Vykan (Nephenee) vs Smash (Lethe) [part 2 only]

[Vykan12]

Showing Neph > Lethe doesn’t need to go any further than 2-1 since she’s severely cutting the turns required to beat this chapter by being actively used. Lucky enough for me, I happen to have a HM save on that very chapter, so I’ll try and Brom solo it as efficiently as possible, then use both characters and compare the results.

Brom solo

Turn 1: Brom gets the steel axe. Neph moves to his left, trades him the vulnerary while taking an herb in case she needs it, then de-equips herself.

Turn 2: Brom moves around a javelin enemy and attacks him. Since he only has 76 display hit, he proceeds to miss. Let’s pretend that never happened. *resets, repeats 2 turns*. Neph is sent into the bottom left corner.

Turn 3: The jav enemy is now in front of Neph, and since her dying results in a game-over, I might as well finish that pest off.

Turn 4: An archer attacked Brom (he’s down to 21 hp) and is also in Neph’s range now. Might as well take 2 turns to kill him.

Turn 5: The archer is now dead and Neph is safe from enemy attacks. Note that Heather showed up while Brom is still only 2 spaces south of the steel axe house.

Turn 6: Brom moves northeast and heals.

Turn 7: If Brom visits the ashera icon house, it will take another 2 turns to get him where I want to, namely attacking the javelin general blocking him from getting to the boss. I’ll be nice to Brom and forget that house. As for that general, Brom only does 11 damage to him per turn, so it’s going to take 2 turns just to kill him.

Turn 8: A brigand reinforcement just appeared 4 spaces from Neph, so Brom’s going to need to kill him. There goes another 4 turns (damn are brigands ever durable!)

Turn 9: One of the houses was burned down, and another one will be the following turn. A hand axe guy who was staying perfectly still before has also come out to attack Brom. Killing that enemy along with the brigand is going to take 5 turns.

Turn 11: Heather just left.

Turn 13: A third house was burned. The only one remaining is the ashera icon one.

Turn 14: 2 myrmidons are blocking Brom’s path to the general, and one of them poisoned him. I might as well kill one of them while the other runs away and uses a vulnerary.

Turn 16: The general is finally dead and Brom got a hit on the remaining brigand in the level. He only has 4 hp left and is still poisoned, so I decide to move 4 spaces to the right and heal (he’s now in vertical alignment with the boss).

Turn 17: Brom finishes off the brigand.

Turn 18: Brom needs at least 27 hp to survive the boss and his 2 personal bodyguards. I decide to put Brom adjacent to the boss and have him heal again (he has full hp now).

Turn 19: Brom’s poisoned state wears off, which is a relief. I recall the boss chasing units down after he attacks them for the first time, so I put Brom on a thicket and have him heal again.

Turn 20: Surely enough, my conjecture was correct, and all 3 enemies attack Brom. He now has 16 hp left, so healing time.

Turn 21: Brom can deal a finishing blow to the boss with an iron axe, but he only has 51 hit currently. Brom is down to 16 hp again, so I might as well move him out of the thicket and heal.

Turn 22: Sure enough, Brom misses. Healing time.

Enemy phase: The boss finally dies.

22 turns was better than I expected, but look at everything I miss out on:

-Heather. Even if we ignore her part 3 use, she can steal some valuable items in 2-E such as a dracoshield.

-An ashera icon.

-A javelin.

-A concoction.

-A spectre card I could’ve sold for decent cash.

Had I gotten all those things (assuming it’s even possible in a Brom solo) that could’ve very well taken over 30 turns.

Using Brom, Neph and (possibly) Heather

Turn 1: Brom gets the steel axe while Neph one rounds the fighter south of her.

Turn 2: Both characters team up to kill an archer.

Turn 3: Neph goes South, takes an herb. Meanwhile, Brom goes north and attacks a javelin enemy.

Turn 4: Neph finishes off the jav enemy while Brom picks up the ashera icon.

Turn 5: Neph proceeds below the ledge and moves right. As for Brom, he moves south and 1HKOes a myrmidon.

Turn 6: Neph recruits Heather. I then have Heather moves fully west, equip a bronze knife (there’s a mage nearby) and visit the concoction house. Finally, Brom attacks the javelin general.

Turn 7: Heather proceeds to attack a fighter at close range. Lucky for me, she landed a crit, not that it’s going to affect the overall turn count. Neph visits the spectre card village and Brom heals.

Turn 8: Heather visits the remaining village, Neph moves north then heals, and Brom finishes off the jav general.

Turn 9: Heather heals (a brigand is blocking her path, so she’ll be healing until he’s dead), Brom moves towards the boss while taking an herb, and Neph moves within the attack range of another brigand.

Turn 10: Brom and Neph team up to kill a brigand.

Turn 11: Brom attacks a javelin soldier while I move Neph at the very edge of the boss’ attack range. She currently has 25 hp so a boss hit should allow her a wrath counter.

Turn 12: There’s a small chance of Brom dying with the 25 hp he’s currently got, so I decide to move him adjacent to Neph and heal. I also notice the jav enemy and the boss can team up to kill Neph so I give her an herb.

Turn 13: Brom and Neph could team up to kill the boss, but I risk having one of them miss. Neph moves down 2 spaces while Brom moves right 1. Now Brom is guarding the stairs, so Neph is safe from being attacked.

Turn 14: Brom is down to 6 hp, so I decide to heal him and finish the boss with an enemy phase counter. Brom was nice enough not to miss, and so the chapter ends.

So there you have it. Using Neph here not only saves 8 turns, she also allows me to recruit Heather as well as visiting all the villages. If Neph had transfers, it would’ve been even faster than this. You could argue I made a strategic flaw somewhere, but the fact remains that using Neph clearly saves several turns as well as making it much easier to acquire all the goodies in 2-1.

For Lethe to be superior to Neph, she has to be directly responsible for saving >8 turns as well as helping the team acquire items they would’ve otherwise missed. 2-2 has a max BEXP turn count limit of 7, and Lethe obviously can’t help you beat that in 0. That leaves 2-E, but then the turn count for that chapter is preset unless you kill Ludveck, and then there’s no way for Lethe to be assisting in that process. After all, Lethe has 26 atk while Ludveck has 26 def, so it’s theoretically impossible for her to do anything against him without a level-up or a stat booster.

Edited June 17, 2009 by Vykan12

[Progenitus]

The problem here is assuming that Neph not doing anything at all = neutral utility.

That is not the case.

You see, Neph is *forced* into the chapter, and right off the bat she's going to get attacked by enemies, so you can't simply have her hide in a corner, unequip your weapon, and do nothing. In fact, doing nothing would mean she has NEGATIVE utility since the enemies are just going to attack her constantly, which means she either dies (obviously bad) or she wastes loads and loads of your healing items for no reason (also bad, just not as bad as a game over). In that case, killing off the enemies (using both Brom and Neph) would be Neph's *neutral* utility.

For example, in your "brom solo" method, Neph was under attack multiple times, so Brom had to go over and save her. This isn't Neph having neutral utility. This is Neph just getting in your way, i.e. negative utility. Neph's neutral utility would be helping killing off the enemies.

In other words, having Brom solo the map and Neph doing absolutely nothing is *negative* utility on Neph's part.

One common method that we generally apply when we try to think if a unit has positive or negative utility is we pretend that the unit didn't exist and we try to figure out what will happen from there. Of course, we obviously can't just make a unit completely disappear, so to emulate it we would either not field the unit at all, or if the unit is forced have them hide in a corner and do nothing, or something similar. For example, we can imagine what would happen if Lethe didn't exist in 2-2 or 2-E, because we can simply have her hide in a corner/not field her.

The problem is that we can't do either for Neph in 2-1, so no matter what we do, Neph will always exist, and this method can't be applied. Thus we have to use other methods.

Not to mention you did several unnecessary things in your Brom solo method (aside from the aforementioned "not kill off Neph's attackers using Neph to help out with that so now she just has negative utility")...

Turn 9: One of the houses was burned down, and another one will be the following turn. A hand axe guy who was staying perfectly still before has also come out to attack Brom. Killing that enemy along with the brigand is going to take 5 turns.

You don't need to kill off the hand axe guy if he's going for Brom. He does TWO damage a hit to him, so you can basically just have Brom do his stuff and the fighter follows him and nothing will happen, because it's only 2 damage a hit. And not only that, you shouldn't EVEN kill him if possible. See, the fighters and myrmidons in this chapter are part of the Volunteer group, not the Rebel group (who are run under the boss), so if you keep the Volunteers alive, you actually get BEXP.

Not to mention that you could have simply recruited Heather and have her visit the houses and such... if Neph wasn't getting in your way and sitting in a corner not doing anything while enemies were attacking her, forcing Brom to waste his time to save her.

So there you have it. Using Neph here not only saves 8 turns, she also allows me to recruit Heather as well as visiting all the villages.

The problem here is that FE is not so simple where you can say "by doing this strategy I can beat the chapter in X turns, and by doing this strategy I can beat the chapter in Y turns".

There are far too many variables in a given FE chapter for someone to lay such a turn by turn strategy down that will always beat the chapter in a certain number of turns.

Let's take 2-E for an example. It's a gigantic chapter with, like, 10 playable units (and later the CRKs join), and tons and tons of enemies. How are you going to do a turn by turn strategy for this chapter? Your units will engage in so many rounds of combat, and the RNG will play a factor so many times, that such a turn by turn strategy is pointless. There's no way you could make one and say "this strategy will let me beat the chapter in X turns". Of course you can make a *basic* strategy (for example, a strategy that consists of "Haar + Leanne 1-turn the chapter", or using a more realistic one, "X unit sits at a chokepoint and godmodes"), but they aren't going to tell you how long you will take to beat the chapter.

The only reason why you could do that for 2-1 is that it's a very plain and straightforward chapter. We have 2 units, a third that can be recruited, and less than TEN rebels (plus four volunteers and two bandits, but that's still very few chapters). You can plan what your units are going to do very easily every turn, because you only have to plan for 2-3 of them, and you can clearly see what the enemies are going to do, and can generally guess what the outcome will be because you end up fighting so little that the RNG will barely play a factor, etc.

But the exception is not the rule. By asking for a turn by turn strategy for 2-2 and 2-E and specifically determine how many turns Lethe saves you, you are asking for the impossible.

Basically, the more units/enemies/stuff to do in the chapter, the more the RNG plays a factor (because more things happen and the RNG is used more often), and the harder it is to give a concrete value of how long it will take to beat the chapter.

And, you could just use Neph to recruit Heather, and then let Heather visit all the houses and such. So Neph would get credit for bringing Heather to the team, but that's it, since Heather visiting the houses and such is Heather's positive utility, not Neph's.

If Neph had transfers, it would’ve been even faster than this. You could argue I made a strategic flaw somewhere, but the fact remains that using Neph clearly saves several turns as well as making it much easier to acquire all the goodies in 2-1.

Well of course Neph is going to save you SOME turns. Part 2 in general gives you so little units that EVERYONE is going to do something, since not using that unit otherwise cuts down on your manpower. Hell, for example, even Leo in 1-P has positive utility, because you only have three units for that chapter, so not using someone cuts down your manpower by a third. It's not like, say, 1-E, where I can go "well I don't have to field this dumbass Leo because his unit slot can just go to someone else".

The thing is that Lethe is just helping you more in part 2 than Neph is.

And of course, using Neph over not using Neph doesn't save you *eight* turns. Your Brom solo method (which is what you used as your baseline) is where Neph has *negative* utility, not neutral.

Not to mention you did a couple of unnecessary things with the Brom solo method that wasted time, such as having Brom kill off that hand axe fighter that did negligible damage to him, and killing him made you lose BEXP.

For Lethe to be superior to Neph, she has to be directly responsible for saving >8 turns as well as helping the team acquire items they would’ve otherwise missed.

As I said earlier, there's no way to even come close to demonstrating that using Lethe instead of not using Lethe will save you a certain amount of turns.

However, I CAN assure you that Lethe WILL make 2-2 and 2-E faster by SOME amount because she actually has semi decent stats at the moment (Neph would pretty much do nothing). Or at the very least, Lethe is going to do a lot more than Neph.

Let's do a stat comparison.

Lethe doubles everything aside from myrms/SMs with 26 att. Neph either won't double anything with 29 att (her steel greatlance) or she *might* double some things with 25 att (steel lance).

Lethe has 51 HP/18 def/20 res/66 avoid. Neph has 32 HP/15 def/14 res/52 avoid.

An enemy with 31 att 2HKOs Neph, 4HKOs Lethe.

An enemy with 27 att 3HKOs Neph, 6HKOs Lethe.

An enemy with 23 att 4HKOs Neph, 10HKOs Lethe (technically Lethe would have 1 HP left, but meh, let's just say it kills her. Not like there's much of a difference between 10HKO and 11HKO anyway).

A thunder mage with 24 att 4HKOs Neph, 13HKOs Lethe.

When you consider that Lethe has 14 more avoid, you can clearly see that Lethe is living more than twice as long as Neph will. And because she doesn't have issues doubling anything, she does a lot more damage as well.

This is pretty much a stomping. This is like Volug vs everyone else in the DB in part 3 where Volug has like twice the offense and/or twice the durability of any given unit on the team.

2-2 has a max BEXP turn count limit of 7, and Lethe obviously can’t help you beat that in 0.

Even if it was humanly possible to give a concrete value of how much faster Lethe makes you beat the chapter, she doesn't need to help you beat it in 0 turns. If, say, Lethe helps you beat the chapter 2 turns faster than if you didn't use her, you would add that to how much faster she could make 2-E go by.

And even in this case, a unit that doesn't actually make your turn count any lower but gives you a greater chance of beating the chapter in X turns has positive utility as well.

For example, suppose that if you don't use Lethe you can beat the chapter in 7 turns, but with only a 50% chance of success. Now suppose that if you use Lethe you still beat the chapter in 7 turns, but now you have a 90% chance of success. You can clearly see that even if Lethe didn't lower your turn count, she would give you a higher chance of beating the chapter within taht turn count, which is obviously a good thing.

Of course there's the whole difficulty of determining that % chance of beating the chapter in X turns, which is why I generally don't bring up concrete values of beating chapters in X turns or % chance of beating the chapter. I just usually go "unit A is helping me here" or "unit B is helping me more than unit C because unit B has these factors that make him a superior unit in the chapter", etc., since that's really the only thing you CAN do.

Again, this just goes back to the problem of assigning concrete values of beating chapters in X amount of turns like what you tried to do for 2-1.

That leaves 2-E, but then the turn count for that chapter is preset unless you kill Ludveck, and then there’s no way for Lethe to be assisting in that process. After all, Lethe has 26 atk while Ludveck has 26 def, so it’s theoretically impossible for her to do anything against him without a level-up or a stat booster.

No, Lethe does not have to even touch Ludveck to assist in beating the chapter. For example, you have have her block the west stairs and have your tank that would have otherwise had to sit at the stairs now go right and attack the generals and help push towards Ludveck. Or you could have her attack some stuff, like thunder mages, that would otherwise pwn Haar. The list goes on.

Also, let me bring up something else, since it can't really fit anywhere else, but pretty much cements Lethe's victory. The method of using a unit.

See, we say are only concerned about part 2 use, but when we use a unit, we aren't ONLY thinking about that part. We have in mind the entire game, and what we will do afterward. We don't say "well since we are only concerned about part 2, we aren't going to use the unit with ONLY part 2 in mind, and give every other part the finger because we don't care about them".

When we use Neph, we generally have in mind that we're going to use her for the entire game. Generally, that's what a tier player is going to do if he fields Neph; use her for the whole game and bring her to 4-E. While he may occasionally use Neph for only part 2 and never use her again, the former is much more common, especially since the former will maximize Neph's usefulness overall throughout the game (and thus it would put Neph higher on the tier list for the overall game, rather than if you just used Neph with only part 2 in mind). On the other hand, when a tier player plays and has the entire game in his mind, he uses Lethe in part 2 and never touches her again, because he knows Lethe is complete garbage after that no matter what he does. It'd be like trying to feed Sothe tons of kills so he can get better in part 4; it's pointless, because we all know no matter what we do he's going to be crap in part 4, and feeding Sothe kills would intentionally build up negative utility.

What I'm saying is that the method we generally use for Neph is that we baby her in part 2 so that when she joins in part 3 she's not retardedly underleveled and remains crappy for the rest of the game. This means that she's actually building up negative utility in 2-2 and 2-E because she needs to be fed kills on top of her having terrible stats. Lethe doesn't. We all know Lethe is god awful outside of part 2 no matter what we do, so we are never worried about feeding her kills.

Now you may say something along the lines of "but since we are only concerned about part 2, we are going to use Neph in such a way that will maximize her part 2 usefulness, not sandbag her and use her in the worst possible way as far as part 2 is concerned". But again this is faulty.

Let me bring up an example, since it's the simplest way for me to explain it.

Let's say I wanted to do Aran vs Edward in 1-4, and who is better in that single chapter. I could easily just feed all the kills to Aran (or Edward for that matter) in 1-3 so I can "maximize" their performance in 1-4, and since 1-4 is the only chapter we're concerned about, it would be okay, right?

No, it's not, and you can obviously see the flaw. While we may only be concerned about one chapter, or one part, we must have the whole game in our mind. We obviously are not going to do stupid things like feed all the kills in one chapter to one unit.

We assume that the player will play the game assuming a tier-list setting (e.g. no dumb things like dumping massive amounts of favoritism to a certain unit), and then we "cut" out a portion of the game, the portion that we're looking at, and then examine it and see who is better. In my example, the player uses Aran/Edward like he would normally use them for the whole game, but then cuts out 1-4 and examine who is better in that chapter.

Similarly, the player will use Neph/Lethe assuming he's playing in a tier-list setting concerned about the entire game, and then cuts out part 2 and examines who is better. In a tier-list setting, he will generally baby Neph in part 2 so she's better in part 3 and later part 4, since this is the most useful way to use her overall. He will also generally use Lethe only in part 2 and then drop her for the rest of the game.

In this case, Lethe maintains her positive utility (since part 2 is the only part of the game where she has any), but Neph accumulates negative utility.

At this point, only one unit has positive utility, and it's not Neph.

tldr

Your Brom solo method has Neph at negative utility. Which means that using Neph over not using Neph is not saving you 8 turns as you claimed, since you'd have to measure it from a neutral utility baseline, not a negative utility one.

Nevermind that it's impossible for your general FE chapter to actually give a turn by turn strategy, as well as an absolute turn count to beat a chapter in using or not using a given unit. Which means that while you can determine that Neph can save you X amount of turns in 2-1 because it's such a straightforward chapter, there's no possible way to say that Lethe will save you Y amounts of turns in 2-2 or 2-E because they are just too large/too many variables/RNG can gay you over.

Lethe crushes Neph in 2-2 and 2-E in pure stats. In addition, because of the way we USE both units so we can maximize their usefulness over the entire game, Neph is being babied and fed kills in those chapters so she's better and ready for part 3 and later part 4, while Lethe is never worried about that, because she knows she's crap beyond part 2 anyway.

[Vykan12]

My Brom solo vs using Neph actively was supposed to illustrate how the more one uses Neph in 2-1, the more easily and efficiently the map is beaten. For instance, you protest to Neph being shoved in a corner unarmed (the most inactive you can really make Nephenee), but just having her equip a steel greatlance in the same situation saves Brom a lot of time. She could have also visited the ashera icon house when all the nearby enemies were cleared, but then now we’re at least using her semi-actively.

I also do not understand how Neph fighting alongside Brom makes her have neutral utility. See, if she teams up with him to kill say, an archer, I just saved Brom a player phase he could use to do something else, such as attacking the jav general he wants to get past.

The problem is that we can't do either for Neph in 2-1, so no matter what we do, Neph will always exist, and this method can't be applied. Thus we have to use other methods.

If Neph magically vanished from 2-1, Brom might save himself 5-6 turns of fighting compared to my Brom solo, but we’re still missing out on some of Heather + village items. Neph is undeniably an asset in this level, that’s positive by any mathematical definition I know.

Turn 9: You don't need to kill off the hand axe guy if he's going for Brom.

Had I left that hand axe guy alive, Neph would’ve needed to heal roughly every turn, so it was just a matter of saving both resources and tedium. This doesn’t change anything about using Neph > not using her in this chapter.

And not only that, you shouldn't EVEN kill him if possible. See, the fighters and myrmidons in this chapter are part of the Volunteer group, not the Rebel group (who are run under the boss), so if you keep the Volunteers alive, you actually get BEXP.

The volunteers give 200 BEXP each, which is hardly worth keeping them alive. I mean Brom requires 2300 BEXP on HM just to level up so we’re missing <10% of a level-up for every volunteer we kill. Considering how they can block a unit from moving fully and some get 1RKOed, it’s not worth the effort to keep these fools alive.

Not to mention that you could have simply recruited Heather and have her visit the houses and such... if Neph wasn't getting in your way and sitting in a corner not doing anything while enemies were attacking her, forcing Brom to waste his time to save her.

If Brom is going south then east to recruit Heather, then Neph is stuck fighting all the enemies around her starting location. Obviously, if Neph kills those enemies, Brom has less to worry about on his way to the boss.

Alternatively, since Neph has higher movement, it’s more logical for Neph to recruit Heather while Brom takes on the enemies near his starting location, or perhaps just goes straight for the jav general.

In any case, Neph is yet again increasing efficiency by being actively used.

The problem here is that FE is not so simple where you can say "by doing this strategy I can beat the chapter in X turns, and by doing this strategy I can beat the chapter in Y turns".

How many ways do you think a Brom solo can be carried out? He takes a certain number of rounds to kill enemies, he has to heal after a certain amount of hits, the map layout is the same, etc. The only major variables are whether Brom’s landing his hits or not, whether Brom is getting hit, and what path Brom takes to reach the boss the fastest.

Sure, things get more complicated when multiple characters are involved, but there’s little denying that using Neph actively will be faster than a Brom solo in the grand majority of cases. You’d need a freak amount of your own hits to miss, NPC Heather to not co-operate, etc for that to happen.

Let's take 2-E for an example. It's a gigantic chapter with, like, 10 playable units (and later the CRKs join), and tons and tons of enemies.

And that’s also where your example falls apart. 2-1 doesn’t have a ton of playable characters or enemies, so it’s far more predictable, meaning a turn-by-turn strategy is more representative of how the chapter will usually carry out.

At any rate, the purpose of that turn-by-turn strategy was not to show that Neph is helping to beat the chapter exactly 8 turns faster while also acquiring x more items. It was simply a way of putting into perspective how Neph is being significantly helpful in 2-1.

But the exception is not the rule. By asking for a turn by turn strategy for 2-2 and 2-E and specifically determine how many turns Lethe saves you, you are asking for the impossible.

For 2-E, I already addressed that in my opener:

That leaves 2-E, but then the turn count for that chapter is preset unless you kill Ludveck, and then there’s no way for Lethe to be assisting in that process. After all, Lethe has 26 atk while Ludveck has 26 def, so it’s theoretically impossible for her to do anything against him without a level-up or a stat booster.

You could argue Lethe is helping someone else to reach Ludveck sooner, but most of the units who are effective against him can fly so Lethe clearing a bunch of generals to the east isn’t helping that process. I don’t need a specific turn-by-turn strategy to figure that out.

For 2-2, I’m assuming at most 7 turns are taken to beat it, though it’s not implausible to take a little over that. Lucia starts 22 spaces from where she needs to arrive, and even if we shoved/vigored her multiple times and pretended the level didn’t have any enemies, she’d only be able to arrive turn 4 or later. Once you add in enemies, it’s more like 5-7 since none of your units 1RKO reliably (Mordy doesn’t double, Nealuchi and Lethe have atk issues, Lucia might but it depends on weapon choice), and most of them won’t counter ranged attacks on enemy phase. Based on that alone, I cannot see how Lethe’s performance could possibly save more than 2 turns, and again, I didn’t use a specific level strategy to figure this out.

And, you could just use Neph to recruit Heather, and then let Heather visit all the houses and such. So Neph would get credit for bringing Heather to the team, but that's it, since Heather visiting the houses and such is Heather's positive utility, not Neph's.

If using Neph is the difference between getting Heather or not, then logically every action of Heather’s can be indirectly attributed to Neph. And why are you constantly neglecting Neph’s combat utility in this chapter?

As I said earlier, there's no way to even come close to demonstrating that using Lethe instead of not using Lethe will save you a certain amount of turns.

I’ve offered justification that Neph’s 2-1 alone is helping to beat part 2 more efficiently than anything Lethe can dream to do in 2-2 and 2-E.

*2-2 Lethe vs Neph stat comparison*

That’s wonderful and all, but you’re leaving out key details, particularly related to Lethe’s transform issues. I don’t know what IS was thinking, but you only have 1 olivi grass to use between 3 laguz here. That means for Lethe to stay transformed, she needs to adversely affect 2 better combat units in Mordy and Nealuchi.

Lethe: 51 hp, 26 atk, 24 AS, 18 def, 20 res, 76 avo

Mordecai: 57 hp, 38 atk, 18 AS, 32 def, 8 res, 55 avo

Nealuchi: 53 hp, 27 atk, 36 AS, 20 def, 20 res, 106 avo

2x Soldier lvl 19 (Venin Lance)

HP 32, Atk 24, AS 16, Hit 126, Avo 41, DEF 14, RES 9, Crit 8, Ddg 9

Lethe inarguably loses to both characters in the durability department (Mordy has less avo but he has so much def he’s not taking damage). Offensively, all 3 characters are basically tied due to 2 rounding the common enemies here.

So for Lethe to be actively used, she has to do at the expense of the 2nd and 3rd best character in the level. Nephenee isn’t doing such a thing by doing chip damage to an enemy with a javelin, even though technically Lethe will probably outdo her damage output in this level.

Speaking of javelins, let’s take a look at how many ranged threats are in this level. According to HM enemy stats on the site, 11/28 (39%) of the level’s enemies have 1-2 or 2 range, so Neph is obviously being more productive against those on E. phase (damage > no damage). This cuts into Lethe’s offensive statistical leads. Actually, now that I look at it, Lethe’s combat isn’t even that much better than Neph’s.

The enemy AS in this level range from 14-18, with 16-17 being most common. If Neph levelled up in 2-1, there’s a 65% chance she has 21 spd, which would allow her to double virtually any enemy in this level when not being weighed down. Now let’s check out Lethe vs Neph directly:

Lethe: 51 hp, 26 atk, 24 AS, 18 def, 20 res, 76 avo

Nephenee: 32 hp, 21 AS, 15 def, 14 res, 64 avo

Steel lance: 25 atk

Javelin: 22 atk

Lethe only beats steel lance!Nephenee in atk by 1. I checked a large sample of 2-2 HM enemy data, and they take the same number of rounds to kill any enemy in the level. The only exceptions are armors (Lethe 6HKOes while Neph sometimes takes 7), but both units do so poorly against those it hardly matters.

As for javelin!Neph, she borderline 2RKOes most of the common enemies while ORKOing mages, which means Neph’s ranged attacking is certainly good enough not to overlook. If 2 archers attack javelin!Neph, Mordy and Lucia can 1HKO them the next turn whereas the same cannot be said if those enemies had attacked Lethe.

This means Lethe’s only ever significantly winning offence when she doubles and Neph doesn’t, which as stated before, is pretty rare. But then Lethe loses player phases to grassing, is ineffective against ranged enemies and is hurting the offensive production of two of our best fighters in this level. What’s more is that Neph is easier to set up for Leanne vigors because of the versatility her range provides. Considering all this, it’s very arguable if Lethe even wins offence at all.

How their durability compares is addressed below:

An enemy with 31 att 2HKOs Neph, 4HKOs Lethe.

An enemy with 27 att 3HKOs Neph, 6HKOs Lethe.

An enemy with 23 att 4HKOs Neph, 10HKOs Lethe (technically Lethe would have 1 HP left, but meh, let's just say it kills her. Not like there's much of a difference between 10HKO and 11HKO anyway).

A thunder mage with 24 att 4HKOs Neph, 13HKOs Lethe.

There are only 3 enemies in this level (~11% of the total) who have 31+ atk, and they all happen to have low hit. For example, a steel blade!general only manages 37 true hit on her, and the other 2 enemies like this are spread out in the level such that you cannot really face them all in 1 turn.

Most enemies will fall into the 3-4HKO range on Neph with about 50% hit. Those are very good numbers considering how low the enemy density is in this level. If she finishes off an enemy with a javelin that say, Mordy injured, or kills an enemy through javelin attacking + being vigored, she can take 2-3 enemy phase counters and still survive. There might not even be that many enemies in her range, and even if there are, it’s likely that she’ll quickly stop being attacked due to enemies blocking squares adjacent to her.

Sure, Lethe wins durability, but that lead is mitigated by the fact that Neph doesn’t need to completely wimp out on this level to avoid death risks. She’ll certainly need to heal more often, but that cancels out with Lethe’s need to grass. In fact, Lethe’s gauge problem prevents us from throwing Lethe into a pile of enemies I couldn’t throw Neph into since then she risks reverting, at which point Neph is obviously winning by a lot.

In the end, I don’t see any convincing evidence that Lethe’s roflstomping Neph here when we put both units into practice. Even if Lethe pulls out a win, the magnitude of that win is only Lethe’s performance – Neph’s, which is still nowhere near cancelling out the value of 2-1 Neph.

No, Lethe does not have to even touch Ludveck to assist in beating the chapter.

There’s only 3 things I need to do for this chapter to be safely beaten (see the picture below).

Once the initial enemies on the middle platform area are cleared and 2 unarmed units are put onto those red squares, there’s little left to do than to end the turn until the chapter is over, healing those 2 units as necessary. You might object that we’re missing out on treasure or CEXP gain this way, but that’s a bit of a sticky subject since this debate is about part 2 only. If we do care about getting the 2-E treasure, we also care about conserving laguz stones for part 3, which only makes Lethe’s 2-2 worse.

It’s not like Lethe’s doing anything to help you acquire those treasures. Just as in 2-2, Lethe’s offence against armors is pretty unimpressive (3RKOing, possibly 4), which eliminates much possibility about her doing anything to the east. I can’t see her being effective at the western stairs either since she’s incapable of throwing hand weapons down a ledge, which makes it more difficult for her to get the nullify scroll than say, short spear!Neph. The entire stairs would have to be cleared, then Lethe would have to descend them, then proceed to take 3 turns just to kill the general who drops the scroll. Why take all the time when Neph could’ve just 2 turned him from above a long time ago?

That basically just leaves the dracoshield you can steal off one of the generals close to Ludveck. If you watch

, you’ll see that the best way to acquire this is by having Nealuchi drop Heather onto the lower tier area, have Leanne vigor her, pull off the steal and finish Ludveck with a Haar+Elincia combo in the same turn. Lethe has nothing to do with that, and the enemies around Ludveck are armor/general heavy, so she’d be ineffective against them even if she got there.

Put in short, my argument here is that the things Neph and Lethe do in 2-E only really serve the purpose of self-improvement, something that means absolutely nothing if we’re only looking at part 2. What either character does towards safely beating the chapter or taking out Ludveck early is so insignificant it’s barely worth mentioning.

Or you could have her attack some stuff, like thunder mages, that would otherwise pwn Haar. The list goes on.

Both Lethe and Nephenee ORKO thunder mages, and Neph can do it at range if necessary, so big deal. If you’re talking about the mages on the eastern side of the map, then Lethe would have to go past where Haar’s chokepointing to kill the enemy, which means a bunch of enemies or going to attack Lethe instead of Haar, and that obviously accomplishes nothing. Moreover, if Haar had a hand axe equipped on enemy phase, none of the mages that attacked him would’ve survived. Finally, Haar has the means to 1HKO mages with higher end weapons. As you can see, Lethe isn’t really helping to alleviate Haar’s biggest problem in this stage.

See, we say are only concerned about part 2 use, but when we use a unit, we aren't ONLY thinking about that part.

That seems highly contradictory towards the conditions laid out in this debate though I’ll go along with it anyways. This hypothetical isn’t really even changing my case since I’ve assumed so far that Lethe and Neph are being used actively throughout part 2.

What I'm saying is that the method we generally use for Neph is that we baby her in part 2 so that when she joins in part 3 she's not retardedly underleveled and remains crappy for the rest of the game. This means that she's actually building up negative utility in 2-2 and 2-E because she needs to be fed kills on top of her having terrible stats. Lethe doesn't. We all know Lethe is god awful outside of part 2 no matter what we do, so we are never worried about feeding her kills.

I can’t believe you’re trying to twist this into a win for Lethe. We have the option to either use Neph like any other unit (ie contributing to a safe and efficient chapter completion), or we can baby her for later returns. Lethe doesn’t have such an option since babying her does little to improve her once she makes a comeback in 3-4.

tldr

Indeed. You don’t need to make 8 paragraph long explanations of concepts I (and probably everyone reading this) grasped within the first. Also, I don’t appreciate it when you try to “educate” me on how tiering in a fire emblem game works. Not necessarily everyone agrees with your philosophy, and many of the examples you give are not adaptive enough to be applied to numerous situations in this game, let alone any FE.

The rest of your points was repeating stuff you’ve already said earlier (and hence I’ve addressed) so I’ll just skip to some summary points.

-There is virtually no denying that using Neph actively in 2-1 allows for a safer and more efficient completion of the chapter than it is to minimize her use. This can only be constituted as positive utility, and thus puts Neph at an advantage before Lethe is even in play.

-In 2-2, Lethe has Neph beat from a statistical standpoint, but this doesn’t carry out on a practical level. Transform issues, lack of 1-2 range and using up valuable laguz resources (olivi grass, possibly laguz stones) hinder Lethe enough that her 1 atk/3 AS lead mean little (especially since Neph doubles most of the enemies here). The only reason Lethe might be superior here is because of her durability lead, but even that falls apart if she reverts, which is reasonably likely given the lack of grass and how quickly her meter depletes (-4 per attack, -5 per turn).

-In 2-E, both characters are for all intents and purposes superfluous in contributing to the map’s goals, even if that includes getting treasure. With access to the short spear, killer lance and brave lance, she’s going to be winning offence anyways. Also note that Lethe has even less grass to work with than in 2-2, so just using her in this chapter isn’t wise.

-Considering the above, Neph wins 2-1 by a lot, either ties or loses in 2-2 by a bit, and wins in 2-E for what that’s worth. The overall result is a resounding victory for our blue armoured lass.

Edited June 18, 2009 by Vykan12

[Progenitus]

Protip: You should read the opponent's entire post before you start countering, since some parts that I addressed later in my post already countered stuff you said because you didn't even read it while typing.

I'm putting this at the top of my post so you will know to read everything I say before you start talking about stuff that my post already countered.

If using Neph is the difference between getting Heather or not, then logically every action of Heather’s can be indirectly attributed to Neph.

Okay then.

Roy for best unit in FE6.

Here's a list of units he can recruit, and units who are indirectly recruited by Roy (Roy recruits a unit, and that unit then recruits someone else).

Clarine, Rutger (from Clarine), Sue, Geese, Klein, Zealot/Treck/Noah (technically Treck/Noah can also be recruited by Zealot, and Zealot can be recruited by either Treck or Noah, but you need Roy to talk to at least one of them, so he gets credit for all three anyway), Fir (from noah), Shin (from Sue), Tate (from Klein), Bartre, Cath, hugh, Juno/Dayan, Karel

Holy crap, that's like half the units in FE6 or something ridiculous, including a bunch of top and high tiers, along with all the weapons and items everyone comes with, including stuff like Geese who comes with a frickin brave axe.

Clearly if Neph gets credit for everything Heather does after Neph recruits Heather, then by that logic Roy gets credit for everything those units on that list do. At this point he has so much positive utility built up that if people like Rutger and Lance were S tier, Roy would be SSSSSSSSSSSSSS tier because of how many godly units he can recruit, and he doesn't even need to attack anything.

See, this is what happens when you say stupid crap like "Well X unit recruits Y unit, so therefore X unit has X + Y utility". This produces hilarious yet inaccurate results where we aren't actually measuring a unit's worth in helping us beat the game, but rather silly storyline events that shouldn't even matter.

At this point I may as well say "Ike is the best unit in this game because without him you can't seize maps like 3-4 or win the BK fight in 4-E-2 or kill Ashera in 4-E-5".

My Brom solo vs using Neph actively was supposed to illustrate how the more one uses Neph in 2-1, the more easily and efficiently the map is beaten. For instance, you protest to Neph being shoved in a corner unarmed (the most inactive you can really make Nephenee), but just having her equip a steel greatlance in the same situation saves Brom a lot of time. She could have also visited the ashera icon house when all the nearby enemies were cleared, but then now we’re at least using her semi-actively.

I also do not understand how Neph fighting alongside Brom makes her have neutral utility. See, if she teams up with him to kill say, an archer, I just saved Brom a player phase he could use to do something else, such as attacking the jav general he wants to get past.

Because Neph sitting around and taking enemy attacks and doing jack in return, forcing Brom to waste his time and come and save her is NEGATIVE utility.

The problem here is you think sitting in a corner doing nothing regardless of what's attacking you = neutral utility. It's not. Neph's neutral utility would be to at least help Brom kill off the stuff that's attacking her. Any house she manages to visit (note: it only matters if Brom/Heather can't do it without going slower) falls under her positive utility, but most of the houses have crappy stuff anyway.

If Neph magically vanished from 2-1, Brom might save himself 5-6 turns of fighting compared to my Brom solo, but we’re still missing out on some of Heather + village items. Neph is undeniably an asset in this level, that’s positive by any mathematical definition I know.

No one is saying Neph doing nothing is better than Neph doing something.

The problem is that Neph's "something" is largely limited to just recruiting Heather.

Had I left that hand axe guy alive, Neph would’ve needed to heal roughly every turn, so it was just a matter of saving both resources and tedium. This doesn’t change anything about using Neph > not using her in this chapter.

Turn 9: One of the houses was burned down, and another one will be the following turn. A hand axe guy who was staying perfectly still before has also come out to attack Brom. Killing that enemy along with the brigand is going to take 5 turns.

Why would Neph need to be healed if she's not the one getting attacked?

The volunteers give 200 BEXP each, which is hardly worth keeping them alive. I mean Brom requires 2300 BEXP on HM just to level up so we’re missing <10% of a level-up for every volunteer we kill. Considering how they can block a unit from moving fully and some get 1RKOed, it’s not worth the effort to keep these fools alive.

It's not just the 200 BEXP, but it's ALSO the turn wasted on killing it. Actually, Brom can't double it, which would just be two of Brom's turns.

How many ways do you think a Brom solo can be carried out?

And that’s also where your example falls apart. 2-1 doesn’t have a ton of playable characters or enemies, so it’s far more predictable, meaning a turn-by-turn strategy is more representative of how the chapter will usually carry out.

It would help if you actually read my entire post before you responded to things. I answered both of these question already.

The only reason why you could do that for 2-1 is that it's a very plain and straightforward chapter. We have 2 units, a third that can be recruited, and less than TEN rebels (plus four volunteers and two bandits, but that's still very few chapters). You can plan what your units are going to do very easily every turn, because you only have to plan for 2-3 of them, and you can clearly see what the enemies are going to do, and can generally guess what the outcome will be because you end up fighting so little that the RNG will barely play a factor, etc.

But the exception is not the rule. By asking for a turn by turn strategy for 2-2 and 2-E and specifically determine how many turns Lethe saves you, you are asking for the impossible.

At any rate, the purpose of that turn-by-turn strategy was not to show that Neph is helping to beat the chapter exactly 8 turns faster while also acquiring x more items. It was simply a way of putting into perspective how Neph is being significantly helpful in 2-1.

Well sure, if you put the baseline at Neph's negative utility and not her actual neutral utility, you can artificially inflate Neph's usefulness.

For 2-E, I already addressed that in my opener:

What the fuck? Your response didn't even answer my statement.

I was talking about it is impossible to give a definite turn count for 2-2 and 2-E. Nowhere in the portion that you quoted did I ever talk about Lethe's actual performance in those chapters.

Generally when you quote something, you're going to respond with something relevant, not something that came out of nowhere.

That’s wonderful and all, but you’re leaving out key details, particularly related to Lethe’s transform issues. I don’t know what IS was thinking, but you only have 1 olivi grass to use between 3 laguz here. That means for Lethe to stay transformed, she needs to adversely affect 2 better combat units in Mordy and Nealuchi.

The only way Mordy and Nealuchi would have a problem is if they both needed 4 grass uses in the chapter. The chapter is only going to last 7 turns or less, so it's more like they're using 2-3.

Plus you can untransform your laguz if they don't have anything to do. This can work for Lethe because she gets +10 gauge a turn untransformed, so if you untransform her early she can quickly transform back anyway.

Lethe inarguably loses to both characters in the durability department (Mordy has less avo but he has so much def he’s not taking damage). Offensively, all 3 characters are basically tied due to 2 rounding the common enemies here.

Lethe is already pretty durable herself. 51 HP/18 def/20 res/66 avoid (before Lucia's stars) means that Lethe is probably never dying, or even needing to heal once, unless Lethe ends up taking on like half the map by herself.

Mordy/Nealuchi's durability leads over Lethe are fairly small, almost negligible, since Lethe's pretty durable herself, while Lethe's durability lead over Neph is most certainly notable, particularly since Neph dies in half the hits and has lower avoid, and the only way she can even try to overcome it is attack at 2-range using a crappy weapon.

Speaking of javelins, let’s take a look at how many ranged threats are in this level. According to HM enemy stats on the site, 11/28 (39%) of the level’s enemies have 1-2 or 2 range, so Neph is obviously being more productive against those on E. phase (damage > no damage). This cuts into Lethe’s offensive statistical leads. Actually, now that I look at it, Lethe’s combat isn’t even that much better than Neph’s.

1 of them is the boss who doesn't move, and 2 of them are reinforcements who come at turn 5 in the southwest corner that you'll never face anyway.

So that's 9 enemies with 2 range or 1-2 range, with only 8 of them being relevant since the boss doesn't move, out of 25 enemies. Note that one of those ranged enemies is a longbow archer, which means javelin Neph probably isn't countering either.

Not to mention that Lethe only cares if it ends up attacking her. If it, for example, attacks another laguz, or does something like attack Brom, Lethe doesn't lose any gauge.

Oddly enough, this is exactly the same number of enemies that have 17+ AS and Neph can't double them. The difference of course is that Lethe is actually effective against the 1-2 and 2-range enemies on player phase while Neph with her not doubling and lame attack is just bad on both phases against the 17+ AS enemies.

And then you're assuming that Neph is actually holding onto her javelin and not a 1-range weapon.

The enemy AS in this level range from 14-18, with 16-17 being most common. If Neph levelled up in 2-1, there’s a 65% chance she has 21 spd, which would allow her to double virtually any enemy in this level when not being weighed down. Now let’s check out Lethe vs Neph directly:

Neph gained a level in 2-1 when she was getting like 18 exp a kill and like 4 for hitting something, in a chapter that only had like 15 enemies and you didn't even need to kill all of them, and of those 15 enemies, 4 of them were so low level that you'd get less than 10 for killing them instead?

Nevermind that your 2-1 strategy using Neph only had her get like 3 kills, which when coupled with her attack exp would put her at like 65-70 exp.

Yes this is entirely believable.

Or not, since we're in reality.

Even factoring in exp Neph gets from 2-2, the chapter will be at least halfway done before she levels up.

And even after Neph levels up she only has about a 2/3 chance of doubling the higher end enemies when Lethe just doubles everything right off the bat?

Lethe only beats steel lance!Nephenee in atk by 1. I checked a large sample of 2-2 HM enemy data, and they take the same number of rounds to kill any enemy in the level. The only exceptions are armors (Lethe 6HKOes while Neph sometimes takes 7), but both units do so poorly against those it hardly matters.

The only problem being that Lethe does so much damage to enemies in general that jokes like Heather can finish them off (in fact, sometimes on the first attack, which means Heather won't take a counter), while javelin Neph requires your best units to finish the job especially if Neph ends up missing attack because the javelin has an amazing 65 hit.

As for javelin!Neph, she borderline 2RKOes most of the common enemies while ORKOing mages, which means Neph’s ranged attacking is certainly good enough not to overlook. If 2 archers attack javelin!Neph, Mordy and Lucia can 1HKO them the next turn whereas the same cannot be said if those enemies had attacked Lethe.

The javelin is crap for attacking. First of all, Neph has 125 hit with it (I included Lucia's 2 stars) against enemies who hover around 40-50 avoid. So like 80 displayed hit. Which is 92.2 true. And you might think that's fine, but let me get started with all the problems.

- She only has 22 att with it, so if she ends up attacking something she can't double (i.e. every promoted enemy in the chapter plus others) or attacks something with a lot of def (i.e. all the armors), she does laughable damage. For example, if she attacks a halb, who has ~34 HP/15 def, she leaves it at 27 HP, and so everyone except Lucia is giving her the finger because they still need another unit to kill it off. Or if she attacks the weakest armor, who has 35 HP/17 def, she leaves it at 23 HP, and unfortunately the only person who can kill this off alone is Lucia. Meanwhile, Lethe leaves the halb at 12 HP, which means basically anyone can finish it off.

- Biorhythm screws with you. Assuming Neph doubles, already at neutral bio Neph has a ~15% chance to miss one of her two attacks, and if one misses you basically get the same result as above; you still need two more attackers to finish the enemy off (unless you use lucia). At a mere 5 hit disadvantage (for example if Neph is at bad and the enemy is at neutral), her true hit is now 87.75, and now has ~23% chance for one of her two attacks to miss. At a 10 hit disadvantage (e.g. Neph is at bad and the enemy is at good), the hit drops to 82.30, and now has ~32% chance to miss an attack.

Of course she could just use a 1-range lance, but now she's eating a lot more counters, which sucks when you're 3-4HKO'd with no healer and every other unit on the team not named Heather is doing 9001 times better.

There are only 3 enemies in this level (~11% of the total) who have 31+ atk, and they all happen to have low hit. For example, a steel blade!general only manages 37 true hit on her, and the other 2 enemies like this are spread out in the level such that you cannot really face them all in 1 turn.

Except if they 2HKO you, you don't even need to face all of them in 1 turn. 1 of them does the job already.

Neph attacks the 31 att enemy on player phase. On enemy phase it attacks her and she dies.

Or the 31 att enemy attacks Neph on the enemy phase, and now Neph can't even attack it again on player phase because it'll kill her off (unless Neph does the finishing blow, but there's the possibility of missing).

Not to mention that getting hit by one of these enemies suddenly turns other enemies who were 4-5HKOing into 3HKOs. For example, after a 31 att enemy hits, two 23 att enemies will kill her off.

So no, they most certainly matter.

Most enemies will fall into the 3-4HKO range on Neph with about 50% hit. Those are very good numbers considering how low the enemy density is in this level. If she finishes off an enemy with a javelin that say, Mordy injured, or kills an enemy through javelin attacking + being vigored, she can take 2-3 enemy phase counters and still survive. There might not even be that many enemies in her range, and even if there are, it’s likely that she’ll quickly stop being attacked due to enemies blocking squares adjacent to her.

Now only if the javelin wasn't a horrible weapon and she ran the risk of missing.

Not to mention that she can't attack the 1-2 range enemies, and sometimes she won't even be able to attack a 1-range enemy from 2 spaces because of how all the units might be set up (for example all the 2-range tiles are plugged up so she has to attack at 1-range).

Speaking of durability, there are two soldiers with killer lances, which really sucks for Neph because they have ~25 crit on her and they do 30 damage on a crit, or the halbs/sages who all have a bit of crit too (the halbs will OHKO on a crit, the sages do ~21 damage).

Sure, Lethe wins durability, but that lead is mitigated by the fact that Neph doesn’t need to completely wimp out on this level to avoid death risks. She’ll certainly need to heal more often, but that cancels out with Lethe’s need to grass. In fact, Lethe’s gauge problem prevents us from throwing Lethe into a pile of enemies I couldn’t throw Neph into since then she risks reverting, at which point Neph is obviously winning by a lot.

If Lethe gets attacked by so many enemies in one turn that she ends up untransforming, Neph would have already died long before anyway.

Once the initial enemies on the middle platform area are cleared and 2 unarmed units are put onto those red squares, there’s little left to do than to end the turn until the chapter is over, healing those 2 units as necessary. You might object that we’re missing out on treasure or CEXP gain this way, but that’s a bit of a sticky subject since this debate is about part 2 only. If we do care about getting the 2-E treasure, we also care about conserving laguz stones for part 3, which only makes Lethe’s 2-2 worse.

Now if you read my entire post before countering, you know would that part 3 and beyond do indeed matter, even if they're not directly relevant to this debate.

And I don't see the issue with the gauge. One grass should be more than enough for 2-2, and there's another one that's very easy to pick up in 2-E, not to mention your first grass should still have a few uses leftover.

Hell, even if there are no grasses for Lethe to use, she can still be transformed about half the time (she gets +10 gauge a turn when untransformed, and she can speed it up by standing at a ledge and having a 2-range enemy attack upwards, which will likely just miss her and give her +15 gauge. Of course she might get hit once, but she'll still be more durable than Neph anyway), which means Lethe can actually do something significant half the chapter, while Neph generally does nothing the entire time. And obviously, doing something > doing nothing

It’s not like Lethe’s doing anything to help you acquire those treasures. Just as in 2-2, Lethe’s offence against armors is pretty unimpressive (3RKOing, possibly 4), which eliminates much possibility about her doing anything to the east.

It's not all armors. There are things like sages and snipers and halberdiers for her to attack. Of course she can't help if generals end up attacking her on enemy phase, but then again Neph wouldn't be doing any better in the same situation (worse, actually, since Neph can actually die).

Speaking of offense, Neph now has a ridiculously low chance of doubling anything, since instead of lolunpromoted enemies now we have tier 2 enemies who have 18-19 AS, which means Neph needs to be on average 20/4 to even start doubling some of them, which will take over half the chapter to even reach that level.

I can’t see her being effective at the western stairs either since she’s incapable of throwing hand weapons down a ledge, which makes it more difficult for her to get the nullify scroll than say, short spear!Neph. The entire stairs would have to be cleared, then Lethe would have to descend them, then proceed to take 3 turns just to kill the general who drops the scroll. Why take all the time when Neph could’ve just 2 turned him from above a long time ago?

The thing is Neph can't just kill the nullify general on her own, since she would be taking attacks from the enemy next to her on the stairs, PLUS potentially get attacked by a second enemy if it's using 2-range, and if she ends up killing whatever attacked her on the stairs another will come up and attack her, and at this point she'd be dead three times over. You'd need a wall in front of her so she doesn't get overwhelmed by the enemies climbing up the stairs, and Lethe can fill as a wall.

Where's the short spear coming from anyway, and why is Neph going to use it instead of any other lance user?

Neph is pretty awful at killing the general either way. It has 36 HP/22 def, which means javelin neph is doing double 2s to it. If she uses the short spear from wherever it came from she does double 5s. A person like Brom throwing a hand axe would do 8 damage. Elincia with the wind edge does the same damage as short spear Neph, only Elincia can canto off and then let someone else attack. Haar with hand axe does double 12s or double 13s. Calill with Elfire does 16 damage and 17 with Meteor.

It's certainly not better than Lethe's, since Lethe can just function as the wall while someone else stands on the spot above the nullify general to attack. Neph can't wall, and she's also the worst 2-range person to kill the general.

That basically just leaves the dracoshield you can steal off one of the generals close to Ludveck. If you watch this video, you’ll see that the best way to acquire this is by having Nealuchi drop Heather onto the lower tier area, have Leanne vigor her, pull off the steal and finish Ludveck with a Haar+Elincia combo in the same turn. Lethe has nothing to do with that, and the enemies around Ludveck are armor/general heavy, so she’d be ineffective against them even if she got there.

becuz there's nothing else in the chapter worth getting rite

Not the energy drop that one of the enemies is carrying. Not the silver greatlance another enemy is carrying. Not any of the olivi grasses hidden in the chapter. Not the arms scroll as a hidden item (which you can sell for moneyz).

none of these items are worth anything rite

BUT, the items in the villages in 2-1 ARE worth something, despite the fact that they generally sell for far less gold and/or aren't as useful by themselves anyway (lawl, does anyone actually attack with a specter card?).

Crappy 2-1 items like loljavelin which you could transfer from 2-P via Nealuchi/Leanne or specter card that sells for only 1500 gold are certainly more useful than things like energy drop or 4k gold arm scroll or anything else in the chapter.

no double standards here rite

Both Lethe and Nephenee ORKO thunder mages, and Neph can do it at range if necessary, so big deal.

Neph with javelin can't 2HKO mages.

If you’re talking about the mages on the eastern side of the map, then Lethe would have to go past where Haar’s chokepointing to kill the enemy, which means a bunch of enemies or going to attack Lethe instead of Haar, and that obviously accomplishes nothing.

Actually, unless Haar one rounds everything that attacks him, having some enemies go for Lethe instead of Haar means that you dealt out extra damage in that round. Enemies that otherwise would just be sitting behind the enemy attacking Haar would go for Lethe.

Moreover, if Haar had a hand axe equipped on enemy phase, none of the mages that attacked him would’ve survived. Finally, Haar has the means to 1HKO mages with higher end weapons. As you can see, Lethe isn’t really helping to alleviate Haar’s biggest problem in this stage.

That's pretty much impossible since you need 40 att to OHKO sages.

And Haar doesn't want to be attacked by too many sages, since they 2HKO him with existent crit rates, so he's only going to hand axe them if absolutely necessary.

I can’t believe you’re trying to twist this into a win for Lethe. We have the option to either use Neph like any other unit (ie contributing to a safe and efficient chapter completion), or we can baby her for later returns. Lethe doesn’t have such an option since babying her does little to improve her once she makes a comeback in 3-4.

Except Neph's former choice is lolcrap compared to her latter one because the former one makes her much more useful overall, even if she sacrifices her part 2 usefulness.

I'm just going to repost my example because you did a horrible job at refuting it (i.e. nothing at all).

Let me bring up an example, since it's the simplest way for me to explain it.

Let's say I wanted to do Aran vs Edward in 1-4, and who is better in that single chapter. I could easily just feed all the kills to Aran (or Edward for that matter) in 1-3 so I can "maximize" their performance in 1-4, and since 1-4 is the only chapter we're concerned about, it would be okay, right?

No, it's not, and you can obviously see the flaw. While we may only be concerned about one chapter, or one part, we must have the whole game in our mind. We obviously are not going to do stupid things like feed all the kills in one chapter to one unit.

We assume that the player will play the game assuming a tier-list setting (e.g. no dumb things like dumping massive amounts of favoritism to a certain unit), and then we "cut" out a portion of the game, the portion that we're looking at, and then examine it and see who is better. In my example, the player uses Aran/Edward like he would normally use them for the whole game, but then cuts out 1-4 and examine who is better in that chapter.

Taking Neph's option where she maximizes her part 2 usefulness at the expense of her performance for the rest of the game solely because it helps Neph more in this argument is no better than the example I just had, and you can obviously see why my example holds true. No one is going to say "well I'm gonna give the rest of the game the finger because I'm only looking at a certain part of the game and nothing else is going to be relevant".

Indeed. You don’t need to make 8 paragraph long explanations of concepts I (and probably everyone reading this) grasped within the first. Also, I don’t appreciate it when you try to “educate” me on how tiering in a fire emblem game works. Not necessarily everyone agrees with your philosophy, and many of the examples you give are not adaptive enough to be applied to numerous situations in this game, let alone any FE.

Huh? "educate" you on what again? I was explaining why Neph is building up negative utility in 2-2 and 2-E, giving examples of why playing Neph with only part 2 in mind makes no sense.

So it's time to recap.

Neph can get some positive utility in 2-1, but it's pretty limited. She's pretty much getting a few items in the houses and many of the items are pretty crappy (lolspecter card).

In 2-2 Lethe can actually help kill the tougher enemies, while God help us if javelin Neph tries to attack them because she either does terrible damage a hit or doesn't double, and if Neph tries to 1-range she's now taking enough counters over the chapter that getting 3-4HKO'd can't be ignored at all. And there are enough grass uses to keep all the laguz transformed almost all the time.

In 2-E Neph now goes from "doubles the wimpy enemies" to "I don't double crap" because pretty much every enemy except tier 1/sages have 18+ AS, and in order for Neph to even compete with Lethe's offense she'd have to take loluber weapons that could have gone to any other unit.

Nevermind that the way a player will generally use Neph is to baby her in part 2 so that she's ready for part 3 and beyond, which just builds up negative utility in part 2.

[Vykan12]

Okay then.

Roy for best unit in FE6.

Perhaps my statement could use some-rephrasing then. Both Neph and Brom can recruit Heather, but Neph can due it sooner thanks to higher movement. This is important since the later you reach Heather, the more likely she will have wandered off somewhere, which makes it more difficult to recruit her before she leaves the stage. Even though this is a minor point for Neph, it has to be considered on some level.

No one is saying Neph doing nothing is better than Neph doing something.

The problem is that Neph's "something" is largely limited to just recruiting Heather.

For the millionth time, why are you supposing that “active” Neph isn’t attacking enemies? Offensively, steel axe!Brom has 30 atk/16 AS to steel greatlance!Neph’s 29 atk/17 AS, so they’re basically producing equally in that regard. Durability-wise, she’s 3-4HKOed to Brom’s 5-12HKOed, but all that means is she needs to heal more often than he does. In essence, Brom wins overall offensive contribution by the amount of player phases she sacrificed healing compared to his own. That difference isn’t so huge that Neph’s offensive contributions get ignored altogether.

Why would Neph need to be healed if she's not the one getting attacked?

The reason the hand axe guy attacked Brom was because he was the only unit in range. In his new position, he’s also in Neph’s range, and since she has lower hp/def, he then chooses to attack her at range. With Brom running off to the east, Neph is stuck taking counters the remainder of the chapter so long as she’s unequipped.

Now if we enter the hypothetical that Neph doesn’t exist in this level, the situation becomes a little different. The hand axe guy will pester Brom every turn until he kills him. 2 damage might not seem like much, but after 6 turns, that’s 12 less hp Brom has, and other enemies are attacking him as well in that time period. In addition, the enemy might block Brom from a direct path to where he wants to go, so killing that enemy will increase Brom’s movement possibilities.

It would help if you actually read my entire post before you responded to things. I answered both of these question already.

The only reason why you could do that for 2-1 is that it's a very plain and straightforward chapter. We have 2 units, a third that can be recruited, and less than TEN rebels (plus four volunteers and two bandits, but that's still very few chapters). You can plan what your units are going to do very easily every turn, because you only have to plan for 2-3 of them, and you can clearly see what the enemies are going to do, and can generally guess what the outcome will be because you end up fighting so little that the RNG will barely play a factor, etc.

But the exception is not the rule. By asking for a turn by turn strategy for 2-2 and 2-E and specifically determine how many turns Lethe saves you, you are asking for the impossible.

These are the points you brought up earlier.

The problem here is that FE is not so simple where you can say "by doing this strategy I can beat the chapter in X turns, and by doing this strategy I can beat the chapter in Y turns".

and

Let's take 2-E for an example. It's a gigantic chapter with, like, 10 playable units (and later the CRKs join), and tons and tons of enemies.

The thing is, I was only talking about 2-1 when you made that counter, not all of part 2. I had no idea why you were making this generalization, so I pointed it out. Don’t accuse me of not reading your posts properly just because you’re not satisfied with the answer I provided.

Well sure, if you put the baseline at Neph's negative utility and not her actual neutral utility, you can artificially inflate Neph's usefulness.

Tell me then, if the benefits of using a unit clearly outweigh those of not using one in a given chapter, how can they have anything but positive utility? There’s only a few ways that can happen:

1) There are a limited number of unit slots and lots of competition for each one. Fielding a sub-par unit is hurting the team since I could’ve fielded a better unit in their place.

2) A unit’s durability is so bad when deployed that I have to wall them in with my characters, which is hurting the flexibility of other team members.

3) A unit’s contribution to a chapter is so infinitesimally small that is may as well be considered neutral.

None of these apply to Neph. She’s forced deployed, which eliminates (1). Seeing as though there are only 13 enemies in the level (15 with reinforcements), and that 5 of them don’t move, the fact that Neph is 3-4HKOed is perfectly manageable. That contradicts (2). As for (3), that is clearly not the case since Neph is both Brom’s offensive equal and is also more competent at non-combat utility (houses+heather) due to her move advantage.

If Neph somehow qualifies as having neutral utility in 2-1, then your definition of negative/neutral/positive utility seems rather arbitrary, and thus I do not see its merits when comparing 2 units.

What the fuck? Your response didn't even answer my statement.

I was talking about it is impossible to give a definite turn count for 2-2 and 2-E. Nowhere in the portion that you quoted did I ever talk about Lethe's actual performance in those chapters.

Re-read what I said earlier in my second post.

At any rate, the purpose of that turn-by-turn strategy was not to show that Neph is helping to beat the chapter exactly 8 turns faster while also acquiring x more items. It was simply a way of putting into perspective how Neph is being significantly helpful in 2-1.

What I said concerning Lethe’s turn-wise contributions in 2-2 and 2-E was an extension of this concept. I guess that response doesn’t satisfy you so I might as well respond to your full argument concerning that issue.

Even if it was humanly possible to give a concrete value of how much faster Lethe makes you beat the chapter, she doesn't need to help you beat it in 0 turns. If, say, Lethe helps you beat the chapter 2 turns faster than if you didn't use her, you would add that to how much faster she could make 2-E go by.

I did exactly that in saying “Lethe saves at most 2 turns in 2-2”.

And even in this case, a unit that doesn't actually make your turn count any lower but gives you a greater chance of beating the chapter in X turns has positive utility as well.

That means the same thing as far as Nephenee is concerned in 2-1. If she’s saving a considerable amount of turns, then we could alternatively look at it as follows: the probability of beating the chapter in X turns or less is significantly higher when Nephenee is used than without. Now by Lethe saving 1-2 turns in 2-2, the increase of probability of beating the chapter in x turns or less she incurs is not going to be that significant.

You can re-interpret a significant lead vs a minor one in infinitely many ways, but that doesn’t change the magnitude of either lead.

For example, suppose that if you don't use Lethe you can beat the chapter in 7 turns, but with only a 50% chance of success. Now suppose that if you use Lethe you still beat the chapter in 7 turns, but now you have a 90% chance of success. You can clearly see that even if Lethe didn't lower your turn count, she would give you a higher chance of beating the chapter within taht turn count, which is obviously a good thing.

Since you were using arbitrary values in your example, I’ll use some in mine.

Probability of beating:

2-1 within 16 turns w/o Neph: 30%

2-1 within 16 turns with Neph: 75%

2-2 within 5 turns w/o Lethe: 18%

2-2 within 5 turns with Lethe: 35%

Once again, I’m simply illustrating that a significant lead > a minor one.

Of course there's the whole difficulty of determining that % chance of beating the chapter in X turns, which is why I generally don't bring up concrete values of beating chapters in X turns or % chance of beating the chapter. I just usually go "unit A is helping me here" or "unit B is helping me more than unit C because unit B has these factors that make him a superior unit in the chapter", etc., since that's really the only thing you CAN do.

If you only want to look at direct combat stats in a comparison, then that’s your prerogative. However, I decided to look at Neph vs Lethe from various angles, one of them being a rough look at how they affect the total turn count in their respective chapters. If you think my method was completely inaccurate or flawed, that’s fine, but you can’t just ignore it since you think it’s more convenient to only look at Neph vs Lethe statistically.

Of course it is difficult to look at how exactly a unit is helping efficiency beyond mere combat stats.

It’s certainly difficult, but not impossible. The approximate turn data I laid out gives a method of weighing some subjective differences against each other, namely how helpful Neph and Lethe are beyond how they compare to other units as well as enemies.

Again, this just goes back to the problem of assigning concrete values of beating chapters in X amount of turns like what you tried to do for 2-1.

I’m not assigning Neph a concete value in 2-1 for beating the chapter in x amount of turns. If that were the case, I’d be giving her some semi-arbitrary score for that chapter (say 8.5), doing the same for Lethe’s chapters (say 5.5 and 0.5) and claiming 8.5 > 6. And again, it’s not a specific turn count I’m talking about, more like an approximate range [a,b] which should cover most of the margin of error (aka freak RNG occurrences, among other things).

Bottom line, you seem to be assuming that the argument I made in my opening post about 2-1 laid out a specific strategy that I’d expect any player with the same goals as me to follow religiously. I’m saying that my turn-based argument for Neph > Lethe does in fact take into account strategic and RNG variance.

Assuming we’re still not on the same page about this, I’ll try and argue this point from a fresh angle.

Let’s look at the units deployed in the relevant part 2 chapters:

2-1: Nephenee, Brom, later Heather

2-2: Nephenee, Brom, Heather, Lucia, Mordecai, Nealuchi, Lethe, Leanne

2-E: Nephenee, Brom, Heather, Mordecai, Nealuchi, Lethe, Leanne, Elincia, Haar, Calill

In 2-1, Neph is the second best unit, which means a lot considering how well she matches up to Brom.

In 2-2, Lethe is only the 5th best unit, possibly 6th (Brom vs Lethe is arguable). In 2-E, Lethe falls to 6th/7th best.

Neph has a period where she is doing well while we have very few units in play. This gives her significant utility value. Lethe, however, is clearly below average compared to the rest of the team, and with so many good units to choose from, she becomes largely replacable. Being good when few units are around > being bad when many are. Sure, Lethe can be argued as slightly better in 2-2, but the fact that they’re so close there allows for Neph’s theoretical 2-1 lead to easily outweigh that.

Let’s take this even further. In 2-1, Neph is contributing roughly 50% of the level’s total player phase production before Heather arrives, and is also doubling the possible radius of enemy phase exposure. Lethe’s contribution in 2-2 and 2-E is but a small fraction of that.

The only way Mordy and Nealuchi would have a problem is if they both needed 4 grass uses in the chapter.

We’re sharing grass between all 3 laguz, which averages out to 2.66 grass uses per laguz, not 4. Once we factor that we might not get olivi grass in 2-E, that number falls to 1.33, which is minuscule (eg/ 2 uses for Lethe, 1 for Nealuchi, 1 for Mordecai).

Then there’s the issues of saving laguz stones for part 3. Considering you continually insist on accounting for Neph’s performance over the entire game, the same standards should hold for these items.

So now Lethe is guaranteed 2 turns to begin with where she’s untransformed. 3 turns and 4 attacks later, Lethe’s meter is down to 3, so she needs to either take her first grass or revert, the latter costing another 2 turns. Give her another turn and 2 attacks, and her meter falls back down to 5, so the same scenario ensues.

Overall, we’re talking about a lot of missed attack opportunities. At best, she loses 6 phases over the course of the chapter, and just 1 reversion causes that number to jump to at least 8. This isn’t even accounting for the inconvenience incurred by the trading process of olivi grass, which either forces all 3 laguz characters to stay close or to waste their movement pursuing each other for trades.

Plus you can untransform your laguz if they don't have anything to do. This can work for Lethe because she gets +10 gauge a turn untransformed, so if you untransform her early she can quickly transform back anyway.

Let’s say Lethe reverts while having 9 meter instead of smoking up to 24. Now she’s lost 2 full turns instead of 1 player phase. Sure, you said Lethe could do this while she has nothing to do, but Neph might within that timeframe. Furthermore, an enemy could pop out from the fog and attack her unexpectedly, at which point she’s 2 rounded.

Lethe is already pretty durable herself. 51 HP/18 def/20 res/66 avoid (before Lucia's stars) means that Lethe is probably never dying, or even needing to heal once, unless Lethe ends up taking on like half the map by herself.

The point I was making was to justify Mordy/Nealuchi beating Lethe from a statistical standpoint, which in turn plays into my argument about Lethe hurting the ability of 2 better units to grass freely.

Lethe's durability lead over Neph is most certainly notable, particularly since Neph dies in half the hits and has lower avoid, and the only way she can even try to overcome it is attack at 2-range using a crappy weapon.

I never argued otherwise, hence why I keep insisting Lethe probably has a small overall edge in this chapter. However, I’ve already stated that Neph’s survival issues are minimal based on low density and having decent avo, so that lead is already mitigated somewhat.

Though, the real reason Lethe’s durability lead has little practical effect in this level is because she never gets to fully apply it. Essentially, a durability advantage allows a unit to safely attack in a situation where another unit will have to stay back if there is a small death risk involved. Problem is, Lethe often isn’t able to safely attack large groups of enemies anyway because of her gauge problems. For example, if she has 13 gauge left, she cannot attack more than 1 enemy that turn, otherwise she’ll revert the following one.

So that's 9 enemies with 2 range or 1-2 range, with only 8 of them being relevant since the boss doesn't move, out of 25 enemies. Note that one of those ranged enemies is a longbow archer, which means javelin Neph probably isn't countering either.

8/25 is still 32%, or roughly 1/3rd of all enemies. I don’t see how you can disregard the boss either since there’s only a single 1 range space and two 2 ranged ones you can attack him from. Neph being able to attack from any 3 spaces > Lethe only being able to attack from 1.

If both units face 3 enemies, one of which has 17 AS while the other has 2 range, then we’ll have the following:

Enemy 1: Both 2RKO

Enemy 2: Lethe 2RKOes, Neph 4RKOes

Enemy 3: Lethe doesn’t damage, Neph 2RKOes

We can disregard enemy 1, and cancel Lethe’s enemy 2 with Neph’s enemy 3. This means Neph is actually winning damage output here, albeit only by ¼ of a round.

Not to mention that Lethe only cares if it ends up attacking her. If it, for example, attacks another laguz, or does something like attack Brom, Lethe doesn't lose any gauge.

Lethe is the most likely recipient of ranged attacking on enemy phase because of 2 factors: First, enemies would rather attack her over Mordy because she has far less concrete durability. Second, enemies prioritize attacking laguz at range to lower their meter, so they’re obviously not attacking Brom before Lethe. This just leaves Nealuchi, but he also wins concrete durability and has a huge avo lead, so I can only see archers going after him for the effective MT boost.

Of course, if any of these units are in the radius of a ranged attacker, javelin!Neph is the least of their priorities. So we can either have Neph better on offence against ranged attacks (damage > no damage) or more durable (not getting attacked > being prioritized), or a bit of both.

Oddly enough, this is exactly the same number of enemies that have 17+ AS and Neph can't double them. The difference of course is that Lethe is actually effective against the 1-2 and 2-range enemies on player phase while Neph with her not doubling and lame attack is just bad on both phases against the 17+ AS enemies.

Neph doesn’t need to be using the javelin all the time. For instance, she could use a steel greatlance on a player phase attack, get vigored, then switch to the jav. Alternatively, she could attack the greatlance while someone trades the jav to the top of her inventory, something not too different from what Lethe is doing with grass on a consistent basis.

With that in mind, Neph 3 rounds anything non-armor with a steel greatlance, which is only 1 round less than Lethe before E. phase javelin considerations. A couple of consecutive 17 AS enemies would need to attack her for this to make a difference, but then it’s just as likely for a set of ranged attackers to attack Lethe on the same turn. After 3 uncountered attacks, a full gauge Lethe is down to 13 come player phase, which means either grassing time (2 ineffective turns) or reverting soon (3+).

Neph gained a level in 2-1 when she was getting like 18 exp a kill and like 4 for hitting something, in a chapter that only had like 15 enemies and you didn't even need to kill all of them, and of those 15 enemies, 4 of them were so low level that you'd get less than 10 for killing them instead?

If we’re supposed to be babying Neph, we might as well give her the boss kill in this level. It’s pretty likely too since a wrath counter heavily speeds up this fight. 4 generic enemy kills nets her 72 exp, so that’ll easily get her leveled up.

You could still protest that we just robbed Brom of a level-up, but we don’t care about levelling Brom in the long run since he’s lower on most tier lists. Even if you neglect that, his speed growth is only 30% and a level isn’t going to change his concrete durability much, so you get greater returns by Neph killing the boss any way you slice it.

And even after Neph levels up she only has about a 2/3 chance of doubling the higher end enemies when Lethe just doubles everything right off the bat?

I already said that, so repeating it isn’t going to make the proverbial wound any bigger.

The only problem being that Lethe does so much damage to enemies in general that jokes like Heather can finish them off (in fact, sometimes on the first attack, which means Heather won't take a counter), while javelin Neph requires your best units to finish the job especially if Neph ends up missing attack because the javelin has an amazing 65 hit.

This is still within the subset of cases where Neph is fighting a 17 AS enemy with a javelin. Against anything else (non-armors excluded as usual), both 2 round, though Neph occasionally leaves a couple enemies with 1-2 hp.

The javelin is crap for attacking. First of all, Neph has 125 hit with it (I included Lucia's 2 stars) against enemies who hover around 40-50 avoid. So like 80 displayed hit. Which is 92.2 true.

The enemies tend to have around low 40 avo values, and the highest listed enemy has 48 according to the site’s HM data. So in most cases, Neph actually has about 95.65 true hit.

She only has 22 att with it, so if she ends up attacking something she can't double (i.e. every promoted enemy in the chapter plus others) or attacks something with a lot of def (i.e. all the armors), she does laughable damage. For example, if she attacks a halb, who has ~34 HP/15 def, she leaves it at 27 HP, and so everyone except Lucia is giving her the finger because they still need another unit to kill it off. Or if she attacks the weakest armor, who has 35 HP/17 def, she leaves it at 23 HP, and unfortunately the only person who can kill this off alone is Lucia. Meanwhile, Lethe leaves the halb at 12 HP, which means basically anyone can finish it off.

These would be cases where Nephenee is doing so little damage she might as well be doing none at all, but then this is still competing against all the non-attacking Lethe does with her gauge issues, being locked to 1 range and constantly needing to trade with 2 other laguz.

Biorhythm screws with you. Assuming Neph doubles, already at neutral bio Neph has a ~15% chance to miss one of her two attacks, and if one misses you basically get the same result as above; you still need two more attackers to finish the enemy off (unless you use lucia). At a mere 5 hit disadvantage (for example if Neph is at bad and the enemy is at neutral), her true hit is now 87.75, and now has ~23% chance for one of her two attacks to miss. At a 10 hit disadvantage (e.g. Neph is at bad and the enemy is at good), the hit drops to 82.30, and now has ~32% chance to miss an attack.

Assuming 85 display hit is a more accurate average:

Neph at neutral bio- 8.6% chance of missing

Neph at low bio- 15%

Neph at bottom bio- 23%

This is only looking at 2/3rds of Neph’s possible bio ranges. At high/top, her hit rates jump to 98.1/99.6 %, respectively.

Of course she could just use a 1-range lance, but now she's eating a lot more counters, which sucks when you're 3-4HKO'd with no healer and every other unit on the team not named Heather is doing 9001 times better.

Technically, Leanne acts as an indirect healer. Whoever she vigors can take a vulnerary/concoction as needed.

Except if they 2HKO you, you don't even need to face all of them in 1 turn. 1 of them does the job already.

As I said earlier, the 31 atk enemies also boast lower hit rates than average (see my 37 hit steel blade general example) and are spread out in such a way that you’re very unlikely to face two 31 atk enemies in a single turn, no less both of them on enemy phase.

Speaking of durability, there are two soldiers with killer lances, which really sucks for Neph because they have ~25 crit on her and they do 30 damage on a crit, or the halbs/sages who all have a bit of crit too (the halbs will OHKO on a crit, the sages do ~21 damage).

The thing is, it’s not just Neph that has to be timid around these enemies, it’s everyone. Lethe loses over 1/3rd of her hp if critted, and she can’t really afford to be both grassing and healing (every time she grasses instead of heals, at least 5 meter is lost).

If Lethe gets attacked by so many enemies in one turn that she ends up untransforming, Neph would have already died long before anyway.

That doesn’t counter this point:

In fact, Lethe’s gauge problem prevents us from throwing Lethe into a pile of enemies I couldn’t throw Neph into since then she risks reverting, at which point Neph is obviously winning by a lot.

As timidly as we must use Neph to stay alive, much of the same applies to Lethe to keep her from reverting. Cat transform issues really are that bad.

Lethe cannot face 2 or more enemies without reverting if her meter is <=13. I’ll assume she’ll want to stay slightly above 15 just to be safe. After 1 turn and 2 attacks, Lethe’s meter is down to 17, so already we need to be careful with her. Limiting her to 1 attack in the next turn, she’s now down to 8. Essentially, 3 attacks in 2 turns (if that) is all it takes for Lethe to become very prudent about how many enemies she’ll face afterwards. What’s worse is whenever Lethe takes olivi, she’ll have at most 25 meter left instead of 30. 1 attack in 1 turn already drops that to 16, which is pretty much in the danger zone.

So either Lethe is grassing every 2nd-3rd turn (more likely every 2nd) at the obvious expense of Mordy and Nealuchi, or she’s being as scared as Nephenee of the frontlines.

Hell, even if there are no grasses for Lethe to use, she can still be transformed about half the time

Half the time is clearly enough for Neph to win overall performance in this level. Whereas Neph has to limit her enemy phase exposure to stay alive, untransformed Lethe has to outright avoid it altogether, otherwise she’s getting 3RKOed at like 65-70 true while 8HKOing soldiers in return. When she is transformed, however, she’s only pulling a significant win against 1/3 of the level’s enemies, if that (depends on if Neph got +spd or not on her level-up), or if Neph misses with a javelin.

(she gets +10 gauge a turn when untransformed, and she can speed it up by standing at a ledge and having a 2-range enemy attack upwards, which will likely just miss her and give her +15 gauge. Of course she might get hit once, but she'll still be more durable than Neph anyway)

Note however, that Neph can counter ranged enemies from below her with very little risk of taking damage, whereas Lethe can’t even attack these enemies.

It's not all armors. There are things like sages and snipers and halberdiers for her to attack. Of course she can't help if generals end up attacking her on enemy phase, but then again Neph wouldn't be doing any better in the same situation (worse, actually, since Neph can actually die).

What’s this got to do with Lethe helping the team acquire treasure?

The thing is Neph can't just kill the nullify general on her own, since she would be taking attacks from the enemy next to her on the stairs, PLUS potentially get attacked by a second enemy if it's using 2-range, and if she ends up killing whatever attacked her on the stairs another will come up and attack her, and at this point she'd be dead three times over. You'd need a wall in front of her so she doesn't get overwhelmed by the enemies climbing up the stairs, and Lethe can fill as a wall.

Problem is, Lethe makes for a terrible chokepoint unit. Putting her to the left of Neph has her facing at least 1 attack per turn, though very likely 2 if there’s a ranged enemy behind the initial one. Then, every second turn, the enemy she 2RKOes dies, so she’s facing 3 attacks. This can even increase to 4 if the enemy below her has range. Since you like assuming worst-case possibilities (see: biorhythm), Lethe could actually revert in 2 turns, so she needs to spam grass every single turn to avoid that. Moreover, she cannot move unless there’s someone else to fill in the chokepoint, so if she runs out, our favorite furry is in major trouble. Oh, and she obviously cannot hold the chokepoint if she reverts since she’s achieving a death risk every 3 enemies she faces, and even a concoction might not bring her back to full hp if she survives that onslaught.

This is all assuming she can even grass every 1-2 turns, something which demands she takes a full set of olivi grass to herself. The 2-2 grass is about finished, so she’s actually relying on hidden treasure pick-ups to be of any use here. Looking at this, these are all locations that are awkward for Heather to reach, and finding a hidden item without a thief is only skill%, which is extremely unreliable. I seriously question any hidden treasure in 2-E being found, no less all of it.

Where's the short spear coming from anyway, and why is Neph going to use it instead of any other lance user?

Geoffrey can send his to the convoy for 2-E units to use. It’s not really a sacrifice for him since he can ORKO most enemies there with a javelin, and he takes multiple rounds for the promoted stuff (basically nobody in the CRK double those).

Neph is pretty awful at killing the general either way.

*stuff about other people doing better damage at 1-2 range*

It's certainly not better than Lethe's, since Lethe can just function as the wall while someone else stands on the spot above the nullify general to attack. Neph can't wall, and she's also the worst 2-range person to kill the general.

Neph is being more useful than Lethe in killing the nullify general, and that’s the only treasure acquired on the western side of the map. How well Lethe can chokepoint there is irrelevant since an unarmed Neph could do a better job, and you haven’t yet given any reason why we should kill these enemies instead of just keeping them at bay.

Not the energy drop that one of the enemies is carrying.

You get that on your way east, the area which is armor heavy, meaning one of Haar, Brom or Mordecai have it covered. Again, using Lethe there would be ineffective since she only 3RKOes armors, and possibly does even worse against generals.

Not the silver greatlance another enemy is carrying.

If you really suck at clearing the eastern side, the CRKs can get this item while proceeding south once they show up.

Actually, unless Haar one rounds everything that attacks him, having some enemies go for Lethe instead of Haar means that you dealt out extra damage in that round. Enemies that otherwise would just be sitting behind the enemy attacking Haar would go for Lethe.

I should probably dispel this myth that Lethe is even attacking these eastern swarms of enemies.

As you can see, there’s already 9 enemies near the right chokepoint, and this is only turn 4. It’s true that the person in the video used NPCs to fight those enemies, but nobody’s ORKOing reliably except Elincia, so it makes little difference to the enemy density you’d expect there. Anyway, you can obviously see that Lethe would be facing an overwhelming amount of counters if even 2 enemies can attack her at 1 range (this frees up ranged attackers in several squares). By now you should get that Lethe’s gauge plummets faster than a roadrunner on steroids if she’s exposed to enough enemies, and so long enemy phases are going to cripple her here.

That's pretty much impossible since you need 40 att to OHKO sages.

And Haar doesn't want to be attacked by too many sages, since they 2HKO him with existent crit rates, so he's only going to hand axe them if absolutely necessary.

My bad. In any case, you’ll be wanting a unit with canto to take out any sage threats bothering Haar since then they don’t have to simultaneously face 89080540 enemies Haar would’ve done better against.

Except Neph's former choice is lolcrap compared to her latter one because the former one makes her much more useful overall, even if she sacrifices her part 2 usefulness.

So let me get this straight. We’re considering part 2 use only, but we’re using Neph as though we intend to use her seriously the entire game. What allows you to make this ridiculous assumption? There’s so much wrong with it I don’t know where to begin.

You’re assuming Neph is being babied while Lethe is not because Neph will get returns in the future, whereas Lethe’s returns in the future are bound to suck. Essentially, you are punishing Nephenee for how good she is outside the part we are examining, which is counter-intuitive in every imaginable sense.

We could easily twist that scenario against Lethe. Let’s say we intend to use Lethe seriously from part 3 onwards without her sucking horribly. We’d then have to train her untransformed in 2-2, a process that would easily take hundreds of turns. Clearly Neph requiring less babying to have decent returns in the future is an advantage for her.

We assume that the player will play the game assuming a tier-list setting (e.g. no dumb things like dumping massive amounts of favoritism to a certain unit), and then we "cut" out a portion of the game, the portion that we're looking at, and then examine it and see who is better.

That’s fine, but this means we’re not babying either unit that’s being compared, which is what I’ve been assuming all along. Name one time where I advocated feeding Neph kills while not doing the same for Lethe.

Taking Neph's option where she maximizes her part 2 usefulness at the expense of her performance for the rest of the game solely because it helps Neph more in this argument is no better than the example I just had, and you can obviously see why my example holds true.

This is directly contradicting the statement you just made earlier:

We assume that the player will play the game assuming a tier-list setting (e.g. no dumb things like dumping massive amounts of favoritism to a certain unit), and then we "cut" out a portion of the game, the portion that we're looking at, and then examine it and see who is better.

How can we assume no favoritism, then sandbag Neph for requiring favoritism to perform well beyond part 2?

Let’s suppose for a second Neph does in fact suffer considerably in part 3 if we don’t favor her in part 2. Going by your assumptions, this should make her drop in a hypothetical tier list, nothing more. Come to think of it, if we are so intent on giving favoritism to Nephenee, why must it be done in part 2? We could’ve fed her as many kills as we wanted to in parts 3-4 to have her catch up to her true potential.

Neph can get some positive utility in 2-1, but it's pretty limited. She's pretty much getting a few items in the houses and many of the items are pretty crappy (lolspecter card).

Due to the lack of PCs, and how well Neph and Brom are statistically matched, she’s actually being extremely useful here. This includes her combat contributions, something you incessantly ignore about her 2-1.

In 2-2 Lethe can actually help kill the tougher enemies, while God help us if javelin Neph tries to attack them because she either does terrible damage a hit or doesn't double, and if Neph tries to 1-range she's now taking enough counters over the chapter that getting 3-4HKO'd can't be ignored at all. And there are enough grass uses to keep all the laguz transformed almost all the time.

Lethe and steel lance!Neph are offensively tied so long as Neph doubles, which is pretty likely (she has a 1/3 chance of not doubling 1/3 enemies, so she’s doubling ~89% of the time). About javelins, she’s only going to want to use those if it’s going to force a ranged enemy phase counter against her, or sometimes to distract the enemies away from her (they’ll go for the weakest 1 range unit). With trades, the amount of time she’s using a javelin can be particularly minimized. This is all before considering durability (admittedly in Lethe’s favor) and Lethe’s gauge issues, which I’ve shown time and time again to be of a great hindrance to her.

In 2-E Neph now goes from "doubles the wimpy enemies" to "I don't double crap" because pretty much every enemy except tier 1/sages have 18+ AS, and in order for Neph to even compete with Lethe's offense she'd have to take loluber weapons that could have gone to any other unit.

Nowhere in your post did you address the fact that neither unit is shaving turns, facilitating the chapter in any meaningful way or getting treasure, so Lethe winning this chapter means virtually nothing. Moreover, you didn’t even consider the killer/brave lance Neph has access to here (your counter was “where is she getting this short spear?”), the latter actually making them tie offensive output. Most importantly, though, is that Lethe’s gauge is sporadically changing, though most of the time it’s on a downward torrent with no chance of recovery. Lack of available grass (2-2 is depleted, 2-E ones are treasure) and huge enemy density are the main factors responsible for this.

Nevermind that the way a player will generally use Neph is to baby her in part 2 so that she's ready for part 3 and beyond, which just builds up negative utility in part 2.

Some of my main counter-arguments towards this:

-We could look to make Lethe worth using in part 3, but that requires an absurd amount of 2-2 untransformed abuse. Pampering Neph a few levels takes significantly less turns, resources and real-time.

-Neph can be favored outside of part 2. Only 1 chapter of favoritism is required to compensate for the levels she apparently missed in part 2.

-Punishing a unit for having larger potential outside the area of the game we’re arguing just doesn’t make any intuitive sense at all.

-If Neph being good in the long run hinges on her being favored in part 2, then perhaps you are overrating her as a unit. Therefore, there’s no reason to baby her in part 2 in the first place.

Edited June 18, 2009 by Vykan12

[Progenitus]

So let me get this straight. We’re considering part 2 use only, but we’re using Neph as though we intend to use her seriously the entire game. What allows you to make this ridiculous assumption? There’s so much wrong with it I don’t know where to begin.

You’re assuming Neph is being babied while Lethe is not because Neph will get returns in the future, whereas Lethe’s returns in the future are bound to suck. Essentially, you are punishing Nephenee for how good she is outside the part we are examining, which is counter-intuitive in every imaginable sense.

Again, I'm assuming that the tier player is playing with the whole game in mind, which means he's going to use a given unit in a way that will maximize their usefulness. I don't want to repeat myself again.

However, let's assume that you ARE right. We are assuming that we are trying to maximize their part 2 usefulness, we give the finger to the rest of the game, and that Neph is not going to be babied in part 2.

The problem now is that Neph's 2-1 performance is almost entirely pointless.

See, a lot of your usefulness you pushed for her in that chapter is to get the items in the villages. However, the items are mostly lolcrap that aren't helping us beat part 2 any faster. A javelin that's cheap and you could just get one in 2-2 via Nealuchi/Leanne trading with Marcia in 2-P, lolspectercard, an ashera icon which we all know how useful +2 lck is (i.e. worthless), a steel axe in a house that Brom could just visit on his own, and a concoction that is largely irrelevant for healing since vulneraries are more than sufficient. And you get enough gold on your own to last the entire part, so selling the items doesn't help much. So Neph getting items doesn't matter anymore.

So all she really does is kill off a few enemies, which is actually ALSO pointless since the point of Neph killing those enemies in the first place was to reach the villages with the items which are now worthless. It was mostly Brom who was killing enemies so he could actually get to the boss. So Neph killing stuff hardly matters anymore.

IN ADDITION, recruiting Heather doesn't even matter anymore, since we all know Heather sucks at fighting, and the items Heather gets us are pretty pointless because they aren't very helpful in the short term. Even though she can get us some nice items, they aren't around long enough to really matter (such as that energy drop you get in 2-E). So recruiting Heather doesn't matter anymore.

So now Neph's positive utility in 2-1 is basically gone. nothing, nada, zilch

On the other hand, with the rest of the game not mattering, we can now have our laguz go wild with the two laguz stones we have. With transformation issues no longer a problem, Lethe can just go wild in 2-2, and she's obviously going to save us a few turns, which is better than "Neph not doing anything important in 2-1".

And then 2-E doesn't matter. Like you said, if we limit our scope to only part 2, anything a unit does aside from doing some of the key things (blocking chokepoints and killing Ludveck) is only for self-improvement and has no real worth in helping us beat the chapter. Getting the items won't really matter anymore since part 2 is going to end after this chapter. This also means that our laguz don't have to be transformed to deal with this chapter (in fact performance hardly matters for them, at least to the same degree as Neph), which means 8 grasses/5 stones for 2-2, which is more than enough to keep all 3 laguz transformed all the time.

So to break it down, we have two possible scenarios, one from me and one from you...

1) My statement where the entire game matters and the player will use units in such a way that will maximize their usefulness over the entire game. And we are simply "cutting out" part 2. In this case, chances are Neph is going to be babied in part 2 because it will help maximize her usefulness over the entire game (since this makes her useful in part 4, which is a lot longer than part 2. It'll also make her somewhat average in part 3). This unfortunately builds up negative utility for Neph. On the other hand, the strategy that maximizes Lethe's usefulness over the entire game is to just use her in part 2 and drop her for the rest of the game, which means we aren't bothering to baby Lethe in part 2. This means Lethe will have some sort of positive utility. And thus Lethe is the winner.

2) Your statement where the player will only play with part 2 in mind, and that the player will play in such a way that will maximize their part 2 usefulness ONLY. In this case, Neph is pretty useless, since now all the stuff she did in 2-1 don't matter when we limit our scope to just part 2. On the other hand, we now don't have to worry about conserving the laguz stones for the rest of the game, which means Lethe will have absolutely no transformation issues in 2-2. And then 2-E doesn't matter when we limit our scope to just part 2, and you basically said that earlier as well, where most things a unit does in 2-E is for self improvement which has no worth in beating part 2. Thus Lethe is the winner.

In either case Lethe comes out on top.

We could easily twist that scenario against Lethe. Let’s say we intend to use Lethe seriously from part 3 onwards without her sucking horribly. We’d then have to train her untransformed in 2-2, a process that would easily take hundreds of turns. Clearly Neph requiring less babying to have decent returns in the future is an advantage for her.

The problem is that this method doesn't maximize Lethe's usefulness throughout the entire game.

As I said earlier, feeding Lethe kills in part 2 is like feeding Sothe kills in part 4. Sothe is going to suck in part 4 no matter what you do. Similarly, Lethe is going to suck outside of part 2 no matter what you do. Therefore, by taking the far inferior strategy, you are intentionally decreasing the usefulness of a given unit.

I may as well throw a healer into a pack of enemies and complain that my healer died on me, except that's not how we maximize a healer's usefulness.

This is directly contradicting the statement you just made earlier:

We assume that the player will play the game assuming a tier-list setting (e.g. no dumb things like dumping massive amounts of favoritism to a certain unit), and then we "cut" out a portion of the game, the portion that we're looking at, and then examine it and see who is better.

How can we assume no favoritism, then sandbag Neph for requiring favoritism to perform well beyond part 2?

My keyword is "massive". In any given playthrough, of course we are going to assume SOME sort of minor favoritism. For example, if we were not allowing any favoritism at all, we wouldn't even be able to give basic weapons to our units, since the gold spent on that weapon can be spent on other units. We wouldn't even give kills to anyone since that kill could have gone to someone else for the exp.

Or for a more "drastic" example, we wouldn't give out our adept in part 3 to anyone because it falls under favoritism.

Favoritism is everyone, it's just in varying amounts. The amount I'm talking about is stuff like "paragon/robe/BEXP/moar random stat boosters onto one guy".

Let’s suppose for a second Neph does in fact suffer considerably in part 3 if we don’t favor her in part 2. Going by your assumptions, this should make her drop in a hypothetical tier list, nothing more.

...I'm not sure what this statement is supposed to mean. Our tier list that ranks units' performances over the entire game would already include Neph's part 2 (or rather the time where she's underleveled and mediocre at fighting) into it.

Come to think of it, if we are so intent on giving favoritism to Nephenee, why must it be done in part 2? We could’ve fed her as many kills as we wanted to in parts 3-4 to have her catch up to her true potential.

The earlier the babying is done, the shorter the time period where Neph (or any unit in general) is lame at fighting, not to mention the later you decide to actually baby a unit the harder it is to do so, because the gap between your babied unit and the enemies is larger.

Let's say that we have Rolf in 3-P. Now we all know he sucks at fighting. Now are you going to try and feed him kills NOW, in 3-P (or some other early part 3 chapter, or even just a bit of favoritism over several early part 3 chapters), or wait until 3-7 to feed him kills? Obviously if we're going to bother to use him we want to feed him kills ASAP so that he's not sucking at fighting between 3-1 to 3-7, not to mention that Rolf will have a harder time killing enemies in 3-7 if he wasn't babied earlier, than if we just fed him kills in early part 3.

Perhaps my statement could use some-rephrasing then. Both Neph and Brom can recruit Heather, but Neph can due it sooner thanks to higher movement. This is important since the later you reach Heather, the more likely she will have wandered off somewhere, which makes it more difficult to recruit her before she leaves the stage. Even though this is a minor point for Neph, it has to be considered on some level.

That's a very funny way to "rephrase" your original statement.

If using Neph is the difference between getting Heather or not, then logically every action of Heather’s can be indirectly attributed to Neph.

It doesn't look good on your part when you say something, and then go "THIS IS WHAT I ACTUALLY MEANT" and then repost something that's almost completely different.

And I already gave Neph the credit for recruiting Heather, since Brom's far too busy with the whole "I'm the only guy who can do any significant fighting in the chapter".

For the millionth time, why are you supposing that “active” Neph isn’t attacking enemies? Offensively, steel axe!Brom has 30 atk/16 AS to steel greatlance!Neph’s 29 atk/17 AS, so they’re basically producing equally in that regard. Durability-wise, she’s 3-4HKOed to Brom’s 5-12HKOed, but all that means is she needs to heal more often than he does. In essence, Brom wins overall offensive contribution by the amount of player phases she sacrificed healing compared to his own. That difference isn’t so huge that Neph’s offensive contributions get ignored altogether.

Because most of the enemies Neph hits are in the way to the villages, while the enemies Brom hits/kills are actually helping toward the direct completion of the chapter (the path to the boss, plus the actual boss). In other words Neph is just killing enemies to reach the houses, which has no direct worth to beating the chapter.

The reason the hand axe guy attacked Brom was because he was the only unit in range. In his new position, he’s also in Neph’s range, and since she has lower hp/def, he then chooses to attack her at range. With Brom running off to the east, Neph is stuck taking counters the remainder of the chapter so long as she’s unequipped.

If the hand axe fighter wasn't even moving until a certain turn, then it's your own fault for not even moving Neph into a different corner.

Now if we enter the hypothetical that Neph doesn’t exist in this level, the situation becomes a little different. The hand axe guy will pester Brom every turn until he kills him. 2 damage might not seem like much, but after 6 turns, that’s 12 less hp Brom has, and other enemies are attacking him as well in that time period. In addition, the enemy might block Brom from a direct path to where he wants to go, so killing that enemy will increase Brom’s movement possibilities.

The hand axe fighter also has to hit Brom, and he has like 100 hit to Brom's 45 avoid, which means he's actually only going to hit slightly more than half the time.

Considering Brom will have a turn here and there where he can't attack anything or visit a house, he can just heal anyway.

These are the points you brought up earlier.

The problem here is that FE is not so simple where you can say "by doing this strategy I can beat the chapter in X turns, and by doing this strategy I can beat the chapter in Y turns".

and

Let's take 2-E for an example. It's a gigantic chapter with, like, 10 playable units (and later the CRKs join), and tons and tons of enemies.

The thing is, I was only talking about 2-1 when you made that counter, not all of part 2. I had no idea why you were making this generalization, so I pointed it out. Don’t accuse me of not reading your posts properly just because you’re not satisfied with the answer I provided.

Responding with a completely irrelevant and/or pointless statement does not mean your answer is satisfactory in any way.

I clearly explained why 2-1 was an exception to the rule, and yet you clearly didn't even read my post when you said "2-1 DISPROVES YOUR EXAMPLE".

To make things clearer, here is what happened.

- You tried to say that Neph saves you X amount of turns in 2-1, and that Lethe would need to save X amount of turns in 2-2 and 2-E.

- I said that it's not possible to give definite turn counts for FE chapters due to how many variables there are. The only reason why you could do it for 2-1 is because it's a simple and straightforward chapter, but it's an exception, not the rule.

- You then said that 2-1 disproves my example because you quoted my post about 2-E and completely ignored the fact that I said 2-1 was an exception, which was right below my 2-E example.

A lack of reading comprehension on your part, my friend.

Tell me then, if the benefits of using a unit clearly outweigh those of not using one in a given chapter, how can they have anything but positive utility? There’s only a few ways that can happen:

1) There are a limited number of unit slots and lots of competition for each one. Fielding a sub-par unit is hurting the team since I could’ve fielded a better unit in their place.

2) A unit’s durability is so bad when deployed that I have to wall them in with my characters, which is hurting the flexibility of other team members.

3) A unit’s contribution to a chapter is so infinitesimally small that is may as well be considered neutral.

None of these apply to Neph. She’s forced deployed, which eliminates (1). Seeing as though there are only 13 enemies in the level (15 with reinforcements), and that 5 of them don’t move, the fact that Neph is 3-4HKOed is perfectly manageable. That contradicts (2). As for (3), that is clearly not the case since Neph is both Brom’s offensive equal and is also more competent at non-combat utility (houses+heather) due to her move advantage.

If Neph somehow qualifies as having neutral utility in 2-1, then your definition of negative/neutral/positive utility seems rather arbitrary, and thus I do not see its merits when comparing 2 units.

If Neph is force deployed and hides in a corner and makes herself useless at doing anything, brom has to come over, waste his time, and save her. This is slowing you down and would be negative utility for Neph.

Again, I never said that Neph is neutral utility in 2-1. Don't try to twist my words. I even said Neph has positive utility.

I said that you have to use neutral utility as the baseline when you're trying to measure Neph's positive utility.

Re-read what I said earlier in my second post.

At any rate, the purpose of that turn-by-turn strategy was not to show that Neph is helping to beat the chapter exactly 8 turns faster while also acquiring x more items. It was simply a way of putting into perspective how Neph is being significantly helpful in 2-1.

And you missed this part here.

Generally when you quote something, you're going to respond with something relevant, not something that came out of nowhere.

I said that FE chapters such as 2-E can't be given definite turn counts due to how many variables exist.

You then said that Lethe does nothing worthwhile in 2-E.

Do you see the problem here? Your refute isn't even relevant to my point.

Let’s look at the units deployed in the relevant part 2 chapters:

2-1: Nephenee, Brom, later Heather

2-2: Nephenee, Brom, Heather, Lucia, Mordecai, Nealuchi, Lethe, Leanne

2-E: Nephenee, Brom, Heather, Mordecai, Nealuchi, Lethe, Leanne, Elincia, Haar, Calill

In 2-1, Neph is the second best unit, which means a lot considering how well she matches up to Brom.

In 2-2, Lethe is only the 5th best unit, possibly 6th (Brom vs Lethe is arguable). In 2-E, Lethe falls to 6th/7th best.

Neph has a period where she is doing well while we have very few units in play. This gives her significant utility value. Lethe, however, is clearly below average compared to the rest of the team, and with so many good units to choose from, she becomes largely replacable. Being good when few units are around > being bad when many are. Sure, Lethe can be argued as slightly better in 2-2, but the fact that they’re so close there allows for Neph’s theoretical 2-1 lead to easily outweigh that.

Let’s take this even further. In 2-1, Neph is contributing roughly 50% of the level’s total player phase production before Heather arrives, and is also doubling the possible radius of enemy phase exposure. Lethe’s contribution in 2-2 and 2-E is but a small fraction of that.

The problem here is that you're not taking into account exactly how many units you actually need, nor how much each unit is actually doing.

For example, in 2-2 Lethe may be "fifth", but she's very, very close to Mordy/Nealuchi to the point where they may as well be equal, since she just loses durability which doesn't really matter because she's getting 6-10HKO'd or something high with decent avoid. Even Lucia is not clearly better because Lucia is getting 3-4HKO'd. And Leanne doesn't really count when it comes to outperforming combat units since she doesn't even fight.

And again, you're overrating Neph's performance. Simply because she's "2nd best out of 3" doesn't mean she's actually all that helpful. Getting 2-3HKO'd by enemies, or 3-4HKO'd by enemies with 2-range and no chances for getting human walls in front of you and no chokepoints to abuse and no healer to help you doesn't make you good, no matter how your offense is.

We’re sharing grass between all 3 laguz, which averages out to 2.66 grass uses per laguz, not 4. Once we factor that we might not get olivi grass in 2-E, that number falls to 1.33, which is minuscule (eg/ 2 uses for Lethe, 1 for Nealuchi, 1 for Mordecai).

I said 4 because if Nealuchi/Mordy use less grasses (for example if they use 3 each), there are some uses leftover for lethe, even if they won't be enough to keep her transformed the entire time.

So now Lethe is guaranteed 2 turns to begin with where she’s untransformed. 3 turns and 4 attacks later, Lethe’s meter is down to 3, so she needs to either take her first grass or revert, the latter costing another 2 turns. Give her another turn and 2 attacks, and her meter falls back down to 5, so the same scenario ensues.

Overall, we’re talking about a lot of missed attack opportunities. At best, she loses 6 phases over the course of the chapter, and just 1 reversion causes that number to jump to at least 8. This isn’t even accounting for the inconvenience incurred by the trading process of olivi grass, which either forces all 3 laguz characters to stay close or to waste their movement pursuing each other for trades.

The thing is that a lot of these missed phases are just player phases where she has to grass, or they're at the beginning of the chapter where not much happens anyway (you only fight like, 1 enemy on turn 1 player phase), where she only just misses out on one attack. As long as she's ready for enemy phase she can counter several enemies to make up for it.

Anyway, no one isn't saying that Lethe's transformation issue is not bad. It's that it's a lot easier to handle than Neph.

Neph attacks one enemy on player phase but then has to watch out for being exposed to too many enemies on enemy phase. It only takes 3-4 attacks to kill her, and if one of those enemies happens to have 31 att or more, you can basically reduce that number by 1, and then she ALSO has to watch out for any enemies that have a crit rate because they can basically OHKO her. Remember that even if Lethe untransforms prematurely she still requires 1-2 more enemies to actually kill her off.

So that means Neph has to watch out for 31 att enemies or more, PLUS has to be out of range for any enemy with a crit rate on her (8 enemies have crit on her, although one of them is the lolrogue. Two of them use killer lances and do 10 damage a hit before crit, which is really bad because the soldiers have like 25 crit on her, two are halbs taht 2 or 3HKO, and 3 are sages that 5HKO).

And then to top it all off she has lame offense against enemies she can't double unless she uses steel greatlance in which case she has slightly less att than Brom but loses more avoid (and still loses to Lethe), and now either had to attack with it on player phase and now takes 1 less attack to die, or you had to do some trading with her which is no better than the whole grass issue, only all the laguz will benefit if they trade grasses between each other rather than only Neph benefiting from someone trading with her.

And she also has lame offense against the armors.

Neph is pretty much worried about every single enemy in the chapter, be it offensively or defensively.

The point I was making was to justify Mordy/Nealuchi beating Lethe from a statistical standpoint, which in turn plays into my argument about Lethe hurting the ability of 2 better units to grass freely.

And my point is that the durability lead Mordy/Nealuchi have on Lethe is very small.

In other words, if I were to use Lethe instead of, say, Mordy in the chapter, the difference in performance isn't wtfhuge, and it's actually pretty small. Sure, Mordy is better, but it's in the same sense as Ulki's durability being better than Janaff's. Ulki is better, but Janaff is not dying anyway, so it's a minor advantage.

I never argued otherwise, hence why I keep insisting Lethe probably has a small overall edge in this chapter. However, I’ve already stated that Neph’s survival issues are minimal based on low density and having decent avo, so that lead is already mitigated somewhat.

wtfux @ saying Neph has no survival issues in this chapter. That's a completely laughable idea. At least half the map can kill her in 1-2 rounds if they either crit (which is really important even if you are facing a sub-5 crit rate when the other unit needs to get critted 3 times before they die, nevermind fewer units actually have crit on her), or they just have so much att they would 2HKO (or come close to 2HKO. There are 3 enemies with 30 att, so Neph would have 2 HP after 2 attacks, which means anything can finish her off at that point, so that's basically a 2-round). Her avoid is not turning any heads either. Untransformed Lethe only loses avoid by 10, assuming Neph doesn't weigh herself down with a steel greatlance (where Neph now would win avoid by only 4).

Though, the real reason Lethe’s durability lead has little practical effect in this level is because she never gets to fully apply it. Essentially, a durability advantage allows a unit to safely attack in a situation where another unit will have to stay back if there is a small death risk involved. Problem is, Lethe often isn’t able to safely attack large groups of enemies anyway because of her gauge problems. For example, if she has 13 gauge left, she cannot attack more than 1 enemy that turn, otherwise she’ll revert the following one.

The difference between Lethe and Neph in this chapter is taht Lethe just has to watch out for 2-range enemies, and not because they're threatening or anything but rather they just waste gauge. Neph has to watch out for any enemy that has crit on her, and also has lame offense against both armors and things she can't double, and then you just have to watch out for putting Neph within range of too many enemies, particularly those with 30+ att or more because they really hurt her badly.

Hell, Neph isn't even safe against the venin weapon enemies, who will not only do a bit of damage to her (they roughly 4HKO her, wtfux) but also 1-3 poison damage over several turns, which Neph can't afford because she only has 32 max HP, while Lethe has 51.

Lethe's gauge issues don't make her perfect in this chapter, but at least she's not going to be dying on me.

8/25 is still 32%, or roughly 1/3rd of all enemies. I don’t see how you can disregard the boss either since there’s only a single 1 range space and two 2 ranged ones you can attack him from. Neph being able to attack from any 3 spaces > Lethe only being able to attack from 1.

If both units face 3 enemies, one of which has 17 AS while the other has 2 range, then we’ll have the following:

Enemy 1: Both 2RKO

Enemy 2: Lethe 2RKOes, Neph 4RKOes

Enemy 3: Lethe doesn’t damage, Neph 2RKOes

We can disregard enemy 1, and cancel Lethe’s enemy 2 with Neph’s enemy 3. This means Neph is actually winning damage output here, albeit only by ¼ of a round.

Again, you have to stop thinking about "how many rounds does it take to kill my enemy", but rather "how much damage is my unit doing and what kind of units can deal the finishing blow".

Lethe attacking something means even someone like Heather can usually finish the enemy off. Neph would generally uber Lucia/Mordy to finish the job.

Lethe is the most likely recipient of ranged attacking on enemy phase because of 2 factors: First, enemies would rather attack her over Mordy because she has far less concrete durability. Second, enemies prioritize attacking laguz at range to lower their meter, so they’re obviously not attacking Brom before Lethe. This just leaves Nealuchi, but he also wins concrete durability and has a huge avo lead, so I can only see archers going after him for the effective MT boost.

Of course, if any of these units are in the radius of a ranged attacker, javelin!Neph is the least of their priorities. So we can either have Neph better on offence against ranged attacks (damage > no damage) or more durable (not getting attacked > being prioritized), or a bit of both.

Again you're overrating the threat of 2-range enemies to Lethe, at least when compared to how much 1-range threatens Neph, considering 1-range enemies outnumber 2-range enemies by at least 2:1.

See, because Neph has the worst durability of any unit on the team not named Leanne (who's not fighting) or Heather (who's only going to be attacking things that were severely weakened), every 1-range enemy that can reach her is going to attack her, and if she's at a low HP a 2-range enemy might decide to attack her even if she has the javelin equipped anyway.

Lethe doesn't like 2-range enemies, but Neph doesn't like ANY enemy.

Neph doesn’t need to be using the javelin all the time. For instance, she could use a steel greatlance on a player phase attack, get vigored, then switch to the jav. Alternatively, she could attack the greatlance while someone trades the jav to the top of her inventory, something not too different from what Lethe is doing with grass on a consistent basis.

With that in mind, Neph 3 rounds anything non-armor with a steel greatlance, which is only 1 round less than Lethe before E. phase javelin considerations. A couple of consecutive 17 AS enemies would need to attack her for this to make a difference, but then it’s just as likely for a set of ranged attackers to attack Lethe on the same turn. After 3 uncountered attacks, a full gauge Lethe is down to 13 come player phase, which means either grassing time (2 ineffective turns) or reverting soon (3+).

So Neph can use the steel greatlance for inferior offense (except against things she can't double), lose more avoid since it weighs her down, and now take player phase counters.

It doesn't make Neph's situation any better, considering Lethe would win offense anyway.

If we’re supposed to be babying Neph, we might as well give her the boss kill in this level. It’s pretty likely too since a wrath counter heavily speeds up this fight. 4 generic enemy kills nets her 72 exp, so that’ll easily get her leveled up.

You could still protest that we just robbed Brom of a level-up, but we don’t care about levelling Brom in the long run since he’s lower on most tier lists. Even if you neglect that, his speed growth is only 30% and a level isn’t going to change his concrete durability much, so you get greater returns by Neph killing the boss any way you slice it.

If Neph didn't have issues getting those kills then that wouldn't be a problem.

However, most of the threatening enemies (the guys that aren't the lolvolunteers) will 3HKO her, or they 4HKO but attack at 2-range (and because the javelin is in the corner of the map she isn't able to use it for most of the chapter). Yeardley himself 2HKOs, as well as a steel greatlance soldier that accompanies the boss. Hell, the volunteer fighters 4HKO Neph (though she one rounds them back, but one has a hand axe) and the volunteer myrms don't do negligible damage (one does 3, the other has a venin weapon so poison, and while it can poison Brom too, Brom can actually handle 1-3 damage for several turns). And killing the volunteers gives her <10 exp.

In light of this, Neph is better off visiting the houses and only killing off a couple of enemies, and in fact if she's the one taking a ton of kills she's actually building up negative utility.

Not to mention the issue of actually getting Neph to 30% HP so she can wrath kill the boss. It HAS to be on enemy phase (I seriously wonder why you'd let Neph attack Yeardley on player phase if she has 30% HP or less, considering if she misses she's dead), where you can't control which order the enemies attack in. It's a ridiculously convoluted strategy based largely on luck and isn't worth considering. And yes, the hit is a problem. She has 74 displayed hit on him with her steel greatlance at neutral bio, which is 86.74 real, which is actually kinda bad considering if she misses he now swings back with 66 displayed hit (77.22 real), which is ~10% chance that she'll miss and get hit and die, which really sucks because we just played the entire chapter for nothing, and wasted so much time that Lethe won't even need to attack once to be more useful in part 2.

It's not even that safe to try and feed her the kill even if she could finish him off without a crit. Yeardley 2HKOs her, so no matter how much HP she has, if she attacks him on player phase and misses, she's dead on the enemy phase, and if she tries to counter at full HP there's no guarantee she's even going to survive the onslaught of attacks from the other enemies, considering there's a soldier nearby with a steel greatlance that can 2HKO her as well (and thus Yeardley + the soldier can kill her).

This is still within the subset of cases where Neph is fighting a 17 AS enemy with a javelin. Against anything else (non-armors excluded as usual), both 2 round, though Neph occasionally leaves a couple enemies with 1-2 hp.

No it's not, at least not to the point where Heather could finish off an enemy and/or not take a counter in the process (which is nice for Heather since she's 2HKO'd by basically everything in this chapter).

Take some random soldier in the chapter. 30-32 HP, 13-14 def. Lethe leaves the strongest soldiers at 8 HP, which means Heather can kill the soldier off with her iron dagger (she takes a counter, but hey she actually kills it). Lethe leaves the weakest soldiers at 4 HP, which means Heather can OHKO with iron dagger or kill with bronze knife.

On the other hand, javelin Neph leaves the strongest soldiers at 16 HP, which means Heather can't kill it, and note that Brom would also need to use his steel axe to kill, which has less hit than iron (Brom with iron would kill off any soldier Lethe attacked). Javelin Neph leaves the weakest soldiers at 12 HP, which means Heather with bronze knife can't kill it, and she takes a counter with the iron dagger.

The enemies tend to have around low 40 avo values, and the highest listed enemy has 48 according to the site’s HM data. So in most cases, Neph actually has about 95.65 true hit.

touche

Assuming 85 display hit is a more accurate average:

Neph at neutral bio- 8.6% chance of missing

Neph at low bio- 15%

Neph at bottom bio- 23%

This is only looking at 2/3rds of Neph’s possible bio ranges. At high/top, her hit rates jump to 98.1/99.6 %, respectively.

Except no one really cares what Neph does at a bio advantage, because we're going to notice far more if Neph misses a crucial attack because her bio is bad, rather than Neph doesn't mess up on our strategy we planned out.

And those values of missing are pretty high when you consider that Lethe has 100 hit against basically everything no matter what bio does.

Technically, Leanne acts as an indirect healer. Whoever she vigors can take a vulnerary/concoction as needed.

Why would Leanne vigor Neph, and not any other unit on the team who are better at fighting? The only reason why I'd vigor Neph is because I want to baby her, which oddly enough translates to negative utility...(!)

As I said earlier, the 31 atk enemies also boast lower hit rates than average (see my 37 hit steel blade general example) and are spread out in such a way that you’re very unlikely to face two 31 atk enemies in a single turn, no less both of them on enemy phase.

And as my example said, you only NEED one 31 att enemy to be a threat to Neph.

And you only need to get hit once by one 31 att enemy for it to matter.

I will repost my example because you didn't address it. I'll bold the part that basically countered you already.

Except if they 2HKO you, you don't even need to face all of them in 1 turn. 1 of them does the job already.

Neph attacks the 31 att enemy on player phase. On enemy phase it attacks her and she dies.

Or the 31 att enemy attacks Neph on the enemy phase, and now Neph can't even attack it again on player phase because it'll kill her off (unless Neph does the finishing blow, but there's the possibility of missing).

Not to mention that getting hit by one of these enemies suddenly turns other enemies who were 4-5HKOing into 3HKOs. For example, after a 31 att enemy hits, two 23 att enemies will kill her off.

So no, they most certainly matter.

Please actually read my posts from now on.

The thing is, it’s not just Neph that has to be timid around these enemies, it’s everyone. Lethe loses over 1/3rd of her hp if critted, and she can’t really afford to be both grassing and healing (every time she grasses instead of heals, at least 5 meter is lost).

No one is NEARLY afraid of the killer lance enemies as Neph is (aside from maybe Heather, but Neph is basically OHKO'd by a crit anyway, and Heather has more avoid...)

See, even if Lethe loses more than a third of her HP, she still has enough durability to take the other attacks that can happen. Even after a killer lance soldier crits her, she still has 31 HP, along with her def/res/avoid. This is still pretty durable for the chapter (she'd be more durable than Neph even if Neph was still at full HP).

On a side note, Lethe has more lck than Neph, where Lethe doesn't even face crit rates against the halbs/thunder sages while Neph does.

That doesn’t counter this point:

In fact, Lethe’s gauge problem prevents us from throwing Lethe into a pile of enemies I couldn’t throw Neph into since then she risks reverting, at which point Neph is obviously winning by a lot.

As timidly as we must use Neph to stay alive, much of the same applies to Lethe to keep her from reverting. Cat transform issues really are that bad.

Lethe cannot face 2 or more enemies without reverting if her meter is <=13. I’ll assume she’ll want to stay slightly above 15 just to be safe. After 1 turn and 2 attacks, Lethe’s meter is down to 17, so already we need to be careful with her. Limiting her to 1 attack in the next turn, she’s now down to 8. Essentially, 3 attacks in 2 turns (if that) is all it takes for Lethe to become very prudent about how many enemies she’ll face afterwards. What’s worse is whenever Lethe takes olivi, she’ll have at most 25 meter left instead of 30. 1 attack in 1 turn already drops that to 16, which is pretty much in the danger zone.

So either Lethe is grassing every 2nd-3rd turn (more likely every 2nd) at the obvious expense of Mordy and Nealuchi, or she’s being as scared as Nephenee of the frontlines.

The difference is that whenever Lethe is transformed, she can actually stay on the frontlines. Neph can never really do that unless she spams vulneraries even more often than Lethe spams grasses.

So even if there are turns where Lethe can't frontline, at least she CAN frontline on several turns. Neph frontlines for 0 turns.

I'm just going to skip all the 2-E parts, since 2-E is not really important given the two situations I listed at the top of my post (either Neph ends up with negative utility overall, or 2-E doesn't matter.)

However, I will address this, not because they're actually important to Neph vs Lethe but rather holes in your logic/debating style....

You get that on your way east, the area which is armor heavy, meaning one of Haar, Brom or Mordecai have it covered. Again, using Lethe there would be ineffective since she only 3RKOes armors, and possibly does even worse against generals.

If you really suck at clearing the eastern side, the CRKs can get this item while proceeding south once they show up.

The post you quoted wasn't even about who's getting the items.

The point was that you implied those items don't matter.

You said that there are only 3 important things to do in the chapter. Block a chokepoint, block another chokepoint, and kill ludveck/steal the dracoshield. You did not even mention any of the other items you could get in the chapter, which is why I brought them up.

It was incredibly hypocritical when you said that Neph was good in 2-1 because she could visit villages for items when they are crappier than the stuff you could get in 2-E which you implied don't matter.

Due to the lack of PCs, and how well Neph and Brom are statistically matched, she’s actually being extremely useful here. This includes her combat contributions, something you incessantly ignore about her 2-1.

It's more like "Neph recruits Heather, visits a few houses but most of the houses don't have very useful stuff anyway, and kills off a couple enemies that aren't actually important towards the direct completion of the chapter, like a priest and a mage, maybe some joke volunteer enemies too, because she's not very good at killing anything else since she's getting 2-3HKO'd by the tougher enemies or 3-4HKO'd by enemies who have 2-range".

She's useful, but it's very limited.

Lethe and steel lance!Neph are offensively tied so long as Neph doubles, which is pretty likely (she has a 1/3 chance of not doubling 1/3 enemies, so she’s doubling ~89% of the time). About javelins, she’s only going to want to use those if it’s going to force a ranged enemy phase counter against her, or sometimes to distract the enemies away from her (they’ll go for the weakest 1 range unit). With trades, the amount of time she’s using a javelin can be particularly minimized. This is all before considering durability (admittedly in Lethe’s favor) and Lethe’s gauge issues, which I’ve shown time and time again to be of a great hindrance to her.

It's more like "Lethe is going to be doing more damage than Neph which means your weaker units offensively can finish off Lethe's job rather than uber mordy/lucia having to clean up Neph's mess, plus has to be worried about biorhythm because missing an attack just screws everyone over, unless neph uses some steel greatlance which actually just makes her offense worse most of the time and now she's taking player phase counters with less avoid, and then she's also worried about getting OHKO'd or nearly OHKO'd by like a third of the map and almost another third of the map can kill her in 2 hits without a crit anyway or come really close to it, and the rest of the map can kill her in 3-4 hits anyway, and this is somehow comparable to Lethe just having transformation issues".

Of course when you try to skew things it makes units look equal.

Nowhere in your post did you address the fact that neither unit is shaving turns, facilitating the chapter in any meaningful way or getting treasure, so Lethe winning this chapter means virtually nothing. Moreover, you didn’t even consider the killer/brave lance Neph has access to here (your counter was “where is she getting this short spear?”), the latter actually making them tie offensive output. Most importantly, though, is that Lethe’s gauge is sporadically changing, though most of the time it’s on a downward torrent with no chance of recovery. Lack of available grass (2-2 is depleted, 2-E ones are treasure) and huge enemy density are the main factors responsible for this.

No, I actually had it countered. Simply because my post didn't specifically mention killer/brave doesn't mean I ignored it.

In 2-E Neph now goes from "doubles the wimpy enemies" to "I don't double crap" because pretty much every enemy except tier 1/sages have 18+ AS, and in order for Neph to even compete with Lethe's offense she'd have to take loluber weapons that could have gone to any other unit.

-We could look to make Lethe worth using in part 3, but that requires an absurd amount of 2-2 untransformed abuse. Pampering Neph a few levels takes significantly less turns, resources and real-time

The keyword of my argument that you missed when you said this is "maximizing usefulness". Babying Lethe in part 2 is not maximizing Lethe's usefulness over the entire game (aka not maximizing her position on the tier list).

-Neph can be favored outside of part 2. Only 1 chapter of favoritism is required to compensate for the levels she apparently missed in part 2.

If we're seriously using Neph over the entire game, it's easier to baby Neph ASAP rather than some later chapter down the line.

-Punishing a unit for having larger potential outside the area of the game we’re arguing just doesn’t make any intuitive sense at all.

I'm only "punishing" Neph's part 2, which has no real value by itself, because tier lists only care about performance over the entire game.

-If Neph being good in the long run hinges on her being favored in part 2, then perhaps you are overrating her as a unit. Therefore, there’s no reason to baby her in part 2 in the first place.

That is possible, but I see her as an above average unit (bad part 2, sorta average part 3, good part 4, but part 4 is longer than part 2. or if you want to change it around, okay part 2, really bad part 3, good part 4, which is worse than the former anyway).

And again, you never ever responded to my whole Aran vs Edward example in 1-4 as to why it's nonsense to pretend the rest of the game doesn't matter. I brought it up twice, and you ignored it twice.

[Mekkah]

First off, smash is a terrible sport (in so far you can call debating a sport). Doesn't influence my vote, but I wanted to bring it up anyway. Not just because of the sassy comments such as "protip:", but also for agreeing on a debate to be just about part 2 then drifting off topic for that anyway.

Which made no sense. vykan said it: there's no possible way to make it an advantage for Lethe that Nephenee can become something resembling a unit in part 3 while Lethe cannot. A similar logic/time/space error occurred when I read about what apparently is arbitrarily judged as negative, neutral or positive utility for Nephenee.

Those two things just stuck out the most for me. The only time I thought smash was near more convincing than vykan was his closer, and closers hold less weight than the other posts. I could go more in-depth if needed, but I don't feel it is.

So vykan.

[Zkirsche]

Vykan gave 2-1, arguably a relatively easy chapter, the same weight as 2-2, a chapter with a ridiculously low turn count, and 2-E, a chapter when even your tankiest units are susceptible to attacks from crossbow users/thunder mages. This.... shouldn't have just been ignored. It's a pretty big point IMO. But since Smash kinda didn't bother with that, I'll just let that slide.

Now, Smash had the right idea: it's not just the turn count - but the chance for success. I feel like Smash did a good job explaining this and effectively showed how Lethe contributes more to the success of a chapter completion when both Neph and Lethe exist through stat comparisons.

Then, Smash did a good job showing the flaws in your plan. Or at least the lack of clarity in it. And it wasn't just the turn 9 fighter either. Some of it (Turn 21 included) was affect by hit rates and subject to differences. Basically, it wasn't entirely impossible for you to kill the boss on turn 21, so just assuming that Neph saves 8 turns is silly. Then, you only have to save it until the bexp turn limit - 15 turns. This means that Neph only saved 6-7 turns of the chapter, not the 8 you just assumed.

Then, you proceeded to go on about the brigands, when they don't hurt him at all. Then, Yeardley only deals 10 damage, the steel greatlance user near him only deals 10 damage and the javelin user only deals 1-2 damage (Depending on which one it is). So, Brom only needs 25 HP for him to take all this damage and be able to heal himself to good enougth HP to withstand those atatcks again. IDK where you pulled 27 HP from.

However, Vykan did make a good case shwoing why Lethe's 2-E performance was largely unnecessary and superfluous.

Overall, Vykan's main point, Neph's 2-1 victory, was largely incorrect and lacked clarity. Because of this, I'm voting Smash

Edit: Also, I think that when doing a conditional debate, it should be made clear what the debate rules were.

See, this was just about their performances during part 2, yes, but there was nothing in the title or topic itself to disagree with including the effect over the whole game with these units.

To help stop this kind of thing occuring in the future, it shoudl be made clearer what the rules are, not just "Part 2 only."

Edited June 21, 2009 by kirsche