Humanoid

Hmm, it just occurred to me that there are a ton of units now with in-built distant counter, but zero with inbuilt close counter. Given how many lance fliers have yet to be added to the game, you could simply give them all javelins (maybe even make it a class of weapons and have Killer Javelin, Heavy Javelin, etc) that would simply be reskinned bows with close counter, lose the effectiveness vs fliers and maybe have lower attack.

Any unimplemented Nohrian or Awakening mage or troubadour could be made into horse mages with next to no fuss, and there are still quite a few candidates - Nyx, Ophelia, Forrest, Maribelle, Miriel, Laurent. Pick two out of that pool to turn into red ones and two into green and we're good. Older games had the more rigid promotions of course, but I'm curious to see how much backlash there'd be if they did something similar to them (Mounted Erk for instance). The pool of believable fliers would be a bit smaller so there might be more stretches in terms of believability, but as I've said before, I prefer having the extra diversity rather than having to remain 100% faithful to the original design. Say Reina, Fiora, Mikoto as archers. Emmeryn, Sumia, Myrrh as healers. Turn every other remaining pegasus lancer in the series into a mage, I'd be down with that. Iago blue armoured mage? Brendan or Kotaro as armoured daggers?

Brides aside, the seasonal banners have been gender-balanced which is a fair enough way of doing things, so despite it making sense that M Corrin would go with the three unused Hoshidan siblings, I'd say the chances are fairly remote. Azura is possible I guess - there's every probability that any New Year's banner was designed long before they came up with the Performing Arts one. As for the Legendary Heroes thing, it may be possible that the next one is a completely different format. Technically, all the "legendary heroes" tag implies is that it will feature one or more Fjorm-type characters, i.e. those who interact with the new seasons system. How long are we going to be left hanging with no active hero for some seasons? It'd be really awkward if they keep drip-feeding us and we don't see a Fire hero until March/April, for example. It may be that they instead introduce a few of them at the same time in the same banner, and leave the existing regular units for a separate Hero Fest banner at some later date. As a bonus, they could call the new banner Earth, Wind and Fire. It'd be a Boogie Wonderland!

To play devil's advocate, the "armoured" property of units in Heroes is a movement type, a classification that sits alongside cavalry and flier. Neither cavalry nor flier units are drawn to reflect their movement type in Heroes, so it would be inconsistent to enforce it on the armoured movement type. Tharja's armour is simply hanging out with Reinhardt's horse. :P Besides, the sexy Santa outfit is pretty commonplace in popular culture so it hardly came out of nowhere - I think you could get something not a million miles away from that at a regular costume store in most countries. All that said, I'd rather have a unit I could level up in public (I mostly play at work since I have a desk job) but I'm just surprised that this is considered a surprise.

I mean sure, it's awkward to have the art not match the role, but I'd rather have the mismatch and get a unit that actually fills an important niche, rather than having more of the same old, same old. It could be handled better, sure, but it at least prevents her from being Summer Leo levels of viability. It's the same reason I'm strongly supportive of more regular units having their type changed up, like what they did to Raven and Palla. It might bother hardcore fans of the specific unit, but ultimately makes for better gameplay. Off the top of my head, something like red mage cavalry Miriel would be an excellent addition to the game without being too egregiously out of character. TL;DR: Armoured bikini Tharja might be controversial but I'd much rather that than Infantry bikini Tharja.

Simply changing Chrom into a armoured blue mage (or healer I guess?) would have made this banner much more desirable, and as a bonus it'd balance out any future Chrom Emblem teams. As it stands, even hardcore Chrom fans would find it difficult to field Santa Chrom alongside Spring Chrom.

On the plus side, I have no 5* armoured blues yet (only ever gotten three 4* Effies since launch) so this fills a need. On the down side, Robin looks to be the least desirable unit in the bunch, skillwise. Also noted that Lissa's weapon (having the same effect as as the other three weapons) is contradictory to her new Bold Fighter skill, which is a shame especially since the effect synergises perfectly with Tharja's apparent role. Geez, would it hurt to make half of them be player phase weapons? It makes me sad that almost all seasonal weapons are there purely for a quick laugh then be replaced. Anyway, fairly ambivalent on the units overall, so I'll do the usual full round when it launches then hold until the next banner is unveiled.

I don't track the ones I've foddered off, but I do keep track of all my current units in a spreadsheet. There's no smarts to it, it's all just manual data entry. Summary is that I have 70 current 5-star units, three of which are +1. From memory I've foddered away just four, all for their weapons. I haven't kept track of pulled vs other sources, but a quick manual count just now has it at 47 pulled, of which I retain 45. I'm not F2P but I've spent in the past, I've purchased a grand total of 118 orbs and have no intention of spending more. Started playing sometime during week one. EDIT: Inline URL embed fail. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DafoF9aElM-rm-b_2XZRXJYzDt2j5jw7tliKZaTL_ag/edit?usp=sharing

Not fussed on the details but let me fill in all the entries on the final day to catch up instead of forcing me to log in every day, geez. I get that they want to run it over an extended period of time for visibility, so adding one slot a day is fine, but don't punish people for forgetting to log in for one day - that's just mean.

This, I think, is the elephant in the room. There's no good reason to have GHBs and BHBs as limited time content, it'd be easy enough to shove them in a submenu under special maps and have them available permanently. For extra copies they'd still be able to run limited time quests for them without restricting their actual availability. You can't even level the usual accusation at IS that they're doing this out of greed since there's no apparent financial incentive for them to do it this way (it might only if they re-run the banners, which they don't).

I don't normally do these things on day one because I'm lazy and prefer to wait on a consensus on what the easiest solution is. But I read that Flier Emblem cheeses this easily, and there's nothing I like better than cheese so I went with that. If you take out the first sword flier in the queue, Michalis can singlehandedly take out the three that come up right behind while the others chill in the corner. Straightforward cheese after that (S!Corrin, Hinoka, Elincia).

Just the standard single-round pull. Four blues and one red looked promising, but as ever, it was a trap. 3* FCorrin +atk -hp (I've been considering promoting my +def -res one, this presents a tempting alternative) 4* Roderick +atk -hp (Only just got a +spd -res one on the Refinery banner so this one is probably fodder) 3* Eliwood +res -def (I have nothing positive to say about this) 4* Reinhardt +res -def (What is it with these identical boon/bane combos coming in pairs?) 4* Roderick +hp -spd (Okay you can go away now)

The classical Fire Emblem "my parents are dead" banner + tempest trials combination, though they'll probably call it something like "dearly departed". 3-unit banner because that's the thing these days. - Cornelius: Opportunity to put a Falchion on a non-infantry unit? To be honest I know next to nothing about him but either an Armoured or Horse Falchion would at least add something different. - Fado: Armoured lance, fits well because there's a glaring lack of them in Heroes. - Mikoto: Archer, possibly flying if the devs are feeling extravagant. Then have Greil as the TT reward. Originally had him and Mikoto swapped but then the banner would be a complete sausage fest. But then we've already had a Tellius-themed TT so maybe one of the others? P.S. Sorry Elbert. P.P.S. If they play silly buggers again and add a fourth new unit in a separate banner with two old units, you could put Elbert alongside Hector and Sigurd/Deirdre I guess.

Taking the question literally, then it's Quick Riposte, no doubt about it. I've long had issues with the extremely binary nature of how speed is implemented in Fire Emblem, and while ideally a complete ground-up redesign would be ideal, QR is the most expedient and elegant solution to slow unit hell. More broadly, I'm a big fan of how deterministic combat is in Heroes. Taking away hit chances for a mainline game might be a bridge too far, but I wouldn't mind seeing the Heroes charge system for specials completely replace RNG critical hits (and in doing so, eliminate the silly luck stat as well). Finally, with a more deterministic system, you do sort of need to add more emphasis on picking your fights, so with the above change it'd also be necessary to port over the increased weapon triangle effects, as well as the skills that manipulate them.