and with the removal of the Dragon Axe and Dragonspear they have even fewer dedicated counter weapons.
Tbf in 3 houses there is very much a downside to spamming wyverns in 3 houses at least. In 3 houses a significant part of balancing is the battlion system and how the battlions fliers have access to are significantly worse on average. Barring specific cases ( which for some excellent gambits just don’t exist) which are sometimes route locked you can’t really have access to some of the excellent gambits like impregnable wall stride or dance of the goddess. A good horse mounted unit with one of these is better then a flier with a bad or no gambit especially considering good battlions significantly support a unit’s stats. Most dark mages like lysidea as well as units like slyvain appreciate hit +20-30 some battlions provide and that’s a lot harder to come across while flying ( especially since there is a whole 1 good battlion for magically inclined fliers)
I still want one for the shaman / dark mage
Also Lord would be cool
But shaman / dark mage, if I could only choose one
late game best class. 'nuff said. In all seriousness tho, you could even make the argument that 3 houses wyvern knight, dismounted is the best infantry in the game as they get +40 dodge.
so just make magic have extra damage vs wyverns like bows do
I really hope future games cn really just nerf mounted units in a good way so infantry units like figthers archers and MYRMIDONS PLEASE are way more usable than the meta for modern games being just get a flier or mount.
I rarely use wyverns
I understand first hand how damning the reclassing FE games are.
Seriously almost anyone who had access to Wyvern rider was better as one. Notably (specifically in awakening), Sully becomes a better Kellam with speed, all manakete’s stats shoot through the goddamn roof along with their natural high res makes wind magic a joke, axes are super useful in calm arc forward, hell… bloody PANNE gets use out of the wyvern tree even though it gives her every weakness in the game cause wyvern lord gives LANCEBREAKER!!
4:45 that's pretty much every FE though, the thing is fire emblem as a series is almost entirely dominated by the Heliocentrism principle, you need 1-2 main combat units with 0-3 supporting combat units healers, dancers and warp. Basically FE is dominated by whatever you main star is with a few scrubs picking up the bones left behind. The games objectives fundamentally are "walk to the critical square with bosskiller and kill the boss" "walk to critical square with bosskiller kill boss+lug lord to throne" and "Walk into every enemies attack range and watch them die"
Other than Rout most of these only really require 1 combat unit
And while I fundamentally hate the fact that FE can be reduced to this, the fact that it can be and most often is is ultimately a flaw in the core system of the game and can't really be fixed because it's inherent in the nature of leveling up and the stat system. You can make it difficult by giving the player a lot of weaker units as what is attempted by FE6 or FE12 on harder difficulties, but ultimately the players will always find a way to solve the game with the fewest units possible.
Though if you want to pretend the games aren't like that and go back to the old mentality, just walk away from efficiency and LTC discourse. Pretend like it doesn't exist and you can live in blissful ignorance.
@@MythrilZenith What's this old mentality you speak of
I only started playing in late 2020 and joined the LTC discord in november.
I opened pandora's box the day I started. I play a lot of drafts to keep myself excited, as it forces me to look at unusual units and strategies for rout maps.
Fe12 did fix juggernauting but that game runs into ... issues for all but the most hardcore of players. Needing to start each map by writing down each map reinforcement trigger and writing down the turns of each of the other map gimmicks before actually doing it is really hard.
I just can't stand how slow the animation is in radiance.
If Wyverns had -1 movement than Peg Knights/Paladins, that would balance their ridiculous stats. In Engage/3H you have 0 reason to use Paladins, that's such bad design.
It would be something, but don't forget that they're still basically flying Armor Knights. They're still going to be more mobile than foot units for the same basic premise.
The most important lesson: do the opposite of whatever Intsys ia doing because they clesrly do not know how to design one whitout breaking the game
the swordmasters in engage are a fking trash, they really need crit and dodge pasive to rly shine
paladins and w riders always are in the top, bc movility weapon triangle and durability, i think making them more slower could be a solution, or just make magic eff vs w riders and with this u cant solo the game with them (or add more balistas)
also, free reclassing is not that great mechanic , fates did a decent job balancing the reclass sistem
Wyvern riders just shouldn't exist in their current form, especially in games with reclassing.
Just remove reclassing. FE7 gives you two Wyvern Riders and neither of them are the best units in the game. FE6 gives you two and only one of them is good. This is a solved issue.