astrophys

Cordelia, Severa, female Morgan, female children of the Avatar, Gregor!Noire, Donnel!Noire, Vaike!Noire, etc.

But 8 full pairs is overkill….. Yes, I understand the arguments about maximizing the number of attacks per round, but frankly even three pairs (one of which is only a single-Galeforce 1st generation pairing) is more than enough to clear Apotheosis (Secret Route). It will even have more than enough turns to spare in the time-rounded. So there's no need to over-prepare and get EIGHT fully trained pairs for the Route. That would just be getting into "win-more" territory.

Of course you should pair him up with Cynthia. Dual Support + is not going to outweigh putting Brady with his S-Support wife. The S-Support is crucial for enhancing Dual-Strike rates, which Dual Support + does not do. Moreover, you get a double Galeforce pair with Brady/Cynthia, which gives them 3 attacks per turn (assuming they achieve kills, which they should). Brady - Galeforce, Limit Breaker, Aggressor, _____-faire (where _____ represents the weapon type he is using primarily) and Luna. Pavise and Dual Guard+ are almost pointless for this map. You can se the stats and abilities of the enemies, so you can always work out what is the worst case possible scenario in combat with a particular enemy and can thus avoid picking fights with anything that could kill you (having another unit better suited to fighting them fight them instead, or having unit get healed back up to a point they can survive the combat first). And because you will likely want an abundance of staff bots, healing from them is plentiful AND you can easily reposition your units so that they don't ever get attacked on the enemy phase….. meaning that all combat will be combat initiated of your direct choice. Which means you don't need these chance based skills (Pavise and Dual Guard +) to help you survive as you'll always pick fights you KNOW that you WILL survive. They aren't ENTIRELY useless, as if they do trigger they may prevent enough damage that they save a staffbot's turn that would be otherwise used on healing, but all in all they aren't reliable enough to make this worthwhile….. you're better off going for a guaranteed damage increase with a -faire. And while Luna isn't guaranteed either, if you're set up correctly you'll get 6 strikes against the enemy (2 from the front, 4 from the rear partner) before they can attack. Luna has the same chance of triggering as Pavise but will help you kill the enemy BEFORE it attacks (while with Pavise it can only trigger WHEN the enemy attacks). So Luna is really better for defensive purposes here under the "best defense is a good offense" philosophy. Dead enemy units cannot do any damage to you, after all. And you have Limit Breaker. And if you beat the Normal Route once you'll gain access to a really good Rallybot. Between Limit Breaker and Rallies your characters aren't going to be overly threatened by the Apotheosis enemies as long as you account for things like Vengeance, Luna, Aether, etc. before you initiate combat. Bring a calculator with you if you're worried you'll mess up on the mental math on figuring out how much extra damage these will cause.

If you're using him as a staffbot, you don't need any combat skills at all…. He'll just be spamming Rescue, Fortify, and Recover all day. If you use him as a combat unit, Limit Breaker, Galeforce, and Luna would be a good idea for you. Also, you are seemingly over-estimating the difficulty of Secret Route Apotheosis if you think that Frederick!Brady has to be a support unit because he'll be "bad". I'd STILL use Brady for offense. Galeforce + Luna = already a very useful unit for that purpose. Don't worry if he doesn't have enough speed to double the final bosses of Apotheosis; you only really need one character or pair of characters who can do that; everyone else can get away with less. You do want staffbots, but Brady in general is too good to waste on that position; use a Spotpass unit instead, or a weaker Shepherd who doesn't have such good skills. You will be abusing Rescue a lot (in many strategies for the map, although there are other ways). Generally, you will be able to manipulate things if you bring enough staff users so that your units NEVER end their turns in the range of enemy attacks. As such, with such careful management the combat stats of the staffbots are almost irrelevant as they'll never get attacked. Only magic matters for them for influencing staff range and healing.

This basically falls in line with what I most recently did with Avatar x Cordelia's children, Severa and Morgan, with respect to the postgame. Cordelia passed Galeforce to both of them (as I was doing postgame consideration, the fact I needed to bring Morgan through Mercenary to get Armsthrift didn't really matter). Avatar passed Axefaire to both of them (and he was a +Spd Avatar). I decided not to go for Rally Strength because I have a pair of Avatar Logbook units I was planning to use anyways in that function.

If you bring Limit Breaker, a good Rally character or two (I used Katarina with Spectrum/Heart/Strength/Magic/Speed), a bunch of staff users with healing staves and Rescue, and a decent number of Galeforce users you should be fine. Rescue is so that all fights happen during the player phase on your terms. I beat it with three teams of attackers (Male Avatar x Cordelia, Cordelia!Morgan x Henry!Owain, Avatar!Severa x Ricken!Inigo) which had 5 Galeforces represented among those characters; I could obtain 8 attacks per round assuming I got my kills. (Having the -faire skills and Aggressor helps a lot in that regard). Avatar was a Grandmaster, Cordelia a Dark Flier, Morgan a Valkyrie, Owain a Dread Fighter, I don't remember what Severa was, and Inigo was a Sniper. It wasn't hard…. just long. I never was in a fight that I could actually lose as I did the math to calculate the maximum damage I could possibly take under the worst case scenarios (i.e. their Vengeance triggered while they were at 1 HP, damages from counter, Luna+, Aether, etc.), double check by math with a calculator, and chose my fights in such a way so that I could never lose. Then some Rescue and healing staves like Physic, Recover, and Fortify as appropriate after fights if I took damage.

Regarding posts #32 and #35 by Czar_Yoshi…. Yes, its a fair enough point that marrying a 2nd generation character allows for one more attack per turn (16 vs. 15). But of course we know that Apotheosis doesn't even require anything remotely close to this, even on the secret route. Sure, you can perhaps beat Apotheosis in less turns with such setups. But if you manage to beat Apotheosis with less Galeforce pairs then at the end of the day you've still beaten Apotheosis. I myself did the secret route of Apotheosis with pair-ups of male Avatar x Cordelia, Inigio x Severa, and Owain x Morgan. The first such pair gets 2 attacks per turn while the second and third pairs get 3 attacks per turn. Which left me with only 8 attacks per turn. I had other characters, but they were either using staves or were rallying and as such they were not attacking. Yet even this was more than enough for me to clear the secret route easily. Even for the timed waves I had roughly half of my turns left on the timer by the time I finished them. So really it isn't particularly worth worrying about whether you can get 15 attacks per turn with one build versus 16 attacks per turn with some other build when even a much lower number, such as 8, is still more than adequate for ensuring victory.