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Pardon the new IP. That’s a wrap for this thread and for 2023. As we near the end of the quest, I keep finding myself thinking about things I might have done differently with more hindsight. This thread more than any has had me thinking about how insane the power creep has gotten. I’ve said before that Blair’s become a bit of a monster, and as such it makes it a bit difficult to come up with combat challenges for her that don’t involve either her or her opponent one-rounding the other. My biggest change would have been to simplify the combat somehow. As it stands now, I think I may have gone a bit overboard with some of the passives, which leads to anons having to do more math and calculations than I’d prefer. That’s something that I think is a bit much even in the actual Fire Emblem games that have skills like Death Blow and Stances in them. But at least in those games you have the benefit of the engine calculating everything for you, as opposed to me and a few very dedicated anons!
When coming up with stats for some of the bosses, I tend to swing in either too strong or too weak territory and try to settle somewhere in the middle. My first iteration of Aubert was retardedly strong, and I had to go back numerous times to rework him to something more reasonable. On the other hand, I think I nerfed Bradley too much by making his Delphi Shield not affect his Demonic Beast. I try to think a lot of the times where these people would fit on a power scale chart of Three Houses characters and take that into account when deciding stats.
What I’ve sort of settled on in my own head canon is:
>Byleth Tier: Byleth
>S+: Seven Sages, Edelgard, Rhea
>S: Dimitri, Claude, Seteth
>A+: Crest users with Heroes Relics, Rex
>A: Crest users without Relics, Blair, Anemone, Kate
>A-: Aces, certain high-ranking Blackwings, Garreg Mach students without crests, Talons
>B: Lower-level Blackwings, certain bosses, etc
Another thing this thread has had me contemplating is what an Empire Blair route would have looked like. For the longest time, I’d always assumed that the things an Empire Blair would have done were all things that Kate and the Hellwings were doing on this route.
One of the main story beats of the Empire route would have been Blair becoming somewhat of a propaganda hero for Edelgard’s vision of a world without Crests. Blair, being of common blood, yet still becoming a distinguished and powerful commander, would be the perfect ideal for what Edelgard had in mind. So, she and Hubert would send Blair on numerous high-profile missions, where she’d earn victory, and serve to further strengthen the ties between Adrestia’s commoners and the throne. From the start, I knew that an Empire Blair would also end up having to fight Indech and Maculi.
