What are the best affinities?

[Liz]

Which affinities give out the best/ most useful bonuses?

Which give the worst/most useless bonuses?

[Nightmare]

Earth or Water for best, Heaven for worst (even though it's my favourite affinity and is really useful for Pelleas).

[Martelé]

I think Earth and Thunder are pretty good affinities. And dark is pretty good, too.

The worst are probably Heaven and Light.

[Saaji]

More or less what everyone has got it down, Earth is great for avoid earth x earth makes for a nigh untouchable duo, while I believe water gives a very well round bonus to attack and defense i believe

[Zanarkin]

Earth is the best the worst well that's hard to decide

[Admiral "Bull" Halsey]

EarthXEarth.

[xanatha]

I'm not sure. I know I like dark and... heaven, I think. Otherwise, no idea.

[Florete]

Earth is easily the best, since the minimum +23 avoid it grants is already awesome. As for the rest, it more or less depends on the character and what they would like, but I would say Earth > Dark > Water > Thunder > Fire > Wind > Light > Heaven. But Earth and Heaven are definitely the best and worst respectively.

[General Spoon]

EarthxEarth.

[Aless]

Earth is complete w1n, and then anything that gives avoid.

[Killer Poleax]

Earth is easily the best, since the minimum +23 avoid it grants is already awesome. As for the rest, it more or less depends on the character and what they would like, but I would say Earth > Dark > Water > Thunder > Fire > Wind > Light > Heaven. But Earth and Heaven are definitely the best and worst respectively.

I'd say the same thing except I'd switch thunder and fire.

[Paperblade]

It's difficult to rank affinities, since certain units need certain stats and it's difficult to say what's overall more useful. For example, while a lot of units like Earth, there are still a few units that don't want an Earth support because it's totally unnecessary and they want more Attack or Thunder would give a larger durability boost because of the Defense boost (Volug, Ulki). Similarly, there are a large number of units that find +Atk boosts a waste because they don't double and +2 Attack wouldn't make them OHKO or 2HKO or whatever a significant amount of time (See: Haar, Micaiah, Nolan, Aran, Ike, Titania, Royals). And then there's Sword users, who can't forge a 1-2 range weapon, and the few they do have prior to Alondite have terrible Hit, so they could really use a Heaven support so that they didn't sit there missing with 50-60 displayed with the Tempest Blade.

However, Avoid and Hit from affinities other than Earth/Heaven are generally less useful. +2 Defense > +8 Avoid in this game since enemy hit rates are so high and biorhythm can ruin a >50 to <50 Avoid jump from +8 Avoid. Similarly with Hit, since a piddling +8 Hit isn't very useful most of the time, and when it is it doesn't make enough of a difference since we still have a high miss rate. On the other hand, Earth solves Avoid problems unless you're in 3-13/4-E-3/4/5, and Heaven solves most hit problems unless you've got a very low Hit weapon and a poor Bio matchup (Worst vs. Best or similar). However, hit problems are much rarer and more difficult to fix than Avoid problems (forge a more accurate weapon!), which is why Heaven isn't as good. This is why most people consider Water to be the second best, since the other 5 affinities only really give 1 "useful" boost in most cases.

I, however, would rank it something like this.

Top (AKA lolEarth)

Earth

Mid

Water/Thunder/Dark/Light

Bottom

Heaven/Fire/Wind

More units want more durability than there are units that want more offense, and giving more Defense/Avoid when you already have a good amount of Defense exponentially increases your durability, whereas more Attack/Hit have diminishing returns.

[charmander6000]

In general...

Earth > Dark > Water >Thunder > Fire > Light > Heaven > Wind

Too bad there aren't many dark affinity users, most people only use MicaiahXSothe and Naesala and Giffca show up really late leaving only Calill and Soren. Thunder and Fire are debatable though defense/avoid work better together than attack/hit plus those two stats can be boosted with forges. Heaven is better than wind because it actually becomes useful during endgame.

[Caliban of Sycorax]

Anything involving Earth is the best support combo. Not counting Earth/Earth, Earth/Dark is the best combo (+30 AVO and +2 ATK).

[Wisper]

EarthXEarth is completely overkill.

EarthXWater is awesome.