Niddo

At work so only quick replies Only the Pair Up "two units on same space" stats bonus is optional. Every other bonus will kick in if two units are side by side. They're rest are unavoidable and forced upon the player. I WOULD play Hard mode without Pair Up... but its impossible. Again, I DON'T want the "Seal to get good stats" option to exist or be forced upon me. And yet its completely forced upon you in Lunatic. FE normally has 3 regular difficulty modes before going into "must play a certain way" modes like H5 Hard. Awakening if you really wanted to avoid ALL of the new stuff (any type of pair up bonus included) only has 1 difficulty mode where that's doable: Normal. Only because its braindead easy. Because Second Seals exist and grinding exist, Lunatic's balance is completely gone, and Hard Mode is only a good difficulty if your artificial handicap yourself. That would be like saying "You can make SS's Normal mode hard if you only use the Lords, the Trainees, and no grinding! Stop complaining that its too easy!" I meant they chip in Dual Attack style. No danger to them, just random (low) chance of dealing damage. Probably reduced damage.

See, I enjoyed doing runthroughs where I would try to use at least one or two of the bad characters. It added life to my playthroughs. "Hrm, I never used Leonardo. Lets see if I can make him usable without just chucking BEXP at him" or "Hey Dorcas. Lets see how you do outside of Lyn Mode." It gave me a reason to come back and play again. When there is no difficult to use unit, or unit stuck with not so great classes, I lose desire to play. I've only completely beaten Awakening once so far, though I'll probably finish my Lunatic runthrough. That's the problem: there are no new maneuvers with Pair Up outside of Galeforce shenanigans. Put two units together, enjoy the free stat boosts, random extra attacks, and random "avoid all damage" events. You are never penalized for using Pair Up outside of maybe Tiki's chapter. At the same time, if you take much away from Pair Up it becomes useless, particularly now with the new people seeing how amazing Pair Up is as it is now. What they should have done is reintroduce Rescue, but maybe have it so that the rescued unit has a chance to chip in during battle to make up for the stat penalty. That would have been fine, and even interesting. But now Nintendo is in a position where if they anger the new fans they risk losing a series. It is possible that they manage to tweak things slightly like some people in this topic are hoping, but I don't think they'll change it a significant amount. Capping the Pair Up bonuses a bit lower isn't going to change my opinion about it. I'll give FE14 a fair shake when it comes out, see what it has to offer and see what has changed, but at this point in time I'm fully expecting Awakening 2.0, particularly if a lot of the new fans filled out those Club Nintendo surveys while praising Pair Up and Second Seals.

While I'm happy that this means there are going to be more FE games... this probably means we're stuck with Second Seals and easy grinding for good now because Nintendo might be afraid to move away from the concepts in this game. I'm fine with a Casual Mode option to bring in more fans, but those two things I just absolutely hate about Awakening. They just can't balance difficultly around their existence properly. Hard is still too easy, Lunatic is way too hard unless you abuse MU and Dark Magic, in which case its very easy once you get past chapter 5. I also feel that it runs a lot of the fun of FE: the risk of units turning out badly, or a unit simply on average not being very good but being there as an option to change up later playthroughts. With Awakening, there's not really any "bad" units in either sense, its just a question of how long it takes them to get good or amazing. Don't even get me started up on Pair Up worsening the previously mentioned balance problems. And what about the other features, will they try to shoehorn in child units every time someway, or the extremely wide range of marriage options at the cost of a number of convos feeling flat? I'm also afraid they won't bother trying to bring back their maps back to a higher standard. Awakening's maps are all very weak, but the new fans won't really realize that. Honestly, I don't know if I would buy another Awakening style FE. There are just too many downfalls to me: for the ones in NA I only consider it better than SS and SD, with it beating out SS solely due to the DLC. Do we really want Awakening to be the new standard for FEs just because its what saved the series? Or more directly: is the series worth saving if we're stuck with Second Seals and Pair Up? I honestly don't know. I love the series, but hate the new direction.

I think people are underestimating the power of Rightful King + Aether when talking about Chrom, or Rightful King in general. He's one of two characters that can have that combo, and one of 3 characters in a playthrough that can have Rightful King period. The ability to boost the proc rate of either Aether or Luna isn't something to be ignored, it's a serious boost to offense in either case, and in one case a boost to survivability as well. There is also the fact that he always has an answer to Wyvrens in the shape of Falchion. Particularly helpful in Chapter 5 and either 7 or 8 I think it was, but it's always an advantage that never runs out. And of course, Falchion's late game boost into an absolutely amazing weapon. Early game he also gets his Rapier to keep his offense up against key targets, a weapon you can easily keep uses on at least until Lucina joins. When Lucina joins, she's only going to want her Rapier for a little while at best, Parallel Falchion takes care of most of her early game needs. No reason not to give Chrom her Rapier, not like there is any other competition for it. Add that in with Chrom being one of the best support characters between Dual Strike+, potential Dual Guard+, and his bonuses, and I believe he should stay in low S Rank. He's good early game, and only falters a bit mid game until he can get Aether and Rightful King going, then he's back up to where he was before. He never falls off the map, he's just a little bit slower at reaching his peak.

Priam for FExSMT's main character? Regardless, I could see him popping up in more games, and him being a main lord of FE14 wouldn't surprise me at all. Maybe he'll be the Hector of FE14, and set up that way so us westerners can have our Ike descendent, while in Japanese they can focus on the other lord more.

Just popping in with a suggestion: Once you get to the child characters, wouldn't a fair way to rate them be based solely on what their attached parent gives them? I don't think a list is ever going to be able to agree on what a child's "average" stats are considering all of the possibilities with the fathers... so just ignore the fathers completely with a note above the list saying that the fathers can drastically change how good or bad a child character is, and that their placement in the tier list is a very rough estimation and that you should pay more attention to the tier letter they are in rather than the actual placement within that tier. Could even just place them in {}s at the end of each section of the tiers in alphabetical order to avoid the more nitpicky arguments completely. With the fathers being ignored, you're taking out a whole whack of variables and making it more manageable. I believe we already have what their base stats are without the parents stats being added in, we already have half of their modified caps and growth rates based on their mother, a good number of their available classes, and they will always have the two skills for their starting class. After that, the only major things you would need to look at are when you can you reasonably do their chapters, and when does their mother join. With the mother's joining time compared to when you can realistically beat the child's joining chapter, you can figure out roughly what skills have a realistic chance of being passed on. Sully and Lissa for example are going to have a healthy choice of options for their children, and their children will be among the first to be recruited. Olivia is probably not going to have as much to pass on due to her own joining time, though more than you may think at first due to the difficulty of Inigo's chapter. It doesn't remove all of the headache, but I think it makes it manageable. At a minimum, I think you could safely stick Morgan into S tier below their parent. Thanks to Veteran, they're always going to have good starting stats from their parent, be able to catch up to the rest of the army insanely fast with their own Veteran. They will also always have that massive list of classes and skills they can access, and have a fairly easy recruitment chapter. They've basically Avatar with higher caps and the ability to have one skill from the opposite gender, at the cost of a later starting time.

Lawful Neutral I was expecting Lawful Good, as thats what I normally get in these things, but the questions were worded in such a way I was bumped down to Neutral.

I use this site enough for looking things up, I figured I should probably join at some point. >_> Hi and all of that stuff.