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Next grand hero battle: Zephiel


Michelaar
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So later this month, the grand hero battle against Zephiel is coming up. What do you guys think/hope the map will look like? And do you think he will be good?

 

And what will the banner look like? Previous banners have had at least one character on it that had something to do with the grand hero, or being the one who recruited them (Nino for Ursula, Minerva for Michalis and Caeda for Navarre), so honestly, i'm predicting either Roy or Lilina for the banner. 

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50 minutes ago, Michelaar said:

So later this month, the grand hero battle against Zephiel is coming up. What do you guys think/hope the map will look like? And do you think he will be good?

 

And what will the banner look like? Previous banners have had at least one character on it that had something to do with the grand hero, or being the one who recruited them (Nino for Ursula, Minerva for Michalis and Caeda for Navarre), so honestly, i'm predicting either Roy or Lilina for the banner. 

Lillina seems like a strange choice for the banner to me, at least as a plot related character, since she doesn't have much of a link with Zephiel. I suppose not a lot of characters do, but Roy, Jaffar and Nino seem like better choices to me (I'd still like to see her on a banner though). They'll probably add either a blue mage (fingers crossed for Linde) or a heavy spear user to deal with Zephiel, and then two more units who are good for handling the other units on the map.

 

The map will probably feature one or two extra armor units to boost Zephiels stats and a healer to make killing him even harder. Probably some units with high resistance to not make it to easy for mages as well.

I think as a unit Zephiel will be a cool addition to armor teams, which is nice since there will probably be a mastering armor set of quests coming up. Considering how the meta curentlly revolves around quickly one shotting stuff, I don't think he will be great outside of specialised teams though. Then again, defence maps are coming up, so who knows?

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I'm hoping now that I've trained more units to 40 or near 40 it won't be too difficult. Zephiel is one of my favourite characters and I voted for him on the poll, and I dig his art in Heroes, so I'm really looking forward to using him. 

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1 hour ago, Bartozio said:

Lillina seems like a strange choice for the banner to me, at least as a plot related character, since she doesn't have much of a link with Zephiel. I suppose not a lot of characters do, but Roy, Jaffar and Nino seem like better choices to me (I'd still like to see her on a banner though). They'll probably add either a blue mage (fingers crossed for Linde) or a heavy spear user to deal with Zephiel, and then two more units who are good for handling the other units on the map.

This is FE6 Zephiel. Jaffar and Nino are extremely unlikely since they are from FE7, and are not strong against Zephiel either. Linde is also very unlikely as Zephiel's wary fighter negates her best asset in speed. If anything, we're probably getting Odin.

Lilina doesn't rely on doubling, and targets Res, and is an important character in FE6 so she's highly likely to be on the banner. Roy may be on as well, but he already had his own banner before.

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I remember someone said oboro might be on a banner, because she comes with a heavy spear. and with her high defence might make her a great option for fighting zephel. So id hope she does appear.

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Banners usually get datamined at the update preceding the GHB, right? Have they been doing something different this time around to keep that from happening?

I guess it's possible that the Zephiel GHB won't be available until the next main banner, since that one's also in April, but that'd be pretty late and wouldn't explain why his map was already datamined.

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27 minutes ago, Korath88 said:

This is FE6 Zephiel. Jaffar and Nino are extremely unlikely since they are from FE7, and are not strong against Zephiel either. Linde is also very unlikely as Zephiel's wary fighter negates her best asset in speed. If anything, we're probably getting Odin.

Lilina doesn't rely on doubling, and targets Res, and is an important character in FE6 so she's highly likely to be on the banner. Roy may be on as well, but he already had his own banner before.

While I agree Nino and Jaffar are less likely because they are from a different game then this Zephiel, they still have the biggest connection to him in my eyes. Also apart from Lilina being an important character from the same game, she has no connection to Zephiel, while Roy is at least the leader of the army that defeats him. I feel that he should be the plot related character on the banner, even though I'd be much happier with Lilina. I agree she is good for dealing with Zephiel, so who knows, she might actually be on it for that reason.

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All things considered, Lilina is not that relevant to the plot of FE6 after 8x.  

For my guess as to the "related" character for Zephiel's banner, I'm going to say Cecilia, because she is the lady he knocks out during Chapter 13 in case you forgot what happened to Hector.  Maybe a stretch, but eh.

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I honestly don't think there will be any green units on the banner since Zephiel's red, and the previous battling banners have never included a hero with triangle disadvantage to the grand hero. Feel free to laugh at me if I'm wrong though.

Edited by Korath88
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24 minutes ago, Othin said:

Banners usually get datamined at the update preceding the GHB, right? Have they been doing something different this time around to keep that from happening?

Encrypted in a different way than usual. Miners have been working on them but nothing yet.

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I wonder if people like to pretend the generic units dont exist when they think about the GHB banner ideas. cause if all units focused on Zephel only, then there would be trouble if generics had a huge advantage over them.

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Regarding whether or not Zephiel will be good: From what I read of Zephiel's datamined stats and skills (which could end up being completely wrong, but they're what I have to go on here) (thoughts in spoiler, for those who don't want to be spoiled as to how good Zephiel will be):

EDIT: Looks like I was wrong about this. Please ignore the spoiler for now, I'll edit it later to be more accurate. Thanks for pointing that out @Eridras!

Spoiler

Zephiel's stats will be (if what I read is correct) 55 HP | 48 ATK | 16 SPD | 41 DEF | 24 RES. Additionally, Zephiel comes with his legendary weapon Eckesachs, which has 16 MT, and Life and Death 3, which would put his stat total at 55 HP | 69 ATK | 21 SPD | 36 DEF | 19 RES. And he comes with Wary Fighter, so no doubling until you whittle him down to less than half HP.

Do I even need to say why Zephiel is scary after showing you that? Probably not, but I will anyway. Zephiel can have effectively 82/83 ATK (82.8, does anyone know whether this is rounded up or down?) at WTA (96/97 (96.6) against the unfortunate Green carrying Triangle Adept or an Emerald Axe), and still has 55 ATK (55.2) at disadvantage (41 ATK (41.4) against Blues with Triangle Adept or Sapphire Lances, which is still a pretty alright amount considering the circumstances), so he's always pretty strong. If you add Hone Armor to Zephiel, he has a neutral ATK of 75 (90 at WTA, 105 at WTA vs Triangle Adept/Emerald Axe (can anything even survive that?), 60 at WTD, 45 at WTD vs Triangle Adept/Sapphire Lance), which is just beautiful.

Also, Eckesachs comes with built-in Threaten DEF 2, which lowers the DEF of enemies within 2 spaces of Zephiel by 4 at the start of his turn. Because Zephiel needs to hit a little harder sometimes.

He has Reprisal too, which is nice since it charges quickly and Zephiel has a sizable HP pool so it could do alright damage, but Zephiel arguably doesn't need it, given how ludicrously strong he already is.

All of this makes Zephiel a terrifying foe to face, but he does have weaknesses. For one, most characters can double Zephiel once he drops below half HP and loses Wary Fighter, so he'll be easier to finish off once you get him to that point. Also, Zephiel's DEF might still be good with Life and Death (36 is good, yeah?), but his RES (19) isn't, so mages and dragons can put some massive hurt on him. Also, he shares the Armor's standard weakness of only having 1 MOV, which is annoying.

I recommend bringing a mage to take this guy out (I recommend Reinhardt, dude's really strong, targets Zephiel's lower RES and always hits twice with Dire Thunder, so he should be able to fry Zeph easily, but Linde and maybe sufficiently-buffed-Odin could work too, and given that Lilina's likely to be on the banner I'll bet she can work as well), and I wouldn't bet on being able to tank against him unless you brought something like Sapphire Lance Subaki (high DEF, lowers Zeph's effective ATK to 41/45 via Sapphire Lance, can double via Quick Riposte when Zeph attacks him), a healer (for when Zeph procs Reprisal on Subaki) and a mage (to finish Zephiel when his HP gets low enough that Reprisal could possibly let him KO Subaki). I wonder if maybe Subaki/Lissa/Sophia/Olivia could work for F2P players?

Also, once we get our hands on Zephiel, we'll be able to give him other Skills and make him even more of a monster. I'm thinking of giving him Noontime/Sol (Zephiel deals enough damage that he can probably get significant healing out of these, just not sure if Sol would be worth it for the better healing despite the extra action required to charge it) or Draconic Aura (because I'm sure Zephiel will want to do an extra 20/21 (20.7) damage sometimes), or maybe Sacred Cowl (to cover for his weak RES). And then we can give him Pivot to make him more mobile too.

Alternatively, you could maybe throw Fortress DEF and Bonfire on Zephiel and make him a ludicrous physical wall (46 DEF with Wary Fighter, that's gonna be a tough nut to crack, and 23-damage Bonfires are great, plus Zephiel still has 61 ATK with Fortress DEF). I wouldn't do this myself, since I want Zephiel to do huge damage all the time and I don't have a Lukas to burn for Fortress DEF anyway, but he's strong and sturdy and Wary-Fighter-having enough that you could make it work.

Zephiel is gonna be awesome, though definitely flawed, and putting him on Armor teams will make him utterly ridiculous. I expect Armor teams to become at least a bit more popular once people can run Zephiel on them.

I really hope I have the math right there (and that the stats and skills I saw Zephiel having are accurate), because after writing that up I'm really excited to get my hands on Zephiel if I'm right about him!

As for his map, I too expect Hone+Fortify Armors to flank Zephiel, with possibly a mage and a healer. Or maybe generic Dragons, that would be cool.

Also, betting on Lilina/Oboro/Fae/Jaffar for the Battling Zephiel banner.

Edited by ILikeKirbys
Had the stats wrong.
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16 minutes ago, Eridras said:

The datamined stats already have his weapon's MT added on. 

They do? Damn it. I should've seen it coming, there's no way they'd give him a natural 64 base ATK. Sigh... He'll still probably be good tho.

I'm still looking forward to Zephiel tho, since he'll hopefully have Life and Death 3 as a 4-Star unit so I can burn one to give it to... I dunno who, but I'll figure it out when we get there.

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Usually the trend for GHBs is 

1) bottleneck the player units

2) supporting units hard counter units that naturally counter the Grand Hero

So my expectations are:

Ideally you would want your team to be able to counter units that would counter any units that Zephiel is weak to. 

Basically whatever Zephiel is strong against the rest of the enemy team will be weak to, so you would want one unit that can handle Zephiel, and the rest need to do something else, like be red or green physical weapon users. And of course the enemy are placed so that as soon as one of your units are in range of an enemy they are in range of maybe 2-3 enemies so you need people that can take a hit.   (of course that is all my best guesstimate, for all we know this could be the easiest GHB ever... lol)

Finally I would like to get both versions, sometimes I have trouble getting both.

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37 minutes ago, ILikeKirbys said:

They do? Damn it. I should've seen it coming, there's no way they'd give him a natural 64 base ATK. Sigh... He'll still probably be good tho.

I'm still looking forward to Zephiel tho, since he'll hopefully have Life and Death 3 as a 4-Star unit so I can burn one to give it to... I dunno who, but I'll figure it out when we get there.

That's my plan as well. Life and Death 3 for Kagero, 4-star the other one for armor quests. 

Edited by Eridras
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I wager we'll get one or both of Est and Florina because "OMG, Heavy Spear+, can totally take on Zephiel, guys!" (given that they somehow thought Eliwood was a good idea for Michalis when he was pretty meh with his mediocre Atk and best defensive stat being Res). As mentioned above, the generics tend to be set up to protect their GHB partner (with some portion of the Battling banner then countering those), so I'm predicting a green tome. This means a good banner pick to counter that would be Roy or Fir (and since previous GHBs tend to at least be some level of helpful here, that would also possibly make Navarre able to do something about it). Gwendolyn is another possibility on the banner. She's pretty durable in both stats (even if her offense is bad), so she could wall Zephiel and still take a green tome hit (it would hurt pretty bad, though). I think for a GHB with such low durability, they're also going to bring a staffer—with Rehabilitate if they're feeling a little mean. Aside from that, Zephiel's also vulnerable to tomes. I expect to see at least one dagger thief, maybe two. If there's not a second dagger thief, maybe a lancer to protect the green tome from the player's reds. Since I think there will be a heavy presence of greys, Cecilia would be an obvious easy banner guess, as well. She'd be able to counter them and since she's got a massive Atk score, provide some level of chip against Zephiel, even at WTD.

 

So... I guess maybe the banner will be something like (one of) Est/Florina, (one of) Roy/Fir, Gwendolyn and Cecilia?

 

That's what I'd guess a standard set would look like, anyway. What might be really interesting, though, is if they themed it more to FE6 and brought in generic manakete. Granted, that might not change up my banner predictions too much, since most of them have fairly good Res, with the exception of Roy, who would be chosen to verse green magic based on TA3 still giving him very good damage reduction. If that were the case, I think the green tome would change to a green manakete and maybe even the fifth predicted member would be a blue manakete. This would, predictably, end in Julia being a small god for this map, though I think the odds of her making it into the banner would be lowish (but not unprecedented, since 5-star-exclusive Minerva did make it into Battling Michalis).

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28 minutes ago, Kuroi Tsubasa Tenshi said:

I wager we'll get one or both of Est and Florina because "OMG, Heavy Spear+, can totally take on Zephiel, guys!" (given that they somehow thought Eliwood was a good idea for Michalis when he was pretty meh with his mediocre Atk and best defensive stat being Res). As mentioned above, the generics tend to be set up to protect their GHB partner (with some portion of the Battling banner then countering those), so I'm predicting a green tome. This means a good banner pick to counter that would be Roy or Fir (and since previous GHBs tend to at least be some level of helpful here, that would also possibly make Navarre able to do something about it). Gwendolyn is another possibility on the banner. She's pretty durable in both stats (even if her offense is bad), so she could wall Zephiel and still take a green tome hit (it would hurt pretty bad, though). I think for a GHB with such low durability, they're also going to bring a staffer—with Rehabilitate if they're feeling a little mean. Aside from that, Zephiel's also vulnerable to tomes. I expect to see at least one dagger thief, maybe two. If there's not a second dagger thief, maybe a lancer to protect the green tome from the player's reds. Since I think there will be a heavy presence of greys, Cecilia would be an obvious easy banner guess, as well. She'd be able to counter them and since she's got a massive Atk score, provide some level of chip against Zephiel, even at WTD.

 

So... I guess maybe the banner will be something like (one of) Est/Florina, (one of) Roy/Fir, Gwendolyn and Cecilia?

 

That's what I'd guess a standard set would look like, anyway. What might be really interesting, though, is if they themed it more to FE6 and brought in generic manakete. Granted, that might not change up my banner predictions too much, since most of them have fairly good Res, with the exception of Roy, who would be chosen to verse green magic based on TA3 still giving him very good damage reduction. If that were the case, I think the green tome would change to a green manakete and maybe even the fifth predicted member would be a blue manakete. This would, predictably, end in Julia being a small god for this map, though I think the odds of her making it into the banner would be lowish (but not unprecedented, since 5-star-exclusive Minerva did make it into Battling Michalis).

 

Could have been worse

 

"OMG Abel with his 40 Attack can totally handle Zephiel guys" could have happened

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2 minutes ago, wheelsonfire said:

I'm surprised no one's mentioned Guinevere for the banner... She's got the biggest connection to Zephiel in both games he appears, and is a major character in one of them (even though she isn't playable until the story ends).

But they don't introduce new characters in the ghb banners?

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2 minutes ago, wheelsonfire said:

I'm surprised no one's mentioned Guinevere for the banner... She's got the biggest connection to Zephiel in both games he appears, and is a major character in one of them (even though she isn't playable until the story ends).

She's not available yet, and all GHB banners so far have picked from characters who were already available.

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