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Thoughts on Status Effects in the series.


Armagon
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What's up, it's your friendly neighborhood Armagon and i wanted to talk about something that's been a thing in Fire Emblem for quite some time now and i don't really see people talk about them that much: Status Effects. Status Effects have been a thing in the series for a long time and the list of known Status Effects are

  • Sleep
  • Berserk
  • Silence
  • Poison
  • Hexed

And then you've got what i like to call "pseudo-status effects". Stuff like the Enfeeble Staff in Fates falls here. So, what are your thoughts on status effects? Do you like them? Hate them? Do you want them to stay in the series or do you want them gone? 

I personally think that status effects tend to bring a lot of unnecessary frustration in the series. They're annoying, sometimes there's no way around them, and they flat-out make the games not fun at times. Plus, Status Effect Staffs really only work in the hands of the enemy. The enemy tends to be more accurate with them compared to when the player uses them, in my experience. The Hexing Rod in Fates is by far the worst status effect the series has. Halved HP until the map ends, who the fuck thought that was a good idea?  Berserk is also another terrible status effect because it's FE's version of Confusion, one of the most annoying status effects in RPGs. Personally, i would love it if FE16 didn't have them but i get the feeling that they might.

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They're annoying, but especially berserk, hexed, and silence if it hits your healer. I hated those druids with the berserk staves in Father and Son from FE8. I think I waited until I beat all the other enemies and recruited Rennac, and then I just moved my healers in their range until the staves ran out.

Poison bothers me the least because you can use antitoxins or stand on a fort to heal the damage back if you don't have a restore staff.

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To be blunt, I think status effects have no place in Fire Emblem. Especially after Fates brought about the damned Hexing Rod. The Jugdral saga was literally the only one that made status effects useful for the player. And that can be attributed more to how the hit formula works. As for poison, outside of Shadows of Valentia, it's more of an annoyance than an actual threat.

Edited by Levant Mir Celestia
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I do not like how Fates handles status effects at all. Now in fairness status effects as you pointed out is not original to Fates as other games have had it as well usually in the form of Berserk, Sleep or Silence staves. However Fates I believe goes overboard with it's Status Effect elements. Fates has 1) Skills that debuff stats and too many of those in my opinion 2) Weapons that cause debuffs both hidden weapons and higher ranking weapons 3) And lastly Staffs that debuff. This I feel is way too many ways that the player can suffer from status effects especially when more times than not it's just the enemy units who have access to these methods. And it is I think a cheap way of making enemies seem harder, tougher or more threatening than they really are. Most of the enemies in Fates are ONLY threatening because of some status effect staff, weapons that debuff or status nerfing skill.

Additionally games that previously had some sort of status effect in place, there were ways of defending your units from these sorts of attacks usually in the form of a Restore Staff which Fates does not have at all. If Fates did, dealing with the Status effects would be a lot more manageable than waiting for the status effects to simply wear off which always increases the turn count. And while I'm not a LTC player I do like moving at a fairly swift pace if possible. Baically there is no means of defending against these attacks or of reversing their effects a fact that I think reveals a very major game design flaw or at least an oversight. Also other games gave you these same staffs in Fates unless I'm mistaken the only way to get some of these same staffs like Hexing Rod is through the Visit and Battle Bonuses which can be annoying to earn up to especially when those points don't carry over to a replay like the Renown Awards in Awakening did.

My final word on the subject is first of all reduce the amount of ways units can get status effects, there should be a purpose to potentialy recieving such debuffs, and there whould be a means to counteract, defend or reverse these effects. If none of these criteria are met than I do not see the point of having them in the game and would say they should stay out.

Edited by SavageVolug
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I feel like status effects work best with a timer, and NO RESTORE staff in the game. It is way too much of a "ignore design" button.

I greatly prefer debuff type status effects to hard status effects. 

I think buff status effects are dangerous. Even when the only one that existed was magic water, they already promoted map cheesing and worse than this,  massive enemy phases.

This does not lend itself to particularly intelligent gameplay. This is more if we are talking about having to use "positional" strategy and adapt during the fight. You can get away with a buff- heavy fire emblem if you think pre-planning is the most important strategc part of the gameplay. 

I think player status's should remain greatly restricted, because they are more interesting in enemy hands. 

 

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I like having them around, preferably without them lasting the entire chapter, on one condition. Give them to the player as well. I like the way FE5 handled it for the most part, though they were a little too good there. But a sleep/silence on the enemies every now and then adds a good layer imo and giving 1 or 2 to the player around the midgame adds some fun strats too. Of course, don't give the player too many as deciding when to use them is part of the challenge/fun.

Berserk is a little more questionable, I'd say use sparingly on enemies and only if the player has a restore staff and either don't give to the player or only in one of the last few chapters.

Poison on weapons/traps would be fine if the animations weren't so annoying, just have all poison resolve at once, not one by one and it's fine.

I personally think any design space beyond merely the clashing of stats should be taken advantage of and status staves are no exception, therefore I am in favor of them.

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It pretty much depends on the game.

DDatSoL/SD: There are none.

Gaiden/SoV: Didn't exist in the original. SoV brings them back, with enemies afflicting some serious damage with poison and trapping your units with Paralysis (the freeze status). We also can finally use Posion Weapons. They suck don't use them. The better half of Fate's staves are also here with Freeze and Silence, which are also bow combat arts. All in all mostly a good change for statuses, though the restore spell is DLC only.

MotE/NMotE: The origin of the status. Silence in this game is amazing actually, inflicting silence (no magic) on everyone (only enemies in the remake) for the rest of PP and EP. It's totally OP in the player's hands and there's a reason there's only one.

GotHW: We get more status effects in this game: Berserk (They turn on everyone), Sleep (They aren't bothered to fight anyone) and the unknown Charm (I assume it would have been a more powerful Berserk you could control). Statuses also hit with perfect accuracy, if the user has more magic than the enemy's res and last several turns. We also get status swords which are niche, but still have some use. Overall not a bad expansion of status affliction.

Thracia: I need to mention this separately. That's because this is the one game where I went "You know, I should use this." Statuses stand out by being permanent for the map. Despite the obvious fuck you the designers are going for, it makes you both do you damnedest to get Restore staves (Don't be me and waste a Repair use on one) and also actually attack the enemy with staves of your own. You have plenty of chances to pick up and use these staves to your advantage, which can be frankly too OP. It introduced stone (You know, not that time you got high. More like sleep paralysis but forever) and..... I'll be honest, locking the cure behind the Kia staff feels like a dick move, especially when the maximum uses of stone the player can cure is 1 greater than the amount on the staff. Enemies can also afflict the new poison status (Slowly eats at you like what you did last summer), but if a player takes the weapon sadly they cannot. 

BB/BS/SS: The decline of statuses begins. First off, Poison is the most common, enemies are still the only ones who can use it and it's merely a turn-limited annoyance. The staves also feel like they don't matter too often outside of some clutch moment you might not even anticipate and their turn limit is noticeable (the statuses themselves aren't unusable mind). Often, the player will see them as nothing but an annoyance from the enemy, especially if their best unit got berserked. Some traps also afflict poison. If it was more than poison I might care in some way. Sacred Stones is more interesting as Stone comes back and the final boss has an area affect Sleep skill. You know, I wish there was something like this again.

Awakening: There are none. :P

Fates: One point ruins them for me: No restore staff. While some of the staves are able to wear off so it it's not a dealbreaker, the Hexing Rod is the worst staff in the series, without a doubt. Entrap also kind of exists but's it's essentially Enemy Rescue. Enfeeble is more annoying debuffing (though it could be worse), Silence feels a bit weak compared to past staves, Freeze is irritating but it's still more interesting than I expected and the Hexing Rod is some demon's idea of fun and it should be cast into hell from whence it came. I'll take it to Mordor if I have to.

TLDR: I'd lean more towards SoV and the Judgral games for status ailments to work with, likely adding area effects from SS/MotE.

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I like status staves as they give some more utility to staff wielding units and can open up some interesting strategies especially in games that want you to fulfill some side objectives like in Binding Blade when you have to keep Douglas alive as an enemy unit to get a gaiden chapter putting him to sleep gives tons of free turns to run around the rest of the map.

For each status specifically:

Poison - Is basically worthless and I just wish the animation was faster

Sleep - Can be helpful in player hands, but is only a mild annoyance in enemy hands when it comes to chapters with no time requirements

Berserk - Fun to play around with, but I've never found it particularly helpful

Silence - Just another helpful staff and something to work around.

Freeze - Really helpful for fighting dodge tanks and saving units from nearby enemies.

Entrap - Can help to blow up some enemy formations and make a later section of the map a lot easier to handle

Enfeeble - Kind of annoying when the enemy uses it, but regardless a good staff that you can still work around as well as make use of to cripple some dangerous enemies

Hexing - Like a lot of people have said is the worst  and cruelest weapon I've seen in this series. It lasts the whole map and basically puts any unit it hits within oneshot range. In a game like Fates where it feels like you don't have a ton of reliable tanks to also have a staff that cuts your HP in half basically rendering one of your few tanks worthless with no way of fighting against it is one of the most infuriating things that can happen.

I think most status stave are fine since your generally have some way of working around them while still being very useful in their own right. For me the hexing rod is the only one I outright hate since there is nothing you can do to fight against it and there's no real way to work around your units being hexed since they'll all mostly end up in oneshot range.

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I really don't like them. It's something I could never get much mileage out of, since I'd much rather kill an enemy instead of statusing them and if the status inducer wields a staff to do it, I'd rather have them heal instead.
Like many other things that bug me about Fire Emblem, it's only really effective when the enemy has them and can use them against you, since you are dependent on each and every one of your active teammates and losing even one of them to some stupid status can cripple your entire run through that particular chapter, like, say, your designated boss killer gets hexed or enfeebled, while the enemy can consider each and every unit as cannon fodder, since it doesn't matter who dies on the enemies' side, which is precisely also why Ninjas and the Counter skill are much more effective in enemy hands.
And Fates just amped up the status annoyance with Inevitable End and Staff Savant... What the actual hell, IntSys?

I'd echo Levant and say that staus effects as a whole don't really have a place in Fire Emblem. They're more annoying to work around than anything else and it usually depends entirely on luck to avoid them (shout out to those stupid f***ing Berserk staves in the GBA games) and I'd much rather say I beat a map because I found the right strategy and not because luck was on my side.

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1 hour ago, Modamy said:

I like status staves as they give some more utility to staff wielding units and can open up some interesting strategies especially in games that want you to fulfill some side objectives like in Binding Blade when you have to keep Douglas alive as an enemy unit to get a gaiden chapter putting him to sleep gives tons of free turns to run around the rest of the map.

For each status specifically:

Poison - Is basically worthless and I just wish the animation was faster

Sleep - Can be helpful in player hands, but is only a mild annoyance in enemy hands when it comes to chapters with no time requirements

Berserk - Fun to play around with, but I've never found it particularly helpful

Silence - Just another helpful staff and something to work around.

Freeze - Really helpful for fighting dodge tanks and saving units from nearby enemies.

Entrap - Can help to blow up some enemy formations and make a later section of the map a lot easier to handle

Enfeeble - Kind of annoying when the enemy uses it, but regardless a good staff that you can still work around as well as make use of to cripple some dangerous enemies

Hexing - Like a lot of people have said is the worst  and cruelest weapon I've seen in this series. It lasts the whole map and basically puts any unit it hits within oneshot range. In a game like Fates where it feels like you don't have a ton of reliable tanks to also have a staff that cuts your HP in half basically rendering one of your few tanks worthless with no way of fighting against it is one of the most infuriating things that can happen.

I think most status stave are fine since your generally have some way of working around them while still being very useful in their own right. For me the hexing rod is the only one I outright hate since there is nothing you can do to fight against it and there's no real way to work around your units being hexed since they'll all mostly end up in oneshot range.

I'd agree with you if they weren't over 9000 times more niche than you claim they are... Which they are. Especially Silence. I mean, outside of Jugdral, when was a status staff ever really useful???

Edited by Levant Mir Celestia
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4 minutes ago, Levant Mir Celestia said:

I'd agree with you if they weren't over 9000 times more niche than you claim they are... Which they are. Especially Silence. I mean, outside of Jugdral, when was a status staff ever really useful???

Yeah, I get what you mean. It's just that I've been pretty inclined to make use of status ailments, buffs, debuffs, etc. in RPGs and whenever I find that these sorts of things might be useful to me I make use of them in SRPGs as well. They're definitely niche, but I guess that's fine with me since they allow me to pull off some of the strategies that I like.

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I'm okay with status staffs actually, I was actually a little annoyed that Awakening got rid of them. I want to see them return actually.

This said, I will not deny that their execution has not been perfect. Poison has never been more than a minor nuisance outside of perhaps Thracia. Silence is rarely an issue due to the player generally using few mages and healers and most of the time magic users have high Res to make they chance they hit lot, but it can be painful if it hits you only healer. Sleep, Stone and Berserk are all nightmares to deal with, they're 5 turns of being totally crippled and you need Restore ASAP to deal with them, particularly for Berserk. And in some cases, the only thing stopping you from pushing forward on a map, like Sacred Stone's Father and Son, is the presence of a few nasty status staffs- in this case four of them, two for each side of your approach to the throne room.

Outside of the infamous Hexing Rod, I felt Fates did good with the status staffs. Many status packing enemies can't move, and Freeze is Sleep as it should be. The effects are not overpowering here at all like Sleep, Stone and Berserk since they only last 1 turn instead of 5, but that one turn of crippling can still matter, just not as overwhelmingly.

There is also the issue of statuses being rather limited in their usefulness for the player. There are few enemies that stand out as being so strong or distinct as to demand or heavily suggest they should be Slept, Berserked, or Silenced (and good luck with this one given generally high magic enemy Res). Poison is meaningless on the player side. Status staffs are typically very rare and have very few uses as well. Besides Thracia, I felt Fates was good with player status staffs, since Elise comes with a 4 use Freeze and you can buy another 3 of them at a reasonable price. 

 

A lot of RPGs have issues with making ailments relevant on the player side, a few games make them work, Etrian Odyssey invents classes like the Hexer and Arcanist dedicated to the job of spamming binds and ailments, and give others skills to abuse those conditions- the War Magus's Ailing Slash, the Dark Hunter's Soul Liberator and Ecstasy. But in general, they tend to be more of an enemy tool because the enemies are either too immune or too weak and the ailment techniques too inaccurate to make them relevant.

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Generally speaking, status effects tend to be either a nightmare (Thracia, Hexing in Fates) or a non-issue (pretty much everywhere else) for me with little ground in-between, so I'd prefer if they were just dropped altogether. 

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On 3/5/2018 at 9:54 AM, Reality said:

I think player status's should remain greatly restricted, because they are more interesting in enemy hands. 

Oh, I agree. If you actually meant "frustrating" instead of "interesting", that is. Because as is, I see status effects as cancer in FE.

On 3/5/2018 at 12:19 PM, Modamy said:

Yeah, I get what you mean. It's just that I've been pretty inclined to make use of status ailments, buffs, debuffs, etc. in RPGs and whenever I find that these sorts of things might be useful to me I make use of them in SRPGs as well. They're definitely niche, but I guess that's fine with me since they allow me to pull off some of the strategies that I like.

I liked debuffing in Fates, but I just think that FE at large has a serious problem with making status effects useful for the player.

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I like them, I just wish they were more useful and worth the time to use instead of just attacking/healing/warping.

I personally liked Echoes the best since there were none that were particularly bothersome (Except poison obviously) and I actually used them sometimes so I think if they were to come back, they should do it like Echoes did (Obviously making them staves instead of white magic though)

 Though Berserk should never come back, like ever, nor should the shitty ones in Fates.

Edited by Azz
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 TI'd like them to go back in the way Thracia handled them. 

Obviously not the "This lasts the whole map" way, but just in the way your army can utilize them. There were plenty of subbosses and bosses that actually made Berserk viable, and there was enough boss variety to make the other statuses work. I like that a status effect actually tied into the story, and it was the main boss of the game's main weapon(Even if this did end up meaning that doing the sidequest to nullify it made him a joke at the end). 

But yeah. Make them viable and I won't have much of a problem with them. It's another element to make healers fun to use, and it CAN add to the game. 

Just don't make Restores stupidly rare/unavailable entirely, and don't have the Hexing Rod. Also make poison a bit more threatening. 

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2 hours ago, Slumber said:

Just don't make Restores stupidly rare/unavailable entirely, and don't have the Hexing Rod. Also make poison a bit more threatening. 

What I thought about doing was making Poison like it was in Thracia, except that it inflicts more damage per turn, but can't kill you on its own.

Kind of like how area-of-effect attacks in the newer games can't actually kill enemies directly.

Edited by Von Ithipathachai
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In order:

Entrap/Freeze > Stone > Berserk > Silence > Sleep >> things that matter >> Poison/Enfeeble > Hex

Entrap/Freeze was really interesting.  Pin down an enemy, or grab a troublesome one to you for a beatdown and a half.  Stone can be OP, which is probably why the player never got it normally in SS.  Berserk had some really cool uses, especially for a couple of my draft runs.  Enemy axe guys are a lot less irritating if they turn on their allies.  Silence also has its uses, though getting it to hit on units that matter was much more difficult.  Sleep was meh only because of the dodge chance that a sleeping unit had (what did they do, roll over in their sleep?).  I completely forgot Enfeeble exists, Poison's rarely a threat, and Hex breaks the game in a bad way. . .though using it on the final chapter was pretty funny.

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