agglebees

Figured I'd just leave this here. This is one of the better bond units I've managed to make recently. Initially, I passed down Quixotic, while the other Avatar gave Locktouch. Locktouch obviously wasn't that useful, but the starting class was Spear Fighter, so I ended up resetting to pass something that wouldn't be naturally available. Death Blow seemed like something a Samurai could use, so I equipped that instead. I don't know how practical the setup would be against anything that isn't computer controlled, but something about seeing "100% hit" and "100% crit" will never not be hilarious.

A few hundred resets? That sounds excruciating, but the unit does seem useful, so I guess it worked out. It seems like damage output would be a problem, though. Outside of critting things to death, the unit doesn't have much to do in terms of boosting damage (which wouldn't be a problem in game, but wouldn't help much online). Quixotic and Certain Blow would be a pain to deal with, at least. I also "discovered" (a term I use lightly) another way of changing a bond unit's inheritance. You can just save before visiting the other player's castle, reset if you don't like the skill combination, and visit again. The fact that you visited doesn't register until the game sends feedback.

The randomization definitely feels like a double-edged sword. It can lead to some unique skill combinations, but manipulating the result is a bit difficult. The most breaker skills I've managed to get on a bond unit was three, but that was completely unintentional. Shurikenbreaker was the personal skill, it inherited Swordbreaker, and it could reclass to Sorcerer to learn Bowbreaker. Getting all six breaker skills seems like it'd take a lot of time and luck.

That actually sounds awesome...but at what cost? You would have to play through Revelation four times. I wouldn't wish that on anyone.

(Edit of an edit: Bond units don't get the +1 to their modifiers. After breaking down the character statues I'd built, their maximum stats match what a Corrin with a specific boon and bane would have.) As far as I can tell, there's no pattern to it after the first time. After the first time, I've had bond units that inherited my class, bond units that inherited the other Avatar's class, and bond units that didn't inherit either.

I hard to learn about the thing with skills the hard way. I wasn't amused at all. Somehow, I hadn't considered planning anything with a friend, but that would probably make the results more consistent.

I haven't played the games for a while, but I agree with you completely. Sweet Scent and spread moves have saved me a lot of time and sanity. For the sake of comparison, I just figured that Super Training would be an easier concept to explain. Applying a similar idea to Fates in general (specifically Birthright and Revelation, which allow grinding), power leveling your bond units is possible with a combination of skirmishes, Paragon, and Nobility. For me, this is only sustainable because of the Logbook (because I don't have infinite Paragon books or infinite gold), but it doesn't take all that long, really. On later maps, I can consistently grind the units for five levels each time.

Hoshidan scum reporting for duty here. So at this point, I’ve put more hours into Fates than I’d probably be willing to admit out loud. Nowadays, most of my stretches spent playing involve farming for stat boosters, mucking around with the lottery, or other similar ways of passing the time. (Glorious Nippon says grinding is A-okay.) This, of course, all becomes stale very quickly, and recently, I’ve been wondering how to make the experience a bit fresher. One of the first thoughts that popped into my head was trying my hand at some PvP. This wouldn’t be my first brush with the competitive aspect of Fates (in the strictest sense of the word, that term might not fit perfectly, but I digress). Somewhere earlier in my save file, I screwed around with a team that wasn’t even remotely battle ready—you know, just for giggles. Fortunately, I didn’t run into any 50+ speed Einherjar Corrins holding a max-forged Hagakure Blade and equipped with some permutation of breaker skills and Lucky Seven. I did, however, suffer through my fair share of Rescue, Warp, and Galeforce shenanigans. I entertained the idea of grinding characters for a proper team, but then I thought to myself, “Well, what about bond units? That might be fun.” In the process of grinding for battle and visitor rewards, I’ve generated quite a few, so I figured I might as well do something with them. My question is this: Is there any consensus on using bond units for PvP? Or more broadly, does anyone feel one way or the other about them? I’m curious about people’s thoughts and find the mechanic interesting. I’ve seen some blanket statements about Einherjar units collectively (see earlier mention of Sonic SPEED Einherjar Corrins); but in the case of bond units (and prisoner units, for that matter, but I won’t talk about those), the possibilities differ in a few ways. In many respects, bond units are functionally similar to the children that result from S-ranking two first generation characters—instead acting as a child between two players’ Avatars. There are, however, several differences. For the sake of comparison, I’ll try to make a cohesive listing of both the similarities and differences. Admittedly, I’m speaking from a position of bias here (because muh children). But I’ll try to be objective in considering bond units’ strengths and weaknesses and the possible ramifications of both. So let’s talk about bond units. To reiterate, bond units essentially function as children between two players’ Avatars. And hence, where these guest units are concerned, some of the same mechanics involving child characters also apply: 1) Skill inheritance functions (almost) the same for bond units as it does for child characters. When a bond unit is created, it inherits the last equipped skill from both Avatars. Imagine entering a child character’s paralogue and seeing those two glorious skill slots you worked to fill. It’s the same here, except that it isn’t. Suppose you hop over to a friend’s castle, gift them an accessory, and your beautiful baby is “born from the earth.” But then, to your horror, you realize that you equipped Magic +2 in your last skill slot. In the case of a child’s paralogue, you could just leave the battle, return to My Castle, and right this terrible wrong. In the case of bond units, inheritance is set the moment you enter the other player’s castle, prepared to deepen your bonds once more. You cannot reset to change your bond unit’s inheritance...unless you saved immediately before entering the other player's castle. In that case, resetting will allow you to visit again immediately. The fact that you've visited doesn't register until you manually leave the castle and the game sends feedback. 2) Personal growth rates and maximum stat modifiers (effectively) function the same for bond units as for child characters. In the case of bond units, their growth rates and stat modifiers are based upon a combination of your and the other Avatar’s respective boon and bane. The bond unit will share your boon and the other Avatar’s bane, or vice versa; which alternative applies is a matter of luck. When a single Corrin can, under certain conditions, trivialize much of the difficulty in Fates, having an army of baby Corrins at your disposal seems potentially game-breaking, doesn’t it? It probably would be, if bond units didn’t suffer several limitations: 1) Unlike child characters, whose personal skills and starting class are set, a bond unit’s personal skill and starting class are chosen from a random pool. Whereas knowledge of a child character’s attributes allows for easy (relatively speaking) optimization, bond units have no such luck. This can easily lead to redundancy where skill inheritance is concerned. For instance, you probably wouldn’t pass down Lancefaire to Shiro. He could just as easily go through Spear Master with an Offspring Seal to get it himself (and more than likely wants to). With bond units, you commonly find yourself in this exact scenario. Pray to Anna for good fortune (not the skill, mind you). Aside from redundancy issues, some combinations of personal skills and starting class simply don’t synergize. Imagine getting Lucky Charm on a bond unit whose starting class set doesn’t have Miracle or Salvage Blow as skills. That’d be somewhat annoying. Starting class sets are a matter of importance for bond units much more so than child characters, because… 2) Either due to intentional design or unfortunate oversight, a bond unit’s starting class is not included in its reclass pool. To clarify, a bond unit’s primary class set is always Nohr Prince\Princess, not its initial class. Suppose you like ninjas, and your bond unit turns out to be a ninja. This seems great, right? Wrong. Both of the available promotions for ninjas are attractive for different reasons: Master Ninja because high skill and ludicrous speed, Mechanist because everyone loves Replicate. Of these two, you can only pick one. Good ol’ classic Fire Emblem right there. If you promote to Mechanist, you can’t Heart Seal to access Master Ninja. Whichever class you promote to, you can’t come back after reclassing to your secondary to pick up other skills. How pointlessly tragic. You could be a Master Ninja with Lethality as your only offensive proc, or you could be a Mechanist that replicates and doesn’t do much else. (As a brief aside, a bond unit supposedly inherits the “Talent” chosen by both Avatars. But in my experience, this is also luck-based. You seem to only get one or the other. How pointlessly tragic.) This unfortunate restriction is only worsened by bond units’ other limitations where reclassing is concerned. While skill buying and pairing options somewhat ease the process of planning for child characters, bond units have no such luck, because… 3) Unlike every other named character in the game, bond units (and other Einherjar, presumably) cannot learn skills from themselves. To clarify, bond units cannot, under any circumstances, learn skills from characters with the same name. (Believe me. I’ve tried.) Even if you don’t change names upon creating the bond unit, this limitation still applies. This removes the whole skill buying aspect of Fates from the equation for bond units. You can’t reclass if you want to stick to your initial class set, and you can’t buy skills to save yourself effort or planning. And it only gets worse from here, because… 4) As is the case with all other Einherjar, bond units cannot support. In other words, in addition to not benefitting from support rank bonuses upon pairing up, they can’t use Friendship Seals, and they certainly can’t use Partner Seals. Outside of any DLC you might have available, their reclassing options are severely limited. Think of Corrinsexuals, but perhaps worse off. At this point, the limitations imposed on bond units might seem to heavily outweigh whatever benefit might arise from using them. To an extent, this is true. They do, however, enjoy some advantages over other “child” characters and story characters in general (aside from having Corrin’s growths, that is). For the sake of these next considerations, assume that a bond unit with godly potential has materialized from the ground for you. Anna has taken mercy upon you, and this unit’s personal skill, inherited skills, and inherited classes all synergize perfectly. Where do you go from here? What do you do? How does this bond unit compare to, say, a painstakingly optimized Avatar or child character? I’ll give a personal example for convenience. Recently, I created a bond unit that ended up with Quick Draw as her personal skill. In any case, an automatic +4 damage dealt when attacking an opponent seems nice to have. This unit came with Spear Fighter as her initial class (my Avatar’s talent) and inherited the skills Vantage and Tomebreaker. Both skills are good to have—Vantage more so in my opinion. All of this made for a bond unit with decent potential. Assuming I promoted to Spear Master, I could throw Lancefaire on her for an automatic +9 damage when initiating battle with a lance. What elevated this unit’s potential from good to great is the secondary class set it inherited: Samurai. Do you know where I’m going with this? Upon reclassing to Master of Arms, she could learn Line of Death, and upon reclassing to Swordmaster, she could learn Swordfaire. These skills used in conjunction with each other would result in an automatic +19 damage when using a sword on Player Phase. Thank goodness she didn’t inherit Spendthrift. Combining all of this with Vantage, Awakening (from Great Lord), and an offensive proc has resulted in a unit that deals hilariously high damage on Player Phase. Furthermore, she only becomes more hilariously overpowered upon falling below half health—which isn’t terribly difficult, because Line of Death exists. The difficult part is keeping her alive below half health. So how does this hilariously strong bond unit, or any bond unit for that matter, compare to any other optimized unit? What advantages do bond units have? Most of what I’m going to mention boils down to two words: Logbook shenanigans. This is probably where my objectivity goes out the window. 1) Unlike story characters, bond units can (without restriction) benefit from every statue available to a player based on his or her path. Due to building limitations in My Castle, you can’t have all the character statues available to you erected at once—not in Revelation, anyway. In Birthright or Conquest, you can feasibly ignore every building and erect only statues, but that seems a bit dull, doesn’t it? In the event that all your statues aren’t simultaneously built, your story characters don’t benefit from all of them at once. Bond units, however, can bypass this limit…because of shenanigans involving the Logbook. For any competitively inclined Birthright or Conquest player, this might not matter when creating a team. For anyone owning Revelation, however, the results can be downright hilarious. Assuming all possible characters are recruited, you have something like sixty-four (!) statues to work with. In the case of owning Revelation, bond units could ascend to ludicrous levels of brokenness. Then again, I’d assume the same applies for practically any unit. I assume most people maximize speed and offensive stats anyway. Defenses don’t seem to particularly matter, unless you’re a Wary Fighter General with Aegis and Pavise. I assume because I’m a peon who only owns Birthright. In my case, a godly bond unit is still slightly worse off than a somewhat optimized child character, given that it suffers from a lack of versatility and supports. Of the many bond units I’ve created, I can count the powerful ones on one hand. They’re fun to use, I suppose, especially because… 2) In an endgame setting, bond units can take (somewhat) less time to maximize than story characters. I say “somewhat” less time because you’d still need to grind levels for skills. Bond units can’t purchase anything, after all. This again involves Logbook shenanigans. It involves Logbook shenanigans, stat boosters, and funds. I won’t go into specifics, but I will call the process what it is: an exploit. For anyone familiar with Pokémon, I will (maybe mistakenly) compare this exploit to a mechanic introduced in newer installments of the game series: Super Training. In past games, if I wanted to maximize a certain Pokémon’s speed stat, I could venture into the wild and massacre anywhere from fifty to upwards of two-hundred Magikarp (depending on held items, etc.). This, as you can imagine, was tedious and took time. In newer games, I can accomplish the same effect by playing a (still tedious) mini-game for an extended period of time. This mini-game, the aptly named Super Training, takes substantially less time than committing genocide. I have experience with both. Of course, one of these two methods of training is an intentional game mechanic, while the other is an exploit. They do, however, both fall completely within the bounds of their respective games (i.e. no hacking), and they both yield similar benefits: saving you time and sanity. This all, I feel, begs the question of where to place the limit. Aside from relevant stats, you can also maximize movement on all of your bond units. I swear I don’t always do this. Really. Depending upon the path, how many Boots do most people typically have to work with? You can get one pair in the story, potentially two from battle and visitor rewards, and one from free DLC. (There may possibly be more. I’m not certain, actually.) Under normal circumstances, you can maximize movement on maybe two units. Bond units don’t care. Who the hell do you think they are? Does any of this compensate for bond units’ various limitations, compared to story characters? The answer depends on the person. For competitive purposes, optimization is typically a safer bet. In those rare cases of extreme luck, your bond unit might surpass your other characters. But most of the time, you’re working with gimped Corrins—no Yato and no supports, alongside awesome growth rates but no guarantee of properly using them. Overall, bond units still seem fun regardless—even if you don’t take wireless battles by storm with an army of them. The randomization makes for some interesting and potentially hilarious skill combinations. I have a Wyvern Lord that doubles things by combining Optimist with Replicate. Since when do Wyvern Lords double anything? I call him “The Flying Death Machine.” The name fits perfectly. For anyone looking to rekindle his or her interest in Fates, I would definitely recommend playing around with bond units. Speedy Wyvern Lords are ridiculous.