MaskedAmpharos

:/

Neutral Alm, Eliwood, Ike, Palla, and Roy are some of the more notable reds that no longer double him. Also, I personally feel like Hector (and armored units in general) are a lot more effective on offense than defense because they often lag behind the rest of your units on a defense team whereas on an offense you can bait the enemies into you. Either way, Wings of Mercy and Vantage are probably the best B-skills for him (though I've also seen a few Hectors that run G Tomebreaker as well to counter Julia, Nino, Spring Camilla, and Cecilia).

"Only 170,000 feathers" Looks at my own 7k feathers mournfully

It goes by the stats of the unit as you see them on their character page at this very moment (minus bonuses/penalties/seals from skills/weapons). So I guess, to answer your question, yes it takes boon/bane into account. EDIT: @fatboyjam Desperation and Swordbreaker are the overall best B-skills for Lucina, yes. Life and Death/Desperation makes her a better sweeper but also makes her more fragile while Fury/Swordbreaker makes her a better duelist. Pick based on personal preference. I suppose it's worth noting that +Spd is the best nature for a LD/Desperation set whereas Fury/Swordbreaker works with just about any nature, if that matters to you. Also, if you run the Desperation set, I would switch Moonbow out for Luna since they would both activate in the same round of combat (since with Desperation, Falchion becomes a pseudo-Brave sword), so you should take the one with more damage output.

Merging a unit gives +1 to the two highest stats (one of which is usually HP). The next merge level gets +1 to each of the next two highest stats and so on, until you've gotten +1 to all stats. Then it repeats. By +5, you should have gotten +2 in all stats (and +3 in the stat that got +1 first), and by +10, you'll have +4 in all stats. Yes. Yes, it is.

Well, until they break the trend, there's no real reason to doubt it, is there? Also, I'm not sure what the point of your second paragraph is. How good a unit may or may not be in-game is absolutely and utterly unrelated to the likelihood of them being added to the game in a given banner, which is what this thread is discussing.

Actually if Defense is set up like I think it is, Reinhardt would be worse on those maps than normal Arena. And I have plenty of units that can ORKO Rein, so I'm not worried :P

With the exception of this week's Hero Fest and also the Voting Gauntlet banners, all banners since the conception of the game have had equal numbers of males and females, and I see no reason for Celica's banner to break the trend. They'd be more likely to have uneven colors before having uneven gender ratios, if past banners are anything to go by. I personally think one of Saber, Valbar, or the Masked Knight will replace Genny.

I wouldn't say so, no. I'm sure Sharena was pleased though.

I nominate MrSmokestack and Rafiel's Aria.

Since the Arena update has yet to hit, this is obviously simply speculation, but my current hypothesis is that they'll do a rotation of sorts. They'll have standard maps one week then defense-oriented maps the next and back to standard, rotating through them. Since each rotation of Arena bonus characters lasts for two seasons, this would mean that each rotation of bonus characters would get one week on standard Arena maps and one week on defense maps, which would keep things balanced.

There's a major Arena update coming in two days, and I believe they're going to be adding in completely new defense maps, which have the potential to completely shake up the Arena meta. It's perfectly possible that you'll do a lot better with those (especially since you seem to prefer tankier characters like Frederick, Ike, and Ephraim compared to squishy glass cannons like Nino or Lon'qu, which are what the current Arena meta favors). Ike in particular seems like he'll be a lot better on Defense maps than in the current Arena meta, and he's already damn good in the current Arena meta.

Sorry, I should have myself more clear. I'm simply arguing that they're definitely not at all useless in general. They may not be as useful for you because you don't have the fodder necessary to give them the skills and weapons that make them shine, but they aren't useless overall (maybe that's not what you meant, but it's what you sounded like you were saying). As for keeping them out of danger: once a player gets good enough with positioning, it is not at all uncommon to be able to consistently go entire games in Advanced arena without their dancers and other squishy characters taking even a single hit. It's not something particularly difficult or rare at all and in fact is something you're expected to be able to do at higher level arena. Because if you can't do that much, then you won't survive in higher tier Arena even if all of your units are S-tier 5* +10 units with perfect natures and skills. After a point, the game becomes much less about the units you're using and more about the skill of the player using them. While I will concede that there will be defense teams that your team isn't equipped to handle, 9 times out of 10 if you lose a match, it's something you could have avoided if you were a better player, not because you don't have the right units. Two different people could play with the exact same team (everything from the skills to the natures of the units are all the exact same) and even fight the exact same opponents and one person could get a score of 4.7k while the second person may not even get above 4k simply because the first person is better at the game.

It's definitely avoidable. On enemy phase, you simply keep them out of range of anyone that would hit them. On player phase, usually if you double them: The normal pattern is attack -> enemy counterattack -> attack With a Brave weapon, if you can double them the pattern is attack -> attack -> enemy counterattack -> attack -> attack With a Brave Desperation build, the pattern is attack -> attack -> attack -> attack -> enemy counterattack Since you're attacking four times before the enemy gets to counterattack, chances are that you'll kill them before they get a chance to hit you back. The fact that Hana and Lon'qu are two of the only sword users capable of running this quad build is what makes them so good with skill inheritance.

Quite frankly, if either Lon'qu or Hana are getting hit at all, you aren't playing them properly. They're best played as quad Brave Desperation units who OHKO all of their opponents before their opponents can retaliate. Admittedly that does require a fair amount of inheritance on both of them, and I understand that you're unwilling to commit to them that far (and even if you were, I don't know if you have the skill fodder for that or not). I'll concede that neither of them are very good with vanilla skillsets. As for Glimmer/Astra, they're arguably the worst specials in the entire game because of how their damage is calculated. Either they do far less damage than if that character used another special or they do so much overkill damage that the enemy still could have been OHKOd with a different special of similar cd length. In other words, there's really no reason to ever use Glimmer/Astra over another skill. I believe @Ice Dragon did more in-depth calculations/analyses on them a while back, so I welcome him to correct me if I messed up somewhere.

I definitely appreciate the amount of attention to detail in all of the character sprites/chibis, and it's especially cool to me that for all of the horse/flying mount units, not a single mount looks the same.

It rounds up for weapon triangle disadvantage but down for everything else. Red mages are probably your best bet or high res green mages with G Tomebreaker. You can also use an archer if she's running blade instead of raven, or if you position properly, you can just OHKO her with a strong green mage of your own, like Nino (though depending on how many buffs Camilla has, you may not be able to bait on enemy phase since she'd OHKO your Nino outright). Also, Xander's a free unit that everyone should have, and he's basically Ryoma/Ike on a horse.

I think it's less that they're sure she's a mage and more that they're hoping she'll be a mage since we already have far too many red swords in the game compared to red mages. Or at least that's how it is for me.

In any given match, you should really only need Xander (or any of your characters) to go through 1-2 rounds of combat. It shouldn't be much of a problem.

Red: Ryoma +3, Ike +1, Lyn, Tharja, Eldigan, Seliph Blue: Ephraim +1, Sharena, Azura, Effie, Clair, Ninian, M!Robin, Reinhardt Green: Julia +1, Hector, Michalis, Minerva, Camilla, Fae, Nino, Soren Colorless: Takumi +1, Jaffar, Priscilla Total: 25 (32 if merges count separately) # pulled: 20 of 25 # promoted: 5 of 25

Definitely QR 2

It's really only Lyn because she's the only person that can run both Brash Assault and Desperation (which is built into Sol Katti). The main weakness of Brash Assault is that by the time you're low enough for it to activate, you really don't want to be taking any enemy counterattacks. Sol Katti fixes this by allowing both of your attacks to come out at once, which is often enough to eliminate the enemy. Since Lyn's the only one that has Sol Katti, she's the only one that can run Brash Assault effectively (someone else could potentially use the same combo in the future if a new hero comes out with a weapon that has built-in Brash Assault, but until then only Lyn can do this).

1) If it does then I'm a bad person too 2) Moonbow is probably best since Blárblade increases special cd 3) Either Desperation (if you run Desperation, consider also inheriting Life and Death as your A-skill, though that's optional) or Wings of Mercy

There's no reason to run Moonbow over Luna on a Brave Bow set (for any character) because they would both proc on the same round of combat since you're attacking twice for each "hit". As for your special on that set, Draconic Aura outdamages Luna if Takumi is +Atk. If Takumi is any other nature, Luna has a better overall matchup spread.

You talk a lot of game for someone who still doesn't have a 5* Oboro