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Worst unit in each game?


FailWood
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15 hours ago, Heritor said:

For Awakening, I'd say Donnel or Panne

Panne's pretty great actually. She requires an immediate second seal, no ifs or buts about it, but taguel has such terrible class bases that merely class changing to wyvern rider gives her +5 Str & Def. This gives her basically the same statline as lv 1 Frederick, later in the game and at E rank axes, but with wings and her promo gains still ahead of her. And she has some of the very best growths in the first gen, arguably the best, period.

Edit: Forgot that you cannot use a second seal before level 10 (worst part is, I'm speaking from experience, it's just been a while), so she does have to be a pairup mule for a minute before initiating god mode. Fortunately taguel gives very good pairup bonuses.

... Or she could actually fight, but eeeh.

 

 

               

 

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11 hours ago, LJ_Tenma said:

Taguel is definitely a subpar class, but Panne's growths as a Wyvern Lord are actually great (105% HP, 75% STR, 70% SPD), and her +2 strength and +3 speed modifiers aren't anything to scoff at either. She does require a Second Seal if you want her to excel, but by the time she joins they should be available to purchase from some merchants. I wouldn't say she's a bad unit at all, but Donnel for sure LOL.

It's PLAUSIBLE but not CONSISTENT. Getting a Second Seal by Ch6 relies on either NG+ renown or a lucky Anna spawn that has a second seal. On emulators you can abuse the latter with the customizable clock shenaniganry but on a fresh save for a new player or new cart it won't be reliable to acquire, as the first source of sold second seals on the main story path isn't until all the way at the Mila Tree. Point taken about her growths though, I never knew!

Oh, I guess the ones you get as drops and the village in the immediately later chapters matter, but there are typically other units you need to second seal that might be approaching their basic class level cap and you don't want to master seal them. If you wanna burn one of those on Panne though, then I can see her doing well.

Edited by Heritor
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13 minutes ago, Heritor said:

It's PLAUSIBLE but not CONSISTENT. Getting a Second Seal by Ch6 relies on either NG+ renown or a lucky Anna spawn that has a second seal. On emulators you can abuse the latter with the customizable clock shenaniganry but on a fresh save for a new player or new cart it won't be reliable to acquire, as the first source of sold second seals on the main story path isn't until all the way at the Mila Tree. Point taken about her growths though, I never knew!

Oh, I guess the ones you get as drops and the village in the immediately later chapters matter, but there are typically other units you need to second seal that might be approaching their basic class level cap and you don't want to master seal them. If you wanna burn one of those on Panne though, then I can see her doing well.

Even on a completely fresh new game, it only takes 100 renown to get to the second seal, which can reasonably happen pretty early. I don't remember if the prologue counts, but at worst, by chapter 6 you have two paralogues unlocked, and by 7 you have a third one. With all of that completed, you've reached the requirement.

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15 hours ago, Heritor said:

For Awakening, I'd say Donnel or Panne. Donnel's awful start makes him nigh impossible to use for no grind, and two of his classes have Hero overlap, limiting his advanced skill diversity. Panne's classlock and lack of access to decent skills (only proc is Lethality) make her fall behind.

 

Fates it has to be Odin by far. What was once the Apotheosis-destroying man of the hour is this weird hybrid growth dark mage that they wanted to easily transition back to the Myrmidon reclass but it ended up both of his offensive growths mediocre. 

I wouldn't really consider any of the proc skills as decent in Awakening. Maybe Vengance because you can get guaranteed activation and pair it with vantage, but on a whole for Awakening I'd rather be putting my skill slots into evasion and rally skills (and galeforce, obviously). Panne at least can be a dedicated anti cavalry unit with built in beastslayer (though it's not like other units can't do that also by carrying a weapon). It'd be great if she could carry beastslayer into other classes.

Edited by Jotari
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On 11/2/2021 at 1:07 PM, Shadow Mir said:

Fates Birthright: Subaki. Poor offense and speed, and he's obsoleted by Hinoka right after his joining chapter.

Subaki's job is being a flier that carries people around. His combat isn't really a big deal.

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In FE12 Bantu easily. He is the absolute KING of bad units, which is ironic since in FE12 most units are viable outside of maniac and lunatic. He was already not good in FE3 outside of a niche use but in FE12 he is SOOO much worse. Even worse than he was in FE11.

For one dragon breath no longer ignores defense and Fire Dragons also no longer do effective damage against Ice dragons. Meaning he loses his original niche use from FE3. To add to this his stats are horrendous. Both his bases and his growth are so bad its almost painful. Its the point that he impossible to make good without hording a ton of a stat boosters and feeding them to him. To put this in perspective, he gets murdered by the enemies in the map he joins, can barely do damage to much, never doubles, and will never grow without stat boosters since nearly every growths are is either 20% or 10%. To add to this unlike shadow dragon where he is required to recruit Tiki at least, he isn't needed to recruit her at all.

 

I'm too lazy to talk about other games atm

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3 minutes ago, CatManThree said:

In FE12 Bantu easily. He is the absolute KING of bad units, which is ironic since in FE12 most units are viable outside of maniac and lunatic. He was already not good in FE3 outside of a niche use but in FE12 he is SOOO much worse. Even worse than he was in FE11.

For one dragon breath no longer ignores defense and Fire Dragons also no longer do effective damage against Ice dragons. Meaning he loses his original niche use from FE3. To add to this his stats are horrendous. Both his bases and his growth are so bad its almost painful. Its the point that he impossible to make good without hording a ton of a stat boosters and feeding them to him. To put this in perspective, he gets murdered by the enemies in the map he joins, can barely do damage to much, never doubles, and will never grow without stat boosters since nearly every growths are is either 20% or 10%. To add to this unlike shadow dragon where he is required to recruit Tiki at least, he isn't needed to recruit her at all.

 

I'm too lazy to talk about other games atm

I would say he at least provides a Fire Stone to Tiki...but he doesn't even do that XD Because they pulled the whole "I lost my Dragonstone" schtick with him for a second time for absolutely no reason.

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10 hours ago, FailWood said:

I meant in terms of general performance compared to the rest if the cast rather then how they are conceptually, but you bring up a good point.  Guess I can't afford leave out anything when creating a topic, eh?

But even general performance isn't well defined. At the very least, it's something that varies greatly over the course of the game. Who's better, a character who is all-but indispensable for a single chapter but that you never use before or after that point, or a character who will perform reasonably well for the whole game but is generally eclipsed by other units and is easy to beat the game without? And that isn't just a hypothetical situation. One of the units that people have mentioned for worst in his game is Mycen, and yet he's an extremely useful unit to have in the prologue. It might be possible to beat the prologue without him but it would be much, much harder. Or another example that people have brought up is Rinkah. She's not as important as Mycen, but she's one of only three available units for chapter 4 of Fates. Not using Rinkah definitely makes the game significantly harder.

Of course, you could say that you don't care about performance for just one or two chapters and that it's only long-term potential that units should be judged on, but where exactly do you draw the line? Jagen has very little long-term potential but I think that few people would call him the worst unit in his games. How many chapters does a unit have to meaningfully contribute in for them to not be in consideration for worst unit? Does it make a difference whether that chapter is at the start of the game or the end of the game? If Mycen and Rinkah are bad because they only contribute in one or two chapters, does that also mean that characters like Gotoh or the laguz royals (in PoR) are equally as bad?

And then there are growth units. People have brought up Donnel, Rolf, and Amelia, for example. Almost by definition, how good a growth unit is will depend on how much effort you're willing to put into raising them. This is especially relevant for Donnel and Amelia, both of whom are from games with infinite grinding. They're going to be rated considerably difficulty in the context of a no-grinding playthrough compared to a grinding-allowed playthrough.

And then you've also got to factor in non-combat performance. Lorenz (Three Houses Lorenz, not Archanea Lorenz) unlocks the paralogue that gives you Thyrsus. Lyre unlocks base conversations that give you a Howl scroll and a Daunt scroll. Even if they never see a single combat, these are still useful contributions. In Fates and Awakening, there's also the consideration of passing skills or classes onto other units. And so on.

In short, pretty much every unit in Fire Emblem has both up sides and down sides. This makes it all but impossible to directly compare units, because the worst in one set of circumstances isn't necessarily going to be the worst in another set of circumstances.

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24 minutes ago, lenticular said:

In short, pretty much every unit in Fire Emblem has both up sides and down sides. This makes it all but impossible to directly compare units, because the worst in one set of circumstances isn't necessarily going to be the worst in another set of circumstances.

Broadly speaking, yes, you're right. But still, what up sides does Karla have?

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16 minutes ago, AnonymousSpeed said:

You can pretty easily make it so she can't kill Bartre, even on 0% growths.

In other words, she's a promoted swordmaster that struggles to kill a level 2 fighter with promotion gains. And she arrives in, essentially, the second last chapter of the game (yeah the last Kishuna chapter exists, but it's deployment slots are low and she'd suck in it anyway as it's all walls) meaning no opportunity to grow, even if she did have the growth rates to make that worth while. Which she doesn't, because yikes 25% str for such a unit is bad. She should have had Karel's Binding Blade growths, but even if she did, justifying using her would have been only for people who don't have any interest in playing efficiently.

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2 hours ago, lenticular said:

In short, pretty much every unit in Fire Emblem has both up sides and down sides. This makes it all but impossible to directly compare units, because the worst in one set of circumstances isn't necessarily going to be the worst in another set of circumstances.

On the surface, you're right. But when you really think about it... what do I get out of using someone like Wendy, other than a headache?? She's hardly the only one, either; the aforementioned Karla gives me nothing of note for all the trouble recruiting her is.

3 hours ago, CatManThree said:

Subaki's job is being a flier that carries people around. His combat isn't really a big deal.

So can *gasp* literally any other flier, except the other fliers don't suck more ass than SSB64 Link's recovery.

Edited by Shadow Mir
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2 hours ago, lenticular said:

 

And then there are growth units. People have brought up Donnel, Rolf, and Amelia, for example. Almost by definition, how good a growth unit is will depend on how much effort you're willing to put into raising them. This is especially relevant for Donnel and Amelia, both of whom are from games with infinite grinding. They're going to be rated considerably difficulty in the context of a no-grinding playthrough compared to a grinding-allowed playthrough.

 

I'd argue that that just makes them a giant waste of time.

Sure, I could prolong by playthrough by a signifficant amount of time, hoping I get random battles/reeking box encounters that are easy enough for Donnel to get kills. (So not the maps that spawn with you in the middle, surrounded by enemies, where the only real chance of weak units getting a kill is a dual strike as Stat Backpack.)

Or just use literally anyone else, such as Nostank Robin.

If I have to put plenty of dedicating grinding into them thanks to infinite grinding, they're still not exactly good because they basically bloat out the game's run time with grinding.

 

Edited by Samz707
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2 hours ago, lenticular said:

Or another example that people have brought up is Rinkah. She's not as important as Mycen, but she's one of only three available units for chapter 4 of Fates.

I'm assuming people are judging each route of Fates as starting at the "Branch of Fate" in chapter 6, so any prior contributions would not be considered. Kind of like how Lyn Mode contributions aren't considered in FE7 tierlists.

2 hours ago, lenticular said:

They're going to be rated considerably difficulty in the context of a no-grinding playthrough compared to a grinding-allowed playthrough.

So there needs to be a paradigm on how units are graded. Usually it's "efficiency" - i.e. trying to complete chapters quickly, albeit with more reliability than what might secure the LTC. Skirmishes are generally inefficient, so no grinding would be assumed. Games with rating schemes can be tiered on that metric, but those games generally don't include grinding options.

2 hours ago, lenticular said:

And then you've also got to factor in non-combat performance. Lorenz (Three Houses Lorenz, not Archanea Lorenz) unlocks the paralogue that gives you Thyrsus. Lyre unlocks base conversations that give you a Howl scroll and a Daunt scroll. Even if they never see a single combat, these are still useful contributions.

I see tierlists as usually about "how valuable is it to use this unit?", rather than "how valuable is it to have this unit?". If an item comes from deploying and using a unit, then that counts to their tiering (i.e. Scythe of Sariel from killing the Death Knight with Caspar, or Sophia's Guiding Ring). If an item comes from simply having a unit in your army, that doesn't count toward their tiering (i.e. Lyre's Daunt scroll or Fiona's Thani). There are some "in-between" cases, for sure - I need to recruit AND deploy Lorenz to get Thyrsus, but I don't need to use him in the map, or on any future maps. So he deserves some credit for Thyrsus, but not all the credit.

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2 hours ago, lenticular said:

And then there are growth units. People have brought up Donnel, Rolf, and Amelia, for example. Almost by definition, how good a growth unit is will depend on how much effort you're willing to put into raising them. This is especially relevant for Donnel and Amelia, both of whom are from games with infinite grinding. They're going to be rated considerably difficulty in the context of a no-grinding playthrough compared to a grinding-allowed playthrough.

The problem with that is that grinding benefits everyone else as well. It's especially apparent with Donnel, because unlike Amelia, he doesn't even level up any faster for how much weaker he is relative to everyone else.

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Well, this topic doesn't really have any assumptions in place, such as "the need to invest into a unit counts as a negative" or "the player aims to end maps / the game quickly", so there's no reason why @lenticular shouldn't name the worst unit in each game by her standards. Training up characters and, especially in the newer games, "building" a character are core aspects of the series, so it's a valid perspective to view grinding somebody up as gameplay and not a chore.

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1 hour ago, Samz707 said:

Sure, I could prolong by playthrough by at least weeks, hoping I get random battles/reeking box encounters that are easy enough for Donnel to get kills. (So not the maps that spawn with you in the middle, surrounded by enemies, where the only real chance of weak units getting a kill is a dual strike as Stat Backpack.)

It's also possible to just use SpotPass encounters to get Donnel off the ground, which is considerably quicker and easier.

2 hours ago, Samz707 said:

Or just use literally anyone else, such as Nostank Robin.

Sure, but "just use Nostank Robin" equally invalidates most units in Awakening.

53 minutes ago, Shadow Mir said:

The problem with that is that grinding benefits everyone else as well. It's especially apparent with Donnel, because unlike Amelia, he doesn't even level up any faster for how much weaker he is relative to everyone else.

Sure, grinding can benefit anyone but it doesn't benefit everyone equally. Donnel (with Aptitude) has fantastic growths. If you use him, he starts out behind everyone due to his poor bases, but then overtakes them due to his outstanding growths, but then he hits his caps before everyone else at which point everyone elses catches up with him. In terms of just raw stats (i.e. not accounting for things like class availability, parenting, etc.), his power curve starts low, then becomes high, then finishes off somewhere fairly average.

1 hour ago, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:

I'm assuming people are judging each route of Fates as starting at the "Branch of Fate" in chapter 6, so any prior contributions would not be considered. Kind of like how Lyn Mode contributions aren't considered in FE7 tierlists.

Well, people are welcome to judge that way if they want to but that's certainly not how I'd think about it. To me, starting from the Branch of Fate is basically using New Game+ to skip part of the game. Which is a perfectly reasonable way to play, but not something that I would automatically assume.

1 hour ago, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:

So there needs to be a paradigm on how units are graded. Usually it's "efficiency" - i.e. trying to complete chapters quickly, albeit with more reliability than what might secure the LTC. Skirmishes are generally inefficient, so no grinding would be assumed. Games with rating schemes can be tiered on that metric, but those games generally don't include grinding options.

Yeah, I don't really like "efficiency" as a concept because it's always so vague and poorly defined and everyone who uses it seems to have a slightly different idea of what it means. I think that a lot of the time when people say "efficient play" what they actually mean is "with a play style similar to how I [the speaker] play". It's not too fully optimised like an LTC or a speedrun, but it's also not doing infinite grinding. It's just... somewhere in the middle, between those two extremes. Which isn't very helpful.

1 hour ago, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:

I see tierlists as usually about "how valuable is it to use this unit?", rather than "how valuable is it to have this unit?". If an item comes from deploying and using a unit, then that counts to their tiering (i.e. Scythe of Sariel from killing the Death Knight with Caspar, or Sophia's Guiding Ring). If an item comes from simply having a unit in your army, that doesn't count toward their tiering (i.e. Lyre's Daunt scroll or Fiona's Thani). There are some "in-between" cases, for sure - I need to recruit AND deploy Lorenz to get Thyrsus, but I don't need to use him in the map, or on any future maps. So he deserves some credit for Thyrsus, but not all the credit.

Whereas I look at it more like this: for most metrics of "optimal" or "efficient", you can split units into two groups, those that you should use at some point in the play through and those that you shouldn't use. For any game (or any route) there are going to be multiple units that fall under "don't use". For these units who never see combat, there needs to be some way of differentiating between them if we are to choose the single worst unit in a game, and I see out-of-combat contributions as one useful way of doing so.

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9 minutes ago, lenticular said:

Sure, but "just use Nostank Robin" equally invalidates most units in Awakening.

I thought that was why he was considered the best unit, and all other units are considered worse than Robin as a result.

Edited by AnonymousSpeed
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7 minutes ago, AnonymousSpeed said:

I thought that was why he was considered the best unit, and all other units are considered worse than Robin as a result.

Splitting characters between the tiers "Robin" and "not Robin" doesn't sound like a particularly fun activity.

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17 minutes ago, lenticular said:

Yeah, I don't really like "efficiency" as a concept because it's always so vague and poorly defined and everyone who uses it seems to have a slightly different idea of what it means. I think that a lot of the time when people say "efficient play" what they actually mean is "with a play style similar to how I [the speaker] play". It's not too fully optimised like an LTC or a speedrun, but it's also not doing infinite grinding. It's just... somewhere in the middle, between those two extremes. Which isn't very helpful.

As someone who helped developed "efficiency" as it is used in FE discussions, I apologize for what it became and personally denounce its continued use.

19 minutes ago, lenticular said:

Whereas I look at it more like this: for most metrics of "optimal" or "efficient", you can split units into two groups, those that you should use at some point in the play through and those that you shouldn't use. For any game (or any route) there are going to be multiple units that fall under "don't use". For these units who never see combat, there needs to be some way of differentiating between them if we are to choose the single worst unit in a game, and I see out-of-combat contributions as one useful way of doing so.

Although I don't really like this, either. The idea of judging a unit when you're not really using them doesn't sit right with me.

3 minutes ago, AnonymousSpeed said:

I thought that was why he was considered the best unit, and all other units are considered worse than Robin as a result.

I'm pretty sure she is the best unit in Awakening, because only female Robin can Galeforce.

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3 hours ago, Florete said:

She can take a lancereaver and dodgetank/maybe kill some wyverns.

So can the guy you use to recruit her, only without a special sword, and with a bow to actually take them down.

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12 minutes ago, Jotari said:

So can the guy you use to recruit her, only without a special sword, and with a bow to actually take them down.

I wasn't trying to say she was better than anyone, just pointing out a role she can fill if you're looking for one.

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14 minutes ago, Florete said:

I wasn't trying to say she was better than anyone, just pointing out a role she can fill if you're looking for one.

Yes, she is a unit in the game that can deal damage to enemies. And even if she literally couldn't attack, at the very least she could be sacrificed as a meat shield. Every unit can be used for something. But my point is that Karla, by some objective measure, is less useful than the vast majority of units in the game. So while it is hard to determine exactly which unit is the worst, as there are many ways in which a unit can be judged, but some of them are just pretty dang terrible no matter which metric you're using.

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3 minutes ago, Jotari said:

Yes, she is a unit in the game that can deal damage to enemies. And even if she literally couldn't attack, at the very least she could be sacrificed as a meat shield. Every unit can be used for something. But my point is that Karla, by some objective measure, is less useful than the vast majority of units in the game. So while it is hard to determine exactly which unit is the worst, as there are many ways in which a unit can be judged, but some of them are just pretty dang terrible no matter which metric you're using.

I mean...yeah? I put her as the worst in her game on my list, too. You asked what up sides she had and I answered. I'm not sure where you think I was trying to disagree with you on something.

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