ussgordoncaptain

Turns don't matter^TM, but even if you say they do map reinforcements offer better exp/turn than any other form of grinding other than thieves shrine. Yes it makes it easier to LTC, but eh you can just hover rig, and it's not really that big of a deal, backtracks don't add nearly as much when you can't get forged Killer bow leon go brrr

Echoes Shadows of Valentia Mila's Turnwheel Removed All terrors have Void Curse Merchant's Removed Map reinforcements removed Retreat Removed This removes the huge amount of grinding present in echoes but it does enable the player to grind in thieves shrine for the small amount of exp that gets you. Merchants/Turnwheels make the game a lot easier by giving the player overpowered equipment or by making dying much less of a scary proposition. Echoes actually has extremely high enemy quality so these changes would be enough to make the game feel like a real challenge and not the easy game it is currently. Though the game will still not be that crazy it will feel like the player has to actually fight for their victories.

Difficulty based on hardest difficulty Easiest to hardest Sacred Stones hard mode - Seth is so good that it makes a game with actually threatening enemies and garbage player units easy almost entirely off the back of one unit. Path of Radiance hard mode- This game is a joke as long as you remember to train ike and give him wrath+resolve. Hector Hard mode (Fe7) - HHM has a combination of weak enemies and medium difficulty enemies with magic, Pure water a lot of forced grind sequences and overpowered prepromotes. However Battle before dawn can suck because Jaffar is extremely liable to die. Echoes Shadows of Valentia hard - Debatably easier it depends on if you want to count grinding as making a game easier or not. Echoes has a ton of grinding available from both world map spawns and from dungeon encounters, these are mostly all skippable .. For reference the LTC of the game grinds for 5 turns because enemies in 1-7 and the desert are hard enough to force you to grind to beat them. However Turnwheels make the game a whole lot easier, and they make 1 random mistake not punishing, by endgame you have so many turnwheels available that you can start rigging crits like a madman. In spite of Echoes having high enemy quality compared to other games the game also has the absurdly broken Turnwheel, which means that the typical map is beaten on the first try. 3 Houses Maddening mode: Divine pulse is such a broken ability that the tough enemies of maddening mode fall apart to its might. once you get to C+ professor level the game's difficulty crumbles since you can start doing aux battle farming instead of trying to raise your professor level and exploring. Once you get to the hold start for 5 minutes and black screen your way to Wrath+Vantage and get OP skills like Swift strike 3 Houses becomes a lot easier. The hump of 3H maddening is harder than many games but the game falls apart much faster than other games in the series. Radiant Dawn Hard Mode: Fairly easy game actually, all you have to do is realize that you can't waifu bias anyone without absurd bases, and that the game is best thought of as a series of trial maps rather than as a complete game. Once you realize these things you start focusing on juggernauting really hard with whatever juggernauts exist right now, and the game falls apart after 1-6-1. 2-1 is sometimes hard but if you rush the steel axe village and clear up a couple of the 2 rangers it's a pretty simple map. Every map after 1-6-1 is quite easy so it's not a struggle after you get over the hump, but getting over the hump can be tricky Fates Birthright Lunatic So enemies in BR can be kind of annoying, but it's nothing that special. Fates skill/stat statcking can eventually get past this but it takes a lot longer than RD hard or 3 houses maddening, it's also much less forgiving than 3 houses due to a lack of divine pulse. Fates in general has low player unit bulk so it gets really hard to keep player units alive unless you use a lot of resources. Fates Revelation Lunatic: harder earlygame than Birthright but easier lategame. Surprisingly similar difficulty all things considered, the main thing is that most units do nothing so the few that are good are very good. Fe6 Hard mode : This games hump is a lot longer than the others, and it has little mercy. The main difficulty is learning all the weird jank that FE6 has like staff targeting priority and thrones. Fe6 hit rates are godawful and hitting a given boss is often a massive luckfest because even high hit rate weapons like the killing edge have a net of 60 accuracy on many bosses. But once you accept that any strategy is going to be delayed by bosskills taking a long time you can just farm EXP while waiting and get all the items, then FE6 start getting a lot easier. Fe6's hump doesn't really end until chapter 13 but it like most games in the series gets a lot easier after the halfway mark. Fates Conquest Lunatic : Not that hard but still quite hard, there's a lot of reading text on each enemies long list of skills, and it's pretty easy to corner yourself and die due to fates having low HP player units. However once you get past chapter 10 the game starts letting you flyskip it all the way to the end so it gets a lot easier in the late/endgame Shadow Dragon Hard 5: There are exactly 2 maps in the entire run that are hard and they are hard for the exact same reason, the boss one rounds your entire army and you have next to no counterplay. Stupid dumb and I hate it. After this it's mostly the wing spear and those other units show, but the first 2 maps are really hard, harder than all of fe6/fe10 combined. Awakening Lunatic+: Lunatic+ has a lot of difficulty due to how hard it is to get robin online. Robin also can easily die if counter density is too high so you often have to be careful at every turn. Lunatic+ falls in difficulty after Valm arc, but even so counter density makes Lunatic+ almost always an uphill struggle, even with Robin's incredible nostanking. Fe12 h4: : Hard 4 is quite challenging, mostly because a lot of habits picked up from earlier games don't transfer over at all. Another major Challenge is that H4 has a lot of situations where you have to memorize the enemy unit movement order otherwise there is no sequence of legal moves that allows for the player to achieve victory. Unlike other games in the series which mostly make themselves extremely easy after you get over the initial hump, fe12 piles on the pressure late with enemies that require player units to be nearly capped for good combat.

Yeah so I disagree that you'll have your merc be a dread by the time the desert starts, they'll be a myrmidon with some levels but that's about it. Unless you feed him kills by waiting for enemies to spawn on the world map+backtrack to seabound shrine to feed him exp wells. Deen also has those issues, but he has the issues in 3 maps (valley approach Temple of mila and Dragon shrine) and in 2 of those maps (Valley approach / Dragon shrine) his lack of range doesn't matter since he'll exclusively fight enemies he can kill with the brave sword. In valley approach level 6 saber has a 33.69% chance of missing the doubling benchmark on the myrmidon and thus you'll need to hope for your +2 brave sword to crit in 1 attack. In the temple of Mila the lack of range hurts both of them but the temple itself has a much more open layout and it's much easier to get a myrmidon to 1 range the enemies. The desert has more walls, is almost entirely high range enemies, and the few 1 range enemies that do exist are rarely doubled by saber. On the class bases comment, Deen has a good chance of *breaking past* his class bases which let's him hit 19 speed naturally, then after a pegasus cheese he hits the 21 speed benchmark, which is a critical benchmark for doubling enemies in dolth keep. You better hope saber doesn't whiff a speed growth in his 1-2 levels you get between 4-1 and 4-3, otherwise he'll fail to double the ram wine dread fighter in dolth keep and the iron sword dread fighters in duma gate. The TLDR is that saber is a worse dread fighter than deen, and is held back by his movement type (5 move foot) in the desert. Dread fighter is an amazing class but myrmidon and mercenary are not good. Using saber long term hurts overall efficiency because he snipes exp away from Mae or Boey who are super juggernauts that snowball out of control, Then when act 3 shows up Saber gets powercrept by leon so it's extremely hard to find places to train Saber in Desert stronghold/Deen's map/Grieth's citadel.

I beat Alm's route in 80 turns by using dread looped archer kliff. If you give him 1-2 EXP wells you can loop him before rigel falls and he'll go brr super hard. The amount of grinding I did was just enough to get him to Myrmidon and silque to warp before zofia castle. Grinding pre 1-7 enables faster strategies in later maps so the grinding more than pays for itself (it also means you don't have to rig silque's nosferatu). From there he just.. snowballs exp and kills dudes with his rapier? idk he's just so much better than every unit in your army that he kills way more enemies than anyone else can. As for Saber: Saber is a worse unit than Deen because he requires a lot more experience to get going. He doesn't use the fire spell which makes him not very good early on. Then in the desert his lack of either flight or range is extremely bad, this is a part where Killer bow leon is one rounding everything with his bow and mae or boey can use extremely powerful spells liek Saggitae/aura to one shot mercs thanks to them snowballing with all their early exp gain. Grieth's citadel is a map about range and Saber lacks it. Deen is also a much better dread fighter than saber because he is likely to hit the 20 speed benchmark naturally, or if he doesn't he's also likely to hit the 19 speed benchmark before promotion so you don't have to hope for a lucky speed proc before Dolth keep. You can just beat that map by blitzing through the right hand side with warp/rescue/swap/shove mycen up there should see exactly 0 combat.

Shadows Of Valentia Alm - Sir Mycen Mycen exists in exactly 2 maps out of 27, and he joins right after dread looped bow knight power-creeps every single player unit. he doesn't have a Killer bow in the part of the game where that and the rapier are the only 2 weapons. He can be OK against fiends but that's about it. Berkut's map is very easily trivialized by Killer bow dread looped kliff+rapier alm+python, so Mycen has no purpose. In the final map he isn't a bow knight isn't alm, doesn't have warp, doesn't have swap/Shove and doesn't have rescue. Therefore he is mostly useless. Lukas/Forsyth are extremely underrated, Forsyth is a better main combat unit than Mathilda, though his flunky capabilities are worse. Forsyth is about 10th-12th overall on alm's route, armorknight is a really good class due to high base attack and base defense, only really held back by a lack of speed. Echoes is a rout game so combat often matters more than movement, forsyth's movement only really betrays him on 3 maps, Zofia castle (his warp priority of 4 is a bit too low), Desaix's fortress (he can't kill the cantor in the corner) and Fear mountain (he can't reach the armorknights as fast as alm/kliff can kill the topside) Celica - Nomah/Jesse/Sonya Jesse's probably the classically worst character he joins at a time when grinding him to myrmidon would be extremely awkward, and his join level is extremely bad. However he's still a dread fighter and if you chose to grind him he'll end up just as good as every other dread, he's not as bad as the next 2 because he has the ability to kill witches at base thanks to his high speed, res and doing physical damage. Nomah just sucks, his spell list is good, but he has 12 magic to use it with. He can kill exactly 1 enemy and heal leon and that's about it, he doesn't join in time to learn swap/shove ect He also exists during the time when leon just goes brrr so he can't even help with chip damage. Sonya is basically the same unit as nomah but slightly better, since she has 13 base magic and has an actual magic growth unlike nomah. She also has a niche use as a swapbot but with only 1 leather shield you'll probably already have a swapbot. However she's worse than Nomah for 1 big reason, she forces you to use Saber

Drafting 1. This is a draft for 3 players 2. Genny Silque Alm and Celica are free 3. This will be played on hard mode Rules 1. No deploying undrafted units 1b. For 1-1 and 1-2 undrafted units may not fight but they may block heal tiles 1c For Berkut fight undrafted units that are forced into the temple must hide in a corner and may not trade or use white magic ect, with drafted units 1d For Dungeons use the evacuate command to undeploy undrafteds 2. All turns spent in all maps count This includes Map spawns and Dungeon fights, Grinding in dungeons IS allowed but you have to pay the turncounts (advice, if you wish to skip map spawns you can use hover rigging https://youtu.be/mCu-rQIVVCo) 2.a.b if you wish to avoid getting ambushed by a map encounter use the wait command to control where the map spawn walks. 3. Saber and conrad are Free for 2-E 4. You are required to do all fights on the world map including Nuibaba's abode and Beast Hunt and also do The dragon shrine fight, the duma lance fight and the Hexlock Shield fight (the necrodragon fight between Zeke's map and Rigel Falls is skippable) 5. Drafting order is snake draft 1-2-3-3-2-1 repeated until all 30 draftable units are taken (Sonya and Deen are drafted separately) 6. Money grinding in dungeons is limited to 15 silver worth of box breaking/grass cutting per dungeon, ( excluding duma tower) provisions are valued at their sell price at the smithy. The first 4 seabound shrine corral does not count toward this limit, in deliverance hideout/Thieves shrine this limit is shared between alm and Celica. 6b. unlimited amounts of grinding is allowed in duma tower 6c. A player upon reaching duma tower is allowed to use the mila's gift DLC to gain 8 extra gold, aside from this all DLC is banned. 7. 0 turning your first visit to dragon shrine will count as 0 turning it, but 0 turning any other map will count as 1 turning it. Penalties 1.Skipping Fear mountain or Nuibaba's abode is a 5 turn penalty 2.Skipping any dungeon map (Duma lance, Hexlock shield, Necrodragons in dragon shrine, Brigand boss) is a 2 turn penalty 3.Having an undrafted unit fight is a 1 turn penalty each time they fight something. (except for saber in 2-E) 4.Deploying an undrafted unit is a 1 turn penalty per unit (on top of penalty 3, does not apply in the final dungeon 1-1, 1-2 or when ambushed by a map reinforcement)

I misremembered and you can't buy iron blades that early. you can use the steel sword which is what I used and thought was an iron blade (steel sword only has 1 less might). You get your first iron blade in 1-8 in the armory. It's a fairly cheap weapon and buying 1 is often worth it for zihark in 1-8/1-E for killing scrubs. The +5 iron sword does have more might though.

In spite of saying things like Jill overrated it's more important to think about "what is the best use for this unit" rather than "how good is this unit" So both meg and fiona suck, and aren't worth deploying unless their deployment is free. However Both of them can do things on the maps they have free deployment that is useful. 1-4 Meg can chip down some laguz, if you give her a steel sword she'll get doubled by the cats but not the tigers, if you give her an iron blade she'll get doubled by everything, but she'll do more damage. With the Iron blade she can combine for a kill with 2 2 range units like micaiah/leonardo/Illyana/Nolan's handaxe. if you give her a steel sword instead she'll need probably 2 magical attack to do the same thing 1-5 meg is mostly useless 1-6-1/2 meg can shove sothe, which is marginally useful in places. 3-6 you give meg the wind edge and she can chip down enemy gauges something which matters a lot when 8-9/12 of the dawn brigade units are not very good on that map. 3-12 she can rescue allied archers to allow player untis to shove rocks, and she can shove rocks herself. 3-13 she can block ledges. Fiona meanwhile 3-6 Fiona can do the same thing meg does but with a javelin. However she also has the nice utility of rescuing the black knight to send him forward. (rescue chain him with Jill) 3-12 Fiona is ideal for placing the shine barrier next to whatever your main carry is. 3-13 fiona can do some silly rescue chains with leonardo getting him to the front, allowing your Ike killer (Tauroneo/Volug/Zihark) to kill ike without needing as many strength procs.

As the person who finished the Fire emblem echoes LTC with a turncount of 154 I'll disagree here In that run Valbar outperformed Catria, and in general armorknights have quite a few good traits that make them useful. In the most recent draft run I did with The chungler and @Carmine Sword the winner (chungler) drafted lukas as his 4th round pick in 3rd position (10th overall pick), second place drafted Forsyth as their 7th pick (20th overall) and valbar as their 8th (22nd overall) Valbar is a shovebot, and he's the best shovebot in the game, he also has great bulk which is very important for tanking on merc boat, a map that most units struggle with greatly. His low speed isn't very bad given that his 2 main roles (shove/tanking) don't require speed, but he also can double mire arcanists in arc boat for some nice chip damage. Forsyth is the fastest Armorknight and he can do things that other units can't due to his amazing stats. Armorknight bases are absurd in all areas except speed, and forsyth can lose only 2 turns to clive in efficient play. That's pretty good for a so called "trash" unit. He actually has decent RES and enough speed that he can poke witches extremely well. Lukas is OK but not great in regular play, his main strength is that his availability is so high he can promote to Knight without grinding. His main drawback is his speed. While forsyth is rocking enough speed to double cavs with boosters, lukas just won't. Lukas in draft however is a top tier pick and is a top 10 overall pick, (easily could be as high as 7th) his availability is amazing, and since you don't have exp competition he can promote before you fight the southern outpost. Where his combat is insane compared to your Merc. (then your merc goes BRRR so lukas takes a backseat) Armorknights can be very useful in their roles, and while none of them are A tier all of them are C tier, they sort of fit in as nice role-players in a game where being a Jobber isn't that bad since every map is rout.

yeah so my reply to the hyper specific playstyles argument is that every tier list needs some sort of criteria for how everything is being tiered, which therefore necessitates its own hyper specific playstyle. Therefore any given tier list can only really talk about the specific playstyle the tier list is designed for. I think my playstyle isn't the most common but it tends to result in a set of goodhart's law considerations that are reasonably close to what most people would accept. Yes there will always be jank, and stuff like "Tauroneo is the best DB carry because he doesn't require an energy drop to kill ike, and Zihark is a much better flunky than tauro" is a bit hard to swallow but at the same time it's hard to find a system that isn't jank because goodhart's law is a thing. Dragonmaster Jill in 3-12 is ... OK not amazing just ok. You 2 round all the bulky enemies like Halbardiers/Warriors/Armorknights and one round the soldiers/fighters. but you have to realize that the objective of that map is to kill 40 enemies and many have healing items/healing staffs, so it takes a while for the enemies to die. The difference between 1 and 2 rounding something is the largest difference in FE, since a unit that 1 rounds can kill 20 enemies in 2 turns while a unit that doesn't can kill 5. I haven't played through 3-12 without a god (wing tauro/Super zihark/Super Jill) so I don't know how the map turns out, but I imagine it's quite slow.

I'm surprised Jill did anything in 4-P at all, aren't Skrimir(with speedwing)/Haar/Naesala just going to crush that map really quickly? The best way to get Jill to good is to promote her in 1-E after throwing as much BEXP as you can into her, she'll likely be level 20 by the time she promotes. Then you can give her beastfoe in 3-6 and she'll be very good in that map, getting a bunch of levels. In 3-12 you promote her and she's also very good on this map then she falls off and sucks. The other way (if you want her to go brr in part 4 instead) is to accept having a bad time in 3-12 and not promoting her, then in 3-13 clear it with tauroneo, save a bunch of GM bexp for her in part 4 and give it to her so she can go brrr in 4-P/4-3 Nailah/Rafiel/Illyana/Tormod/Maurim/Vika/The Black knight are all arguable one way or the other, I choose to count them as "dawn brigade" because for many of them all of their utility is found in the DB chapters.

Oh hey people mentioned me and I just found out today. Why did Vykan12 post under a different name, you would think he'd prefer the status of being a well known individual. So Wyvern is a totally broken class, but Jill joins about 8 levels lower than she "should" to make up for this. Zihark and Volug each have strictly superior availability to Jill and join 7-9 level's higher. If Jill joined as a level 3 dragonmaster with 30 Hp/16 strength/4 mag/17 skill/21 speed/19 luck/18 def/8 res there would be no question that Jill is a god. It's also why transfers Jill makes such a big difference, without transfers Jill fails to hit some early benchmarks which make it harder to gain exp, which make it harder to hit later benchmarks and this compounds. With transfers you hit the early benchmarks which let you hit the later benchmarks and snowball the other direction. Since flight and move are the only 2 stats you can't rig LTC's like Chiki's who rigs like a maniac are able to get Jill to snowball. if you watch love-death's playthrough you'll see that he got Jill to gain strength in 13 out of 14 levels, and she capped her defense by level 11, something that is exceptionally unlikely given that Jill has an 11% defense growth with 0 stats capped. (If you do GM paragon + don't feed laura you can get Jill to 20/10 instead of 18/11 which still is the same) I contend that if you're not rigging on the level of Chiki/Love death, you aren't going to see a Jill that can actually 1 round enemies in 3-12 without an early promotion, and if you do early promote you aren't going to 1 round in part 4. Jill's not merely not the best member in the dawn brigade, she's probably not even top 5, 1. Sothe, 2. Zihark, 3.Rafiel, 4. Volug, 5. Nailah There is an approach to that called numerical tiering it produces some interesting results due to the way radiant dawn is structured as a game, many units just end up sucking for large parts of the game. The thing to realize is that radiant dawn is more like 2.5 short games Smashed into one, rather than being one long game. Edward and Boyd both have high availability but they both exist in entirely separate games practically speaking. Part 2 feels like a weird set of trial maps where only some of the units actually feed into part 3, (while others like Kieran just suffer). Numerical tiering is roughly equal to a units availability*average quality, so it's really important to be both available and useful, if you fail on either axis you end up falling low. The fastest LTC uses Jill because when you rig her stats to the max she gets to go brr. My most recent "efficient" run did not use Jill because without rigged stats Jill just isn't able to function. Here is what an average Jill with an energy drop 2 seraph robes a dracoshield 3 regular levels, followed by 3 BEXP+promo followed by 8 regularl levels and 1 BEXP level looks like in 3-12 {'HP': 47.666, 'STR': 20.898, 'MAG': 4.433, 'SKL': 19.269, 'SPD': 24.702, 'LCK': 23.361, 'DEF': 21.373, 'RES': 11.523} so rounding to like 47 hp/21 strength/5 magic/19 skill/25 speed/23 luck/21 def/12 RES we can compare this to Love-death's Jill (who skipped out on the energy drop and both seraph robes) HP:35 Str:26 Mag:3 Skill:22 Speed:25 Luck:21 Def 25 Res 12 Basically Love death using the power of Rigging was able to get a Jill that had massively higher Def/Strength than average, and those 2 stats matter a lot, The strength let's him one round halbs/warriors in part 4 after a promotion which most Jills would not, and the bulk lets him survive (4 defense is worth a lot more than 12 hp in an Enemy phase rout game) There is a non-nebulous version of "reliable efficiency" called expected turn count it ends up being fairly jank to use in practice, because the strategies that expected turn count ends up using are extremely silly looking, combat ends up becoming the most valuable thing followed by movement, and some runs do explicit grinding to get their units up to snuff. Just a lot of janky strats that don't seem "natural" to an LTC player. I have one of 3 completed ETC's . One thing people love about LTC's is finding some cute unit that can do some cool thing, one of the issues with ETC's is that whatever cute unit idea you had you can't do it because all your investment has to go into your super-Juggernaut. Apologies, I only started playing fire emblem in 2020, so I was mostly saying that based on what I could read about post 2010 FE, a better statement might be "Most overrated unit by people who are good at fire emblem" but that's a mouthful and not good clickbait for reddit. I also would put Jill closer to 12th today. mostly due to some new stuff I've found with Nailah/Tauroneo, Energy drop on Nailah allows her to ORKO generals in 4-4, which makes her the ideal candidate. Tauroneo can kill every ike with 4 hp and 4 def procs or 5+hp and 3 def procs. This makes Tauroneo the most reliable ike killer, and lets you skip the 1-2 energy drop, and with the speedwings tauroneo's 3-12 performance is unmatched.Tauroneo falls off super hard after 3-12/3-13, but he's super amazing before then as the only truly reliable killer of Ike that also costs few the least resources to get to good status. (even though speedwing titania is a very good unit, I found a way around this by feeding her more bonus experience and paragon, using Mia as my 3rd GM unit and not having a 4th main GM combat unit). Also fire emblem units follow a pareto distribution so the difference from #2 to #12 is bigger than #12 to #40.