Johann

I hear ya, I just barely had exactly 28. The other tricky thing is that they might need to be well-prep'd with skills, so you end up being like "alright well... what's good for Tobin?". The extra orbs, upcoming banners, 3*/4* chance swapping, and free summons should help though. Just the other day, I gathered the 8 or so Cecilias I had and promoted/merged them all at 4*, so maybe with the changes, it'll be easier to pull something like that off.

Quickly made a list of my capable units and started to arrange them into balanced teams. They're not all 5*, but I have 28, though a few needed some work (oh Seliph). Only thing that really concerns me is that I only have 6 suitable greens, so at least one of my teams might end up in an even worse position against Effie or Nowi than Reinhardt. It'll be interesting to see how they line up your opponents. In normal Arena, if you intentionally include an underleveled/underskilled/unarmed character, you might into some similarly unbalanced teams that your hardier units could potentially win alone. I suppose that it might be possible to use a weaker unit to skew the match-ups, perhaps at a slight reward drop. Kind of a gamble though.

Ah, I never noticed that there's a thing that shows who voted for what. Very groovy.

I suppose it might be a lot of work, but does anyone have any interest in keeping tabs on who's on what team? I'm curious who goes where, but I'm far too lazybusy to go through all the posts myself.

Team Robin cuz it's all I got.

The video just says "This applies to summoning events beginning from August 7th", which I guess could be interpreted a lot of ways. I think they mean that every new banner we see after the 7th will have it, but it won't apply to banners that are already in place (which, if true, would apply for Celica's Tempest banner and Lilina/Cecilia's BHB banner, but not Nohrian Summer). At the very least, we are assured that those two I listed will definitely have it. If it is for a limited time only, then I'd assume it would end when the 6-month anniversary stuff is over (which, going by the login stuff, would be Sept 11).

[image deleted for space]

Nah, that's just some more feathers from Genny's special art. I had to move a few sparkles and feathers to match the silhouette, as they modified her art to fit the space better. I was just too lazy to fill out every last bit of silhouette with the extraneous details.

Also I just remembered I need to prepare 28 units for this new Arena thing.

Solving puzzles and public health are just two of my passions

Once again, you've led me to the correct piece of the puzzle. Behold! The banner is complete, with Ike, Julia, Ninian, and Genny.

You're right, Ninian is a perfect fit if you smooth erase the edges

It's actually Genny's arm, I goofed the placement in my previous gif. Here's an improved one

It was tricky to spot, but it's by the two tufts of hair that I could tell. Observe!

Yeah, considering last time, it seems they go for characters who are very popular and/or tend to have good skills to inherit. I'm working on an image that shows the characters matching the silhouettes and so far, Ike is a perfect fit. Genny fits too, but with some resizing of her extra sparkles and feathers.

Lower right Hero Fest looks like Ike, wonder if I can figure out the last two

The silhouette in the lower left looks like Genny's special

Daylight/Sol/Noontime should all be 1 charge lower than what they have. Escutcheon, Holy Cowl, etc should either be made to reduce enemy's attack or boost unit's defense/resistance.

Before the summer banner, I would've guessed some kind of trick-or-treat Gaius. I actually think they'll do something reflecting the season itself, not directly Halloween. As a counterpart to the Spring banner, I'd wager that'd be something relating to harvesting (crop/farming weapons). Also probably Hoshido people and Corrin since they haven't used any of them yet.

The power couple that is ZEffiel

Well, look at it this way; you know exactly what you're fighting before each round (minus the first unless you've tried it or heard from someone). It's a little more like doing 5 GHBs in a row, and like GHBs, you may need to end up using skills you didn't think much of before (like -wolf tomes, who knew? glad I had that ready). Plus, unlike GHBs, Tempest, or even Arena, there's no rush to beat these.

After getting home, I updated and gave the Squad Assault a try. Really liked it, and managed to win on my first try somehow. Nothing story related, but I'll spoiler the 5 maps: All with high stats and very few of them have actual passive skills, the rest having nothing but their weapon (and a heal for the healers). You get to look at the maps when selecting your team, just like when you'd fail a Tempest map. Breaker skills, Triangle Adept, and debuffs (daggers, staves, Seal/Threaten skills) are highly recommended; 5* Felicia with Seal Speed 3 made the 3rd map pretty easy for me. If anyone cares, here were my teams and course of action:

Oh, I don't get particularly invested into who wins. I'm just saying the individual battles ought to have more significance and definitely should be more varied in some way.

Barring the results of voting rounds themselves, people are only excited for feathers. Everybody stops talking about the actual battles pretty fast, since they're repetitive and you can cheese 'em pretty easily.

Cuz it's so much fun as it is, right?