samthedigital

When were you able to do the Ike paralogue?

Can you list everything she does that you feel is significant before Kagetsu joins in an efficiency context? I'm talking about things that no other unit can do that would warrant her being rated as a top tier unit. We're not judging based off of several different kinds of playthroughs unless I'm mistaken. Ranking units would be even more pointless if we factored in every style of play into one. I suggested using an LTC because it gives us some numbers rather than having nothing as we do now if we're ranking based off of efficient play. If you feel that the levels are going to be too different then there isn't really much to add as far as that goes. If you want to discuss some other kind of playthrough please indicate that, but the rules have to be clear.

It really is just for the range to take care of an enemy while everyone else is going for the boss or to otherwise aggro a specific enemy. It's a niche that has some use especially if you don't want to dump the bond shards on a unit who isn't heavily invested in Lyn. It's not something I would suggest for general use to be sure, but it's something. The forge is only really making up for the fact that Thieves and Wolf Knights don't have a great strength base. I would rather go Wolf Knight if I want to use daggers though because of the move.

Your argument can be summed up as this: Lapis contributes more during chapters 9-13 and is the same for the rest of the game besides the defense and personal. If she does not match Kagetsu then it does indeed hinge on that given the fact that Kagetsu would be the better unit for a far more significant portion of the game. If you're trying to argue that there's a big difference between an LTC and an efficiency run consider that most if not all of the paralogues and maps past chapter 19 will look almost identical and several chapters before then will also look identical; the low reliability strategies you are talking about do not apply in every instance. When they do the difference might only be a turn or two to set up a reliable clear. If it doesn't change anything then why mention it and ask me to give you more reasons if you're not just trying to be rude? I'm specifically not responding to everything you have to say because it's often off-topic at best, so I'm not sure where the similarities are. In the context of this you'll probably want to avoid DLC since it was not originally assumed. You'll want to share video evidence so that other people can analyze your gameplay. It's more useful than trying to convince me, but I would have a hard time believing you otherwise.

I disagree somewhat with your assessment of Snipers and Thieves. The covert tag and bow access make Lyn sniping useful on occasion. It's not a lot, but it's something. I'm also not as high on the Thief class because of the low str base. It might be the fact that units like Yunaka struggle with damage as the game goes on more than the class itself, but it's something that I'd have to experiment with more.

You could try her out with a Martial Master.

The thing is that we're going in circles when we don't have to. Are the kinds of things you've said multiple times that don't really add to the discussion or refute what I'm saying. I could continue to tell you that Lapis is not comparable to the best units in games like FE8, 9, 10, etc, but it doesn't really change anything. The fact that Lapis can help out with rewarp strategies is not relevant to her stats when Kagetsu joins or when he can be reclassed into a wyvern, etc. Your argument that Lapis is as good as Kagetsu hinges on the claim that she can get enough levels to match him, and then there's the rest of the game to consider where he's going to enjoy defensive leads even in the worst case scenario for him. There are a lot if similarities between efficiency runs and LTCs than you'd think. Speedruns are a completely different beast (they're often done on normal mode for starters), so I won't dig into that much further. In an "efficient" playthrough we would still be doing many LTC strats as long as they're consistent enough; it's hard to beat a 1-2 turn clear even if it relies on a killer item crit especially with all the rewinds available in the game. There are some instances where consistency might be an issue, but I couldn't tell you what chapters those are because it would require more research. My guess would be that the maps without Micaiah would tend to have more variance (chapter 13 is probably most relevant to our discussion in terms of turn counts, but that's just a guess, chapter 11 and 12 won't play out very differently). Chapter 8 can be completed in 2 turns reliably. I'm not sure if chapter 9 can be completed in 1 turn reliably (might need a crit on Ivy), but I would assume that a 2 turn is reliable enough since we have more units available to rewarp. If not then it would be a matter of seeing whether the consistency of a slower clear would outweigh the speed of a faster clear, and that's not work that I want to do. I'm not as familiar with chapter 10 strategies whatsoever. Chapter 11 should be completed in at most 3 turns, but I'm not sure if there are faster available strategies now; you'd want to look into that. Chapter 12 can be completed in at most 4 turns reliably, and potentially less; that is again something that you would have to test out. Chapter 13 is far more complicated and I have no idea how that would play out, but my guess is that exp in chapter 12 and 13 is a little more even because Kagetsu also exists there and can kill enemies. You could always try it out; it's not as if it's a big deal to lose a few turns while experimenting to see what works better next time. Even then it's mostly a matter of routing chapters without Micaiah, and there's a lot of work you can borrow from.

If we're talking specifically about the ability to low-man games the other games are kind of bad about it though, so if it's a joke it's still pretty close to the mark. FE8 is Seth Emblem, FE9 is Titania to Jill/Marcia, etc. There's some nuance, but they can still be pretty bad about it most of the time.

That's true to an extent, but off the top of my head there were always objectives spread out through most maps (he also feeds Palla a bunch of stat boosters to make her a carry, so there are some similarities) so that more units were necessary regardless. I could be wrong though; I haven't really looked at any LTC runs of FE12 outside of that.

Why do you get that impression exactly? I've had to point out when you've misinterpreted my arguments, but I'm not trying to treat you like an idiot, and if I wanted to I could point out instances where I feel that you have been rude; it just doesn't bother me though. The difference between the units you listed and Lapis is that they dominate all of their games while also factoring in all of the broken tools available to the player. There's no need to avoid things like warp, bonus experience, or whatever when talking about how good they are. I'm not comparing Lapis to Chloe there. I just think that Chloe is a good substitute for Lapis when there's not a whole lot to go on at the moment, so we can use those as a baseline for comparison. If there was more to go on I'd gladly share. The only other run I'm aware of doesn't use either Chloe or Lapis, so it's not a good comparison to Kagetsu. If you want to do an efficiency run yourself I can't really offer you much. LTC turn counts (you can find those yourself if you want) are really the only thing to go by at the moment. Efficiency runs aren't as popular and take more of a collaborative effort to do. I don't think that they will look too different from LTCs though. Somewhere in this mess I've probably also mentioned that you don't necessarily have to assume warps every map, but that you can't give a unit credit for playing through a map more slowly (aka not taking advantage of things like rewarp, 2 turn clears, cheese, etc). This is why things like "What I'm saying is she naturally gets kills becasue she is good at doing just that while moving forward strong and fast." don't really matter. If she's doing that while completing chapters as quickly as possible that's to her benefit, but otherwise it's not fair to give her any credit for self improvement when playing a map at a slower pace.

To me it depends on exactly how tedious it is to use more units. It's a single player game, so I don't really care about it being balanced, but I think that it's telling if all I want to do is blast through the game with one unit to get things over with. It's more of an issue with Pokemon than Fire Emblem though. Speedruns lean even more heavily on low manning; they often use only one carry and utility units. I find that LTCs and other kinds of challenge playthroughs generally have more combat units and need to fulfill more side objectives especially when doing full recruitment. Maybe I'll post my thoughts on each individual game later, but to me some of the biggest offenders are FE4, 8, 9, and Awakening. I'm going to disagree with you on FE12. The speedrun is probably different, but just basing off of dondon's 0% growths LTC there's a lot going on with every single unit that's being deployed most of the time. FE11 is the one that seems bad of the two since there aren't as many things to do most of the time besides warping a unit to the boss and seizing. The main takeaway for me is that the best way to prevent low manning is to give the player a lot of worthwhile side objectives to complete in most maps. That also makes the games more interesting. Then again there is a certain kind of charm in being able to shut my brain off and just enjoy the story, and that's not possible when there's too much to do. FE9 is the prime example of that for me.

Now that we've established this we can then move onto the next point. I'm going to assume that affiant=efficient; spending more time to train Lapis is not efficient. If you want a more objective measurement you'd want to clear maps quickly and consistently (which means you'll still likely want to abuse staves) while also feeding Lapis as much as possible if that's what you want. You don't really need to do the work if you don't want though. If you're comfortable using an LTC run as a baseline they have Chloe at level 5 compared to Kagetsu's level 2 by chapter 14. An "efficient" playthrough is going to look slightly different, and this run used DLC to it's advantage (looks like XS used the Edelgard stuff to get extra turns with Chloe; again, I'm not familar with the DLC), but it should be a reasonable baseline. If we substitute Chloe's levels with Lapis then we get Kagetsu leading with 6 HP, 3 strength, 3 speed (more when she's weighed down), and 5 defense. Lapis might be able to close the gap with most of it if you choose to give her stat boosters, but it's hard to see her winning on the defensive stats, and Kagetsu should at least have that lead for the rest of the game. Why do you feel that turn counts are a vague criteria compared to "strongest" or "easiest"? If you tell me exactly how long it takes you to give Lapis extra levels we can go from there; we can't do that with your descriptors.

I was originally responding to this: Everything after but isn't relevant to that. I never said that my runs were faster than yours because I didn't used Lapis. I'm pretty sure what I actually said was that clearing chapters more quickly means that units get less experience; that's regardless of who is playing the game. If you want to move the conversation forwards you really have to address the experience issue which is what I've been focusing on for a while now. This is one of the first things you'll notice in Vykan's FAQ: and this is posted a little later: The main point of contention is the benchmarks that you claim Lapis hits require that she be at a level I find to be too high for that point in the game when playing efficiently. The thing is that your criteria is pretty vague. Efficiency is not the greatest term either, but at least there are a few things that we can objectively measure.

This is one of the less interesting ones unfortunately, at least in my opinion. I can't say for the reclass era outside of Engage where Berserker is just inferior to Warrior, but Berserkers are generally pretty average, and I don't have a lot to say about them, so I wouldn't really object to any kind of placement as long as they're not S-rank lol. There are two units that I want to mention in particular: Dart in FE7 is a unit who I've seen be underrated because of the ranked mindset where gold is actually valuable. I wouldn't say that he's good otherwise, but he's definitely a salvageable unit. Ross is the second one, and he's a unit who I think is a little overrated. His water walking ability often comes up when evaluating him. It saves a turn, but it requires effort that doesn't show up when we're just looking at turn counts. Everyone already knows that his bases are bad and all that.

I didn't say that she wouldn't have an impact but that there wouldn't be much of a difference between using her and a mid-game unit. You said yourself that Kagetsu has similar stats, and he's not the only one that has good combat stats that the game gives us in the midgame. I don't know how to tell you to play the game faster exactly, but if we're using the examples you provided... If I remember correctly the only thing that's required to three turn chapter 11 is to have Alear max move and canter every turn. That might require Griffin Knight with Obstruct or some other staff to ensure that Canter is always available, but I don't remember for sure. Chapter 12 can be finished in 1 turn with DLC and in 2 turns without, but I don't know the logistics of that. I still think that taking a couple extra turns is reasonable, but... The other important thing to mention is that clearing the game in a low amount of turns doesn't necessarily mean doing an LTC either. I mentioned that I cheese just about every paralogue, but I wouldn't call my playthroughs LTCs because I often take a few more turns to clear a chapter here and there, and there are other ways of speeding up chapters too outside of turn count. If you don't want to respond anymore go ahead, but I have been trying to move the conversation forwards. What I have been trying to communicate more than anything else is that you can't necessarily use your playthroughs to show that Lapis is better than another unit in general; if someone is investing in more units Lapis isn't going to get as many levels. If they instead choose to have another unit rush forwards and give Lapis the secondary kills she's going to have less experience. If they're abusing staves their Lapis won't have as many levels, etc. You get the idea; you can say that she's better for you, but that doesn't make for an interesting conversation, and I would assume that you'd have clarified this when I mentioned it earlier.

With the well existing and Hortensia's skill now working with rewarp (pretty sure anyway; could be wrong on this one since I only saw it in passing) that's not an issue anymore, but it wasn't much of an issue before either. We have different definitions of what it means to not slow down based on this which goes back to the core issue at hand. Repeating yourself isn't going to change the fact that you're looking at it from an entirely different perspective than others and yet wonder why people don't value Lapis as much as Chloe or Kagetsu. You're not going to see much of an impact without Lapis in a full game run. The game hands out enough units that it really doesn't make much of a difference. You could forego all of the early game units and it wouldn't matter that much honestly.

How would you rate the story from a so bad it's good perspective? It definitely has moments; that's why I enjoyed it more than the 3DS entries personally, but it definitely doesn't lean on it nearly as much as I'd like.

You're still allowed to use staves in "efficient" play, but finishing consistently is more valuable than the turn count. It's a loosely defined term, but to me they should still be considered because it's part of the game. You don't necessarily have to warp skip or max move every single map, but I wouldn't give a unit credit for taking that extra time to get experience. I don't know where the topic is, but if you go look at Colonel M's tier list there's a FAQ that has a link to something Vykan posted years ago; that defines it better than I could. How much of this are we doing is another question. We don't have to rewarp on every map or anything, but again, the more we do the less exp each unit is going to get. I certainly have never seen a unit reaching level 8 promoted by the time we get Kagetsu though (which is what she would need to be at -2 str), and most of my units don't level cap before reclassing by the end of the game. That's just my personal experience, but I also don't go for the lowest turn counts possible, so I find it hard to imagine Lapis reaching that benchmark without giving her like half of the exp every map has to offer. I never said that it was; the main takeaway is the bit about the exp.

The main point of contention is that I don't agree with the first assumption. I'm not saying that she can't get there, but I don't think that she can match Kagetsu at his join time in an efficient way especially without DLC. In an LTC setting using Lapis over Chloe is an active decision; you'd have to hold onto resources that Chloe would otherwise be getting for immediate benefit. In an LTC the reason we wouldn't use both is because of resource management. If we're not doing an LTC I'd agree with you, but it also limits the potential exp that they're getting making the comparison to the mid-game units even less favorable. Just as an aside though there are probably some kinds of planned playthroughs that could favor using Lapis over Chloe, but that's something that would have to be tested, and it might still be close.

You haven't established that she's better than equal (so you can repeat it as much as you want and it won't really change anything) by my estimation, and I replied to a comment where you made the claim that she was better. That's only one part of the picture. There's also the matter of exactly how much they're being used and how much experience you can dump into them in a given time frame. As we've seen this can vary quite a bit; your numbers don't necessarily reflect the ones that I would expect to see. You also have to determine exactly how good that the unit is compared to others when they join and during future chapters.

If you make the claim that Lapis is better than Chloe or Kagetsu you have to establish that she helps clear chapters "better" than they do. If either option performs exactly the same except for the fact that we get one of them earlier the choice is generally pretty clear. My logic isn't that we shouldn't give her credit but that we shouldn't give her that much credit. You could make the claim that she's better for a few chapters, but for her to be the better unit she'd have to be better for a longer period of time. She (along with Chloe) can be the best wyverns for a few chapters, but Merrin and Kagetsu outpace them as wyverns once they can change classes and should be better for the rest of the game unless you get to level 13 promoted with them over the course of a few maps. This is why I wanted to establish exactly how quickly you were clearing maps. The one LTC I could use as an example gets Chloe to level 4 promoted by the time we get Kagetsu, and that's still a ways off from him. You can't really make the argument that she's so close that it doesn't matter either; Kagetsu will reach benchmarks with less time investment required which would make him the better unit using that as a criteria. Kagetsu and Merrin also have the benefit of not having to worry about positioning if they want to take advantage of crits. Your post was framed as a reason why Lapis is better than other units; if it was framed as a way to make Lapis good it would be different. If you want to continue to state that Lapis is the better unit because she's better using your specific playstyle then discussion is pointless; Lapis reaches Kagetsu's level and always does exactly what he can do at all points in the game. If instead we include a variety of ways of playing the game the discussion becomes different and Lapis might just not be that good.

I never said whether I've used Lapis or not; only that I didn't need her to finish chapters quickly, and if the turn counts you provided are any indication it means that you could still go faster with or without using Lapis. The "way better" that you describe is killing maybe 3 or 4 enemies given that there are 11 enemies at the start of the map, and it's not possible to cover all that distance in a few turns. Ideally we have multiple wyverns to clear the map, so while Lapis can be useful it's not as if she's doing a lot even at her best anyway. edit: With DLC Kagetsu can also swap to wyvern for this map right? This is only true if she has gained enough levels to be as effective as Kagetsu. To reiterate my point: Lapis might be more useful for you, but the way you play is not objectively better than anything else. Doing 4 runs and showing me exactly how you play doesn't really prove anything. The only thing that really proves anything to me is demonstrating that using Lapis in the way you described is both faster and more consistent than the alternative. The problem is that there isn't really any great way to prove it, and if there are any differences between strategies it won't be much given that the DLC helps equalize things.

You don't need to use Warp to clear chapter 11 in one less turn. There might be faster ways of finishing the chapter now that the DLC and well exist, but it doesn't really matter. The point is that Alear needs to reach the objective and starts closer to it than anyone else given their starting position. The only reason for anyone to kill most of the enemies on that map is for self improvement, and you can't give Lapis any credit for that. Chapter 12 can be cleared more quickly provided you can take care of the enemies before reinforcements arrive. You can give Lapis some kills there, but it's a team effort because enemies are spread throughout the map. LTC does it in 2 last I checked, but clearing it in 4 is still pretty reasonable. I don't remember for sure since I haven't played in a few weeks now. Isn't the closest path to the bosses through the middle? They also have 4 health bars, and one of them is carrying a ranged weapon, so I doubt she's killing them before everyone else reaches the bosses. You're missing the point. The point is that we don't play the game the same way and I don't see the need to use Lapis to finish maps quickly. I can warp if I want or use some filler units to get the job done before getting units like Panette, Pandreo, Kagetsu, Merrin, etc. Why then is Lapis more useful than the other two outside of an LTC context? You've demonstrated to me that she's more useful for you, but not that she's more useful in general. What do you mean by worth exactly? When I say that Chloe is the only good long term prospect I mean that the other early game units are a mix of not that good when trained, replaceable, and taking too long to train. Anna fits nicely in that group, and while she can become a good unit it's not exactly worth doing; she can become as good as any other magical unit but with the downside of taking longer to get there. Something to mention is that now that the well exists (and the extra DLC if you want to include that) it's easier to get SP, and I do think that this can shift the discussion somewhat; Lapis can inherit canter more easily early on, and she doesn't need the help that the early game scrubs do.

That's not really an argument against Chloe though; we can apply the same logic to Lapis because other units want experience too. Alear wants to promote eventually, but there isn't any real downside to snowballing Chloe early since the other early game units aren't good long term prospects; not compared to Chloe anyway. LTCs (barely iirc) are able to promote Chloe before Lapis comes around, but outside of that it's going to be far easier to feed her kills to make her a strong unit for the rest of the game, and she's still pretty good while getting there. I don't LTC, but I also play in a way that limits the available experience in chapters 11 and 12. I also like to cheese paralogues. This means that my units will be weaker than yours, and my Lapis won't be as good as advertised; certainly not as good as the midgame units with inflated stats relative to the ones we get early on anyway. That's an example of why tiering units without specifically defined parameters doesn't really work that well, and even then it's not always useful. I've seen a few 'tier lists' where people try and rank units in terms of how useful they are given certain amounts of investment, but that also means that they aren't comparing units to one another.

It's also going to depend on how you choose to play too. I like to warp skip more than a handful of maps, so Speedtaker is naturally going to be less valuable to me.