bottlegnomes

This isn't one of the better forging bonds IMO. Marth's was weird. It itself was fine, but they've done this with Marth enough, not to mention this is the sixth Marth to join the order, at least one of whom is explicitly the Hero King and post Mystery of the Emblem. They had to have had these experiences already. I still need to get Marianne's S support, but hers doesn't seem too bad. Linhardt seems like he's being a bit pushy, but maybe that's true to character from 3H—never did BE. I detest Eirika's. The C convo doesn't fit in with any of the rest, and as many have mentioned, is super gross, and the rest of the convos are more about Ephraim than Eirika. It just reinforces my sense that IS only thinks Eirika is popular because of her association with Ephraim, which is frankly insulting. Gatekeeper's was a little silly, but still endearing. Pending Marianne's S, it was probably my favorite. The story itself is fine. The only particularly memorable part was Gatekeeper standing up to Thor, which like his convos, was a bit silly but endearing.

Raijinto > Siegfried > Ragondite > Gradivus IMO. I know half is from his fancy new kit, but L!Ryoma is going to be nuts. DC, NFU, spectrum buffs, +7 true damage, DR, and effective +4 spd/def/res. All he needs is an A slot upgrade. Normal Ryoma can now be a diet DC Mareeta which is pretty cool. The open A slot makes up for the speed diff and somewhat the lack of slaying effect. Siegfried isn't anything special, but it does what Xander needed. Keeps him from dying and helps his damage output. If you really wanted to, you could even force his res to be somewhat worthwhile. Not good, but 35 res is decent enough when not getting doubled. Zelg and BK get 2CD BL, L!Ike gets 1CD RA, and Ike becomes old L!Ike. Nothing gamebreaking, but makes them stand out a bit more. Hardin can worry more about his attack than his survival now, which helps him. Camus still feels underwhelming. The biggest thing he has going for him is innate DC, but Duessel, Petrine, and Perceval all still seem like they'd still be better. His only real advantage over the latter two is better def (35 vs 30/32), but his res is still pretty meh and his speed is worse. For PP, Sirius also does the same thing with more stats and even Dmitri can be a decent substitue, even if his weapon is a bit awkward in this day and age. Neither is bad. They just feel like they still fail to stand out from pretty saturated pools.

They also actively contribute to completing the map by killing things on EP. Very few maps value just walling without contributing in a timely fashion.

Like I said, though, what modes are you really cheesing with it? Most have mitigating factors like a time limit, score, or a massive number of hugely powerful and diverse enemies (sweep skills only keep the units safe against half them so you still have positioning and initiation concerns). And again, what's really the difference between choking a point with a Stillness dagger and choking it with an invincible wall like B!Hector, B!Edelgard, or Surtr back in the day? Yes, it's powerful, intentionally so, and yes, it makes things a lot easier in the player's hands, also intentionally so, but it's not the autowin button you seem to be making it out to be. I'm honestly more concerned about fighting against it since it could be a pain in the ass since you'd have to clear out potentially bulky units first, but I still think it's fine because again, I was trying to make a skill that was strong enough to really get people's attention.

I think you're kinda over estimating this. As soon as the unit takes any damage they're wide open, so the AI doesn't really need someone who can OHKO, just someone who can counter and for the player to not have some way of immediately healing them back up. If you run all four units with it, you're locked to 4 daggers which means that you need to give them all sweep skills or healing abilities and most healing abilities aren't real great at keeping the unit at 100% HP. If you run a dedicated healer, then the healer is open to attack and once they're dead then it's back to the all Stillness scenario. In AR, you can easily time out. In PvE content like abyssals, it's difficult to ORKO enemies and there are so many that you'd need to be incredibly careful with your choice of attacks to keep an enemy from being able to counter or have the Stillness unit only ever block things. In Mjolir's strike, this could be a liability since those maps are usually open then the enemies would target your gates faster. In RD/GC, same thing. They skip past the unit and head toward your gate and if you're taking too long to make sure to maintain up time then you time out. Not to mention being restricted entirely to daggers. I will say maybe I should let the enemies pass through the unit and let them attack structures the unit is on so you can't just plop a couple on your fortresses and keep them 100% safe. Arena is really about the only mode where you have infinite time with enemies with non-inflated stats and even there you still need to make sure to maintain up time somehow. The only mode where it's literally a guaranteed win is defensive PvE content that doesn't require you to make any level of offensive push. Again, it's fine if it's incredibly powerful in the player's hands so long as there's a counter when facing it. I mean, B!Edelgard is basically a win button but there are counters for her.

Yup, the former. The enemy effect is really just to keep it from being completely unfair for a player facing it. As far as in the player's control, throw balance to the wind. But that's why I was saying maybe it's be more appropriate as a B skill or a dagger exclusive. As a B skill, it'd eat most of the means of maintaining it past the first combat, such as sweeps or mystic boost. As a dagger exclusive, then they can't use firesweep so a mage/bow (whichever the equipped sweep doesn't affect) who can survive one hit can knock them out of it in additional to most not being able to double anymore. AoE effects will also knock them out of it very easily and Null C-Disrupt would get rid of the majority of the means of maintaining it. Don't get me wrong, it's most likely broken and intentionally so, but there are ways around it. I will say I neglected to think about if all four units had it, in which case it'd be hilarious in player control. In AI control, it'd actually be less useful since then it'd be the same as none of them having it. Maybe it would be more balanced if the range effect were symmetric, but I stand by it since I find it funny and FEH doesn't seem to care too much about balance in the player's control so long as there's a reasonable counter when the player is facing it. Having at least one of your units only in range to attack the Stillness unit doesn't seem too unreasonable to me. Plus daggers seem like maybe they could use a buff. You know, I think I am going to make it dagger exclusive.

Had an idea for Stillness and so I decided to run with a unit behind it. Edit: decided dagger exclusive since bows are in a good spot at the moment.

I was about to ask about that given that there's a month between FBs, but then I started typing out what I'm guessing they do, and I can definitely see what you mean, especially since there's stuff I'm probably missing. Even with the month in between FBs, I wouldn't be surprised if the writing staff has like a week to write these on average.

Glad I'm not the only one who felt that way. While I didn't mind his portrayal in his convos, in the main story, he seemed weirdly jerky. Seteth can come across a bit curt, but he is actually a pretty nice guy, just very cautious and a bit stern. In these he was just being kind of a jerk to Flayn. To be fair, it's not exactly that. What people hated was all four characters gushing over how amazing the summoner was with literally no interaction with any actual characters. When they first introduced this format, IIRC the one where Alfonse was talking to Caineghis and I forget who the rest had, people loved it because it was actually showing how the characters interacted with the Order of Heroes and gave the Askr trio some characterization, which they still largely lack, while showing off the FB characters' personalities a little. This one does feel kind of regressive since there's no other characters, but at least it isn't the format that causes such an uproar. For me, this FB is fine. I really like all the characters, but this isn't doing much for me. Flayn's is cute because Flayn's a sweetheart. Seteth's is kind of fun but is still just Anna with a get-rich-quick scheme. Catherine's is pretty dull. Shamir's seems like it might be interesting what with the imposter but I don't have overly high hopes. The main story is whatever. Seteth is being a dick and seems like someone who had a passing knowledge of him wrote it rather than someone who actually understood his character. Catherine and Shamir, in their own and in the main story, both seem kind of bland and a tiny bit off, again like someone who got bullet points on them wrote it rather than someone who really understood the characters. Flayn seems the best in her story, though I know her the least of the 4, and in the main story, it's just really hard to get past how off Seteth seems. Overall, it's not the worst one, but that's because worst FB is a very low bar, and I have a fondness for these characters that's nothing to do with their portrayals here.

Well, just fuck Nemesis I guess. Especially considering how lenient the solo effects are and how they provide larger boosts (not to mention Ashnard's rein), >=90% is minuscule, like 4-5 HP, which is less than the recoil from fury and tier 4 push skills. Okay, cool, so my other units literally can't take damage or engage in combat half the time? Thanks. As for the damage reduction, I hope IS quits the once per phase thing. There are enough modes in this game that that's not practical for, HBs, AR, etc. His stats themselves are good, and given that I don't care about arena, the lack of superboon is whatever to me, but I can sympathize with the people who don't like it. I would've liked if Seteth's res was a bit higher, but as it stands, guess Heath is still the go-to for mixed taking lance fliers. +res Seteth would be virtually identical to +spd Heath, but +res on Seteth seems like a bit of a waste, especially with his lance, whereas +spd on Heath is pretty much ideal. And I have a soft spot for Heath and his art. Shamir and Catherine are pretty much as expected. Seeing them in action in the FB reminded me how much I like all the characters* so ended up hitting 40 summons. Just need to decide who to go for. Catherine's weapon seems more fun and I like her art better, but Shamir has a better kit on the whole and she's one of my absolute favorites in 3H, even if I'm not a fan of her FEH art. A surprisingly tough choice. Flayn's Flayn, and she didn't show up. She looks good and she's a sweetheart of a dweeb, but I don't really care to go for her. *That's not to say the FB was anything great. It was fine I guess, but more so that I liked the characters enough in 3H and reading their lines in their voices in my head jogged that nostalgia.

Considering this banner has 3 of my favorite 3H characters and one (Flayn) that I still like quite a bit, I'm weirdly unenthused about it. I'll probably wait for the next banner trailer and then decide if I want to blow the orbs to spark someone on here or fail to chase one of the legendary heroes I haven't gotten and actually care about (Eliwood > Leif > Julia > Chrom > Alm). Catherine seems good for what she is, but what she is isn't all that interesting. Really not feeling Shamir's art. It feels like they cutesied her up. As a unit, she's another PP bow. At least Claude and especially Shinon had the potential to be dual phase to set them apart a little. Flayn looks really good, but eh. I don't actively participate in any mode that really necessitates damage reduction, so at most she'd help with some of the LegHBs. Seteth is probably the banner unit I'm most excited for. 4* with a decent prf looks fun. I'm curious what his stats are. He seems like he's going to lean PP, but if he's got a decent mixed phase statline, I might make him my lance flier merge project over Heath, especially considering the last new character. Nemesis is definitely the highlight for me. His art looks amazing and that he has a prf is great. I'm really hopeful he's pretty solid, like Ashnard or Petrine were. If he is, he'll definitely be a priority for merge projects. It seems like he'll be a bulkier sword which is a little bit of a shame as I have a spare F!Kris to fodder off Spurn and Fury 4 to someone. Currently Echidna and Rutger are looking like the best options, but I was hoping a really solid F2P character would come along. That said, not a knock against Nemesis at all, just not exactly what I was hoping for at the moment. I'll definitely be getting all 3 copies and training him just from how awesome he looks. And if he's fairly decent, probably +2 him.

As @Othin mentioned, I'm more curious about how games like this usually end. It'd be astoundingly bad PR to just kill the game without much notice, but at the same time, it seems like it'd be hard to justify adding any new content as I doubt players would be willing to spend much on something that's going to be gone in a couple months or whatever the typical time frame is for announcements, and saying that there won't be future new content is effectively just telling people the game is going to be shut down, just with a longer notice. As for what I hope happens, I honestly don't know. To me, it's basically just collecting baseball cards at this point, and it's not like physical collectibles where you can hold onto them for later, so I can't say I'm all that invested in what they do.

I think that's the issue with this type of phraseology. Neither one is technically wrong given certain interpretations, but both are prone to misunderstandings due to lack of clarity and connotations of words. The only way around it is being particularly verbose, which FEH doesn't always have room to do. It's a linguistic rock and a hard place. Though reading the exact wording back, they could have just added "foes within" so it would read "At start of turn, inflicts Atk/Res-5 on foes within 3 columns and foes within 3 rows centered on unit through their next actions." Still not the clearest, but probably would've helped some. Looking at the ploy skills' descriptions they could've gone with the more flowery route of "At start of turn, all foes in cardinal directions of unit and unit's adjacent spaces suffer Atk/Res-5 until the end of foe's next action." But well, that's being a bit silly.

Regarding Arvis/Saias refine, I just checked in the TT and it's definitely or. So basically Yune's area of effect, but affecting enemies both horizontally and vertically. @Othin @XRay @LoneStar I can see why there's the wording issue. Neither one is particularly great because of the colloquial mean of or as being exclusively one or the other which might make it seem like it's only columns or only rows depending on some criteria. Meanwhile and causes this confusion. Personally, I just assumed IS wasn't that incompetent.

Well this is a pretty disappointing batch. Sigurd's looks the best, though DC on him is still worthless unless he wants to die to mages or you can speed stack him to an absurd extent. If I'm following it correctly, does this mean he gets +10 atk/def when he's over 50% health? Or is it a translation error? Arvis and Saias are like the most boring possible refines, but at least they're decent. They're better at their jobs and they get basically a free +10 attack, and hey, no res check anymore so they can run full offensive skills. It's what it is, but I was hoping for something that'd make me really keen on investing in them since I have 5 Arvis's lying around. I kinda wish they debuffed different stats so you could run them on a team. Effie's is just ugh. It's just so...there. And that's it. Rhajat's galeforceless Kempf now with a better base effect. A watersweep speed build on her might be kind of fun. Effie seems like she got the worst one since it means the better half of her weapon is useless for a decent chunk of EP. The rest are decent, but just not all that interesting.

Ugh. I wish they'd stop debuting new characters on seasonal banners. But at least Deg and Xane are in at all. I'm broke and I don't like seasonals, so I won't be pulling much. Might go for Xane since hell probably never get in otherwise amd I certainly won't complain if Deg shows up, but I probably won't make a point of going for him.

At the risk of asking a stupid question, why did he grind for that long if he wanted a challenge? More on topic, I'd say try a chapter or two and then decide. If he's enjoying it, then keep going, but if not, then swap out all the characters for ones he didn't level and let Byleth sit in the back for all the maps until everyone catches up. If he leveled literally everyone up, then at least he's not too far in to restart. And as mentioned, there's higher difficulties and classic mode.

That's exactly what I was thinking. Ploys have the issue of being pretty positioning dependent so this could make them like a variation on smokes that also work at the start of a turn and give the player some additional control over inflicting debuffs. Heck, it'd also make the threatens excellent, basically turning them into smokes (that also give stat boosts for the tier 4 versions). Arvis and Saias would love that.

This 100% won't happen, but what if they went with "Effects that trigger at start of turn now occur after every round of combat on applicable turns"? Arvis gets to use his recovery ring to completely offset Fury 4 or just patch up after combas, Saias could do similarly on odd turns with renewal 3, both's ploys get triggered more often and with more flexibility, etc. I don't think it'd be too broken since they can't equip Wrath, Special Spiral and smoke skills have that effect anyway, and most field buffs don't stack. You could also optionally swap the ploy for a chill so it goes debuff strongest enemy -> kill strongest enemy -> debuff next strongest enemy. It'd be a way to make chills a bit more relevant, though still probably suboptimal because you can't always or don't always want to deal with the strongest enemy first. I guess the biggest danger I could see is combining special spiral and time's pulse to give them guaranteed icebergs every turn. Which would be annoying, but let's be honest, is it really any worse than half of what's out there as is?

@kradeelav Zihark is a favorite so very glad to see him. I have some thoughts on him—feel free to disregard. Currently, his BST is too high for gen 5 infantry (188 vs. Brave Dimitri's ~176), and currently they have a soft ceiling at 45, so maybe drop his speed to 45 and strength to 38? If this includes his weapon, then ignore the BST part. I'd go with Slaying Edge+. Killing weapons are pretty much dead in the water since slaying weapons were released, aside from upgrading them in the refinery. Might also be worth giving him a personal weapon. I'm pretty sure FEH represents adept as desperation. Both provide sequential attacks rather than normal P -> E -> P combat and have a fairly similar icon. That said, I like the idea of a special that reorders combat rather than a straight damage buff. I don't think they'd give Zihark Lif's personal skill, or probably even any personal skill. In general, only special units (mythics, legendaries, the anniversary/brave characters) seem to get personal skills and they very rarely, if ever, overlap, and when there is overlap, it's because the characters are closely related. It seems more likely he'd get a personal weapon which is where you could differentiate him and also give a nod to his vigilante work. Like I mentioned, him getting a personal skill seems unlikely, but I like the flavor of his C slot too much to say no to it. It could be an inheritable skill with some tweaked effects as a possibility too. Definitely agree that letting them transform is a good idea. I like your take on him, and as mentioned, always glad to see Zihark. These were just some thoughts to make him a little more in line with FEH's apparent current hero creation approach.

In honor of Petrine making it in, I decided to do the remaining two riders. I'm assuming they're both GHBs. Was going to include Tauroneo, but I haven't had any ideas I liked for him yet.

I'd whale for this. Ball's in your court, IS.

Yeah, that is a weird decision in retrospect. I guess their biggest reason was probably that FE3 has a book 1 remake of FE1 while the Tellius games are only available as two independent games? I don't see that holding them back from making a Hardin alt given how distinctive they are. Everyone forgets that the Grimas available in the game are actually referred to as Robin, and one even debuted alongside Hardin in the first Fallen Heroes. So adding good Hardin wouldn't really be any different than having Robin/Fallen Robin (Grima) or Delthea/Fallen Delthea, etc. Arvis, Travant, and any other FE4 gen 1&2 characters would be in the same boat. Finn at least had the out of being in FE5. Mist was certainly one that came to mind since she's a cute girl, I think fairly popular, and has both a significant number of design and gameplay differences (well, pre-promo in PoR). I think the biggest knock against her would be that her vanilla PoR form in FEH is so forgettable that it might've actually hurt her popularity. Actually, a duo of RD Mist and Boyd would be pretty cute.

My guess is a combination of popularity and noticeable design differences. Like PoR Sothe probably isn't popular enough to ever get in, even if he is adorable and a significantly different design, and Shinon and probably Haar don't have enough design differences to really warrant an alt even if they are fairly popular. With Catria, Ike, and potential candidates, such as Hardin, it seems fully possible for someone to like one version and not the other, so it seems like they'd be remiss in not adding them barring extreme obscurity of one version. Now the question is, will we get short hair Lucia or long hair Lucia? His LHB could be a desert. Please don't toy with my emotions like that.

@Sunwoo Never did read much of her supports so I suppose I'm not doing her justice. I'll have to read them. And yeah, Shinon is a great character, but he is still a prick. It's a part of what makes him great and his reasons for having reservations about Ike are reasonable, but he was still a complete prick about it and I highly doubt Titania would just let him go on like that.