Irysa

Isadora str is so shit and her con is so poor that I have difficulty really believing that Eliwood can't do better than that...her wpn ranks probably make her easier to use but otherwise...no way. Some level of Eliwood favouring is needed on non Hector modes, and it's not hard to feed him a bit. He really should turn out better than Isadora in both offence and defence. Lyn if you did Lyn mode at least could have decent bases/lvl but even though I always use Lyn (I just like her), it's really such a waste of time lol, I kind of just use her over Guy since Guy is not getting much action lategame anyway (Raven and Harken get Sword Priority, SM crit bonus got halved in FE7), and Lyn is forced, so w/e.

Roy isn't exactly "good throughout". He NEEDS to be fed kills, and he won't be able to keep up with his army after the midway point of the game since FE6 maps get so big, relegated to running in the back or riding in someone's saddlebags. His superweapon is amazing, but has like no uses and he's pretty much borderline dead weight for post Western Isles till his promotion, aside from Gaiden Chapters (which admittedly are very easy to feed him kills on, as well as Western Isles before anyway). Unless you throw boots on him I guess? FE7 has more tighter maps so it's at usually less of a pain to raise Lords on reinforcements or w/e chokepoints while your other units are rushing. The payoff sucks though, Eliwood and Lyn get mega slowed by their superweapons (did Eliwood break Durandal in FE7 so that its only 12 WT in FE6!??!), Eliwood is outclassed by basically every Cav/Paladin (maybe not Isadora), and Lyn is a swordmaster without crit bonus(ORKO on flier is cool, but any non Sword Locked unit would probably do that easily with an Axe/Lance anyway)... Hector and Athos with Nils refresh can probably kill the Dragon easily anyway.

your Roy's resistance level ups are making me lose it, that kept happening to me in my HM run and I had to dump stat boosters on him so he could hold his own later on. voted for Lalum route because Elphin is a nerd and Lalum is cute.

Why would you nerf Ephraim :( God damn your Eirika is getting str screwed. And this looks like it's going to be FE The Sacred Cavaliers now since Franz is beasting, and both he and Seth are like your only reliable earlygame units. Might also be worth having Natasha AND Moulder on your team for supplementing healing, unless you really want those extra levelups before Bishop (can see Slayer kicking ass in this)

Ninian would have had to fly halfway across the continent if I'm remembering correctly...thats pretty far, but probably not a "long time" for a creature like a Dragon, but that still has to be a reasonable amount of energy. I dont remember it anywhere saying that the dragons who fled were "pacifists". They ran because the humans were bloody well slaughtering them, only Arcadia seems to have peaceful dragon human relations. Read what Nils said again, they DID fight with humans past the gate. I still think the fact its merely a "few" with regards to humans and skirmishes makes it sound more in favour of dragons than not.

"A few skirmishes" with "few in number" humans doesn't really sound like coexistance so much as either those humans got wiped out, or else fled and didn't bother the dragons again. I don't really see the world beyond Dragon's Gate being implied to be Arcadia all over again. Also, bear in mind that Ninian and Nils are half dragon, which probably means they have less abhorrence to humans in general. Jahn from Binding Blade, another surviving Fire Dragon seemed to holds humans with a great deal of disdain, regardless of working with Bern or not. Also, whilst it's true that Manakete don't have the strength to maintain Dragon form at all time in Elibe, bear in mind that Ninian and Nils had their quintessence drained and that is stated to be the main reason why they had to take human form. However.... These seem to contradict each other a little, so maybe the Japanese text would be better suited here. Jahn implies that the Ending Winter's rebalance meant Dragons had problems maintaining form in Elibe, whilst Nils seems to imply that without their power being drained, they'd be fine. Ninian before Eliwood kills her seems to do fine in maintaining her form for a lengthly period of time. Perhaps the effects of The Ending Winter had lessened, much like the power of the legendary weapons? Jahn might have been incapable because of being crippled and slowly healing for thousands of years, and War Dragons/Manakete were obviously weaker. Wheras the Fire Dragons from beyond the Gate may have had plenty of power to wreck havoc on Elibe.

I think what elevates 8 for me is mostly that a lot of the cast have some pretty good interaction with the enemies, and are fitting to use as well. 7's enemies are rather bland until you go through all the extra effort and gaiden chapters to get the backstory, or go to the effort of using Black Fang related characters like Nino and Legault (who are pretty mediocre combat units without tons of investment). If you do all that, the gap isn't so big, Nergal turns out to be sympathetic in his own right, and I like Nino a lot, even with her low recruitment level. Meanwhile, Grado characters are mostly stalwart combat units, and in both routes of 8 have a lot to say that expands the story beyond the usual "bad guy wants power". You even get considerably more time and ease of access to the supports with skirmishes and the tower. In Eirika's route, something of a rarity in Fire Emblem, non Lord characters get a veritable amount of time dedicated to developments, and the Lords themselves have a far greater level of personal investment in what's going on (Lyn is seriously borderline irrelevant most of the time in 7, and Hector is mostly just tagging along with Eliwood). In general there is a greater sense of urgency because of the apperance of monsters and the destruction of the stones. Whilst the climaxes are really similar between the two games, 8 has the whole continent involved and it "felt" like a more spectacular scene to me. Athos showing up was really cool, and so was all of the Lords getting special weapon animations, along with a gauntlet of previous bosses, but it felt like there was more behind 8 I guess? Admittedly that's not directly related to characters and development I suppose. I'd still give it to 8 though, moments like having Joshua and Cormag face down Caellach and Valter were just fantastic, they even had special music.

I completely ignored biorythym and manipulation of it in all my playthroughs of Tellius games, I just try to make the best choice based on the current hit/avd rates and damage totals. I'm quite sure you'll find plenty of others who pretty much didn't really pay attention to it either. If they would make it more important it might be worth investigating but as it stands it was kinda generally not significant enough to matter.

Which I completely agree on. Fir is mentioned because I, think she is an underrated SM, and I believe to be better than other SM's in contest here. I realise in retrospect I wasn't really clear on this and sort of just jumped into rambling about why Clarine x Rutger is worse than Fir x Rutger, so, sorry about that. What I meant by that was to say that Fir (unless you're just looking exclusively ferry to the boss, and quick kill seize, which is admittedly like at least 80% of FE6 maps if you play efficiently), by merit of having +30 crit, some good support options and ease of use/raising/lack of significant contest for promotion items is a good SM, better than many others (whilst I consider Rutger the best SM I have used), and I think having more good SM's in FE6 is just all round plus, making her more valuable than other SMs, in a discussion of SM tiers.

If you gave Fir crit supports and didn't give Rutger crit supports and had her crit supports lined up...then yes for all intents and purposes she'd beat him out for sake of crit. If we're talking ferrying Rutger and Roy to the boss to kill him then seize in a few turns then no, not really, because he'll have an advantage of general levels and stuff beforehand. I think its undeniable Rutger is better than Fir (for various reasons), I was trying to talk about how Fir is actually a pretty good SM, and works well with Rutger to both of their advantages (equal mov, both benefit from crit a lot more than previously mentioned Clarine support in this topic, anywhere you throw either of them is an ideal place or safe for the other one etc) If that isn't what this topic is meant to allow in terms of discussion relative powerlevels of SM's and their rankings across the series, and the only purpose was to propose who the best is and discuss that, then I messed up, sorry.

Well if we're litearlly only discussing "who the best is" and not "ranking" SM's then okay, I apologise. I though it would be okay to start a discussion involving Fir's worth in comparison (I rate her higher than a lot of those other SM's on the top, but feel she's underrated because of how good Rutger is) since it's an SM topic but if not then w/e

I find Dieck pretty invaluable most of the time on my runs. Nice and beefy, tag teams well with Rutger, and he he's the only sword unit (aside from Noah I guess) that can use Durandal without a penalty due to his massive con. Rutger admittedly doesn't need it to kill Manaketes since he will crit like crazy anyway, but it's still pretty useful, and he's basically certified to cap hp str and skill. Also I don't really think 3 panel support is more than plenty considering how many ridiculously large and open maps FE6 has. Also because you need to actually be right next to each other to get the rank up. Building that support early on is a little risky as a result without walling her, and Clarine only gets decent AVD once she has some levels into her, which takes naturally longer as a healer. Maybe it's just preference but I find it a chore to have to keep her safe so much if I'm trying to build that support, whilst Fir and Dieck can stand where Rutger stands anytime, because anything he takes they can take too. You can deal with it but I think it's a bit overrated, and only comes up because Clarine has poor support options otherwise as a backliner. Dorothy, pfft, Klein pfft. Lance makes a bit more sense since they have equal movement, and she could use his Anima but she really doesn't want to be charging up front as a low level healer. Healers supports with GBA system are just nearly always kind of meh options I find. Fir x Rutger is slow to build I agree, but you have far more opportunites to just leave them next to each other as they have equal movement and no reason not to be near each other, whilst Clarine has other things to do and can't always be near him. Also this is totally on topic because I'm just sayin that Fir is a good swordmaster too, she is just underrated because Rutger is so good even though she tag teams with him way better than units like Clarine, who are supposed to be his "ideal" support according to most.

Yeah it's not very well balanced. I do like the incentive though, since unlike many games, it's actually punishing to try to take a moral high ground. I have a problem with many games with "moral" choices where more often than not, either good is equal or better than going evil, because they want to make both extremes viable. In reality, it should always be easier to take the immoral route, thats supposed to be the temptation. It's hard to really think about a decision if you know that if you pick "the good option" it'll all turn out fine in the end anyway. I personally beat the game on zero kill A route first time. For efficiency's sake it's "better" to do C then B then A on replays since you keep benefits, but whatever. Well affecting the game statistically/mechanically can be interesting if it adds to the overall theme or experience, like with what I outlined above. I didn't like the idea of killing off my friends for power, so I abstained from using the Plume. Thats a choice that will vary from player to player. The idea there was to provide a temptation of power, the same one the protagonist can sink into. The thing here is though that that's a very direct player decision that is present. A unit dying on the battlefield in Fire Emblem is more often than not a mistake. People don't "want" the characters they're using to die for the reasons I outlined in my previous post. And I don't think litearlly sacrificing your recruited units will work in the context of an FE game. They COULD have like some kind of system where units you don't deploy are deployed elsewhere on a different battlefield/part of a battlefield that you don't have control over, and their chances of success or death are outlined based on combat experience/stats/levels, and then units you're not using have chances to be dying instead of litearlly needing to be kamikazed by the player, resulting in a wasted slot for that map and negative effects on the player's current map strategy. Maybe alternate sidequests and missions could be done with units you send off to do so? It would also probably help with the low manning issue present in many games, bigger team means you have more reliable units to send on sidequests elsewhere for net benefits in funds and items, maybe even the story without affecting turncounts, thus everyone can be utilised. It would also allow more XP to be present in the game without the ability to "grind" to trivialize, sidequests could be time based or just done while you're fighting your own battle. Theres a real element of risk accessment in that concept, along with the fact it would let you rotate your units to as they fit, allowing maps to be more varied and punishing on different types of units. You'd also get to see more supports or relationships develop per playthrough.

A bunch of characters do that. Makalov and Astrid have different supports if Marcia is dead for example. He's picking flowers for Marcia, and if she's alive it's to try to cheer her up/make amends since she gets mad at him a lot, and if she's dead he upset talking about it, since he's going to place them on her grave. He also gets guilt tripped by Ike into giving back Astrid's pendant instead of being told off by Marcia. It's a neat touch. Anyway on the subject, core problem with this is that people tend to use characters they like, or characters they think are strong/useful. If those characters die, then by those reasonings, you're generally more compelled to NOT LET THEM DIE. Thats part of the focus of the series to a degree, and with the exception of Shadow Dragon, the series has kinda gone to more lengths to make characters more than a disposable means to an end. I feel this is a strength of the series, many strategy games either have lots of faceless template player created units, or death isn't permanent anyway. Letting characters die only really becomes an option if you actually don't care much about them in the first place ("casual" standpoint), or you gain some kind of significant benefit for doing it ("hardcore" standpoint). . Neither of which sound appealing to me. Choices in plotline on recruitment and killing characters/taking routes makes more sense. Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume has a decent attempt at this though. You can super power up a character for one map, after which, they die forever, and you gain a powerful skill or buff that can be used permanantly after they're gone. Using this power also affects the plot and which route you go down. Not killing anyone has you stay on the on the hardest route of the game, killing a few gets you the normal route, killing a LOT is effectively the easiest, and if you kill too many you just lose the game period. You can also shift "down" the routes by using that power, but you can't go back up. It also has moral implications on the state of the MC and his beliefs/goals, and who he allies with in a big mess of a civil war.

Rutger. I actually like Mia more but Rutger is so good. I haven't played the pre GBA games though. However, Rutger's support with Clarine is overrated. Her spd and luck are good but unless you wall her off with Dieck, Rutger, and maybe some other unit (probably a cav), exposing her is dumb, making her support bonus mostly a benefit for boss killing than anything else. The Dieck support is fantastic however, no drawbacks. Theres also a ton off opportunties to buy Killing Edges in FE6, making them a staple for him. I like to support him with Fir and Dieck instead of Clarine, Fir still provides and benefits from crit bonuses just as much as he does. I find a lot of people underrate Fir, mostly because Rutger is really good and Fir comes in later, and her base 5 con kind of blows. But she's easy to train due to how axe heavy Western Isles is, and she can effectively solo the west side of the map she's recruited on. Her bases are better than Rutger's considering she's 3 levels lower, and she'll grow quickly due to low level. Noah is also pretty easy to level up on those chapters as a sword focused cav, and he will be able to make a nice support with Fir there efficiently too. Rutger is still the better unit but considering how many problems FE6 has with accuracy and 30% crit, more SMs is hardly bad, and I don't really think Hero Crests are in huge demand. I quite heavily disagree with the people that rate Gonzales as a good candidate for a Hero Crest in that game because of his severe accuracy and skill problems, the general issues with axes compounding that. Gonzales feels to me like he NEEDS the Hero Crest to become reliable because of the skill gain on becoming a Berserker, without it he'll miss way too much and be difficult to raise, and he's hard to utilise on the Sacae route. Other units like Fir, Rutger and Dieck are all sound without promotion and will have more chances to grow. (Also, if you use Fir and Noah, Noah will probably have to wait till 16 to promote since Lance and Alan kick so much ass, but at least he has pretty much no competition for the 3rd Knights Crest, Treck being mediocre and all the Knights being pretty shitty.)

Gatrie's speed in PoR is pretty much unfixable without holding back a lot on his early use and letting him take kills/bexp with a Knight Ward when he comes back. 5 base speed at level 9 and 25% spd growth, 55% with Knight Ward? He's going to need to get 5 or 6 consecutive levels of speed growth to not be doubled (which isn't so bad since PoR enemies aren't that scary and he has high def, but by most standards, if you're taking more than 7 damage per enemy, you're not an effective tank, and they only need to double for 4 for that to happen), AND still won't be doubling reliably. He comes back when you have access to 4 Paladins who tank just as good/better than he does. Even Neph and Jill tend to end up tanking pretty well since their base def is great for their level and their growth isn't bad. And his mov sucks in a game all about high mov.

Oh yeah sorry, I didn't mean NO INFANTRY HAVE WEAKNESSES, I meant as an infantry lance unit your weaknesses are almost neglible by comparison. All other lance users have weaknesses, Mounted = Horseslayers/Rapiers/Poleaxes heavy terrain movement penalites in some instances, etc, Armored = Hammer/Armorslayer/Rapier soft countered by magic users due to lower AVD cause of low speed, mov penalties/crappy base mov, Flying = Bows, Ballista, Magic, Speciality Magic...

Any unit that isn't fat and is on the ground with Lances. So, Soldier/Halberdier/Sentinel (Nephenee~), Lord (Ephraim prepromo. Chrom and Luciana post promo I guess, havent played 13 yet) 1. Grounded - Yay, mounts are UGLY, fuck utility. Mounts have huge benefits but being foot means that you have... 3. No inherant weaknesses or problems being deployed on basically any map - No anti armor, anti cavalry, anti flying, anti terrain, anti 1/2 range lock, anti anything, and they don't have crap MOV. 2. Lance unit - Yay my favourite weapon, Lances have the best balance of WT, MT, and HIT, and Javelins are slightly better than Hand Axes, along with the fact most of these units have good skill, so they usually have decent displayed hit unlike axe users trying to throw. Lances are overall a very versatile weapon, and they do statistically better at reversaling the weapon triangle than other weapons, as enemy axe users have crappy hit and avd anyway because of class tendancies and heavy weapons. Enemy lance units usually have either good def, good speed, or both (mounted/armored), so swords need speciality weapons to usually be effective at reversaling. And conversely, axe units can't hit sword users for shit most of the time, due to sword users generally higher speed, and light weapons. 4. Fantastic growth spreads - Well it's not always true, but characters like Neph and Ephraim are almost RNG proof! Their speed and skill growths rival Myrmidons and Swordmasters, whilst their strength, def, and bases in those stats usually outclass them too. They take a lot less babying and are less likely to get fucked over earlygame because you didn't a few crucial str ups, and won't die because somebody looked at them funny.

That's a very interesting point. When on an emulator in particular, it just feels so much more tempting to attempt to rig growths. Now maybe I should go around asking for everyone who tends to play on the actual systems if they lean more towards disapproval and compare it to the emu players, haha. Considering how much you seem to get out of fighting the odds with hit/miss/crit in your 0% runs I've followed this actually makes a lot of sense :V

I kinda made the poll a bit too big, but whatever. There are obviously some options I haven't listed, but that's a decent gist of most viewpoints I think. For lack of a better word, by "undesirable", I mean, do you frown upon it? Do you consider it a bad attitude to approaching games of the series, should you always take what you get, etc. Personally I reset for growths early on when chapters are really short to get some decent stats up and may abuse later on if someone is seriously lagging behind on critical stats. I prefer to use the characters I like over neccessarily statistically better or easier choices so sometimes it becomes almost neccessary if I stick to that mindset. If you're flexible and don't mind throwing new units or later prepromotes to fill out your roster, the games are definitely beatable regardless, but I enjoy it more this way.

Low res growths on your characters =/= low res for all enemies. Besides, enemy magic users should really actually matter more, especially with long range Berserk or Sleep staves. The vast majority of the time they're not really much more of a threat than other units, despite them being somewhat rare. It would also help to make Barrier staves, or Pure Waters and their equivilants actually useful (one of the things I liked a lot about FE6 and 12)

have growths be lower on average, give 5% increased chance (maybe more) to a growth every time a stat fails to level up. upon level up, reset the growth back to its default value. this will help offset characters getting stat screwed, and also actually make you not want to immediatly reset if you get a bad/empty level up. and keep resistance low. I mean, really low. non magic units shouldn't really be having more than 10 or 15% chance to get resistance on average, seeing units with like 30% or better res growth when you're not a magic user or pegasus knight is just stupid.

Whilst I enjoyed Yggdra Union, part of the reason this works for the game (both with regards to enemies and you) is bceause you only get one attack per turn, and general positioning and movement is far more limited. The entire game has a LOT of heavy emphasis on making every single turn really really matter. Precise positioning, timing, no reusing cards/skills, etc. Using your single attack per turn to the fullest, via your formations is such a big deal, and the enemies also try to always get into formation to offset the problem you're describing. They even reward LTC on every map with stat bonuses for clearing fast!* I don't really see this working with the way Fire Emblem functions because unless we just pull how Unions work (depending on gender, units pool successive support in either an X or + formation around themselves), because otherwise the AI is going to try it's damndest to beeline a single unit all the time, and without enough chokepoints this isn't feasibly preventable. That and boss ganging will get even dumber unless bosses get buffed sigificantly. In YU, you can protect yourself from that effect by being in formation due to 1 attack per turn, but in Fire Emblem, without having a flat wall of units/using a chokepoint you are basically always going to be exposed on 3 sides, not even counting ranged attacks or canto shit that mounted units can do. It would ultimately end up not affecting as much as you want (penalities only severely kick in at 4 or 5 rounds, which a fairly average amount for a lone unit charging enemies on a single turn as it is anyway), or making the whole game take way longer as you slowly pull the AI out towards you so you don't get overwhelmed. I think something closer to what you'd ultimately want would probably be a more developed support/bonus system, because ultimately that is by far one of the best reasons we already have in place for wanting characters to stay in formation near each other. Base stats, formula calcuations for avo/def and such, effects/skills/procs could be reworked to not only be "better" with more supporting units around but basically almost mandatory to achieve good reliable results. Hell make characters who are near each other get better growths? That in itself might sort of encourage babying I guess though... tl;dr it could be to do with just different passive bonuses units get for sticking around each other and playing together, to the point of being highly important on harder difficulites to succeed. It wouldn't have to neccessarily be unlocked via supports, could just be flatline, could be tied to class, relationships between characters, weapons...who knows. It sounds a bit overcomplicated but idk, just musings. (random final thought I had, maybe doubling could become less of a big deal if we had a system of say where, Unit A attacks Enemy X, does damage, doesn't kill, Unit B attacks Enemy X and finishes them off, Unit A's movement gets refreshed! Might sort of incentivise Knights and other slower tankier characters to be more useful) *I really really really want FE games to do this again, Rankings were piss easy to meet quota for but BEXP bonuses for clearing in X turns was neat. Increase the penalty on going over on your turns, maybe even just cut it entirely. YU gives you a free random stat increase to the unit that did the most damage that map -its a little more complicated than that but I won't get specifics-, which helps to encourage efficiency to even players who aren't particularly interested in optimisation.

If they ditch class changing (please god, I hate that shit), then I'd fully support having a couple of exceptions for the series. Doesn't need to become a regular thing, doesn't need to be a big deal. But if IS sticks with class changing, then things could get a bit wonky. I'd say class changes need to be more specific to every unit compared to what gender they are, because whilst I have nothing against a female fighter or male pegasus knight existing, I do think that it would be pretty ridiculous if I could reclass ANY the males in my army into flying horsemen, or turn ALL the women into berserkers. That just doesn't make sense thematically for the series. That level of attention is probably not going to be there though, so I can't really expect it to happen. A more pressing concern for me is having more foot lance units (Soldiers), bugger the mounts! tl;dr, If they ditch class changing, who cares if there's an exception or two. And if they keep it, you can still have exceptions fitting for the character's build, personalitiy, and aesthetics without compromising anything (which is already compromised anyway mostly, but that's part of why I hate class changing...)