samthedigital

There really isn't a definitive answer to this because it depends on the emblem. As an example I use Lyn primarily to fix the speed on a unit and don't really bother with the bow aspec, but with Celica I'd opt to pair her with a unit who is effective with magic because she primarily gives you a buff to damage with tomes. Generally speaking though I'd say that you should look at the abilities they provide first and then only look to pair a unit with an emblem that matches their weapon if that's the most important thing that the emblem gives. If you're just looking to upgrade weapon ranks it's better to use bond points for that.

Goddess Dance is probably a nod to the Dance of the Goddess gambit that anyone in three houses can use if I recall correctly. Anyway, if Goddess Dance is only being used once or twice in a map it's likely because the map is getting cheesed with Entrap, Warp, etc, and that would make Corrin's ability far less valuable than Micaiah's or Byleth's. I find that they are pretty close to even otherwise, but it really depends on how strong the player's offensive options are, and I wouldn't care to argue one over the other. It's worth noting that Micaiah can have practically the same effect for as long as the staff lasts, and there are enough of them that we can be at least somewhat liberal with their usage.

Avoiding the support with the unit that's using Goddess Dance also works; that gives you the benefit of being able to let other units use Divine Pulse + while having Goddess Dance available as often as possible. Even better is to pair it with Favorite Food to make it instantly available after it goes down for the first time. As for my quick thoughts on rankings (not assuming inheritance, canter and Divine Pulse+ are probably the two most notable ones to me if we include those): Top: Byleth, Micaiah, Corrin Byleth has Goddess Dance, Corrin has an amazing crowd control ability, and Micaiah makes busted staves even better. Micaiah requires Divine Pulse+ to make it truly overpowered, but with it she can effectively freeze as many units as Corrin can without her special and use a myriad of cheesing tools. She can make use of Rescue and Warp in non cheesy ways too. Bottom: Celica, Leif If we're including early game utility I'd rank Celica higher. Echo is decent with Dual Support+, and Warp Ragnarok is good for positioning later on in the game, but I just don't find her kit to be terribly effective for dealing damage most of the time. Maybe there's a good use for Vantage, but I haven't really found anything great since it takes some setup and is probably only conditionally good when used on Leif. Everything else feels about the same to me. I haven't played around with Lucina's Bonded Shield yet though since I don't really like any Qi Adept classes besides my Dancer who usually has better things to do. Some short notes on each Emblem not otherwise mentioned: Roy: He's a good stat stick, Hold Out is pretty good, and Blazing Lion can be a decent crowd control option similar to Corrin, but it's a lot more limited. Lyn: She's the best stat stick. I've found Astra storm to be only situationally useful. and Call Doubles would be more useful if I knew how AI target priority worked, but I don't find it to be terribly effective right now. Eirika: Twin Strike can one shot almost anything, and Lunar Brace is good, but I don't find her kit to be that impressive otherwise. Ike: The other part of the Wrath/Vantage combo, but the defense makes him more useful in a general context too. Sigurd: The unit that uses Sigurd can afford Wrath (since they don't need Canter) to one round a lot of enemies with an engraved Killer Lance combined with Momentum. There are probably a lot of other good combos, but this is the one I found to be most useful. Marth: It's kind of boring, but the general power boost and avoid isn't bad.

Not TC, but to answer your question: There are some fast swordmaster and wolf knight type enemies that she has problems hitting, and if you're using a variety of tomes you won't always have a good engrave for the situation. I used +hit from Sigurd myself to fix it. It doesn't help for offensive staves, but I find that other units make better use of them.

I find that this is the case with a lot of different kinds of units in modern Fire Emblem. In this game in particular a character's usefulness is often tied to the emblem they're using and the skill setup; Byleth and Corrin are two easy examples because Dreadful Aura and Goddess Dance are good regardless of the unit that's using the skills. I do find that Ivy is a worthwhile investment though; she's decently bulky and has an amazing class type. Without Lyn she can probably function with Dire Thunder, Sigurd, or a lot of speedwings. Sigurd is probably best left to someone that needs help with damage; I find that physical units need more help in that regard. I paired her with Lyn and gave her Canter and Hit+X to fix her accuracy issues personally, but she performs well enough without Lyn when needed. I swapped Lyn to another unit to make use of Astra Storm only a handful of times. Alacrity seems pretty situational to me since it's a player phase only skill; there are other ways of avoiding damage, so it would require a specific build to make good use of it while only ever being useful on player phase.

I like that money management is more interesting on MM. Otherwise Path of Radiance is just far too slow of a game for me to enjoy dealing with the added enemies. Radiant Dawn has a fairly good hard mode except for the thing you mentioned if I'm being honest. It makes the game more difficult in the sense that it's easier to make a mistake, but calculating an enemy's range isn't difficult. It just means that the player is taking more time to calculate basic information rather than planning a strategy based on said information, and I find that the latter is significantly more fun.

Has anyone mentioned how bad loading times are? That makes the monastery and such feel even worse.

I'm not exactly an avid reader, but... From a plot perspective It would probably make sense to do at least three routes while not going into detail on the first half of the game after the first playthrough, but one playthrough makes sense if you're just trying to rate the gameplay. I think that two playthroughs would be the happy medium for that though given that Edelgard's route has a few map differences that might be worth exploring. Of course if you're looking to make this thing complete you kind of have to do every route as painful as it would be right? 😉

It feels like you have an ulterior motive for asking the question. The answer to the topic title is no depending on how you define bad. From my reading it seems that you're trying to show that GK is not a good class if we don't count Duessel because it's never efficient to actually have another GK on a macro scale. It's just that I don't find this to be an effective way of evaluating classes.

It would be great in PoR if it wasn't for the fact that it takes time to get Reyson to transform. Laguz Stone are limited in quantity, but even if they weren't generally speaking the first turn refresh is far more important than a 4 move refresh later on. I'm not as familar with RD, but I do remember that Rafiel helps trivialize endgame maps with kill boss objectives. A lot of RD maps focus on having units juggernaut and kill swarms of enemies on enemy phase though, and galdr can only really help position units to get there. I'll also point out that if galdr enables ridiculous player phase strategies then by definition 3H will enable more of them given that there are more player phase options in 3H compared to RD. As for Dance of the Goddess... Are there any maps that don't have boss kill objectives after obtaining it? I don't know if some 1 turn clears are possible without it, so it would be hard not to justify a perfect rating. It might be slightly worse if we're not cheesing maps, but I'm going to assume that we're rating gambits based on fast clears. I didn't say it outright in my last post, but I would also give Stride a perfect score, and as a bonus it's far easier to use in a casual setting if we're doing full clears and such.

I don't consider Stride to be any worse on Maddening when compared to Hard mode. I find that cheesing certain maps is even more useful considering that the alternative is that much more difficult. At worst a stride use allows the player to easily kill a group of enemies on any given without having to lure them which still probably ranks it among the best gambits.

I mean it's basically the same thing as long as you're not in a car where it can get annoying =P. It's interesting on a technical level I guess? I'd still rather have the notches as they make the minigame on the moon much easier to deal with.

Gyro aim tends to be pretty good. I like to play FPS games on PC for example because I don't like stick aiming whatsoever, but gryo makes it tolerable. Generally speaking I felt that the Majora's Mask remake was a letdown. Outside of the gyro movement feels worse for several reasons. A few have already been mentioned, but the lack of notches on the 3DS means that getting a good angle for the goron roll is annoying, and that's one of the smaller grievances I have with the game. I don't really like any of the changes either besides the visual updates.

You will find a lot of this info on the sacred stones section of the main site. You can miss out on promotion items, but later on you'll be able to buy an infinite amount of them provided you have the money and the member card. Make sure to get it in chapter 14. I don't have a lot of advice, but I would suggest you avoid grinding if you don't want to remove the challenge completely unless you want to train some of the underleveled units that join you. I wouldn't worry about it too much though. The game is fairly forgiving even if you do accept deaths. If you don't though it's probably impossible to softlock the game unintentionally.

I don't remember if it matters a whole lot, but Calill's strength lets her double with long range tomes more often. She can also use them at base. I don't know how much time it takes to get Soren or Ilyana's weapon ranks up. Soren's support with Ike is also a factor that should be considered. I think that it's worth mentioning Tormod too just based on the fact that Celerity is amazing. I'd at least give him an edge on Ilyana because of it.

It gives you exactly two really good prepromotes. We discussed Haar earlier, but just because his stats are similar to Jill it doesn't make him very good. He joins far too late, and availability matters when evaluating how good a unit can be. His actual peers are any other unit that we'd consider for combat. It's not just relegated to swordmasters; we aren't considering one swordmaster to another for a deployment slot as an example. If he's significantly better than most units in the game can you give me some examples? I left out some units that he's worse than, so I could name several more, and I don't think it's a particularly strong argument to say that he's much better than half of the cast therefore he's a good prepromote.

To be clear I am not praising Path of Radiance for anything; I am not commenting on whether or not it's a good design choice. In any case the logic has nothing to do with using units at the end of the game. It has everything to do with comparing their relative utility throughout the game. Path of Radiance does function in a way that lets growth units thrive throughout the game especially compared to prepromotes whether it be because of availability or the ones that they give the player are just not very good. If you want to praise him for his sword rank and Astra you also have to penalize him for his lack of any other weapon ranks or a mount. If we do want to factor in just his numerical stats then he's not beating Jill statistically at that point in the game certainly, and a trained Marcia is going to be close especially if she's given the energy drop. Kieran might not be too far off either, and several other units are probably only lacking in a few points of str. Conveniently enough better weapons fix that disparity. I'm not going to say that Stephan is outright bad; he can provide some utility, but he certainly isn't great. The discussion only really flips on maniac mode where things are significantly different. I want to emphasize my point here. It is an argument that growth units are better than prepromoted units. If Jill, Marcia, Kieran, Astrid, etc, etc are better than Stefan it is an argument in favor of growth units being better than prepromoted units. The classes might be unbalanced, but if you ignore the class labels and just look at the numbers Stefan is a 6 move unit (without canto) and is worse than the growths units they give you just because of that. Unless your units are really underleveled I don't see this happening. Besides that she still stinks being relegated to player phase combat, and she doesn't actually do very much. If bonus experience did not exist I do think that Astrid would be better than most ests to be sure, but she would be far worse than she is now. That's for Path of Radiance in particular though. It doesn't negate the fact that if you throw her in another Fire Emblem game in chapter 13 with those bases she'd be awful unless she got babied.

Skills are actually pretty bad in Path of Radiance for the most part. Generally speaking they're used on Paladins or for niche uses otherwise. I'm not sure what skills you're referring to that actually help growth units a lot early on. Just about every tier 1 unit wants to get stats from levels and get to level 20, so I'd say that they fit the definition of a growth unit archetype. If we want to generalize many Fire Emblem games prefer units with strong bases and promotion bonuses regardless of growths if they're not promoted, and that's simply not true in Path of Radiance. I'm not sure I follow here. If we use bonus experience on growth units it's more effective than using it on prepromotes. Isn't that the definition of rewarding the player for using growth units? It's not exactly topical, but even Titania falls off later on in favor of some of the other Paladins because her growths and supports won't match their stats. Outside of Titania this just isn't true unless you're using the word favoritism very loosely. If we spend bonus experience to optimize 'efficiency' then growth units will be at least on par with and often at least marginally better than prepromotes when they join. I would call this favoritism as much as I would call giving Titania the bulk of the kills on the first 9 maps favoritism. In FE9 if we compare a growth unit to their counterpart in terms of class it is much closer (I would still say it favors growth units, but it is a hell of a lot closer), but if we disregard that there is a definite gap. Of the 12? prepromotes only 1 of them is significantly better than the good growth units for any period of time. There are two more that can compete with the best growth units while still not being better than them. Besides that there are some utility prepromotes and 6? prepromotes that can never be as good as growth units just because their classes are bad.

Boyd's combat is effectively the same as a lot of mounted units, and his bulk is lacking somewhat, so he's not really a great investment. I'll try not to be sidetracked too much though, the point is that you can actually do all of those things while still leveling Jill. We don't have to assume that Jill is trained, but it's also not correct to use it against her when the resources required to do so are not that valuable. You're misinterpreting my argument somewhat. I said that flight along with similar (or better, eventually the strength difference will matter) makes Jill better from the time she joins until the end of the game. You can have an argument about who is better overall, but this isn't the kind of debate I'm interested in. Weapon ranks aren't really worth considering unless we're talking about magic based units, so that isn't really a critical piece of information. The important thing is that the growth units are useful when the prepromotes don't actually exist, and it's an important point that you didn't mention in that post. I think that you touched on that point when you talked about Elincia earlier, but I am sure you will agree that it's far more valuable to dump bonus experience on units that can contribute for a large portion of the game than saving it just because we get a unit that is just as good for another small portion of the game. That isn't considering the fact that using both can oftentimes be better, so we would train the growth unit to begin with. This does make the prepromotes worse with the exception of Titania even if their stats end up more or less the same. I just want to note that Haar does need Speedwings to contribute as much as Jill does with bonus experience, and it is a significant difference. It's worth considering as a resource as much as the bonus experience is.

I did mention earlier that bonus experience is rather broken in PoR. It's more than reasonable to get Jill either to promotion or close to it by using bonus experience in the base the chapter after she joins. I am basing this off of personal experience, but there are examples of strategies that dump bonus experience similarly to how I've described in LTCs and speedruns, so this isn't unreasonable in other contexts. Otherwise it really is as simple as there being way too much bonus experience in FE9 unless we're talking about maniac mode. How much better are you really making Titania? She doesn't need the bonus experience; she can do anything combat related without it. I did mention that PoR is complicated, it definitely doesn't lean in a way that makes (some) prepromotes bad or anything close to it. Speedwings aren't in great demand, so Haar can use them to achieve doubling thresholds. Haar is in a similar boat to Tanith to a greater degree though; he joins late, so while he can be as effective as Jill with speedwings he's not outperforming her; the stat differences outside of speed are largely insignificant.

I find that units eventually reach a point where they can one round enemies and don't really need any more investment, so my primary goal is getting as many units that can do that as possible while also having enough for secondary goals. I mentioned that FE9 is tricky earlier, and that's because the prepromotes that are good generally just don't need any bonus experience to achieve this. I guess it would be a little different Maniac mode, but that's another beast entirely. Why do you think that Tanith is better? They're fairly similar statistically, but Marcia has a huge join time lead on her. The general strategy for 'efficient' (I hate that word though) playthroughs is to dump a ton of bonus experience on Marcia by at least chapter 12 so that she can solo that map. She's also one of the two options to get the desert chapter done quickly along with a few other flier only jobs, so the question then becomes whether you want a second (or 3rd at that point) flier for the army.

Jill has flight and as much strength as Titania on the chapter after she joins unless you're getting Titania to level 15 or something, and that's well before the halfway point. Several other units can reach or surpass her combat by chapter 15 or sooner, it just depends on how much bonus experience you want to spend. I also think that it's fair to take classes into consideration given that it's just another parameter to consider.

For Stephan it really depends on who you consider his competitors to be. He's good when compared to Mia and Zihark, but that's a low bar; he's realistically competing with mounted 1-2 range units who are far better than he is. Tanith is a good unit to be sure, but Marcia will be close to her when she joins, and Jill will be better. Bonus experience is really just that strong. In an 'efficient' playthrough there aren't enough mounted prepromotes to fully replace mounted growth units, and unless you're superfluously using bonus experience there's enough to go around; I think that it's unfair to call it an investment when all we're really doing is spending a few minutes dumping bonus experience in the menu.

I guess I'm a little late, but this is the most recent topic in this sub-forum... I'd rather see Nintendo sink time into other things. There are some other entries that need it far more for other reasons. An FE6 overhaul might be nice if only to see it released outside of Japan, but I find that the GBA games have aged fairly well outside of a few small irritants. There have been quality of life patches that have fixed several of those things, so the only things that remains that I can think of are irritating AI quirks that can result in the player being unable to recruit units, perform certain objectives, or just losing maps entirely. I don't think that the mine glitch is a notable problem. It's abusable to be sure, but it's also easy to avoid. I don't see it affecting anyone negatively unless they feel that they have to play optimally in a way that fundamentally breaks the games.

I would say that it does remove the discrepancy completely. BEXP is fairly plentiful, so even if some prepromotes might want the help we have plenty to dump into our other units. The best units after chapter 11 are all units that we dump a bunch of bexp into also (Jill and Marcia in particular). Astrid might be the best example of this. She would be downright awful in any other Fire Emblem game with her bases, but she can effectively become as good as Titania a few chapters after she joins without any of the drawbacks that she'd have otherwise.