Humanoid

Heroes with Stubble banner when? I actually missed the facial hair when I first looked at Fates roster on the wiki (shortly after the Japanese launch of Fates) and assumed he was a middle-aged woman. And I thought Takumi was a cute girl too but then who didn't?

Oliver's Head+ as a morningstar when?

Muscled the Lunatic map blind with horses, but having seen the map proceeded to switch to Flier Emblem for Infernal, no problems whatsoever for either team. I know it's a thing to call every new map the easiest one yet, but this didn't even require any complex strategies or cheese, just standard dance-repositioning 101 like it was April 2017. In hindsight I should have skipped Lunatic because I don't need a duplicate of another mediocre unit in my nearly-full barracks but oh well. Will leave the 3-star version for the rerun.

I know I should keep trying for Micaiah but ...ooh shinies. TT banner yielded: 4-star +Spd -Res Palla - nice but I've already got one. 3-star +Atk -HP Lon'qu - I keep getting these good IV 3-star Lon'qus, why? 4-star +HP -Def Clair - I guess I can replace all my former Drag Backs with Hit and Run, she keeps turning up. I'm at 432/435 units at the moment and don't really want to spend orbs expanding the barracks. My next batch of 20000 feathers might be spent on making a +10 Bartre or similar - I have a level 40 +Atk -HP one and I have exactly 10 other ones, all at 3-star, so....

It's not as if it won't sit there in my inventory alongside the two water blessings anyway. :P At any rate, being able to field a full team of bonus units for once should make this a relative breeze, Hinoka, Airzura, NYCorrin and Sakura. Might take full flier team at times too, but sorry Alfonse, you stay on the bench. P.S. Going back to the merge discussion, I just promoted a better IV Nowi so that's just my sixth +1 unit. Strongly thought about merging my Elincias (both +HP/-Atk) since I can never use Flier Formation effectively anyway, but remembered she has Death Blow too. Hmm, tricky decision - if only another unit could give Flier Formation 1/2 at 4-star so I could pass both DB and FF to someone like Cordelia or Cherche.

I have very few 5* merges as well, and they were all down to circumstance rather than intent. "Marth" and Reinhardt at +2, Eirika, Adult Tiki, Lilina, Linde and Bridelia at +1, that's all. In each case it's either due to a random additional pull with minimal inheritance value, or upgrading to a better IV. I've never pulled or spent feathers for the intention of merely adding a merge level, because seeing two numbers go up by one after spending 20k feathers does not feel satisfying in the least. I even have a few 5* units pointlessly idle because I can't decide whether to merge or fodder them (two Ikes and Spring Xander) or because I'm reluctant to merge dancers "just in case" (Ninian, Inigo). It does make me wonder sometimes about what I want to get out of this game at this point in its life. It's not really to get a more powerful roster - in both quality and quantity I have enough units to do the content I'm interested in. It's not about favouritism because I've played relatively few mainline FE games and don't feel particularly strongly about individual characters. It's not really about collecting either because I have no intention of 5-starring many of the roster. It might just be (a loose interpretation of) the sunken cost fallacy at work: I've invested so much time and a little money into the game that it'd feel wasteful to abandon it and let myself fall behind.

I went Wrathful but then my Clarine is +atk (which gives her +4) and will usually have full horse buffs. She has the speed and bulk such that an enemy will generally need QR to kill her, so I'm fine with her eating a counter most of the time. As pointed out though, her 25 neutral attack is iffy for damage purposes even after horse buffs, so perhaps the decision should be influenced on whether you plan on merging her into a more offensive IV version in future. (Another factor is that I don't really value the Fear+ debuff all that much either, Dazzling seems more appealing on someone with Gravity+, say)

I'm betting they'll die.

A little over 100 orbs in and all I have to show for it is a -spd Linde. Bleh. Pity rate's at 3.5%, reckon I'll keep going with TT orbs until that's broken then call it quits. (I switched to blue sniping about 30 orbs in) Amongst the mediocre fodder is my first Leon but he's +HP -Def. One Hinata, one Selena and three Shannas otherwise.

Well then, while the Ike games are the English FE games I'm least familiar with,it's good to see people being happier with a new banner than they've been for some time. Personally I'm neutral on the characters themselves because of the unfamiliarity, and since the art to me is just middling instead of good, my orb usage will be guided by their utility as units (Zelgius aside, who is not different enough for me to bother). Just one of Sothe or NY Takumi is good enough for me, but Micaiah is looking reasonably unique in her role so it'll be either blue only or blue+grey. I'll let smarter people do some analysis first before I snipe too much. That the TT is NY based instead of RD is a little bit of a disincentive in terms of rolling on this banner, unfortunately, but not a big one as I do at least have Azura as a 40% unit so it's not as big a deal.

A score of 130k has just fallen out of the top 10000, might want to get back on the bike for a little bit if you're still awake.

I spent so much time weighing up Hana vs Lon'qu vs Athena that Soleil showed up and powercreeped them all. I'm still interested in promoting one of them (I have both atk and spd variants of all of them ready), but probably still 4th in the queue at best. IV-wise I'm thinking +atk Hana and +spd Athena but thoughts are of course welcome. I have the following available. +Atk -Res Athena +Spd -Def Athena +Atk -Def Hana +Spd -HP Hana +Atk -Res Lon'qu +Spd -Res Lon'qu +Spd -Def Lon'qu

4874 is still good enough to get into T20 although it's getting uncomfortably close to the cutoff (was about rank 9000 10 hours before the close). Still, that I can still get there with horses and a dancer is nice. Did my new lazy thing of 3 advanced AA fights and got 4828 for a comfortable enough rank of 16000.

I'd still want to know their relative popularity, which we wouldn't know if they were excluded outright. Just exclude them from the new unit "reward".

I do the AA exploit daily and a couple of days ago I had a run where four of the seven fights were against an unarmed Eirika. On average I'd say I see about 3-4 Eirikas and Ephraims combined per seven map clear, though that's counting armed ones. Unfortunately now that the new Arena season is starting people might switch back to their main defense teams, at least until they get a defense win.

Having more difficult BHBs and GHBs would be more palatable if they weren't time limited. No good reason why they should be time limited in the first place, just shove the old ones in a submenu of Special Maps, everyone wins.

Plus bread is bad for ducks, you probably shouldn't feed ducks bread in the same was you shouldn't feed Gunnthra to Bartre.

And for what it's worth, 121,494 is rank 9922.

For all the talk about the unit list, I wouldn't mind seeing the skills list tidied up a bit too. Merge Spurs with Drives for example. Maybe buff the +stat A-skills to 2/3/4 and boost their SP value. I also don't like how the ones that boost two stats work at the moment but fixing those would be a bit messier and I don't have a good idea how to do so yet.

People drop off pretty quickly. I do about 9000 points a day and for the first 100k points I held steady at about rank 22000. Today I got about the same points as I have every other day, but in the process I jumped up to rank 13000-ish. (110,824 points is rank 13140 to be exact) My plan is to just squeak into the top 10k as I've done for every TT bar the first (which I hard-quit at Masked Marth).

I kept a printout of the extended ASCII table on the wall next to my desk for so long because of the crappiness of Character Map, ugh. These days in the age of multiple monitors and always-on Internet I just open an extra browser window instead though.

Was just about to say that I wasn't intending to assert that *all* DC weapons are an anti-cheese mechanic, but reading back my original post it does appear I'm missing the word "often", so my bad on starting an argument around semantics. I do know at the very least, Xander and Ryoma will both actively engage you under certain circumstances for instance. I have absolutely no problem with them having DC. I don't think "Zeke" should have DC based on his Echoes design but I've never encountered his other incarnations so I can't say for sure. I do assert that given the frequency of this type of boss encounter, it is the intended purpose most of the time, and that FEH would be a poorer game if every unit that had 1-2 range in their original game was given DC (and that second thing is the important one). I only played FE7 for the first time last year and so many fights including the final one were so anticlimactic because of this design. The 3DS games at least cover it up a bit using infinitely respawning mooks to put some pressure on the player, rather than encouraging the cheese of walking up to bosses, hitting once on enemy phase, then backing out to heal.

Obviously the solution would now be to inherit Dazzling Staff to that Genny.

God no, gaining/losing orbs due to (mostly) luck would be horrible.

Eh, it's certainly justifiable for some weapons. Never played the Ike games personally so no idea how they worked there, but Fates pulled some crap like giving archer bosses "Steel Shortbow" for example, which is identical to Steel Bow in every respect except it has 1-2 range. Care should be taken to limit DC/CC access to weapons, where the justification goes beyond "well it had it in the source game".