Fe1 has a devil sword. I put that on the first thief and he became one of the most useful units in midgame. Even if it backfires, he's still a thief which won't hurt
I like it for the high risk high reward mechanic. It's deals a lot of damage and gives a good amount of wexp (in the gba titles for example 8 instead of the usually 1).
Just think about being the lumber jack that recieved a devil axe for your wood carving of a bear. You then go to chop some logs and suddenly die of a heart attack.
So funny thing about Adaptable, it's actually insanely potent when you get to ignore Leif's weapons, which is why Leif's arguably strongest build involves never activating Leif's B support so he never gets to bond 10 and only has a Killer Axe. So you slap him on a warrior with extremely high strength and Wrath, give them a better Killer Axe than Leif's, a Killer Bow and a Longbow if you feel like it and it works exactly like you want it to.
Wait, that's kind of hilarious. I just inherited Vantage over onto a Warrior w/ Ike Ring, but sticking Wrath on Leif means you can adaptable + vantage +wrathcrit with a Bow OR Axe based on which range you get attacked at? My main complaint is you get stuck with the worst version of Vantage if you're relying on low bond Leif (25% HP threshold) , but honestly, I think we should let you cook with this one because it's funny
The only downside to this strat is you have to work around base Vantage's somewhat limiting less than 25% HP activation. It can usually still be done by picking the right enemy and using Corrin's flame vein to safely get in range. Otherwise, yeah. This let's Warrior Panette solo entire sides of maps even on Maddening, it's great.
@@Shark3143inheriting hold out is a good idea, that way the below 30% health requirement of hold out and the below 25% health requirement from vantage synergies Also a wrath user being at lower health means more crit chance
Yeah Vantage/Wrath warriors with rank 9 bond on Lief is the one place Adaptability works. His killer axe has worse stat value than a storebought Killer Axe, and if you don't go to rank 10, the game will never pull anything but a Killer Axe at 1 range, Killer Bow at 2 range, and Longbow at 3 range. The low tier activation health of Vantage kinda sucks but, that's a fair tradeoff for being unable to be hit by anything at range 1 or 2
It’s sad to me how IS makes you work really hard just for Leif to work how he was supposed to. I think this was something they forgot to fix before shipping the game.
Also shoutouts to Emblem Celica's Ragnarok for being the only non-Leif weapon that actively makes them worse. Once she hits bond 15, she keeps Ragnarok equipped whenever she Warp Ragnaroks instead of staying with what she already had equipped. And there is basically no scenario where Ragnarok itself is useful, because not only is it just worse than Bolganone/Levin Sword, by the time you get it almost all enemies left in the game are corrupted, so you'd rather use Seraphim anyway.
I think Echoes defaults to countering with sword instead of magic, because magic uses HP, and the game doesn't want players to use up HP as a resource outside of the player's control.
If they get attacked from range or if a mage/male sage is attacked, they counter with Fire for 1HP. What you mention is why I think Fire is the only thing that can be countered with - it would make it very dangerous to ever use a 6HP Aura spell on player phase if that mage is gonna be attacked and delete more of its HP in chunks of 6 on enemy phase, including the incoming attacks. If it was like that then the better spells (and Gaiden/Echoes mages in general) would be on this list for different reasons, probably
@@MrPSaunI would also add that Echoes implemented a Damage Floor, so even if you have 30 Defense and the enemy only has 6 Attack power, you still take 1 damage, this makes using higher level spells to counterattack even MORE deadly, because even a bulky as heck mage would die from a mosquito that hit first if they already had low health
I was hoping you would mention Rexbolt, the worst SS rank weapon in FE10 that can only be equipped by a promoted Ilyana, who is one of the worst targets for investment in the game because she either takes exp from the Dawn Brigade or needs it when she can't contribute with the Greil Mercs due to how underleveled she is. Rexbolt has a shockingly low might of only 12 and only grants +3 skill for equipping it
@@Shark3143 It's weak, inaccurate, heavy, and its low% crit odds aren't reliable enough to fish for while possibly killing enemies when you don't want it. It's effectiveness against wyverns and dragons is pretty negligible, too
Even more damningly, FE10 Ilyana has such horrendous HP/DEF caps that *Dheginsea unconditionally OHKOs her through Night Tide* on Normal and Hard, with Laura being the only other unit to have this problem. She can't use Rexbolt on the one boss it is good for unless it's Easy mode (where units get +5 all stats for 4-End-3 and beyond that can exceed caps). If you want to fry Dheginsea, you're better off giving Thoron or Bolting to another Arch Sage because Ilyana just dies if she tries Rexbolt.
Double Bow is very funny because they made it absolutely insane in FE10, instead of being only 4 range, it’s now 1-2 range, has 22mt, 100 hit, 5% crit, and grants +3 strength, it’s only slightly heavier than a silver bow and the PoR Double Bow, which as you said weight barely matters in Tellius
And the t3 archer class has innate +1 range with bows, so with the Double Bow equipped they are basically wielding a 1-3 range assault rifle, while most other classes in endgame are settling for 1-range-locked weapons to keep their damage output relevant.
Fun fact - RD Shinon is so good hes even worth the tower deployment in 0% growths, though only in royalless Source - have done that, hes genuinely good in E-1 (regular combat), E-3 (3hkos White Dragons outside their attack range) and E-5 (good aura chip, doesnt explode to ashera after a pure water)
My bad weapon of choice is FE4's Bolganone. It's obtained in the middle of the Penultimate chapter, and can only be used by a total of four characters. Three out of those four require a specific pairing for the necessary weapon rank, and all of them have access to strictly better options long before Bolganone arrives.
To be fair, I would extend this to ALL fire magic in Holy War. As stated earlier, fire magic is much heavier than the other magic types, which means big AS drops. The only fire magic that *isn't* complete garbage is Valflame...which, of course, is enemy exclusive.
Fire magic in Jugdral in general is pretty bad, Bolganone isn't even in FE5 at all (even if it was it would likely have bad stats) it's pretty funny how wind magic is just so much better
It's not that bad, honestly. 20 magical damage cannot be understated, and all of the characters that would actually be using it are benefitting from inheriting Azelle's massive speed growth, and in the cases of Ced and Tinni massive speed base/promo bonus. Azelle!Tinni in particular is the main character who actually benefits from the tome--Thoron, her best tome, is almost certainly going to her big brother Arthur, she's extremely fast so the weight penalty isn't particularly severe, and against the many extremely magically bulky enemies of FE4's lategame the 20 might is very appreciated. It's not like she's forced to use it 24/7, anyways---she can still have Elwind on hand for weapon triangle control and low weight. While this pairing isn't meta, it's also still one of the best ones you have for Tailte and I would imagine many new players went for it because of the talk conversation in chap 4 making it get set up fast. For Ced, it is the single most powerful tome he can possibly access, which has its benefits, but Azelle/Erin is...well, at best a very niche pairing for if you *really* want Fee to hit hard with magic swords, but the total lack of skills really kneecaps the utility of that pairing, especially when Claude is another high magic pairing that provides tons more utility for both kids. Still, it's pretty funny pulling 50 magical damage out of your ass without needing silly things like holy weapons, so at least the fun factor is there. Speaking of fun factor, the animation alone gives it like 300 bonus points ngl
@@user-wl5jt7vz2u For better or for worse, Azelle is largely stuck using his Elfire tome for whenever he wants to deal big damage. In the context of gen 1 where Lewyn is desperately clutching onto his Elwind tome for all but the final chapter and Elthunder literally doesn't exist, it's a useful sidegrade to the lower might Thunder tome.
The one benefit of SoV "sword" is that you won't damage yourself on counterattack, I've had a few scenarios where the residual damage builds to a unit death over enemy phase due to them taking hits and using their health to double cast and kill
I love how even in being horrible weapons the fates S rank weapons are unremarkable not only do you get them in like, the final 5 chapters, not only are they locked to a miniscule set of classes, they are also balanced like weapons that are supposed to have a niche. You get these weapons when all of your units already have a build cut out for them and some of them have capped level already yet the game expects you to just adapt to them for some reason. They're so bad.
Although I overall like the removal of weapon durability, they REALLY haven't figured out how to make S-rank weapons relevant in this system. In both Fates and Engage they are just pathetic, being way too restrictive in distribution (NINETY THOUSAND GOOOOLD) and not even worth using in most situations even once you get them. I hope they figure out a way to make them work better with no durability to balance them out, because getting those powerful weapons and using them used to be one of the highlights of progressing through the games.
@@LoudWaffleThe Brionac with a Lyn or Lucina Crest is pretty good all things considered. Venemous is a solid one-shot tool if you've got the strength. Georgios has a specific niche in that it basically makes Lodestar Rush into a insta kill move. Probably the only two bad ones imo are Ukonvasara and the S rank bow, since the former just doesn't cut it for hit rates, and the latter is worse than a Silver Bow +2. Still, the Fragarach, Nova Tome, Caladbolg, and the Nodus are all solid weapons imo compared to the Fates S rank weapons which most are more detrimental than helpful aside from Waterwheel and maybe Excalibur.
@@LoudWaffle at least in engage you get them earlier (at least the max donation ones) and you're given more flexibility to morph one of your units into someone who can use it
The Hakagure Blade has the one good niche in Heirs of Fate on Hisame making him into a dodge tank But outside of Heirs of Fate the random drop Sunrise Katana has the exact same avoid buff
An unironic use of eclipse I've seen is in an outdated fe7 0% growths ltc where you get canas to eclipse Limstella in Victory or Death and it ends up having a 40%+ chance to hit which is pretty alright considering how bulky and dodgey she is. Priestess having swords is a mixed bag but from what I hear the ladyblade I think it was has a brave combat art which sounds incredibly funny
The short bow's WExp may not be very useful in FE8, but it's legit in FE7 since you get a couple for free and can't "promote away" from bows. I had really good results in a recent HHM play where Lyn and Bartre were blessed, and the short bow got them quick access to killers and longbows for a bit of extra utility
Funny is that with emblem leif is that he works the best timera as since she a default lance use, she wouldn't have to deal with leif switching to the master lance(in fact Leif work best with lance user in general) and sandstorm can work well with quadruple hit.
I've done this! I did a draft run of Engage where I got Timerra and ended up using Leif on her, and I used that old file to get some clips for this video.
Yep. If you put a Spear or a Javalin+1 iirc on a lance-using Leif user, Adaptability's selection heuristic will have zero reason to equip the Master Lance.
I will say for the FE9 Double Bow, if Astrid could use it, it would genuinely have a niche in chapter 28 to snipe siege tome sages, which are usually out of reach
PoR's Bolt Axe was apparently a meme in the Japanese community due to a particularly inept enemy in that one chapter with the falling rocks that tries and fails to use it, nicknamed "Bolt Axe Shogun". When not killing himself with the environmental damage from said rocks, he's failing to use the Bolt Axe because he has a terrible magic stat. He doesn't actually drop his Bolt Axe, but even if he did, your axe units don't have good enough magic stats to ever justify using it either! Bolt Axe Shogun: proof that some weapons are awful for players and enemies alike. Or just that PoR seemingly forgets how the physical/magical split works half the time, given incidents like giving you a physical and magical dragon laguz duo right before the endgame... which is nothing but magic userss so one of them is comically worthless. They don't have low enough Def for him to do good damage and his Res is bad enough that they chew through his enormously inflated (because PoR) health pool
To be fair I think with the ch 25 boss, they intentionally gimped him with a Bolt Axe just so they could justify slapping Resolve on him, which in PoR also boosts str by 50%
@@Rengor1997But even then, Resolve does nothing for him except make him harder to double... which you prolly don't need to since he's more likely than not one hit away from death, especially if he ended up picking a fight with a mage using wind magic.
Second paragraph is talking about RD, not PoR, for the record. Ena/Nasir split in PoR is moreso just "One is better than the other but also required that you invested a lot in Ike" And yeah, Gareth has got to be one of the most abysmal units ever seen. Gets doubled and massacred by the entire map in an instant.
@@wannabecinnabon ...I'm going to be perfectly honest, it has always been a genuine struggle for me to keep the Tellius duology's names straight. It's less confusing than the faction of the fanbase that for some reason insists on exclusive referring to the games by numbers, but not by much. I've seen way less of that in recent years, thankfully. I think people realized that the remakes were too much of a snarl to keep the numbering straight for.
@@alexanderkosten7611 It's less insistance and more that the numbering system is quite literally official. The reason it finds less use with modern titles is that nobody can quite agree what game counts and what doesn't. Heck, even IS themselves struggle with it, as they randomly decide to count Archanea Saga and then they don't again. It is still fairly intuitive for the first 13 games(Dark Dragon and Blade of Light to Awakening), but from Fates onwards, it is genuinely easier to just call them by name (Fates, Echoes, Houses, etc)
Surprised you never mentioned Engage's Flame Lance, a weapon you can only get 9 chapters after the Levin Sword (ignoring forge evolutions) and is worse in literally every single way. Its only redeeming quality is being a lance instead of a sword, so its weapon triangle position is different. Of course, Engage is one of the only, if not the only fire emblem game where swords aren't the worst non-bow weapon type, so even that upside isn't great.
I actually had a section for Flame Lance in my script, but it wasn't funny or interesting on my first draft so I just cut it LOL Since Griffons/Mage Knights and such can just reclass into a swordie version, Flame Lance is a truly irredeemable weapon you're never "Stuck" using unless you like Royal Knight for some reason.
Idk flame lance can be nice on royal knight due to their strength and magic growths. It can be fun to get jean there to keep the healer meme but also make a mounted combat unit
>Engage is one of the only, if not the only fire emblem game where swords aren't the worst non-bow weapon type Meanwhile in geneaology swords give you +10 speed over any other weapon
Engage flame lance definitely isn't the worst thing out there since it does have a specific niche If you have a mage knight that only use tomes that means they can go any of sword/lance/axe. Since heroes on maddening almost all have triangle adept and start the map holding swords, you could use a flame lance to unconditionally double them. Is it good? Not really that much, but it is funny and worth comedy points
To be frank you could almost unilatterally extend this to any magic-based lance weapon in the series. They're always either needlessly obtuse to acquire or are just generally shit.
I'd disagree with swords on priestesses being bad tbh. First off it doesn't make Mae's enemy phase worse because most enemies have 1 range or more than 2 range, so outside some situations where you force an enemy to fight at 2 range (which is a niche scenario) your enemy phase is't really impacted at all, it's often made better actually. The attack boost from swords can allow Mae to straight up one round a lot of enemies if she's able to double them due to her already absurd atk. This also ends up helping mae's bulk since she won't always be taking damage with every attack. This make them a genuinely good option to consider in some situations I think Celica in act 2 just gives them a bad impression tbh. She's the only scenario in which you really wish you weren't forced into a sword since she would very easily sweep act 2 if she just used fire. Once act 3 starts though she really doesn't mind either since: her attack will be higher if trained, you'll have access to some good swords, and enemies with 3+range are much more common
That's really neat to hear! I was under the impression you'd be better off with Mage Ring/Grimoire Ring or something, but I'm having a belated realization that you get a lot of the good accessories in Act 4 and you could reasonably use a sword during Act 3
Yeah it's a huge boon that in Echoes there's only one Attack stat. Does it make sense that my skinny priestess waifu deals more damage with a sword than my buff mercenary swordsmen despite spending all her life casting spells? No, and I don't care.
I'm surprised the slim sword (specifically, in GBA and Tellius) wasn't mentioned. In Genealogy, it was stronger than the iron sword, and in it and Thracia, the lower weight could be meaningful. In the GBA and Tellius games, on the flipside, its lighter weight means nothing because no sword user in GBA or Tellius gets weighed down by the basic iron sword, and all it has to its name is a minor crit boost. What's more, they generally must be bought... at a higher price than an iron sword. Also agree on Engage Flame Lance (too heavy for how weak it is). And while we're talking about magic weapons, Path of Radiance's Bolt Axe is just laughable. Its 10 might is unimpressive considering axes are the strongest weapon type, which is bad enough, but pretty much every axe user will have poor enough magic that it's never worth using over anything else. Even against dragons, it does bugger all because dragons are tanky as hell, and because effective damage got knocked down to double effectiveness. That last bit makes wind magic, bows, and effective weapons in general bad too. The latter are also really heavy, meaning you're probably getting weighed down a lot, mostly early on, but even later on, they're not great against their designated targets.
Slim sword is probably my pick. It's worse than the iron sword in nearly every meaningful way, and the only reason we need a slim weapon (the lance,) is because of how heavy iron lances are relative to the con of Peg Knights. Iron swords aren't heavy at all, and just about every sword unit is balanced around having more con than an iron sword requires. So getting rid of the extra damage an iron sword deals, for a sword that will maybe let one or two units over all the GBA games double maybe 3 or 4 more enemies than they would otherwise, is extremely pointless It's worthless. Very worthless. Especially in a game trilogy where swords are the best overall weapon
@@SSBBPOKEFAN And even then, it's still really bad. It's a sword in a game where swords are not a good weapon type, and if I wanted to exploit the crit glitch, Thunder would be a better forge option. Oh, and Slim Swords are expensive to forge with max might.
@@Un1234l in which game? Because far as I know, that's outright false. Genealogy and Engage have fixed weapon ranks, Thracia and Binding have all weapons give 1 point of weapon experience, and in the remainder of games with them, slim swords don't give you any more weapon exp than other weapons.
The one cool thing about Path of Radiance sages having knives is every single promoted sage you get comes with knives instead of staves… so if you want a sage with staves you will have to train one up. It’s a neat utility bonus for training one up to keep pre promotes weaker outside of nerfed growths or stats
You mentioned some of the joke weapons and how a lot of them aren't as bad compared to some of these "good" weapons that aren't even that good, and it's funny because there's some games where joke weapons are just flat out really good for no reason. Fates has plenty of them via My Castle that can border on really good to really meh, with the E rank low might weapons ironically being some of the better ones due to being better options than bronze weapons and having some additional effects (Raider weapons granting +3 effective speed when in combat, quill pen and frying pan granting higher hit than bronze weapons, as well as avoid). Sacrificial Knife and Berserker's Axe are great too since they can allow you to hit low HP thresholds for Vantage or Silas' personal. S rank weapons in Fates however are pretty bad, since they suffer from the same Double Bow conundrum of not being available for most of the cast and coming in way too late to be useful. In Conquest, the only ones you get are the Aurgelmir (which halves str until used again in another combat), the Excalibur (which is better, but also makes you and the enemy faster, meaning they can double you as easily as you'd double them), and while not a weapon, the Bifrost, which is a worse Aum Staff more or less. Note that of these weapons, only Berserkers, Sorcerers and Butlers/Maids can use them, since they're the only classes that can have S rank weapons. So they're definitely up there for being bad despite looking good on paper.
Speaking of S rank weapons in Fates, it seems like even enemy exclusive ones aren't free from that game's bizarre weapon effects. Skadi is allegedly the only weapon in the series to actively reduce your crit rate without outright preventing critical hits (granted this is definitely for the player's benefit in CQ endgame lmao)
The thunder sword in Echoes can crit and it also reduces critrate by 10. Though yeah, the only S rank weapon in Fates that is actually "good" is Garon's axe. Heck, it's weirdly not even Garon-locked, despite what its description claims.
I'm surprised you don't mention literally all of the silver weapons in Fates, since they debuff literally all of the user's stats after combat, and as I recall, the debuffs STACK. But then again, nobody uses silver weapons when playing Fates for precisely this reason, so I could understand you forgetting. Meanwhile, the Raider weapons, joke weapons to the core, are unironically really nice for training up units who start at E rank in something when reclassing.
Engage had a _lot_ of flaws, but out of all of them, I can never forgive how dirty they did Leif as an Emblem. He is by _far_ the biggest Zero to Hero story in the series, going from worse Roy whose whole utility revolves around taking ballistae to the face, to a one-man army in Genealogy. Couldn't have even just given him a built-in Galeforce to reference movement stars or anything else to reference the weird mess of mechanics that was Thracia 776
Quite the entertaining video, random as hell but thats why i love the algorithm sometimes. Edit: binged through a few videos, Im shocked there were so few, keep it up, mate.
I actually don't find Swords on Priestess to be a problem. Here's an in depth explanation why: With the exceptions of Celica and Yuzu, you're not expected to have a Priestess until late Act 3 at the earliest. Yuzu's bases are ao high that she doesn't care if you recruit her very early, while Celica has her own explanation down below. On Alm route, your only Priestesses are Mage!Faye, Delthea and optionally Yuzu. Alm route is filled with physical units that favor ATK and DEF but have mediocre to low SPD; all three Priestess candidates have no issue doubling and all have excellent ATK. They unironically have better matchups against them than Dread Fighters because of their higher firepower, especially as a forged Rapier or Brave Sword can produce enough firepower to reliable defeat an enemy on Enemy Phase, and then kill another enemy on Player Phase with magic to avoid counterattacks. Celica's route is more interesting. Celica joins as one, while Mae is expected to promote by late Act 3, and Sonya tends to promote mid Act 4. There is a very powerful Blessed Sword in the Seabound Shrine with 3 MT 100 Hit and HP recovery, making it highly competitive. However, Kamui and Saber have better equipment to be using. Both prefer either a shield to let them wall large groups of enemies due to Valbar having problems getting into position, or something like a Steel Sword for higher raw damage. If anything, the crit chance can make them less safe to use due to their CrtAvo issue making them prone to randomly taking big damage; adding crit rate to oneself risks critting enemies and being exposed to even more attacks. By late Act 3 Mae can use it to ORKO enemy mages as Dread Fighters have firepower issues, while Mae has plenty of ATK and enemy magic users use extremely heavy magic. It also helps her offset expensive spell costs like those lf Silence or Aura. As for Sonya, by the time she competes for a sword, you get a Silver Sword in Lost Treescape and a Lady Sword in Duma Tower 1F. Silver is excellent due to high might and not using gold marks while having Roundhouse to wallbreak Fiends and Dracoshield Jedah, with Mae being particularly good for nuking Jedah every other turn. Lady Sword gets doubled might in female hands, giving it crazy firepower especially when forged; both of its combat arts hit RES off of its 12-20 MT, and even on Enemy Phase it has so much MT that it no longer really cares.
To make Leif work out alright, there's two ways around this one. A) Never go above Bond 9 and just... never unlock the Master Lance/Lightbrand so Adaptable only chooses from your own weapons, especially strong with warriors to counter with Killer Axe/Killer Bow/Long Bow. B) Put him on a Lance user (ideally Lance+Sword, but the Lightbrand is fine so its less of a problem) so Adaptable never has a reason to pick the Master Lance over your own forged inventory lances.
Leif is the textbook definition of “the boss when you unlock him as a playable character” he’s one of the toughest bosses in the game and corrupt Hyacinth is no pushover either but when you have him he’s just a slapdash thrown together emblem ring that’s meh at everything.
Something I’d like to mention is that in FE10 the Double Bow is actually really good on paper. 50 durability, 22 might, a nice extra little 5% crit, 1-2 range, and it only weighs 12. On top of all that, it also keeps the +3 strength passive from FE9 but is no longer locked to Snipers. However, all of this good stuff comes at its availability being absolutely horrific, with only 1 existing in the entire game. Specifically as a drop from a Sniper during Rebirth 1, which is at the end of the game. Plus it’s an SS rank weapon which means it’s a bit difficult to get a unit able to use it in the first place (at least from what I remember, if I’m wrong about that please let me know).
Those are great examples! I don't have much personal experience with Fates, and I didn't want to be too derivative of that really good Excelblem video on the Fates S-Ranks, so I ended up cutting them from the script. Hagakure Blade seems particularly bad at a glance, though, because it makes me want to compare it to Ryoma's no downsides, 1-2 range Ranjinto and laugh
@@Shark3143as a Fates fan Hakagure Blade has 1 niche. The avoid buff on it in Heirs of Fate DLC Chapter 5, if you promote Hisame. In a really hard end chapter, turning him into a dodge tank relieves a lot of stress
Imo the default sword in SOV isn't that bad because you generally don't want mages enemy phasing due to their poor durability and when they do have to do so it can be beneficial to not sacrifice hp to counterattack because it can sometimes be the difference between life and death
As an echoes enjoyer I can't really agree with the priestess sword assessment. In the early game it's pretty bad, but in the midgame it's really, really good. Enemies have very low defense in that portion of the game and its not unlikely for a priestess to double and orko on counter with a sword. Meanwhile, fire weighs them down. As a bonus, it doesn't cost hp. You'll want to switch to rings later, sure, but it's at worst a transitional weapon with strong midgame utility especially with the blessed sword. It's not like you get a good ring before the late game anyways.
Before the rest of the comment: Awesome to see another new face appear in my feed in the Fire Emblem sphere! Your production quality is solid and I hope to see more of you! Something not mentioned in the Echoes section is how the Sword actually works in practice for Priestesses. It activates at 1 range, and will generally deal only marginally less damage than Fire would have due to the shared ATK stat. Mae is already not a unit you want to be using for enemy phase against anything but enemy mages, who are going to ignore the Sword anyway. As someone who has played through Echoes 5 or so times on both difficulties, I find myself using the Sword, or more often a Blessed Sword, on Mae to have an easy way to get rid of problematic mages and monsters, since it turns her into an incredibly versatile unit.
Personally, I'm surprised the Bronze weapons in FE10 aren't on here, as the only one that you actually ever use at base is Sothe's Bronze dagger. It can't crit and hardly anyone starts with E rank in anything aside from maybe Brom (E rank in swords, what the actual heck?) Edit: Must've skipped past this part, but I don't think the default Swords in SoV are that bad, especially since I think the reasons for the switch are mainly due to HP hazards regarding your characters. If they get dogpiled by a swarm of units, the last thing you need is one of them killing off your mage because they Fire'd themselves into kill range. The other thing that helps them is that they can counterattack with Fire at 2 range (though surprisingly can't counter with Thunder if attacked by a Sniper from 3 range). This way they can still do effective damage. The last thing that helps swords out a little more is that magic stats don't exist in SoV. Your strength and magic are the same stat, and so the amount of damage you deal with a 0 might sword is still relative to that strength level. So if your Celica has 25 strength, that's still 25 whole damage your dealing.
I’m a bit surprised how few axes are actually in this video. I’ve always seen axes as “strong but very inaccurate” weapons across the series, plus there are even games in the series that don’t have good or even any axe users in the first place and the ones that do exist tend to not have decent dex growths or bases to help hit, so they rarely even hit in the early to mid game.
Axes have always been good, is just that sometimes you either get crappy users or crappy classes. FE6 is really the only game where Axes are bad on both fronts, having awful users and choices. Armads is kind of ok.
Weirdly, Axes have originally been designed as joke weapons, exclusively wielded by either enemies or filler units and having generally kinda terrible weapon, or only a basic weapon in the case of Gaiden. But then they weirdly morphed into actually being kinda good later on. In some games they are even considered a candidate for the best weapon type, which is pretty funny.
Kinda was expecting the GBA Blades to appear on this list ngl. Or at least Steel & Silver Blade. Quick warning, this comment is a bit of a doozy. In FE6, weapon Hit Rates are at an all-time low in the franchise & the GBA Blades vary from okay to Y I K E S. Iron Blade was always a decent weapon, never great, but never bad, but the other two; Steel Blade & Silver Blade.... yeesh. Here's a copy of the stats on Steel & Silver Blade STEEL BLADE FE6 - Sword C | Mt 11 | Hit 60 | Wt 14 | Rng 1 | Uses 25 | Price: 1250G FE7/8 - Sword C | Mt 11 | Hit 65 | Wt 14 | Rng 1 | Uses 25 | Price: 1250G SILVER BLADE FE6 - Sword A | Mt 14 | Hit 55 | Wt 13 | Rng 1 | Uses 15 | Price: 1800G FE7/8 - Sword A | Mt 14 | Hit 60 | Wt 13 | Rng 1 | Uses 15 | Price: 1800G In FE6, you get multiple good sword units, so Blades never feel truly terrible because of who can get their hands on them. Honorable mention to Steel Blade having 60 Hit in FE6 and appearing early, but still being okay at best thanks to units like Rutger, Marcus & Dieck who are all at least decent users of the Ch4 Steel Blade you can get. FE6's Silver Blade is basically budget Durandal, and I would just sell it for cash tbh. Most sword units will be using Silver Sword at best, or Killing Edge/Wo Dao if their name is Rutger, Fir, or Karel. Killer weapons are just so good in FE6 because of how plentiful they are. Steel Blade you're maybe using early if you care, Silver Blade, just sell it man, you already have Durandal. FE7 & FE8 are where the Blades fall off a cliff. Again, Iron Blade is actually pretty decent. 1 Mt stronger than Steel Sword aint bad, but Swords in EP focused games are usually not great. Steel Blade in particular in FE7 is especially bad, because its C rank, and 99% of the time, you'll want sword units to use other weapons outside of swords (Raven/Harken want Axes, All the Cavs want Lances/Axes bar Isadora, who'll stick mostly to Iron weapons, lighter Swords or Javelins, & units like Florina, Heath & Farina will never touch swords, despite getting them after promotion). And in Fe7, you get a lot of okay but not great Sword locked units. Guy, Matthew, Lyn, Karla, Karel, Legault, Eliwood before promo... None of these people I just named are noteworthy combat units and none of them bring anything unique to the table in terms of combat outside of a chapter or two after recruitment, if even. Jaffar is honestly the only Swordlocked unit in FE7 who holds up well past recruitment, and he comes with great stats + almost capped Strength. And NONE of these swordlocked units will ever want to touch Steel Blades. Enemies are weak, but most sword-weilding player units are too weak for the Blades to leave any positive impact, and a lot of them kill your speed because, surprise surprise, Steel Blade weighs 14 and that will kill your speed. And a lot of those units I just mentioned, only have Con in the 5-8 Range, so that's at least 6 speed lost from holding the damn thing. FE7 has a low speed threshold to double most of the time (hovering around 13-15 Speed in HHM for most of the game), but when your claim to fame is being blazing fast in Blazing Sword, and a Steel/Silver Blade can knock you OUT OF DOUBLING THRESHOLDS, you know something's up. I also want to shoutout really quick that a majority of all physical enemies in FE7 carry a Lance, meaning you'll have weapon triangle disadvantage on average when holding this thing too. Both Steel + Silver Blades come too late to benefit from the Axe heavy earlygame unlike FE6 as well, shame. Basically, low sword unit value + sword that wants high stats to function properly + game that hates swords and prioritizes EP = very poor showing FE8 is at least a bit better because the enemies are all so weak, that even weak units with Blades can meaningfully contribute. Units like Eirika, Colm & Marisa can still pick up kills semi-reliably against the low bulk cannon fodder that is Sacred Stones enemies, especially on Eirika Route. Steel Blade still sucks, but the enemies somehow got weaker and now you have a Seth. Stick to other weapons for those who can, and for those who can't, Iron/Steel/Killing is usually good enough. Plus at least the effective weapons work in this game, so Armorslayer, Wyrmlayer & Zanbato/Longsword can do something here. You don't get Steel Blade until Gerik, and he's not a bad user of it, but he'd prefer other weapons ASAP or an instant promotion to use it better. And just like the last two games, a player-owned Silver Blade basically doesn't exist in this game. TL;DR - GBA Steel Blade sucks. Outside of FE6, it usually causes more problems than it helps solve. FE6 Steel Blade is at least niche whereas in the other games, its something you sell to buy other weapons 99% of the time. Iron is good, but not great. And Silver has problems, but its a tad bit better than Steel Blade. And Silver Blade is just overkill with the same problems just moved around a bit. Higher Mt and lower Wt, but less hit & higher weapon rank requirements. Who needs a Sword with that much might and that little hit???? Binding Blade *would have been* THE game out of the GBA titles for this, but you have Durandal and +30 Crit Swordmasters for that. Not as bad as Steel Blade, but not as strangely viable as Iron Blade. Plus it's usually locked to there being only a single copy in the entire game outside of the Secret Shop, making it highly missable & forgettable. (FE6 - Desert treasure, FE7 - Chest in Genesis, FE8 - Desert Treasure again). Keep GBA Iron Blade, & just sell your other GBA Blades... At least Tellius & Engage made Blades more memorable with better units & Engage's Smash Weapons...
Thanks for the detailed comment! Let me add a couple things. All blades give doubled wEXP in FE7~8 compared to most other swords, which is kind of neat. Gerik joins with a monster 13 Con, which I believe is the same in Ranger and 15 in Hero, which means he really only has accuracy concerns if anything with blades. Steel Blade comes out to be more or less a better Steel Axe in his hands, which I understand isn't a very high bar, but it's a few points higher mt for similar Acc/Weight.
I'm proud to say that in my FE9 draft I had the double bow come in clutch exactly ONCE. The bow was a meme, but Rolf was actually pretty legit in that run. Naturally, he takes some investment, but the payoff is decent and he made for a really fun gamble abuser. Shinon *can* be good on account of his absurd strength growth (IIRC it's tied with Boyd for the highest) and the fact that you can just forge him a good weapon to tide him over for a bit. Given how late he rejoins though, it's really not worth it.
20:40 what really i wasnt paying attention can you repeat it all please joking aside great video man and i truly had no idea about how bad some weapons can be like the short bow. Super overprices and as weak as an iron bow but hey 10% crit so...... Im a gambling man ill take those odds. Enjoyed man and keep up the work
Radiant Dawns weapon catalogue is extremely funny it has some of the most insane weapons (Vague Katti having 22mt) and some of worst Wo Daos are usually like, Killing edges with a bit less might and crit-- but are usually D compared to C eexccept in RD where the Wo Dao is B rank... with 7 mt 20crit 30durability-- compared to killing edges being B with 8 mt and 30 crit and 30 durability. it does provide 1 more weapon exp (3 vs 2) but the steel sword also provides 3 wexp. brave weapons are also only C rank in radiant dawn- as are steel weapons as a whole gonna mention the Silencer bow the lore on this one is that Shinon makes his own bows and taught Rolf, which is also how we got Rolfs bow (in por it was a prf wpn but not in RD!) however the Silencer can first be bought in 3-4, you get the base conversation where shinon is making the bow and rolf asks if he is going to sell it to Aimee again-- meaning he sold the weapon to her and then the player can buy it off her and give it back to him. the steel sword has 9 mt, the steel dagger has 8 mt. silver weapons always weigh 1 less than steel- except the silver knife which weighs 1 more, and the silver dagger which weighs 2 more. the difference in mt between tomes is stupid low, rexflame has 14 mt-- but sanakis cymebline is 13 mt and has 8 less weight, and 5 more crit. oh and 30 more uses. the only potential users for the rexflame are sananki and tormod. and tormods wonky recruitment, and sanakis better tome and later recruitment mean its not really worth having a rexflame target rexbolt has this worse, the only one who could use is illyana and even with capped everything she still gets 1 rounded by Dheginsea. rexwind being for soren has the use of being a tome for soren the SS tome Balbarith gives 3 str and can only be used by Pelleas on NG+ purge and bolting are B rank, Meteor and Blizzard are C rank, oh and Fenrir is A. bolting has the typical thunder magic rules of "the worst stats, but 5 crit!" it also had the Card items. they are only usable by non casters uses the "casters" magic. whats funny is the weakest card, the spectre card, has 5 mt. the thunder tome has 3 mt. meaning that Rafiel and the other herons deal more magic damage than base ilyana with a thunder tome (transformed)
Another thing to note about the double bow is if you REALLY wanted to make use of a sniper in fe9 their best option is making use of telius gamble which allows you to choose to half your hit rate in exchange for double the crit rate ( yes you can still choose not to do this if you really need the accuracy). You are never not using a killer bow with that you can get like 80% hit 100% crit shots why would you ever turn that down for low might but I do 2 times more damage well a crit does even more. Like a gamble sniper is actually a good boss killer their damage on player phase is some of the highest in the game ( still a bad build in a enemy phase focused game but hey at least every attack is a kill ) and that is entirely because of their guaranteed crit rate with high accuracy for a gamble user’s standards with a killer weapon. So even if you wanted to use the one bad class that has access to it it’s still not their strongest weapon.
Please talk about bows in all your videos. It's my all time favorite weapon type and I enjoy learning about them even if you're (deservedly) bashing them.
The only usable S rank Engage weapon is Georgios for Lodestar Rush and Override. Engage attacks ignore insignificant things like “weight” “accuracy” or “being a heavy weapon”. No, instead you can fire off a massive attack with a 35 might weapon (with the Ike engraving) instead of a silver sword with its might of 12. The best part is that it’s a boss drop that you don’t have to spend 90k on
As others have likely pointed out, Leif is actually at his best if you DON'T do his Bond conversations. Never doing Bond 10 will banish the Light Brand and "Master" Lance, and as long as the unit can equip an Axe you can usually out-prioritize the Killer Axe with something better. This actually lets you use Adaptable with good weapons, and combined with inherent Vantage can make him one of the best juggernaut Emblems. Imo his best user is a Warrior Panette with high forges on a Killer Axe and Killer Bow, allowing her to crit enemies for triple digit damage in some cases (especially if you inherent Wrath). Imo this is better than inheriting Vantage onto an Ike user because of Adaptable's built in Crit bonus for backup units
Sad to hear about the Double Bow. I've started but never finished FE9 and was endeared to Rolf but clearly my fondness for growth units is working against me on that one 😅
@@gameboyn64 Exactly, and would say by the time Shinon rejoins Rolf should be better by the time. Heck I'd say he's one of the perfect units for Gamble due to archers having high skill for accuracy so it balances out the con of the skill which is why on Kieran who uses axes given while they hit hard they got low accuracy that his default Gamble is wasted on em and better off not using it. My Rolf was a crit machine and another thing to keep in mind for why Gamble works great with him is due to PoR having bond support which his brothers being near him providing an additional 20% crit chance as they provide 10% each. Was on hard mode and having Rolf triangle attack Naesala was just something else to witness lol. Either way though Rolf > Shinon in PoR, Shinon > Rolf in RD (provided not using save data) that said there's Astrid over both of them due to Paragon for double exp and being able to canto, but yeah if you really want to make the game that easy with how many mounted units there are some people can go ahead and do that. To me, it's incredibly boring on an already easy game. Bonus exp should just be used on characters who people like that are behind in the team and not for characters that well off carry own already in being higher level (gain less exp from combat then obviously) or if maybe someone rng screwed level ups. There's no reason to at all ever give bexp to Ike especially when he has his own dedicated chapter in the map where it's just him, Titantia, Shinon and Gatrie who all may as well just be meatshields while he farms as they hardly get any exp (yes you'll likely hardly get any bexp but it's worth it in comparison for what you're getting out of it) nor on Mist even as she's a healer as just spam heals even if not in desperate need of healing.
Huh, I agreed with most of these but I actually found a lot of use with the short bow at least until killer bows become commonplace and really helps with bow rank until then.
I think Eclipse is such a shame, personally. Conceptually, it's one of the coolest weapons in the series, serving as high impact siege held back by a near inability to actually deal lethal damage (moreso in 7/8, I think the FE6 Eclipse effect is potentially too much with high hit,) but its hit rate is such a severe overcorrection that it's nearly unusable. That's part of the reason why I try my best to include high accuracy Eclipse in hacks I'm a part of, and it's always super fun. Eclipse is definitely the biggest example of this, but GBAFE has a tendency to give theoretically powerful weapons such bad stats that they're relegated to gimmick (Longbow, Runesword, Shamshir, FE8!Luna, etc.) At least dark has it better than bows, which don't get a single cool weapon outside of Longbow
Something hilarious is that FE8 in general already balanced Luna pretty harshly with the 50% hit, but the localization decided to kill every last one of them and also take away 10% of its critbonus.
The venomous Lance is probably the only donation weapon in engage i'd call worthwhile. Despite it's high weight, just give it to a character where doubling using them was already a pipe dream and it basically doesn't matter. The raw power it has and the ability to poison makes it great against bosses and great to tank with
I just cannot stress how bad of a fit the Sol Katti is for Lyndis. What’s her greatest strength? Speed. What’s her greatest weakness? Her strength. What does she get? A heavy sword that kills her speed in exchange for negligible might. Ever since the day I completed FE7 at an age of like 12 I have questioned what the game designers were thinking.
I would've given her Mulagir instead, not only because it's a Divine Weapon on par with Durandal and Armads, but also because it's the Divine Weapon of Sacae, making it even more fitting. The fact Lyn can use bows only makes it fit even more.
I can argue Arrow of Indra from Three Houses. Not only is it obtainable in 2 routes (Hubert's Paralogue in CF and Final Chapter in VW) but few units can actually take advantage of a Magic Lance. Marianne, Hubert, Flayn maybe and she can only access it in VW.
After looking it over a bit more, Echoes actually did something kinda clever with the counter mechanics in my opinion... The default weapon for a Priestess has 0 weight, while Fire has 3 weight, so even though it might be annoying that you don't get to choose, you also know it's how it works, and using magic instead of a sword against something like a Dread Fighter, would be a near guarantee to get doubled, do next to no damage because of their +5 res and Apotrope on a counter, and lose additional HP from using a spell in the first place... So i understand that you really should get to decide in some way, i would like that too, but to make the gameplay smother and as weighted in the players favor as possible, countering with a fast sword with 0 weight at 1 range against mostly really fast enemies, while countering with slower magic against slower enemies at 2 range, honestly seems like the best default option.
Not sure if this counts as a bad weapon per say, but I really get annoyed by the Silver Blade in FE7. Compared to the Silver Sword, it: -has 60 accuracy vs the S.Sword's 80 -has a weight of 13 vs the S.Sword's 8 -requires A-rank vs the sword's B-rank -only has a durability of 15, compared to thr Sword's 20 -costs 1800 gold, when the S.Sword cost 1500 All this for *ONE* more point of strength! It also gives 2 w.exp, but I don't think that's worh much as the S-rank weapons only show up in the final chapter And for acquiring it, without a shop it's only obtainable in chapter E22x/H23x, and it's only purchasable in the secret shop in E19/H20. You can get 3 Silver Swords without buying one, and one of them before your able to buy a Silver Blade Unless you desperately need that 14 damage, I don't see the point. It can sell for a decent chunk of money, and can be used to train Sword Rank to use the Regal Blade. But by that point you likely already have an S-rank sword user, or weren't going to the Regal Blade in the first place. Not to mention that the Lancereaver, both personal swords, and every blade weapon also gives the extra w.exp. I guess you can buy it before you can buy Silver Swords? But you get another S.Sword two chapters after the S.Blade is purchasable I still ended up using it in my playthrough becuse my Kent had capped both Speed and Strength, lol
There's also the Venin weapons you can get in Fire Emblem Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn which are a pain to get and are just fancier Iron weapons IIRC and being able to inflict poison in Fire Emblem which falls into the classic trope of: Just killing the opponent by hitting harder is easier and better.
Silver Weapons from Fates should have been mentioned. They're so bad that even the game designers circumvented how awful they are by giving powerful enemies "Silver Star" weapons which are basically stronger Silver weapons that don't have a penalty that can't (to my knowledge) be accessed by the player. I feel like this is the only time where an available weapon-type is so awful that the game will feed enemies a much more powerful version of said weapon-type so that they can still be viably threatening units to your army.
fwiw, i think eclipse in fe8 is like exclusively for "you should on average hit 1 of the 5 on the final boss" which is what i did as a kid. obvs just having good units with consistent weapons is better. but i think it was to be "safe" for kids to be able to like get through it i assume
Some awful Weapons I'd lile to mention: -Silver Weapons in Fate due to them lowering your Units Strength by 2 everytime they are used ( this Effect stacks btw ) - S Rank Weapons in Fate are also awful, since similiary to S Ranks in Engage only specific Classes can even use them. It also doesen't help that you still have to grind Weapon Ranks, so you may not even be able to use them despite having the correct class. Also they halve the Units STR/MAG till their next attack decleration. - I'm quite surprised you didn't mention the S Rank Dagger Carnwenhan from Engage. Its a SMASH Weapon and comes with all their usual drawbacks ( always attacks second, heavy asf ) and is the only Dagger that can't attack from Range. While it could have Niche as a way to poison Armored Units even this gets taken away by the fact that you'll recruit Veyle after clearing the Chapter Carnwenhan is found in and she comes with her own Dagger that uses MAG for Damage Calculation, which lets her poison Enemies withou putting herself into Mortal Danger
the default sword is actually quite useful on Mae juggernaut runs(as in feeding her atk shrines from novis so she reaches 1 round threshold against all brigands in act 2) since if you use the mages as your main carry they have to cast fire twice on each enemies losing 2 hp on each + the enemies attack so the default sword helps with durability. And in Mae's case by the time she reaches priestess she will have like 20+ something atk and still one round fine physically since atk are both str and mag in this game. Also Leif's priority isn't just WT it's 1. Able to counter 2. WTA 3. Effective damage 4. Stat total (so a regular +0 Javelin is prioritized over master lance since +0 Javelin is 6 might 80 hit, 86 total stats and Master lance is 7 might 55 hit, 63 total stats) 5. Highest slot
Bro I really wish S rank weapons go back to just being powerful weapons with stat boosts. The whole class limitation thing isn’t the worst but it’s annoying when even then the weapon isn’t that good
Knives on Sages in Tellius are actually a pretty cool way to nerf them. Traditionally, the mid-late joining prepromote magic users you get are always *really* good (e.g. Niime, Pent, Saleh, etc.) and all prepromoted Sages you get here have Knives instead of Staves. So if you want a strong, zero investment magic unit, they can do that job just fine. But if you want the benefit of Staff utility, that's a reward for training up a weaker mage to take their place instead.
What's funny is the "sword" saved Mae a few times. I got jumped by necro dragons so they acted first. Mae was in range of two of them. They both attacked and they both hit leaving her with 1 hp. Had she used fire even once she would have died
sage knives in PoR almost feel intentionally bad. I noticed that every prepromoted Sage in FE9 has knives instead of staves, so it almost seems like the game is telling you to raise your own sage if you want the staff utility. Edit: I watched further and you said exactly this, so yeah
![АЛАУДИНОВ у Скабеевой: эти их ВСУ нас НЕ ДОГОНЯТ 😁 [Пародия]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/an0anqU4WGQ/mqdefault.jpg)
I will always love the Devil axe. Landing a crit on yourself will never not be funny
Fe1 has a devil sword. I put that on the first thief and he became one of the most useful units in midgame. Even if it backfires, he's still a thief which won't hurt
The Mang's emotional roller coaster will always have a place in my heart.
I would agree if my Rutger didn't die to a random crit via devil axe at the end chapter 14
I like it for the high risk high reward mechanic. It's deals a lot of damage and gives a good amount of wexp (in the gba titles for example 8 instead of the usually 1).
@@user-vn7rq7dn4xHow the hell is Rutger using an axe? (Maybe you meant enemy berserker nvm).
Just think about being the lumber jack that recieved a devil axe for your wood carving of a bear. You then go to chop some logs and suddenly die of a heart attack.
Unironically how my grandpa died lol, just went out to chop logs one day and had a heart attack
I can imagine the other people in the village saying "What is that thing"
A wise man once said "Emblem Leif is basically just a boss gimmick" and he couldn't be any more right
And i love him for it.
When I was a kid I'd always give my sages knives in PoR because I thought it was so badass and edgy and cool.
I think kid you was onto something
I did the same thing while laying por a couple of months back.....
Ilyana can actually get strength funnily enough, just the non-forging of knives & only 8 Mt max really does hurt their efficacy
@@metalgamer21pfp checks out
@@KaruHart lmfao
So funny thing about Adaptable, it's actually insanely potent when you get to ignore Leif's weapons, which is why Leif's arguably strongest build involves never activating Leif's B support so he never gets to bond 10 and only has a Killer Axe. So you slap him on a warrior with extremely high strength and Wrath, give them a better Killer Axe than Leif's, a Killer Bow and a Longbow if you feel like it and it works exactly like you want it to.
Wait, that's kind of hilarious. I just inherited Vantage over onto a Warrior w/ Ike Ring, but sticking Wrath on Leif means you can adaptable + vantage +wrathcrit with a Bow OR Axe based on which range you get attacked at?
My main complaint is you get stuck with the worst version of Vantage if you're relying on low bond Leif (25% HP threshold) , but honestly, I think we should let you cook with this one because it's funny
The only downside to this strat is you have to work around base Vantage's somewhat limiting less than 25% HP activation. It can usually still be done by picking the right enemy and using Corrin's flame vein to safely get in range.
Otherwise, yeah. This let's Warrior Panette solo entire sides of maps even on Maddening, it's great.
@@Shark3143inheriting hold out is a good idea, that way the below 30% health requirement of hold out and the below 25% health requirement from vantage synergies
Also a wrath user being at lower health means more crit chance
Yeah
Vantage/Wrath warriors with rank 9 bond on Lief is the one place Adaptability works.
His killer axe has worse stat value than a storebought Killer Axe, and if you don't go to rank 10, the game will never pull anything but a Killer Axe at 1 range, Killer Bow at 2 range, and Longbow at 3 range.
The low tier activation health of Vantage kinda sucks but, that's a fair tradeoff for being unable to be hit by anything at range 1 or 2
It’s sad to me how IS makes you work really hard just for Leif to work how he was supposed to. I think this was something they forgot to fix before shipping the game.
Also shoutouts to Emblem Celica's Ragnarok for being the only non-Leif weapon that actively makes them worse. Once she hits bond 15, she keeps Ragnarok equipped whenever she Warp Ragnaroks instead of staying with what she already had equipped. And there is basically no scenario where Ragnarok itself is useful, because not only is it just worse than Bolganone/Levin Sword, by the time you get it almost all enemies left in the game are corrupted, so you'd rather use Seraphim anyway.
I literally never used Warp ragnarok after losing the emblem. Any super mage prefers Seraphim already for everything is a monster late game
I personally just find it funny, finishing off a strong enemy that was built up throughout the game with a broom.
The 100+ hit rate coming in clutch.
I think Echoes defaults to countering with sword instead of magic, because magic uses HP, and the game doesn't want players to use up HP as a resource outside of the player's control.
If they get attacked from range or if a mage/male sage is attacked, they counter with Fire for 1HP. What you mention is why I think Fire is the only thing that can be countered with - it would make it very dangerous to ever use a 6HP Aura spell on player phase if that mage is gonna be attacked and delete more of its HP in chunks of 6 on enemy phase, including the incoming attacks.
If it was like that then the better spells (and Gaiden/Echoes mages in general) would be on this list for different reasons, probably
Yeah they'll counter with whatever has the least hp cost, so either Fire, Nosfetartu or a sword
This is it right here. It also incentives the player to keep their mages out of danger.
@@MrPSaunI would also add that Echoes implemented a Damage Floor, so even if you have 30 Defense and the enemy only has 6 Attack power, you still take 1 damage, this makes using higher level spells to counterattack even MORE deadly, because even a bulky as heck mage would die from a mosquito that hit first if they already had low health
Which hammers home the point that only having ONE INVENTORY SLOT per unit is an absolutely HORRIBLE IDEA!
I was hoping you would mention Rexbolt, the worst SS rank weapon in FE10 that can only be equipped by a promoted Ilyana, who is one of the worst targets for investment in the game because she either takes exp from the Dawn Brigade or needs it when she can't contribute with the Greil Mercs due to how underleveled she is. Rexbolt has a shockingly low might of only 12 and only grants +3 skill for equipping it
Great example! I haven't played much FE10, but lightning always struck me(lol) as kind of ass in that game
@@Shark3143 It's weak, inaccurate, heavy, and its low% crit odds aren't reliable enough to fish for while possibly killing enemies when you don't want it. It's effectiveness against wyverns and dragons is pretty negligible, too
@@KelikNSG2 The logic with which they balanced the thunder magic was interesting, it is inferior in every possible way but it has a 5% chance of crit
@@r.c.8268
The devs: minimal crit boost! 🤯
Even more damningly, FE10 Ilyana has such horrendous HP/DEF caps that *Dheginsea unconditionally OHKOs her through Night Tide* on Normal and Hard, with Laura being the only other unit to have this problem. She can't use Rexbolt on the one boss it is good for unless it's Easy mode (where units get +5 all stats for 4-End-3 and beyond that can exceed caps). If you want to fry Dheginsea, you're better off giving Thoron or Bolting to another Arch Sage because Ilyana just dies if she tries Rexbolt.
Double Bow is very funny because they made it absolutely insane in FE10, instead of being only 4 range, it’s now 1-2 range, has 22mt, 100 hit, 5% crit, and grants +3 strength, it’s only slightly heavier than a silver bow and the PoR Double Bow, which as you said weight barely matters in Tellius
And the t3 archer class has innate +1 range with bows, so with the Double Bow equipped they are basically wielding a 1-3 range assault rifle, while most other classes in endgame are settling for 1-range-locked weapons to keep their damage output relevant.
Shinon no cap becomes one of the best boss killers for the endgame
@@filipower776Shinon is so powerful in Radiant Dawn. Me and my siblings call him "Mr. Invinsible".
Fun fact - RD Shinon is so good hes even worth the tower deployment in 0% growths, though only in royalless
Source - have done that, hes genuinely good in E-1 (regular combat), E-3 (3hkos White Dragons outside their attack range) and E-5 (good aura chip, doesnt explode to ashera after a pure water)
@@Rengor1997 The power of racism overcomes all.
My bad weapon of choice is FE4's Bolganone. It's obtained in the middle of the Penultimate chapter, and can only be used by a total of four characters. Three out of those four require a specific pairing for the necessary weapon rank, and all of them have access to strictly better options long before Bolganone arrives.
Fire magic got done raw in FE4 lmao. Same strength as the corresponding wind tomes, and like 20 more weight.
To be fair, I would extend this to ALL fire magic in Holy War. As stated earlier, fire magic is much heavier than the other magic types, which means big AS drops. The only fire magic that *isn't* complete garbage is Valflame...which, of course, is enemy exclusive.
Fire magic in Jugdral in general is pretty bad, Bolganone isn't even in FE5 at all (even if it was it would likely have bad stats) it's pretty funny how wind magic is just so much better
It's not that bad, honestly. 20 magical damage cannot be understated, and all of the characters that would actually be using it are benefitting from inheriting Azelle's massive speed growth, and in the cases of Ced and Tinni massive speed base/promo bonus. Azelle!Tinni in particular is the main character who actually benefits from the tome--Thoron, her best tome, is almost certainly going to her big brother Arthur, she's extremely fast so the weight penalty isn't particularly severe, and against the many extremely magically bulky enemies of FE4's lategame the 20 might is very appreciated. It's not like she's forced to use it 24/7, anyways---she can still have Elwind on hand for weapon triangle control and low weight. While this pairing isn't meta, it's also still one of the best ones you have for Tailte and I would imagine many new players went for it because of the talk conversation in chap 4 making it get set up fast.
For Ced, it is the single most powerful tome he can possibly access, which has its benefits, but Azelle/Erin is...well, at best a very niche pairing for if you *really* want Fee to hit hard with magic swords, but the total lack of skills really kneecaps the utility of that pairing, especially when Claude is another high magic pairing that provides tons more utility for both kids. Still, it's pretty funny pulling 50 magical damage out of your ass without needing silly things like holy weapons, so at least the fun factor is there.
Speaking of fun factor, the animation alone gives it like 300 bonus points ngl
@@user-wl5jt7vz2u For better or for worse, Azelle is largely stuck using his Elfire tome for whenever he wants to deal big damage. In the context of gen 1 where Lewyn is desperately clutching onto his Elwind tome for all but the final chapter and Elthunder literally doesn't exist, it's a useful sidegrade to the lower might Thunder tome.
The one benefit of SoV "sword" is that you won't damage yourself on counterattack, I've had a few scenarios where the residual damage builds to a unit death over enemy phase due to them taking hits and using their health to double cast and kill
This is a really good video, just some straightforward chatting about Fire Emblem from a fan.
Would love a part 2
I love how even in being horrible weapons the fates S rank weapons are unremarkable
not only do you get them in like, the final 5 chapters, not only are they locked to a miniscule set of classes, they are also balanced like weapons that are supposed to have a niche. You get these weapons when all of your units already have a build cut out for them and some of them have capped level already yet the game expects you to just adapt to them for some reason. They're so bad.
Although I overall like the removal of weapon durability, they REALLY haven't figured out how to make S-rank weapons relevant in this system. In both Fates and Engage they are just pathetic, being way too restrictive in distribution (NINETY THOUSAND GOOOOLD) and not even worth using in most situations even once you get them.
I hope they figure out a way to make them work better with no durability to balance them out, because getting those powerful weapons and using them used to be one of the highlights of progressing through the games.
@@LoudWaffleThe Brionac with a Lyn or Lucina Crest is pretty good all things considered.
Venemous is a solid one-shot tool if you've got the strength.
Georgios has a specific niche in that it basically makes Lodestar Rush into a insta kill move.
Probably the only two bad ones imo are Ukonvasara and the S rank bow, since the former just doesn't cut it for hit rates, and the latter is worse than a Silver Bow +2.
Still, the Fragarach, Nova Tome, Caladbolg, and the Nodus are all solid weapons imo compared to the Fates S rank weapons which most are more detrimental than helpful aside from Waterwheel and maybe Excalibur.
@@LoudWaffle at least in engage you get them earlier (at least the max donation ones) and you're given more flexibility to morph one of your units into someone who can use it
The Hakagure Blade has the one good niche in Heirs of Fate on Hisame making him into a dodge tank
But outside of Heirs of Fate the random drop Sunrise Katana has the exact same avoid buff
The pursuer is great, the shuriken one is okay, and the rest are so bad it’s actually hilarious
An unironic use of eclipse I've seen is in an outdated fe7 0% growths ltc where you get canas to eclipse Limstella in Victory or Death and it ends up having a 40%+ chance to hit which is pretty alright considering how bulky and dodgey she is. Priestess having swords is a mixed bag but from what I hear the ladyblade I think it was has a brave combat art which sounds incredibly funny
Using ladyblade is funny, I also gave Mae a rapier to have a funny crit attack
Ladyblade is busted
Another point against PoR Shinon is that, in order to re-recruit him, you have to talk to him with Rolf, then defeat him with Ike.
The short bow's WExp may not be very useful in FE8, but it's legit in FE7 since you get a couple for free and can't "promote away" from bows. I had really good results in a recent HHM play where Lyn and Bartre were blessed, and the short bow got them quick access to killers and longbows for a bit of extra utility
Funny is that with emblem leif is that he works the best timera as since she a default lance use, she wouldn't have to deal with leif switching to the master lance(in fact Leif work best with lance user in general) and sandstorm can work well with quadruple hit.
I've done this! I did a draft run of Engage where I got Timerra and ended up using Leif on her, and I used that old file to get some clips for this video.
Yep. If you put a Spear or a Javalin+1 iirc on a lance-using Leif user, Adaptability's selection heuristic will have zero reason to equip the Master Lance.
Timerra gaming 🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏
Of course Timerra has to be the one to use Leif. Cause with that build she's lucky she can carry anything at all
I will say for the FE9 Double Bow, if Astrid could use it, it would genuinely have a niche in chapter 28 to snipe siege tome sages, which are usually out of reach
I'm currently running Rolf in my current playthrough (he's been extremely stat blessed so far) so thank you for the hot tip!
PoR's Bolt Axe was apparently a meme in the Japanese community due to a particularly inept enemy in that one chapter with the falling rocks that tries and fails to use it, nicknamed "Bolt Axe Shogun". When not killing himself with the environmental damage from said rocks, he's failing to use the Bolt Axe because he has a terrible magic stat. He doesn't actually drop his Bolt Axe, but even if he did, your axe units don't have good enough magic stats to ever justify using it either! Bolt Axe Shogun: proof that some weapons are awful for players and enemies alike.
Or just that PoR seemingly forgets how the physical/magical split works half the time, given incidents like giving you a physical and magical dragon laguz duo right before the endgame... which is nothing but magic userss so one of them is comically worthless. They don't have low enough Def for him to do good damage and his Res is bad enough that they chew through his enormously inflated (because PoR) health pool
To be fair I think with the ch 25 boss, they intentionally gimped him with a Bolt Axe just so they could justify slapping Resolve on him, which in PoR also boosts str by 50%
@@Rengor1997But even then, Resolve does nothing for him except make him harder to double... which you prolly don't need to since he's more likely than not one hit away from death, especially if he ended up picking a fight with a mage using wind magic.
Second paragraph is talking about RD, not PoR, for the record. Ena/Nasir split in PoR is moreso just "One is better than the other but also required that you invested a lot in Ike"
And yeah, Gareth has got to be one of the most abysmal units ever seen. Gets doubled and massacred by the entire map in an instant.
@@wannabecinnabon ...I'm going to be perfectly honest, it has always been a genuine struggle for me to keep the Tellius duology's names straight. It's less confusing than the faction of the fanbase that for some reason insists on exclusive referring to the games by numbers, but not by much. I've seen way less of that in recent years, thankfully. I think people realized that the remakes were too much of a snarl to keep the numbering straight for.
@@alexanderkosten7611 It's less insistance and more that the numbering system is quite literally official. The reason it finds less use with modern titles is that nobody can quite agree what game counts and what doesn't. Heck, even IS themselves struggle with it, as they randomly decide to count Archanea Saga and then they don't again.
It is still fairly intuitive for the first 13 games(Dark Dragon and Blade of Light to Awakening), but from Fates onwards, it is genuinely easier to just call them by name (Fates, Echoes, Houses, etc)
Surprised you never mentioned Engage's Flame Lance, a weapon you can only get 9 chapters after the Levin Sword (ignoring forge evolutions) and is worse in literally every single way. Its only redeeming quality is being a lance instead of a sword, so its weapon triangle position is different. Of course, Engage is one of the only, if not the only fire emblem game where swords aren't the worst non-bow weapon type, so even that upside isn't great.
I actually had a section for Flame Lance in my script, but it wasn't funny or interesting on my first draft so I just cut it LOL
Since Griffons/Mage Knights and such can just reclass into a swordie version, Flame Lance is a truly irredeemable weapon you're never "Stuck" using unless you like Royal Knight for some reason.
Idk flame lance can be nice on royal knight due to their strength and magic growths.
It can be fun to get jean there to keep the healer meme but also make a mounted combat unit
>Engage is one of the only, if not the only fire emblem game where swords aren't the worst non-bow weapon type
Meanwhile in geneaology swords give you +10 speed over any other weapon
Engage flame lance definitely isn't the worst thing out there since it does have a specific niche
If you have a mage knight that only use tomes that means they can go any of sword/lance/axe.
Since heroes on maddening almost all have triangle adept and start the map holding swords, you could use a flame lance to unconditionally double them.
Is it good? Not really that much, but it is funny and worth comedy points
To be frank you could almost unilatterally extend this to any magic-based lance weapon in the series. They're always either needlessly obtuse to acquire or are just generally shit.
I'd disagree with swords on priestesses being bad tbh. First off it doesn't make Mae's enemy phase worse because most enemies have 1 range or more than 2 range, so outside some situations where you force an enemy to fight at 2 range (which is a niche scenario) your enemy phase is't really impacted at all, it's often made better actually. The attack boost from swords can allow Mae to straight up one round a lot of enemies if she's able to double them due to her already absurd atk. This also ends up helping mae's bulk since she won't always be taking damage with every attack. This make them a genuinely good option to consider in some situations
I think Celica in act 2 just gives them a bad impression tbh. She's the only scenario in which you really wish you weren't forced into a sword since she would very easily sweep act 2 if she just used fire. Once act 3 starts though she really doesn't mind either since: her attack will be higher if trained, you'll have access to some good swords, and enemies with 3+range are much more common
That's really neat to hear! I was under the impression you'd be better off with Mage Ring/Grimoire Ring or something, but I'm having a belated realization that you get a lot of the good accessories in Act 4 and you could reasonably use a sword during Act 3
Yeah it's a huge boon that in Echoes there's only one Attack stat. Does it make sense that my skinny priestess waifu deals more damage with a sword than my buff mercenary swordsmen despite spending all her life casting spells? No, and I don't care.
awesome video I love hearing people talk about fire emblem
One rounding Formortiis with eclipse by halving his HP was the best feeling thing I did in sacred stones
I'm surprised the slim sword (specifically, in GBA and Tellius) wasn't mentioned. In Genealogy, it was stronger than the iron sword, and in it and Thracia, the lower weight could be meaningful. In the GBA and Tellius games, on the flipside, its lighter weight means nothing because no sword user in GBA or Tellius gets weighed down by the basic iron sword, and all it has to its name is a minor crit boost. What's more, they generally must be bought... at a higher price than an iron sword. Also agree on Engage Flame Lance (too heavy for how weak it is). And while we're talking about magic weapons, Path of Radiance's Bolt Axe is just laughable. Its 10 might is unimpressive considering axes are the strongest weapon type, which is bad enough, but pretty much every axe user will have poor enough magic that it's never worth using over anything else. Even against dragons, it does bugger all because dragons are tanky as hell, and because effective damage got knocked down to double effectiveness. That last bit makes wind magic, bows, and effective weapons in general bad too. The latter are also really heavy, meaning you're probably getting weighed down a lot, mostly early on, but even later on, they're not great against their designated targets.
Slim sword is probably my pick. It's worse than the iron sword in nearly every meaningful way, and the only reason we need a slim weapon (the lance,) is because of how heavy iron lances are relative to the con of Peg Knights. Iron swords aren't heavy at all, and just about every sword unit is balanced around having more con than an iron sword requires. So getting rid of the extra damage an iron sword deals, for a sword that will maybe let one or two units over all the GBA games double maybe 3 or 4 more enemies than they would otherwise, is extremely pointless
It's worthless. Very worthless. Especially in a game trilogy where swords are the best overall weapon
Literally, it's only niche is in Japanese PoR, and only due to the 255 crit forge glitch.
@@SSBBPOKEFAN And even then, it's still really bad. It's a sword in a game where swords are not a good weapon type, and if I wanted to exploit the crit glitch, Thunder would be a better forge option. Oh, and Slim Swords are expensive to forge with max might.
Slim Swords are usefu if you want to speedrun Sword rank, but practically speaking, not sure how impactful that is over non Slim Sword
@@Un1234l in which game? Because far as I know, that's outright false. Genealogy and Engage have fixed weapon ranks, Thracia and Binding have all weapons give 1 point of weapon experience, and in the remainder of games with them, slim swords don't give you any more weapon exp than other weapons.
The one cool thing about Path of Radiance sages having knives is every single promoted sage you get comes with knives instead of staves… so if you want a sage with staves you will have to train one up. It’s a neat utility bonus for training one up to keep pre promotes weaker outside of nerfed growths or stats
It is nice how the weapon type was seemingly only programmed to follow Kaga-design, yet they also allow you to ruin your own trained units with it.
You mentioned some of the joke weapons and how a lot of them aren't as bad compared to some of these "good" weapons that aren't even that good, and it's funny because there's some games where joke weapons are just flat out really good for no reason. Fates has plenty of them via My Castle that can border on really good to really meh, with the E rank low might weapons ironically being some of the better ones due to being better options than bronze weapons and having some additional effects (Raider weapons granting +3 effective speed when in combat, quill pen and frying pan granting higher hit than bronze weapons, as well as avoid). Sacrificial Knife and Berserker's Axe are great too since they can allow you to hit low HP thresholds for Vantage or Silas' personal.
S rank weapons in Fates however are pretty bad, since they suffer from the same Double Bow conundrum of not being available for most of the cast and coming in way too late to be useful. In Conquest, the only ones you get are the Aurgelmir (which halves str until used again in another combat), the Excalibur (which is better, but also makes you and the enemy faster, meaning they can double you as easily as you'd double them), and while not a weapon, the Bifrost, which is a worse Aum Staff more or less. Note that of these weapons, only Berserkers, Sorcerers and Butlers/Maids can use them, since they're the only classes that can have S rank weapons. So they're definitely up there for being bad despite looking good on paper.
Speaking of S rank weapons in Fates, it seems like even enemy exclusive ones aren't free from that game's bizarre weapon effects. Skadi is allegedly the only weapon in the series to actively reduce your crit rate without outright preventing critical hits (granted this is definitely for the player's benefit in CQ endgame lmao)
As a Casual mode player, what's the difference between Bifrost and Aum?
@TheWizardMus Bifrost will only revive the most recent fallen unit - so if multiple units die in a turn you cannot choose who you revive.
@@-memoria-2136 ah thank you
The thunder sword in Echoes can crit and it also reduces critrate by 10.
Though yeah, the only S rank weapon in Fates that is actually "good" is Garon's axe. Heck, it's weirdly not even Garon-locked, despite what its description claims.
I'm surprised you don't mention literally all of the silver weapons in Fates, since they debuff literally all of the user's stats after combat, and as I recall, the debuffs STACK. But then again, nobody uses silver weapons when playing Fates for precisely this reason, so I could understand you forgetting. Meanwhile, the Raider weapons, joke weapons to the core, are unironically really nice for training up units who start at E rank in something when reclassing.
I think they are good for your pal Attacking with Pair Up since they don't get debuffed.
love small creators with great, passionate content. looking forward to the next video
Engage had a _lot_ of flaws, but out of all of them, I can never forgive how dirty they did Leif as an Emblem. He is by _far_ the biggest Zero to Hero story in the series, going from worse Roy whose whole utility revolves around taking ballistae to the face, to a one-man army in Genealogy. Couldn't have even just given him a built-in Galeforce to reference movement stars or anything else to reference the weird mess of mechanics that was Thracia 776
>a lot of flaws
OK buddy
@@ChuuniKaedeI agree. Utter shit is more like it.
@@ChuuniKaede Do you mind if I ask what you meant? Are you disagreeing? Agreeing? I...honestly can't tell, and it's been confusing me all day
Just came from the FE8 no damage video, and this is a good video :)
I'm so glad that I found a Fire Emblem channel :) I can watch this along with my Elder Scrolls lore videos now
I LOVED this video even though I didn't really get much information out of it, it was fun.
Subbed, keep up the good work.
Quite the entertaining video, random as hell but thats why i love the algorithm sometimes.
Edit: binged through a few videos, Im shocked there were so few, keep it up, mate.
I actually don't find Swords on Priestess to be a problem. Here's an in depth explanation why:
With the exceptions of Celica and Yuzu, you're not expected to have a Priestess until late Act 3 at the earliest. Yuzu's bases are ao high that she doesn't care if you recruit her very early, while Celica has her own explanation down below.
On Alm route, your only Priestesses are Mage!Faye, Delthea and optionally Yuzu. Alm route is filled with physical units that favor ATK and DEF but have mediocre to low SPD; all three Priestess candidates have no issue doubling and all have excellent ATK. They unironically have better matchups against them than Dread Fighters because of their higher firepower, especially as a forged Rapier or Brave Sword can produce enough firepower to reliable defeat an enemy on Enemy Phase, and then kill another enemy on Player Phase with magic to avoid counterattacks.
Celica's route is more interesting. Celica joins as one, while Mae is expected to promote by late Act 3, and Sonya tends to promote mid Act 4. There is a very powerful Blessed Sword in the Seabound Shrine with 3 MT 100 Hit and HP recovery, making it highly competitive. However, Kamui and Saber have better equipment to be using. Both prefer either a shield to let them wall large groups of enemies due to Valbar having problems getting into position, or something like a Steel Sword for higher raw damage. If anything, the crit chance can make them less safe to use due to their CrtAvo issue making them prone to randomly taking big damage; adding crit rate to oneself risks critting enemies and being exposed to even more attacks. By late Act 3 Mae can use it to ORKO enemy mages as Dread Fighters have firepower issues, while Mae has plenty of ATK and enemy magic users use extremely heavy magic. It also helps her offset expensive spell costs like those lf Silence or Aura. As for Sonya, by the time she competes for a sword, you get a Silver Sword in Lost Treescape and a Lady Sword in Duma Tower 1F. Silver is excellent due to high might and not using gold marks while having Roundhouse to wallbreak Fiends and Dracoshield Jedah, with Mae being particularly good for nuking Jedah every other turn. Lady Sword gets doubled might in female hands, giving it crazy firepower especially when forged; both of its combat arts hit RES off of its 12-20 MT, and even on Enemy Phase it has so much MT that it no longer really cares.
This was a great video! Much better than all the weapons you talked about for sure
I watched this while cuddling my own Blahaj, very enjoyable video
I'm glad I found you, this is the slop content I needed to listen to in the background
It's some quality slop too!
To make Leif work out alright, there's two ways around this one.
A) Never go above Bond 9 and just... never unlock the Master Lance/Lightbrand so Adaptable only chooses from your own weapons, especially strong with warriors to counter with Killer Axe/Killer Bow/Long Bow.
B) Put him on a Lance user (ideally Lance+Sword, but the Lightbrand is fine so its less of a problem) so Adaptable never has a reason to pick the Master Lance over your own forged inventory lances.
Just found this channel. Time to binge the low-tier Sacred Stones playlist.
Leif is the textbook definition of “the boss when you unlock him as a playable character” he’s one of the toughest bosses in the game and corrupt Hyacinth is no pushover either but when you have him he’s just a slapdash thrown together emblem ring that’s meh at everything.
Sync skills are the skills that are still active when you _aren't_ engaged, actually. Adaptable isn't a sync skill.
I love our guest star Blahaj
Something I’d like to mention is that in FE10 the Double Bow is actually really good on paper. 50 durability, 22 might, a nice extra little 5% crit, 1-2 range, and it only weighs 12. On top of all that, it also keeps the +3 strength passive from FE9 but is no longer locked to Snipers.
However, all of this good stuff comes at its availability being absolutely horrific, with only 1 existing in the entire game. Specifically as a drop from a Sniper during Rebirth 1, which is at the end of the game. Plus it’s an SS rank weapon which means it’s a bit difficult to get a unit able to use it in the first place (at least from what I remember, if I’m wrong about that please let me know).
Sol Katti made me quit FE7 and never look back.
I expected you to mention Fates silver and S rank weapons for reducing the user's stats after use
Those are great examples! I don't have much personal experience with Fates, and I didn't want to be too derivative of that really good Excelblem video on the Fates S-Ranks, so I ended up cutting them from the script.
Hagakure Blade seems particularly bad at a glance, though, because it makes me want to compare it to Ryoma's no downsides, 1-2 range Ranjinto and laugh
@@Shark3143as a Fates fan Hakagure Blade has 1 niche. The avoid buff on it in Heirs of Fate DLC Chapter 5, if you promote Hisame. In a really hard end chapter, turning him into a dodge tank relieves a lot of stress
Imo the default sword in SOV isn't that bad because you generally don't want mages enemy phasing due to their poor durability and when they do have to do so it can be beneficial to not sacrifice hp to counterattack because it can sometimes be the difference between life and death
Awesome video! The FE9 double was always a huge disappointment!
Ngl, I’d move knives to the Sniper class, since they can at least use it automatically.
As an echoes enjoyer I can't really agree with the priestess sword assessment. In the early game it's pretty bad, but in the midgame it's really, really good. Enemies have very low defense in that portion of the game and its not unlikely for a priestess to double and orko on counter with a sword. Meanwhile, fire weighs them down. As a bonus, it doesn't cost hp.
You'll want to switch to rings later, sure, but it's at worst a transitional weapon with strong midgame utility especially with the blessed sword. It's not like you get a good ring before the late game anyways.
Before the rest of the comment: Awesome to see another new face appear in my feed in the Fire Emblem sphere! Your production quality is solid and I hope to see more of you!
Something not mentioned in the Echoes section is how the Sword actually works in practice for Priestesses. It activates at 1 range, and will generally deal only marginally less damage than Fire would have due to the shared ATK stat. Mae is already not a unit you want to be using for enemy phase against anything but enemy mages, who are going to ignore the Sword anyway. As someone who has played through Echoes 5 or so times on both difficulties, I find myself using the Sword, or more often a Blessed Sword, on Mae to have an easy way to get rid of problematic mages and monsters, since it turns her into an incredibly versatile unit.
shout out to TRS's ballistae, locked to 3 mov units and locks them in place for the rest of the map when used!
Great video! Keep doing things like this
Personally, I'm surprised the Bronze weapons in FE10 aren't on here, as the only one that you actually ever use at base is Sothe's Bronze dagger.
It can't crit and hardly anyone starts with E rank in anything aside from maybe Brom (E rank in swords, what the actual heck?)
Edit: Must've skipped past this part, but I don't think the default Swords in SoV are that bad, especially since I think the reasons for the switch are mainly due to HP hazards regarding your characters. If they get dogpiled by a swarm of units, the last thing you need is one of them killing off your mage because they Fire'd themselves into kill range. The other thing that helps them is that they can counterattack with Fire at 2 range (though surprisingly can't counter with Thunder if attacked by a Sniper from 3 range). This way they can still do effective damage. The last thing that helps swords out a little more is that magic stats don't exist in SoV. Your strength and magic are the same stat, and so the amount of damage you deal with a 0 might sword is still relative to that strength level. So if your Celica has 25 strength, that's still 25 whole damage your dealing.
I’m a bit surprised how few axes are actually in this video. I’ve always seen axes as “strong but very inaccurate” weapons across the series, plus there are even games in the series that don’t have good or even any axe users in the first place and the ones that do exist tend to not have decent dex growths or bases to help hit, so they rarely even hit in the early to mid game.
Axes have always been good, is just that sometimes you either get crappy users or crappy classes. FE6 is really the only game where Axes are bad on both fronts, having awful users and choices. Armads is kind of ok.
Weirdly, Axes have originally been designed as joke weapons, exclusively wielded by either enemies or filler units and having generally kinda terrible weapon, or only a basic weapon in the case of Gaiden. But then they weirdly morphed into actually being kinda good later on. In some games they are even considered a candidate for the best weapon type, which is pretty funny.
worst imo is Aureola on fe6, almost impossible to train a S-rank light user without knowing beforehand
Kinda was expecting the GBA Blades to appear on this list ngl. Or at least Steel & Silver Blade.
Quick warning, this comment is a bit of a doozy.
In FE6, weapon Hit Rates are at an all-time low in the franchise & the GBA Blades vary from okay to Y I K E S. Iron Blade was always a decent weapon, never great, but never bad, but the other two; Steel Blade & Silver Blade.... yeesh.
Here's a copy of the stats on Steel & Silver Blade
STEEL BLADE
FE6 - Sword C | Mt 11 | Hit 60 | Wt 14 | Rng 1 | Uses 25 | Price: 1250G
FE7/8 - Sword C | Mt 11 | Hit 65 | Wt 14 | Rng 1 | Uses 25 | Price: 1250G
SILVER BLADE
FE6 - Sword A | Mt 14 | Hit 55 | Wt 13 | Rng 1 | Uses 15 | Price: 1800G
FE7/8 - Sword A | Mt 14 | Hit 60 | Wt 13 | Rng 1 | Uses 15 | Price: 1800G
In FE6, you get multiple good sword units, so Blades never feel truly terrible because of who can get their hands on them. Honorable mention to Steel Blade having 60 Hit in FE6 and appearing early, but still being okay at best thanks to units like Rutger, Marcus & Dieck who are all at least decent users of the Ch4 Steel Blade you can get. FE6's Silver Blade is basically budget Durandal, and I would just sell it for cash tbh. Most sword units will be using Silver Sword at best, or Killing Edge/Wo Dao if their name is Rutger, Fir, or Karel. Killer weapons are just so good in FE6 because of how plentiful they are. Steel Blade you're maybe using early if you care, Silver Blade, just sell it man, you already have Durandal.
FE7 & FE8 are where the Blades fall off a cliff. Again, Iron Blade is actually pretty decent. 1 Mt stronger than Steel Sword aint bad, but Swords in EP focused games are usually not great. Steel Blade in particular in FE7 is especially bad, because its C rank, and 99% of the time, you'll want sword units to use other weapons outside of swords (Raven/Harken want Axes, All the Cavs want Lances/Axes bar Isadora, who'll stick mostly to Iron weapons, lighter Swords or Javelins, & units like Florina, Heath & Farina will never touch swords, despite getting them after promotion). And in Fe7, you get a lot of okay but not great Sword locked units. Guy, Matthew, Lyn, Karla, Karel, Legault, Eliwood before promo... None of these people I just named are noteworthy combat units and none of them bring anything unique to the table in terms of combat outside of a chapter or two after recruitment, if even. Jaffar is honestly the only Swordlocked unit in FE7 who holds up well past recruitment, and he comes with great stats + almost capped Strength. And NONE of these swordlocked units will ever want to touch Steel Blades. Enemies are weak, but most sword-weilding player units are too weak for the Blades to leave any positive impact, and a lot of them kill your speed because, surprise surprise, Steel Blade weighs 14 and that will kill your speed. And a lot of those units I just mentioned, only have Con in the 5-8 Range, so that's at least 6 speed lost from holding the damn thing. FE7 has a low speed threshold to double most of the time (hovering around 13-15 Speed in HHM for most of the game), but when your claim to fame is being blazing fast in Blazing Sword, and a Steel/Silver Blade can knock you OUT OF DOUBLING THRESHOLDS, you know something's up. I also want to shoutout really quick that a majority of all physical enemies in FE7 carry a Lance, meaning you'll have weapon triangle disadvantage on average when holding this thing too. Both Steel + Silver Blades come too late to benefit from the Axe heavy earlygame unlike FE6 as well, shame.
Basically, low sword unit value + sword that wants high stats to function properly + game that hates swords and prioritizes EP = very poor showing
FE8 is at least a bit better because the enemies are all so weak, that even weak units with Blades can meaningfully contribute. Units like Eirika, Colm & Marisa can still pick up kills semi-reliably against the low bulk cannon fodder that is Sacred Stones enemies, especially on Eirika Route. Steel Blade still sucks, but the enemies somehow got weaker and now you have a Seth. Stick to other weapons for those who can, and for those who can't, Iron/Steel/Killing is usually good enough. Plus at least the effective weapons work in this game, so Armorslayer, Wyrmlayer & Zanbato/Longsword can do something here. You don't get Steel Blade until Gerik, and he's not a bad user of it, but he'd prefer other weapons ASAP or an instant promotion to use it better. And just like the last two games, a player-owned Silver Blade basically doesn't exist in this game.
TL;DR - GBA Steel Blade sucks. Outside of FE6, it usually causes more problems than it helps solve. FE6 Steel Blade is at least niche whereas in the other games, its something you sell to buy other weapons 99% of the time. Iron is good, but not great. And Silver has problems, but its a tad bit better than Steel Blade.
And Silver Blade is just overkill with the same problems just moved around a bit. Higher Mt and lower Wt, but less hit & higher weapon rank requirements. Who needs a Sword with that much might and that little hit???? Binding Blade *would have been* THE game out of the GBA titles for this, but you have Durandal and +30 Crit Swordmasters for that. Not as bad as Steel Blade, but not as strangely viable as Iron Blade. Plus it's usually locked to there being only a single copy in the entire game outside of the Secret Shop, making it highly missable & forgettable. (FE6 - Desert treasure, FE7 - Chest in Genesis, FE8 - Desert Treasure again).
Keep GBA Iron Blade, & just sell your other GBA Blades...
At least Tellius & Engage made Blades more memorable with better units & Engage's Smash Weapons...
Thanks for the detailed comment! Let me add a couple things.
All blades give doubled wEXP in FE7~8 compared to most other swords, which is kind of neat.
Gerik joins with a monster 13 Con, which I believe is the same in Ranger and 15 in Hero, which means he really only has accuracy concerns if anything with blades. Steel Blade comes out to be more or less a better Steel Axe in his hands, which I understand isn't a very high bar, but it's a few points higher mt for similar Acc/Weight.
It’s not much, but I did land an Eclipse hit on the Demon King on a 13% chance to hit, which did make an admittedly easy fight a bit easier.
Great video. 👍
This was a banger, really hope to keep up with the scripted content!!
If you want a good joke weapon, look up the morph-o-ray in Ratchet and Clank. It transforms your enemies into chickens.
I'm proud to say that in my FE9 draft I had the double bow come in clutch exactly ONCE. The bow was a meme, but Rolf was actually pretty legit in that run. Naturally, he takes some investment, but the payoff is decent and he made for a really fun gamble abuser. Shinon *can* be good on account of his absurd strength growth (IIRC it's tied with Boyd for the highest) and the fact that you can just forge him a good weapon to tide him over for a bit. Given how late he rejoins though, it's really not worth it.
20:40 what really i wasnt paying attention can you repeat it all please
joking aside great video man and i truly had no idea about how bad some weapons can be like the short bow. Super overprices and as weak as an iron bow but hey 10% crit so...... Im a gambling man ill take those odds. Enjoyed man and keep up the work
Hope you'll have a good day
Radiant Dawns weapon catalogue is extremely funny
it has some of the most insane weapons (Vague Katti having 22mt) and some of worst
Wo Daos are usually like, Killing edges with a bit less might and crit-- but are usually D compared to C
eexccept in RD where the Wo Dao is B rank... with 7 mt 20crit 30durability-- compared to killing edges being B with 8 mt and 30 crit and 30 durability. it does provide 1 more weapon exp (3 vs 2) but the steel sword also provides 3 wexp.
brave weapons are also only C rank in radiant dawn- as are steel weapons as a whole
gonna mention the Silencer bow the lore on this one is that Shinon makes his own bows and taught Rolf, which is also how we got Rolfs bow (in por it was a prf wpn but not in RD!)
however the Silencer can first be bought in 3-4, you get the base conversation where shinon is making the bow and rolf asks if he is going to sell it to Aimee again-- meaning he sold the weapon to her and then the player can buy it off her and give it back to him.
the steel sword has 9 mt, the steel dagger has 8 mt. silver weapons always weigh 1 less than steel- except the silver knife which weighs 1 more, and the silver dagger which weighs 2 more.
the difference in mt between tomes is stupid low, rexflame has 14 mt-- but sanakis cymebline is 13 mt and has 8 less weight, and 5 more crit. oh and 30 more uses. the only potential users for the rexflame are sananki and tormod. and tormods wonky recruitment, and sanakis better tome and later recruitment mean its not really worth having a rexflame target
rexbolt has this worse, the only one who could use is illyana and even with capped everything she still gets 1 rounded by Dheginsea.
rexwind being for soren has the use of being a tome for soren
the SS tome Balbarith gives 3 str and can only be used by Pelleas on NG+
purge and bolting are B rank, Meteor and Blizzard are C rank, oh and Fenrir is A. bolting has the typical thunder magic rules of "the worst stats, but 5 crit!"
it also had the Card items. they are only usable by non casters uses the "casters" magic.
whats funny is the weakest card, the spectre card, has 5 mt.
the thunder tome has 3 mt. meaning that Rafiel and the other herons deal more magic damage than base ilyana with a thunder tome (transformed)
Another thing to note about the double bow is if you REALLY wanted to make use of a sniper in fe9 their best option is making use of telius gamble which allows you to choose to half your hit rate in exchange for double the crit rate ( yes you can still choose not to do this if you really need the accuracy). You are never not using a killer bow with that you can get like 80% hit 100% crit shots why would you ever turn that down for low might but I do 2 times more damage well a crit does even more. Like a gamble sniper is actually a good boss killer their damage on player phase is some of the highest in the game ( still a bad build in a enemy phase focused game but hey at least every attack is a kill ) and that is entirely because of their guaranteed crit rate with high accuracy for a gamble user’s standards with a killer weapon. So even if you wanted to use the one bad class that has access to it it’s still not their strongest weapon.
Great video! I hope to see more like this in the future. Subbed
Cant forget u require training rolf in the first place to even rerecuirt shinon
Bad weapons huh? I know Kaga saga isn't Fire Emblem but his hammers are fun. In Vestaria they have a hitrate of 40 and in Tear Ring Saga it's 36%.
omg that's even worse than the FE6 Hammer which has 45%
Lmao. I guess Kaga stuck with his original design of Axe being a joke weapontype.
@@lpfan4491not really, Samson in TRS and Deen in BWS are very solid units and also axe users, it’s just the hammer that sucks for some reason
@@lightbrand_ That makes it infinitely weirder.
Please talk about bows in all your videos. It's my all time favorite weapon type and I enjoy learning about them even if you're (deservedly) bashing them.
The only usable S rank Engage weapon is Georgios for Lodestar Rush and Override. Engage attacks ignore insignificant things like “weight” “accuracy” or “being a heavy weapon”. No, instead you can fire off a massive attack with a 35 might weapon (with the Ike engraving) instead of a silver sword with its might of 12. The best part is that it’s a boss drop that you don’t have to spend 90k on
As others have likely pointed out, Leif is actually at his best if you DON'T do his Bond conversations. Never doing Bond 10 will banish the Light Brand and "Master" Lance, and as long as the unit can equip an Axe you can usually out-prioritize the Killer Axe with something better.
This actually lets you use Adaptable with good weapons, and combined with inherent Vantage can make him one of the best juggernaut Emblems. Imo his best user is a Warrior Panette with high forges on a Killer Axe and Killer Bow, allowing her to crit enemies for triple digit damage in some cases (especially if you inherent Wrath). Imo this is better than inheriting Vantage onto an Ike user because of Adaptable's built in Crit bonus for backup units
I used eclipse on a whim once in fe7 and i burst out laughing when the fire dragon's hp got cut in half
Sad to hear about the Double Bow. I've started but never finished FE9 and was endeared to Rolf but clearly my fondness for growth units is working against me on that one 😅
Fe9 rolf is a trap. He is neither a growth unit nor is he a unit with high bases for his level
@@gameboyn64Still performed just fine on my Easy, Normal, and Hard mode runs.
The boy is usable.
@@ResurgentRaven well it is fe9. Everyone is usable.
@@gameboyn64 Exactly, and would say by the time Shinon rejoins Rolf should be better by the time. Heck I'd say he's one of the perfect units for Gamble due to archers having high skill for accuracy so it balances out the con of the skill which is why on Kieran who uses axes given while they hit hard they got low accuracy that his default Gamble is wasted on em and better off not using it. My Rolf was a crit machine and another thing to keep in mind for why Gamble works great with him is due to PoR having bond support which his brothers being near him providing an additional 20% crit chance as they provide 10% each. Was on hard mode and having Rolf triangle attack Naesala was just something else to witness lol.
Either way though Rolf > Shinon in PoR, Shinon > Rolf in RD (provided not using save data) that said there's Astrid over both of them due to Paragon for double exp and being able to canto, but yeah if you really want to make the game that easy with how many mounted units there are some people can go ahead and do that. To me, it's incredibly boring on an already easy game. Bonus exp should just be used on characters who people like that are behind in the team and not for characters that well off carry own already in being higher level (gain less exp from combat then obviously) or if maybe someone rng screwed level ups. There's no reason to at all ever give bexp to Ike especially when he has his own dedicated chapter in the map where it's just him, Titantia, Shinon and Gatrie who all may as well just be meatshields while he farms as they hardly get any exp (yes you'll likely hardly get any bexp but it's worth it in comparison for what you're getting out of it) nor on Mist even as she's a healer as just spam heals even if not in desperate need of healing.
Huh, I agreed with most of these but I actually found a lot of use with the short bow at least until killer bows become commonplace and really helps with bow rank until then.
I think Eclipse is such a shame, personally. Conceptually, it's one of the coolest weapons in the series, serving as high impact siege held back by a near inability to actually deal lethal damage (moreso in 7/8, I think the FE6 Eclipse effect is potentially too much with high hit,) but its hit rate is such a severe overcorrection that it's nearly unusable. That's part of the reason why I try my best to include high accuracy Eclipse in hacks I'm a part of, and it's always super fun.
Eclipse is definitely the biggest example of this, but GBAFE has a tendency to give theoretically powerful weapons such bad stats that they're relegated to gimmick (Longbow, Runesword, Shamshir, FE8!Luna, etc.) At least dark has it better than bows, which don't get a single cool weapon outside of Longbow
Something hilarious is that FE8 in general already balanced Luna pretty harshly with the 50% hit, but the localization decided to kill every last one of them and also take away 10% of its critbonus.
The venomous Lance is probably the only donation weapon in engage i'd call worthwhile. Despite it's high weight, just give it to a character where doubling using them was already a pipe dream and it basically doesn't matter. The raw power it has and the ability to poison makes it great against bosses and great to tank with
I just cannot stress how bad of a fit the Sol Katti is for Lyndis. What’s her greatest strength? Speed. What’s her greatest weakness? Her strength. What does she get? A heavy sword that kills her speed in exchange for negligible might. Ever since the day I completed FE7 at an age of like 12 I have questioned what the game designers were thinking.
I would've given her Mulagir instead, not only because it's a Divine Weapon on par with Durandal and Armads, but also because it's the Divine Weapon of Sacae, making it even more fitting. The fact Lyn can use bows only makes it fit even more.
I thought I was crazy about the Tempest Trials giving you basically nothing. So glad that's not the case.😅
I can argue Arrow of Indra from Three Houses. Not only is it obtainable in 2 routes (Hubert's Paralogue in CF and Final Chapter in VW) but few units can actually take advantage of a Magic Lance. Marianne, Hubert, Flayn maybe and she can only access it in VW.
After looking it over a bit more, Echoes actually did something kinda clever with the counter mechanics in my opinion...
The default weapon for a Priestess has 0 weight, while Fire has 3 weight, so even though it might be annoying that you don't get to choose, you also know it's how it works, and using magic instead of a sword against something like a Dread Fighter, would be a near guarantee to get doubled, do next to no damage because of their +5 res and Apotrope on a counter, and lose additional HP from using a spell in the first place...
So i understand that you really should get to decide in some way, i would like that too, but to make the gameplay smother and as weighted in the players favor as possible, countering with a fast sword with 0 weight at 1 range against mostly really fast enemies, while countering with slower magic against slower enemies at 2 range, honestly seems like the best default option.
Not sure if this counts as a bad weapon per say, but I really get annoyed by the Silver Blade in FE7. Compared to the Silver Sword, it:
-has 60 accuracy vs the S.Sword's 80
-has a weight of 13 vs the S.Sword's 8
-requires A-rank vs the sword's B-rank
-only has a durability of 15, compared to thr Sword's 20
-costs 1800 gold, when the S.Sword cost 1500
All this for *ONE* more point of strength! It also gives 2 w.exp, but I don't think that's worh much as the S-rank weapons only show up in the final chapter
And for acquiring it, without a shop it's only obtainable in chapter E22x/H23x, and it's only purchasable in the secret shop in E19/H20. You can get 3 Silver Swords without buying one, and one of them before your able to buy a Silver Blade
Unless you desperately need that 14 damage, I don't see the point. It can sell for a decent chunk of money, and can be used to train Sword Rank to use the Regal Blade. But by that point you likely already have an S-rank sword user, or weren't going to the Regal Blade in the first place. Not to mention that the Lancereaver, both personal swords, and every blade weapon also gives the extra w.exp. I guess you can buy it before you can buy Silver Swords? But you get another S.Sword two chapters after the S.Blade is purchasable
I still ended up using it in my playthrough becuse my Kent had capped both Speed and Strength, lol
There's also the Venin weapons you can get in Fire Emblem Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn which are a pain to get and are just fancier Iron weapons IIRC and being able to inflict poison in Fire Emblem which falls into the classic trope of: Just killing the opponent by hitting harder is easier and better.
Silver Weapons from Fates should have been mentioned. They're so bad that even the game designers circumvented how awful they are by giving powerful enemies "Silver Star" weapons which are basically stronger Silver weapons that don't have a penalty that can't (to my knowledge) be accessed by the player.
I feel like this is the only time where an available weapon-type is so awful that the game will feed enemies a much more powerful version of said weapon-type so that they can still be viably threatening units to your army.
fwiw, i think eclipse in fe8 is like exclusively for "you should on average hit 1 of the 5 on the final boss" which is what i did as a kid. obvs just having good units with consistent weapons is better. but i think it was to be "safe" for kids to be able to like get through it
i assume
And while definitinely not intended, it has also helped me finished a few Randomized runs of FE8 that didn't end up with any sacred weapons lmao
Some awful Weapons I'd lile to mention:
-Silver Weapons in Fate due to them lowering your Units Strength by 2 everytime they are used ( this Effect stacks btw )
- S Rank Weapons in Fate are also awful, since similiary to S Ranks in Engage only specific Classes can even use them. It also doesen't help that you still have to grind Weapon Ranks, so you may not even be able to use them despite having the correct class. Also they halve the Units STR/MAG till their next attack decleration.
- I'm quite surprised you didn't mention the S Rank Dagger Carnwenhan from Engage. Its a SMASH Weapon and comes with all their usual drawbacks ( always attacks second, heavy asf ) and is the only Dagger that can't attack from Range. While it could have Niche as a way to poison Armored Units even this gets taken away by the fact that you'll recruit Veyle after clearing the Chapter Carnwenhan is found in and she comes with her own Dagger that uses MAG for Damage Calculation, which lets her poison Enemies withou putting herself into Mortal Danger
A few of them I was expecting are Niles's Bow and Takumi's Shinai from Fates.
Don't forget that leveling Rolf with Bonus exp messes with stat growths. Caps you at a max of 3 stat increases per level I think
That's an FE10 specific mechanic, actually! Afaik FE9's BEXP level-ups are the same as getting levels through combat.
Short Bow feels like a Slim variant type weapon but way more expensive with less durability.
the default sword is actually quite useful on Mae juggernaut runs(as in feeding her atk shrines from novis so she reaches 1 round threshold against all brigands in act 2) since if you use the mages as your main carry they have to cast fire twice on each enemies losing 2 hp on each + the enemies attack so the default sword helps with durability. And in Mae's case by the time she reaches priestess she will have like 20+ something atk and still one round fine physically since atk are both str and mag in this game.
Also Leif's priority isn't just WT it's
1. Able to counter
2. WTA
3. Effective damage
4. Stat total (so a regular +0 Javelin is prioritized over master lance since +0 Javelin is 6 might 80 hit, 86 total stats and Master lance is 7 might 55 hit, 63 total stats)
5. Highest slot
Bro I really wish S rank weapons go back to just being powerful weapons with stat boosts. The whole class limitation thing isn’t the worst but it’s annoying when even then the weapon isn’t that good
Great video!
Knives on Sages in Tellius are actually a pretty cool way to nerf them.
Traditionally, the mid-late joining prepromote magic users you get are always *really* good (e.g. Niime, Pent, Saleh, etc.) and all prepromoted Sages you get here have Knives instead of Staves.
So if you want a strong, zero investment magic unit, they can do that job just fine. But if you want the benefit of Staff utility, that's a reward for training up a weaker mage to take their place instead.
Agreed, its an extremely unique way of balancing out what are usually really strong prepromotes
Cool video thank you for making it
good vid, i'm suprised you didn't put the engage poleaxe or wyrmslayer on the list though
Engage mentioned closing the video
What's funny is the "sword" saved Mae a few times. I got jumped by necro dragons so they acted first. Mae was in range of two of them. They both attacked and they both hit leaving her with 1 hp. Had she used fire even once she would have died
This was a hilarious video. Very well done
sage knives in PoR almost feel intentionally bad. I noticed that every prepromoted Sage in FE9 has knives instead of staves, so it almost seems like the game is telling you to raise your own sage if you want the staff utility.
Edit: I watched further and you said exactly this, so yeah
You seem like a person I would've gotten along super well in a school cafeteria