Talsian

Dondon, the 0% growth thing sounds right down my alley. How do I swing that on my machine?

Is the concern that you have four "tanks" on the beach but 5 spots to fill? (T hasn't showed back up yet) If that is your concern then maybe you could target sending the disposable yellow units out past the area where the hole in your wall is at to distract the laguz for a couple of turns till the BK arrives to plug that last spot.

Oh well, maybe it would be more obvious and seem less like a theoretical subject if Sothe were a little bit more of a capable fighter. As it is I almost feel like I'd need to go to easy mode and research to find a character Sothe could test this out on.

You know you have a sad sad skill when you'd seriously consider throwing a parity on him to keep him from accidentally leaving a slam dunk kill with 1 hp.

Well filler units on that level shouldn't even have a weapon equipped. The laguz will transform back to human and just sit there. No worries or experience drain there and less work for the healer. Much better than a resolve IMHO.

Well with Soren he hits so many caps so easily in the second tier he can max his weak growths EZPZ with a boatload of BEXP on normal. Actually, I'm betting that Zihark's issues against the laguz should be fixed with a Resolve.

Yes, but he does have a pretty cool trench coat. Soren faces the additional problem of being a magic user and that magic users suck by definition in this game. They give mages the advantage of special damage on certain foes, but then those foes rarely ever exist (except for Micaiah). I sort of wish Soren could at least kill Lyre and Lethe to save me the trouble.

Well the key to Zihark is having him kill things on the Player turn while having him do damage, but not kill things on the Enemy turn (so he doesn't take two attacks from tigers in a round). He needs constant monitoring of his enemy's health and switching from harder hitting (but non lethal damage, no silver or brave swords) to softer hitting chip damage. I'd bring a bronze, iron, and steel sword on him so you can switch gears. Bronzes don't do crits, which is very nice when a tiger is at half health and you are worried about getting an unlucky crit on the enemy turn. I'd also be leery of using that steel sword too much. Also his luck stat is abysmal so you'll want to stick a Fortune on him in the middle battle or he could take a fatal crit from the Myrmidon based enemies. It's true, he's a pain, but it can be done pretty reliability. When he's in the 3rd tier it's smooth sailing.

Between using Jill, Nolan, Micky, Aran over there it's not that bad. The trick is getting a feel of when to get more aggressive and what you can get away with. The cavalry units are pretty weak and couldn't even hit the ground if they fell off their horses. You can kill the first group before the second arrives. I use volug a lot and he is particularly perfect for weakening enemies without killing them from 1-7 on. But even if he does kill enemies, I don't really care. It's good to build his strike and often he is a long term character. Even if I don't start out the game planning to use him for the end, I still groom him as a possible backup for units that may have turned out badly. I don't normally level Fiona. I only did it the one time out of curiosity. Zihark is ok. You might have to keep him from biting off more than he can chew in his awkward early second tier, but after that he is fine. He certainly can handle 1-6-2 foes easily enough though. I'm not sure how that would slow you down. You could make most of the DB chapters go super fast if you use all the OP units they give you. I guess the thinking is that they will make the game hard but almost always give you an out if you get stuck. But then they make you pay the piper for your sins on chapter 3 if you abused it too much. It's a pretty cruel maneuver.

Oh, Sothe doesn't get any kills. If I remember correctly I had 4 kills with him the last game I played and I ended out wondering when that could have happened. He's just an evasion tank while other characters that I may be trying to level (like Micaiah or Jill) are standing in the back soaking up kills. All Sothe does is stand there, dodge, and shove others out of the way of ranged users. I generally only send Zihark and Volug up north. They can handle the few stragglers. I generally don't even have weapons in Sothe's inventory in the earlier parts of the game in case his inventory gets full from thieving and he has to trade with someone which of course would equip a weapon on him and he might accidentally kill something.

Not that it's a major point, but you could pull it off with an unequipped Sothe (you could throw a Resolve on Sothe if you're feeling paranoid) and a sturdy unit like Nolan equipped with a weapon next to him (you could put a shade on Nolan if you're feeling paranoid). I generally have Sothe up there unequipped with Tauroneo and Sothe gets the vast majority of the attacks and he can dodge enough of them to pull it off (assuming that Micky is in range with the A support). If I equip Sothe then almost all of the attacks go to Tauroneo, but Sothe does end up getting some kills and I generally don't like that waste.

I asked because I was thinking that Jon Snow was referring to Tauroneo as more of a long term character.

It seems pretty obvious but I didn't think about the Paragon + Blossom for Astrid. I've used it on Kurth before though. I don't think I'd do anything like this again anytime soon.

Well there's a difference, at least in my mind, between Fiona, who I can make something resembling useful and a character like Astrid. I've tried with Astrid and even up to a good level I still felt like she was a liability with poor speed, strength, and def. It's probably a lot easier in normal where there is a lot more BEXP to fix her stats. Tauroneo?

It's hard to go wrong with either warrior. Boyd's bio bothers me more with him getting hit. He can't avoid worth a damn. Boyd ends out at about 34 speed which does the job for the end. You might need a speedwing to fix it but just bringing him up to nearly leveling and the giving him a few points of bexp to level after hittin a couple caps does the job generally. Nolan has so many levels he gets more time to drift off course. But generally Nolan is pretty excellent.