Augestein

It's just a pair up and a reclass though. I can understand if you hate pair up bots. I like them because then I don't need to worry about enemy dual strikes. Leo IMO is better suited for attacking first because of what his tome actually does. I do wish he had some more skill though, and I think his strength is a bit too low to make use of swords until he gets the Levin Sword. I do agree that Elise is one of the better units in the game though.

Yeah, IIRC he can, but it's still a pain to save a brave lance for him and it's a bit of a let down to have to bless that instead of say... The Wishblade for units that can double naturally.

Which only matters if you're saying "I specifically want 6x units to have this" on a micro-scale. If I have a team that's comprised of units up to Chapter 13, it's hellishly unlikely that the half that are hit by a meal are all of the units I'm not planning on fielding. That's why I'm saying I'm fine with it when you're talking about single units. Of course you're not going to compare and entire team with the effects of food, but 1 unit? Sure, why not? I don't think it's entirely unreasonable. I mean, we aren't talking about something like the random stat boosts that people get on a daily basis before chapters or birthdays or the like. But that's not entirely true though. Let me use an example: Leo. If you turn Leo from a DK to a Sorcerer, he gets +1 speed. Pairing Up with Selena gives him + 3 speed, and then turning around and getting a C support then pairing up nets +4 speed. Right there without Leo having to gain a single level Leo has +5 speed. This opens up a huge portion of things that he can double that were once pipe dreams without the effect of a tonic or a cooking, rallies, dances. They should be considered as opposed to people like Revelations Silas who are pretty much doomed to never double-- course they probably won't get doubled, but you catch my drift.

See the thing is here though, I was thinking how D'n'D bards are, where they aren't just guys that write poetry, and instead are well rounded units that can fight but also has some proficiency in spells-- in this case, the spells being "rallies." Bards were already units in some of the games, and I feel like doing something like that would help to differentiate the bard from the dancer class. If we keep the dancer with the whole "move again" aspect, then bards can concentrate on the "strength allies" aspect. Truthfully, I feel like commander type classes should be the ones that get rallies. But I'm strange, because I would have made those augmented by authority stars.

Ilyana: She should have been a promoted mage. Man, she is not good. Part 1 she's pretty solid, being the only mage that doesn't get destroyed by life itself in the event that a stray javelin happens to come flying her way, she starts out doubling in NM and can occasionally get lucky in HM with it especially if you got a transfer with speed. Her Biorhythm has no "worst" in it, so you never have to worry about super dips in accuracy or evasion which is a great boon as Part 1 is the only time I find biorhythms offensive. So what's wrong with her then? For starters, she's tier 1, so she's locked to the terrible Thunder tomes until she promotes, and even if she somehow DOES promote in Part 1, her stats are not enough to carry her into Part 3. She'll easily be the least durable, slowest, and weakest unit in the GMs that's supposed to be an attacker. Sure she can kill Wyverns on occasion, but that's still not enough. If she had gotten staves in tier 2, maybe she would have been okay (I'd have used her before Rhys on the account that she isn't OHKOed by enemies), but here? Just... Decidedly below average. Even if you invest a ton in her, what do you end up with? Great, another healer that can't attack worth anything and has "staff utility." Freaking mages. 4.5 /10 - Because at least she's pretty decent in the DB portion. Not great, but certainly not garbage levels. I remember that she might be kinda scrubby, but in comparison to people like Lyre, Lethe, Meg, Fiona, Tauroneo in part 4... She seems to come out okay. Just below average the whole game. She never brings about true hell if you try to raise her. She just fails to ever really impress. Quite a step down from Path of Radiance I'll say. Aran isn't the tank you need, he's the tank you want (no, that isn't backwards). A tank that can grow with you. However, Aran's problem is the same thing as every DB unit: he needs time to actually grow into a good unit. If you use him immediately, he can be pretty useful, and can tank all sorts of nonsense coming your way. His affinity only assists with his tankiness in making him simply put a physical wall. However, any stray mage that appears is bound to tear through him like no one else's business. Fortunately, he doesn't run into many mages until part 4. He's also a character that's ripe for BEXP abuse because he caps str, def, and skill so easily. My biggest beef with him is actually his part 4 and early part 1 performance honestly. In Part 1, his biorhythm hurts him in a bad way which causes him to have a ton of hit problems which makes his seemingly average skill a bit inaccurate to his actual accuracy. It's a problem for him, because he usually will be at "worst" when you're fighting the Laguz enemies which can make it difficult to use him on the chapter which can cause him to fall behind in levels. He can also get doubled before he gets a chance to start growing into the tank you want. If that happens, he's pretty much sunk for the rest of the game. For part 4, he's 1 point shy of being able to double things on his own. This means that he'll have to spend a good portion of his time near Nasir to actually have 34 points of speed to double. Kinda annoying but not the end of the world. Those little things simply add up to him not being a great unit despite those super growths. 4.5/10 - Like a lot of DB units, doesn't double but has some monstrous strength, skill and defense growths. If he starts to get doubled he can be in some trouble though. I still think units like Edward are better than Aran. Sadly he continues the trend of being "okay for what he was, but not worth taking once you can not use him."

Now that you mention it... It is kind of like that in the way things are.

Perhaps bring them back as the actual bard class? Dancers refresh people, and Bards rally people through song? I could get used to that. Although, there are so many rally kills that the current method of learning skills wouldn't allow all of them to be on another character anyways...

That was an example. It wasn't specifically meant to be a real one here. As for the flairs, that's not how they work. The character's flair is just the one that's more likely to appear. Even a good chef can mess up a meal on occasion. The reason that I mentioned someone like Keaton though was because his cooking is pretty much always a net negative. Even people like Arthur can still manage to whip up something good overall. That simply requires that you pick a stat that you don't care if you lose with Arthur and then gamble that you get one you like. And the effect is actually stronger overall for whatever stat you want. I hate when post fudge up, has anyone else's posts been acting funny for them lately?

Those menus are looking good. Also, Nephenee / Brom would be good choices on the account that you could still have the prison break chapter and have them explain what happened to other people that weren't exactly knights. They were just militia, so it can give some more perspective on things. I do have to ask, is the whole medallion aspect going to be removed from the game, or that still a thing? With Ike and company gone, I can only see the medallion aspect really starting to work later on in the game. I mean I guess Elincia could have been given the Medallion as a symbol of the Beorc / Laguz alliance that Crimea and Gallia had, and the "berserking" aspects could be removed, I'm just curious about how that would work.

Which is why I argued that "base" cooking should be the only ones that matter and not people that have hilariously bad cooking or hilariously good cooking. Because I agree that talking about "good" chefs doesn't work because sometimes you get lucky with them, and sometimes you don't get lucky and get bad cooks like Arthur-- such as my Camilla example in the lottery with giving me axes. THAT'S too random to be argued for its existence, because this literally made my playthrough easier and is by no means what I'd call normal (on the flipside, I have a Jakob that refused to get speed at all, so I guess that's only fair). That allowed me to forge things that I had no business forging because Arthur appeared in the Smithy as well. But the cooking effect itself is something that I don't see as bad enough to be on a coin flip. On a macro scale, I see the cooking as reliable enough on the account that it's always there. IE, to explain a bit better: let's use Arthur for a minute. His hit can be kinda shaky at moments. What I can argue is that I fed him a skill increasing meal and continue to talk about how this meal time can help Arthur be a better unit. Especially if I opt to give him a Secret Book as well. What I shouldn't do however, is within that same map of talking about Arthur with a hypothetical skill boost from food is mention an Arthur with a speed boost as well and consider both Skill!Arthur and Speed!Arthur in the same instance. The reason why it's not the same as say, tonics, is that even though tonics are cheap, they can add up over the course of a playthrough, and can and should count against the unit after awhile if they have to use them the entire game. Even more crazy is that I've heard of some people for instance that will literally reset the game over and over until they get the food types that they want-- which means that it's technically fair game to mention ANY of the foods just as long as you stay consistent with what foods you have. I can honestly see both sides of the spectrum, and that's some of the reason I like Fates so much. There are so many ways to get what you want for units, stat boosting items, tonics, rallies, food, pair ups, standing adjacent to other units, forges... and even in some cases dances. I'll wait to see how the OP wants to do it, but I'm fine with it either way. I was just stating why I thought food should count. Make sense? Case and point for why I really like Fates. That's nuts. I didn't even think about abusing the Bolt Axe for her damage...

Static deployment. Like lets say you have 10 "special" units, and you have a deployment of 6. Cooking only allows 5 units to get a bonus. But if you have generics, it pushes your army numbers higher for what constitutes half. Even if it takes half of your current numbers, this is still useful. You aim for 2 generics. So that means that you'd get 6 people to eat the meal. Even if 2 generics could still get the meal, that's 1/6 (2/12 for what it's worth just so you know I'm not fudging numbers) units that are generic that'll get the meal. This means that more than likely, a generic won't be eating it over a special character. However, what changes is that the deployment numbers can now all have the meal bonuses.

To be honest, I actually get Levant's arguments on it. "It's not 100% so we shouldn't count that." I get it, he's expressed hatred for things like Killing weapons, proc skills, criticals in your favor etc... but the problem is that most things in Fire Emblem aren't 100%. Even growths for that matter, so instead, we use averages so we can have some sort of grounding for comparison. In the case of cooking, it's in *just* the right range for me to personally give it a free pass. The kitchen is always there to be able to be used, so we can always guarantee goodies and bonuses for our units. We might not be able to have *all* of them, but we can say that they'll always be there. In this case, it can be a useful counter argument for a "make or break" sort of ordeal for characters. I just think that a person just shouldn't use "lol cooking" as an argument for why a character is good, but you can consider say... A speed base cook for a unit in an argument if they literally are just 1 point away from doubling range or out of being doubled. As it's asinine to say "well that might not get hit by the cooking effect," because the same counter argument could be made that a person with speed might never proc their speed growth ever and remain at their base speed for the whole game outside of promotions. I brought up RD transfers and Anna in Awakening, because these things are wild in their variance in comparison and have absolutely nothing static about them. RD transfer bonuses just plain flat out require a character to be RNG blessed to some degree to get a transfer bonus for darn near all of the characters sans Sothe (who just gets a straight transfer bonus at level 20 but without some degree of RNG blessing is actually worse than regular Sothe). Anna can do things like bring you Second Seals before you can feasibly have one, sell you weapons that you have no business having at that point, or... Just plain not show up.

I don't see a point in keeping them at that point if you're not planning on using them. Seriously, the kitchen is more reliable than Radiant Dawn transfers, and people still counted those transfer bonuses back in the day. Not only do you have to get them to 20/20, but that character has to have an extremely good run. Not a single character is guaranteed to have a bonus on any stat. Let's take someone like say... Boyd or Jill for instance. Boyd with a speed bonus is great, and Jill with a strength bonus starts out more amazing than before. However, both of these characters have a very hard time hitting that caps that really want. Jill has around a 30% chance for strength and Boyd has like... I think 20% for speed. We shouldn't just throw out their best case scenarios in this case IMO just because it might not happen. The kitchen in this case? It's always there. You can always get a bonus. So we should always allow the kitchen to be used. What *shouldn't* be counted for a character however is having stuff like +1 str, +1 def, +1 spd at the same time. Because that's rare and very unlikely to happen even with standard meals being made. Does that make more sense where I'm coming from? I'm not laughing at you, but at the fact that it IS kinda funny to think about Corrin killing his/her friends just to make sure that their units can get a bonus. It's such a video game thing that you can't help but laugh, you know?

But that's not my fault if you don't like using generics or capture. It's there, it helps. It lowers the chance of getting bad cooks, and it artificially inflates the party members to higher numbers than deployment which can help ensuring that most of your units are hit by a cooking effect. 2) Your the one that is absolutely hellbent on removing luck aspects. Haha.

1) That's why I captured generics. You can also use invasions to help pass the time if you really need to do non-Wi-Fi activities to have time pass. So again, hitting half your army when... Half of your army are generics is very helpful. If you hit half of your army and you have generics in them let's see, you may have 6 main units and it hits 3, but if you stuff 4 generics in there, it means it hits 7 instead of 5. Nothing I said is BS. Which again, even if you're not having all of your units being hit, it's still a reliable bonus. 2) How would killing them to alleviate luck not help?

1) Which is why in the early game I catch generics. That ups the chance of not running into people. Heck, in the early game, generics will still come out to cook when you don't have enough people in your troops. Generics are safe, reliable and useful. And in the early game it hits everyone because your army isn't at full capacity. 2) It hits about 30 people. I've seen 33 at most. That literally covers everyone in your army until you start having children. So don't recruit Corrinsexuals (especially useful if you aren't planning on using them), and if you're *that* hard pressed to ensure it hits the characters you want because you have super bad luck, kill the parents after you've recruited the child. The example I used with meat and milk was just that: an example. I mean we aren't talking something like Anna from Awakening where the variance of appearance and held items was incredibly wild and varied. Here? You can always get something. And in the event that you can't, you can substitute that for tonics, or even statues.

You can just pass on Keaton cooking though. Heck, you can pass on anyone cooking. Things like "adjective" flair shouldn't be counted, but I think regular cooking SHOULD be counted. You can reliably walk into a map with +1 str/ + 1 spd every time by having meat and milk prepared before a map. As long as you keep the arena around to ensure that you always have +1 meat / +1 milk, you can keep the food you need around for pretty much forever. The reason I throw people like Keaton out is because his stuff is truly random doing stuff like -2 str/-2def, but + 2 str! The reason it should be counted is because the effects can be replicated reliably. Put a hat on someone to cook more frequently-- I generally capture generics as much as possible just to ensure that they are the chefs instead of lousy cooks like Arthur for instance. If Arthur is a chef, you check to see if it screws up, and if it does, pass. Even better/worse, is that you can just defend your castle and it redoes a roll, or just wait a few (and it'll reroll again) if we are banning Wi-Fi interaction. I see no reason to ban these because it's considerably more reliable than many of the other things. I'm not going to count stuff like the lottery where Camilla appeared every other chapter and gave me an axe every chapter.

Yes. A guy that can either rally people or debuff enemies? Awesome. I honestly wish he was a ninja at base rather than needing a heart seal. And I agree that food should totally be counted as a thing. It's not that unreliable unless you have people like Keaton cook.

Sothe - How good Sothe is, is entirely dependent on when you transferred him. Normal Sothe is pretty solid for Part 1, and then it's all downhill for him after that point. Transfer Sothe? Can potentially be a god of part 1, and then pretty solid in part 3... However, he's still quite poor in part 4. Honestly, part 1 is the hardest portion of the game, but I can't help but feel people overstate how difficult it is as after part 1, prepromotes start rolling in, and they never stop, and I'd argue that pretty much all of them are better than Sothe. I'm of the opinion that people put way too much emphasis on Part 1, because he's as close to deadweight as you can get by part 4 without actually being a literally weight. 6.5 / 10. Most of the GMs are better than him. He's an early game prepromote that isn't worth raising. He's great for pointing at an enemy and insuring it dies early on, and then becomes pretty worthless later on. Really, if you let him kill too much, Part 3 DB chapters are an absolute pain. Doable, but still annoying. Laura - Heal bot in a game where healing items are common, powerful, and characters can carry a ton of items. She can heal so she'll always have *some* use by saving people actions on needing to heal. That's about it. Forget about her ever trying to be an attacker with those terrible might tomes she has. 3? Come on. Her growths are also wasted being inside of the class she has. I will say that she also suffers from "Micaiah syndrome." One attack, one kill. I have brought her to endgame once, and it was dreadful. I still say she's slightly better than units like Edward because things do not need to go right for Laura to be useful. Just keep her out of range of attacking, which seems to be a general theme for every healer in RD that's not named Elincia and at moments Mist. 5.5/10

So is the arc with the laguz still being a thing then? I'm curious what your final line-up for characters is looking like now.

If the switch one is having new stuff, I definitely want Wolf back as he is one of my favorites. I also want a F-Zero character as well. Everything else? I'm good on. I got Robin like I wanted in Smash 4. I'm not pressing my luck again :D. Especially because I was all "I really want Captain Falcon and Robin!" And then that trailer... Was the greatest thing I had scene in a long time for their introduction.

You might have a transferred Boyd for RD. Boyd with transfers is pretty good. And Boyd has great strength, and speed in RD (and in PoR tbh), just kinda mediocre bases (in RD, in PoR they are good). Boyd in PoR is amazing IMO, and he's okay in RD as well.

I can actually explain this one. Meg actually has good base stats. It'd honestly be completely true to say that she has great base stats for her level. 10 defense at level 3 is nuts. 10 strength at level 3 is godlike. The problem is that her two worst stats, skill and speed, are two of the most damning "bad" stats to have. Her hit is shaky, and it's not unreasonable to see enemies actually get double attacks off of her. And unlike other units that get doubled, Meg has a nasty tendency to miss, which results in nothing really happening on the EP for her. She has heaven affinity, which is nice, but realistically no one actually wants Heaven affinity so she's going to be kinda SoL for getting supports early on, especially when people like Aran have just gotten the ability to start theirs perhaps, and people like Edward, Micaiah, Leonardo, and Nolan can have a solid C and possibly a B depending on how the chapters went for them. Her only real viable options are Zihark, Jill, and Volug. None of them actually need hit boosts except Jill, but Jill would rather have someone with closer movement to her like Zihark or Volug. Even if you manage to use Meg, her stupid caps damn her, unlike Nolan, which has growths and bases that seem to optimize when he should start capping out. Meg on the other hand, gets screwed over by her class. Any hope of her being good is destroyed by her Tier 2 speed cap. 22 speed is absolutely horrid, and her defense does NOT make up for this nonsense. If Meg had these base stats and was say... Any other class than the class she was, I'd wager she'd actually be pretty solid. Heck, if she was a pegasus knight, she would be incredible. For Nolan, he has a steel axe which sucks, but you can quickly give him a Hand Axe to stop the AS loss. You're right that Nolan has seemingly scrubby strength for his level. The problem is that somehow everyone else's base:strength growth ratios are similar or worse than his. Meg for instance should have the same or slightly more strength than Nolan by the time she reaches Nolan's base level, the issue is that it's literally 6 levels away from Nolan's base level and she joined 3 chapters later. Also, there's nothing Meg can do to fix her stupid caps.

Actually it does change things. It means that Aran being doubled doesn't matter as a negative in comparison to Edward. In general? Yeah, but not in comparison to Edward. They both die the same way and Aran has higher strength than Edward. Which means that Edward has to use weapons with higher might to keep up in damage with Aran. I still think Edward is better overall, but it's not much of a detriment here comparatively.

Leo reclassed is really solid. Dark Knight is just kinda bad for him. He's not fast enough to continue doubling if he's a DK and ends up being Xander light instead of being a good magical cannon. Unless of course you support him with someone like Selena in which case it can push his speed to *just* the right doubling levels. Agreed. Elise is really useful. Even if you reclass Corrin to a healer class, you still have to get a heart seal first before you can use it.