Hawk King

Bonus heroes are a good idea. It forces variance among arena teams. Otherwise, you could just make one team and never have to change anything up ever. Whales with a full team of +10s would be set forever. And having defense teams require a bonus hero now means that you have at least a small idea of what to be prepared for every week. If there are a couple Cavalry units on the list, you can expect some horse emblem teams, etc. It doesn't matter how much the bonus for the bonus heroes is. It will alway be enough to make people run one of them. A difference of 20 point can end up being hundreds of spots higher or lower. Giving more bonus for more bonus heroes would drastically change the meta game, and would make it much less fun for people who already struggle to fit just one bonus hero on their team, let alone 4.

This might be a stupid question, but can you Smite a unit with pass through an enemy? The stat increases aren't that great, but the higher leveled skills help to make the upgrade worth it. You should definitely consider taking Sharena and Anna to 5*. Sharena almost never leaves my Arena team, and Anna puts in a surprising amount of work when she is on it. My Alphonse however is still at 4*. I have a +def Chrom who just performs better than Alphose would, and I have gotten lucky with bonus units when it's Alphonse's weeks. Eventually, I will probably promote him, but he is a low priority right now. You can always grind for feathers with Hero Merit. The normal difficulty on the new trial maps are great for it since they have LV40 enemies and only cost 5 stamina. Specifically, Trial 2 seems to be the quickest and easiest.

That's pretty weird. Could you try using a low SP cost skill like a +3 and see what that does? Or maybe only actually inherited skills make a difference and not just skills in general. Specifically only the skills that they don't have in their Vanilla forms? Hector for example, would only improve his score by learning a B-slot or an assist skill? And maybe a characters base value is determined by the cost of their base skills (along with theirs stats and LV etc) regardless of whether they are equipped or not. That would explain why Hector always seems to be so valuable. I really wish IS would just tell us...

Did you give him something in place of distant counter or did you leave it blank?

Vantage is great on distant and close counter units. Ike, Ryoma, Xander, Nowi, Hector, Takumi, etc. Run both Ike and Ryoma with the fury/vantage combo. Just make sure you have a good green to cover their weakness to blue. A green mage with Wings of Mercy would most certainly be able to swoop in and ruin someone's day. Wings of Mercy is also great on a dancer as well. Good luck getting those defense wins you have been craving for so long!

I've also noticed that nothing is highlighted when you haven't gotten any score yet. I would assume that you would be treated as having a score of zero and you would drop drop down as a result of it. Maybe there is an unintended loophole and you will just stay in Tier 13, but I doubt it. If that did somehow happen you probably wouldn't get any of the rewards so I don't think it would be worth it either way.

Just want to point out that at 5 stamina cost the normal difficulty maps are the most efficient way to earn Hero Merit right now. I'm not sure exactly how quickly they can be completed in real time though.

Do you mean Swap? Every support skill is good for different situations. I find it most difficult to deal with Mages with the Draw Back skill, so that might be good for a defense team. Stay away from Shove and Smite for defense. Distant counter and Close counter are good for defense teams. Before the Hero fest banner, I was lucky if I got even 1 defense win per week. Since adding a +1 Ryoma and a Hector to my team, I have gotten 8+ defense wins per week, including a win in the first 6 hours of every season so far with them. I realize that they are quite rare and not everyone was able to get them, but they work. I also added Wings of mercy 3 to my Sharena at the same time I added Ryoma and Hector. Train up Xander, give him Vantage 3 and promote him to 5*. He will be good for getting defense wins. Also give some units Wings of Mercy. It catches people off guard and is hard to plan for. My defense team has had these 3 locked in for a while: +1 Ryoma +Spd/-Def - Fury 3 - Vantage 3 - Hone Spd 3 - Swap - Astra Hector +Atk/-Res - Distant Counter - Vantage 3 - Goad Armor - Pivot - Dragon Fang Sharena - Spd +3 - Wings of Mercy 3 - Fortify Def 3 - Rally Attack - Blazing Flame The fourth slot goes to my best 5* who is a bonus unit for the season, unless Sharena is a bonus unit then I bring whichever 5* I feel like using. I have a 5* Anna for when she is the bonus. She has HP +5 - Vantage 3 - Spur Res 3 - Swap - Astra I use my Defense team in the arena. Try to imitate whatever it is that you have a hard time going up against. Chances are that other people will struggle with it too.

I love me some Pokeaim. Some of those new maps look pretty interesting. Are those 5 the only maps for the season? Or are they just added to the pool of the other defensive maps we had?

Try using a Lv 1 Dancer. Or the lowest level one that you have. Seriously, it's an easy way to get to at least 4,000 points. Only choose advanced. Half of Tier 16 is moving up to Tier 17. That's 18,059 people right now. And I imagine some people from Tier 15 will be jumping up to Tier 17 again as well, so Tier 17 is going to be getting much larger than it was this week. Around 3x larger.

That is why i'm kind of glad that I forgot the last season was ending and never finished my 7 win streak. (I had 5 in a row and 2 crests left to use but I just forgot to do it). Now when I move up to Tier 17 there will be more people in there, and the majority of the super whale teams will have moved out. Haha, I have the same exact defense score as you too. 582. Does anyone know how many people are in Tier 17? There are 36,026 in Tier 16.

Yeah, things are just going to be a little more competitive now than they used to be. For reference, a score of 4836 is rank 315 right now in Tier 16. Even that started out at about 120 when I first got it.

What do you mean by this? Surrendering a fight simply gives you a loss. The same as having all of your units die. And all that does is end your current streak. What do you mean it counts against your tier ranking?

This has absolutely nothing to do with the TCs question. He is asking about gameplay mechanics. Hector and Cain are just used as examples. He could have picked literally any brave user with Brash assault for the attacker. And an unit with Vantage for the defender. That should be how it goes. I believe Vantage just moves the defending unit's 1st attack to the top priority. Everything else should happen in it's normal order after that.

IF it is obtained, possibly in the context of a playthrough where all chests are obtain or some other criteria which would allow for it, Ilyana will have no problem getting the Wexp to be able to use it. Soren wont be able to before getting Meteor. He already has to get his rank up in Fire tomes for Meteor, and he will be staff spamming as much as possible on the player phase. After he gets the weapon rank for Meteor though, Soren will be basically using Thunder Tomes exclusively so he would be able to use it for some of the late-game bosses. Having Bolting would definitely have some uses, but there are strategies that exist which can always make it unnecessary. @-Cynthia- could you bold and underline the tiers? It would make reading the list much easier.

Best Buy cancelled mine like 4 days ago. Apparently they sent me an email that I had 24 hours to respond to, but I only check my email like once a week. I was pissed. I went and checked Nowinstock.com and Gamestop had the pre-order available. I wasted no time in ordering it and it came around noon today. Still a little pissed that I had to pay about $20 extra compared to my price through Best Buy, but i'm super excited that I actually have it.

I know it isn't strictly LTC which is why I asked about the context of a playthrough where Bolting is acquired. Draft teams are great for Tier list discussions because you get to see how good characters are with sub-optimal team choices. I can tell you that no drafter ever gets the Bolting. shove and smite. 17-4 for example, the 3rd fastest clear in drafts will go to the person who drafted Rolf. I believe he also allows for the 3rd fastest clear of 17-2. Because he is so light, he is able to be shoved by every single character in the game. Drafts also limit the amount of Bexp that is allowed to be dumped onto a character so there are no unreasonable resource expenditures for the sake of these arguments. And they are played on fixed growths, so these strategies come without inflated stats from abusing random growths and resets.

Without fliers, believe it or not, Rolf is actually the 3rd best option for some LTC strategies. No, it wont actually save any turns pre-Meteor. Fliers or no fliers. Well, Unless you are doing a Mounts and Mages only run... Depending on the type of playthrough, Soren can have significant contributions throughout the entire playthrough. And Calill can never use staffs so Soren/Ilyana make more contributions after. Soren > Ilyana > Calill has already been set in stone at this point.

Robin had 5 hours of the bonus. Tharja had 2. I took the cumulative score from those hours, multiplied by 2/3rds and subtracted that from their overall total scores.

Rounds 1 and 2 are 1000 less for the top rewards than the final round. so I assume got 9.9k This gauntlet final was ridiculously close compared to the previous two. Without any 3x comeback mechanic, the final score would have been: Tharja - 26.697 billion Robin - 20.737 billion Which is a ratio of 1.2874:1 It would be really cool if IS released all of the information from the gauntlet. Like how many people were on each team for each round, and how many flags were used for each team in each round.

@kirsche@Snowy_One Y'all were talking about a Bolting. Is that the one you get from the chest in Chapter 16? If so, that thing costs at least 2 turns to get, so what type of playthrough is this where we go out of our way to get a Bolting that doesn't help us do anything before we get the Free Meteor? In an absolute LTC playthrough, Soren will be the first character to promote, and he will be at a higher level than Oscar for the entirety of the game.

*inconsistency* Sorry that was driving me nuts. I definitely think it looks silly the way it is. They all should just have their subtitles, with the exception of Fire emblem switch.

I think some form of rotation would be nice. I have a theory that certain characters are already more common on certain days. Hence why people always seem to continuously get certain 3* characters during pull sessions. It would be cool for 4* and 5* to be on a cycle though. It won't lessen a 5* only characters rarity too much because 4* units just aren't very good, and you would need to spend 20,000 feathers to make them 5* anyways. The majority of the cast should eventually end up in focus banners sooner or later so this won't be too much of a problem.

This guy gets it. This guy too. I should be walking away with a little over 10,000 feathers from this gauntlet.