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2023 New Heroes Speculation


Othin
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We're three months into the year now, and after all the buzz about Rearmed Heroes and the release of Engage, things seem to be settling back into a similar pattern to last year. Another Engage banner sometime this year seems likely, but they seem to be taking their time with it. In the meantime, we can expect Fallen Heroes in May, CYL7 in August, and a continuation of the regular New Heroes rotation.

What are you expecting?

One possible reference point is the 2022 appearances of the games on the regular rotation:

  • February: Binding Blade
  • March: Thracia
  • April: Genealogy
  • June: Blazing Blade
  • July: Shadows of Valentia
  • September: Three Houses
  • October: Awakening
  • November: Shadow Dragon / Mystery
  • December: Fates

If the next few months follow the rotation, we can expect Binding Blade in April, then the two Jugdral games in June/July. In that case, the last four months will probably have some sequence of Engage, Three Houses, Blazing Blade, and... who even knows. Maybe they'll jump ahead to Archanea or Fates, or squeeze Shadows of Valentia or Awakening even further, or do something else entirely.

Over the past two years, the June/July and September-December banners have all involved OCs and a resulting second demote, so we can probably expect the same thing to continue, with several of them likely to double up on Ascended+Rearmed. Meanwhile, the past few months have alternated between Rearmed and Ascended, so if that continues, April will be Ascended.

If we get an FE6 Ascended next month, the two most prominent options are Lilina and Fae. Both have already gotten legendary versions, but Celica shows that doesn't necessarily rule a character out from getting an Ascended. It could decrease the likelihood, though. After them, there's Fir, Sophia, and Igrene. Lilina and Sophia have the further complications of their bride versions less than a year ago, and in Lilina's case, featuring her signature special. Of course, they could also go for someone lower-ranked.

For actual new(-ish) FE6 characters, the ten who scored best on CYL7, in order, are Wolt, Dorothy, Elffin, Noah, Ogier, Zeiss, Lance, Karel, Murdock, and Bors. CYL6 had the same top ten characters, but different ordering past the first two - Elffin, in particular, has jumped up a lot. Murdock and Dorothy in particular seem like strong guesses, but Murdock has defied expectations already - much like Glen has continued to do with this month's FE8 banner. So who knows.

Like the past few New Heroes banners, the next FE6 banner could very well be themed around a specific nation. Dorothy and Elffin could pull towards an Etruria focus, which might be rounded out with Saul as the demote, Douglas as the GHB, and an Ascended pick of either Lilina or Cecilia. Alternatively, a Bern focus might involve Murdock, Zeiss, Elen, Ascended Guinivere, and... hmm. Are we even missing any other Bern characters? Karel is recruited from a village in Bern, if that's worth anything. But Etruria seems like the most prominent option at the moment.

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I'm surprised we've only gotten one Engage banner so far, I thought we'd have had a second one by now. But I'm also kinda glad we haven't gotten the next one yet? I'd very much so like April to be a Binding Blade month, and I'm hoping we finally get Elffin and Douglas into the game. But, of course, seeing as the characters I like take super long or have yet to arrive (*cough*BROM*cough*), I'm not getting my hopes up.

I'm hoping for Binding Blade in April, and June/July to be Thracia and Genealogy, and September to be Blazing Blade. After that, I'm thinking October and November will be Engage and Three Houses/Hopes, and December will be Shadows of Valentia because it'll be super easy to squeeze a couple more out of there with the addition of the next Book's free OC.

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I understand why there was no Ascended Hero on last year's fallen banner since, well, ascending is literally the opposite of falling. But it would be a lot easier to add a Rearmed Fallen Hero, and I certainly hope there is one.

Other than that, I was kind of against Engage banners initially because it meant no room for an Ascended Hero, but now that we have the Sacred Stones banner with the same setup as the Engage one, I don't really care anymore if/when they appear. Still don't know any of the characters of course, but whatever, that was true of half the FE games for me when FEH first launched.

Incidentally, I thought Legendary Lilina was a relatively new unit and was shocked when I checked and saw that she launched in 2020. Where did all the time go?!?

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12 hours ago, Humanoid said:

Other than that, I was kind of against Engage banners initially because it meant no room for an Ascended Hero, but now that we have the Sacred Stones banner with the same setup as the Engage one, I don't really care anymore if/when they appear. Still don't know any of the characters of course, but whatever, that was true of half the FE games for me when FEH first launched.

The weird thing is, characterization wise Tana really should be an Ascended unit since this is a more mature version of her. I wonder if Ascended units will be a bit more sparse going forward, or if IS is just going to prioritize getting as many Arcane Weapons out as possible regardless of how much in-universe sense it makes?

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1 hour ago, DefyingFates said:

The weird thing is, characterization wise Tana really should be an Ascended unit since this is a more mature version of her. I wonder if Ascended units will be a bit more sparse going forward, or if IS is just going to prioritize getting as many Arcane Weapons out as possible regardless of how much in-universe sense it makes?

At this point, it seems like pretty much any version of a character can qualify as a Rearmed unit, including ones that would meet the criteria for being Ascended or a regular New Hero.

At this point, four of the ten original weapon types are still missing Arcane weapons: Blue tome, green tome, dagger, and staff. There's also the possibility of including colorless tome and beast, but those are probably lower priorities, and inheritable beast weapons would have their own complications. (They'd need to either have inheritance restricted by movement type, have their effect vary based on movement type, or break from the movement-specific effects entirely.)

It looks like the new pattern is that January-April will alternate between Ascended and Rearmed, while September-November can have both due to the presence of OCs, and June/July may start to have both as well. I could see May and August starting to count some of the Fallen and CYL units as Rearmed and Ascended, respectively, but it remains to be seen. If I were designing the pattern, I'd make it so that Rearmed Heroes show up in Jan/Mar/May/Dec, Ascended Heroes show up in Feb/Apr and two in August as the two CYL finalists, and both show up in Jun/Jul/Sep/Oct/Nov, for a total of 9 of each per year - but IS often doesn't listen to me.

There's also the possibility of a new unit type later this year complicating things further, but that sounds too crowded to go for yet. Seems to me like it'll more likely join the Legendary/Mythic rotation - and probably involve Emblem Rings, one way or another.

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I'm not holding my breath but am certainly hoping that the theory about Ascended plus Rearmed banners is true. Psychologically the recent switch to them alternating has already killed much of my summoning enthusiasm for them and for the game in general, similar to how I felt there was nothing to play for when I stopped playing in 2020/21. If not for there being two sparkable AHR banners in the first quarter of this year, there'd be nothing to look forward to at all without FEH Pass.

The fact that we're not getting a full set of Arcane weapons every year is especially disappointing in the context of continuing skill restrictions. If I want to give an Arcane Bow to a non-flier I have to throw away Guidance 4. If I want to give Arcane Lance to a foot unit, I have to throw away Canto. That hurts a hell of a lot more if these weapons only come around every two years, instead of once a year.

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1 minute ago, Humanoid said:

I'm not holding my breath but am certainly hoping that the theory about Ascended plus Rearmed banners is true. Psychologically the recent switch to them alternating has already killed much of my summoning enthusiasm for them and for the game in general, similar to how I felt there was nothing to play for when I stopped playing in 2020/21. If not for there being two sparkable AHR banners in the first quarter of this year, there'd be nothing to look forward to at all without FEH Pass.

The fact that we're not getting a full set of Arcane weapons every year is especially disappointing in the context of continuing skill restrictions. If I want to give an Arcane Bow to a non-flier I have to throw away Guidance 4. If I want to give Arcane Lance to a foot unit, I have to throw away Canto. That hurts a hell of a lot more if these weapons only come around every two years, instead of once a year.

To be honest, I wouldn't mind if they stopped making Ascended Heroes entirely and started putting Rearmed Heroes on every non-CYL New Heroes banner. We'd just need another source of Florets - as long as we can get a decent supply of them somehow, Ascended Heroes don't really do anything special.

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46 minutes ago, Othin said:

To be honest, I wouldn't mind if they stopped making Ascended Heroes entirely and started putting Rearmed Heroes on every non-CYL New Heroes banner. We'd just need another source of Florets - as long as we can get a decent supply of them somehow, Ascended Heroes don't really do anything special.

I can definitely go with that. There are plenty of places in the game where the reward scheme has been completely neglected and is utterly obsolete, so doing a pass over all of that would be healthy for the game in general.

Ascended Heroes do have value beyond that of course, in that they're about one generation of BST ahead (fewer absolute points but more optimised) and tend to have more complete kits. But really the best fix for that would be making the 5-star exclusives on a given banner more equal in quality, instead of there being one who comes with a kit one skill short and which often feels like a glorified 4-star.

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I personally like Ascended Heroes and would be upset if they stopped making them, at least right now.

But, anyway, to expand my earlier thoughts a bit. I'm expecting the New Heroes banners for April, June, and July to be influenced mainly by last year's CYL results, not this year's. I don't expect influence from this CYL until August-onward, when this year's CYL winners actually hit. Specifically, I'm thinking Binding Blade, Thracia 776, and Genealogy of the Holy War (as well as the banners that have already happened) will have influence from last year's CYL while all the other games will have this year's influence.

For Thracia and Genealogy, I'm expecting a focus on Edain for Genealogy and a focus for either Linoan or Tina for Thracia, since Edain was the highest-scoring female character from Genealogy's Gen 1 not yet in the game, and Tina and Linoan were Thracia's highest-scoring. If the good treatment of Staff units so far this year is anything to go by, Edain could turn out pretty darn well, and she would probably bring Midir with her. For Thracia, if they focus on Linoan, she's definitely pulling Deen along, and if they focus on Tina, I'm expecting Perne to come with. I would actually not expect Safy, I think she'd come later and potentially drag both Lifis and Shiva with her.

As for Binding Blade, that's one game where I can definitely see them not going strictly by CYL results and instead going with a specific theme. In this case, I can definitely see Ascended Cecilia, with Elffin and Douglas, and I suppose Dorothy so there isn't just one lady. Or, Ascended Guinivere, with Zeiss and Elen. Regardless of the banner, the GHB is definitely gonna be either Murdock or Jahn.

Going past that and into when I think we're gonna start seeing THIS year's CYL influence, the only games I can really kinda pin down are Blazing Blade, Three Houses, and Marth's games. For Marth's games, it's easy: They made a special category in this year's CYL where they made specific and special note of characters who have a large number of increased votes since the previous year, and Marth's very own Yuliya was the lady winner of that new category, so we'll definitely get something with her for the next banner with those games and she's definitely dragging along Jubelo, and potentially Lorenz as a demote, free quest reward, or GHB.

For Three Houses, I think they'll finally stop putzing around and give us Felix and Dorothea, but not Ashe. And for Blazing Blade, well, I can see a couple possibilities with that. One possibility I see is a Pherae theme with Wil, Isadora, Harken, and Ascended Rebecca, with a Nergal GHB. Or, a very loose "kind of connected to Nergal/Black Fang but also kind of not" theme with Rearmed Dagger Jaffar, Harken (company killed by Nergal/Black Fang), Isadora (Harken's fiance), and a lady Ascended OC who would probably be Peony, as well as Renault (used to work with Nergal, probably) as a free quest reward, and of course Nergal as the GHB. It's a VERY loose theme but IS has shown multiple times that they've actually used even looser ones in Heroes. And lastly, I can see Rearmed OC Peony, Ascended Lyn, Wil, Wallace, Dart free quest reward, and Lundgren GHB. As for the elephant in the room, that being Athos, he's almost definitely going to be a Mythic character, so I highly highly HIGHLY doubt he'll factor into Blazing's next banner.

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On 3/20/2023 at 9:51 AM, Fire Emblem Fan said:

I personally like Ascended Heroes and would be upset if they stopped making them, at least right now.

But, anyway, to expand my earlier thoughts a bit. I'm expecting the New Heroes banners for April, June, and July to be influenced mainly by last year's CYL results, not this year's. I don't expect influence from this CYL until August-onward, when this year's CYL winners actually hit. Specifically, I'm thinking Binding Blade, Thracia 776, and Genealogy of the Holy War (as well as the banners that have already happened) will have influence from last year's CYL while all the other games will have this year's influence.

For Thracia and Genealogy, I'm expecting a focus on Edain for Genealogy and a focus for either Linoan or Tina for Thracia, since Edain was the highest-scoring female character from Genealogy's Gen 1 not yet in the game, and Tina and Linoan were Thracia's highest-scoring. If the good treatment of Staff units so far this year is anything to go by, Edain could turn out pretty darn well, and she would probably bring Midir with her. For Thracia, if they focus on Linoan, she's definitely pulling Deen along, and if they focus on Tina, I'm expecting Perne to come with. I would actually not expect Safy, I think she'd come later and potentially drag both Lifis and Shiva with her.

As for Binding Blade, that's one game where I can definitely see them not going strictly by CYL results and instead going with a specific theme. In this case, I can definitely see Ascended Cecilia, with Elffin and Douglas, and I suppose Dorothy so there isn't just one lady. Or, Ascended Guinivere, with Zeiss and Elen. Regardless of the banner, the GHB is definitely gonna be either Murdock or Jahn.

Going past that and into when I think we're gonna start seeing THIS year's CYL influence, the only games I can really kinda pin down are Blazing Blade, Three Houses, and Marth's games. For Marth's games, it's easy: They made a special category in this year's CYL where they made specific and special note of characters who have a large number of increased votes since the previous year, and Marth's very own Yuliya was the lady winner of that new category, so we'll definitely get something with her for the next banner with those games and she's definitely dragging along Jubelo, and potentially Lorenz as a demote, free quest reward, or GHB.

For Three Houses, I think they'll finally stop putzing around and give us Felix and Dorothea, but not Ashe. And for Blazing Blade, well, I can see a couple possibilities with that. One possibility I see is a Pherae theme with Wil, Isadora, Harken, and Ascended Rebecca, with a Nergal GHB. Or, a very loose "kind of connected to Nergal/Black Fang but also kind of not" theme with Rearmed Dagger Jaffar, Harken (company killed by Nergal/Black Fang), Isadora (Harken's fiance), and a lady Ascended OC who would probably be Peony, as well as Renault (used to work with Nergal, probably) as a free quest reward, and of course Nergal as the GHB. It's a VERY loose theme but IS has shown multiple times that they've actually used even looser ones in Heroes. And lastly, I can see Rearmed OC Peony, Ascended Lyn, Wil, Wallace, Dart free quest reward, and Lundgren GHB. As for the elephant in the room, that being Athos, he's almost definitely going to be a Mythic character, so I highly highly HIGHLY doubt he'll factor into Blazing's next banner.

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Edited by RodolfoRowlett
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  • 1 month later...

With that all aside, Engage has some really good unit chances, such as:

-Every main character in the game (Go figure)

-The Four Hounds

-The New Fell Dragon

Spoiler

-Fallen Veyle, Morion (If anyone cares about him), and Lumera

Spoiler

-The Four Winds

 

Spoiler

-Duo Nel and Nil

Spoiler

-Ascendant (Possibly Legend?) Emblem Alear

Spoiler

-Possibly Harmonic Forrest and Rosado?

What do ya'll think?

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  • 1 month later...

So, Three Houses ended up jumping ahead of Binding Blade, but now we've got the rotation suggesting the most likely game for July is Thracia.

On CYL7, the 12 highest-rated missing Thracia characters were Tina, Linoan, Machyua, Marty, Misha, Amalda, Fergus, Homer, Lara, and Shannam, Safy, and Carrion. If we look back to CYL6 instead, the list changes to Tina, Linoan, Machyua, Misha, Homer, Marty, Lara, Amalda, Fred, Carrion, Shiva, and Dagdar - not a huge difference.

The fact that Thracia is missing an unusually high number of female characters creates an interesting situation. Perhaps this is a time when they would be willing to go with a male Ascended/Rearmed Hero again. Meanwhile, Thracia's pool of alt candidates is especially weird. Reinhardt would be a strong candidate, unless they want to avoid overlapping with his existing pseudo-Ascended version. Olwen has the same problem, and is also much less popular. Nanna already got a legendary version last year, they could double up like with Celica but even if they wanted to, it might make the banner too staff-heavy. Finn will probably get some sort of major alt eventually, but even if they're willing to open up an Ascended/Rearmed alt slot for a male unit, this specific banner might be an awkward place for it since he'd likely stay as a lance cavalry but that's a really close class to Freyr's, who could be a strong candidate for being the OC to kick off the Book 4 TT story. So maybe the best option would be Eyvel. I'd initially ruled her out because we just got an Ascended sword infantry on the FE6 banner, but Ascended Eyvel could easily use bows instead.

Rearmed Freyr would suggest some way of implementing inheritable Arcane beast weapons, which could be a bit strange but I think it's doable. They'd just have to either restrict the inheritance by movement type, have the special effect change based on movement type, or just make it an exception to the usual beast categories. Tina seems likely to be the one "regular" 5*, while Machyua and Marty could be candidates for one or both of the demote slots. I'd certainly like Raydrik to be the GHB, but Marty could fir there as well, as could Misha, Amalda, or Shannam.

Personally, I'm rooting for Linoan, Lara, and Safy, but they might not have the best odds. Linoan is near the top of the list, but that also means she could be less likely to get a demote slot.

I'm not even going to try to hack together a theme here. I guess Marty would make sense to associate with Eyvel, as would Dagdar for that matter, but I'm not sure there's much more than that to work with.

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On 3/19/2023 at 11:21 PM, Fire Emblem Fan said:

For Three Houses, I think they'll finally stop putzing around and give us Felix and Dorothea, but not Ashe.

Wow, I was 75% right on this. We got Felix, and we did not get Ashe. But, we also did not get Dorothea.

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3 hours ago, Fire Emblem Fan said:

Wow, I was 75% right on this. We got Felix, and we did not get Ashe. But, we also did not get Dorothea.

If you were right on 2/3 of your guesses that's technically 66.7% /pedantic

Uh. I have no idea what they're doing this year. I wouldn't be upset if they skipped Awakening after they got two banners in one book. Genealogy, Thracia, and maybe Engage to be expected?

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Ideally for me, this is how the rest of the year goes: 

July: Engage [with a FEH OC who may or may not be Freyr and Ivy as a Rearmed G Tome]
August: CYL7 [with Desaix as the GHB]
September: Genealogy [with Triandra as a Rearmed Dagger and Brigid as an Ascended]
October: Thracia [with Peony as an Ascended and Reinhardt as a Rearmed B Tome]
November: Blazing Blade [with a new FEH OC as a Rearmed Staff and Ascended Rebecca]
December: Engage [with Book VIII's freebie Mythic and Diamant as a Rearmed Sword]

Awakening doesn't need a banner for this book since it got two in Book VI and has very few characters left (unless they finally add base Severa, Inigo and Noire). Valentia also practically has no one left (unless they add the Cipher Quartet). Archanea, for its part, can wait until January 2024 and it also has next to no characters left who are worth adding.

Look, I'm just desperate for any Engage content (but Ivy most of all) and if that means Jugdral has to wait until post CYL7 then so be it. But since this what I'd like to happen, IS will instead put Thracia in July, will give Three Houses / Hopes another banner in October and will put Archanea in December.

Edited by Tybrosion
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The only way I'd want an Awakening banner this year is if Noire is one it. Otherwise, pass. All the other characters I really want from that game are in, as of when Gregor was added. Blazing still has a couple for me (namely Isadora, Oswin, Wil, and Athos). Jugdral definitely has characters I still wanna see.

I expect Engage sometime soon-ish, since Ivy's actress recently had work in Feh. I'm thinking we'll end up getting Ivy with a Rearmed green tome, Male Alear as the regular 5-star star, and Hortensia as...actually, potentially the demote, depending on whether or not we get an OC with them?

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Of the Awakening characters who you can vote for in CYL, there are literally only five left who aren't in FEH at all:

Vaike: 148th in CYL7
Kellam: 153rd in CYL7
Laurent: 166th in CYL7
Validar: 321st in CYL7
Excellus: 392nd in CYL7

So with this information in mind, we can probably expect the next Awakening New Heroes banner to be something like Ascended / Rearmed Severa, Noire, Inigo, Laurent [Demote], Validar [GHB].

Oh and no, I have no clue where they'll fit Vaike and Kellam in.

38 minutes ago, Fire Emblem Fan said:

I expect Engage sometime soon-ish, since Ivy's actress recently had work in Feh. I'm thinking we'll end up getting Ivy with a Rearmed green tome, Male Alear as the regular 5-star star, and Hortensia as...actually, potentially the demote, depending on whether or not we get an OC with them?

I'm honestly expecting Hortensia to be a five star exclusive regardless of whether the banner has a FEH OC (and it most likely will if a Book IV TT+ story series begins next month). In exchange, we would get someone like Rosado (who is hopefully an axe flier) as a quest reward and direct demote.

Not so fun fact: there has only been two axe fliers (Jill and Fell F!Morgan) added to the standard summoning pool since launch. I shouldn't need to elaborate on how dumb that is with how many lance fliers we get.

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1 minute ago, Tybrosion said:

Of the Awakening characters who you can vote for in CYL, there are literally only five left who aren't in FEH at all:

Vaike: 148th in CYL7
Kellam: 153rd in CYL7
Laurent: 166th in CYL7
Validar: 321st in CYL7
Excellus: 392nd in CYL7

So with this information in mind, we can probably expect the next Awakening New Heroes banner to be something like Ascended / Rearmed Severa, Noire, Inigo, Laurent [Demote], Validar [GHB].

Oh and no, I have no clue where they'll fit Vaike and Kellam in.

I'm honestly expecting Hortensia to be a five star exclusive regardless of whether the banner has a FEH OC (and it most likely will if a Book IV TT+ story series begins next month). In exchange, we would get someone like Rosado (who is hopefully an axe flier) as a quest reward and direct demote.

Not so fun fact: there has only been two axe fliers (Jill and Fell F!Morgan) added to the standard summoning pool since launch. I shouldn't need to elaborate on how dumb that is with how many lance fliers we get.

I don't think Severa would show up in an Ascended/Rearmed slot, since she hasn't technically gotten a normal version yet. Accounting for Severa/Inigo/Noire, that's eight characters who will probably be split into two batches of four.

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19 minutes ago, Othin said:

I don't think Severa would show up in an Ascended/Rearmed slot, since she hasn't technically gotten a normal version yet. Accounting for Severa/Inigo/Noire, that's eight characters who will probably be split into two batches of four.

Look, if the Ascended / Rearmed is like Lucina or Owain, then there's a very good chance Laurent gets left off of the banner.

Besdies, we already have Alfred, without any special design / outfit, as a Rearmed. They could just make Severa (or Inigo or Noire, it doesn't have to be Severa), in her regular design / outfit, a Rearmed too.

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5 minutes ago, Tybrosion said:

Look, if the Ascended / Rearmed is like Lucina or Owain, then there's a very good chance Laurent gets left off of the banner.

Besdies, we already have Alfred, without any special design / outfit, as a Rearmed. They could just make Severa (or Inigo or Noire, it doesn't have to be Severa), in her regular design / outfit, a Rearmed too.

Alfred was an exception for Engage specifically, a game that had literally zero alt options at the time. I don't know how long it'll take for Engage to start having alts on its New Heroes banners, but I do not think we have any relevant precedent for expecting that treatment for any pre-Engage games.

My guess is that whenever we get the next Awakening banner, it'll have Severa, Inigo, Vaike, and Validar, leaving the final Awakening banner with Noire, Laurent, Kellam, and Excellus.

Edited by Othin
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  • 4 weeks later...

Turns out Engage is continuing to break patterns around Rearmed Heroes to the point of even having the first double-Rearmed banner.

Meanwhile, we've now got CYL7 coming up. We know the winners are Robin M, Soren, Gullveig, and Corrin F, but there's still some questions standing.

For one thing, who will be the GHB? I've seen people speculating about Desaix due to the Rising Hero award. Some other candidates from the lower part of CYL7's Top 100 are Cyril, Scarlet, Edward, Tormod, and - still missing a regular version - Bruno.

Meanwhile, there's the matter of unit classifications. Traditionally, CYL banners are all normal heroes, but that feels pretty unimpressive nowadays. At this point, all New Heroes banners in the year since CYL6 have had at least one special kind of unit, and 6 of those 11 banners have had two. (Ascended+Rearmed for Sep/Oct/Nov, Mythic+Rearmed for Dec, Mythic+Ascended for June, and Rearmed+Rearmed for July.) They could toss Ascended classifications onto the first place winners to make them stand out a bit more - although Ascended Heroes are a lot less compelling to pull for than Mythic and Rearmed Heroes since they go into the normal summoning pool, and at this point they're rarely showing up without being accompanied by a Mythic or Rearmed Hero to be the real banner seller. (The only exception since CYL6 has been the FE10 banner in Feb 2023.)

Of course, tossing a Rearmed classification onto CYL units would cause other issues, so maybe there isn't really any more of a fix they could do. At least, not within a single four-unit banner. If they really wanted the CYL units to run alongside non-CYL Rearmed units, they could split the CYL7 characters across two New Heroes banners - similar to the structure of the Alm's Army and Celica's Army banners back in 2017 - and add a Rearmed unit to each of them. But that would be a bit uncharacteristic of them, and also would draw attention away from the actual winners, so I'm not gonna bet on this.

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As far as the GHB goes, Desaix really does make a lot of sense. Shadows of Valentia is very likely not getting a New Heroes banner this year and that game has quite a backlog of GHB candidates. Besides Desaix, there's still (base) Rudolf, Jedah, Rinea, Nuibaba, Marla, Hestia, Slayde, and Grieth. And yes, despite all of those options we ended up with Brigand Boss (a meme that wasn't even as funny as Gatekeeper) getting paired with that SoV banner last year. 

As for the state of CYL banners, I agree that IS probably should be considering changes because a banner with just bog standard 5* Heroes isn't good enough anymore. It was pretty telling when CYL6 actually got voted out of contention on the revival polls (in favor of banners with a Rearmed and/or an Ascended Hero). 

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The perks of being a CYL winner are less impressive these days for sure, though still relevant for now.

- The guaranteed Prf skill in addition to their usual Prf weapon, plus having a full kit (unlike the crap they still pull like Citrinne arbitrarily not getting an A-skill). Generic New Heroes can also come with this sort of setup, but it's usually reserved to the one most premium unit on a given banner. With CYL it's all four. This is presumably the biggest draw for most people, including myself, but by the time December rolls around, there'll likely be at least four other New Heroes released that are just as good (assuming one per month from Sep-Dec).

- Being the vanguard of a new BST generation. Bonus stats are nice, but Ascended heroes also get bonus stats where you can choose the allocation, *and* bonus stats to another unit in your barracks of your choosing (though unlike BST they admittedly don't impact scoring). Plus of course it's an advantage that gets progressively drowned out over the 12 months that follow.

- Getting refine access faster is nice, but requires faith that the game will still be alive and well 2+ years into the future.

- Multiple sparks are theoretically nice, but there will be plenty more opportunities to get the units later, and of course the freebie you get also dilutes the desire to manually summon somewhat as well. Paying the full 160 orbs for every spark after the first really doesn't end up being very special, and F2P players will rarely hoard that many orbs to make it viable anyway.

 

I'm not sure what should be done if the banner needed a little boost. Just making them all Ascended would be effective but boring. I personally really like Rearmed heroes, but also acknowledge that their weapon is inherently compromised compared to true Prfs if we're talking about using the unit themselves and not as fodder. That is, the weapon will be a fair bit more generic, and also score worse. Maybe we could have a variant of Rearmed heroes where instead of the weapon, it's their other Prf skill that can be inherited?

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47 minutes ago, Tybrosion said:

As far as the GHB goes, Desaix really does make a lot of sense. Shadows of Valentia is very likely not getting a New Heroes banner this year and that game has quite a backlog of GHB candidates. Besides Desaix, there's still (base) Rudolf, Jedah, Rinea, Nuibaba, Marla, Hestia, Slayde, and Grieth. And yes, despite all of those options we ended up with Brigand Boss (a meme that wasn't even as funny as Gatekeeper) getting paired with that SoV banner last year. 

As for the state of CYL banners, I agree that IS probably should be considering changes because a banner with just bog standard 5* Heroes isn't good enough anymore. It was pretty telling when CYL6 actually got voted out of contention on the revival polls (in favor of banners with a Rearmed and/or an Ascended Hero). 

I imagine we probably won't end up getting to all of them, but I do hope we get Rudolf and Jedah alongside the remaining playable characters, whenever that happens. Ordinarily, I'd say Desaix probably wouldn't get precedence over them, but he's now the highest-voted character from the game, which worked for Brigand Boss last year, so I guess now he's in the same situation.

And yeah, the New Heroes revival poll is a big thing that got me thinking about this. Which, now that I think about it, would be too recent for any significant restructuring, but slapping on Ascended status could happen a lot later in the process. And maybe they'll end up restructuring things for CYL8.

If they aren't set on doing it all in August, one possibility for a restructured CYL banner could be to split it across two months, having each of those months get a New Heroes banner consisting of two of the CYL winners alongside prominent missing characters along the lines of Farfetched Heroes. Although that would conflict with the OC storylines that have been happening for those parts of the year by locking the OCs out of a second month. They usually compensate for OCs with demotes, but CYL-related banners have never had demotes - it'd feel weird for a character's placement to be "rewarded" that way. People already complain about that happening plenty on regular banners, so that might not stop them, but it'd feel pretty weird, unless they went for a character who didn't place well in the first place. Alternatively, they could have the fourth unit be a free 5* like Alear M who isn't on the banner.

11 minutes ago, Humanoid said:

The perks of being a CYL winner are less impressive these days for sure, though still relevant for now.

- The guaranteed Prf skill in addition to their usual Prf weapon, plus having a full kit (unlike the crap they still pull like Citrinne arbitrarily not getting an A-skill). Generic New Heroes can also come with this sort of setup, but it's usually reserved to the one most premium unit on a given banner. With CYL it's all four. This is presumably the biggest draw for most people, including myself, but by the time December rolls around, there'll likely be at least four other New Heroes released that are just as good (assuming one per month from Sep-Dec).

- Being the vanguard of a new BST generation. Bonus stats are nice, but Ascended heroes also get bonus stats where you can choose the allocation, *and* bonus stats to another unit in your barracks of your choosing (though unlike BST they admittedly don't impact scoring). Plus of course it's an advantage that gets progressively drowned out over the 12 months that follow.

- Getting refine access faster is nice, but requires faith that the game will still be alive and well 2+ years into the future.

- Multiple sparks are theoretically nice, but there will be plenty more opportunities to get the units later, and of course the freebie you get also dilutes the desire to manually summon somewhat as well. Paying the full 160 orbs for every spark after the first really doesn't end up being very special, and F2P players will rarely hoard that many orbs to make it viable anyway.

 

I'm not sure what should be done if the banner needed a little boost. Just making them all Ascended would be effective but boring. I personally really like Rearmed heroes, but also acknowledge that their weapon is inherently compromised compared to true Prfs if we're talking about using the unit themselves and not as fodder. That is, the weapon will be a fair bit more generic, and also score worse. Maybe we could have a variant of Rearmed heroes where instead of the weapon, it's their other Prf skill that can be inherited?

I feel like anything involving inheriting their personal skills would make them stand out less than CYL units are expected to. Even if there's no power level change, it would stop being unique to them.

But speaking of Rearmed Hero variants, I've been speculating about the possibility of "Emblem Heroes" who get a duo-style skill that can be inherited in the same way. And that's something they could add to the CYL first place winners without taking any expected things away from them.

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