samthedigital

Your money will probably be tight in the short term. Just make sure to sell all of the unnecessary items you have. If she's not working out you can bench her and use some of the other units. Her money making skill is not really her main selling point anyway. It's not the end of the world though; the game hands a lot of new units that you can use in place of the ones that aren't performing. If I remember correctly fishing is a good source of gaining bond fragments. I've found that the game hands out enough of it, so I have never needed to resort to that or any of the other monotonous grinds. If you feel you need them though the option is always available to you. You also don't really need to invest into the early game units. You could go with Alear alone and still make it out OK... Merrin, Kagetsu, Ivy, Pandreo, Panette, etc, etc, are all fantastic and can inherit Canter after chapter 17. You'll probably save time if you continue your current save file. That being said there's nothing wrong with retrying if you really don't want to continue and want to do better.

I agree with you on this, yes, but it's still part of the game as much as I dislike it. I'm still not so sure what the point is. You're free to avoid cheese and define it however you like, but my point is that I do find Rescue cheese to be acceptable and take it into account. This is all rather subjective, so if you have a difference of opinion that's fine, but there is no right and wrong here, and you'll have to accept that I don't tier units the same way you would. I'm sure that there are a plethora of other options, but it still doesn't reflect positively on him in Paladin. If you really want him to run away from Generals he can do that perfectly fine in any 6 move class provided he isn't Frozen. Paladin will naturally have less tactical flexibility if it is in play. That being said it's really just not something I would consider good personally; I'd work towards more aggressive strategies.

Wuzzy mentioned the Parthia strategy originally, yeah. It's just not something that I would see myself going for. There's no doubt that Kagetsu can slaughter the game regardless though; I wouldn't dispute that. The LTC you linked doesn't do the emblem paralogues either, so there's more room for exp.

Without any context my vote would go towards Shadow Dragon because it's rather ironman friendly and there isn't much to most of the cast. That being said if you dropped it there must be a reason, and I would always suggest going with a game you like and have a lot of experience with first and foremost. That will offset difficulty to a good degree, and that's doubly true if you're patient enough to reset and try again if it doesn't go well for you.

What games are you familiar with, and what difficulty do you want to play on? That might be important to know before answering. I chose Awakening as my first ironman since I had been playing it a lot at the time and am more familiar with that game than the others. I wouldn't suggest a game you've never finished first unless you really don't care about the story, though.

Capture mechanic. It doesn't force cheese, but again, your opinion is completely irrelevant, and I'm not sure why you're bringing up a game that I have never played. Fliers are a great deal better than Paladins, but more to the point is that you're both making Xander worse and do care that he's in Paladin given the fact that you're running away from enemies. So to be clear you're saying that 97% isn't reliable considering the fact that it's on top of some other damage avoidance based mechanics? If you want to bring up Sol vs. Luna there's a better place for it. If you've read what I've said in the other topic then you'll know my opinion on it. That's a more Awakening focused discussion though, and it's much easier to show why the numbers work.

Nowadays the meta is to make use of her magic stat and make her a Mage/Griffin Knight. It tends to do better towards the late game and doesn't require a lot of important stat boosters. Wyvern was the choice early on because people would hyper invest into Chloe dumping a ton of resources on her to get her to snowball as soon as possible. Wyvern was probably more popular early on because that is a common strategy in a few of the other games. That's not exactly true. There are definitely people that contributed that played through once (and that's fine!), but generally speaking it's probably how you rate units and your playstyle that are at odds with the tier list rather than because people don't know the game that well. I'll give you a few examples of this: I could provide you with counterexamples based on playstyle or a difference in personal opinion for every single one of those points, but for the sake of some brevity I will only go through the first of those quotes that I listed. I am not milking chapter 21 for exp because it's not going to help me later. I'd much rather finish within like 4-5 turns at most, and that's only if I'm trying to grab the weapons that enemies drop.

The low odds roll is likely far south of 1% over the course of a map, so if that failure happens it's perfectly acceptable to me if that's what you're wondering. A typical map will feature maybe 30 or more enemies, so Sol not proccing like 10 times over the course of 60 attacks let alone once is low enough that I wouldn't worry about it. Empirically it checks out too given the fact that Sol has worked for me in countless playthroughs including the 2 ironmans I mentioned earlier.

There is a certain amount of risk of death so to speak. It's just that it's low enough that the chance of failure is acceptable to me. I'll go back to Awakening since it's an easy example; my units will die if Sol never procs over the course of a map, but the chances of that happening are incredibly low to say the least. Conquest is also on my mind for similar reasons, but I'm not sure I want to go down that rabbit hole because it's more complicated, and your playstyle in that game is rather different from mine if I'm remembering how you play correctly.

I'd say that it's a little more contextual than that. If I include Luna in my strategy that's because I know that there is a low chance of failure at the very least, so it's not something to be relied on to get an important kill or in an instance where a unit is in danger when more enemies can attack them. The same principle applies to Sol; if I'm using the skill it's because I've already determined that my character has a low chance of death. So yes, Sol not proccing can lead to a dead character, but that's more of a skill issue than a problem with Sol.

In my example it's not necessarily the deciding factor, but it is an important part of the process as it's what is keeping the unit's HP topped off while soloing the entire map. It's also the player unit's stats and dual guard that is doing a large part of the work in mitigating damage otherwise; I don't usually build into avoid specifically. The same thing can be done in Conquest in a more limited fashion, but it does require more setup and good skill selection in that game. I'm also familiar with PoR where I don't find the healing to be very necessary at all (and Jill/Marcia are more relevant when Sol is actually an option), but you might be right for the other games that have Sol. I won't speak about games that I've only beaten once or twice and don't have a lot of experience with.

Sol is actually really good in tandem with avoid stacking since it gives additional outs to survive enemy phase. It's in part what makes it such an amazing skill in Awakening. It was a key skill in both of my ironman runs in that game as a quick example. edit: To expand on that somewhat it's really just a numbers game. If I'm relying on Sol to proc after like 4 attacks then yeah, that's not very reliable regardless of what the unit's dex stat is. An endgame Awakening unit is going to have a ~90% chance to proc Sol once in that amount of attacks (2 enemies) without factoring in other skills, but in any case it's not consistent enough for me on its own. The thing is that Sol is often paired with dual guard, low enemy hit rates, damage, etc, and that's really what makes it such a strong tool even on Lunatic. Unless the chance of death is literally 0 with a dodge tanking strategy Sol is only going to make it more reliable, and that 0% is tough to find without going Sorcerer. There are also a lot more than 2 enemies to attack on any given enemy phase; getting a few Sol procs is an inevitability when the unit is doubling and getting attacked by 10 or more enemies in a turn.

I can only speak from experience, so I'll talk about the games I know to some extent where Sol and Luna exist: Engage: Getting Diamant to proc Sol enough for it to be relevant requires a lot of setup and is probably just a meme. Bonded Shield and player phase cheese also exist which are much lower effort ways of solving enemy phase. I wouldn't say that Luna in particular is good exactly, but it's probably useful more often. I'm not sure that I would count Grasping Void, but the same logic would apply. Awakening: Sol is a one skill solution to the sustain problem. It can allow most units that get it to press start and win their way through Lunatic for the most part and to do the same thing conditionally on Lunatic+. Luna requires some more setup; I've seen it work, but I'd rather have the sustain. Fates: I get damage by stacking raw damage skills, forges, and stats, so Sol is more useful for me by default. edit: I also find that it can be relevant to know for certain if I'm going to kill an enemy or not in some situations. I consider topping up health to be a downside far more rarely.

You have thus far ignored the numbers that do support my claim. Naturally if we're relying on Sol to proc once over the course of multiple attacks it's going to have a higher than 30% chance to land, and unless I'm mistaken this initial 30% number is the only one you've referenced. If I rely on a Sol proc over 10 attacks with 30 dex I have a 97% chance of triggering the skill at least once (85% to proc twice). This is reliable, yes? Chance of survival can only increase since we can manipulate WTA and hit rates in our favour, and as I've said before 30 skill is being at least somewhat charitable compared to how high units can stack dex later on. You say that I have not made any convincing arguments, but I have already mentioned that Xander can go over this by level 12 on average, and you haven't contested that. He also doesn't have that high of a dex stat, and this is a statement that shouldn't be too controversial either. The difference is that I am not trying to change your mind, and you won't change mine if yours isn't well supported. You're the one who has a problem with how I play given that you responded to my post and criticized my opinion. It doesn't really work the other way around. Just as an aside Conquest "meta" is fairly enemy phase focused and does make liberal use of things like Rally Luck/Skill for consistency, but in any case... If you can get 100% accurate hits with every single attack then I'd be interested. It would make my argument for Sol even better. Otherwise the utility in 10% hit is in swapping to less accurate weapons or just to hit more often. Rally Skill+Luck in the Kitsune map can increase the reliability of hitting every single attack by like 50% or something and bottom out enemy crit rates; 10% only seems like a small amount if it's being applied to 1 attack. That doesn't really take away from any other Rally either since we can also use those at the same time, so there's no need to compare them. It's not Engage where I'm forced to pick or have strong tools to reach 100% accuracy already. Iago uses his staves sequentially; so it's possible to map it out and plan around that. It's similar for leaving Corrin at below half health. It's only a problem if you can't plan around it, and I've already given you a few ways that people have used to make it effective and reliable. edit: unless I'm mistaken this has to do with Xander running away from Generals with effective weapons which is a problem that is created by going back to Paladin in the first place. Your opinion on whether it's a legitimate strategy or not doesn't really matter in the context of this discussion. I consider cheese to be legitimate and have the freedom to rank units with cheese in mind. edit: If it takes you that long then my suggestion would be to focus on fewer things. For example if you believe that any given proc rate below 50% means that Sol is unreliable then the whole discussion about Rally is pointless. We don't need to talk about your issues with Silas, etc.

Did you also take into account the RN system? Either way 9 hit is really good because it makes everything more consistent. It's ironic considering what you think of Sol. I need 2 uses of Rescue for endgame. That leaves two uses; one of which I only need 50% of the time if I'm not cheesing chapter 25. It's also an LTC strat for chapter 26 anyway. As for Physic and Xander in that hall... It's good in that situation, and Xander doesn't really worry about dying, so if Physic sucks it's not pertinent to this discussion. This remains to be shown. I'm not sure why you're waiting almost a month between replies only to give me an unsupported opinion if you're trying to change my mind. Corrin isn't seeing any less use when employing that strategy unless the player wants to distribute exp between more units when Corrin isn't getting as much. Unfortunately common sense isn't proof and can often be wrong. A mathematical argument is far better if you're looking to prove something. It helps develop better common sense when you do run into a situation where your intuition is wrong. I'm also fairly sure that I've explained to you why Fissure is not similar to Sol, but the short of it is that Sol isn't an OHKO move or something that is meant to prevent OHKOs. In any case you often cross the line with this sort of thing. Try to stick to stick to the facts rather than trying to insult me by telling me I lack common sense or that you consider it stupid to rely on certain strategies that I would use.

A Tier: FE10. FE10 features a few fantastic royal Laguz with limited availability and a lot of decent filler ones throughout the game. If I remember correctly one of Janaff/Ulki can also contribute provided they get their strike rank up, but I don't remember the specifics of that. B Tier: FE8 Myrrh is pretty decent at damaging Leon when there aren't a lot of good options. I might be overvaluing her slightly since FE8 is not my forte. C Tier: Awakening I'm not too sure about Awakening's placement. I might even want to put this in B tier and not have a D tier, but whatever. Taguel isn't good because of the lack of 1-2 range. The dragons can work well though. Nah can start juggernauting Lunatic; it just takes a little longer than some of the other options because her mom joins after we probably already have one. I'm just not sure how much I value that even if it's fun to sweep the difficulty with dragons. I have no experience with them on Lunatic+. D tier: FE9, FE6 None of these are necessarily bad; they're almost purely utility though. Muarim and Lethe have serviceable combat at certain points in the game, but they're shove bots first and foremost. Fae in FE6 is also purely staff avoidance utility; as mentioned if she's late in the deployment order units will prefer to target her which helps for the myriad of staves that enemies spam.

I did a small amount of research because I was curious about them in an LTC context. Apparently Ricken is actually good because of his bases and ability to promote through combat exp which is pretty funny since he's often considered to be the worst of the bunch. Miriel can also be pretty useful at the same time, though. The natural staffers don't have the time to get to promotion in such a low number of turns, so while useful they aren't as good. It doesn't influence my opinions since I don't really care about turn counts in Awakening (and LTCs have other weird quirks that make them ill suited for unit/class rankings IMO), but it is interesting.

Are you suggesting accounting for player skill or something? It doesn't make a lot of sense to do that to me; I'm interested in how good a strategy is and not on a player's ability to execute that strategy. I mean yeah, you can optimize enemy phase in Awakening cutting out level ups when the carry gets enough stats to clear the game as an example, but you're right, I'm not that strict about it. The reason I brought it up in the first place was to show that it's possible to have efficient play in mind without necessarily caring whether a strategy takes a few more turns to complete since you mentioned "turncount murder". For all the differences in how we approach class ratings we still come to roughly the same conclusion with regards to Awakening right? Mage/Sage is a class with good skills, class utility, and has a niche for certain carries. I would also add that it has additional value on Lunatic+ early on because of Pavise+ for the sake of being a little more thorough even though you don't have any opinions on that difficulty.

I could say the same thing about optimizing for turn counts or any other kind of system for unit/class/etc evaluation, so I guess I'm not sure why you're making that specific point. If that ruleset bans grinding, yeah.

I don't factor in the time it takes to think about a move. It's a skill to be sure, but not a quantifiable one if we're comparing different strategies. I agree with you though, at least in the sense that I wouldn't compare speedrunning to real time efficiency. Speedruns don't necessarily care about reliability either which is obviously something I find important. They also tend to be played on the easiest difficulty, and a certain friend of mine would probably feel some type of way if I didn't mention that the amount of people that speedrun Fire Emblem is really low; 1/1000 is... generous. The water trick doesn't necessarily have to be considered inefficient even if I would compare it to grinding to some extent. It might be that the water trick saves time overall; it certainly makes it easy to get Robin to start snowballing as soon as possible. The same can be said for staff spamming for a Sage. I just don't see the difference between getting it done while my carry is getting kills and grinding at the end of a map in a real time setting is all. Just as an aside I played through a few chapters of Awakening to see where Chrom would end up assuming I skipped more enemies. Chrom was a level 7 Sniper by chapter 18. I stopped playing because Fred just didn't have the stats to continue since I skipped so many enemies. This is while employing the Chrom kills a few enemies here and there strategy.

FE13 has the enemy phase skip feature and has more route maps. I wouldn't say that it's a lengthy process either; the point was to show why I don't necessarily value turn counts rather than critiquing things like the water trick and the like. Maybe I am underselling Sorcerer's ability to kill Grima a little bit since you originally showed me a strategy that assumes Chrom will do nothing at all. We are still only talking about the Grima kill right?

To be absolutely clear I care more about the real time implications of spamming staves. If it's better to get my unit to some specific level then it doesn't matter to me when that happens. It's a more obvious difference in Awakening compared to say FE6 where there's a stronger correlation between time and turns. Practically speaking though I don't see it making much of a difference since most people are pretty lax about what they consider to be efficient anyway. Are you also factoring in Prescience and any skill stat booster that the carry might not need? In my Fred solo (where I could have fed Crom for free a lot more than I did since I didn't really go into it with much planning) he went from 10(Lord)>10>10(Sniper)>10>1 or something like that where I got at most 1 child paralogue run done if I did any of them. I'd have to see what he would look like if I skipped more enemies... Maybe I'll look into it a little later when I'm not busy.

To be as brief as possible for the sake of this discussion I consider grinding to be a good option if it saves time later on, I don't particularly care about turn counts if they aren't wasting much time and aren't interfering with mechanics that I care to take advantage of ( e.g Engage stuff and Lucky 7 in Fates), and I consider staff spamming in an ETC like context to be similar to something like water trick in Awakening or grinding in general. If you're just looking at raw turn counts and the like then your perspective on a few things might be different to mine. For the sake of staying at least somewhat on topic it does influence how I rate Sages to some degree seeing as I don't consider Rescue/Dance spamming for exp to be a free action. For as much time I've spent defending the class in Awakening I wouldn't rate them that strongly really. Thracia would be my pick for #1, but otherwise the class feels relatively similar to me in terms of effectiveness throughout the series. Chrom might not even need to do this to gain a sufficient amount of levels either; I'm not too sure. I needed him to get a lot of levels in my Fred solo, but with units that don't need such strict breakpoints just going Archer>Sniper>Paladin/etc probably works, so the backpack exp alone might be enough. I haven't played around with it too much; I just go for it because I'm not worried about spending an extra turn if the carry doesn't dual strike. It might not be intuitive; I'll give you that. It does make just about every strategy more reliable and doesn't take appreciably longer to set up than not doing it though. As far as reliability goes... I think that some setups have a chance at one rounding Grima with Chrom in the back, but at worst you could Rescue everyone else away and hope that Grima attacks first on EP. From what I've been told Grima attacking first might have a little bit of randomness associated with it, but I don't remember exactly. That much might be going overboard if I'm being honest lol; the one time I needed a 100% reliable kill I went with 3 combat units instead. Kuroi is still around elsewhere too.

If you're interested in what works and what doesn't this might be accurate. I've gotten my information primarily from talking to people though, so I'm not sure if there's an actual resource for it. It's just a matter of giving Chrom the boss kill; there isn't any grinding involved. The Longbow is useful primarily so that Chrom doesn't have to worry about facing a counter. You don't have to do too much more than that. Chrom gets a lot of exp just from being the backup and will get any stat booster that the main character doesn't need. I don't really see it as work. The specifics of the carry aside though we probably have differing opinions when it comes to turn counts, grinding, etc. I'm not sure if I should go down this particular tangent though.

We might have discussed this in another thread, but I go down the Archer>Sniper line specifically for this. It also helps Chrom get a little more boss exp with the Long Bow. I would mostly consider those kinds of runs to be inferior to carries with units that support Chrom in general if I'm being honest since it's more work to keep Chrom safe over the course of the playthrough if he isn't the backup, and he provides some Dual Guard protection if he is. This is a setup that I would go for in more of a duo than a pure solo since it then opens up the possibility of a kid (probably Morgan or some other Veteran/Galeforce kid) using Galeforce and backup to train their Bow rank.