It does, but most weapons are so light that the entire system stops mattering after only a few chapters. The amount of weapons heavier than 10 weight can be counted on a single hand.
@@jules9424 yeah it feels like the weapons are weighted as if weight worked like 1 still and the decision to implement the fe9 weight system didn't quite reach whoever was crunching the weapon stat numbers
Kelik: I wasn't just being edgy when I asked how much weight you can handle. I want to know if I'll have enough attack speed to double you with a Silver Blade.
@ZX-Gear that's a neat concept. You could potentially do away with rank requirements for most weapons then, since that would soft restrict silver or etc to characters with enough weapon rank to actually make them better.
I mean, it's not something I would apply to all weapons, but the concept of a cursed weapon or something that is very strong but that gets more hevy with each kill, eventually screwing up it's usefulness if you abuse it seems interesting.
This could be the new Durability system too, as only an S unit would be able to handle a single weapon for good, and they could even make an SS weapon that nobody could maintain beyond the set amount of uses.
It may be overly complicated but I wonder how different weapons needing different stat checks would be like. Ex axes weight is reduced by strength, swords don't reduce at all, and lances by skill. That kind of thing.
My main issue with the lack of weapon weight in Awakening was that the classic "Nosferatu Robin" strat only really works because it's no longer one of the heaviest tomes in the game that would put you in danger of being doubled. But I definetly loved not having my mages lose speed with the weakest tome equipped.
That was the issue with Fire Emblem 4 and 5. Wind Magic was BUSTED due to the low weight and Sety did not help matters with his tome Folsety as it gave him +20 Speed to just kick the other Magic types while they are down.
Well Nosferatu tanking wasn’t broken because nosferatu was weightless, it was broken because snowballing was broken. Noferatu got gutted in FE fates, yet it’s still decent, as long as your character isn’t getting doubled.
What I think is funniest about fe9s weight system is that the one point of strength that illyana has at base is one of the things people immediately bring up when talking about her vs soren. Mages definitely got the short end of the stick with that weight system
Getting knives as a weapon type should give extra strength too so that not only could the unit use the damn knives (the weapon type is already weak enough why would you want to use it on a mage lol), but it would give a legitimate reason to chose them since they would help with magic. Knives should also be efficient against mages to give them a real utility both for thieves and so that mages chosing them have a valid use case for them. That would have made all that a lot better, and chosing between staff utility or not being weighted down by tomes would be a really interesting decision.
@@Laezar1as far as I can tell, knives exist as an option for mages just so all the prepromoted sages you get can’t use staves. Since they all come prepromoted with the worse knife option.
@@mistriousfrog I get that but it's pretty lame. I think with what I suggested staff would still be a better choice overall but knives would feel like they have a genuine niche rather than not even being worth the inventory slot
The basic systems, where it's just speed - weight + con, are mostly fine. Especially if con is class-based. It helps distinguish weapons, can be used to give classes an identity, without being overly intrusive. And if you want to stop it from fading into the background in the late game, all that needs to be done is to add more weight/weapon tiers so units don't outscale the mechanic.
Right. However, I think it needs some rebalancing. Because Str and Def rise in about equal measure per level, the rising HP means mightier weapons are needed to compensate for the HP increase. Swords have traditionally gotten the shaft because swordfighter con is usually considerably lower than the Wt of anything mightier than an Iron Sword or Killing Edge. Low Mt requires damage by doubling, and low WT and high Hit support that. The high speed of typical swordfighter required for doubling supports dodge-tanking which low Def and HP require. However, their Con is measured to take away their main advantage if they do get better weapons, while the hit of weapons in general has increased. Well-liked sword locked units either don't fit this archetype, or they are given abilities like Astra, Luna, Adept, or +n to crit to allow them to deal several attacks worth of damage. The Pegasus Knight is another unit type that is usually screwed over by this as well: Losing their main advantage because their stats don't actually support it.
Imagine if using heavier weapons would actually increase Build over time as units get used to using heavy weapons. No idea how to balance that, just a funny thought I had while watching
That could be an interesting idea. Make it to where you can use any weapon in the game (if you can afford it, of course), but it comes at a speed hit if you don't have a high enough weapon rank.
For example: Give all units the ability to gain +1 permanent con after 40 successful hits with a weapon that weighs them down(only once, otherwise it kinda breaks the game)
Fe4 has minus speed with weapons which can be really dump. Also weight is just binded to the weapon type. This was done to help with hard bosses like arvis and the Helswrath users. It sadly punishes using units og the same type like the fire mage Azelle or non brave axe users
The thing that sucks with FE4's weight though is they made Fire objectively worse than Thunder and Wind. All magic has the same stats, it only differs in Weight and Fire's is ridiculously low.
I feel Engage got Build growths just right. Growths are around 10% for most, with the really high ones being 20%, but most people only need 2 or 3 Build levels over the course of a playthrough and you're likely to get that by the end. Or you could just inherit Leif's Build+ skills, but levelling build lets you save on SP and slots.
The Fates version and con are my favorite. Not only do the downsides make using the higher rank weapons more of a question than a given, they also made a bunch of unique weapons that I hope come back in future games (weapons with built in rallys, weapons that do more damage on enemy phase, the guard naginata). It’s worth mentioning that forging in Fates is a bit more of a pain than in other games with forging. You need ore and you need multiple copies of the same weapon to make forges. Constitution works well when the rescue mechanic is in the game. I just wish the gender disparity wasn’t there. Especially when they alter the way rescue works for the mounted units.
I wouldn't mind female units having lower con nearly as much if women didn't get 5 less aid when mounted compared to men. I mean really, are the horses they ride weaker too?
@@DuelingShade seriously if the 5 less aid wasn’t a thing, then (I think) at least one mounted woman in each game could have a niche in rescuing a u it no one else can.
Clearly we need to make Dexterity the stat that mitigates weapon weight - it even makes a certain amount of sense! Of course being more skillful with a weapon would let you compensate for a heavier one.
Yay, some love for Fates' funky AS system! I genuinely think players would have been more receptive to it if they had just been given more intuitive descriptions, perhaps paired with a pop-up tutorial if necessary. That being said, I can't really think of a succinct way to describe it in one phrase/line, so I can understand how it turned out the way it did, just a little unfortunate. Also, I enjoyed the idea of weapon weight having penalties other than AS in future games! I think the two have just been tied together for so long that players wouldn't even consider other possibilities (and to be honest, I doubt the developers would change it up either). Still, the concept of speedy units getting a relevant penalty while non speedy units with high Con/Build/etc. getting to play normally sounds interesting. It wouldn't be enough to completely balance the classes to be equally relevant across all playstyles, but it could be a neat start.
The main problem I had with Fates' weapons (and the game as a whole) was how much of the system was tied to the streetpass mechanics. I think the system would have been better if forging had been strictly tied to a resource like money or removed entirely so +4 raider weapons weren't the go to option 95% of the time. I enjoy the game much more when I don't interact with many of the my castle systems like the lottery or forging because it forces better resource management and encourages more variety in the weapons I use to tackle various obstacles.
I thought the Brave Weapons' and Steel Weapons' debuffs were super smart, but it's the Silver Weapon Debuff where I grow concerned. Gettibg weaker with every battle is just auch a risky game to play, and I rarely find the extra might worth the hassel (even without forges).
I really like the 3H system. Mitigating penalties for heavy weapons is possible, but it either builds up slowly, so the weight doesn't become irrelevant, or requires you to specifically invest in it by training heavy armor and spending a skill slot (which also gives a nice distinguishing feature to armored knights and their derivatives, since they get to use bigger weapons without having to grind through ranks of an otherwise useless proficiency, in exchange for their lower movement). And it works nicely with the accessory system, where you can get cheap defense points or spell boosters by increasing WT.
I like con the most, allows for for speed to still be the core state and unlike str varients EVERYBODY wants speed and keeping con is just another balancing method to allow a slower fighter archtype or something, i do wish pegsai had con making me worth actuly using them more thoe
I think the best feeling system is PoR/RD. Late game, you get the good part of the weightless systems like Awakening, where weapon weight is effectively eliminated from calculation since it’s not that interesting, especially as stats bloat towards endgame and single points of speed won’t make doubling thresholds. You also get a super dynamic early game where a unit can get a huge power spike by hitting a +2 AS level. I feel like every time I play PoR there’s a different member of the squad that pops off early, be it Ike, Boyd, or Oscar, and makes me always look forward to playing another run. It encourages you to actually train early units instead of waiting for godly prepromotes or hoarding bexp for later.
I liked that the Tellius games let the characters grow out of having the weight penalties throughout the game. I've been playing Fates quite a bit lately and I like the various pros and cons of each weapon type. Though now I'm wondering if just getting a bunch of forged iron weapons would be the way to go for my next Conquest run.
In theory, the difficulty of using forged weapon in fates is having to plan out how and when you are getting the materials to enable forges. Since there's only one mine, all other forge mineral are going to come from trades and arena fighting, putting a heavy timing penalty to the more advanced forge levels, something a new bought higher rank weapon doesn't have. However, with castle visits it all doesn't matter, spamming hacked castles give all the minerals one could possibly need and more. That said, a forged weapon tends to cost double the money as a weapon of similar attack might
I don't mind weapon weight in principal, but it seems like the developers aren't really mindful of how Con/Spd/Wt interact (in games where they are relevant to AS, of course) given how they build some characters. I liked how Three Houses handled it, using a percentage of Str instead of Con, but the problem with that system is that Wt becomes a bit redundant later in the game because characters can negate so much of it, and it compresses potential variety within the cast once that differentiating factor is lost. Con doesn't grow on its own, so the relationship between Con and Wt is consistent, and you can also use this relationship to design a wider variety of functionally unique characters because it introduces a meaningful new variable to alter.
I think the simplest and most effective way to make Weight matter is to subtract by 2 for every point over your unit's Constitution/Build. So if a weapon weighs 10 and your unit's Build is 7, that's a -3, then simply double it, and now said character has -6 speed by being +3 overweight. This'll make Build similar to Luck, in that having excessive amounts of it doesn't help a unit in combat that much. The benefits of having this stat maxed out is minimal compare to having other stats maxed out. HOWEVER, having too little can screw with a units viability. Too little luck and the unit's vulnerable to crits. Too little Build makes doubling unreliable, and makes one susceptible to getting doubled. Course, in this state, there needs to be a way to increase a units Build. You can make it another stat that can be gained on level ups, or you can be a bit more funky and make the leveling of build directly tied to how often they use weapons too heavy for them to use. Also, with Weight now serving such a severe penalty, you can make items that directly affects one's Build, like a potions that temporarily increased one's Build just as Pure Water increases one's resistance. Or an enfeeble status that lowers one's Build by, say, 3-5 points, which affects a unit's both offensively and defensively, without directly impacting how hard a unit hits or how much damage a unit takes. I we want to be even more fruity with this, we can keep Build as a static stat, and have Weapon Rank offset any weight issues instead, as well as having individual weapon proficiencies that's tied to a character and can be leveled independently from Weapon Ranks. Which is to say the more a unit uses a weapon, the more bonuses they get from using that specific weapon. So use an Steel Sword 100 times and now a unit get's a +2 Might and -2 Weight on using Steel Swords. That'll be Weapon Proficiencies. Meanwhile you'll also have Weapon Rank Bonuses that applies to all types of weapons in that class. S rank Swords might give you +5 Speed for ALL sword weapons, for example. This allows a Unit able to power through Weight Penalties by simply using a weapon multiple times, as well as give transferable power to other weapons as to not dissuade a player from changing weapons. This is a pretty radical change but it makes some sense, swing a sword a 1000 times and now you can swing said sword very well. This'll also lay the foundation for when you pick up a different sword. It might not be what you're used to, but it IS still a sword, so basic sword fundamentals still apply. Heck, you can make it so mastering weapons is tied directly to Weapon Rank, or just remove Weapon Rank entirely and have Weapon Mastery give permanent buffs to other weapons in the same class or even direct stat buffs, encouraging you to master ALL the weapons. Make it something similar to how SoV did Weapon Arts, but it gives more than just Arts. But like I said, all this is pretty fruity, might as well make a new game with this system in mind at this point instead of modifying and Frankenstein pre-existing FE titles. Probably better to stick to, "Overweight gives -2 speed per point over instead of -1" idea I proposed earlier.
I love working with the weapon weight in Shadow Dragon. Maybe because of how easy it is to calculate one's AS after weapon weight considerations. It's just very easy to understand and I'm not having to deal with an extra stat like Con. What I've come to appreciate in the GBA games is that your Con doesn't change unless you promote and so it affects the kind of weapons you can use, meaning you have limitations put in place and encourage strategic play because you need to decide which weapon on a unit will yield better results.
I think weapon weight could be fun to play with when mixed with other mechanics. Like weapon skills (thracia) or stat bonuses. Like a really heavy lance with beeg might that gives wary fighter or smth idk
Vestaria Saga (other game made by Kaga) has a bunch of interesting weapons with high weight as a drawback, can't remember too many of them but I remember there is a spear that weighs 15 vs the standard spear's 9 but halves the damage taken by the wielder. IIRC there is also one that weighs 18 but works like an FE6 eclipse tome and always leaves the enemy at 1hp.
Another good video idea if you need one could be "early Fe maps" and how they work to introduce a player to the game mechanics Example would be awakening from chapter 0 to the lucina fight as that's before everything opens up. Fates the prologue maps before the route split but I also consider the first maps of each route it's own starting map too. Engage is probably some of the most fun maps as it's a fun puzzle to play repeatedly
@@actuallizard guess I'll check later. Though engage is better with replays I loved the early maps more as I replayed them and got used to the system I feel Fe games have two stories to them. The early maps where you got little resources and the main game as both play differently with options. Awakening for example you get an early elixir and hammer so it's telling you to use it wisely especially on lunatic. That's the kind of puzzles I love where they give you everything you just need to figure it out
@@________-vy4sx honestly best part is giving you an early dancer which should be a thing in every game going forward. Gunter should be a bit better in battle but giving us maid and butler units aka the healer with protection is great
I think that Lapis and Etie are especially egregious cases of build not reflecting the capabilities of female characters. Both of these characters are supposed to be incredibly strong, yet they have a poor base build and a growth rate of 5%. It's just. Not good.
I think what makes Engage Con annoying is that the stat pretty much only matters for the earlygame characters who join with miserably low Con. Most of the characters after Firene have quite competent amounts of con that they aren't particularly bothered by most weapons. Meanwhile most of the characters you get in the first few chapters (including your Jagen, for some reason) lose speed even from simple iron weapons. Those characters have to rely on low chance lucky Con level ups, while the rest of the roster gets to rely on a solid base stat. It makes the already fairly weak feeling earlygame squad feel even weaker
Maybe it could affect hitrate instead of speed, like, if the weapon is too heavy for you, you arent swinging or piercing it as precisely, so people with good con can use heavy weapons normally while people with weak con have some.... questionable hitrates
I say the lack of female characters with higher constitutions has more to do with the lack of diversity with more buffed female characters. In their artwork, there's barely any muscle even If they can be taller. Also, trainee Amelia somehow has more cons than Marissa, so...
Even echidna only has 8 con if you take away the 1 con from being promoted, which is the same as Ogier lmfao Vaida has 11 con without her promo which makes sense, but it also cuts so hard into her aid 😭fe hates women fr
Speed - Weight is my favourite system out of them, but this is mostly by default rather than a glowing endorsement. When it comes to games with systems to mitigate the loss in attack speed I find it common for both myself and a lot of other people for it to "feel bad" for some units to be weighed down when others are not. I would say this is probably the main reason why I prefer the simple "all units take the same speed penalty" approach. -Tellius is kind of neat early game for reasons you mentioned but is otherwise more or less a game without weapon weight from the mid game onward for most units most of the time. At the very least it doesn't feel especially bad because Strength can and will go up so it isn't a problem characters are locked into. -GBA goes pretty hard on that "feels bad" aspect of attack speed loss where there is almost no way to help a character out of it other than like one body ring you get all game or a promotion that helps slightly. It also feels especially bad for female characters. -Engage and especially Thracia can escape the feels bad aspect of this to some degree because the stat can go up on level up, but it's still there to a degree and affects some units (women mostly) more than others. Thracia escapes the "feels bad" more because one of the growth boosting scrolls also boosts Build growth and also Thracia has an excellent selection of weapons in it with variable weight. Characters with huge build can use more weapons without being weighed down, but almost every character can use something good without being weighed down much. Killing Edge only weighs 1 more than Iron Sword in this game and Silver is only 2 more than Iron. Both of which are plenty solid options. In addition to this the only characters with a lower base Build than 5 are some kind of Mage/Utility character and Tanya (RIP Tanya) so it overall just doesn't feel as limiting as in say GBA. Now with all of that said I kind of like your other propositions where we take other penalties for Build or just make it an outright requirement for certain weapons. I particularly care for the hit idea. I'd kind of like to see how this would pan out in practice. A bit of an aside: The disappointment I felt when playing Engage when I saw that Speed+ had the same SP cost and same maximum as Build+ was palpable. I'm sure I'm not alone there.
You'd expect Isadora to at least better a little better rescuing than the other cavaliers but because men have a higher con cap she has the same Aid stat
One additional feature worth mentioning that changed between fe3 and fe4 (I can't remember whether it was present in the first two games as it's been a long time since ive played them) is the addition of negative attack speeds. In fe3, AS bottoms out at 0, which isnt the case in fe4. This means that a unit like Azelle can consistently double gen 1 axe users at base despite starting out at -3 AS, while a unit like Cecil in fe3 can't even double the slowest potential enemies with an iron lance until she gets a point of speed, since she starts out with 2 AS when wielding one. Steel lances are even more punishing, needing 11 speed to start doubling 0 AS enemies. This makes the lighter weight of swords even more valuable, as sword users can start to hit the doubling threshold earlier than lance or axe users. This is only a problem early on in the game, and it does allow for some interesting mechanics like making it impossible to double with javelins since they weigh the same as the speed cap.
I'm of the opinion the best solution is to have a slow growth Con stat that also effects damage. Something to the effect of having Con over weapon weight improves the damage based on a percentage of the base weapon. Penalizes in a stat which can usually be overcome by fast units but isn't useless for slow characters.
well Lizard? How much can you handle? Can you handle the life one whose con is low? Those with con is low are unable to handle weapons with higher weight…Intelligent Systems, lend me your sexism!
I'm convinced heavy weapons only exist to make enemies look scary while also being absolutely pathetic sacs of free exp. Just look at Engage's smash weapons, any unit worth their salt doubles them.
The disparity on the gendered weight in gba i believe is cause of rescue. Females being lighter makes them easier to rescue, and because aid for mounted units is the class aid - unit's weight, female riders can rescue heavier allies. Shoutout to shanna's 20 aid
bro shanna has 15 aid without considering their own con, all mounted women have 5 less aid than mounted men (so marcus and isadora have the same aid), its so bad lol
Tying weapon weight to unit weapon level would be my ideal solution. I.e. a steel sword requiring D in swords would have a malus of -5 AS up until that character reaches C in swords
An idea I had to that effect; have weapon weight affect *damage* rather than just doubling, with a possible exception for tomes. Basically: Attack power = Weapon's Might + Unit's Strength (up to Weapon's Weight) Attack speed = Unit's Speed - Weapon's Weight This produces an intuitive effect where you want to give your heavy weapons to units with high strength because they can capitalize on it more, but speedy units want lightweight weapons so they can double to make up for mediocre single-hit damage. Just as importantly, it also means that lightweight weapons are not universally good; you hit a wall with their damage potential, since no weapon can ever do more than Might+Weight damage.
That'd basically just result in units either being 40 Mt 0 Spd or 40 Spd 0 Mt though, since to be able to apply a unit's 20 points of Strength, you'd need a weapon with 20 weight that then subtracts 20 from Speed - and there's little room for anything in the middle because once you're being doubled, you may as well lose every remaining point of speed and maximise the amount of Strength you're adding.
I like the weight system, I just never really liked how it's tied to the Constitution stat, which becomes more or less just a secondary Spd/Str stat. And it hurts even more how Con just isn't manipulatable, units with low Con are just stuck with it. I would like to see more of Fates' system where there's a distinction between offensive and defensive AS: an enemy with a Steel Axe can be doubled just the same as an enemy with an Iron Axe while keeping the "Weight" penalties of the Steel weapons intact.
I think the Fates system did a great job of balancing 1-2 range weapons, like Javelins, but Steel weapons are often not even considered. I'd rather forge a stronger Iron Sword and potentially sell Steel Swords than take the guaranteed speed punishment. Of course, this doesn't apply to units with Wary Fighter or absolute speed demons. Just a general preference.
@@TuskyBaby I'd actually say that the Steel weapons are balanced. There's plenty of units and builds in Fates that just don't use the Spd stat, and also certain enemies like Ninjas where you'd generally prefer just having more Atk than more Attack Speed to one-round. Steel weapons, compared to other weapons, maintain a solid niche of just having sheer Mt, which helps in this regard. Iron weapons in this case though have none of the advantages of Bronze and Steel weapons, and it's very easy to just sell Irons for Bronzes instead.
Something I remembered about weapon weight in Radiant Dawn or path of Radiance was it affected how fast your skill level goes up. And a high skill level was useful for either equipping higher tier weapons or getting bonus damage added. If you wanted to train a unit on cannon fodder, you could purposefully equipped a heavy spear to skill grind more effectively.
I like three houses system the best. Its basically the same as Tellius but it remains a factor after the earlygame. It made training weapons which i view as the same as slim weapons actually important. I never felt like steel weapons were too heavy to use either under this system. It felt well balanced
The biggest issue with 3H’s system is that early weapon weight when unit strength isn’t enough to nullify much, if any, weight just compounds on the issues of early Maddening. Kill thresholds are high so a fair amount of units need Steel Weapons to get kills, but those make most units get doubled and one rounded by a ton, so Training Weapons are mostly needed to not get doubled, but then you end up tickling most enemies. I do enjoy 3H weight past Ch3 when the game stops being unfair on maddening, particularly when it leads to interesting scenarios where for example Lysithea may train in Swords to certify for Swordmaster and gain a nice base strength to help nullify some Weight.
@rattyxoxo7397 I would argue this is more of an issue of enemy stat inflation than the weapon weight system being bad but I agree with youre overall point. It can feel like a dammed if you do dammed if you don't in the early game. I like that this made slim weapons actually good for the first time since fe 4. And it made other light weapons such as gauntlets good.
I think having HP reduce speed reduction from weapon weight would be more interesting like speed - (HP/5 - weapon weight). Units that are strong, but slow tend to have high hp. And fast units tend to have lower hp. HP is also more universal than strength, while also making sense since in a lot of games CON often determines HP.
The con disparity on gendered lines I think has one small benefit for female characters: They're much easier to rescue because any unit with higher con can pick them up. Even Natasha can carry lute around. That's really not much but it's something that I can appreciate.
One way to have a dedicated stat that isn't speed-but-lesser would be to have weight (potentially not just your equiped weapon weight, but also carried weapons and armor) also potentially reduce your move, and Build/Constitution mitigates that too. Now it's move-but-lesser and speed-but-lesset.
I like the existence of a gender con disparity, at least in concept, because it's an opportunity to make stats back up aesthetics a little more than they normally do. As a fantasy series, fire emblem has long had a drive to push character designs towards "ideal" images, and as a result fire emblem games tend to end up with male characters on the chunky side and female characters on the lithe side. Even within the same class, compare Fates' Charlotte to Arthur or Effie to Benny. In other RPGs, the starting point for representing these differences in stats is usually to give bigger characters higher strength and smaller characters higher speed, but Fire Emblem doesn't have a lot of space on this front because a single point of either stat can have such a big impact. Con/Bld is a nice compromise, provided it's used well - you can give smaller characters higher base speed but lower con, and bigger characters lower base speed but higher con, leaving both unit types with a reasonable doubling rate and damage output via different routes. If you were to design around this, you could easily create a situation where two units using the two approaches both had for sake of example 20spd and 30mt, and the only difference would be that the smaller character would have the option to sacrifice some might to increase speed, by using a lighter weapon than the one that makes them equal. This sort of design would only become a problem if you were still doing something like lowering female units' strength score in addition to lowering build, or lowering build and not raising speed to compensate, or using gender as the base source of build, instead of using the aesthetics that are related to gender (which is how you'd get your Ewan case, or for another example, not giving Rinkah high build despite her being the most muscular character in her game).
Having weapons need a certain Con/Build stat is a really interesting idea. Maybe it'd mean mercenaries can use Blades that myrmidons can't use for higher might. Or armor knights can use Greatlances that cavs and fliers can't use. It'd also make Body Rings/Con boosters more meaningful rather than being a meme since you could mybe make a unit able to wield a strong heavy weapom they wouldn't notmally be able to. I wish this were a system used in a game or romhack.
It feels weird that they removed the con and build stats in fates when they made Effie, who seems destined to absolutely DOMINATE those stats. I'd imagine her having one of the highest con or build stats in the entire series.
"An enemy with 11 attack speed cannot be doubled by any axe user". LOL and I thought Kaga hated axes in Marth's games enough. (No promotions for Fighters, no axe users period in Mystery and the game gives you Silver Axes expecting you to sell them) So my thoughts on every weight system: FE1-4: Equal-opportunity, but I agree with you that it makes Speed, which is already a really good stat, too good. FE5: This one's interesting in that not only does Build have a growth, there's ways to mess around with it via Crusader Scrolls. It's not quite Engage's Build Emblems, but there's a little customization you can do. It also led to silly unit concepts like Marty, who have the Build to be capture-bots and not much else. FE6-8: My least favourite weight system. There's the men vs women issue you mentioned, but I've also felt Con allocation per unit created a "the rich get richer" effect. Units with already shaky starts like Neimi and Nino tended to have bad Con on top of all their other issues, while already strong pre-promotes like Marcus, Harken and Pent tended to have higher Con than unpromoted examples of their classes. In theory their lower speed potential is supposed to make up for it, but once people realized the actual benchmarks for doubling in the GBA games are very low, that's not an issue. (And part of WHY the thresholds are so low is enemies are weighed down so much by THEIR weapons) And given how relevant Hand Axes are, and that they're on the somewhat heavy side... I feel only Pegasus Knights do low Con well, but Pegasus Knight is just a busted class in general. What's interesting is LOW con is actually a benefit for the Aid stat (affects rescuing), which is a minor niche that women cavalry have over their male counterparts but the gender issue with Con still sucks. FE9-11: My biggest issue with this is Weight stops mattering for physical units very, very quickly. If they had weight mitigated by Strength, they should've made weapon weights a lot higher across the board. Meanwhile, Mages get utterly screwed over if they have bad Strength... well it's mostly just Soren being built like a twig. Thinking about it, I actually kinda like this, as one of Ilyana's distinguishing factors over Soren is her higher Strength base and growth letting her more reliably use Thunder and other heavy tomes, while Soren has higher raw Magic and Speed. FE12-13: No weight isn't a bad system, except, as other comments said, with Nosferatu. There's a lot of really strong weapons in Awakening without many mitigating factors. Fates: I agree with you. A cool idea in theory, but could use some work. It also bugs me that Killer weapons are not only infinite use, but deal 4x damage on crits on top of their high crit chance. Yes they're a little weak when not critting, but they always felt a bit too strong. Three Houses: It feels like someone took PoR's system and tried to balance it. Strength/5 I feel might lean too far in the other direction though, /4 maybe. I like the encouragement to learn Armour for the Weight- skills, but in practice I rarely see anyone use those. Engage: Engage is currently my favourite one. Weight on weapons is just high enough that lighter ones have their uses and some strong weapons aren't always best, certain Forges and Engraves lowering Weight adds a lot to messing around with that system (-1 weight goes a long way for certain characters). Agreed that Build+ is redundant with Speed+, though admittedly you have Leif and Lyn at different times and you need to spend a lot of Bond Fragments on Lyn to get access to her best versions of Speed+, and you might not have that luxury. (Build+3 from Leif is super cheap in terms of fragments and SP and is accessible way earlier, and it comes with bonus reclassing proficiencies)
I think fe8s gender divide on con makes sense minus ewan, I think a better example would be fe7 Isadora having less con than units like matthew and kent
I like the Tellius(and 3H I guess to a lesser extent) style of offsetting weapon weight with strength, because it at least doesn't penalize you for using stronger weapons like most of the other games do. It does make strength kind of a 'double dip' stat though, providing damage as well as attack speed... not a perfect solution. I think Thracia/Engage is probably the best actual implementation of weight vs speed by integrating it into stats(and critically, emblems), but as mentioned in the video it ends up making build a worse, more specialized version of the speed stat. Weapon weight has always felt like a half-baked idea that struggles to find a place in the balance of Fire Emblem games. The GBA games have some units that suffer greatly from having egregiously low con, and it sucks that there are no good ways to deal with that shortcoming aside from the extraordinarily rare body rings. Conversely, in the Tellius games strength is disproportionately valuable, so some units snowball while others struggle to find a niche to fill. I think Fates changing the weapon design universally was a really good step in the right direction, but it felt overly complex and fiddly and has way too many edge cases and spots of imbalance -- you have to hope the devs did the extra work to account for these things or else it's still imbalanced and still limits the meta in a negative way. It would be a shame to lose weapon weight as an axis to make choices on(even if it would be the lesser evil at this point), so I hope they experiment some more to help give you meaningful choices to make about your weapon selection.
I find tellius and dsfe handled the weapon weight well and the best imo, the str mechanic is like highly valued in it, and many units can use many weapons with high str and not worry about the weight of the weapon
I think part of the reason getting rid of weapon weight in New Mystery, Awakening, and Fates felt good is that weapon weight and its effects are often just more difficult to see than other stats and their effects. You generally have to click an extra time to see what a weapon's weight is, and many games don't directly display AS, so the system feels clunkier than things you can check by just looking directly at a unit's stats screen. If the presentation of that information were more accessible in the UI, I think the system would feel better. Engage addresses this somewhat with the "in-use" stats display, although the flipside of this is that when I want to see a weapon's raw stats (e.g. b/c I want to trade for it, or calculate effective damage), it can be frustratingly difficult to actually access that information.
The biggest issue with Fates in CQ in regards to silver weaponry is that you have to buy it, because there are no free Silver weapons in the entire game. You do however get a ton of free iron weapons and bronze weapons that can then be forged to be of a similar strength with no downside, or just use a steel weapon to get a stronger hit without needing to buy anything. The only arguably worthwhile Silver Weapon is likely the Silver Bow, because you get no Steel Bow in CQ either, so there’s no free substitute of similarly strong power, and so it might be worth it to let archers like Niles or Mozu hit some kill thresholds. One of the things that I like about BR and Rev is that they give some free silver weapons to actually enable the debate about which weapons to be use when, while CQ’s weapon choices basically means you never use Steel or Silver weaponry over Bronze, Iron and other quirky stuff like the Bolt Axe or Horse Spirit
I ultimately prefer No Weight or Tellius Weight. Tellius does suck for early levels especially on mages but usually by midgame or promotion mages will have just enough str to wield e-c weapons without issue (in rd unpromoted Sorens 9 str lets him wield every wind tome except blizzard with no penalty). But really Weight just feels like an unfun hindrance. If Elibe remakes ever happen I hope for Lyn and Florinas sake they ditch weight bc a Lord should not be losing 5 speed using D rank weapons.
I do think making a weapon's weight affect other facets of using it is honestly just a good idea, because rather than having Speed and whatever flavor of Speed But Worse to interact with weight, it suddenly becomes something you have to put a lot more thought into if a weapon's weight also affects its accuracy and potential damage. Another thing with weight is just the fact that none of this would be much of an issue if not for doubling being a thing, which I want to know the genesis of that mechanic in specific. If I were making a Fire Emblem-like game, I'd just get rid of doubling entirely and just fold critical hit chance into the accuracy check much like a certain popular fantasy heartbreaker to fill a similar role.
I think a neat work around could be finding some type of way of incorporating low constitution into having its own benefit like a crit multiplier. That way the stat is more of a sliding scale rather than big number go brrrrr
The weight - strength system was particularly funny in Radiant Dawn, as by part 2 every unit is a pre-promote, and by part 3 essentially everyone has enough strength to never be weighed down ever, barring mages with siege tombs. Really the last time weight is even a factor is Nephenee and Marcia with Steel Greatlances.
To me the most basic idea for weight tbat i haven't seen used yet is for carrying stuff. Like weight doesnt make your attack speed lower, and every item you can carry has weight not just weapons. Then if the total combined weight of all your gear exceeds your con you get -1 move, if it exceeds 2x your build you get -2 move if it exceeds 3x your build -3 and so on. Light weigh characters like Pegasus knigts would have yo carefully consider if move matters more or having more inventory. It makes slow units with high build worth while so long as you add enough cool items that you would want tomout in your inventory. Maybe rather than being consumables stat boosters provide their effect whenever they are in your inventory meaning characters with high build can have more of them. Or you have a larger degree of weapons with secondary effects so someone with high con can have a more diverse bag of tricks vs a lower con person who now has to make careful choices about what they bring with them
I generally just don’t enjoy the weight system at all. In every game it’s been in, it’s just been a redundant stat that you can ignore when your stats get big enough. I love the idea behind it, but it hasn’t been done in a way that I like. (Disclaimer; I havent played awakening-3 houses)
Wonder ifnit would have made more sense to have skill add to con, or some average between def and res. We dont need more reasons to stack the stat that decides if we take out an enemy in one turn or not.
I like the Tellius system in theory, the problem is that weapon weigbt becomes nore or less irrelevant about halfway through the game for everyone that isnt a mage or Mist. I do like how the STR stat sets Soren and Ilyaba apart a bit
An idea I had for con would be that if a unit's con was greater than the weapon's weight, they would gain AS equal to the difference. This way, con would feel just as important as speed rather than con being worthless if a unit has poor speed.
At that point con is just a second speed stat. I suggest lowering the bonus and slightly increasing the penalty. That way con will be better than speed untill it matches weight but worse afterwards.
Regarding the GBA games, I like the few heavy weapons that only a few characters can use effectively (iron/steel/silver blade). It makes high-con sword users like Dieck, Hector (promoted), and Gilliam (promoted) stand out a bit more. I also think it's sort of interesting that steel weapons weigh more than silver weapons. This mostly just makes it so that I never buy steel weapons though. It could definitely be implemented better.
I have an alternative way of making sure that people do not spam silver weapons in Fates. All we need to do is increase the forge options for the lower class weapons and decrease the forge options for silver weapons. The silver weapon can be a more generalist weapon while forged iron and steel weapons cover certain situations better.
I never really thought about the sexist Con before but yeah that is rather dumb While it is realistic that women are on average smaller than men, there isn't such a huge difference that there should be nearly 5 Con between the average male and average female in Sacred Stones
I lowkey like the GBA version of weapon weight, where it doesn't grow. I've actually thought more about promotions and body rings now going back and playing them than I did as a kid. Kinda similar to what you were saying in FE1 giving Jeigan the slim lance, in FE8 Chapter 5x (aka the worst one), Kyle starts with a Steel Lance and an Iron Sword, where Forde starts with the Javelin and a Steel Sword. And in all of my previous playthroughs, I've just kinda kept them with their original weapons. Kyle's base con is exactly the same as that Steel Sword, though, whereas Forde gets weighed down by 1. Granted, Forde already has a point or two of speed ahead of Kyle at base, but realizing that if I switch Kyle's Iron Sword with Forde's Steel Sword, I essentially just increase his damage output with 0 penalty. I also had things to consider with my Pegasus Knights, particularly during my 0% growths run, deciding whether or not I wanted to promote them into Falcoknights or Wyvern Lords, as Wyvern Lord gives them a bit more con, but less speed, and Falcoknight gave them less con, but more speed and access to a lighter weapon class. Idk, it was just an interesting amount of decisions I had to make.
Not having weapon weight in Awakening honestly drove me absolutely insane. It was one of the first things I noticed, and it completely removed the utility of specifically choosing a heavier weapon to set up an enemy for a weaker unit to take the kill. Obviously there's other ways to do that, but it personally drove me mad, and it's STILL one of my least favorite aspects of Awakening to this day.
I really like the Bld system. I'm on my 3rd playthrough of engage at the moment and having a stat independent of str that, when it grows, allows you to use stronger weapons without a spd and avo penalty just makes the unit leveling process so much more rewarding. I always used to get excited when a unit leveled res in Echoes, and now when a unit levels Bld in Engage I pop off. In fixed growths, these Bld growths are also guaranteed after a certain number of levels adding to depth at which exp distribution becomes a part of your strategy in such a limited exp economy. It also gives an incentive to take units through classes like armor knight for the huge Bld growth rate modifier. It works so well. I hope it continues to return.
Weapon Weight and the Con stat in general (I started with the GBA FE games) has always been one of those mechanics I never really dug into, but looking back I wish I had. It's an interesting idea that's explained pretty badly in-game. I'm a bit torn on how it works though. Stronger weapons already have a balancing factor in having fewer uses, as well as being rarer and more expensive, so the higher Weight as well feels like they tried to overcorrect. It reminds me of the early Energy or Heavy Weapons in Fallout 3 and New Vegas, where they were terrible to spec into early game because the IDEA was this powerful gun you could break out but had to use sparingly because the ammo was rare. But then they went and ruined it by also making the weapons nearly broken which not only made them even scarcer, but also negatively impacted their damage so they ended up being no better than your basic Physical weapons... I think that's part of why many players, myself included, just stick with Iron Weapons in games without infinite uses (Fates/Engage, or late game Awakening with Armsthrift). They have so much going for them with lower weight, better availability, lower cost, and more uses (and often better Accuracy) that the few points of Might just aren't worthwhile. I love the idea of the system, but I don't particularly love what any game has done WITH it. I suppose Fates' is the best for what I like about it, but even then it feels odd, and I'd often rather not deal with the hassle of the debuffs, especially when you don't get the option to use a different weapon for Enemy Phase so you can end up a crippled mess from chaff units running into you. IIRC Fates also did away with Trade-equipping so you couldn't even change weapons that way!
16:35 Though weight-3 just isn't good enough. Especially since you don't really want to master armored classes with fast units and the units that can master them are so slow that it's not going to make a difference.
You know I think it would be interesting if build added to your HP or defence just to see how it would go of corse not strait adding but you know it sounds interesting somthing like that anyway
currently playing binding blade. weapon weight seems more significant in how they affect common enemies. steel lance guys hurt but are easy to double. not related to weight: iirc, in 3h, units get base stats of the class they change into so it's worth training armor for stats.
My favorite weight system, at least on paper (I still haven’t played the game yet, so I don’t know how well it works in practice), is that from Vesteria Saga: weapons have their weight penalty reduced by half your strength… For physical weapons. Magic weapons instead benefit from half your magic stat in weight mitigation. Personally, I think there’s probably not a _perfect_ system for this, and that each individual game should weigh (heh) the pros and cons of each one. Except Con as weight mitigation. That one should’ve been left behind.
I get that "realism" is a poor argument in fantasy games, but I hope you're still aware that teenage boys, as long as they've reached puberty, can often outperform grown women in sports - see the many instances where professional female athletes are beaten by second-league or amateur male athletes. The quality and composition of muscle is very different in men to women, and the general build means that centre of gravity etc are much better suited for physical activity with men. Also, certain things like grip strength are so overwhelmingly in favour of men that the women with the strongest grip strength are about equivalent to the men with the weakest grip strength. Realistically speaking, Ewan would still be able to fight Neimi physically and win, because, well, do you really think that Neimi with her stature has any business fighting? And she has the same con as him. Trust me, I'm a woman, and every woman who has tried to wrestle with a man while he is not going easy will confirm that the vast majority of men who aren't psysically disabled will kick our asses. Thankfully most men know this and appropriately are very gentle. This is not to say women suck, we just have very different strengths, and I honestly really don't want to compete in waging war. A society that would send women to die on the battlefield would die out, and not necessarily because they would lose, but because of everything else the women are contributing that is being lost on the population. Anyway, all the scores are of course just numbers, of course, and ultimately none of the appearance really factors in. Not to mention that IRL, str and dex and skl and spe and all those stats are not completely independent of each other, and actually you need to be strong to be fast, etc.
I think fates' system could be good, but there are a lot of facets of it that just kinda suck. Like, at the end of the day the priority goes to Prf> iron> bronze (for if you won't be critting)> steel (if you weren't gonna be doubling anyway, technically if you speed is insane you could also use it but...)> silver, which is generally gonna be used to one shot one maybe 2 guys for the whole map
That Neimi example is more of an example of why you don't promote Neimi to Sniper than an example of why Neimi is bad, bc a Ranger Neimi isn't getting weighed down by a steel bow at all and has the same speed as Sniper Neimi. Neimi is still bad mind, but that's more bc of poor bases and starting bowlocked and at best becoming bowlocked and swordlocked in a game where you generally want 1-2 range and being bowlocked is especially bad.
Regarding one of your suggestions. Having a Strength (or CON in FE's case) requirement for certain items is actually pretty common in many TTRPGs and CRPGs (Miniguns in Fallout 1&2 required 7 strength). D&D 5e even has it for armor. But Larian removed this in BG3 because... reasons. Another way to utilize CON would be through ways you could overpower foes. Expand on the capture/con system of Thracia 776. Similar to how strong characters in D&D can do things like grapple, pin down and do all sorts of other things to bully weaker characters. Again removed from BG3 because... reasons.
I vastly prefer the system used in the GBA games and engage. It's a simple but effective system for getting you to use different weapons in different situations. Giving weight mitigation to strength was one of the biggest mistakes the series has ever made, which greatly devalues weight as a mechanic. Yes, even in 3H. It's an inherent balance issue which exacerbates snowballing for physical units. You don't need 35 str for edelgard to double everything in sight with an iron axe; by the time you have 35 str, you're doubling everything in sight with a hand axe instead, because losing 3 speed just isn't that big of a deal at that point of the game.
I think the classic no weight mitigation can work, but you need to really give variable stats to units based on what weapons they have access too. Tearring Saga sort of does this but I think it can go further. For example, swords have low weight but also low hit, while lances have higher weight but very high hit, so your cavs join with mediocre speed and skill and have a choice between maybe doubling with low accuracy and might with swords or go for a reliable higher damage lance attack. On the other hand, myrms and mercs will join with 7-8 more points in both speed and skill so they can consistently double and hit with swords, but they don't get 1-2 range. Finally, most axe users start with a similar speed and skill to mercs, but axes have even less hit than swords, so they end up being as fast and inaccurate as sword cavs, but with the damage of lance cavs. Though it still does have the problems of stat caps locking axe users to a relatively low max speed which is one of the ways I think it can still improve.
3H is my favorite system by far, even if it can be a bit unintuitive. One thing I wanna add is that, despite Steel weapons being extremely heavy in this game, they have a niche in being the go-to weapon to use on Player Phase while making use of combat arts (with Iron remaining king on Enemy Phase). I liked this approach, as Steel Weapons in other games were either complete garbage, or just straight up better than Iron.
You could have luck reducing weapon rate as well as increasing your dodge (reduces chance of scoring a critical hit). I feel like luck doesn't have anything to do a lot of the time as you can get additional dodge in many games from pair-up bonuses, and once your opponent's crit-chance has reached 0 there's no benefit to lowering it further (very few enemies have unusually high crit chances in my experience, so you can usually get that number down to 0 without any work). This makes luck a little more impactful but, once again, the effect wares off by the end-game. Either way, it helps ward off the problem of some stats just being better than others. Important to note that 3 houses also gave you shields (as did SoV) and wands/staves to weigh down units further, and I think combat arts could add weight. These are ways of further upping the weapon-weight on a unit (especially if the arts allowed you to double) without just making super heavy weapons. Having characters who's build doesn't grow is an interesting option, I'm not sure I like the 'feel' of a stat not growing though (it doesn't feel great how rarely it grows in engage, and the way resistance barely grows in SoV feels bad), but perhaps if it was linked to class then that could mitigate this problem (I don't think anyone's annoyed about how movement doesn't grow). I do agree that it's not something that always has to exist and it's ok to let players just use the 'better' weapon tyoes at the end-game, so getting rid of it is a valid solution.
I know you already went over _Fates_ a bit here, but how do you feel specifically about that game's one-sided speed system (effective speed)? It has some interesting implications, since something like steel weapons affect the wielder's ability to follow up, but not the enemy's ability to follow up against them. That and there are a select few weapons that make it easier for the enemy to follow up without hindering the user's ability to follow up, like Beruka's Axe. Heck, the ranged S-level weapons actively make it easier for _both_ parties to follow up. Do you think this could be a more interesting way to balance weight if applied to more weapons?
I think it's definitely a good idea, it's how I've implemented weight in my own rip-off. One-sided speed allows weight to just be a question of damage output - multiple weaker hits vs one larger hit - instead of also having to consider the defensive impact of high weight weaponry - bringing a point of speed and a point of weight a little closer together in value.
Worth mentioning is that Starsphere adds +15% growth to all stats including Build! Which means that, for a lot of characters (mages, Pegasus knights, and even axe users), Starsphere effectively boosts speed growth by 30%. Essentially, this OP DLC skill is even better than I originally anticipated.
Most units cap build if you starsphere them early enough. Starsphere is one of the main reason I switched back to using no DLC, along with all the sp buffs.
The problem with weapon weight is doubling is really powerful. Anything that makes you not double is a waste of time. This feels awful especially on effective weapons.
Three Houses' weapon weight system still confuses me to this day. I can never know how it is calculated and I'm having to do guess work on when it would be time for someone like my Yuri to be able to use a Silver Sword without getting weighed by it and my guesstimating says that the earliest would be one or two chapters before the last chapter of the pre-timeskip but I still don't know exactly how much Strength he needed to not be weighed down by a Silver Sword. 😅
Like many mechanics, I feel Engage handles weapon weight best. It's basically the same as the GBA games, but weapons are balanced around weight better. Silver is actually heavier than steel. Although admittedly, with the refinement system, this can often feel like a build tax. For the endgame, a high build unit would likely use a silver weapon +3, while a low build unit would use a steel +5. They've got comparable stats aside from wt, but the steel weapon is about 60% more expensive to refine. The early FE games (and Echoes) that use Spd-Wt always felt awful to me. But there's another mechanic that's likely more the culprit than Spd-Wt. It only takes Speed+1 to double. This makes it so using a heavy weapon is extremely punishing. You can be in situations where using a weapon a mere 2 wt higher than your current one can take you from doubling to being doubled. I might warm up a bit to the simple AS = Speed-Wt system if there was a game that used this, but also required +4/5 speed to double. But as of now, there isn't, and all games that use this system feel miserable. I never liked strength as the wt mitigator either. I'm basically in agreement with the video. Wt is only relevant early game, and a good stat is made better. Dividing it by 5 in Three Houses also just felt kind of dumb, and largely irrelevant. You've got, maybe a 10 point spread between a high and low strength unit, so their difference in ability to wield heavy weapons is pretty minimal. I can see where they were coming from. They wanted weight to remain relevant throughout the game, but also wanted to have a growing stat to mitigate weight. But like a lot of Three Houses mechanics, the thought process was half-baked. I really disliked the weightless weapon system from Awakening. Partly because it makes weapon decision trivial. Just use the strongest weapon. But also, it doesn't play nice with the weapon rank system. When a unit promotes, they often gain a low weapon rank for a secondary weapon. But in Awakening, it's really hard to justify using a bronze axe when you can use a silver sword. In previous games, E rank weapons are often reasonably viable. Your new, low level weapon type becomes the cheap light and fast weapon in your loadout (or throwing weapon) which grants extra weapon triangle coverage, while your primary weapon type is the powerhouse option, killer, brave and silver to deal with beefier enemies. I want a reason to use a secondary weapon type. So low rank weapons need to not be good enough to justify carrying, and making them light is a good way to do that. I can also say I like what Fates did. I'm a fan of systems where most weapons are good for something. I'd love to see this return and be refined a little. I don't recall the issue with forging cheap weapons being the best option. My last playthrough, I really only remember having one forging mineral to work with, so forging was just not an option for most weapon types. In the days of street pass, this may have been different. But when I played through last year, I felt I got some decent use out of most (but not all) weapons.
Gosh, I hate how the GBA games handled gender-based con. I wanna use Fir/Marisa instead of Rutger/Joshua and feel less bad than I already do due to their starting levels/stats.
I do appreciate the lack of weapon weight in Awakening on player characters as I feel like Steel Weapons having lower accuracy, requiring a higher weapon level and costing more is all a trade-off enough. In the GBA games, I find it hard to justify using Steel Weapons much ever, especially in FE6 where the accuracy divide is much bigger. That being said, enemies not being weighed down and having to deal with Steel weapon ambush reinforcements is definitely not a fun time, though that's mainly a problem with ambush reinforcements
I do agree you use steel weapons less in GBA but they’re nice to have in your inventory. Like a merc can benefit from having an iron and a steel sword in their inventory because sometimes high defence enemies can take more damage from one stronger attack than two lighter attacks especially if there say an armour knight where an iron weapon might not be able to damage them. But for the most part I do agree they are probably the worse weapon tier but still have a use. It’s why I personally actually do like weapon weight
11:09 I’m pretty sure shadow dragon uses the same system path of radiance does
Pinning this because its correct, thanks for the correction!
It does, but most weapons are so light that the entire system stops mattering after only a few chapters. The amount of weapons heavier than 10 weight can be counted on a single hand.
@@jules9424 yeah it feels like the weapons are weighted as if weight worked like 1 still and the decision to implement the fe9 weight system didn't quite reach whoever was crunching the weapon stat numbers
New mystery is the one without weight
weapon weight should increase the more kills a weapon has, it truly does get heavier since it carries every soul taken with it
Kelik: I wasn't just being edgy when I asked how much weight you can handle. I want to know if I'll have enough attack speed to double you with a Silver Blade.
I was thinking the opposite that weapon ranks should decrease the weight penalties for each rank.
@ZX-Gear that's a neat concept. You could potentially do away with rank requirements for most weapons then, since that would soft restrict silver or etc to characters with enough weapon rank to actually make them better.
I mean, it's not something I would apply to all weapons, but the concept of a cursed weapon or something that is very strong but that gets more hevy with each kill, eventually screwing up it's usefulness if you abuse it seems interesting.
This could be the new Durability system too, as only an S unit would be able to handle a single weapon for good, and they could even make an SS weapon that nobody could maintain beyond the set amount of uses.
It may be overly complicated but I wonder how different weapons needing different stat checks would be like. Ex axes weight is reduced by strength, swords don't reduce at all, and lances by skill. That kind of thing.
maybe swap sword and lance, i think it's well known that poking someone with a stick is easier than swinging a stick properly
My main issue with the lack of weapon weight in Awakening was that the classic "Nosferatu Robin" strat only really works because it's no longer one of the heaviest tomes in the game that would put you in danger of being doubled. But I definetly loved not having my mages lose speed with the weakest tome equipped.
That was the issue with Fire Emblem 4 and 5. Wind Magic was BUSTED due to the low weight and Sety did not help matters with his tome Folsety as it gave him +20 Speed to just kick the other Magic types while they are down.
@@ZX-Gear I mean, it kinda makes sense for wind magic to be so light, as well as having a high crit chance.
Well Nosferatu tanking wasn’t broken because nosferatu was weightless, it was broken because snowballing was broken. Noferatu got gutted in FE fates, yet it’s still decent, as long as your character isn’t getting doubled.
@@NightOfTheRavens Yeah, but it doesn't make sense that wind tomes have the same might as fire and thunder tomes
I like Shadows of Valentia's system. Everyone has some sort of weapon a d upgraded weapons lower speed
What I think is funniest about fe9s weight system is that the one point of strength that illyana has at base is one of the things people immediately bring up when talking about her vs soren. Mages definitely got the short end of the stick with that weight system
Getting knives as a weapon type should give extra strength too so that not only could the unit use the damn knives (the weapon type is already weak enough why would you want to use it on a mage lol), but it would give a legitimate reason to chose them since they would help with magic. Knives should also be efficient against mages to give them a real utility both for thieves and so that mages chosing them have a valid use case for them.
That would have made all that a lot better, and chosing between staff utility or not being weighted down by tomes would be a really interesting decision.
@@Laezar1as far as I can tell, knives exist as an option for mages just so all the prepromoted sages you get can’t use staves. Since they all come prepromoted with the worse knife option.
@@mistriousfrog I get that but it's pretty lame. I think with what I suggested staff would still be a better choice overall but knives would feel like they have a genuine niche rather than not even being worth the inventory slot
The basic systems, where it's just speed - weight + con, are mostly fine. Especially if con is class-based.
It helps distinguish weapons, can be used to give classes an identity, without being overly intrusive.
And if you want to stop it from fading into the background in the late game, all that needs to be done is to add more weight/weapon tiers so units don't outscale the mechanic.
Right. However, I think it needs some rebalancing. Because Str and Def rise in about equal measure per level, the rising HP means mightier weapons are needed to compensate for the HP increase. Swords have traditionally gotten the shaft because swordfighter con is usually considerably lower than the Wt of anything mightier than an Iron Sword or Killing Edge. Low Mt requires damage by doubling, and low WT and high Hit support that. The high speed of typical swordfighter required for doubling supports dodge-tanking which low Def and HP require. However, their Con is measured to take away their main advantage if they do get better weapons, while the hit of weapons in general has increased. Well-liked sword locked units either don't fit this archetype, or they are given abilities like Astra, Luna, Adept, or +n to crit to allow them to deal several attacks worth of damage.
The Pegasus Knight is another unit type that is usually screwed over by this as well: Losing their main advantage because their stats don't actually support it.
Imagine if using heavier weapons would actually increase Build over time as units get used to using heavy weapons. No idea how to balance that, just a funny thought I had while watching
That could be an interesting idea. Make it to where you can use any weapon in the game (if you can afford it, of course), but it comes at a speed hit if you don't have a high enough weapon rank.
It's all fun and games until a army of buffed shamans arrives
@@joshuabonesteel2303 Oh my gosh, I hadn't considered Weapon Rank possibly reducing Weight Penalties. That's so smart!
@@GeaForce "You asked what side are we on?, we are on the side of side chest pose!!!" -Super Muscular Dark Druid.
For example: Give all units the ability to gain +1 permanent con after 40 successful hits with a weapon that weighs them down(only once, otherwise it kinda breaks the game)
Fe4 has minus speed with weapons which can be really dump. Also weight is just binded to the weapon type. This was done to help with hard bosses like arvis and the Helswrath users. It sadly punishes using units og the same type like the fire mage Azelle or non brave axe users
The thing that sucks with FE4's weight though is they made Fire objectively worse than Thunder and Wind. All magic has the same stats, it only differs in Weight and Fire's is ridiculously low.
@@BigKlingy Oh a wild Klingy!
Yeah... It sucks that it balanced that way and i hope it will be fixed in a potential remake.
@@BigKlingy yo I didn’t expect to see you here but yeah. WInd is just GOOD for no reason in that game
@@Blazecap Literally the only time Wind isn't good is vs Arvis since Valflame has weapon triangle over it. But that's ALL.
First time I played FE4 I thought my ROM had a bug. Why the hell does Fire make you lose 11AS without any upside at all?
My favorite is with the build that you can level up. Though I think the growths for build should be higher all around. No single digit growths
Kid named Marty:
I love build growth but a part of it is definitely that it’s because it’s rare
Leveling build and movement is why thracia 776 is the best fe game
@marinary1326 I thought it was Leadership Stars and the Pursuit Critical Coefficients.
I feel Engage got Build growths just right. Growths are around 10% for most, with the really high ones being 20%, but most people only need 2 or 3 Build levels over the course of a playthrough and you're likely to get that by the end. Or you could just inherit Leif's Build+ skills, but levelling build lets you save on SP and slots.
The Fates version and con are my favorite. Not only do the downsides make using the higher rank weapons more of a question than a given, they also made a bunch of unique weapons that I hope come back in future games (weapons with built in rallys, weapons that do more damage on enemy phase, the guard naginata). It’s worth mentioning that forging in Fates is a bit more of a pain than in other games with forging. You need ore and you need multiple copies of the same weapon to make forges.
Constitution works well when the rescue mechanic is in the game. I just wish the gender disparity wasn’t there. Especially when they alter the way rescue works for the mounted units.
I wouldn't mind female units having lower con nearly as much if women didn't get 5 less aid when mounted compared to men. I mean really, are the horses they ride weaker too?
@@DuelingShade seriously if the 5 less aid wasn’t a thing, then (I think) at least one mounted woman in each game could have a niche in rescuing a u it no one else can.
Clearly we need to make Dexterity the stat that mitigates weapon weight - it even makes a certain amount of sense! Of course being more skillful with a weapon would let you compensate for a heavier one.
Yay, some love for Fates' funky AS system! I genuinely think players would have been more receptive to it if they had just been given more intuitive descriptions, perhaps paired with a pop-up tutorial if necessary. That being said, I can't really think of a succinct way to describe it in one phrase/line, so I can understand how it turned out the way it did, just a little unfortunate.
Also, I enjoyed the idea of weapon weight having penalties other than AS in future games! I think the two have just been tied together for so long that players wouldn't even consider other possibilities (and to be honest, I doubt the developers would change it up either). Still, the concept of speedy units getting a relevant penalty while non speedy units with high Con/Build/etc. getting to play normally sounds interesting. It wouldn't be enough to completely balance the classes to be equally relevant across all playstyles, but it could be a neat start.
The main problem I had with Fates' weapons (and the game as a whole) was how much of the system was tied to the streetpass mechanics. I think the system would have been better if forging had been strictly tied to a resource like money or removed entirely so +4 raider weapons weren't the go to option 95% of the time. I enjoy the game much more when I don't interact with many of the my castle systems like the lottery or forging because it forces better resource management and encourages more variety in the weapons I use to tackle various obstacles.
I thought the Brave Weapons' and Steel Weapons' debuffs were super smart, but it's the Silver Weapon Debuff where I grow concerned. Gettibg weaker with every battle is just auch a risky game to play, and I rarely find the extra might worth the hassel (even without forges).
Hi Lizard!
Game theory videos are my favorite. You're so knowledgeable and insightful!
I really like the 3H system. Mitigating penalties for heavy weapons is possible, but it either builds up slowly, so the weight doesn't become irrelevant, or requires you to specifically invest in it by training heavy armor and spending a skill slot (which also gives a nice distinguishing feature to armored knights and their derivatives, since they get to use bigger weapons without having to grind through ranks of an otherwise useless proficiency, in exchange for their lower movement). And it works nicely with the accessory system, where you can get cheap defense points or spell boosters by increasing WT.
I like con the most, allows for for speed to still be the core state and unlike str varients EVERYBODY wants speed and keeping con is just another balancing method to allow a slower fighter archtype or something, i do wish pegsai had con making me worth actuly using them more thoe
I think the best feeling system is PoR/RD.
Late game, you get the good part of the weightless systems like Awakening, where weapon weight is effectively eliminated from calculation since it’s not that interesting, especially as stats bloat towards endgame and single points of speed won’t make doubling thresholds.
You also get a super dynamic early game where a unit can get a huge power spike by hitting a +2 AS level. I feel like every time I play PoR there’s a different member of the squad that pops off early, be it Ike, Boyd, or Oscar, and makes me always look forward to playing another run. It encourages you to actually train early units instead of waiting for godly prepromotes or hoarding bexp for later.
I liked that the Tellius games let the characters grow out of having the weight penalties throughout the game. I've been playing Fates quite a bit lately and I like the various pros and cons of each weapon type. Though now I'm wondering if just getting a bunch of forged iron weapons would be the way to go for my next Conquest run.
In theory, the difficulty of using forged weapon in fates is having to plan out how and when you are getting the materials to enable forges.
Since there's only one mine, all other forge mineral are going to come from trades and arena fighting, putting a heavy timing penalty to the more advanced forge levels, something a new bought higher rank weapon doesn't have.
However, with castle visits it all doesn't matter, spamming hacked castles give all the minerals one could possibly need and more. That said, a forged weapon tends to cost double the money as a weapon of similar attack might
I agree it's nice, but I think Str is the wrong stat for it. It basically means screwing low-Str characters out of a big advantage.
I don't mind weapon weight in principal, but it seems like the developers aren't really mindful of how Con/Spd/Wt interact (in games where they are relevant to AS, of course) given how they build some characters.
I liked how Three Houses handled it, using a percentage of Str instead of Con, but the problem with that system is that Wt becomes a bit redundant later in the game because characters can negate so much of it, and it compresses potential variety within the cast once that differentiating factor is lost. Con doesn't grow on its own, so the relationship between Con and Wt is consistent, and you can also use this relationship to design a wider variety of functionally unique characters because it introduces a meaningful new variable to alter.
I think the simplest and most effective way to make Weight matter is to subtract by 2 for every point over your unit's Constitution/Build. So if a weapon weighs 10 and your unit's Build is 7, that's a -3, then simply double it, and now said character has -6 speed by being +3 overweight. This'll make Build similar to Luck, in that having excessive amounts of it doesn't help a unit in combat that much. The benefits of having this stat maxed out is minimal compare to having other stats maxed out. HOWEVER, having too little can screw with a units viability. Too little luck and the unit's vulnerable to crits. Too little Build makes doubling unreliable, and makes one susceptible to getting doubled.
Course, in this state, there needs to be a way to increase a units Build. You can make it another stat that can be gained on level ups, or you can be a bit more funky and make the leveling of build directly tied to how often they use weapons too heavy for them to use. Also, with Weight now serving such a severe penalty, you can make items that directly affects one's Build, like a potions that temporarily increased one's Build just as Pure Water increases one's resistance. Or an enfeeble status that lowers one's Build by, say, 3-5 points, which affects a unit's both offensively and defensively, without directly impacting how hard a unit hits or how much damage a unit takes.
I we want to be even more fruity with this, we can keep Build as a static stat, and have Weapon Rank offset any weight issues instead, as well as having individual weapon proficiencies that's tied to a character and can be leveled independently from Weapon Ranks. Which is to say the more a unit uses a weapon, the more bonuses they get from using that specific weapon. So use an Steel Sword 100 times and now a unit get's a +2 Might and -2 Weight on using Steel Swords. That'll be Weapon Proficiencies. Meanwhile you'll also have Weapon Rank Bonuses that applies to all types of weapons in that class. S rank Swords might give you +5 Speed for ALL sword weapons, for example.
This allows a Unit able to power through Weight Penalties by simply using a weapon multiple times, as well as give transferable power to other weapons as to not dissuade a player from changing weapons. This is a pretty radical change but it makes some sense, swing a sword a 1000 times and now you can swing said sword very well. This'll also lay the foundation for when you pick up a different sword. It might not be what you're used to, but it IS still a sword, so basic sword fundamentals still apply. Heck, you can make it so mastering weapons is tied directly to Weapon Rank, or just remove Weapon Rank entirely and have Weapon Mastery give permanent buffs to other weapons in the same class or even direct stat buffs, encouraging you to master ALL the weapons. Make it something similar to how SoV did Weapon Arts, but it gives more than just Arts.
But like I said, all this is pretty fruity, might as well make a new game with this system in mind at this point instead of modifying and Frankenstein pre-existing FE titles. Probably better to stick to, "Overweight gives -2 speed per point over instead of -1" idea I proposed earlier.
I love working with the weapon weight in Shadow Dragon. Maybe because of how easy it is to calculate one's AS after weapon weight considerations. It's just very easy to understand and I'm not having to deal with an extra stat like Con.
What I've come to appreciate in the GBA games is that your Con doesn't change unless you promote and so it affects the kind of weapons you can use, meaning you have limitations put in place and encourage strategic play because you need to decide which weapon on a unit will yield better results.
Banger vid, good stuff!
Kelik sighting in a video all about weight in Fire Emblem, this video is perfect
I think weapon weight could be fun to play with when mixed with other mechanics. Like weapon skills (thracia) or stat bonuses. Like a really heavy lance with beeg might that gives wary fighter or smth idk
Vestaria Saga (other game made by Kaga) has a bunch of interesting weapons with high weight as a drawback, can't remember too many of them but I remember there is a spear that weighs 15 vs the standard spear's 9 but halves the damage taken by the wielder. IIRC there is also one that weighs 18 but works like an FE6 eclipse tome and always leaves the enemy at 1hp.
Another good video idea if you need one could be "early Fe maps" and how they work to introduce a player to the game mechanics
Example would be awakening from chapter 0 to the lucina fight as that's before everything opens up. Fates the prologue maps before the route split but I also consider the first maps of each route it's own starting map too.
Engage is probably some of the most fun maps as it's a fun puzzle to play repeatedly
I did a video awhile ago on engages early game maps and what they teach you. Maybe I'll do one on the rest of the series too!
@@actuallizard guess I'll check later. Though engage is better with replays I loved the early maps more as I replayed them and got used to the system
I feel Fe games have two stories to them. The early maps where you got little resources and the main game as both play differently with options.
Awakening for example you get an early elixir and hammer so it's telling you to use it wisely especially on lunatic. That's the kind of puzzles I love where they give you everything you just need to figure it out
Fates chapter 5 teaches the player a lot of the games mechanics without being too obvious about it
@@________-vy4sx honestly best part is giving you an early dancer which should be a thing in every game going forward. Gunter should be a bit better in battle but giving us maid and butler units aka the healer with protection is great
I think that Lapis and Etie are especially egregious cases of build not reflecting the capabilities of female characters. Both of these characters are supposed to be incredibly strong, yet they have a poor base build and a growth rate of 5%. It's just. Not good.
I think what makes Engage Con annoying is that the stat pretty much only matters for the earlygame characters who join with miserably low Con. Most of the characters after Firene have quite competent amounts of con that they aren't particularly bothered by most weapons. Meanwhile most of the characters you get in the first few chapters (including your Jagen, for some reason) lose speed even from simple iron weapons. Those characters have to rely on low chance lucky Con level ups, while the rest of the roster gets to rely on a solid base stat. It makes the already fairly weak feeling earlygame squad feel even weaker
Maybe it could affect hitrate instead of speed, like, if the weapon is too heavy for you, you arent swinging or piercing it as precisely, so people with good con can use heavy weapons normally while people with weak con have some.... questionable hitrates
I say the lack of female characters with higher constitutions has more to do with the lack of diversity with more buffed female characters. In their artwork, there's barely any muscle even If they can be taller. Also, trainee Amelia somehow has more cons than Marissa, so...
Even echidna only has 8 con if you take away the 1 con from being promoted, which is the same as Ogier lmfao
Vaida has 11 con without her promo which makes sense, but it also cuts so hard into her aid 😭fe hates women fr
Speed - Weight is my favourite system out of them, but this is mostly by default rather than a glowing endorsement.
When it comes to games with systems to mitigate the loss in attack speed I find it common for both myself and a lot of other people for it to "feel bad" for some units to be weighed down when others are not. I would say this is probably the main reason why I prefer the simple "all units take the same speed penalty" approach.
-Tellius is kind of neat early game for reasons you mentioned but is otherwise more or less a game without weapon weight from the mid game onward for most units most of the time. At the very least it doesn't feel especially bad because Strength can and will go up so it isn't a problem characters are locked into.
-GBA goes pretty hard on that "feels bad" aspect of attack speed loss where there is almost no way to help a character out of it other than like one body ring you get all game or a promotion that helps slightly. It also feels especially bad for female characters.
-Engage and especially Thracia can escape the feels bad aspect of this to some degree because the stat can go up on level up, but it's still there to a degree and affects some units (women mostly) more than others.
Thracia escapes the "feels bad" more because one of the growth boosting scrolls also boosts Build growth and also Thracia has an excellent selection of weapons in it with variable weight. Characters with huge build can use more weapons without being weighed down, but almost every character can use something good without being weighed down much. Killing Edge only weighs 1 more than Iron Sword in this game and Silver is only 2 more than Iron. Both of which are plenty solid options. In addition to this the only characters with a lower base Build than 5 are some kind of Mage/Utility character and Tanya (RIP Tanya) so it overall just doesn't feel as limiting as in say GBA.
Now with all of that said I kind of like your other propositions where we take other penalties for Build or just make it an outright requirement for certain weapons. I particularly care for the hit idea. I'd kind of like to see how this would pan out in practice.
A bit of an aside: The disappointment I felt when playing Engage when I saw that Speed+ had the same SP cost and same maximum as Build+ was palpable. I'm sure I'm not alone there.
You'd expect Isadora to at least better a little better rescuing than the other cavaliers but because men have a higher con cap she has the same Aid stat
@@ryco9669 Yeeeeeeeeah
One additional feature worth mentioning that changed between fe3 and fe4 (I can't remember whether it was present in the first two games as it's been a long time since ive played them) is the addition of negative attack speeds. In fe3, AS bottoms out at 0, which isnt the case in fe4. This means that a unit like Azelle can consistently double gen 1 axe users at base despite starting out at -3 AS, while a unit like Cecil in fe3 can't even double the slowest potential enemies with an iron lance until she gets a point of speed, since she starts out with 2 AS when wielding one. Steel lances are even more punishing, needing 11 speed to start doubling 0 AS enemies. This makes the lighter weight of swords even more valuable, as sword users can start to hit the doubling threshold earlier than lance or axe users. This is only a problem early on in the game, and it does allow for some interesting mechanics like making it impossible to double with javelins since they weigh the same as the speed cap.
Great video!
kelik being here already makes this video a 10
Off-topic, but cute avatar, also a 10.
I'm of the opinion the best solution is to have a slow growth Con stat that also effects damage. Something to the effect of having Con over weapon weight improves the damage based on a percentage of the base weapon. Penalizes in a stat which can usually be overcome by fast units but isn't useless for slow characters.
well Lizard? How much can you handle? Can you handle the life one whose con is low? Those with con is low are unable to handle weapons with higher weight…Intelligent Systems, lend me your sexism!
I'm convinced heavy weapons only exist to make enemies look scary while also being absolutely pathetic sacs of free exp. Just look at Engage's smash weapons, any unit worth their salt doubles them.
The disparity on the gendered weight in gba i believe is cause of rescue. Females being lighter makes them easier to rescue, and because aid for mounted units is the class aid - unit's weight, female riders can rescue heavier allies. Shoutout to shanna's 20 aid
bro shanna has 15 aid
without considering their own con, all mounted women have 5 less aid than mounted men (so marcus and isadora have the same aid), its so bad lol
Tying weapon weight to unit weapon level would be my ideal solution. I.e. a steel sword requiring D in swords would have a malus of -5 AS up until that character reaches C in swords
An idea I had to that effect; have weapon weight affect *damage* rather than just doubling, with a possible exception for tomes.
Basically:
Attack power = Weapon's Might + Unit's Strength (up to Weapon's Weight)
Attack speed = Unit's Speed - Weapon's Weight
This produces an intuitive effect where you want to give your heavy weapons to units with high strength because they can capitalize on it more, but speedy units want lightweight weapons so they can double to make up for mediocre single-hit damage. Just as importantly, it also means that lightweight weapons are not universally good; you hit a wall with their damage potential, since no weapon can ever do more than Might+Weight damage.
That'd basically just result in units either being 40 Mt 0 Spd or 40 Spd 0 Mt though, since to be able to apply a unit's 20 points of Strength, you'd need a weapon with 20 weight that then subtracts 20 from Speed - and there's little room for anything in the middle because once you're being doubled, you may as well lose every remaining point of speed and maximise the amount of Strength you're adding.
I like the weight system, I just never really liked how it's tied to the Constitution stat, which becomes more or less just a secondary Spd/Str stat. And it hurts even more how Con just isn't manipulatable, units with low Con are just stuck with it.
I would like to see more of Fates' system where there's a distinction between offensive and defensive AS: an enemy with a Steel Axe can be doubled just the same as an enemy with an Iron Axe while keeping the "Weight" penalties of the Steel weapons intact.
I think the Fates system did a great job of balancing 1-2 range weapons, like Javelins, but Steel weapons are often not even considered. I'd rather forge a stronger Iron Sword and potentially sell Steel Swords than take the guaranteed speed punishment.
Of course, this doesn't apply to units with Wary Fighter or absolute speed demons. Just a general preference.
This is a good shout, I also really like how physical 1-2 range weapons were handled in fates. Made them feel useful but not dominant
@@TuskyBaby I'd actually say that the Steel weapons are balanced. There's plenty of units and builds in Fates that just don't use the Spd stat, and also certain enemies like Ninjas where you'd generally prefer just having more Atk than more Attack Speed to one-round. Steel weapons, compared to other weapons, maintain a solid niche of just having sheer Mt, which helps in this regard.
Iron weapons in this case though have none of the advantages of Bronze and Steel weapons, and it's very easy to just sell Irons for Bronzes instead.
Something I remembered about weapon weight in Radiant Dawn or path of Radiance was it affected how fast your skill level goes up. And a high skill level was useful for either equipping higher tier weapons or getting bonus damage added. If you wanted to train a unit on cannon fodder, you could purposefully equipped a heavy spear to skill grind more effectively.
I like three houses system the best. Its basically the same as Tellius but it remains a factor after the earlygame. It made training weapons which i view as the same as slim weapons actually important. I never felt like steel weapons were too heavy to use either under this system. It felt well balanced
The biggest issue with 3H’s system is that early weapon weight when unit strength isn’t enough to nullify much, if any, weight just compounds on the issues of early Maddening. Kill thresholds are high so a fair amount of units need Steel Weapons to get kills, but those make most units get doubled and one rounded by a ton, so Training Weapons are mostly needed to not get doubled, but then you end up tickling most enemies. I do enjoy 3H weight past Ch3 when the game stops being unfair on maddening, particularly when it leads to interesting scenarios where for example Lysithea may train in Swords to certify for Swordmaster and gain a nice base strength to help nullify some Weight.
@rattyxoxo7397
I would argue this is more of an issue of enemy stat inflation than the weapon weight system being bad but I agree with youre overall point. It can feel like a dammed if you do dammed if you don't in the early game. I like that this made slim weapons actually good for the first time since fe 4. And it made other light weapons such as gauntlets good.
I think having HP reduce speed reduction from weapon weight would be more interesting like speed - (HP/5 - weapon weight). Units that are strong, but slow tend to have high hp. And fast units tend to have lower hp. HP is also more universal than strength, while also making sense since in a lot of games CON often determines HP.
The con disparity on gendered lines I think has one small benefit for female characters: They're much easier to rescue because any unit with higher con can pick them up. Even Natasha can carry lute around.
That's really not much but it's something that I can appreciate.
11:09 Shadow Dragon uses the same weight system as telluis
One way to have a dedicated stat that isn't speed-but-lesser would be to have weight (potentially not just your equiped weapon weight, but also carried weapons and armor) also potentially reduce your move, and Build/Constitution mitigates that too. Now it's move-but-lesser and speed-but-lesset.
I like the existence of a gender con disparity, at least in concept, because it's an opportunity to make stats back up aesthetics a little more than they normally do. As a fantasy series, fire emblem has long had a drive to push character designs towards "ideal" images, and as a result fire emblem games tend to end up with male characters on the chunky side and female characters on the lithe side. Even within the same class, compare Fates' Charlotte to Arthur or Effie to Benny. In other RPGs, the starting point for representing these differences in stats is usually to give bigger characters higher strength and smaller characters higher speed, but Fire Emblem doesn't have a lot of space on this front because a single point of either stat can have such a big impact. Con/Bld is a nice compromise, provided it's used well - you can give smaller characters higher base speed but lower con, and bigger characters lower base speed but higher con, leaving both unit types with a reasonable doubling rate and damage output via different routes. If you were to design around this, you could easily create a situation where two units using the two approaches both had for sake of example 20spd and 30mt, and the only difference would be that the smaller character would have the option to sacrifice some might to increase speed, by using a lighter weapon than the one that makes them equal.
This sort of design would only become a problem if you were still doing something like lowering female units' strength score in addition to lowering build, or lowering build and not raising speed to compensate, or using gender as the base source of build, instead of using the aesthetics that are related to gender (which is how you'd get your Ewan case, or for another example, not giving Rinkah high build despite her being the most muscular character in her game).
Having weapons need a certain Con/Build stat is a really interesting idea. Maybe it'd mean mercenaries can use Blades that myrmidons can't use for higher might. Or armor knights can use Greatlances that cavs and fliers can't use. It'd also make Body Rings/Con boosters more meaningful rather than being a meme since you could mybe make a unit able to wield a strong heavy weapom they wouldn't notmally be able to. I wish this were a system used in a game or romhack.
It feels weird that they removed the con and build stats in fates when they made Effie, who seems destined to absolutely DOMINATE those stats. I'd imagine her having one of the highest con or build stats in the entire series.
"An enemy with 11 attack speed cannot be doubled by any axe user". LOL and I thought Kaga hated axes in Marth's games enough. (No promotions for Fighters, no axe users period in Mystery and the game gives you Silver Axes expecting you to sell them)
So my thoughts on every weight system:
FE1-4: Equal-opportunity, but I agree with you that it makes Speed, which is already a really good stat, too good.
FE5: This one's interesting in that not only does Build have a growth, there's ways to mess around with it via Crusader Scrolls. It's not quite Engage's Build Emblems, but there's a little customization you can do. It also led to silly unit concepts like Marty, who have the Build to be capture-bots and not much else.
FE6-8: My least favourite weight system. There's the men vs women issue you mentioned, but I've also felt Con allocation per unit created a "the rich get richer" effect. Units with already shaky starts like Neimi and Nino tended to have bad Con on top of all their other issues, while already strong pre-promotes like Marcus, Harken and Pent tended to have higher Con than unpromoted examples of their classes. In theory their lower speed potential is supposed to make up for it, but once people realized the actual benchmarks for doubling in the GBA games are very low, that's not an issue. (And part of WHY the thresholds are so low is enemies are weighed down so much by THEIR weapons) And given how relevant Hand Axes are, and that they're on the somewhat heavy side...
I feel only Pegasus Knights do low Con well, but Pegasus Knight is just a busted class in general. What's interesting is LOW con is actually a benefit for the Aid stat (affects rescuing), which is a minor niche that women cavalry have over their male counterparts but the gender issue with Con still sucks.
FE9-11: My biggest issue with this is Weight stops mattering for physical units very, very quickly. If they had weight mitigated by Strength, they should've made weapon weights a lot higher across the board. Meanwhile, Mages get utterly screwed over if they have bad Strength... well it's mostly just Soren being built like a twig. Thinking about it, I actually kinda like this, as one of Ilyana's distinguishing factors over Soren is her higher Strength base and growth letting her more reliably use Thunder and other heavy tomes, while Soren has higher raw Magic and Speed.
FE12-13: No weight isn't a bad system, except, as other comments said, with Nosferatu. There's a lot of really strong weapons in Awakening without many mitigating factors.
Fates: I agree with you. A cool idea in theory, but could use some work. It also bugs me that Killer weapons are not only infinite use, but deal 4x damage on crits on top of their high crit chance. Yes they're a little weak when not critting, but they always felt a bit too strong.
Three Houses: It feels like someone took PoR's system and tried to balance it. Strength/5 I feel might lean too far in the other direction though, /4 maybe. I like the encouragement to learn Armour for the Weight- skills, but in practice I rarely see anyone use those.
Engage: Engage is currently my favourite one. Weight on weapons is just high enough that lighter ones have their uses and some strong weapons aren't always best, certain Forges and Engraves lowering Weight adds a lot to messing around with that system (-1 weight goes a long way for certain characters). Agreed that Build+ is redundant with Speed+, though admittedly you have Leif and Lyn at different times and you need to spend a lot of Bond Fragments on Lyn to get access to her best versions of Speed+, and you might not have that luxury. (Build+3 from Leif is super cheap in terms of fragments and SP and is accessible way earlier, and it comes with bonus reclassing proficiencies)
I think fe8s gender divide on con makes sense minus ewan, I think a better example would be fe7 Isadora having less con than units like matthew and kent
I like the Tellius(and 3H I guess to a lesser extent) style of offsetting weapon weight with strength, because it at least doesn't penalize you for using stronger weapons like most of the other games do. It does make strength kind of a 'double dip' stat though, providing damage as well as attack speed... not a perfect solution. I think Thracia/Engage is probably the best actual implementation of weight vs speed by integrating it into stats(and critically, emblems), but as mentioned in the video it ends up making build a worse, more specialized version of the speed stat.
Weapon weight has always felt like a half-baked idea that struggles to find a place in the balance of Fire Emblem games. The GBA games have some units that suffer greatly from having egregiously low con, and it sucks that there are no good ways to deal with that shortcoming aside from the extraordinarily rare body rings. Conversely, in the Tellius games strength is disproportionately valuable, so some units snowball while others struggle to find a niche to fill. I think Fates changing the weapon design universally was a really good step in the right direction, but it felt overly complex and fiddly and has way too many edge cases and spots of imbalance -- you have to hope the devs did the extra work to account for these things or else it's still imbalanced and still limits the meta in a negative way.
It would be a shame to lose weapon weight as an axis to make choices on(even if it would be the lesser evil at this point), so I hope they experiment some more to help give you meaningful choices to make about your weapon selection.
i love that this video exists
I find tellius and dsfe handled the weapon weight well and the best imo, the str mechanic is like highly valued in it, and many units can use many weapons with high str and not worry about the weight of the weapon
I think part of the reason getting rid of weapon weight in New Mystery, Awakening, and Fates felt good is that weapon weight and its effects are often just more difficult to see than other stats and their effects. You generally have to click an extra time to see what a weapon's weight is, and many games don't directly display AS, so the system feels clunkier than things you can check by just looking directly at a unit's stats screen. If the presentation of that information were more accessible in the UI, I think the system would feel better.
Engage addresses this somewhat with the "in-use" stats display, although the flipside of this is that when I want to see a weapon's raw stats (e.g. b/c I want to trade for it, or calculate effective damage), it can be frustratingly difficult to actually access that information.
gender disparity in fe would be a good video
I'm tired of all my male units dying to crits
Correction: Shadow Dragon uses the Strength system for calculating weight.
The biggest issue with Fates in CQ in regards to silver weaponry is that you have to buy it, because there are no free Silver weapons in the entire game. You do however get a ton of free iron weapons and bronze weapons that can then be forged to be of a similar strength with no downside, or just use a steel weapon to get a stronger hit without needing to buy anything. The only arguably worthwhile Silver Weapon is likely the Silver Bow, because you get no Steel Bow in CQ either, so there’s no free substitute of similarly strong power, and so it might be worth it to let archers like Niles or Mozu hit some kill thresholds. One of the things that I like about BR and Rev is that they give some free silver weapons to actually enable the debate about which weapons to be use when, while CQ’s weapon choices basically means you never use Steel or Silver weaponry over Bronze, Iron and other quirky stuff like the Bolt Axe or Horse Spirit
I ultimately prefer No Weight or Tellius Weight.
Tellius does suck for early levels especially on mages but usually by midgame or promotion mages will have just enough str to wield e-c weapons without issue (in rd unpromoted Sorens 9 str lets him wield every wind tome except blizzard with no penalty).
But really Weight just feels like an unfun hindrance. If Elibe remakes ever happen I hope for Lyn and Florinas sake they ditch weight bc a Lord should not be losing 5 speed using D rank weapons.
I do think making a weapon's weight affect other facets of using it is honestly just a good idea, because rather than having Speed and whatever flavor of Speed But Worse to interact with weight, it suddenly becomes something you have to put a lot more thought into if a weapon's weight also affects its accuracy and potential damage.
Another thing with weight is just the fact that none of this would be much of an issue if not for doubling being a thing, which I want to know the genesis of that mechanic in specific. If I were making a Fire Emblem-like game, I'd just get rid of doubling entirely and just fold critical hit chance into the accuracy check much like a certain popular fantasy heartbreaker to fill a similar role.
I think a neat work around could be finding some type of way of incorporating low constitution into having its own benefit like a crit multiplier. That way the stat is more of a sliding scale rather than big number go brrrrr
The weight - strength system was particularly funny in Radiant Dawn, as by part 2 every unit is a pre-promote, and by part 3 essentially everyone has enough strength to never be weighed down ever, barring mages with siege tombs. Really the last time weight is even a factor is Nephenee and Marcia with Steel Greatlances.
I do think we need some kind of system which makes heavier and slower units especially capable of using heavy weapons.
I'm also a "iron weapon" enjoyer
To me the most basic idea for weight tbat i haven't seen used yet is for carrying stuff.
Like weight doesnt make your attack speed lower, and every item you can carry has weight not just weapons. Then if the total combined weight of all your gear exceeds your con you get -1 move, if it exceeds 2x your build you get -2 move if it exceeds 3x your build -3 and so on.
Light weigh characters like Pegasus knigts would have yo carefully consider if move matters more or having more inventory.
It makes slow units with high build worth while so long as you add enough cool items that you would want tomout in your inventory. Maybe rather than being consumables stat boosters provide their effect whenever they are in your inventory meaning characters with high build can have more of them.
Or you have a larger degree of weapons with secondary effects so someone with high con can have a more diverse bag of tricks vs a lower con person who now has to make careful choices about what they bring with them
16:28 rare footage of Ingrid levelling strength
At 5:40 that looked like 2 lvl ups with no stat increases! I think I’d have reset the fight to avoid horrendous RNG like that.
Oh that footage is from a 0% growths run, so all the level ups were like that lol
I generally just don’t enjoy the weight system at all. In every game it’s been in, it’s just been a redundant stat that you can ignore when your stats get big enough. I love the idea behind it, but it hasn’t been done in a way that I like. (Disclaimer; I havent played awakening-3 houses)
Wonder ifnit would have made more sense to have skill add to con, or some average between def and res. We dont need more reasons to stack the stat that decides if we take out an enemy in one turn or not.
Between this and the weapon ranks video, i got a feeling you just like if SoV's system was iterated on.
I like the Tellius system in theory, the problem is that weapon weigbt becomes nore or less irrelevant about halfway through the game for everyone that isnt a mage or Mist. I do like how the STR stat sets Soren and Ilyaba apart a bit
An idea I had for con would be that if a unit's con was greater than the weapon's weight, they would gain AS equal to the difference. This way, con would feel just as important as speed rather than con being worthless if a unit has poor speed.
At that point though I feel like it wouldn't be meaningfully different enough from speed to justify its own existence
At that point con is just a second speed stat.
I suggest lowering the bonus and slightly increasing the penalty.
That way con will be better than speed untill it matches weight but worse afterwards.
Regarding the GBA games, I like the few heavy weapons that only a few characters can use effectively (iron/steel/silver blade). It makes high-con sword users like Dieck, Hector (promoted), and Gilliam (promoted) stand out a bit more. I also think it's sort of interesting that steel weapons weigh more than silver weapons. This mostly just makes it so that I never buy steel weapons though. It could definitely be implemented better.
I have an alternative way of making sure that people do not spam silver weapons in Fates. All we need to do is increase the forge options for the lower class weapons and decrease the forge options for silver weapons. The silver weapon can be a more generalist weapon while forged iron and steel weapons cover certain situations better.
i still cant get enough with how cute your ‘ch’s are omg
I never really thought about the sexist Con before but yeah that is rather dumb
While it is realistic that women are on average smaller than men, there isn't such a huge difference that there should be nearly 5 Con between the average male and average female in Sacred Stones
I lowkey like the GBA version of weapon weight, where it doesn't grow. I've actually thought more about promotions and body rings now going back and playing them than I did as a kid. Kinda similar to what you were saying in FE1 giving Jeigan the slim lance, in FE8 Chapter 5x (aka the worst one), Kyle starts with a Steel Lance and an Iron Sword, where Forde starts with the Javelin and a Steel Sword. And in all of my previous playthroughs, I've just kinda kept them with their original weapons. Kyle's base con is exactly the same as that Steel Sword, though, whereas Forde gets weighed down by 1. Granted, Forde already has a point or two of speed ahead of Kyle at base, but realizing that if I switch Kyle's Iron Sword with Forde's Steel Sword, I essentially just increase his damage output with 0 penalty.
I also had things to consider with my Pegasus Knights, particularly during my 0% growths run, deciding whether or not I wanted to promote them into Falcoknights or Wyvern Lords, as Wyvern Lord gives them a bit more con, but less speed, and Falcoknight gave them less con, but more speed and access to a lighter weapon class. Idk, it was just an interesting amount of decisions I had to make.
Not having weapon weight in Awakening honestly drove me absolutely insane. It was one of the first things I noticed, and it completely removed the utility of specifically choosing a heavier weapon to set up an enemy for a weaker unit to take the kill. Obviously there's other ways to do that, but it personally drove me mad, and it's STILL one of my least favorite aspects of Awakening to this day.
Why would anyone ever go Sniper Neimi?
I really like the Bld system. I'm on my 3rd playthrough of engage at the moment and having a stat independent of str that, when it grows, allows you to use stronger weapons without a spd and avo penalty just makes the unit leveling process so much more rewarding. I always used to get excited when a unit leveled res in Echoes, and now when a unit levels Bld in Engage I pop off. In fixed growths, these Bld growths are also guaranteed after a certain number of levels adding to depth at which exp distribution becomes a part of your strategy in such a limited exp economy. It also gives an incentive to take units through classes like armor knight for the huge Bld growth rate modifier. It works so well. I hope it continues to return.
Weapon Weight and the Con stat in general (I started with the GBA FE games) has always been one of those mechanics I never really dug into, but looking back I wish I had. It's an interesting idea that's explained pretty badly in-game.
I'm a bit torn on how it works though. Stronger weapons already have a balancing factor in having fewer uses, as well as being rarer and more expensive, so the higher Weight as well feels like they tried to overcorrect. It reminds me of the early Energy or Heavy Weapons in Fallout 3 and New Vegas, where they were terrible to spec into early game because the IDEA was this powerful gun you could break out but had to use sparingly because the ammo was rare. But then they went and ruined it by also making the weapons nearly broken which not only made them even scarcer, but also negatively impacted their damage so they ended up being no better than your basic Physical weapons...
I think that's part of why many players, myself included, just stick with Iron Weapons in games without infinite uses (Fates/Engage, or late game Awakening with Armsthrift). They have so much going for them with lower weight, better availability, lower cost, and more uses (and often better Accuracy) that the few points of Might just aren't worthwhile.
I love the idea of the system, but I don't particularly love what any game has done WITH it. I suppose Fates' is the best for what I like about it, but even then it feels odd, and I'd often rather not deal with the hassle of the debuffs, especially when you don't get the option to use a different weapon for Enemy Phase so you can end up a crippled mess from chaff units running into you. IIRC Fates also did away with Trade-equipping so you couldn't even change weapons that way!
16:35
Though weight-3 just isn't good enough. Especially since you don't really want to master armored classes with fast units and the units that can master them are so slow that it's not going to make a difference.
You know I think it would be interesting if build added to your HP or defence just to see how it would go of corse not strait adding but you know it sounds interesting somthing like that anyway
currently playing binding blade. weapon weight seems more significant in how they affect common enemies. steel lance guys hurt but are easy to double.
not related to weight: iirc, in 3h, units get base stats of the class they change into so it's worth training armor for stats.
My favorite weight system, at least on paper (I still haven’t played the game yet, so I don’t know how well it works in practice), is that from Vesteria Saga: weapons have their weight penalty reduced by half your strength… For physical weapons. Magic weapons instead benefit from half your magic stat in weight mitigation. Personally, I think there’s probably not a _perfect_ system for this, and that each individual game should weigh (heh) the pros and cons of each one.
Except Con as weight mitigation. That one should’ve been left behind.
I get that "realism" is a poor argument in fantasy games, but I hope you're still aware that teenage boys, as long as they've reached puberty, can often outperform grown women in sports - see the many instances where professional female athletes are beaten by second-league or amateur male athletes. The quality and composition of muscle is very different in men to women, and the general build means that centre of gravity etc are much better suited for physical activity with men. Also, certain things like grip strength are so overwhelmingly in favour of men that the women with the strongest grip strength are about equivalent to the men with the weakest grip strength. Realistically speaking, Ewan would still be able to fight Neimi physically and win, because, well, do you really think that Neimi with her stature has any business fighting? And she has the same con as him.
Trust me, I'm a woman, and every woman who has tried to wrestle with a man while he is not going easy will confirm that the vast majority of men who aren't psysically disabled will kick our asses. Thankfully most men know this and appropriately are very gentle.
This is not to say women suck, we just have very different strengths, and I honestly really don't want to compete in waging war. A society that would send women to die on the battlefield would die out, and not necessarily because they would lose, but because of everything else the women are contributing that is being lost on the population.
Anyway, all the scores are of course just numbers, of course, and ultimately none of the appearance really factors in. Not to mention that IRL, str and dex and skl and spe and all those stats are not completely independent of each other, and actually you need to be strong to be fast, etc.
I think fates' system could be good, but there are a lot of facets of it that just kinda suck. Like, at the end of the day the priority goes to Prf> iron> bronze (for if you won't be critting)> steel (if you weren't gonna be doubling anyway, technically if you speed is insane you could also use it but...)> silver, which is generally gonna be used to one shot one maybe 2 guys for the whole map
That Neimi example is more of an example of why you don't promote Neimi to Sniper than an example of why Neimi is bad, bc a Ranger Neimi isn't getting weighed down by a steel bow at all and has the same speed as Sniper Neimi. Neimi is still bad mind, but that's more bc of poor bases and starting bowlocked and at best becoming bowlocked and swordlocked in a game where you generally want 1-2 range and being bowlocked is especially bad.
Regarding one of your suggestions. Having a Strength (or CON in FE's case) requirement for certain items is actually pretty common in many TTRPGs and CRPGs (Miniguns in Fallout 1&2 required 7 strength). D&D 5e even has it for armor. But Larian removed this in BG3 because... reasons.
Another way to utilize CON would be through ways you could overpower foes. Expand on the capture/con system of Thracia 776. Similar to how strong characters in D&D can do things like grapple, pin down and do all sorts of other things to bully weaker characters. Again removed from BG3 because... reasons.
I vastly prefer the system used in the GBA games and engage. It's a simple but effective system for getting you to use different weapons in different situations. Giving weight mitigation to strength was one of the biggest mistakes the series has ever made, which greatly devalues weight as a mechanic.
Yes, even in 3H. It's an inherent balance issue which exacerbates snowballing for physical units. You don't need 35 str for edelgard to double everything in sight with an iron axe; by the time you have 35 str, you're doubling everything in sight with a hand axe instead, because losing 3 speed just isn't that big of a deal at that point of the game.
I think the classic no weight mitigation can work, but you need to really give variable stats to units based on what weapons they have access too. Tearring Saga sort of does this but I think it can go further. For example, swords have low weight but also low hit, while lances have higher weight but very high hit, so your cavs join with mediocre speed and skill and have a choice between maybe doubling with low accuracy and might with swords or go for a reliable higher damage lance attack. On the other hand, myrms and mercs will join with 7-8 more points in both speed and skill so they can consistently double and hit with swords, but they don't get 1-2 range. Finally, most axe users start with a similar speed and skill to mercs, but axes have even less hit than swords, so they end up being as fast and inaccurate as sword cavs, but with the damage of lance cavs. Though it still does have the problems of stat caps locking axe users to a relatively low max speed which is one of the ways I think it can still improve.
3H is my favorite system by far, even if it can be a bit unintuitive. One thing I wanna add is that, despite Steel weapons being extremely heavy in this game, they have a niche in being the go-to weapon to use on Player Phase while making use of combat arts (with Iron remaining king on Enemy Phase). I liked this approach, as Steel Weapons in other games were either complete garbage, or just straight up better than Iron.
You could have luck reducing weapon rate as well as increasing your dodge (reduces chance of scoring a critical hit). I feel like luck doesn't have anything to do a lot of the time as you can get additional dodge in many games from pair-up bonuses, and once your opponent's crit-chance has reached 0 there's no benefit to lowering it further (very few enemies have unusually high crit chances in my experience, so you can usually get that number down to 0 without any work). This makes luck a little more impactful but, once again, the effect wares off by the end-game. Either way, it helps ward off the problem of some stats just being better than others.
Important to note that 3 houses also gave you shields (as did SoV) and wands/staves to weigh down units further, and I think combat arts could add weight. These are ways of further upping the weapon-weight on a unit (especially if the arts allowed you to double) without just making super heavy weapons.
Having characters who's build doesn't grow is an interesting option, I'm not sure I like the 'feel' of a stat not growing though (it doesn't feel great how rarely it grows in engage, and the way resistance barely grows in SoV feels bad), but perhaps if it was linked to class then that could mitigate this problem (I don't think anyone's annoyed about how movement doesn't grow).
I do agree that it's not something that always has to exist and it's ok to let players just use the 'better' weapon tyoes at the end-game, so getting rid of it is a valid solution.
I wish you could've shown Valentia more
I know you already went over _Fates_ a bit here, but how do you feel specifically about that game's one-sided speed system (effective speed)? It has some interesting implications, since something like steel weapons affect the wielder's ability to follow up, but not the enemy's ability to follow up against them. That and there are a select few weapons that make it easier for the enemy to follow up without hindering the user's ability to follow up, like Beruka's Axe. Heck, the ranged S-level weapons actively make it easier for _both_ parties to follow up.
Do you think this could be a more interesting way to balance weight if applied to more weapons?
I think it's definitely a good idea, it's how I've implemented weight in my own rip-off. One-sided speed allows weight to just be a question of damage output - multiple weaker hits vs one larger hit - instead of also having to consider the defensive impact of high weight weaponry - bringing a point of speed and a point of weight a little closer together in value.
Worth mentioning is that Starsphere adds +15% growth to all stats including Build! Which means that, for a lot of characters (mages, Pegasus knights, and even axe users), Starsphere effectively boosts speed growth by 30%.
Essentially, this OP DLC skill is even better than I originally anticipated.
Most units cap build if you starsphere them early enough. Starsphere is one of the main reason I switched back to using no DLC, along with all the sp buffs.
The problem with weapon weight is doubling is really powerful. Anything that makes you not double is a waste of time. This feels awful especially on effective weapons.
Three Houses' weapon weight system still confuses me to this day. I can never know how it is calculated and I'm having to do guess work on when it would be time for someone like my Yuri to be able to use a Silver Sword without getting weighed by it and my guesstimating says that the earliest would be one or two chapters before the last chapter of the pre-timeskip but I still don't know exactly how much Strength he needed to not be weighed down by a Silver Sword. 😅
Like many mechanics, I feel Engage handles weapon weight best. It's basically the same as the GBA games, but weapons are balanced around weight better. Silver is actually heavier than steel. Although admittedly, with the refinement system, this can often feel like a build tax. For the endgame, a high build unit would likely use a silver weapon +3, while a low build unit would use a steel +5. They've got comparable stats aside from wt, but the steel weapon is about 60% more expensive to refine.
The early FE games (and Echoes) that use Spd-Wt always felt awful to me. But there's another mechanic that's likely more the culprit than Spd-Wt. It only takes Speed+1 to double. This makes it so using a heavy weapon is extremely punishing. You can be in situations where using a weapon a mere 2 wt higher than your current one can take you from doubling to being doubled. I might warm up a bit to the simple AS = Speed-Wt system if there was a game that used this, but also required +4/5 speed to double. But as of now, there isn't, and all games that use this system feel miserable.
I never liked strength as the wt mitigator either. I'm basically in agreement with the video. Wt is only relevant early game, and a good stat is made better. Dividing it by 5 in Three Houses also just felt kind of dumb, and largely irrelevant. You've got, maybe a 10 point spread between a high and low strength unit, so their difference in ability to wield heavy weapons is pretty minimal. I can see where they were coming from. They wanted weight to remain relevant throughout the game, but also wanted to have a growing stat to mitigate weight. But like a lot of Three Houses mechanics, the thought process was half-baked.
I really disliked the weightless weapon system from Awakening. Partly because it makes weapon decision trivial. Just use the strongest weapon. But also, it doesn't play nice with the weapon rank system. When a unit promotes, they often gain a low weapon rank for a secondary weapon. But in Awakening, it's really hard to justify using a bronze axe when you can use a silver sword.
In previous games, E rank weapons are often reasonably viable. Your new, low level weapon type becomes the cheap light and fast weapon in your loadout (or throwing weapon) which grants extra weapon triangle coverage, while your primary weapon type is the powerhouse option, killer, brave and silver to deal with beefier enemies.
I want a reason to use a secondary weapon type. So low rank weapons need to not be good enough to justify carrying, and making them light is a good way to do that.
I can also say I like what Fates did. I'm a fan of systems where most weapons are good for something. I'd love to see this return and be refined a little. I don't recall the issue with forging cheap weapons being the best option. My last playthrough, I really only remember having one forging mineral to work with, so forging was just not an option for most weapon types. In the days of street pass, this may have been different. But when I played through last year, I felt I got some decent use out of most (but not all) weapons.
Gosh, I hate how the GBA games handled gender-based con. I wanna use Fir/Marisa instead of Rutger/Joshua and feel less bad than I already do due to their starting levels/stats.
I do appreciate the lack of weapon weight in Awakening on player characters as I feel like Steel Weapons having lower accuracy, requiring a higher weapon level and costing more is all a trade-off enough. In the GBA games, I find it hard to justify using Steel Weapons much ever, especially in FE6 where the accuracy divide is much bigger. That being said, enemies not being weighed down and having to deal with Steel weapon ambush reinforcements is definitely not a fun time, though that's mainly a problem with ambush reinforcements
I do agree you use steel weapons less in GBA but they’re nice to have in your inventory. Like a merc can benefit from having an iron and a steel sword in their inventory because sometimes high defence enemies can take more damage from one stronger attack than two lighter attacks especially if there say an armour knight where an iron weapon might not be able to damage them.
But for the most part I do agree they are probably the worse weapon tier but still have a use. It’s why I personally actually do like weapon weight