[The Lunatic Club [Fates]]

The best berserkers usually have wyvern partners and have wyvern access themselves, which makes them useful in chapters like 19, 20, and 21 where being footlocked is actively bad. Around that point, you can roll through late paralogues to grab level 15 damage skills. Stacked berserkers push one-shot thresholds. Arthur’s personal skill can help him run a pretty reliable crit build even earlier, as soon as he gets into berserker and gets his hands on a killer axe.

[Conquest Laslow Solo]

I can’t really speak for it on Normal and Hard, but Endgame might be a real roadblock for a solo (well, duo) run.

4 hours ago, JSND Alter Dragon Boner said:

Master Ninja Sol Laslow is literally just Master Ninja Silas with worse alvailability

The set up is Sol, Riposte, Axebreaker, Shurikenbreaker, and 1 filler slot probably for the Shuriken ATK+5. This is all alvailable from Laslow's base class set so all you need to do is heart seals on a specific level thereshold

I would say probably marry Dragon talent Corrin (who eventually gets to Wyvern Lord) and do this:

• Go to Ninja early and promote to Master Ninja at level 20, building Shuriken rank as much as possible
• Change to Hero at promoted level 4 and grab Sol at level 5
• Change back to Master Ninja
• Go into Malig Knight at level 11 and earn Trample at level 15
• Swing through Hero for Axebreaker and Bow Knight for Shurikenbreaker
• Return to Master Ninja and acquire Shurikenfaire

The general build is Sol together with as many damage stacking skills as possible on your 1-2 range Shuriken. Axebreaker and Shurikenbreaker have specific utility in late-game chapters.

[Conquest tiering discussion]

3 hours ago, JSND Alter Dragon Boner said:

How exactly did you properly set him up for mid-late game? I originally had an ok Odin performance on my first Lunatic run but he drops off during Hoshido map rush since i stopped putting attention to him(and i memed with Leo >_>) . ATM he kinda struggles in Fuga.map

Ideally, he’ll get two levels in samurai and then go back in the middle of the game. If you don’t want to burn two heart seals before you can buy them in unlimited amounts after chapter 20, you could wait until chapter 19 or so and then switch to Master of Arms to collect the first three skills from that line, then go back to Sorcerer after chapter 20. An alternative is to go samurai early, grab Vantage, and then recruit Ophelia with Vantage inherited to do this job. This usually works better because you want the loot from Ophelia's paralogue as soon as possible.

Use late paralogues to boost levels. After chapter 20, depending on how overleveled Odin is, it'll probably take between 1 and 3 paralogues to get him to level 15. The non-boss enemies in the Nohrian child paralogues are level 6 at this point, but in the paralogues for shared children (Sophie, Dwyer, Midori, Shigure, Kana) the “captains” of enemy squads are level 14. Kana's paralogue is particularly lucrative, especially if you wait for the reinforcement waves, because it has something like a dozen captains and two bosses. For every chapter you delay, the levels go up by 2, but I’d want to have my late-game builds ready to go before chapter 22 at the latest.

Ideally, Odin or Ophelia marry someone who gives them Tomefaire or Trample. The reclass route goes like this:

1. Acquire early Vantage by whatever means
2. Promote to Sorcerer
3. Consider picking up a few levels in Master of Arms around level 9 to clear a few of those skills early if you haven’t already, especially in Ophelia's case. Odin might dip into the mercenary line if he gets it from Laslow.
4. Partner Seal into Onmyoji or Malig Knight at level 11 and get Tomefaire/Trample
5. Switch to Master of Arms and grab Life and Death, ideally at level 16
6. Return to Sorcerer so you can start pushing toward S rank in tomes

At this point you have Vantage, Heartseeker, and +17 damage stack. Nosferatu is no longer good once Life and Death comes online, but instead of trying to heal yourself, you should now try to just reach one-hit kill thresholds on everything you fight. You’ve got a lot of tools to help get there: modest tome forges and the calamity gate with its doubled reverse WTA, strong +Mag pair-up, meals, and tonics usually, and potentially Rally Magic and +damage auras.

Bowbreaker also has significant value in 25 and may prove better than Malefic Aura in 22, 23, and 24 if you’re two points beyond the kill thresholds. Ophelia can often get there but Odin usually needs all the damage boosts he can get.

[Conquest tiering discussion]

14 minutes ago, Shadow Mir said:

I would say you're selling his speed issue short - if his speed winds up being low to the point he's getting doubled, what then? We ARE talking about the most important stat in the game, after all...

His speed base is kinda low, but it's not abysmal, and his speed growth is fine. It won’t ever be enough to make him fast, but it’s extremely unlikely that he misses so many speed growths that he gets doubled by generic enemies. Even the chapter 17 Master Ninjas don’t double 20/1 Odin on average. (That’s one of the few cases before Life and Death comes online where he might be cutting it pretty close on his averages, but he can attack stance them to death with the Calamity Gate anyway.)

[Conquest tiering discussion]

You should not expect Odin to double anyone without serious support. It’s just not what he does. He uses Nosferatu early and stacks damage for one-shot kills late. Speed support will not help him at either of these jobs.

[Conquest tiering discussion]

1 hour ago, Shoblongoo said:

Yes--I watched the videos you posted.

You can level Odin up a few times the chapter he joins if you dedicate your entire chapter strategy to supporting him + feeding him kills, then use castle visits to harvest materials for the forge and give him a custom weapon to get him up to snuff for chapter 10.

You can level Mozu up a few times the chapter she joins if you dedicate your entire chapter strategy to supporting her + feeding her kills, then use castle visits to harvest materials for hte forge and give her a custom weapon to get her up to snuff for chapter 10. 

Hes not unsalvagable, but hes not better than any higher tier unit given comparable amounts of favoritism. 

Oh, I love this game!

You can make Jakob 1 do what Silas does in chapters 7-9 if you pick female Corrin, dedicate your entire early game strategy to supporting him and feeding him kills, and spend the game's very first Heart Seal on him. But he's top tier because of the way you can spend three of the eleven total early seals on him to do everything that Silas and then Camilla do for free.

—

Obviously I'm being disingenuous to make a point. The nature of the game is that any early unit is going to take a certain amount of investment to get going. Odin is not a significant burden in this respect. He's good enough at base to still pull down 2-3 levels quickly across two chapters without especially good matchups for him. The early game is even kind enough to give three free EXP bonanzas in a row with paralogue 1, invasion 1, and chapter 10; that’s a big reason why early units are much better than the ones that join in chapter 12 and 13.

Odin doesn't take a forged weapon. If you're complaining that he gets Nosferatu, what else are you going to buy with that money? You get 13,000 G before chapter 10 (plus up to 2,000 from Goddess Icon sales) and the only things worth buying are 1-2 seals, tonics, a Javelin, maybe a second Javelin or Hand Axe, and 4-7 bronze weapons for early forges. 

Under the rules of the tier list this thread was made to discuss, all castle resources are completely free.

[The Lunatic Club [Fates]]

52 minutes ago, Azure the Scale Tipper said:

That might be me still used to guard stance. Especially when his guide emphasizes it:

Shephen's original pairing guide was done very much with an Awakening mindset. In that game, pairing up was always correct, and it was pretty difficult to build supports outside of those pair-ups, especially for whichever unit was in back. (There also wasn’t much reason to build support with anyone but a unit's spouse, because S rank pair-up bonuses were so much better than even A rank ones.) This has several effects on his reasoning that I think are wrong.

1. He says, for instance, that it’s very hard to get Azura married off (since pairing her up with someone would be a waste of her abilities). This isn’t actually all that true because she gets +4 support points every time she sings and gets another +4 any time someone fights adjacent to her (+6-8 if they use her attack stance), and the highest level of support gain on a map is reached at just 30 points. So it’s quite possible to max out support with Azura in 3-4 turns without ever putting her in guard stance with anyone.
2. Because he was thinking about being in guard stance all the time, he overemphasizes the idea of aligning the guard stance stat boosts between support partners: +speed support for big bulky units, +str/+def for speedsters, and so on. Those are good, yes, but a lot of the value in achieving support ranks comes from new class access, a thing that didn’t happen in Awakening at all. He treats pairing two bulky but slow units who give +DEF bonuses as redundant, when in fact these sorts of units tend to do extremely well in attack stance together.
3. He assumes that your choice of partner is more or less fixed for the whole game. Thus pairing Silas with Camilla means not pairing him with Kaze. This is not how you should play. Many times you’ll want to have a specific kind of support partner earlier in the game, perhaps because a unit needs extra defense early on or really wants a friendship class as soon as possible, but then that same unit will be looking for something very different later on—a sweet level 15 skill or a great finishing class, perhaps. Also, using guard stance and attack stance in tandem allows you to build support ranks with multiple partners at the same time.

I respect what he was trying to do with this series, but I think it shaped the community's understanding of how to play Fates for the worse.

[Conquest tiering discussion]

59 minutes ago, Shoblongoo said:

I think thats fair tbh. (at least if the parameters you're using exclude immediate reclassing to darkflier or dreadfighter or some DLC class)

Its not that Odin doens't have potential. His base stats and early game are just so bad. And for the amount of investment it takes to get him up-and-running: hes not going to turn out amazingly better than units that join with solid bases and don't require extensive babying before they turn into "good units." 

Did you watch any of the videos I posted? Odin is great in the early game. “Babying” him consists of doing a few attack stance setups in his join chapter in 4-6 turns and then buying the Nosferatu tome when you have 10,000 G and not much else to spend it on. That alone is good enough to get him off the ground. He’s got tons of opportunities to get more levels in the early chapters, performs as well as Jakob 1 on Chapter 10, and then past that point is the second-strongest enemy phase unit you’re likely to have after Camilla. This is before he can do any of his reclass shenanigans to break the middle and late game.

[The Lunatic Club [Fates]]

It’s a really fun challenge run. It’s possible even to give every first gen unit an S support and a relevant A+ support and level them all to 20 and then promote them all by the end of chapter 20, but that takes some really intense planning and a good sense of how to work with under-leveled units all the time. (Abuse attack stance, mainly.)

Still, that’s not at all what you should do if you’re just trying to learn how to do a solid Lunatic Conquest clear. A focused team will work a lot better.

Charlotte!Siegbert is a really nice physical unit, in my experience, but his paralogue is very frustrating unless you have a top-tier blender unit or two. Think Sorcerers with Vantage or really strong Sol Master Ninjas, each with a lot of +damage skills.

[Conquest tiering discussion]

4 hours ago, Centh said:

The numbers I think Est/villager units are a great litmus test. They're nearly always bad but growth rates are blown out of proportion by a seemingly large group of players, when base stats are arguably much more important. This is where prepromote aversion comes from, which is hopefully close to death after people play Fates. I'm hungry and this post sounds salty....

What’s funny is that Fates makes almost all its prepromotes great, but also makes trainee units way less of a burden. Bronze forges are genuinely great throughout the game (E rank hell basically isn’t a thing with +2 forges), and Attack Stance lets weaklings steal kills and catch up without much special attention.

[Conquest tiering discussion]

3 hours ago, joshcja said:

Silias can tank maps and has the stack to brave sword down tacomeat no-proc in Hero (This is new tech). He's completely busted.

Can you pull this off? I have Hero Silas at:

33 STR (cap)
+ 4, at most, from statues (+STR Corrin, Beruka, Effie, Sophie, not counting level 3 Siegbert)
+ 3 Vow of Friendship
+ 5 Trample (marry Beruka or Camilla)
+ 3 Elbow Room
+ 2 Strength +2
+ 1 Defender
+ 7 Berserker Corrin (+STR, -HP/SPD/DEF) A Rank Guard Stance
+ 2 Supportive
+ 4 Rally STR
+ 1 Fancy Footwork
+ 2 Tonic
+ 3 Sword A Rank
+ 1 A Rank WTA
+ 6 Brave Sword might
------------
= 77 total attack

This hits the mark exactly without spending Corrin's marriage on him, but you still have to have a specific boon/bane and marriage setup. Marrying Samurai Corrin makes the margin much wider with Swordfaire & Life and Death over Trample & Strength +2.

[Conquest tiering discussion]

Reddit dropped Odin down to D tier.

 

I tried.

[Conquest tiering discussion]

Let's suppose Jakob changes from Butler to Paladin at level 5, then gets to level 8 in Chapter 7 so that he has both Elbow Room and Defender, and they're both active. If using Silas instead, let's say he gains two levels in chapter 7, also reaching level 8. On average, these are their effective stats with skills factored in:

Unit          HP   STR   MAG   SKL   SPD   LCK   DEF   RES

Jakob         26   19    7     15    12    15    12    11
Silas         23   15    3     10    9     8     11    6
Silas (VoF)   23   18    6     10    9     8     14    9

So Silas with VoF up basically trades a few points in everything else for 2 defense. This is not as bad as you might think for a few reasons. One, Silas still has just enough speed at base to reasonably reach doubling thresholds on enemies in chapters 8, 9, 10, and 11, and that's when more +SPD pair-up options start arriving. Two, he has overall better growths; Silas will erase the 1-point deficit in STR pretty soon and will expand his DEF lead. The superior Defense makes Silas better than Jakob for attack stance purposes; Jakob will tend to do better with dedicated guard stance support.

Lastly (and this doesn't apply to you so much), Jakob 1 has the hidden downside of not being able to benefit from Felicia. On a male Corrin run, you can position your units so that Silas gets incredibly tanky by himself, making him a much better abuser of attack stance.

Jakob doesn't require you to pay attention to Corrin's HP to perform at his best. That's a nice convenience, but there are turn 1 or turn 2 setups to drop Corrin below half health through at least chapter 14. Corrin's usually over-leveled enough from the prologue that she can still fight well at low health and doesn't need to pick up a lot of kills to remain useful throughout the early game. There's also a chapter that is devoted more or less exclusively to feeding Corrin enough EXP to promote.

[Conquest tiering discussion]

On 1/12/2019 at 1:00 PM, joshcja said:

Edit: Nvm no more videos, curse you.

Being sick has left me with a little bit of time on my hands.

Here's an interesting way to play chapter 7, focusing on building Silas's lance rank and Elise's axe rank.

And here's a quick, low-effort demonstration that Odin dominates chapter 13.

 

[Conquest tiering discussion]

Since I posted this on Reddit, I figure I'd also share here.

This first video is a demonstration that Odin can gain a level even at LTC pace in his join chapter.

This one is a variation that goes slower to give Odin another level and generally build the army better.

And the most recent one I've done is a showcase of Odin on chapter 10.

 

[Conquest tiering discussion]

2 hours ago, starburst said:

Selena has bad Strength, bad Defence, and only passable Skill in the class-tree that grants the greatest Skill bonuses in the route. Her redeeming quality might be her decent Speed, but she wields swords, which makes her less useful than Niles or Kaze, who more or less have the same build but can attack from distance and either wield weapons with higher Might or have de-buffs (and tank magic, and give +1 Mov and Speed bonuses, and open chests...)

How exactly is one supposed to use Selena? In Enemy Phase, she does not have enough Defence or HP to hold the lines; on Player Phase, she does not have the Strength or the range to kill a variety of enemies.

Nothing personal, mate. I use Odin and Mozu regularly and am used to deal with 'less-than-ideal' units. I simply fail to see Selena's use.

Uh, Selena has quite good personal strength, speed, and defense bases, and her growths for the latter two are above average. She has perfectly adequate skill, too. She performs pretty well for a few chapters before sword lock and the mercenary line's middling stat and growth spread get to her. And early Selena x Beruka is simple to build.

In Chapter 10, Selena occupies the northeastern ballista on her join turn with Camilla's support. Camilla and Beruka can then fight off the whole first wave from the east side the next turn, passing Selena around as needed. After that, Selena one-rounds the rest of the archers with Beruka's support, using only some vulneraries. They appreciate Azura's help along the way, but Camilla can go fly somewhere else. Both Beruka and Selena can get a level from this.

Selena helps Beruka wipe the Oni Savage room in Ch.11 on turn 2. She can then poach kills in the diviner room or the samurai room.

Chapter 12 is a place where they can do work in Attack Stance. Selena and Beruka can pick up kills along the left side at the beginning, and then they become part of your giant player phase swarm on the turn you trigger the dragon vein.

In chapter 13, Selena should have the armorslayer, so it's no trouble to get her 4-5 kills in the northeast corner while the rest of your party crosses the river in the west or middle parts of the map. She should reach level 14-15.

Immediate friendship seal to Wyvern Rider trades 2 skill, 2 speed, and 2 res for 2 def, 1 str, flight, axes over swords, and a quick Strength +2. The extra def and higher def growth leverage Selena's stat spread a lot better than her natural classes. She becomes essentially a Beruka who doubles nearly everything.

[Conquest tiering discussion]

Selena is actually quite good in her own right if you’re diligent about building her fast supports and you get her into Wyvern after chapter 13. She usually won’t be a world-beater by endgame because she doesn’t have the class sets for it, but you can do a lot worse than being a fast and bulky flier with moderate early damage stack for the price of a single Friendship Seal from the second shop.

[The Lunatic Club [Fates]]

@joshcja do you have a rough turn-by-turn of how you’re stuffing 3 levels into Odin in chapter 8? I know of ways to do it, but they’re pretty slow, so I’d love to read a faster setup if you’ve got one.

[Conquest tiering discussion]

6 minutes ago, Shadow Mir said:

If I may be frank, that's a very, very, VERY idealistic - and generous - way of looking at it. Guard Stance isn't reliable - ergo, while it does block one attack, the negated attack may not be the one I was hoping it would be. Also, I do not put much stock in high evade, what with even high evade units being surprisingly hittable - which you should have noted from my last post:

Breakers can help with that, except for the part where they're level 15 skills, which means they're only going to be relevant for about three chapters at most unless you're Felicia, Jakob or Gunter. Which, incidentally, is why I think by bringing up Shurikenfaire and breakers, you only managed to trip over yourself. Regarding the bolded statement, that's only going to be true if, once again, Sol activates on your first attack, else the enemy is damaged to the point where you're likely getting less healing than an obsolete healing item.

There's no "hope" anywhere. Guard Stance is extremely reliable. You don't use it correctly because you think of it as a way to negate the worst possible enemy attack. Instead (if you don't know for sure what the enemy turn order is) you should think of it as a guaranteed block on the weakest enemy attack.

It doesn't matter what order the enemies end up attacking in. If you're going to be in range of three enemies, you make sure the two strongest attacks can't kill you, and then you're fine. It goes like this:

Enemy 1 attacks.

Counterattack twice. Guard gauge is at 6/10. It doesn't matter whether the enemy hits or not.

Enemy 2 attacks.

Counterattack twice. Guard gauge is full. It doesn't matter whether the enemy hits or not—I made sure I would survive regardless.

Enemy 3 attacks; it's blocked.

Counterattack twice.

Now, maybe attack number 3 here was some weakling who could only do one damage. That's fine! Simply because I'm going to get that dual guard, I know that I have four consecutive chances to steal HP from two different enemies, after all the damage has come in. I don't care what kind of power Enemy 3 has because he represents just a 100 - (100-Skl)^2 % chance of being an HP donor.

The likelihood is high, even on a lowball estimate of 25 skill, that you'll recover a large chunk of HP. There's also a decent chance, stacked on top of that, that one of the first two enemies just happens to miss. If you don't recover with Sol and they don't miss, fine, you can get a healer over there or retreat or use a healing item—whatever you would've otherwise done if you didn't have Sol at all. But if you do hit those chances, great! You've effectively gained an action next player phase and saved some resources. Healing does vary depending on the enemy's exact defenses and whether you get Sol on the first strike or the second, but because you get these streaks of four strikes in a row thanks to dual guards, a lot of the variance is smoothed out.

I mentioned Breakers and Shurikenfaire not because they're essential but because they're tools that any of these units will eventually get. It's not a gotcha to say that those are late-game things—of course they are! The build works on underlying principles, and these late-game bonuses simply accentuate the features that were already there.

[Conquest tiering discussion]

Sol is very strong on units with: high damage, high skill, good speed, decent bulk, and unrestricted 1-2 range. That list encompasses basically ninja Silas, ninja Laslow, ninja Soleil, and no one else.

If you're imagining that Sol is supposed to recover whatever damage you take instantly, so that no enemies deal damage to you, you're not conceptualizing it properly.

Normally, you position your units so they take a certain number of battles and you know they'll survive until the next turn no matter what. If you're doubling in Guard Stance, you know that at least one in every three enemy attacks will get blocked, and if you take five fights you could potentially block the third one and the fifth one. So if your unit won't die in three hits, and it counterattacks and doubles all the enemies, you've got potentially ten chances to proc a skill.

With Sol on such a unit, you still set things up the same way—you don't count on Sol procs going off at the right moments to keep you from dying. But what changes is that you can now be reasonably sure that the unit comes out of the fight with a good amount of HP. On ten fights with 25 Skill, the chance that you proc Sol at least three times is 47.4%; you'll get it at least twice 75.6% of the time. With the high damage you get from these units by stacking Elbow Room, Strong Riposte, Vow of Friendship/Sisterhood, +STR pairup, meals, and eventually Shurikenfaire, any given Sol hit is likely to heal a lot of HP—generally about ten each time. Combined with ninja's high Avoid, and especially when WTA or breakers are in play, chances are quite good that the unit in question will not need healing in order to fight multiple enemies on the following turn, too.

So Sol is a skill that buys actions for you. 

[Conquest tiering discussion]

There are five early Heart Seals in Conquest. Even under the assumption that Corrin, Jakob 1, and Camilla each take one, there are two left over that you can use for just about anything.

Friendship Seals are pretty easy to build toward for many early units, and they relieve a lot of the demand for mid-game class changes. There aren’t many units who need a Heart Seal mid-game to keep up; most do well in their base class until chapter 20 or have a good friendship set.

To me, the list of first gen units who really need one of those two other Heart Seals before chapter 20 to be any good begins and ends at Mozu. They’re nice to have for Gunter and Xander, while Elise would like an early one and Odin can get stupidly broken if you give him two.

But I would also contest the notion that Camilla, Jakob, and Corrin really need the early Heart Seals. Jakob does better with marriage to Corrin for early Malig Knight, whereas Silas does Paladin Jakob’s thing but for free. Corrin’s perfectly good abusing the dragonstone throughout the early game and can steal other classes via friendship in the middle game. Camilla does just fine staying in Malig Knight for a while.

[Conquest tiering discussion]

15 minutes ago, Shadow Mir said:

How in the name of Anankos would you pull that off when the Mercenaries are too tough for him to kill in a timely manner??? I could be wrong, but even with a Rinkah pair up, he can only take one hit from the Mercenaries, and folds like a napkin to another.

You can follow this guide to do it. He actually gets Kaze to level 10 before the route split, which is pretty hilarious. Not the thing to do if you care about low turn counts, though. I’ve run modifications to this general strategy that don’t give Kaze quite as much of the experience, either to go faster or to get Rinkah to D Axes (also a pretty amusing result).

[What Is Your Strategy for Conquest Ch 25?]

I'm with @joshcja. I pretty much always have a stacked Sol Master Ninja with Shurikenbreaker (Silas, Soleil, or Laslow) for the right-hand side and stacked Calamity Gate Ophelia with Bowbreaker for the left. You can just Freeze one or both of the Spy Shuriken MNs around the corridor on the east side. Once everyone else around them is eaten, it's pretty trivial to break down the wall there and clean up.

[Conquest tiering discussion]

The Silas discussion over on Reddit really annoyed me. Their collective wisdom seems to be that he becomes kind of disappointing during the middle game and other units surpass him… which is completely correct, if you leave him in the cavalier line, but is wildly untrue if you bother to exploit his array of reclass options. The Sol Master Ninja role seems completely unknown there and damage stacking isn't considered at all.

I made a giant effort post about the really dumb things Odin can do, and rated Nyx a lot lower than him, but I got no responses from anyone but the guy running the tier list. He complained that Nyx and Odin do practically the same things.

[Wyvern Conquest mkll]

11 hours ago, starburst said:

I was actually rooting for Camilla and Odin.

I may be one of the few who think that pairing Elise and Odin screws the mechanics of the whole party early in the game in order to grind support between them. Either Elise ‘loses’ level-ups by being attached to Odin instead of healing every single turn, or Ophelia is ‘unlocked’ later than I would like to.

 I will be following your campaign, mate.

The fun way to do it is to send Elise into wyvern immediately, letting her build axe rank at a time when her high speed base, Strength +2, and a forged Bronze Axe can carry her. Early access to weapons makes her personal skill much more potent, too.